Trump’s victory at the polls makes me feel optimistic. The wake-up call can no longer be ignored, now that a beast has ascended the throne of world power. It is time to act.
I’m not worried that this revolting man will unchain the apocalypse or so. His America will not be substantially different from Obama’s, and the powerful institutions of the US state will mostly stay on course. Trump’s initiatives, if he even takes them, will be doggedly resisted by the US civil service and will mostly come to nothing. He would be mad to take on the state machinery and try to swing it around to implement his daft ideas. But I don’t even believe he will try. He will now cozy up to power and want to gain acceptance at Davos and fly around the world in his 747. I’m not sure his ambition even goes beyond sitting in the oval office with his feet on the desk and some hot chicks around.
Forget about Trump. His presidency will be another good reason to avoid watching TV. His face, anyway, is a more appropriate one for the neoliberal US military-industrial complex than Obama’s. His was too nice, too civilized, and thus misleading. I was sucked in by the hype and let down by Obama when he failed to close Guantanamo Bay and embarked on targeted assassination drone campaigns around the world. That was stupid of me and I knew it, because with the best intentions there was not much Obama was going to be able to change in US policy. The state is an oil tanker that hardly responds to the leaders which come and go; predictably the one will want to steer it a bit to the left, and the next to the right, so it has its own habit of just heading straight forward (without any clue where it’s going, because the State is just a machine). Trump has no interest in steering it, I believe, and will focus on revamping the captain’s quarters to throw sex parties there. So let’s all just please ignore him.
But we cannot ignore what his victory says about the world we’re living in, and particularly the USA. I’m reading a lot of strange analyses. That Americans voted out of fear. Pardon? The safe option was obviously Hillary, who stood for more of the same. Trump stands for the wild unknown; it takes more bravery to vote for him than for Hillary. That Americans are fascists. To the contrary, they are probably the people least inclined to fascism (what does that word even mean?) on the planet. The Americans are truly and thoroughly democrats; they’ve been at it for more than two centuries without a glitch. It’s precisely because they are democrats that they voted against Hillary and the almost unshakeable establishment she stands for (the same people who are now hastily embracing Trump, pretending they liked him all along, saying sanctimonious things about ‘respecting the voice of the American people’). Voting for Trump was a way to signal your rejection of that establishment. The only way, in fact, because voting for one of the two small candidates (the libertarian Johnson and the green Stein), with more interesting political programs, was tantamount to letting Hillary win. So it had to be Trump. If somebody could wreck ‘the system’ and upset ‘the establishment’ it was him.
Many commentators compare this election to that of Hitler in 1933. But this comparison is based on the rewriting of history that happened after World War 2. The Germans in 1933 did not vote for starting the second world war and exterminating the Jews. They did not vote out of fascist sentiment. They voted for the National Socialist Workers party because they wanted an end to the mess they were in, and because Hitler seemed the most capable of bringing socialism to Germany. Which he did; he brought not only order and industry, but also social housing, public infrastructure, paid annual leave and an end to the misery of the poor. This is what made him strong enough to embark on his expansionist policies from the late 30s onward. I don’t see Trump doing that, and the situation is very different in the USA of 2016. So exit the comparison with Hitler and 1933.
The victory of Trump is above all a kick of the American people against the establishment. Americans voted for Trump because of his anti-establishment discourse, because he dared say things that this establishment hated hearing. A considerable number of voters probably were swayed on election day to vote for Trump, for the sole pleasure of proving wrong all those smug commentators on CNN etc who were banking on a clear win of Hillary and parties on Wall Street to celebrate it. In that sense the US vote is similar to the UK vote for the Brexit. An interesting fact is that it is precisely in the two countries with the longest democratic tradition, the UK and the USA, that voters have delivered this blow against their ruling elites.
In 2016, ‘democracy’ seemingly leaves no other chance for the people to make their voice heard than by delivering a blind kick against ‘the system’. As a result, many people the world over are taking this electoral result (and the Brexit) as evidence that democracy doesn’t work. This point of view expresses the fear of the ‘stupid, brutal masses’, the so-called ‘tyranny of the majority’ which has always worried the educated elites that feel entitled to rule. Accordingly, we would now have to go ‘beyond democracy’ and some analysts are already preaching the benefits of an enlightened autocracy.
Whoa, STOP! First of all, is this democracy? The chance to vote every four years, to choose between two candidates that will apply more or less the same policies? Or that make promises for change which we know they’ll break once in power, with no accountability mechanism other than kicking them out at the end of their term, knowing that the next elections will deliver similar leaders and results?
No, this version of very limited, ‘representative’ democracy that was developed in the West in the 18th and 19th centuries is not democracy. It can at best be called democratism, i.e. an ideological construct which pretends to be democratic. It was designed as a manner to allow very limited input by ‘the population at large’ into government, and more importantly to secure the buy-in of that population into the policies decided by experts and other entitled people (the wealthy, the educated, the old ruling families).
It’s amazing that we still apply the 19th century forms of democracy today, in the age of internet, which offers a myriad of new and easier ways for people to directly participate in democratic decision-making, instead of through electing a representative. Isn’t it time for democracy 2.0? Direct, instead of representative democracy?
In my travels I have encountered societies that are much more democratic than our Western ones (which are so hierarchical and class-based). Not some small community of native Amazonians, but Afghans, Kurds and Somalis, for example. Societies where every man and woman is used to having her or his say, to being heard, and where there’s much easier access to power than in the Netherlands. Where young people don’t feel flustered when speaking to the President because they are convinced of the equality between him and them as human beings. These are societies without elections, without formal institutions of democracy, even without a guaranteed freedom of association and expression; but intrinsically more democratic than the West. Because they have no principle of delegation of democratic rights to a representative, which is the principle Western democracy is built on. See for example some posts on this site about Rojava, the Kurdish self-governance experiment of ‘stateless democracy’ in Syria, or the movie I made about the first electoral process in post-Taliban Afghanistan, the Loya Jirga.
Elections, a fundamental mechanism of democratism, actually suffocate the democratic spirit. No, we should not delegate our right to participate in collective affairs to someone else (an MP), once every four years. We should exercise that right ourselves, directly; the more often the better. As experience points out, active participation in collective decision-making rapidly improves people’s understanding of issues; it also makes them more responsible, conscious citizens, aware of differences in society. Direct democracy has the exact opposite effect of representative democracy, which ends up making people cynical and nihilistic (and then they vote for Trump).
This is why I feel optimistic today. Democratism is cracking, revealing its true nature (oligarchy, plutocracy, global police state: it has different faces). There’s now a true chance to explore new forms of democracy. And it will not be only a few marginalized dreamers who are interested in this, but large parts of the population, especially in the US, where people who truly believe in democracy – unlike us cynical Europeans – will be seeking alternatives for the system that brought Trump to power, and that otherwise would have brought the wife of an ex-President after the son of an ex-President (how democratic is that?).
There are a few good options around already. The impressive result of the Pirate Party in recent elections in Iceland (they came second) is largely thanks to their successful practice of direct democracy; the Leap Manifesto in Canada points an interesting way forward, and the Dutch artist Jonas Staal’s New World Summit has been developing a radical global practice based on inviting groups that are expelled from democracy or that explore novel forms of democracy, in settings that propitiate better democratic exchange. There are many similar alternatives sprouting up around the world – the most mind-blowing one remains, for me, the revolution against the patriarchical state in Rojava – and it’s time to join forces.
In fact, we may not have much time left.
(11/11/2016, for my daughter Ariana)