6

(Grayed-Out) Illiberalism

The Road Taken

For Blue America—liberal, Democratic America—election night and the Trump transition evoked dread. Blue America had lived with a generation and a half of conservative ascendency. But this was different. To the liberal eye, the course of the past three-and-a-half decades of the Republican populist right resembled the successive generations of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, offering up politicians who acted more and more inbred over time. Their thinking seemed stunted, frequently only making sense within their own circles; their words and actions could not only be incomprehensible to outsiders, but they often seemed unprecedented and outrageous, beyond the bounds of known political practice and etiquette.

Still Trump was different. He was disconcerting at a level that had not yet been touched by earlier populist right proximity to power. He was not so much an extension as a leap. He was not the next Yoknapatawpha County generation. He was from a county apart. That earlier succession went from Reagan, through Gingrich, who impeached a president over a sex scandal; DeLay, who attempted to create a permanent Republican majority in the House of Representatives through the K Street Project and unprecedented redistricting tactics; and Bush-Cheney, who declared the Geneva Conventions “outdated” when it came to pursuing their wars. From the ashes of the manifest failures of Bush-Cheney rose the Tea Party movement, the 2010 generation of Republican populist radicalism that spoke of defaulting on the national debt and could not let go of fantasies about Barack Obama, which ranged from alleging his foreign birth, to alleging his Muslim faith, to alleging his planning to round up the political opposition into concentration camps.

But still Trump was different. There was every other president-elect and then there was this one. For Blue America, no one else had made racist dog whistles so explicit and raised them to the center of his campaign, made it his brand. No one else suggested he might not accept election results. No one led his rallies, even his convention, in chanting “Lock her up” about his Democratic presidential opponent. For Blue America this was a uniquely repulsive personality in politics. No one looked and acted as weird as Trump: orange-hued tan with whites under his eyes; hair an oddly colored parody of a comb-over; a singularly disjointed debate and rally style, rich in name-calling mockery and made-up anecdotes like stories of Arab Americans dancing in the streets on 9/11. No one flaunted expectations, like refusing to reveal his tax returns with blatantly bogus reasons. No one celebrated pussy grabbing.

Still, it was hard in Blue America to put your finger on exactly what Trump dread was about. The dread did not reside simply at the level of odious politics and electoral flimflam. It went deeper than that, and that was what was novel and so profoundly disconcerting about Trump. He put into question something that felt as if it was the foundation of politics, below the level of platform and rah-rah. It was about what was taken for granted in American politics, what previously even the worst insults Blue America felt it had endured from conservative and populist America had not put into question. Trump dread was about what Blue Americans never had to think about before; it felt more like a deep malaise than something you could easily name. And it felt like something that, once it had momentum, could be irrevocable. It was what put more people than any previous demonstration in American history in the streets in Washington, across the country, and around the world for the Women’s March the day after Trump was inaugurated.1 It was what put thousands of demonstrators spontaneously into American airports the following week when the Trump administration issued an executive order banning travel from Muslim-majority countries.² It was what led progressive Americans to organize into thousands of Indivisible groups (based on the model of the Tea Party) within weeks of the new administration taking power.³ It was what gave rise to voices in Blue America calling themselves the Resistance.

Liberal Democracy

The dread Trump evoked took the form of malaise—more feeling than articulation—in large part because Blue America had not yet parsed the meaning of liberal democracy. In America we are used to equating democracy with voting. It is our typical common-sense answer to what democracy means. Journalism in America can seem addicted to horse-race coverage of elections, and academic political science to voting and polling data. When the Democrats finally decided to pursue impeachment against Donald Trump, it was not for judicial interference, not for depriving people of their rights at the border, not for emoluments, not for obstruction of justice around the FBI and Mueller investigations, not for perjury, but for messing with elections—in this case Trump attempting to use his office to suborn a foreign power to undermine Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential candidacy. This was something, the Democratic leadership felt, that could be widely understood and supported. It was the kind of assault on democracy—on voting—that resonated most readily with how democracy is perceived in America.

By his second inaugural, in 2005, George W. Bush was justifying his invasion of Iraq as part of his “freedom agenda,” the aim of which, following the neoconservative thinking that guided pre-Trump Republican foreign policy, was to bring democracy to all benighted nations on the planet. The first post–Saddam Hussein election was held in Iraq in January 2005. Bush and the Republican Party celebrated what they portrayed as having successfully brought democracy to Iraq by ostentatiously dipping their fingers in purple ink, as Iraqis who voted had done.4 But this celebration ignored the fact that Iraqis were still being blown up wholesale at markets and were settling old scores by denouncing neighbors to the American authorities. It was as ghastly a premature claim of “democracy accomplished” as Bush’s May 2003 misbegotten aircraft-carrier claim of military “mission accomplished,” two months into an invasion that would keep Americans at war for another eight years.⁵

