It’s with an acute sense of despair that I’m increasingly convinced Donald Trump is not only going to have another term as president, but quite possibly a third as well. It is starting to seem inevitable. I hope I’m wrong, but to explain – at great length – I’ve tried to piece together my reasoning below.

Note: this is not only of the scattershot quality of my usual rambles, but also profoundly not funny. So if you came here thinking “hot shit, Steve has put out another one of his uniquely hysterical topical rants”, I’d recommend turning back now and perhaps seeking professional help. On the other hand, if you’ve got any interest in political philosophy and how we ended up living in a poorly-written parody of our own society, grab a snack and buckle up.

West is Best

Francis Fukuyama released The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. Contextualising the rise of liberal democracy and fall of communism, it was a major success, widely regarded by many as a sort of collective celebration of the twin successes of democracy and capitalism. We had, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the liberation of Eastern Europe, and the close transatlantic intertwinement we call the West, finally ‘won’ history. Everything to come was just bookkeeping.

As with most political philosophy, a lot of words were used to make this central point: liberal democracy is the end point of social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. All of history has been a slow, bloody progression towards this. It therefore follows that extending such a system to encompass the entire human race is the last step towards a kind of utopian Best Possible World.

Yes, there might be long periods of regression, but fundamentally we would see a trend towards (specifically) US-style liberal democracy as a final state of political enlightenment. Everyone else couldn’t help but fall into line with this model and, in the interests of the human race, it would be better that this happen comprehensively and quickly.

It was a desire to advance the whole planet to this idyllic state of post-history that underpinned much of (particularly US) foreign policy throughout the 1990s and 2000s. While it descended into a mocking trope, there was genuinely a sense that the solution to problems such as those found in the Middle East at the time was simply ‘more freedom’. If those people were freer, everything else would follow.

Freedom Isn’t Free (and Cannot be Given)

There were three key problems with this thinking. First, it fell foul of exactly the same kind of naivety as seeded the eventual collapse of Communism; that when freed from external pressures, people will gravitate towards rationality, compassion, and fairness. Not only does history show quite clearly that this has never really been the case, but it also assumes that the only external pressures on a society stem from its form of government.

This leads to the second – and most easily missed – problem. That is: there is only one sort of freedom and liberal democracy naturally maximises it. In fact, there are many things to be free of and it has become increasingly clear that liberal democracy may well severely exacerbate some of those things. The biggest being the fact freedom in general may well lead to exploitation at the (mass) individual level. Your living in poverty is justified by my freedom to make enormous profits.

We ignored the fact that these pressures can be just as great as those imposed by the state. It was a strange disconnection between government and society, as if the former is the sole source of problems in the latter. Or, perhaps, it was a childishly optimistic belief that we had found a system that wasn’t zero-sum, where we could have winners without losers and the height of the wins would not deepen the depths of the losses.

Thirdly and, to be honest, blindingly obviously, is the fact that people tend to dislike having anything imposed on them. Yes, their current government may be imposing all sorts of shit on them already, but it is their government. Your government coming along and imposing something else – even if under the aegis of that something else being better – is no less an imposition and, importantly, is a culturally external one.

Anyway, aside from a number of avoidable disasters and atrocities, the damaging implications of this kind of thinking for the West took a little longer to manifest. They can be summed up fairly neatly in two words: hubris and complacency. The Western world had ‘completed’ socio-politics and was now in an unassailable position from which it could generously spread the Good Word.

There is one other very important implication of all this, which helps to fuel that complacency: there is no progression from liberal democracy. Events still happen, but History does not, because it lacks any social or political future state into which it can unfold.

The Last Man

Back in the good old days when George W Bush was the worst president in living memory, some sort of conservative-evangelical nadir from which we must surely rebound, opposition to Western exceptionalism was not focused on what we were, but on how we were going about spreading it to everyone else. There wasn’t much question that we should promote liberal democracy in the form we were practicing it. It wasn’t suggested there was anything more on the home front than the odd wrinkle which needed smoothing out. That we were arrogantly feeding the festering rot that would bring about our own demise was certainly not a popular view on either side of the political centre. However…

An unwillingness to address the inequalities of liberal democracy has lead to widespread suffering, discontent, and disengagement from political reality. Governments have been reluctant – either out of self-interest or fear of perceived heavy-handedness – to grapple with problems such as voter turnout, media bias, or holding elected officials to meaningful account when they fall short of the high standards to which they should rightly be held.

This in turn has led to endemic disenfranchisement in a system that is not only reliant on but justifies itself through people being engaged, informed, and invested in the outcomes of political decisions. Usually but not always via elections. It has also allowed media bias to turn into mass manipulation via deliberate misinformation. And as a reflection of the very inequality that fueled this fire in the first place, it has enabled the political elite to exist in a bubble where accountability and consequences are abstract concepts. Want to lie to win an election or sway public opinion? Go for it. Nothing bad will happen to you. In fact, you can get out of it by just telling another lie. Nothing bad will happen to you for that, either.

