Henry Kissinger and the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss held a belief in common. As German-Jewish refugees in the United States, they had personally witnessed the failure of democracy in Weimar Germany, and carried the painful knowledge that such an exalted political system was no automatic safeguard against tyranny and misrule.
In his book The Inevitability of Tragedy (2020), Barry Gewen shows how Kissinger’s doubts about democracy ultimately accounted for his world-weary view of geopolitics. Likewise, the great philosophers of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance well understood that without the minimum virtue on the part of its practitioners, democracy, like any system, was vulnerable. That is why Arendt and Strauss were particularly unnerved by the ideological witch-hunts of the McCarthy era in the late Forties and Fifties in the United States. But at least back then there was the rectitude of presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to ultimately protect the system. Now, it is the occupant of the Oval Office himself who constitutes the mortal danger.
Donald Trump is no Adolf Hitler, the killer of Weimar. But he is a destroyer of institutions, of constitutional safeguards, and of the very demeanour of political life in America. He is the impresario of American political decline for a reason that is so obvious it goes virtually unnoticed: the loss of the centre in American politics, leaving the system at the mercy of both Right- and Left-wing ideologies. The late Polish philosopher Czesław Miłosz, in surveying the pathologies of Cold War-era communism, noted that the great attraction of ideologies was a “fear of thinking” for oneself, so that the masses had extreme ideas prepared for them by others. We have reached a similar moment in today’s America, where the advancement of communications technology has produced social media mobs driven by simplistic messages and passion. And passion is the enemy of analysis. It is impossible to imagine Trump outside of the digital-video age.
“It is impossible to imagine Trump outside of the digital-video age.”
It turns out that what protected America for so long was the more primitive technology of the print-and-typewriter age, which led to a deeper exploration of issues and generally avoided simplistic thinking, and was thus a barrier against mass ideologies. The print-and-typewriter age upheld America’s vibrant and stable democracy for most of its history. It is unclear whether American democracy can succeed as well in our new media era.
Another reason the centre has vanished is the fact of globalisation itself. Rather than unite the world, globalisation has split countries down the middle. In the United States that has meant the creation of a cosmopolitan, wine-sipping, European vacation-oriented upper-middle-class intimately connected with the outside world, and a working-class stuck in the old nation-state. There is even a geographical basis to this divide, with the globalised half inhabiting the two coasts, as well as the urban areas and college towns in-between, and the non-globalised half living in that vast rural obscurity defined as flyover country.
Finally, there is a flaw in democracy itself that the Founders well understood. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison preferred a republic to a democracy: that is, he favoured a limited democracy with elite safety measures. One could argue that America remained crucially a republic for as long as the party bosses chose presidential candidates. But that ended some decades ago, when the primary system was gradually established, allowing voters to choose their own candidates for the presidency. Because of low-voter turnouts in primaries, the new system favoured the extremes who were more motivated to vote. In fact, the party bosses never would have chosen Trump in 2016; they would have preferred the boring but supremely competent Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who would have governed like his father and not like his brother. America is now a fully fledged democracy and the result is Trump.
Since mass democracies function best in the political centre, it is worth exploring what the centre and the loss of it has meant to American politics. For that loss is the real fruit of globalisation and the digital-video era, justifying the fears of Kissinger, Arendt, and Strauss.
The centre made Congress work, both as a balancer against the executive branch and as a producer of good laws, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986. When the Republicans were a centre-right party and the Democrats a centre-left one, there was always a large philosophical overlap of senators and congressmen from both parties that got things done. That is no longer the case, as the Republicans have become a radical populist Right-wing party and the Democrats a radical progressive one.
The centre also produced a vital unity in foreign policy, so that the party out of power in the White House generally supported the foreign policy of the party in power. Politics, it was said, stopped at the water’s edge, so that America spoke with one voice when it came to matters on the other side of the two oceans. That is long gone, too. Now America’s foreign policy oscillates by 180 degrees between one administration and the next, so that foreign governments no longer wholly trust the United States.
The centre produced a dedicated and competent federal bureaucracy, including a Foreign Service elite that staffed the many dozens of embassies and consulates abroad: so that problems in a myriad of countries, especially in complex and troubled ones like Pakistan, Nigeria, and Colombia, were well handled before they reached the level of the secretary of state and the White House. The Trump administration is in the process of gutting this bureaucratic cadre which for decades kept American foreign policy far removed from both Left- and Right-wing ideologies. The so-called deep state, as I have written elsewhere, based on my own experience as a foreign correspondent for decades, is vastly superior in knowledge and common sense to the Right-wing ideologues who are now suspicious of it.
Finally, and most profoundly, the loss of the political centre has meant that elections have been invested with dangerous existential significance. Whether it’s the Democrats or the Republicans who are in power, there is now the phenomenon of the tyranny of the majority, with the 52% who voted for the winner tyrannising the losing 48%. In normal democracies, elections don’t — and shouldn’t — matter so much.
The United States has experienced the same phenomenon and worse in its nearly 250-year history. There was the presidency of Andrew Jackson from 1829 to 1837, and the Civil War itself from 1861 to 1865. Jackson was a rather rough-hewn military commander from Tennessee, with much Native American blood on his hands, who scandalised the genteel Virginia and Massachusetts elites who had run the country up until then. It was a geographical factor — the country’s westward expansion — that brought him to the fore as a man from the frontier; just as it was a geographical issue — the question of whether new western states entering the union would be slave states or not — that instigated the Civil War. And it is, in part, a geographical issue — the encroachment of the outside world upon American shores through globalisation — that is key to the country’s present dysfunction.
In each case, the country’s physical horizons have expanded, discomforting the elites. But the American West was ultimately absorbed into the body-politic of the nation in the late 19th century and a new political consensus arrived at, with all of its variations. Similarly, globalisation, which despite the new tariff regime is inexorable in so many subtle ways, could absorb all of America and help lead eventually to a new consensus. But that very process could itself require new battles and upheavals. In any case, the German-Jewish intellectuals who had personally experienced the end of Weimar were right to worry about their newly adopted land.