Democracy proved to be a more complicated confection than simply holding elections. Democracy required institutional and cultural foundations that would accomplish two overarching purposes: (1) to prevent unitary power in an individual, a political party, or government institution. This is accomplished by the rule of law and by institutions that act as checks and balances on the accumulation of unitary power; among these institutions are an independent judiciary, a free press, freedom to assemble, and freedom of speech in civil society;⁶ (2) to prevent majorities in power from undermining the rights and civil liberties of other individuals or groups. The exercise of political power does not authorize deprivation of individual freedoms or the scapegoating and persecution of any group in a society’s pluralist makeup; indeed, vigilance of those rights is the obligation of those entrusted with power.⁷

This substructural scaffolding fills out the picture of what liberal democracy consists of. Pre-Trump, they are the values and protections that Blue America had taken for granted—they had not had to think about them. True, these values and protections could be and often were violated in the breach. Liberals in America had a long history of criticizing and organizing against government activity that ran afoul of these principles. Donald Trump’s novelty was that he raised the violations into a set of countervalues. He raised them into his presentation of self as a politician. That the Republican Party and 63 million voters supported his accession to the presidency had turned Trump from a punch line into a scalding, surreal Blue America nightmare. What had been taken for granted in the foundation of American democracy—what was unnecessary to think about until it seemed in jeopardy of being lost—was the object of Blue America’s malaise.

Illiberal Democracy

As we have seen with the case of Viktor Orbán, illiberal democracy proceeds by undermining the foundation of democracy while keeping voting intact.

Undermining democracy’s foundation is the theme of books, like Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning, that emerged in the wake of Trump’s candidacy; the books that were part of the country’s unprecedentedly serious conversation about fascism. One of these books, Yascha Mounk’s The People Vs. Democracy, is particularly trenchant in Mounk’s systematic parsing of the meanings of “liberalism” and “democracy.” This gives his writing a profound insight into the nature of contemporary right-wing populism, and allows him to develop a comprehensive fourfold typology of forms, democratic and undemocratic, liberal and illiberal, that are in power around the globe.8

Fascism provides a compelling heuristic for measuring the breadth of illiberal erosion of democratic foundations. Each of the two historic fascist regimes, Italian Fascism and German Nazism, had versions of what the Nazis called their Enabling Act. Passed after the Reichstag Fire (likely set by the Nazis), the Enabling Act allowed the government to enact any laws without the consent of the German Parliament. (This act stayed in force throughout the Nazi era; the Weimar constitution stayed in place, too, but was rendered moot.) In Italy, a year into Mussolini’s government, parliament passed the Acerbo Act, which gave the party winning the greatest number of votes two-thirds of all seats in parliament. These laws not only effectively ended all permitted opposition to the ruling party, they provided as well the legal basis for the unfolding of the totalitarian regimes that followed.9

Illiberal democracies lie across a continuum of how much the foundation of democracy has been vitiated. Fascism lies at the extreme of this continuum, the foundation annihilated. In both Italy and Germany, fascism came to power through legal democratic means. The changes these regimes effected provide a yardstick to judge the effectiveness of illiberal transformations of current democratic polities. As Primo Levi observed:

There are many ways of reaching [fascism], not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned.¹⁰

Unlike in George W. Bush’s Iraq, where the institutional foundation of democracy was never established, illiberalism around the globe today—in India, Turkey, Poland, Brazil, and others—proceeds by undermining institutions already established. What this means for America is significant. The wall of liberal institutions in the USA is over two centuries in the making. The contrast to recently established democracies, like Poland and Hungary, is stark. Illiberalism has much more to overcome in the United States than almost anywhere else. But this relative insulation also makes Trumpism’s assault on liberal democracy stand out all the more in American culture.

Fascism has an unbridgeable gulf from illiberalism, which resides not in the foundation of democracy but in the electoral superstructure, in voting, in the capacity of suffrage itself to legitimize the state or the regime. Illiberal regimes across the globe, while fecund in introducing measures to cripple the political opposition and jeopardize civil liberties, still mount elections and assert their legitimacy on that basis, on the basis of being electorally democratic. This allows the illiberal regimes that now dominate Poland and Hungary still to maintain their troubled memberships in the European Union, which famously barred Spain, Portugal, and Greece from joining the EU until democratic regimes replaced dictatorships in those countries.11 In contrast, Italian Fascism was explicit on the matter of electoral democracy: Fascism rejected it. In a famous interview given to the New York Times in 1928, Mussolini said, “Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.”¹² As for voting, Mussolini wrote in the 1932 “Doctrine of Fascism”:

Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can be the determining factor in human society; it denies the right of numbers to govern by means of periodical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage.¹³

Undermining the foundation of democracy begins at the cultural level. Political culture in the United States, as elsewhere, relies on unwritten norms. Norms are the sure but informal guides to behavior found in all societies and groups. In the USA, shaking hands when people are introduced is a norm. So is tipping your waiter. Norms are proscriptive as well as prescriptive—what not to do, like using insulting racial or ethnic terms for individuals or groups, or picking one’s nose. It is precisely because norms are agreed upon at a deep cultural level, and socialized into individuals who grow up in those societies, that they have their taken-for-granted quality; things taken for granted become conscious when they are violated. It was with norm-breaking bombast that Donald Trump introduced himself as a political candidate. As one observer put it, Trump “turn[ed] dignified debate formats into a political version of the Jerry Springer show.”14

