Will Trump Get Re-Elected? And What Happens if He Does?
Image: Bryan Woolston
Trump, Democracy’s Decline, and the Global Macro Trend Quake
by umair haque
It’s almost election season proper. And the question on many minds is: will Trump be re-elected? And what happens if he is? Let’s talk about it.
The way that this question gets answered, in American thinking, is through a micro lens. We look at poll data, state by state, group by group, and infinitesimally, painfully, tot up the numbers. And we arrive at the Same Old Conclusion: the election, and the fate of the nation, not to mention perhaps the world, is in the hands of a handful of voters in swing states, notably “independent” ones, which, in America, tends to mean people who already lean pretty far right.
I’m going to teach you a very different way to answer this question. One that I think is more powerful. And you’re going to learn a few striking facts along the way. Ready?
One of the things we’ve been discussing quite a bit at my new publication, The Issue, is what I call “macro trends.” (And if you haven’t joined us yet, by all means, please come on over, click around, have a good old read — there’s tons to peruse there already.) Now, in future posts, I’ll explain just why thinking in terms of macro-trends is key to understanding a world that seems to be breaking down around us, but for now, a little case study.
Trump’s re-election bid comes in the context of a certain macro trend. The implosion of democracy worldwide. When I say that, there are people who’ll cry, “Oh, there goes Umair, being hyperbolic again!” But am I? Hold on, because I’m about to cite you a figure that should alarm you a great deal, maybe even set your hair on fire.
What kind of shape is democracy in, at this juncture in human civilization? A much, much worse one than most people think. We have a kind of cognitive bias when it comes to thinking about democracy — we overestimate, badly, just how much of the world is democratic, and as a consequence, just how far and fast democratic decline has really spread. Political scientists call it “backsliding,” but when I quote the actual statistics to you, as I’m about to do, you’ll soon see why I call this macro trend “implosion.”
Just a little more than 40% of the world was ever democratic. And that number’s fallen to below 20% or so. That’s bad, but it’s not the worst part. That’s happened in two decades. Hence, I think that calling that state of affairs “backsliding” seriously understates the scale, scope, and speed of the trend. What we have before us appears to be a genuine case of the implosion of an institution, or a public good (and we’ll come to what that means, if you want a refresher).
To put it in perspective, those figures mean that democracy’s declining at the rate of 10% a decade. From a current level of just 20%. That puts the…end…of democracy…within living sight. I’m not saying that “will” happen. But I am saying that at some point, we’re going to begin talking about democracy’s twilight, if this macro trend goes on in the direction it’s currently heading in. If we think about it in the simplest way, which is linearly, then we have two decades — just two decades — of democracy left ahead of us.
Of course, we don’t need to think linearly, and that’s the point of macro-trend thinking, in a way — to give us nuance, depth, sophistication, and let us form complex judgments about a world going haywire. The point emphatically isn’t “Umair’s saying democracy’s going to die in twenty years!” Rather, it’s that the current situation is bad enough. Most people have little to no idea that democracy’s in as dire shape as it is, and when they’re told, informed, enlightened, they react with surprise and more than a little bit of horror — and then they begin thinking, taking it in, reflecting, as their cognitive bias is undone.
Now let’s come back to Trump. The micro picture tells us a little bit, but not that much, really. Could Trump be re-elected? Sure. Is the election in the hands of swing states? Sure. Are American independents going to decide it? Yup. Do they lean heavily right, at least in global terms, where “center” means something more like Canadian or European social democracy? Of course, that’s why they’re “independent” in America’s sense of politics, which is deeply imbalanced to begin with — after all, neither party offers people universal healthcare or retirement, etcetera. So we learn…something…but not a great deal. Especially that we don’t already know.
Now think of what we’ve already learned by thinking in terms of macro trends. Could Trump be re-elected? In a sense, in this context, given this trend — and this is a civilizational, global level trend, sweeping across the world, defining an age in history by now — it’d be more surprising, perhaps, if Trump weren’t re-elected. Or just “got back into power again,” if you want to be the kind of person who objects to America’s weird electoral college system, which is more than fair.
For America to buck this trend would be the bigger surprise. Because of course “macro trend” means just that: something which affects us all. And something which is a force. One of the ways in which I object to American thinking — is it even really thinking very much anymore? What do you really learn from reading the op-eds at this point? — is that it discounts the idea of historical forces. European thinking — sociology, psychology, economics — on the other hand, is very much built around the notion of historical forces. I think it’s done a much better job being thinking, but that’s a topic for another time. To put it more simply, this is a great, grave, grand historical force — democratic implosion — and should we really expect America to buck it?
American thinking’s answer goes like this: American exceptionalism means we’re not subject to historical forces. American thinking never accepted European thinking’s notion of historical forces because it internalized, accepted, cherished, perhaps, even, a little bit, the thing known as American exceptionalism. History and its forces apply to everyone else. But not us. We’re above history. We’re not subject to it. We create it, was the logical endpoint of this argument, which was famously taken to its limit in Fukuyama’s “The End of History.”
But history didn’t end. Neoliberal democracy, as Fukuyama claimed, American-style, didn’t sweep the globe. In a kind of capitalist revolution every bit the equivalent of Marx’s claims of socialist revolution, which were eerily similar, a few centuries before Fukuyama’s triumphalist thesis. Instead, history…rewound. At that precise instant, around the turn of the century…democracy began to implode. And it kept right on imploding.