Trump and the cult of personality around him are part of a broader reactionary movement

On Wednesday, I told you about the problem of seeing the coming election as a choice between democracy and anti-democracy. The problem stems from the slipperiness of the word. “Democracy” can mean a range of things – from a just, peaceful and equitable society to a top-down social order, with continued dominance by white men.

From the liberal view, or at least the anti-fascist view, the decision is obvious. A vote for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election is a vote against democracy. From the perspective of a Trump voter, however, the same terms apply. A vote for Joe Biden is a vote against democracy. The difference rests on opposing views of the term.

According to Thomas Zimmer, a historian at Georgetown University, “what we often describe as the American project has been shaped by two competing visions from the very beginning. One is captured by the idea that all men – all people – are created equal. Who had a claim to be counted among the people has always been contested, but there was undoubtedly an aspirational vision there: A civic nationalism that defined the country as a place where everyone could become American if they subscribed to the principles of egalitarian democracy.

“But for most of the country’s history,” Thomas went on to say, “status and resources have been distributed in accordance with a very different vision of democracy – that of America as a land of and for white Christians, where white Christians had a right to be at the top and determine the boundaries of who and what was ‘American.’”

The second problem is that anti-democracy, in the form of Trump, is being accomplished democratically. Though he tried and failed to stay in power by force, Trump is now asking people who might share his anemic vision of America to vote for him. You can say a vote for Trump is a vote against democracy. But you can also say it’s a vote for it – a kind of democracy, of course, that excludes more than it includes.

I’m not sure what the solution is. It could be, as Perry Bacon wrote, that we talk about what we want to achieve – “greater majority rule,” he suggested by way of example. Another might be adding the words “liberal” or “illiberal” to “democracy.” There’s some merit to that – I’ve done it – but it runs the risk of being so abstract as to be meaningless.

Thomas suggests putting the term in its proper context, meaning the “multipronged, multi-level reactionary counter-mobilization that has a judicial arm, a political arm, an intellectual arm and a paramilitary arm, all flanked by a highly effective media and propaganda machine.”

Below is Part 2 of my interview with Thomas. (Part 1 is here.) Meanwhile, maybe the best thing is awareness of what we are saying and the limits of the words we are using in saying it. That way, we don’t take for granted that the people we are trying to persuade understand what we mean when we say Donald Trump threatens democracy.

JS: A third of Republicans are OK with violence. The percentage is growing. Is now a good time to talk about the GOP’s paramilitary wing?

I think what we need to grapple with is something much, much bigger – that multiracial, pluralistic democracy faces a multipronged, multi-level reactionary counter-mobilization that has a judicial arm, a political arm, an intellectual arm and a paramilitary arm, all flanked by a highly effective media and propaganda machine.

Trump himself is not the story – nor, however, is his fate simply a distraction from what really matters. We need to see the ex-president, the cult of personality around him, and his core followership as a specific part of that broader reactionary project.

It’s hard to keep track of everything that’s happening, on so many levels, in so many states and communities, all at the same time. That’s why it’s crucial to emphasize the underlying political project, the comprehensive reactionary vision for society that drives all this.

Over the past few years, we have seen the rapid normalization of far-right ideology, far-right militancy and fascistic violence. It comes in more or less organized forms: More organized in the way militant groups like the Oathkeepers or the Proud Boys are aggressively trying to make their presence felt in the public square; less organized in the omnipresence of guns and tactical gear in American public life, and also in the way symbols of white fascistic militancy are now everywhere, proudly displayed on T-shirts or bumper stickers.

None of this is new, per se. There is a long tradition of white power or white-militia movements. There’s not a moment in history when white supremacist violence and white nationalist terrorism weren’t important factors in American life. Far-right extremist ideas and actors were always part of the modern conservative movement.

What feels new to me, however, is the speed with which all this has moved towards the center of conservative politics and has been thoroughly normalized within the mainstream Republican Party.