As president, Trump’s norm breaking became legion.¹⁵ In the eyes of Blue America it sometimes seemed as though Trump was someone who simply had never learned what was appropriate behavior in social situations. To take a couple of paradigmatic examples among a wealth of others: his pushing aside the prime minister of Montenegro to get to the front row in a 2017 NATO picture taking;¹⁶ his grinning and thumbs-up pose in an August 2019 photo, standing next to his grinning wife who was holding an infant orphaned by a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.¹⁷ At other times, Trump appeared to Blue America to resemble a petty Mafia don. Paradigmatic examples here include his calling his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, a “rat” for his testimony to federal investigators, contrasting him to “stand-up guy” former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who did not “break”;¹⁸ Trump’s “shakedown” of the Ukrainian president, which led to his impeachment inquiry, in which he made urgent military aid and a White House meeting contingent on Ukraine’s publicly opening investigation into potential 2020 presidential opponent Joe Biden.¹⁹

But norm breaking is only the opening act of how illiberal regimes establish themselves. In the most entrenched of the illiberal democracies, successive steps have followed something of a blueprint, a blueprint that the Trump administration mirrors only as a kind of grayed-out shadow of possible future directions. The blueprint begins with election to control the national executive. Then, by increments—salami tactics—the executive moves to control all branches of government and to monopolize the institutions of civil society. The executive comes to control most mass media. The courts are stacked. The country’s electoral system is weighted to reduce to a minimum any chance of being voted out of office. Public campaigns of ethnic nationalism, isolating “enemies of the people,” are mounted. In the most effective of illiberal states, like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the national constitution is rewritten.20

A Nation of Epistemologists

Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s original 2016 campaign manager, offered a corrective to the mainstream press shortly after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency: “This is the problem with the media: You guys took everything Donald Trump did so literally. And the problem with that is the American people didn’t.”²¹ Lewandowski had a point. Literalism is how we grope our way in an unfamiliar culture; literalism is the shaky tool we use to ascribe meanings to words and phrases when we are at sea in a foreign environment—meanings that unfortunately are often humorously (or disastrously) off the mark. Donald Trump is fluent in the culture of right-wing populism that thrived online and on Fox News. “The media” Lewandowski refers to, the mainstream media, Blue America’s media, is not. Ideas that seem wildly off-kilter to liberals and Democrats make sense to Lewandowski, and to Trump and to his right populist followers, the way that local customs make sense to the native born. For Blue America, having little other recourse than to take right populism literally meant sharing a mismatched national discourse and came to feel like it was operating in a “post-truth” political culture.

Trump’s preparation for his presidential run, which consisted of his immersion in right-wing media, brought him face-to-face with unreal ideas that were rampant among the populists who convened there. Among much else, a couple of paradigmatic examples include the multiplicity of Obama birther stories and the certainty that Obama’s elections had been stolen. With Trump, this kind of counterfactual reality landed on fertile, even kindred, ground. This was, after all, the man who (again to take a couple of paradigmatic examples from a great universe of possibilities) had mounted framed pictures of himself on a false Time magazine cover in his golf clubs around the world and in his own office, which was housed in an eponymous building whose height he inflated by ten stories.22 Falsehood was Trump’s métier. For Trump, falsehood created a conduit to his base that did not register with Blue America. It recapitulated in words and slapstick gesture, like a stand-up routine, the made-up drama and thrills of professional wrestling, where Trump learned to play to a live audience, a live crowd; where the idea that the spectacle was a contest, was actually competitive, somehow survived the knowledge that the contest was scripted, was rigged. This would only bother the literalists. (See note 25 in chapter 4.)

Hannah Arendt is the theorist par excellence on the relationship between lying and politics. As of October 14, 2019, the Washington Post counted 13,435 “false or misleading claims” during Trump’s term in office.²³ Arendt argues that lying has the effect of distorting reality, reducing what is real and factual into an epistemological soup where it becomes indistinguishable from what is false. Her insight into the question bears a profound resonance with the American experience of Donald Trump as president.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.24

Within two days of Trump’s inauguration, his administration introduced the reality-challenging phrase “alternative facts” into the American political lexicon.²⁵ Trump’s press secretary was obliged to deny contrasting photos of Trump’s and Obama’s inaugurations and claim a greater crowd for Trump that the photos plainly belied.²⁶ Trump’s having the inaugural-crowd photos edited to bolster this fabrication anticipated such enterprises as “Sharpiegate” over thirty months later, when Trump extended by hand the map of Hurricane Dorian to encompass the state of Alabama, which Trump insisted was in the path of the storm.²⁷ By then, the administration’s insults to scientific fact had become a routine event, undermining social policy and turning public discourse into an enervating daily test of what was real.

