America, America...

Narcissism usually operates on a relentless logic. In this sense, it is not at all strange that Donald Trump has juxtaposed, without any complex or sense of ridicule, the celebration of his 80th birthday with the 250th anniversary of the creation of his country. Last July 4th, he made public a brief triumphalist and somewhat delirious speech in which the United States was presented as the culmination of the human race. Two authors came to mind who, as those kind enough to read me know, have helped me understand that nation for very different reasons: Alexis de Tocqueville and Walter Lippmann. If you are not familiar with Democracy in America (1835) or Public Opinion (1922), this is a good time to delve into them. If Tocqueville had contemplated the 250th anniversary of the United States coinciding with a presidency as polarizing as Trump's, it is quite likely that his reading would have been more curious than scandalized: Tocqueville was not exactly a prophet of consensus, but an analyst of the forces that shape democracy. In this sense, he would probably see the Trump phenomenon as an extreme, but at the same time understandable, expression of the tendencies he himself diagnosed 191 years ago. He affirmed that American democracy is capable of generating unexpected leaderships because the system favors the rise of figures who connect with the immediate passions of the people. I imagine he wouldn't celebrate it, although he wouldn't necessarily consider it a catastrophe either: these are things that can happen. Tocqueville also warned of the danger of democratic despotism, a form of power that is not imposed by force, but by the ability of a leader to present himself as the sole interpreter of the “real people”. Here, perhaps, he would make a severe objection: the simplification of conflicts and the disqualification of institutions and counter-powers are the mechanisms that erode freedom without remedy. Modern despotism, he said, "degrades men without tormenting them". That is, it makes them children, feeds them with easy certainties, exempts them from critical effort. Tocqueville admired the solidity of the North American constitutional system, its ability to absorb tensions without breaking. The fact that, despite the intensity of the political conflict, elections continue to be held, courts act, counter-powers function, etc., would confirm the intuition that American democracy has exceptional elasticity. The question is: until when? Before Trump's second term, this suspicion might have seemed an exaggeration. Right now, it is a perfectly real possibility.

Lippmann was neither a moralist nor a prophet of democratic decline, but an analyst of perception, of how citizens construct images of the world that rarely coincide with reality, but which always have a political or other translation. For Lippmann, modern democracy functions through simplified representations, of mental schemes that are not necessarily rational, but which allow one to orient oneself in a world too complex to be known directly. Many citizens do not react to reality, but to the images they receive of it, produced by actors who compete to define the framework of what is "real". Trump knows a lot about this: the other day, for example, he told his fellow citizens that he had devastated Iran. Congratulations, then.

Presumably, Lippmann would see Trump's presidency and the current political climate as an exacerbation of the structural problem he described: when each group lives within its informational ecosystem, the notion of a shared public space weakens. Then democracy ceases to be a debate about facts and becomes an unpredictable free-for-all of perceptions. Under these conditions, public opinion inevitably becomes volatile, manipulable, and modifiable with simple narratives that offer supposed certainties amidst chaos. Lippmann died in 1974, long before, therefore, the explosion of social networks and fake news. "Public Opinion" was published in 1922, the same year Mussolini became the most powerful man in Italy. What subsequently happened in Europe (and the world in general) was already intuited in that lucid essay. The possibility of a Donald Trump, too, of course, but with nuances: an anomaly of this kind was foreseen... but the normalization of the anomaly, no. And this dangerous normalization is precisely what has been clearly shown on the 250th anniversary of the creation of the United States of America.