CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Fascism and democracy

Since World War II, the ideology [Trump] represents has usually lived in dark corners, and we don’t even have a name for it anymore. The right name, the correct name, the historically accurate name, is fascism. I don’t use that word as an insult only. It is accurate.1

That was Newsweek’s Jeffrey Tucker in July 2015. Similar warnings appeared in Slate, in Salon, in the Daily Beast, in the New Republic, and in many other impeccably mainstream media outlets when Trump spoke casually of registering Muslim Americans and forcibly closing mosques. After the election, footage circulated of Richard Spencer telling Nazi-saluting supporters to ‘Heil Trump’. In August 2017, the president responded to the murder of an anti-racist protester at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville by condemning ‘hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides’ — creating a bizarre equivalency between fascists and those opposed to fascists.2

The Nazi publication The Daily Stormer openly gloated about Trump’s reaction when reporters pressed him to comment on Charlottesville. ‘No condemnation at all,’ it wrote. ‘When asked to condemn, [Trump] just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.’3

As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie said, Trump ticked many of the boxes associated with classical fascism. He emphasised strength and he disparaged the weak, while his anti-elitism offered small-business owners and others in the middle class an idealised image of America’s vanished greatness.

‘Alone and disconnected,’ Bouie concluded, ‘this rhetoric isn’t necessarily fascist. Some of it, in fact, is even anodyne. But together and in the person of Donald Trump, it’s clear: The rhetoric of fascism is here. And increasingly, the policies are too. The only thing left is the violence.’4

The problem with that argument, though, was that violence was central to classical fascism, not incidental.

‘The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program?’ Mussolini famously replied to a liberal critic. ‘It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.’5

Trump might have mocked protesters, but he didn’t break their bones. His supporters attended campaign rallies; they didn’t form militias. There was, in any case, no reason for them to do so. The traditional function of fascism was to quell, through violence, a left-wing challenge to the capitalist order. Mussolini and Hitler established their bona fides by physically destroying mass socialist and trade union movements, in conditions of political and economic crisis. Despite the economic polarisation in the US, the American situation in 2016 wasn’t comparable. Whatever the lurid stories circulating on Infowars and similar sites claimed, capitalism wasn’t under threat. The organisations of the American left — including the trade union movement — had never been weaker.

The racism of Trump’s Mexican wall and his Muslim ban emboldened, as was intended, racists of all variety. Yet Trump arrived at the White House via the usual route, not at the head of a paramilitary posse.

Neil Davidson used the classic work of the historian Roger Griffin to distinguish fascism’s sharp political break with the norms of democracy from the qualitatively different program of the non-fascist far right. He noted that fascism promised to transform the people — to create a ‘new man and woman’ with new values — while the non-fascist right emphasised the virtues of the people as they already existed.6

In other words, fascism spoke of a revolutionary break, a project quite different from the restoration offered by outsider anti-elitism.

Symptomatically, once in power, Trump palpably didn’t establish the tyrannical regime associated with fascist transformation. When his Muslim ban faced persistent legal challenges, the courts weren’t disbanded. The media continued to function (according to one study, news stories about Trump’s first 60 days in office contained about three times more negative assessments than during the same period for Obama), while demonstrations against the Trump agenda proceeded without unusual state repression.

Far from ruling as a dictator, Trump barely exerted the normal authority associated with his office. After the first 100 days of Trump in office, Corey Robin noted that the new president possessed ‘no realistic agenda for, or steady interest in, consolidating power’. His promise to be a ‘strong leader’ was ‘a rhetoric, a performance’, Robin argued, before concluding: ‘Trump has always thought his words were more real than reality. He’s always believed his own bullshit. It’s time his liberal critics stopped believing it too.’7

But the widespread assumption that Trump represented an especial debasement of America’s democratic traditions didn’t come from nowhere. It reflected a particular understanding of democracy, one that arose from the left’s growing disdain for mass politics.8

Teasing out the exact meaning of a word like ‘democracy’ poses a difficult task, not least because almost all political actors today claim to be democrats. But this consensus emerged only recently. Until the 19th century, respectable people used ‘democracy’ as a term of approbation. For them, it meant mob rule, a society in which the masses oppressed their betters. That was why, during the upheavals that shook Europe in 1848, the insurgent forces were often described ‘The Democracy’, and why the philosopher Edmund Burke described ‘perfect democracy’ as ‘the most shameless thing in the world’.9 Even today, Roget’s Thesaurus hints at an older usage by offering ‘democrat’ as a synonym for ‘commoner’.