It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans openly propagating and explicitly embracing far-right ideology such as the so-called “Great Replacement Theory” on the national stage could expect some form of pushback and – remember the example of Steve King in 2017 – maybe even actual consequences. That has rapidly changed.

In the context of a radicalizing rightwing assault on democracy and an escalating reactionary counter-mobilization against multiracial pluralism, it all makes for an enormously toxic, acutely dangerous situation. And I fail to see why it wouldn’t get worse, because I don’t know where the moderating impulse is supposed to come from.

It’s certainly not coming from within the right, as moderate voices have been largely sidelined or purged, and whoever is left has all the incentives in the world to keep pushing these ideas, in order to keep the base engaged and riled up, but also because the people who are left are, ideologically speaking, true believers in white nationalism.

JS: The thing about authoritarianism is that it's often accomplished by democratic means. Trump wants to be elected! Counterarguments?

Maybe the silliest position is “democracy just means elections, and whatever comes out of elections is therefore democratic and must not be criticized by people who pretend to be all about democracy.”

Because democracy does not just mean elections.

In widely accepted parlance today, democracy is defined, at a minimum, as a system of institutionalized popular sovereignty that plays by majoritarian rules and treats all citizens as equals.

An election outcome that undermines that system – because it empowers forces that are explicitly vowing to install minority rule, for instance – is therefore not good for democracy. Many autocratic rulers got to power by legal, democratic and/or constitutional means and then set out to transform the system into something that was no longer democratic. Think Viktor Orbán in Hungary today.

What we need is an honest conversation about how democracy can protect itself against those who explicitly set out to destroy it – without becoming that which it seeks to defeat in the process.

It is true that democracy indeed needs to tread carefully in fighting authoritarianism. If it stays committed to what distinguishes it, democracy is destined to fight with one hand bound behind its back. But it must not mean that it can’t fight back at all – or it will perish.

JS: We’ve been here before.

TZ: This was one of the key lessons contemporaries drew from the near-demise of democracy almost everywhere in the period between the two world wars – a key lesson especially in postwar Germany.

The Weimar Republic had evidently failed in that regard. It had proved incapable of defending itself against the onslaught of extremist movements and parties that were making use of the very democratic features of Weimar’s constitution to bring the hated republic down.

After 1945, West Germany adopted the idea of a “wehrhafte Demokratie” – a fortified democracy capable of fighting back. For instance, Germany’s Basic Law allows for groups or parties to be declared “hostile to the constitution” and therefore be surveilled by the state or, at the extreme end, even outlawed.

Again, such instruments need to be handled with great care, unless the defense of democracy turns the system into something other than democratic. At the same time, to bring this back to the US today: Trump could not be more explicit about his desire to erect an autocracy – and he has tried. Trumpism is a much broader political and societal problem to which there are indeed no easy legal fixes.

But if the leader of a radicalizing, increasingly fascistic movement can attempt to nullify the results of a democratic election and end constitutional government via a multi-level, multi-month coup attempt that ultimately led to a violent insurrection and then just return to power four years later, without ever facing any real consequences, democracy will not persist.

JS: In the face of Christian nationalism, liberals often resort to secular nationalism. That might work, but maybe not. Can you explain?

TZ: What we often describe as the American project has been shaped by two competing visions from the very beginning. One is captured in the idea that all men – all people – are created equal. Who had a claim to be counted among the people has always been contested. But there was undoubtedly an aspirational vision there: A civic nationalism that defined the country as a place where everyone could become American if they subscribed to the principles of egalitarian democracy.

But for most of the country’s history, status and resources have been distributed in accordance with a very different vision of democracy – that of America as a land of and for white Christians, where white Christians had a right to be at the top and determine the boundaries of who and what was “American.” The current form of white Christian nationalism is a specific iteration of this anti-egalitarian vision.

That does not mean egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy is hostile to religion – in fact, it is defined by its acceptance and embrace of religious and cultural pluralism. But that’s also precisely what makes it fundamentally incompatible with a nationalism that insists on white Christian patriarchal supremacy. That is the line all those who consider themselves (small-d) democrats need to hold.