Trump transformed the meaning of the phrase “fake news.” The term emerged as a characterization of false stories, inventions planted for political gain especially in online media. Trump seized on the term with metronomic frequency to characterize press reporting he found critical of him and his administration, utterly transforming its meaning. The daily challenge to distinguish “real” fake news—the planted fabrications—from Trump’s “fake” fake news—his and his political supporters’ term for any coverage that rubbed them the wrong way—sunk Americans into an epistemological crisis that turned living in Trump’s America into a collective experience of the mind-numbing miasma Trump had cultivated as his salesman’s advantage throughout his business and show-business life.

Karl Rove was credited with calling liberal America and the mainstream media the “reality-based community” during his run as the chief strategist throughout the presidency of George W. Bush.28 For Rove, the reality-based community were fusty empiricists, rendered history’s bystanders and viewers, left in the dust by the doers, like the Bush administration, who forged ahead with actions based on their gut-derived vision. Ron Suskind narrated his experience of Karl Rove revealing the term:

[Rove] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”²⁹

Trump rendered Rove’s dichotomy a mere warm-up act. Under Trump, the reality-based community were no longer simply bystanders, they became the Other. Its minions in the press became “the enemy of the people.” In the cult of personality mounted by totalitarian regimes, the leader was the voice of the nation’s interests, a providential deliverance to the nation. In contrast, with Trump the leader’s personal and political interests became conflated with the nation’s interests. Treason was redefined as disloyalty toward him. The Tea Party movement had made liberal politics the criterion of treason; the Tea Party Nation routinely called the Democrats the “party of treason” based on its approach to domestic policy. Trump called out treason against both the author and the New York Times, when “Anonymous,” a senior member of his administration, published “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” in the paper.30 So, too, did he label as a traitor the whistleblower whose report led to the House impeachment investigation; later leaders of the investigation, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, became accused of treason.³¹ Earlier, participants in the investigation of pro-Trump Russian interference in the 2016 election were the alleged traitors.³² The conspiracy thinking that so dominated the Tea Party populists’ fabrications about the Obama administration’s intentions and actions transferred under Trump into the core conviction Trump shares with his supporters (and much of the Republican Party) of a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine his presidency.³³ In America’s split-screen reality, every development in mainstream-press or congressional investigations into scandals involving Russia or Ukraine, was paralleled by elaborations in right populist media (and among congressional Republicans) that projected the mainstream findings onto treasonous “enemies” of the president.

Trump’s turning hot and cold on personnel in his administration was head-spinning. A paradigmatic example: When he announced his nomination of Rex Tillerson as his first secretary of state, Trump said, “I can think of no one more prepared, and no one more dedicated, to serve as Secretary of State at this critical time in our history.”³⁴ Two and a half years later, Trump said, “Rex Tillerson [is] a man who is ‘dumb as a rock’ and totally ill prepared and ill equipped to be Secretary of State.”³⁵ Similar head-spinning occurred on policy matters, including issues of critical importance. In Trump’s estimation, Kim Jong-un of North Korea went from being “Little Rocket Man … a madman with nuclear weapons” who was opening his country to “fire and fury like the world has never seen” to “a great personality and very smart … a great leader,” with whom Trump now enjoyed “a great chemistry” and with whom he had “fallen in love.”36 In June 2019, having approved air strikes against Iran for shooting down an unmanned American drone, Trump recalled the planes already in the air on their way to targets in Iran.³⁷

Fake fake news, deep-state conspiracy allegations, the constant lying, vulgarity and ridicule, and head-spinning personnel and policy shifts—all that and more contributed to the collective miasma which, in some ways, approximated a psychiatric condition, a kind of epistemological insanity.³⁸ Commentators on the Trump era introduced “gaslighting” into America’s political vocabulary. Based on a 1944 George Cukor movie, starring Ingrid Bergman, gaslighting refers to psychological manipulation that results in the victim doubting her or his own reality and, eventually, own sanity. Finally, this was Trump’s signal achievement in reality shape-shifting: surpassing Karl Rove’s designation and dismissal of the “reality-based community,” Trump got into the community’s heads, disorienting them on both political and psychological levels, making the community’s reality something that required unprecedented, daily energy simply to maintain. As Jonathan Rauch put it:

The ultimate power of the gaslighter is to make it impossible for his targets to imagine a reality different from the one he imposes. While Trump is far too weak to pull this off on a massive scale, as a successful fascist dictator might, he has already done significant damage and may do much more. With the media’s unwitting complicity, he may be strong enough to prevent a coherent shared alternative vision from emerging.39

The Tweetocracy

From his official declaration of candidacy in June 2015 through the first two-and-a-half years of his presidency, [Trump] tweeted over 17,000 times. Since early in his presidency, his tweets have been considered official statements by the president of the United States.⁴⁰

As president, Donald Trump was in continuous campaign mode. He thrived on rallies where he gave clear voice (“Knock the crap out of him”) to undermining the foundations of American democracy.⁴¹ As though the 2016 election was not quite resolved in his mind, he never tired of attacking both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in press conferences, be those conferences in formal settings, with foreign leaders in the White House, or beside the roaring blades of his helicopter.⁴²

Of all Trump’s engines to manipulate the contents of what was in the public debate and on the public’s minds, his use of Twitter was his foremost tool. Trump’s tweeting must be understood in context: Monitoring the media on television was the outstanding daily preoccupation of his White House routine, at times taking up to eight hours of his day; his tweets more often than not were his speaking out—or acting out—after a provocation encountered in the media.