But that sense was challenged by a different meaning, one that made ‘democracy’ more palatable for respectable opinion. The second definition understood democracy not in terms of participation but in terms of representation — a quite different idea.

The debates among the American Founding Fathers illustrated the distinction clearly.

Thomas Jefferson wanted a country run by direct governance based on town meetings — a version of democracy that would, he said, make every man ‘a sharer … a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day’. He belonged to a faction, he said, ‘who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe … depository of the public interest’.

But Jefferson also identified a rival faction, one whose members ‘fear[ed] and distrust[ed] the people’.10

Alexander Hamilton belonged to that group. For Hamilton, the masses were ‘the Beast’, a frightening, animalistic force to be tamed and controlled. Against Jefferson, he insisted that vesting deliberative or judicial powers in the collective body of the people would lead to ‘error, confusion and instability’. Instead, he advocated representative democracy, ‘where the right of election is well secured and regulated, and the exercise of the legislative executive and judicial authorities is vested in select persons’.

The virtue of a representative scheme was that it dampened the dangerous passions of the multitude. ‘Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy,’ Hamilton explained. ‘Their turbulent and changing disposition requires checks.’11

In most countries, a version of the Hamiltonian argument prevailed. Throughout the developed world, elections — hedged with various checks and restrictions — selected politicians, who duly sat in a parliament for a set period. Such systems were democratic, in that ordinary people voted in elections. But that was all they did. After the votes were counted, the elected representatives governed the country.

Despite the consolidation of parliamentarianism, the argument about the nature of democracy persisted. As Raymond Williams explained in his 1976 book Keywords, throughout the 20th century the debate took a new form.12

For the direct-politics left, democracy retained something of its original meaning. To take a characteristic formulation, Todd Gitlin described how:

The New Left style was an extension of a much older small-d democratic tradition. It wanted decisions made by publics, in public, not just announced there. It valued informality, tolerated chaos, scorned order … Participatory democracy entailed the right of universal assertion. It meant inserting yourself where the social rules said you didn’t belong — in fancy meeting halls if you were a sharecropper, off limits and off campus if you were a student.13

Gitlin and his comrades valued democratic participation as a means as well as an end. By exerting their will directly (whether through plebiscites, protests, union elections, cooperatives, or elsewhere), the people clarified their ideas and grew in political confidence. The debates and discussions mattered, not merely because of the decisions they delivered, but because the process changed those who took part in it. Direct democracy brought individuals with different experiences and different backgrounds together. By encouraging them to collaborate, it broke down prejudices and suspicion. They became more confident in their abilities and those of the people around them — and that prepared them to take charge of other aspects of their lives.

This was why recent attempts to rebuild a direct-politics social movement (such as the Global Justice Movement and Occupy) developed elaborate mechanisms to involve as many supporters as possible in decision-making.

The delegated-politics left, however, did not share that enthusiasm. On the contrary, because delegated-politics activists saw themselves as acting on behalf of their constituency, they tended to accept the mainstream view of democracy as necessarily representative.

The difference between participatory and representative democracy could seem abstract. In times of social peace — and when the boundary between direct and delegated politics remained fluid — the distinction was often one of degree: enthusiasts for participatory democracy would contest elections, even as they organised protests between polls.

On other occasions, however, the distinction became critical. A major strike depended on workers acting together — an eminently participatory and thus (for some, at least) democratic practice. But for those committed to a strictly representative model, an industrial dispute threatened democracy, since it prevented elected leaders from exercising their mandate.

