The election will decide whether Donald Trump gets the opportunity to impose his dark vision on our nation.
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In the last few days leading to the election, Donald Trump and his followers have abandoned any pretense of moderation or civility. Trump’s ballyhooed rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden degenerated into a festival of hatred for immigrants, anyone of color, and liberals in general.
The context for the racism and xenophobia is the gradual but seemingly inexorable demographic transformation of America. In 2010, roughly 9 million Americans described themselves as multiracial — i.e., having parents of different races. By 2020, more than 33 million Americans described themselves as multiracial. Though 3 out of 4 Americans are white today, white races are projected to be less than half the US population by 2045.
At the Garden rally, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe dismissed the American territory of Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”
Spreading the love, Trump running-mate JD Vance encouraged the crowd, dismissing Kamala Harris’s running mate as “Tampon Tim.”
“I’m not allowed to say that,” Vance told the crowd, “but you can.” Another speaker called Kamala Harris a “prostitute” and denounced her advisers as “pimp handlers.”
With Trump increasingly accused of sliding into fascism, comparisons to the mass rally held by American Nazis belonging to the German American Bund movement in 1939 seemed suddenly apt, no longer far-fetched.
Whether Trump is a genuine fascist or not is debatable, but there is no question that his vision for America is an authoritarian state with himself as commander in chief. He has already threatened, if elected, to shut down the major broadcast networks, punish The New York Times, prosecute political opponents, and deploy the US Army to deport some 11 million undocumented immigrants by force. He’s routinely denouncing immigrants as criminals, and anyone who disagrees with him as America’s enemies. “When I say, ‘enemy within,’ the other side goes crazy,” Trump told the crowd.
Trump’s stream-of-consciousness rhetoric is increasingly flavored by an explosion of hatred for foreigners mixed with naked admiration for dictators. His former White House chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, notes that Trump not only shares an unnerving proclivity for fascism but that, in private, he expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.
Trump’s close coterie of supporters and advisers sound like they are ready to go even further than their boss. Gen. Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s national security director, noted that if Trump wins the election, “the gates of hell — my hell — will be unleashed.”
For many non-Trumpers, the ex-president’s rambling vituperations sound like evidence of cognitive decline, which Harris euphemistically describes as “acting weird.” Trump calls his increasingly unnerving incoherence “the weave.” It consists of tossing out disconnected ideas and then combining them to make some incomprehensible point. “It’s brilliant,” he says.
An alternative explanation for Trump’s recent bizarre behavior could be that he is engaging in a desperate, last-ditch attempt at reenergizing his power base, which covers the spectrum from non-college-educated white males to racial supremacists, misogynists, and video game fanatics, along with just about anyone who feels disaffected in America today. This ragtag assemblage was notorious in the past for not bothering to vote.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s then-strategist, managed to mobilize them during the 2016 election, realizing that as few as 150,000 votes in key swing states might be enough to swing the election. To a man, they loved Trump’s politically incorrect approach; the more outrageous, the better. Aided by a flood of misinformation on social media, some of it supported by Russia, the strategy worked in 2016.
It didn’t in 2020. It’s anyone’s guess whether it will in 2024, though “garbagegate” may serve to boost its chances.
Trump Suggests Himself as Alternative to the Constitution
Trump’s latest “policy” arguments have focused on inflation and the claim that everything seemed more affordable when he was president. He neglects to mention that the COVID-19 pandemic virtually shut down the world economy during his presidency and led, in its aftermath, to global inflation far more severe than what the US has experienced. Or that the main reason that manufacturing fled the US was that corporate America sought to exact a maximum profit from low wages in China.
Trump also seems oblivious to the reality that his suggested 20 percent tariffs on virtually all US imports would not only raise the cost to consumers of virtually everything but would also amount to a replay of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which have generally been blamed for intensifying, if not triggering, the Great Depression. At least a thousand US economists pleaded with Herbert Hoover to veto the tariffs. Like Trump, Hoover thought he knew best.
Of 11 recent recessions, 10 were launched by Republican administrations, though that is hardly common knowledge.
The Constitution blocked Trump during his first administration; it may not be enough to stop him if he secures a second term. And it has become increasingly problematic as a vehicle for sustaining a representative democracy.
Among his other egregious proposals, Trump is also hinting that the US Constitution may no longer be all that useful. What the country really needs, Trump suggests, is a president who is ready to take charge regardless of the Founding Fathers’ frustrating checks and balances. The strong man America needs, he thinks, is Donald Trump.
Trump may have a point — not about overriding checks and balances, but about whether the Constitution needs adjustment. The Constitution blocked Trump during his first administration; it may not be enough to stop him if he secures a second term. And it has become increasingly problematic as a vehicle for sustaining a representative democracy.
Can an 18th Century Doc Handle a 21st Century Democracy?