[Trump] seems driven by … watching the watchers. In a 24-hour-news version of burying oneself in press clippings, Trump spends hours a day parsing political coverage about him and reacting in an endless and agitated feedback loop…. His tweets and public comments suggest he spends hours a day watching shows, even on the networks he dubs “fake news” (mainly, CNN).43

Fox News had a special place in Trump’s TV routine. He would bring people into his administration, including in senior positions, who had been talking heads he admired on Fox News.⁴⁴ He would make impromptu appearances on his favorite show, Fox and Friends, in the morning.⁴⁵ His favorite commentator, Sean Hannity, “basically ha[d] a desk at [the] White House.”⁴⁶ On the rare occasion he did not like what was on Fox he would accuse them of betrayal.⁴⁷ When Fox acted as a hinge raising up false and conspiratorial stories from the online world of right populist media, Trump was ready to bite.⁴⁸ More than any other source, Trump’s tweeting was heavily influenced by what was on Fox News; often his tweets followed directly from what had just been broadcast.

Many of the president’s most vicious tweets, which often baffle observers because they seem to come out of nowhere, make more sense when you realize that they are actually his responses to Fox’s programming.⁴⁹

Twitter gave Trump—both as candidate and as president—an unmediated avenue to the public—both pro and con. In a somewhat improbable way, as head of state, Twitter also gave Trump his most profound resemblance to Benito Mussolini as head of state. Like Trump on Twitter, Mussolini had his own unmediated connection to the public, his newspaper, called (in the most populist manner) II Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy), which he founded upon his break from the Socialist Party in 1914. Except for a few brief tenures as a teacher in his early twenties, journalism had been the consistent occupation of his adult life. Always, he was a journalist in the sense of editorialist—or propagandist—rather than reporter. And always, his opinions were bellicose and provocative. Mussolini continued to publish II Popolo d’Italia until his ouster from power in 1943. Here is the British historian F.W. Deakin’s description of Mussolini as head of state. Note the rather astonishing overlap between the place of parsing the news in Mussolini’s and Trump’s everyday routines:

The reading of the Italian and foreign press occupied a central position in [Mussolini’s] activity, and the daily directives to the Ministry of Popular Culture were the essence and revelation of the personal direction of the Duce. A study of these directives would give a detailed picture at any given moment of the shifts and trends of Italian policy. A change in headlines or pagination in the totally-controlled Press would indicate imminent and future developments and recent decisions.

This was Mussolini’s real world, and the measure of his genius lay essentially in the manipulation of the masses by the written and spoken word…. In a sense Mussolini governed Italy as if he were running a personal newspaper single-handed, setting the type, writing the leaders, interviewing everybody, chasing the reporters, paying the informers, sacking staff incessantly, defining the policy to be adopted and the causes to be defended.50

In this behavior, both Trump and Mussolini violated liberalism’s notions of the relationship between the press and political power. Murray Kempton pointed out the central role Mussolini’s skills as a journalist had in his political career, and the top-heavy representation of journalists among the gerarchi, the fascist leadership—so much so that Kempton called this a fundamental reversal of the rational arrangements of the liberal state:

In democratic societies journalism is often a branch of government; but in Mussolini’s, government was a branch of journalism … [a] curious reversal of the normal arrangements of nature and reason.51

The difference between Trump’s and Mussolini’s violations of the place of journalism in liberalism is that Fascism institutionalized it. Fascism in Italy created the “corporate state.” Under the corporate state the citizen as a participant in political life was defined not geographically (as in voting in the location one lives in) but in terms of the sector of the economy one worked in, each of which was called a corporation, and the relations among corporations were mediated by the state. In the Fascist state, “giornalista,” or journalist, was enshrined as a corporation. There were three categories of journalists officially recognized in the corporation: One was simply called journalist, defined by working for the press in much the way the liberal world would define journalist. The second was “giornalista praticante,” apprentice journalist. The third? “Pubblicista.” Pubblicista roughly translates as publicist but is best understood as eliding the difference between the publicist and the journalist. The Fascist constitution, as it were, officially recognized publicity as a sub-category of journalism; it muddied the distinctions between journalism and advertising, publicity and public relations. This has been the effect of Trump’s political ascendency on American culture; it is an informal effect, not yet reaching into the country’s legal structure, but at large in the miasma that Trump has introduced into the country’s political culture.