In 1976, with the direct-politics left still a presence, Williams argued that the ‘two conceptions [of democracy] in their extreme forms now confront each other as enemies’.14

Much has happened since then. The collapse of the New Left — and the failure of recent protest movements — helped relegate participatory democracy to the fringes of public life, even as the neoliberal turn contributed to a further redefinition of parliament’s role. The acceptance of the market as both superhumanly efficient and wise limited, by definition, the space for collective decision-making. Robert McChesney labelled neoliberalism ‘the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy’, on the basis that the reforms carried out in the 1980s across the Western world deliberately quarantined the economy from democratic pressure.15 As David Harvey argues, neoliberals ‘favour governance by experts and elites’. Typically, they try to insulate institutions such as central banks from political influence, and they have a preference for ‘government by executive order and by judicial decision rather than democratic and parliamentary decision making’.16

The slow implosion of left organisations affected the consensus among progressives about democratic practice. In the past, officials in trade unions or staff members in major NGOs necessarily accepted at least some role in public life for ordinary people. But the new disdain for the masses associated with smug politics changed that. Activists who saw their country as full of ‘stupid white men’ — essentially, a dangerous aggregation of reactionary bigots — naturally gravitated to a Hamiltonian position, embracing those restrictive measures necessary to keep ‘the Beast’ in check.

The ambiguity in the term ‘democracy’ — its susceptibility to two different, even hostile, meanings — thus helped the left’s embrace of smug politics. Those who saw the populace as deluded, racist, and sexist could reassure themselves that their disdain was eminently democratic. They were, they thought, protecting progressive political ideas against ‘error, confusion and instability’.

Symptomatically, in 2015, a musical about Alexander Hamilton became a phenomenon, embraced by the icons of progressive America. Barack Obama said the musical reminded him ‘of the vital, crazy, kinetic energy that’s at the heart of America’; Lena Dunham claimed she wanted ‘every kid in America’ to see the show, because they would then ‘thirst for historical knowledge and then show up to vote’17; Rolling Stone called Hamilton the ‘mass-cultural moment [the Obama administration] deserves’.

At first glance, such enthusiasm might have seemed strange. ‘Given how Democrats, in particular, embraced the show and Hamilton himself as a paragon of social justice,’ wrote Matt Stoller, ‘ you would think that he had fought to enlarge the democratic rights of all Americans. But Alexander Hamilton … fought — with military force — any model of organizing the American political economy that might promote egalitarian politics.’18

In fact, Hamilton — and the liberal excitement about it — perfectly illustrated the evolution of delegated politics to smug politics. The historical Hamilton could be rehabilitated as a hero for progressives because, contra Stoller’s argument, he didn’t oppose ‘democracy’ so much as participatory democracy. The show presented Hamilton as an immigrant entrepreneur, remaking himself in a new country. ‘Hey, yo,’ he rapped. ‘I’m just like my country/I’m young, scrappy and hungry.’ The musical linked diversity with an anti-participatory version of representative democracy, replicating more or less exactly the reaction to Trump’s victory by progressives committed to smug politics.

The evolution of democratic ideas in relation to Trump was expressed particularly clearly in 2016 in an essay for New York Magazine by the idiosyncratic Andrew Sullivan.

For Sullivan, Trump was a neo-fascist demagogue, a racist and an aspiring tyrant who represented ‘an extinction-level event’ for liberal democracy. But America lacked mechanisms to defend itself from Trump-like candidates because contemporary society destroyed hierarchies. Once upon a time, voting itself had been restricted to the rich and the white. Even when the franchise expanded beyond white property owners, viable candidates still came from a small pool: essentially, only those who had demonstrated their competency in various ways.

Now, though, ‘that elitist sorting mechanism’ had disintegrated.

Worse still, the rise of the internet gave, Sullivan argued, everyone, including idiots, a platform. As a result: ‘We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get.’19

The path had been cleared for Trump, a man bewitching the masses with crass demagoguery so as to establish dictatorial power. Hence Sullivan’s conclusion: America needed elites ‘to protect democracy from its own destabilising excesses’.

In other words, Trump’s rise exposed US politics as insufficiently elitist. Or, as his headline put it, ‘democracies end when they are too democratic’.

Sullivan admitted that his argument was ‘shocking’. Yet the two meanings of democracy enabled progressives to make the same case, without spelling out the anti-egalitarian implications quite so bluntly. For if ‘democracy’ was taken to mean representation, it was entirely democratic to prevent the sexist, racist, and homophobic masses from interfering with progressive politicians.

Prior to Trump’s election, a version of the argument had been made publicly by progressives in Britain.

