Trump as revenge from the bully

2024-11-11 07:20:00, Opinione Ermal Mulosmani

In the final days of his election campaign, President Donald Trump has portrayed himself as a fixer for a country plagued by inflation, crime and immigration.

The slogan seemed quite familiar to me. Those four words were simple, concrete, hopeful, and above all: Coming from a Higher Authority. People were frustrated with the sense of sophistication and the liberal community that spoke for them and then did as it pleased.

Liberals have no persuasive power in a society that has increasingly lost faith in their politics.

However, liberals had anticipated the arrival of such a moment in time. Their respected voices have warned of the great crisis of the system, the stalemate between liberal policies and voters.

Here is how the Bulgarian Ivan Krastev describes this impasse:

"Voters can change governments, but it is becoming more and more impossible for them to change economic policies."

People seem trapped. Power depends on them but does not ask about them. This is a cynicism, a kind of torment without reward, it seemed like mockery. People's powerlessness to influence economic policies leads to indifference and accumulation of wealth.

Krastev has thus figuratively described the feeling of powerlessness of people in our time compared to that of the past:

"In 1968 the general feeling was that in the coming world you could be whoever you wanted. In 2008, the feeling is that everyone and everything - people and institutions can call you...in you."

Ivan Krastev, "We trust unbelief"

Another joke that Krastev mentions but that best expresses the popular frustration with the elections is an outstanding slogan somewhere on a building in Sofia-Bulgaria:

"If the elections were to choose something then they would have been banned"

Citizens may not have the proper qualification to make the best possible solution, but their sense of powerlessness inevitably leads to the accumulation of money. They become emotional and don't even want to listen to reason. The self-deprecating and dark humor phase of the 2010s gradually morphed into a popular desire for payback. The ground was fertile for sowing the seeds of counter-liberals. The declared popular enemy is none other than the chief ideologue of the Open Society, the preacher of free movement, George Soros.

Despite identifying the problems, the Liberals did nothing to fix them. They lived in another, ideal world, where technocracy ruled, not populism. Liberal elites despised populists. They (the people) were emotional, unsophisticated, direct, manipulative, almost hypnotic. This is how another liberal ideologue Benjamin Arditi describes the relationship between populists and liberals:

"Populism is like a drunken guest at a dinner party, he does not respect table manners, is uneducated and may even start flirting with the guests' wives. But at the same time he may be slapping us in the face with the truth that liberal democracy IS FORGETTING THE PRINCIPLE ON WHICH IT WAS FOUNDED, THAT OF PEOPLE'S SOVEREIGNTY."

"In the minds of the people, I don't even go to the toilet. They are uneducated ignoramuses" - says Paridi, a smart liberal, well versed in politics. Perhaps rightly so. He is the epitome of one of those elite gentlemen invited to Benjamin Arditi's dinner party. The ideal world for him is what Jan Werner Miller describes:

"Theorists of democracy are preoccupied with the revival of what they consider liberal technocracy, meaning liberal government with a team of experts that is consciously unresponsive to the wishes of ordinary citizens."

Herein lies the source of the scorn of liberalism's opponents, the contemptuous arrogance of liberal gentlemen. Dutch researcher Cas Mudde describes this quite nicely:

"Illiberal democratic response to an undemocratic liberalism".

This is the essence. People fed up with their impotence for change, with the dismissive cynicism of liberal leaders, decided to become cynical themselves: They will choose another. Everything liberal is hated. Free movement must be banned, immigrants are the enemy, the marginalized too, LGBT defame him, the strong man is cool. It's all a blast of bullshit. The theses of equality are declared abhorrent, the family with a strong man, with a capital B is liked, crime needs a strong hand, these will not let go.

Donald Trump is the consequence of this situation. People came out and despised their detractors. It doesn't matter at all that they may be the biggest sufferers of the consequences. Boll see their scorners once powerless.

Liberals wanted to change the natural order of things, to protect the small, the poor, the marginalized by building another order, that of a world as it should be. People tried, they were indoctrinated, they were self-suggested. They almost submitted. Until finally they got tired and exploded. Because liberals overdid it. Like the communists once with the "new socialist man", they also tried to bring the "new capitalist man". With the same success in failure.

The thesis "Trump will fix it" was the right one to channel the popular rage against liberal revanchism against democracy. The people feel the need for an authoritarian person who is not a hypocrite, an illiberal. "Trump will fix it" is what he wanted to hear, a true representative of the sovereign. Every popular concern is paid off in "Trump will fix it". Even if you don't fix it, this one is different. This is the Commander, this is the Legend, this is forgiven. This is different from Ata. That's enough.

The times have come for strong men, peoples have shown their natural instinct to be ordered. This is not only in the USA but also in Europe. Putin, Erdogan, Vucic, Orban. Even Austria and Germany have shown strong trends. Even politics will be subject to cyclical trends. Like everything in the human universe. Liberal democracy has lost its luster and must wait for other times to return. I hope that by then we will not have irreparable consequences./ CNA