The public front of this is the two faces of Fake News. On one side of the coin is the real fake news, which is to say lies used to shape public opinion. On the other side of the coin is the concept of fake news, which is used to undermine the real news when it looks like it might itself shape public opinion in a way not to your liking. This used to be called propaganda, but we don’t call it that anymore because to do so would be to draw painfully sharp attention to the fact we are not free. That we in fact exist within a perpetual Orwellian loop of incrementally better-sanitised oppression.

Which brings us to the Last Man, the archetypal human being best adapted to thriving at the End of History. In the cartoon version of this world, as painted by Fukuyama and co, such a person was an educated, ambitious, enlightened missionary of The Truth. In practice, the Last Man is privileged to such a point as being unaccountable no matter what their actions, opportunistically dishonest whenever it suits their narrative, and fundamentally hostile to the very idea of a well-informed and actively engaged electorate. Their ability to remain above the law is dependent on a combination of preventing as many people as possible from voting and ensuring those that do are as misinformed by propaganda as possible.

… And the End of History

It doesn’t take too much of a leap to work out to what the above alludes. In Donald Trump and the general rise of populist nepotism in the West, we are seeing exactly that evolutionary tale unfold. By being unwilling to staunchly, impartially defend the system, we have destroyed it. And that is something increasingly blamed on the American population, for allowing this to happen.

But the reality is not so simple as that. Firstly, any population which is already at risk of manipulation is by definition already ill-equipped to defend itself against it. There most certainly is a case for scathing criticism of those in the US who’ve deliberately and systematically undermined concepts such as evidence, accountability, and equality. That is not in question. But it’s also important to understand that many of the people who voted for Trump did so as victims rather than perpetrators.

Blaming people for not voting when they can’t afford – or even get – the time off work to do so is asking them to put an abstract ideal over the wellbeing of them and their families. Expecting people who grew up indoctrinated into violently polarised identity politics to just turn off those fundamental, life-long beliefs and act impartially to defend the system isn’t realistic. Especially – and this is the foulest trick the US political system has pulled on its own voters – when the violently polarised identity into which you were born is one which was taught you the system is your enemy.

Secondly, the rest of the West has sat idly by, unwilling to intervene. Nobody here has placed sanctions on the US as it has descended into a nightmare of propaganda, economic exploitation, and terminal Stage-4 Imperial inequity and decadence. The very top-most members of the elite have not faced personal asset-freezes, travel-bans or other consequences for their now monumental abuse and defilement of liberal democracy. Yet, had these people been from Iran or Russia, exactly those measures would have been taken.

So, while bemoaning the fact the US is being consumed by a poison of its own concoction, we’ve done nothing to help avert it. Indeed, we’ve been slowly administering it to ourselves, our unwillingness to act on those challenges at home implicit in our refusal to address them elsewhere. Suicide nets around Chinese mega-factories are greeted with abhorrence, when really the key difference between that and the most impoverished workforces in the West is we allow ours to go and kill themselves at home. Russia’s shameless interference with elections on both sides of the Atlantic are decried but not investigated or properly addressed, because doing so would make it harder for our homegrown despots to do the same. But don’t worry, because we’re a liberal democracy and therefore just somehow better than those places. The same rules don’t apply. Somehow, the problems with them are greater than any we might have here.

History is Written by the Victors

All this, with some degree of irony, just highlights the truth of the oft-repeated claim our understanding of history is inherently exceptionalist. It started with the Greeks and Romans, then evolved to the Western liberal democracies of Europe and the US. Everyone else, by this view, is just dragging their feet, lagging behind, lost in the socio-cultural foothills.

But the Fukuyaman end of that history has turned out to not be an evolutionary apex; it is a dead end, an illusion that distracts from the real end of history, whereby the rest of the world finally forces itself into our narrative and reveals that deception. We are left staring at the uncomfortable fact evolution favours multiple branches and that the one we’re on has left us poorly placed to survive and seemingly unable to adapt.

Our incessant, uncritical consumption of media has been the proverbial lead in our water. Confirmation bias has amplified the negative news about how other places are terrible, while reinforcing the positive news that we’re doing things just great. Pretending there was no enemy within, we have allowed it to blossom and flourish, in turn exposing us to the enemies without. They don’t care about truth, freedom, equality, compassion or anything else once held to be liberal or democratic.

But, watching us over recent decades, the regrettable truth they see – and we have not – is that we don’t either. Which is why the president of the United States can brazenly admit he wants to underfund the postal system in order to help him win an election that, under anything like fair and free circumstances, he looks certain to lose. It is why he is surrounded by a party that will excuse anything and everything he does, up to and including rape or avoidable mass casualties, in order to cling to power. And it is why the rest of us are, really, just tutting and shaking our heads about how bad things are next door as a distraction from the fact the exact same things are happening at home.