In 2016, the Conservative Party implemented a promised plebiscite on membership of the European Union: essentially, a way of settling intractable divisions within the elite about relations with Europe. Most of the political class supported a vote to Remain — and yet the Leave side triumphed. The temptation was to see the result as an electoral manifestation of familiar culture-war stupidity. In the past, anti-elitism ginned up by tabloids had been mostly controllable, and was eventually funnelled back to the mainstream right. Now, though, the main beneficiaries were outsider anti-elitists of various kinds, who agitated strongly for a Leave vote.

Accordingly, many in the political class railed at an outcome understood less as a victory for a particular political perspective than as a kind of category error: an example of what resulted if the ship of state were to be steered by those who seriously believed anti-elitist demagoguery.

‘The Brexit has laid bare the political schism of our time,’ explained James Traub in Foreign Policy. ‘It’s not about the left versus the right; it’s about the sane versus the mindlessly angry.’20

For Traub — and many, many others — the vote was a victory for ‘the ignorant masses’: people too foolish and ill-informed to make reasoned decisions.

Certainly, the Brexit campaign revealed a disturbing level of xenophobia and outright racism, with some Leave activists making the plebiscite a vote on immigration. Nonetheless, despite the tenor of liberal commentary, this wasn’t the whole story of the vote. The Guardian’s Paul Mason explained some quite reasonable grounds for hostility to the EU project:

The EU is not — and cannot become — a democracy. Instead, it provides the most hospitable ecosystem in the developed world for rentier monopoly corporations, tax-dodging elites and organised crime. It has an executive so powerful it could crush the left-wing government of Greece; a legislature so weak that it cannot effectively determine laws or control its own civil service. A judiciary that, in the Laval and Viking judgements, subordinated workers’ right to strike to an employer’s right do business freely.

Its central bank is committed, by treaty, to favour deflation and stagnation over growth. State aid to stricken industries is prohibited. The austerity we deride in Britain as a political choice is, in fact, written into the EU treaty as a non-negotiable obligation. So are the economic principles of the Thatcher era. A Corbyn-led Labour government would have to implement its manifesto in defiance of EU law.21

Irrespective of the merits of those particular points, the Leave vote clearly couldn’t be reduced to an eruption of irrationalism without doing violence to the complexity of the situation.

The activists of delegated politics had possessed a (sometimes unwarranted) faith in their ability to decide on behalf of the masses, confident that their organisational heft would eventually persuade their traditional constituency to embrace (or at least accept) their choices. But prolonged culture war had shattered that certainty, convincing them that the voters were unmanageable, even dangerous.

They understood Brexit as a grim confirmation of the smug perspective. By conducting a plebiscite, they reasoned, the Conservative Party had urged people to express themselves — and the brutes had duly vomited up their hateful prejudices. The result was a reminder of why consulting the public directly was so dangerous.

‘Referendums are alien to our traditions,’ said the human-rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson as he campaigned to overturn the result:

They are inappropriate for complex decision-making, and without careful incorporation in a written constitution, the public expectation aroused by the result can damage our democracy … Democracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority, much less the tyranny of the mob (otherwise, we might still have capital punishment).22

The philosopher A. C. Grayling voiced a similar perspective:

[T]here is an excellent reason why most advanced and mature polities do not have systems of ‘direct democracy’ but instead have systems of representative democracy, in which legislators are not delegates sent by their constituents but agents tasked and empowered to investigate, debate and decide on behalf of their constituents. This reason is that rule by crowd acclamation is a very poor method of government.23

Such statements drew upon the old Hamiltonian arguments about democracy as representative rather than participatory. To many progressives, they made intuitive sense, expressing attitudes that had been percolating through the left for some time.

But in the context of massive public alienation, the new progressive consensus provided a huge opportunity for outsider anti-elitists, both in Britain but also in the US, where the Trump campaign watched Brexit closely. Who were these ‘agents’ that Grayling thought would do such a wonderful job investigating and debating issues around Europe? The British political class — like its counterparts the world over — was widely discredited by the imposition of austerity, a succession of disastrous wars, and the blatant greed exposed during the scandals over parliamentary entitlements. Ordinary people did not see their leaders as wise and farsighted. They despised them as venal and self-seeking.

