How do civilizations end? Or, say: how do systems die?
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Russian and Chinese dictators must love the spectacle of American democracy these days.
On the one hand, an elderly president who advances with an unsteady step, who stumbles in his own speeches and who will probably be politically blocked for the rest of his mandate.
On the other, Donald Trump, unofficial leader of the opposition, burdened with criminal investigations of all kinds, who convinced two-thirds of Republican voters that their country’s electoral system was a vast fraud – and justice too. This system which claims to be morally superior, which the United States has claimed to export throughout the world: free, safe elections, with certain and verifiable results.
Okay, next Tuesday’s elections don’t decide the fate of civilization. They are not even presidential. It’s still a revenge match. More importantly, Tuesday’s result will set the stage for the 2024 election. In several states, candidates for various key positions are Trumpists who believe in the “Big Lie”: the 2020 election was “stolen”. It’s not really their opinion that counts, but the fact that they will be in a position to control the organization of the vote and even the counting system.
It is therefore the very idea that we have of the system that is at stake.
The most interesting poll of the last few weeks showed this: voters of both parties overwhelmingly believe that the country will be in serious danger if the opposing party takes power.
“Divisions”, even radical ones, are nothing new in the history of American democracy or of democracy itself.
The American media are full of historical analyzes to remind us: the United States has known much more obviously critical periods. What is called today “division” is a farce compared to the Civil War, this civil war still present in the memories. The Elon Musk of the last century, Henry Ford, was a militant anti-Semite. He didn’t have Twitter, but he did own the newspaper in the second circulation in the United States, full of anti-Jewish conspiratorial propaganda. The country has experienced riots, political assassinations, the near impeachment of a president (Nixon), segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, the delirious fight against communism, etc.
So there has never been an ideal democratic moment. A time when the people, united, moderate and reasonable, chose enlightened representatives who regulated the affairs of the nation and the world in serenity.
Democratic history is a perpetual struggle, a battle of opposing interests and views.
Perhaps we simply had the illusion for a time that electoral matters were acquired for good, or would never be questioned.
Perhaps “democracy in America” was in a sort of complacent, pretentious numbness. The “system” seemed to be progressing everywhere. China was opening up, Russia was de-Sovietized, the Latin American dictatorships seemed to be dying out. The inexorable movement of History was on the move…
All of a sudden, Americans realize that while they weren’t going to vote, the religious right organized to elect representatives and the president who would appoint enough judges conservative enough to overturn judgment on the right to abortion. Among others.
So there are the optimists, who take a historic step back, for whom we have seen so much worse, and for whom American institutions are strong enough to survive the current ups and downs. They always have.
It’s true, the Supreme Court has veered ideologically much further to the right than American society. But that faced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to implement his social policies was no less hostile.
And at the same time, it did not become Donald Trump’s personal court. When it came time to decide questions of integrity, Trump consistently lost (apart from highly dubious Judge Clarence Thomas, whom he did not name).
Many of the country’s fundamental institutions are still strong. The FBI, the military, even its former attorney general William Barr, have not followed Trump in his attempts to pervert the rule of law. Turnout has never been higher in modern history than in the 2020 elections (two-thirds of those registered)…
However, I am not sure that the optimists are right. This time, a former president, and likely future candidate, is leading the charge. I naively believed that after the defeat in 2020, the Republican Party would dump Donald Trump instantly, as if waking up from some kind of temporary fit of insanity. The opposite happened. He made babies. His surly offspring repeat his speech, now well established in the mainstream republican.
How will this current of the party react when Trump is brought to justice? How will the people of Wisconsin react, when the Republicans, with less than half of the votes, will have two-thirds of the seats and therefore the power to counter the governor elected by universal suffrage?
It is the basic rules of the system that are at stake here. Stuff as ridiculously basic as “one person, one vote” and majority rule.
Faced with the scale of this Holocaust denial movement, I have the impression that, on the contrary, this country is falling apart, rotting from within. What makes it its very strength is questioned. And I wonder how he will survive.
So sometimes, I admit, I think back to the pages of cache memories of André Malraux, great explorer of lost civilisations. At this moment when he flies over the desert of Yemen in a bush plane in search of the ancient city of the Queen of Sheba, buried in the sand and oblivion…
How does it all end?
It seems to me that elections are more existential these days…