Citizenship After Trump

Democracy versus Authoritarianism in a Post-Pandemic Era

Bradley S. Klein, Scott G. Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032214832
• eBook ISBN: 9781000572537
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Citizenship After Trump, political theorists Bradley S. Klein and Scott G. Nelson explore the meaning of community in the context of intense political polarization, the surge of far-right nationalism and deepening divisions during the coronavirus pandemic.

With both Trumpism and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic greatly testing American democracy, the authors examine the political, economic and cultural challenges that remain after the Trump Administration's exceedingly inept leadership response. They explore the promise and limits of democracy relative to long-standing traditions of American political thought. The book argues that all Americans should consider the claims of citizenship amidst the forces consolidating today around narrow conceptions of race, nation, ethnicity and religion—each of which imperils the institutions of democracy and strikes at the heart of the country's political culture. Chapters on the media, political economy, fascism and social democracy explore what Americans have gotten so wrong politically and considers what kind of vision can, in the years ahead, lead the country out of a truly dangerous impasse.

Citizenship After Trump is an invaluable and timely resource for self-critical analysis and will stimulate focused discussions about as yet unexplored regions of America's political history.

1Dynamics of the Current Impasse

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268741-2

We are aware of the defining characteristics of the historical moment in which we live. There is no escaping embeddedness in the issues of our times, least of all when undertaking political analysis and prescription. To somehow rise above or push beyond and purport to analyze from an objective position outside of a unique space and time would mean reducing one’s perspective to simplistic generalizations. Worse, it would imply that endeavoring to produce some kind of abstract, universalistic account is even feasible, never mind politically appropriate. Our own understanding of the way knowledge and values work is much more grounded, tied to particular moments in time. And while we seek to offer a position that does not get mired in the minutiae of the moment, we also think it is important to consider the emotional valence that defines the era in which we live.

There is a danger, of course, in being too near to something. All it takes is a bout of binging on round-the-clock-news or following the attendant commentary and postings on social media—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on—to feel overwhelmed, lost in a blur of screaming headlines and events. That has especially been the case since the spring of 2020, when we started to outline key features of the nation’s current political impasse, with the convergence of so many issues that present themselves as both tragic and terrifying.

Yet we also are motivated (and inspired) by the public response that accompanies these events—some of them, anyway. The sustained outpouring of protest at the police brutality that has destroyed so much of America’s non-white, urban and poorer communities is a powerful assertion of public protest in the best democratic traditions. While there have been excesses, the overwhelming majority of the demonstrations under the banner of Black Lives Matter have been peaceful and respectful. One revealing sign of the way media coverage works in an era of relentless 24-hour “news” is that the various television networks effectively lost interest in the drama of major protests precisely because of their non-violent nature. It was not exciting enough to garner the kinds of ratings producers were hoping for, so they turned the cameras off and it felt like the protests had just disappeared when in fact they simply became further ensconced in the everyday practices of a shifting political culture. News is about what erupts from the surface as anomalous. Too often, closely tracking “break-through news” becomes an impediment to understanding deeper, underlying currents at work in the nation’s politics.

Yet there is evidence that the depth, intensity and geographical diversity of social justice protests stand in contrast to earlier waves of protest movements the two of us have experienced in our lifetimes. Both the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and 1960s and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement that followed on its heels generated intense, sustained support and attention. Yet these movements also suffered in their impact because they became disconnected from larger social issues having to do with systemic poverty, colonialism and militarization. In many ways both of those movements can be understood in retrospect as precursors of the current protests. What looks promising is the way in which the latest generation of protests seems to build upon simmering discontent that has lately become joined in a more comprehensive discourse that questions the nature and limits of citizenship, power, equity and justice in America. The task for “episodic democracy,” a concept Sheldon Wolin introduced some years ago to call attention to democracy’s fugitive, all-too-fleeting character, is to cultivate bonds of trust and attachment across space and time, thereby preserving civic commitment and leveraging collective action to effect policy and institutional change (Wolin 2018).