Consider, for example, the institutions of the US Senate and the Electoral College, both solidly embedded in the Constitution. When that document was originally drafted in 1788, America’s population was just over 7 million citizens — roughly the current size of New York City. America’s population today is nearly 350 million. More than four-fifths live in urban areas — mostly along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
California alone accounts for more than 39 million people and is the fifth largest economy in the world. In contrast, the population of Wyoming is under 600,000. Yet both states enjoy equal weight in the US Senate.
The composition of the Electoral College is determined by allotting one elector for each senator and one for each congressional district. The effect is to give a voter in Wyoming a good deal more influence in choosing who runs the government than a voter in California or New York (or Texas or Florida, for that matter).
In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton won nearly 3 million more popular votes than Donald Trump, but had 74 fewer electoral votes. The effect of the Electoral College is to work against the country’s densest population centers when it comes to picking a president. George W. Bush, along with Trump, have been recent beneficiaries of this anti-democratic quirk.
Many believe it is time to change or simply drop the Electoral College altogether but, in a dramatically polarized political climate it is not at all clear how to do that. The Republican Party — which is overwhelmingly white, male, and resistant to social change — sees itself losing out in a future in which the American population will be increasingly diversified ethnically, religiously, and culturally. The Electoral College “works” for red states and, in a different way, for most swing states, which treasure their “decider” role and the political power and largesse it carries.
Social Media, Disinfo, AI, Musk, Trump: Quo Vadimus?
The Electoral College is not the only aspect of the Constitution that needs attention. The First Amendment, which guarantees free speech, is probably the most important right embodied in the text.
Freedom of expression has been vastly complicated by global communications, social media, the increased use of disinformation as a political tool, and the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, which makes it possible to produce fake photographic, video, and audio recordings that are nearly impossible to distinguish from the real thing.
America’s view of the world and itself is heavily influenced by news media. Fox News, which reaches more than 10 million cable TV subscribers, has turned into a virtual propaganda tool for the Republican Party, with occasional straight news reporting immersed in a flood of heavily opinionated talk shows.
X and Facebook, with far greater reach, are more subtle and potentially more dangerous. Facebook, the largest social media platform, reaches an average of over 2 billion people a day — 80 percent via mobile phones. The X platform, formerly Twitter, reaches around 106 million users in the US, and averages around 250 million messages a day.
Both Facebook and Twitter provide access to something that looks like news. What each user gets to see, however, is decided by an algorithm that is supposed to tailor the flow of information to the individual user’s specific interest. How the algorithm actually works is a trade secret but the obvious impact has been to deliver constant hits of confirmation bias and intensify tribalistic world views and belief systems.
It is hoped that the social media platform is operating in the interests of its users but, since the structure is opaque, that has to be taken as a matter of faith. Elon Musk, a South African who emigrated to Canada and only became a US citizen in 2002, is projected to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2027. After buying Twitter and reframing it as X, Musk has turned the platform into his personal bullhorn, and has made no secret of the fact that he is trying to get Trump elected president.
Lately, Musk has been using X to promote both himself and Trump. Why? Musk’s two major enterprises, Space-X and Tesla, are both highly dependent on decisions made in Washington. Trump has promised to let Musk play a key role in shaping how the US economy operates if he is elected president.
A deep irony of contemporary American politics is that a nation with so limited an understanding of its own history and traditions is saddled with a constitution — rooted in that history and those traditions — that is virtually unamendable, and thus terribly difficult to adapt to the needs and conditions of our own time.
There’s much evidence that Trump sees the US as a transactional business, parts of which can be sold off to the highest bidder. While Europe has already begun establishing guidelines on how artificial intelligence should be used, Musk thinks that should be left to the handful of potential oligarchs who currently exercise private control over the technology. He and Trump have clearly signaled that they’re ready to “do business,” quite possibly with Musk operating from a high position within the federal government itself. Although he has made major contributions through Tesla and Space-X, Musk may prove to be a more dangerous immigrant than any Central American or Venezuelan trying to slip discreetly across the border into Texas.
Social media, especially as shaped by opaque algorithms, is one of the major forces that have tended to split America into different camps, encouraging biases that were already there and inflaming antagonism for opposing ideas.
This persuasive warping of reality is easier in America precisely because so many of its inhabitants lack a basic knowledge of American history. A deep irony of contemporary American politics is that a nation with so limited an understanding of its own history and traditions is saddled with a constitution — rooted in that history and those traditions — that is virtually unamendable, and thus terribly difficult to adapt to the needs and conditions of our own time.
On both ends of the political spectrum there’s been some itching to ditch the old “We the People…” parchment and replace it with…
And there’s the rub.
It is anyone’s guess whose vision would emerge victorious from a new Constitutional Convention — whether our democracy would be refurbished and enhanced for its journey through the digital age, or gutted.
For better or for worse, that is not the task or the choice before us next week. But this Election Day, November 5, will give each of us a vital and precious chance to voice an opinion on what kind of America we want to become. Whether we will still get to have that choice in the future depends to a great extent on what we decide this time around.
