Remember when former Vice President Joseph Biden, then the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, told a radio host that black voters torn between voting for him and President Trump “ain’t black”? There is a widespread sentiment among progressives that, even if a white person can’t identify as black, being black is more about ideological standpoint and partisan sympathies than it is about ancestry. The race of a black man who strays from the Democratic Party fold is suspect. He’s an “Uncle Tom” or an “Oreo” (with a politically incorrect crème filling). Despite this, the radio host to whom Biden was speaking has now effectively endorsed Biden by declaring that Trump represents the “end of democracy.”
This is something we’re hearing a lot lately. Yesterday, on the view, Whoopi Goldberg begged Liz Cheney, a chip off the block of her father Dick Cheney, the notorious warmonger in charge of death and torture under the Bush Jr. regime, to run as a third party candidate to take votes from Trump because, in her words, Trump “wants to be dictator for life.” Goldberg warned that “if he ever gets in again we’ll never have anymore elections—there will be no more. He will stop it, and he’s very clear about that.” One wonders whether Charlamagne and Goldberg are ignorant or lying (I will leave that determination to the reader), but there is not a single indicator nor even a vague pattern indicating that a Donald Trump presidency spells the end of democracy. On the contrary.
To be charitable, what Charlamagne and Goldberg don’t understand is that the panic they feel urged to express by the voices in their bubble (those who shape the bubble recognize the importance of recruiting cultural figures in the campaign) is not fear of the end of the democracy but terror felt among elites in anticipation of a Trump second term that will initiate the process of deconstructing the administrative-technocratic apparatus (Google “Project 2025”) and expose more profoundly the steering mechanisms of corporate power, including the election rigging system and the deep state. As I have shown on Freedom and Reason, when elites talk about democracy, they really mean the opposite, what Sheldon Wolin refers to in Democracy, Inc., as “inverted totalitarianism” or “managed democracy.”
Elites are terrified that the twin projects of managed decline and transnationalization will be constrained and retarded if Trump is elected again. Although Trump cannot reverse the effects of the projects given the short four-year time frame of the US presidency, delays in the elite agenda increase the likelihood of mass resistance to denationalization by providing time for the populist forces defending cultural integrity and national sovereignty to effectively organize. Moreover, the socialization of mutual knowledge that will occur during a second Trump term will entrench the social movement he represents, and the political realignment in party politics that predicts makes the permanency of populist-nationalism in the West all the more probable.
The campaign to destroy Trump, a little too late it seems to me, is an attempt to nip the realignment in the bud. The corporate state worries about the risk of creating a martyr (which is why Trump is still alive, I suspect), but even the effort to delegitimize him—impeachment, lawfare, electoral rigging, mass mediated hysteria—is a form of martyrdom in late capitalism. Thanks to the anarchy of rapid technological innovation, elites lost control over the narrative. This is the dilemma for elites. The best way out of the mess would be to centralize command over the electoral system and lean in to censorship, which they’re trying, but they’re dealing with an awakened population and Musk’s X (Twitter) and other open social media systems, as well as a vast alternative media network utilizing all traditional formats. This explains the desperation in progressive voices. Goldberg appears genuinely panicked.
The panic of elites should be grasped as a source of hopefulness; if they are this concerned about a second Trump presidency, then they agree with me about how effective a Trump presidency will be in diminishing the hold power elites have on the West. The authoritarians are so scared of loosing the grip on the world that they let the covers slip. They should be scared. It’s imperative that the American people prevail in 2024. We are the tip of the spear. Europe is counting on us. We need a chance to build the resistance. And we don’t have much time. It’s not Trump that’s the threat to democracy. It’s the progressive-transnationalist uniparty and the administrative-technocratic establishment that represent the New Fascism.
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