Robertson’s rhetoric denouncing voters as ‘the mob’ sounded not only condescending but massively out of touch, a reaction that associated progressives with the elitism of which they’d always been accused. By making such statements, liberals weren’t simply condemning the racism manifesting in the No vote, or even the result itself. They were implicitly or explicitly arguing that the public were the problem; that, if given free rein, ordinary people would spew forth their prejudices; and that, as a result, progressive reforms (such as the abolition of capital punishment) could only be achieved despite — even against — the masses.

‘It’s hard to avoid concluding,’ wrote Abi Wilkinson in the Guardian, ‘that some of my fellow Remainers really do hold vast swaths of the country in contempt.’24

In this context, it wasn’t so difficult to understand why Trump’s mockery of reporters or Yiannopoulos’s sexist trolling could be greeted by the Trump base with such glee. Anti-PC had long argued that elites wanted to forcibly impose their dogma on the masses. Much of the time, the proffered examples had been thin: councils employing daffy euphemisms, librarians refusing to circulate Enid Blyton, or whatever. By 2016, however, Trump supporters could point to a proliferation of articles in which liberal journalists explained, more or less openly, that everyday people were dangerous idiots, that they shouldn’t be consulted about anything important, and that polls in which they’d expressed their opinions should be nullified.

As a consequence, during the American election, Trump activists and Clinton activists could often, quite literally, not understand each other. Democrat supporters looked at Trump’s bluster, his disdain for economic orthodoxy, and the extremist, alt-right figures who clung to his train, and judged him an incompetent who should be excluded from the poll. This was the rationale when, in July 2015, the left-leaning Huffington Post editorialised that its Trump coverage would feature under the headline ‘entertainment’ rather than ‘politics’. It explained: ‘Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what the Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.’25

Obviously, this was disastrously wrong. Trump’s campaign wasn’t a sideshow, but one of the biggest stories of the new century. The condescension pervading that editorial was telling. As Lance Selfa noted, the Clinton campaign enjoyed the support of a ‘popular front’ of most of American business, the media, the political establishment, and liberal activists.26 The Huffington Post therefore seemed to be expressing the sentiment of a broader political class that believed hick voters were incapable of distinguishing reality from reality TV, and as such should somehow be quarantined from serious matters.

At the same time, for many of those committed to smug politics, the accusation that such attitudes were undemocratic sounded bizarre, almost unintelligible. From their perspective, they were defending democracy (which they associated, first and foremost, with representation) in an election in which Donald Trump was manifestly unfit to represent anyone.

The sentiment was captured particularly clearly in a drawing for the New Yorker in the wake of the election. In January 2017, the magazine published a cartoon by Will McPhail. It showed the interior of an airliner, with a moustachioed man addressing the other travellers. The caption read: ‘These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?’ All hands were raised in agreement.27

The virality of McPhail’s cartoon indicated that the sentiment struck a chord with the many Americans dismayed by the election. Yet the drawing made no reference to any of Trump’s specific policies or actions. It wasn’t a cartoon about race or gender — it was a cartoon about democracy. More exactly, it presented an explicitly elitist understanding of government, presenting the common sense of the smug-politics left. The drawing depicted society as a jet aeroplane, a complex piece of machinery requiring a highly trained captain and crew for its safe operation. Within that metaphor, the notion that the unqualified passengers might express an opinion seemed so ludicrous as to be comical. Travellers — citizens — should remain in their seats and let the experts do their work. If they didn’t, if they interfered with a cockpit they couldn’t possibly understand, they’d cause catastrophe and disaster.

Abi Wilkinson noted the praise McPhail received from prominent writers and thinkers associated with mainstream liberalism.

‘You nailed it, @NewYorker. Props,’ tweeted the Atlantic’s Jonathan Merritt.

‘This,’ said Peter Daou, a former Clinton adviser, as he shared the image on Facebook.

‘To me it captured our whole predicament,’ wrote the columnist Jill Lawrence in USA Today, ‘from Brexit to Donald Trump to whatever comes next in the change-or-bust brushfire that is spreading across the globe.’

Such comments weren’t, perhaps, surprising from leading Democrats, given their party’s commitment to technocratic capitalism. ‘That nobody could possibly do a better job than the professionals is a core belief of elite liberalism,’ noted Wilkinson.28 Beltway insiders saw Trump as a crass parvenu, a ghastly reality-show host who’d unfairly beaten far more talented politicians in the race to the White House.