In the 1980s, Trump used a telephone pseudonym, John Barron, to assert fictitious estimates of his net worth.52 As a politician, hiding behind a fiction like John Barron has been scuttled. Instead Trump’s self-aggrandizement has constantly been out in the open—in his speeches, in his off-the-cuff remarks (calling himself a “stable genius”) and in tweets noting such qualities as his “great and unmatched wisdom.” Unlike illiberal leaders abroad, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Trump has not been able to institutionalize a transformation of journalism à la Mussolini in the USA. He has simply been able on an individual basis—but in the country’s most powerful political position—to act like a pubblicista-style journalist.⁵³ This reflects both the strength of liberal institutions in the USA, and Trump’s limitations as a politician, owing to both personality and his ignorance of history and political philosophy.

Trump’s Tweetocracy has not yet transformed into a robust illiberal democracy, like Hungary, Poland, or Russia. Instead, what he has wrought is rather like a grayed-out version of illiberalism: grayed-out in the way that websites gray-out options that are not yet available. The options are there, but as potentials, upcoming options when prerequisites are all in place; possibilities just over the horizon. The conditions to move an option from grayed-out to live have not yet fully been realized. So it is with Donald Trump’s Tweetocracy: The potentials for institutionalized illiberalism are present as never before in American public life. As yet they remain grayed-out.

The New New Nationalism

This liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population…. This liberal idea presupposes that … migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.

—Vladimir Putin54

American nationalists were quick to applaud Putin’s post-mortem for liberal democracy. Pat Buchanan saw Putin as a leader who correctly understood liberalism’s “failure to deal with the crisis of the age: mass and unchecked illegal migration.” Buchanan added approvingly, “Putin also sees the social excesses of multiculturalism and secularism in the West as representing a failure of liberalism.” Buchanan pointed out how Putinism might have been a bulwark against the “politically correct” offense he observed the week he was writing his column—“a week where huge crowds celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall ‘uprising’ in Greenwich Village, as it is now called … “⁵⁵

Buchanan was the most well-known figure of the paleoconservative movement that most significantly prefigured the nationalism that came to power under Donald Trump. Paleoconservatism had more serious intellectuals than Buchanan, like Sam Francis, whose writings in the 1990s envisioned the rise of white nationalism a generation later; and Paul Gottfried, Richard Spencer’s teacher, who coined the term paleoconservatism.⁵⁶ Sam Francis went over the line in making explicit the place of whiteness in his nationalism, losing his position as a columnist for the Washington Times in 1995. But by and large paleoconservatism was able to play the double game Steve Bannon so successfully played at Breitbart and in the Trump campaign, denying a racist orientation but relentlessly alleging the injuries and crime minority populations were inflicting on American society. The 1990s also saw the rise of explicitly anti-immigrant organizations like VDARE, founded by Peter Brimelow, whose racist politics could no longer be tolerated at William F. Buckley’s National Review, where he had been an editor.57 The largest such group was NumbersUSA, founded by Roy Beck, who published The Case Against Immigration in 1996.⁵⁸ At the level of national political leaders, the outstanding figure in the movement was former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, who joined the Trump administration as attorney general, and whose chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has been the mastermind in the administration behind its anti-immigrant policies.⁵⁹

At its heart, paleoconservative and anti-immigrant nationalism dissented from the liberal point of view in seeing the underpinning of democracy as traditional, rather than as propositional. It was not the words that were contained in America’s founding documents that defined the nature of American democracy; but it was the culture, religion, and ethnicity of the authors of those words that formed the enduring and immutable basis of that democracy.⁶⁰ Propositional national feeling in this view is spiritually unsatisfying and leaves the body politic vulnerable to political correctness.⁶¹ Trumpism represents a radicalization of this point of view: It suggests not merely that liberalism has misunderstood and distorted the essential premise of the American nation, but that in its globalist hegemony since 1945, encompassing both Democratic and orthodox Republican thinking and policy—and in particular with its current multiculturalism, gay and feminist political correctness, and, above all, its openness to immigration—liberalism has brought the country to the point of an existential crisis.

During the presidential campaign the outstanding expression of this point of view came in the September 2016 publication of “The Flight 93 Election,” which explicitly analogized the jeopardy America faced in a Hillary Clinton presidency with the dilemma of the passengers in the plane hijacked on September 11 that was brought down over Pennsylvania by the action of its passengers:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try death is certain.62

The article’s byline was “Publius Decius Mus.” PDM turned out to be Michael Anton, who would become the deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications, a senior posting in the National Security Council; it was a position he would hold until April 2018, when he resigned rather than serve with the incoming national security advisor, John Bolton, whose career had been as a grandee, if a rather bellicose one, of Republican foreign policy orthodoxy.