It is hard to deny that the United States is currently emerging from a long succession of economic disappointments as well as abject failures. We are not referring simply to recurring, cyclical bouts of boom and bust, whether one is speaking about the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the dot.com bubble burst of 2000 or the Great Recession of 2008–2009. It would be easy, once again, to get lost in the particularities of each recessionary phase rather than to see them as stages in the unfolding and deepening of increasing inequality in income distribution, the hollowing out of the middle class, the steady advance of poverty (especially in communities of color) and increasing economic despair for so many throughout the vast middle class. All of this has been going on, to be sure, and at the same time one notices the experiences of an ever-smaller elite cadre of businesspeople and celebrities who enjoy more wealth, more generous tax breaks and greater access to privatized healthcare and education. And perhaps most consequential in terms of the impact upon governance at the present moment (winter 2021–22) is how the Republican Party displays such ideologically vacuous opposition to the Democrats’ post-Trump legislative agenda, addressing as it does long put-off neglect of the nation’s infrastructure and proposing massive investments in education, health and elder care, and finally facing up to a host of challenges associated with climate change.

The operative concept regarding those who are closed out of the nation’s narrowing socio-economic system is “precarity”—being in a state of anxious uncertainty concerning access to housing, healthcare and adequate employment, let alone never feeling reassured about long-term stability. This runs the gamut, from homeless veterans to Lyft and Uber drivers and an increasing class of freelancers in fields as diverse as manual labor, graphic design, journalism and teaching. It includes the range of occupations, from temporary faculty (who comprise a majority share of teaching time at many major universities) to migrant workers employed in agricultural fields and landscape trades. It also includes those employed “full-time” at sub-poverty hourly rates as clerks and suppliers in retail sectors. The pandemic has certainly exposed the precarious employment base of a wide swath of the American economy. But the bigger picture is coming into focus as well. Because of sustained attacks on unionization and the declining rate at which workers in this country are protected by organized contracts, it should not surprise anyone that so much attention has been focused on the vulnerability and exposure to viral infection of an entire class of employees whose “essential services” have heretofore largely gone unacknowledged.

Given the extremely uneven availability of basic healthcare in this country, and the high costs associated with private insurance, we recognize the ironies of an economy that has been exposed as one in which the lowest-paid sector provided essential delivery and transport services to the sequestered middle and upper classes. And it was precisely those precarious classes that were deemed “essential” and who were “forced” early on in the pandemic to choose between continued work (and exposure to the coronavirus) or the relative safety of homestay and with it, financial ruin. One revealing statistic about the extensive nature of socio-economic precarity is how few Americans have emergency savings of even a very modest amount. Data suggest that 40 percent of Americans do not have access to $400 cash in the event of the most basic crisis—home emergency, car repair or urgent medical need.

Traditionally, industrial democratic societies have based their legitimacy on the promise of a better life. The toils and sacrifices of each generation were supposed to be justified through the assurance, or at least the realistic expectation, that successor generations would have it better off and that avenues of advancement through education would provide a path to jobs that paid better, made better use of talent and created a modicum of stability and continuity. Without that promise, and without widespread belief in a political collective that was actually trying to make good on that promise over the long term, a society loses its moorings and becomes filled with uncertainty and despair.

The normal path for expressing discontentment has been the ballot box. It is surely no coincidence that a chief aim of the Civil Rights Movement was not only racial equity but guaranteed, unfettered access to voting rights. It took the U.S. Congress decades to codify those rights yet, in 2013, nearly five decades after enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the Supreme Court of the United States voted 5–4 to void key parts of the act’s oversight provisions, effectively leaving enforcement of those hard-won rights in the hands of the states. The result has been a series of restrictions on access, this time achieved not through outright disenfranchisement on racial grounds but through gerrymandering of districts, reducing the number of polling stations, removing names from registration lists and reducing eligibility for absentee balloting. The effect, largely undertaken by state houses and state governments run by Republican partisans, has been to deliberately target Democratic strongholds—cities, poor areas and those places with high numbers of people facing various legal liabilities—in short, the “precarious.” In the aftermath of the fall 2020 elections—with all the (falsified) claims of “stolen elections”—some 20 Republican-controlled state houses have picked up on this trend and begun to implement various measures aimed at further suppressing access to the vote.