Yet the cartoon, and the enthusiasm it engendered, expressed in embryo the logic of a broader — and quite disastrous — response to Trump. It might, for instance, have been possible for progressives to understand the result in 2016 as a wake-up call, with the victory of such an odious candidate suggesting not only a public discontent with the status quo but a frustration with the normal channels for expressing such discontent.

After all, a few days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the ‘Women’s March on Washington’ brought some 500,000 people out onto the street — and millions more mobilised in solidarity around the world. The event’s title recalled the 1963 ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’ (the rally at which Martin Luther King gave his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech), and the scale of the response hinted at a vast potential constituency for a resistance to Trump: one that pushed back against his racism and sexism, and linked that pushback to significant social change.

But this would have been direct politics — and, for liberals committed to smug politics, direct politics was as dangerous as Trump. In early 2017, Thea Riofrancos examined the already extensive literature examining the meaning of Trump’s victory for democracy. She curated a selection of typical headlines: ‘Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?’; ‘An Erosion of Democratic Norms in America’; ‘Will Democracy Survive Trump’s Populism? Latin America May Tell Us’; ‘Trump, Erdogan, Farage: The attractions of populism for politicians, the dangers for democracy’; ‘How Stable Are Democracies? Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’; and so on.29

Trump certainly threatened democracy in the sense that racism and xenophobia excluded oppressed groups from decision-making. But, as Riofrancos pointed out, that generally wasn’t what pundits meant. They objected to Trump on almost exactly the opposite basis. Often, those who labelled Trump a ‘fascist’ disliked the president’s racist, sexist populism as much because it was populist as because it was racist and sexist. Or, more exactly, for many, the three terms went together. Because populism involved the participation of the masses, they saw it as facilitating the racism and sexism that the masses gestated.

‘Seen from the fast-shrinking center,’ Riofrancos said, ‘every populism, right or left, is equally suspect, because each one represents the pathologically unhinged demos that the existing institutional order seeks to moderate, filter, and contain.’ Thus, when political researcher David Adler looked at values surveys across Europe and North America, he discovered that centrists were less supportive of civil rights than either the far left or the right.30

For mainstream Democrats, Trump was a fascist not because he mobilised an army of goons to beat up opponents, nor because, once in power, he established an authoritarian regime. His ‘fascism’ pertained to a perception of him challenging the balance by which democratic representatives kept the populace in line. But this meant that mass campaigns resisting Trump were equally suspect — for they, too, threatened to bring the unruly and the uncontrollable into the streets.

The enthusiasm of young people for the Sanders campaign had been seen by the Democratic leadership as a problem rather than an opportunity. Even after Clinton’s defeat, mainstream Democrats worried about protests getting out of control and tilting the party too far to the left. Increasingly, they devoted themselves to finding ways to remove Trump without engaging the masses at all.

This was why many liberals focused more on painting Trump as a Russian pawn than they did on organising grassroots opposition to his policies. Space prohibits a full discussion of the supposed Russian involvement in the 2016 election, except to note that the allegations relied heavily on speculation, innuendo, and anonymous sources. In any case, whatever the extent of foreign intervention, it was impossible to deny that Trump had marshalled considerable genuine support.

But for the liberal opponents of Trump who disdained the public, the claim that ‘Putin hacked the election’ took on an almost talismanic significance, since it suggested an administrative method of deposing the president. If Trump had not been validly elected, he could be removed by court order or impeachment, the traditional mechanisms for maintaining a parliamentary system. The exposure of the supposed Trump–Putin connection offered, liberals thought, a way to bring down the ‘fascist’ regime and restore normalcy to American politics.

The same logic underpinned a focus on Trump’s mental health. Again, the various diagnoses depicting Trump as unhinged, or psychotic, or otherwise cognitively impaired were circulated by liberals who imagined that a diagnosis of insanity would enable the removal of the president and thus somehow turn the clock back to politics as conducted during the Obama years.

Yet more than 61 million Americans voted for Trump. They weren’t all Russian agents, or duped by bots or hackers. The removal of a democratically elected president by a court order would be understood, for obvious reasons, by these voters as something very much like a military coup.

Even if it succeeded, deposing Trump bureaucratically would not address the fundamental question: how did such a ghastly figure assemble such supporters — and what could be done to fight them?