Anton was part of the southern California–based Claremont Institute, publisher of the Claremont Review of Books; the institute would emerge not only as having the ear of the administration, but as the locus for elaborating the meaning of Trumpian nationalism in the years since Trump’s inauguration as president.⁶³ It is interesting that the intellectual heartbeat of Trumpian thought is located in California. In its voting behavior California confirms the implication of the “imagined Other” (see chapter 3), that if support for Trump varied inversely to the presence of immigrants in a voter’s near environment, then the presence of immigrants, the reality of immigrants, would mean relative inoculation against Trumpian fear-mongering of immigrants as criminal. Already majority minority, California voters preferred Clinton over Trump by 4.25 million votes (or 62 percent to 32 percent).⁶⁴ But the story reverses for right intellectuals and ideologues. The minority and immigrant footprint in California is precisely the political and social nightmare that haunted the proto-Trumpian intellectuals.65 Not only is Claremont the center of Trumpian nationalist theory in the United States, but the state has provided some of the most important ideological players in the administration: these include Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro, Anton, and others.

In July 2019, Daniel Luban attended the National Conservatism Conference in Washington and observed:

Usually, intellectual movements precede the rise of political ones, but in this case, Trump’s camp followers are reverse-engineering an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s basic instincts.⁶⁶

The outstanding figure in this ideological endeavor is the Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony. The author of The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony defines a conservative as “someone who strives to defend and build up the political and intellectual traditions of his or her own tribe or nation.”⁶⁷ Accordingly, conservativism in America must hew to “the conservative tradition of English-speaking countries,” or “Anglo-American conservatism,” which derives not from “rationalist-liberal axioms,” but above all from the “Hebrew Bible.” National Conservatism stands in contrast to the liberal “mythology” of America as a “creedal nation” (or a “propositional nation”), defined solely by certain abstractions found in the American Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address. Important though these documents are, they cannot substitute for the Anglo-American political tradition as a whole—with its roots in scripture and the English common law—which alone offers a complete picture of the English and American legal inheritance.⁶⁸

Hazony sees the period of “liberal democracy” in the West as an historical anomaly deriving from “the trauma of World War II.” It is this anomalous ideological dependence “on a closed system of Enlightenment-rationalist principles—liberalism—as the sole foundation for public life” that has resulted in the U.S. and other Western nations “hurtling toward [the] abyss,” as Michael Anton described in “The Flight 93 Election.”69

If Western post–World War II liberalism is an anomaly, Hazony’s national conservatism represents a return to (historical) normalcy. The route to that return is to reimagine fundamentally the current conventional-wisdom (post-Fukuyaman) view of what constitutes the defining political bipolarity of the age, namely the antithesis of liberalism and nationalism. Hazony obliges by proposing that the real bipolarity of the age is nationalism versus imperialism. In this view, the liberalism shared by the Western powers constitutes the contemporary version of imperialism, which squashes national cultures in favor of international culture, and makes achieving true conservatism, national conservatism, impossible. The perception that globalism is shared by both Republican and Democratic elites is America’s transgression in this regard; and here Donald Trump achieves his highest national-conservative marks for making his attack on globalism the heart of his presidential campaign. Internationally, the most significant offender of national conservatism is the European Union.

Hazony criticizes the neoconservative dream of global American hegemony, which he depicts as one manifestation of this imperial mindset. But the main target of his ire is the European Union, “a universal state … whose reach will be limited only by the power that this empire can bring to bear”—the most insidious of empires because it looks [the] least like one.⁷⁰

The Grayed-Out Illiberal State Going Forward

In the end, Trump’s government has participated more in the spirit of illiberalism than in illiberalism’s concrete restructuring of liberal society. While American institutions are indeed a formidable barrier to structural change, so too liberalism in America has benefited from the considerable political limitations of Donald Trump. Benito Mussolini was not the first post–World War I political leader to stake out the role of the Duce. The poet and war hero Gabriele D’Annunzio had already done so in his year-long seizure of the city of Fiume in Yugoslavia. Mussolini, named for the hero of the left, the indigenous Mexican president Benito Juarez, had grown up in politics since he was a boy in Emilia-Romagna, had been an activist all his life, and had read the important political writers of the day. This put him in the position to eclipse D’Annunzio as leader of the revolt against both the liberal order of the day and its socialist opposition. Will there be a successor to Donald Trump who can sweep up and mobilize right-wing populism in the United States? And if so, will that successor be a more able political actor than Trump?

Under Trump, illiberal structural changes have remained largely potential—like the grayed-out options on a web screen. But there has been an exception, where harsh illiberal policy has been in place, and where it provides a model of how that might be made to spread to other spheres of national life. The exception has been the treatment of refugees on the country’s southern border. Giorgio Agamben has taken the notion of the “state of exception” from the Nazi-era political German philosopher Carl Schmitt. A state of exception occurs when one element of government, typically the executive, takes on powers above the law that allow that actor (whom Schmitt calls “the Sovereign”) to impose arbitrary rule over some part or the whole of a population.71 In practice this means that the population in question is deprived of its rights or redefined as noncitizens or nonpersons who are without rights altogether. Agamben argues vigorously that the government of George W. Bush imposed a state of exception in its treatment of prisoners of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who were declared outside the rules—outside the very definitions of personhood, in this case “prisoners of war”—of the Geneva Convention. The Bush administration’s doctrine of the unitary executive acted as an approximation of the state of exception and allowed the administration to take captured prisoners to Guantánamo Bay and where they were held without trial.

