As Jürgen Habermas predicted, the crisis of legitimacy the world is experiencing has led to an unstoppable crisis of identity. It is in this abyss of contemporary secular societies that the ghost of Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt appears: what authority does any law or government have in that global secular republic that is the West?
The great theorist of dictatorship, Schmitt, already pointed out a century ago that politically, "chaos is more interesting than the norm." This is what this second Trump administration is implementing, based on an incessant and exhausting trickle of political measures—or announcements of measures—that inundate our daily lives. Amending the law and imposing divine authority with decrees in an irrational drift.
The consequences of frontier tariff policies, more typical of the last century, and the enmity provoked by selective deportations based on race, nation, or ideology are not taken into account. The global discredit the country has suffered in a matter of weeks clashes with the long half-century in which America has led the world, winning the greatest political and cultural battles—from the communist bloc to radical Islam. Western Europe was never a problem. We all remember the novel and film. The American Friend, a name that has its origins in the 1948 Marshall Plan.
This neglect of political hegemony is unprecedented. As the great Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci said, it is cultural hegemony that is truly capable of dominating a society—both nationally and globally—through values, customs, and ideologies that become culturally accepted. Politics soft The imposition of figures like Kennedy, Clinton, and Obama was about that. The imposition of lifestyles, through musical, media, commercial, and even food consumption, to which the United States has subjected the world for decades, is also about that.
But this government seeks enmity with the world and with history. It seeks an exceptionality that, because it is so mundane, is permanent. Chaos and heroism are the only two strategies of the supersovereign who calls himself the savior of the people. Regrettably, this rhetoric floods the global public sphere: from media debates to parliaments or between political parties. In our country and in Spain, political actors like the Catalan Alliance, Vox, and the Ayuusist faction cling to this anti-systemic conflict.
Is disruptive action possible in today's world, or does it simply risk remaining an aesthetic showcase? One of the most important debates for understanding democracy was fought during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) between the aforementioned Schmitt, the great conservative political thinker – and Nazi – and Hans Kelsen – the most influential jurist of the 20th century. While the former rejected Parliament in favor of a dictatorial regime, with a Constitution controlled by the ruler – the sole expression of democracy – the latter advocated for the separation of powers and legal oversight of the Constitution – vested in Parliament.
Today, however, sovereignty is an impure property. It oscillates between two powers, one downward and one upward: the power of nations and Constitutions opens its doors to a fourth power—formerly media-based, now algorithmic, in the hands of technopolitical, consumer-driven, and surveillance currents that control our daily lives. Sovereignty, as Schmitt conceived it, no longer exists. The author himself acknowledged this, contemplating the rise of overwhelming capitalism, a few decades after uttering the legendary phrase "the sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception."
If Schmitt won the ideological battle, Kelsen won the systemic one, because it is as true that the exception produces chaos and seduction at the same time as it is that the norm generates both boredom and security. It does not seem that, a century later, the structures of Western parliamentarism are any less solid than at the gates of the Third Reich or the Second World War. Under the regime of constitutional and international law, which Trump completely ignores, procedures and norms make the capacity for the Trumpian exception very limited.
A few days ago, in an unprecedented gesture in the long American constitutional tradition, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts – of clearly conservative affiliation – warned Trump about interferences with the separation of powers by requesting the dismissal of a federal judge who had blocked the deportations carried out by his government. The unusual statement was a way of defending not so much the person (Judge Boasberg) as the general principle – the indivisibility of powers that has reigned for almost two hundred and fifty years in the inviolable nation–. But as incapable of reading a single book as he is adept at intuiting people's desires, Trump responded to his social network, Truth Social: "I'm just doing what the voters wanted me to do." The super-sovereign businessman offers an alliance between the desire for popular sovereignty that stirs the powerless classes of an America that will no longer give back and the sovereignty of the omnipotent leader. It is a pincer movement against national sovereignty in the hands of representative institutions like Parliament.
This frontal antagonism highlights how hatred of foreigners trumps the well-being of one's own citizens. When political action is driven by the logic of punishment (Mexico, Canada, China), revenge (Europe), or blackmail (Ukraine), the boomerang effect is as likely in commercial and economic terms as in political and moral terms. Today, no one, or almost no one, feels admiration for a nation that in the past has provided opportunities for everyone.
Science, universities, and education are the latest and most humiliating victims of this irresponsible drift that throws overboard decades of exemplary civic, ethical, and professional conduct in countless fields of knowledge. In a naive way, that liberal society welcomed persecuted people of all kinds—from intellectuals and Jews during the Nazi era to Republican exiles during the Franco regime. Today, the path toward civic democracy is a journey in the opposite direction. Now it's Europe's turn. We just need to believe it.