When voting rights groups countered in 2020 with lawsuits in the courts and various measures designed to ensure fair access to physical balloting through absentee and mail-in balloting registration, the Trump Administration responded with the utterly cynical strategy of blocking the U.S. mail through a managed work slow-down. This was undertaken in the name of managerial cutbacks but was clearly intended to throw the electoral process into chaos by preventing ballots from reaching election boards, slowing the vote count, and threatening the legitimacy of the entire election system. These efforts included obstructionist measures undertaken by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee—measures that Congress has failed to reverse because of the reluctance of Republicans in the House and Senate. This is how authoritarianism makes critical inroads: a basic institution of democracy that requires significant backing from career as well as elected officials finds itself in a considerably weakened state, unable to meet the needs of ordinary people.

The integrity of the voting process has become a battleground in its own right, something that played a role in the 2016 presidential election and was also at issue in the 2020 elections. There is every reason to believe that elections will be even more contested in 2022 and 2024—which is part of the reason why Georgia politician Stacey Abrams’s efforts to secure voter registration and balloting have won her so much attention. The point to make here is that protests against police brutality have been joined by a movement that aims to foster widespread public outrage about voter disenfranchisement, political disempowerment, and a general lack of accountability of elected and appointed officials. Of late, bottom-up progress on these fronts in many states is encouraging. Still, the headwinds against which citizens are struggling—to ensure access to the vote, to fight egregiously partisan redistricting, to fund government, to plan for the future—remain substantial.

For all the talk about democratic norms and practices, the fact is that “rule of law” requires a culture that amounts to a fundamental democratic sensibility, one grounded in citizens’ concern for the truth and a commitment to crafting public policy to meet massive challenges with intelligence and a concern for justice. The law entails mutual sensitivity to compliance and cooperation, and a shared understanding of the importance of principles that transcend the immediately personal, financial or emotional interests of any one citizen or group of citizens. The nature of that mutual understanding forms a large part of the inquiry in the pages that follow. The point is that when those in positions of authority do not themselves adhere to those principles, there is a substantial risk of the democratic culture sliding into citizen and state violence. To a large degree, what is happening today at the state level in the United States looks increasingly like Russia under Putin—basically a gangster regime of privatized interests, selective enforcement, and an eagerness to rely upon force to “settle matters” in lieu of institutional safeguards and the absence of a commitment to amicable consensus building across value structures. In such a situation the risk of actual authoritarianism only grows.

We would hope that Americans are learning that democratic norms are fragile. It is a mistake to simply assume that people occupying positions of power will play by the rules simply because procedures for accountability and checks on power are written into a constitution. Sometimes it is possible to tip the balance of favoritism in government to the point where, say, the Senate refuses to carry out its responsibilities to preserve and protect the Constitution, displaying more concern with enabling a lawless executive or ensuring a seat for the base on the Supreme Court. Or, that executive might have the backing of an attorney general, and with it the entire retinue of law enforcement such that allies can proceed to break the law with impunity. And should the military align in such a way as to become an enforcement mechanism against domestic uprisings, then the threat of overt authoritarianism—and the grounds for civil war—become real. When a masked troop of armed forces from the Department of Homeland Security marches into a city during a peaceful protest under the pretense of protecting federal property—despite a lack of authorization by mayor and governor—and persists despite the objection of elected local office holders, the country has reached a dangerous inflection point. Such paramilitary crackdowns in Portland, Oregon and Seattle need to be understood not as isolated cases of excess, but as trial balloons that test the limits of public tolerance and civic resistance.

Americans once believed that such incidents were purely hypothetical in this country. But if the last few years have shown anything, it is that the threat of a shift toward authoritarianism is a distinct possibility. In such a situation it behooves us all—as citizens, as parents and as teachers of political practice (e.g., citizenship), and just about anyone who cares deeply for the country’s democratic ideals—to explain what is happening and work to cut a path for a counter-politics of resistance.