According to the anonymous author of A Warning, “Donald Trump proposed designating all migrants entering the US without permission as ‘enemy combatants’ and shipping them to Guantánamo Bay.”72 The Trump administration’s treatment of detainees at the border “would violate the Geneva Conventions,” according to Lauren Suken.⁷³ The legal means the administration used to enforce its border policy was to declare a state of emergency at the border.⁷⁴ Julian De Medeiros argues that Trump’s very idea of a wall at the border “prefigures a state of exception rather than a state of emergency.”⁷⁵ In general, how the state of exception under illiberalism is expressed is by showing no respect for minority rights. At an extreme this means defining groups as nonpersons.

In more politically competent hands, Trump’s use of declaring a state of emergency to advance predetermined policy goals, especially those that single out groups for less than full citizen rights, could serve as a model for an unencumbered executive operating under the conditions of a state of exception. The technologies that have helped Trump create epistemological chaos are sure to advance in the coming years. Already the capacity to create “deepfakes” is becoming available. These are videos where individuals, like public figures or political opponents, can be made to appear to be saying whatever the videographer wishes; it is a technology that conjures up the movie Face Off, where two individuals swapped faces and could operate seamlessly in one another’s lives. Deepfakes will make current versions of (real) fake news look as prehistoric as silent movies; it will make Sharpiegate look pre-Gutenberg.76

Today the buttons of illiberal power remain largely grayed out on U.S. screens. With a more able populist leader, armed with technologies enabling fabrication of unimpeachable political fables, those buttons could begin lighting up like corn in a popper.

Blue America in 2020

By 2020 Blue America had found their voice. The threats to the foundations of democracy they intuited in their opening exposure to Trumpism four years earlier had become explicit. As Adam Schiff, the lead House Manager in Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, put it in January 2020:

We may be remembered … for a single decision … affecting the course of our country. I believe this may be one of those moments. A moment we never thought we would see. A moment when our democracy was gravely threatened and not from without but from within.⁷⁷

The impeachment came after Blue America felt it had endured not merely Trump’s daily assault on the canons of public discourse, but his skirting criminal behavior. The Mueller Report had adduced ten occasions that merited investigation for obstruction of justice.⁷⁸ Michael Cohen went to jail for carrying out Trump’s orders!⁷⁹ The impeachment trial itself was crippled by the administration’s refusal to part with documents and the Republican Senate’s refusal to call witnesses. Attempts to hold Trump accountable were met with a two-step hair-trigger: deny the accusation, then mirror the charge, projecting it back on the accusers. Back in 2016, when Donald Trump was first introducing himself as a political candidate to a Blue America at once aghast and amused, the two-step seemed like Trump’s personal tic.80 By 2020, it had morphed into the operative principle of the William Barr’s Justice Department, Fox News, and the whole of the Republican Party.⁸¹

For Blue America, the political business of 2020 was unseating Trump in the November elections. After the impeachment, Blue electoral chances looked fairly straightforwardly good—negative partisanship seemed to rule national elections.⁸² In 2016 Democrats were unenthusiastic about Hillary Clinton, but Republicans despised her and turned out in droves. In the 2018 midterms, after enduring two years of Trump, Democrats turned out massively. They had the numbers, and revulsion at Trump had not diminished. Without a fatal self-inflicted error, things looked promising for Blue America. Democratic primary voters rallied around Joe Biden when it looked as though Bernie Sanders might take the nomination—safeguarding against alienating moderates, independents, and Republicans repulsed by Trump. There was a gnawing doubt about what might be happening out of sight and beyond the polls. Trump named Brad Parscale, who had orchestrated his 2016 web strategy, as campaign manager, pushing his campaign chips out on the mastery of cutting-edge and massive microtargeting on Facebook and the like.⁸³ Still, there was cause for optimism.

But the coronavirus pandemic introduced an unprecedented element into the 2020 electoral calculus. On the one hand, reality—people dying in heightening numbers—made short work of Trumpian dismissals of “hoax.” From the perspective of Blue America, could the mortal nature of the pandemic finally break the hold Trump had maintained on his legions throughout four years of nonstop outrage and error? But on the other hand, the pandemic gave a fresh impetus to populist organizing. Trump fanned the flames of a new anti-sheltering movement that put protesters in the street and resembled, even self-consciously, nothing so much as the early Tea Party.84 Tea Party constitutionalism reappeared in the populists’ insistence on their superior grasp of the meanings of tyranny and liberty; indeed this thinking was now accompanied by what could only be called populist epidemiology.⁸⁵ Abroad, in the name of coronavirus emergency, illiberalism’s leading light, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, effectively used the pandemic to give himself an enabling act, the power to rule by decree.⁸⁶ Trump’s assertion of his “total” powers in the face of the pandemic echoed the impulse behind this development.⁸⁷ Blue America’s route to restoring democracy’s status quo ante Trump had unprecedented shoals to navigate.⁸⁸