Do students of American history and politics really grasp what it means when constitutional norms fail to be properly anchored, or what the implications are when countries revert to state-issued violence in the form of fascism, National Socialism or any of the many variants the twentieth century has seen? Beyond the concentrated efforts of many citizens in Georgia and a few other states—particularly those agitating against voter disenfranchisement—there would seem few encouraging signs. Resignation and despair seem the more established sentiments. History is an important measure here. Once the initial slide into violence takes place it becomes very difficult to rescue the polity from within. Among the powerful lessons to be gleaned from many nations’ experiences in the last century is that fascist regimes have not often succeeded in reforming themselves. Instead, to effect the regime’s collapse they have required total defeat in war. Only after almost complete annihilation were those nations rebuilt into modern democratic societies, with firm rule-of-law procedures and (in some instances) with early-warning mechanisms designed to prevent a drift back into authoritarianism.

While the threat of a major regional or world war seems for many to be an unlikely scenario at this moment, we are deeply concerned about evidence of increased tensions among nation-states and the failure of leading countries to engage in cooperative international relations through alliances and treaties, both old and new. We are certainly witnessing a shift toward insularity, protectionism and a “go-it-alone” approach, whether in the form of America’s retreat from arms control, trade agreements or cooperation on international public health and global climate policy measures. Evidence here is all too abundant, including America’s recent unilateral withdrawals from the Paris Climate Accords, the Iran Nuclear Deal, Strategic Arms Limitations Talks with Russia and, most recently, efforts to abide by rulings of the World Health Organization.

Great Britain’s Brexit decision is another example of this troubling trend, and it should remind us that America’s experiences are not entirely unique. The risks posed by nativist and nationalist approaches to problems of regional and world trade and cooperation simply exacerbate the pressures on countries to provide for their citizenry, and they only further inflame domestic tensions that have been building for decades. Such tensions are compounded by growing ecological crises—whether in the form of global warming, accelerated species extinction, more turbulent weather patterns or resource conflicts, including those bearing on such basic resources as safe drinking water.

While such lines of argument may have a screed-like quality, the aim of this chapter is actually more sober, and more limited: to call out the fragile nature of democracy in the context of America’s recent political experiences and in terms of the long-term build-up of social and cultural tensions. That call is based upon the strength that derives from a shared commitment to the norms and principles that were supposed to underpin the American political experiment. While there can be no doubt that this experiment is at the present moment at considerable risk of disintegration, there are grounds for hope that the norms being trampled can be used as the basis for mobilizing a powerful public response.

However, we are not optimistic. For several years now a significant number of journalists and scholars have pointed out structural features of authoritarianism in America and in many other countries, highlighting the sources of scorn, anger and humiliation and exploring their opposites in the form of building commonalities among citizens at many levels of governance. In this context the history of democracy needs to be seen in terms of the pressures visited upon many nations by global capitalism in the last half century. While many analysts share the concerns we register in the following chapters, Americans’ political attitudes continue to drift to the right and public policy remains stuck in the past. The consequence is that the country’s prospects grow dimmer by the year. Throwing a spotlight on the mounting stakes and challenging citizens and lawmakers to work assiduously against authoritarianism’s rising tides require a unique kind of perspective, one in which a rough accounting is used to frame the likelihood of several scenarios obtaining in the years ahead.

It is hardly novel to say that developments in national and international politics are both bewildering and benumbing, and yet it is nonetheless important to consider the sudden cascade of social and political problems against the backdrop of American political history, and in particular in terms of developments in political culture and political economy that have brought us to our current political impasse. At the moment of writing—again, winter of 2021–22—the world has been in the grips of a pandemic that has upended most people’s sense of the known and familiar. The search for enduring meaning and context in a time of suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Endorsements Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Dynamics of the Current Impasse
• 2 Social Distancing as Civic Virtue
• 3 Media
• 4 The Elusiveness of Fascism
• 5 Social Democracy
• 6 Pandenomics
• 7 Beyond a Momentary Intervention
• Postscript
• Index