The Direct Democracy of Trump’s Cult

Demagoguery, self-restraint, and Republican derangement

Fictional monsters from Medusa to Lovecraft’s abominations are supposed to be so hideous that it’s prudent to avoid even looking at them, for fear of losing your sanity. After Donald Trump’s pseudo-presidency, the Republican Party is monstrous in that respect because of its lingering Trumpism.

Take the symbolic ousting of Liz Cheney from her leadership position in the House because Cheney has made a show of opposing Trump, specifically by repudiating the so-called big, Goebbelian lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump due to mass voter fraud.

As Frank Bruni points out, though, Cheney consistently voted with Trump while he was president, and voted against his impeachment, even going as far as to belittle the audacity of the Obama birthers. But like Mitt Romney, Cheney is now positioning herself as a contender for an alternative Republican leader, by distinguishing herself from the Trump cult which only Trump can rule.

Mostly for that reason, rather than just because she blames Trump for the storming of the Capitol, denies publicly that Joe Biden stole the election, and wrote an editorial in the Washington Post excoriating the Trumpian Republicans for being on the wrong side of history, the Trumpian monstrosity flexed its ghastly appendages and unseated Cheney. Ironically, by martyring her, the Trumpian party may be creating the very alternative it tried to stifle.

Like any monster, this political party’s grotesque visage is multifaceted and terrifying in its capacity to overwhelm the senses. What is it about the Trumpian GOP that’s so appalling? Is it Trump’s malignant narcissism that’s the source of storybook evil? Is it the trolling and the bad-faith sanctimony and cluelessness of his cultists? Is it the lazy, scapegoating racism of the white supremacists?

Perhaps it’s the anti-Jesus “Christianity” of the Evangelicals who idolize or manipulate Trump. Or else it’s the humiliation of America by an egregious pseudo-president who served as a Russian asset (if not as an agent). Or maybe it’s the indignity of the cultists’ feigning to have the moral high ground as “the real Americans” while arguably they’re the sorest losers in world history.

The Trumpian conservatives’ appalling derangements are seemingly endless and are therefore fittingly horrific. But there’s one facet that might be overlooked, which is that Trumpism shows what’s wrong with democracy. Thus, the disgust with Trump isn’t fear of the Other so much as it’s the suspicion that even liberals and progressives are standing on quicksand.

Demagogues and The Cult of Direct Democracy

If Vladimir Putin had travelled back in time to converse with Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius about the pitfalls of democracy and returned to engineer a turn of events to stand as an eternal paradigm of how democracy can go wrong, Putin couldn’t have schemed for anything more illuminating than Trump’s capture of the Republican Party.

The ancient Greeks explained how ideal political systems degenerate because human nature is divided against itself, so we’re always at war with our worst impulses or with other natural social dynamics that don’t have our best interest in mind (because they’re mindless). Democracy may begin as a constitutional government that protects the majority from the whims of a tyrant, but democracy degenerates into an ochlocracy, into mob rule. The mob in turn is whipped up by demagogues or populists who excel at manipulating the emotions of the uncritical masses. Thus, special interests eventually rule in a democracy by instrumentalizing the mob.

This is an aspect of the Trumpian GOP that might go unnoticed: The Trump cult is a pure form of direct democracy. Ask yourself why Kevin McCarthy and the other Republican leaders still kowtow to Trump, going to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring even after Trump not only lost his bid for re-election in 2020 but stirred up a mob to take over Capitol Hill, assassinate VP Mike Pence, and retake power in a coup against Biden.

There’s only one answer: political self-interest requires that the Republican politicians please Trump, betraying their oath of office, their conscience, and their religious convictions, because Trump has a stranglehold over the Republican base of voters. If you fail to flatter Trump or to extend fealty to him, Trump’s thin skin can cost you your job in the GOP, as Liz Cheney, Jeff Flake, Charlie Dent, and others discovered.

But to speak of that stranglehold is another way of saying that most Republican voters support Trump. They may have been manipulated into their cultish enthusiasm for Trump’s self-destructive un-Americanism, but their support is real and plain. To whit, 70 percent of Republicans don’t think the 2020 election was “free and fair.” Half of Republicans think Biden won because the election was “rigged,” and 52 percent said Trump “rightfully won.”

There’s nowhere near the amount of evidence you’d need to rationally support those charges, not when Trump and his allies filed 42 lawsuits to overturn the election results in the courts, and lost all of them, and not when those anti-Biden polling results are based purely on Trump’s lies, spread by Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber and hate machines.

Respect for empirical inquiry into the facts has nothing to do with Trump’s ongoing support. It’s not a question of caring about reality or of critical thinking or intellectual integrity, let alone of taking a principled stand in honour of a worthy ideal. Those skills and virtues are anathema to the rural, anti-elitist side of the American culture war. If Cthulhu rose from the murky depths and conquered the earth by conning some troubled souls with eldritch mastery of the dark arts, to serve in his cruel vanguard, the cult of Cthulhu would be no more fervent than Trump’s.

But as the essence of mob rule, a cult is precisely what a degenerate democracy looks like. The majority flock to the populist leader not because the masses know better or because they’ve made a reasoned decision that voting for that leader is in their best interest. On the contrary, the demagogue manipulates the lower-class voters into humiliating and destroying themselves. Trump does so not just with the voters whom he debases, but with the cabinet members who served under him, who were forced to publicly flatter the dear leader like they were holding office in North Korea.

Republican Masters and Slaves

Trump’s relation to his voters is like that between master and slave in the Hegelian sense. The slave invests the master with all the irrational hopes stirred up by the slave’s desperate situation, while the master needs the slave, too, to feel dominant and to gratify the master’s vanity. As symbolized or satirized by the sexual games of sadomasochism, the master-slave dynamic is a folie a deux, a collective hallucination and a complex, two-headed depravity.

For these reasons, a functioning republic interposes the rule of law and a body of elected representatives between the majority and their would-be demagogic tyrant. Once elected, the representatives are free to exercise their independent judgment and to ignore the voters’ will. The voters exercise their power mainly by selecting the members of the government, not by directly writing laws or by ordering their representatives to adopt certain policies.

That’s the respectable democracy, tamed by republican principles that are informed by the ancient philosophical critique of this form of government. By contrast, the Trumpian Republican Party is the result of a calamitous, farcical breakdown of those principles, making the name of that party fittingly Orwellian.

Likely, Trump’s delirious supporters have been conned or they’re using Trump to troll the liberals, to take vengeance on the elites and the establishment, or to try to usher in the second coming of Jesus. Either way, the rural bedrock of Trump’s support doesn’t excel at critical thinking. These are paranoid, belligerent, reckless scapegoaters and petty authoritarians.

But those very characteristics make these voters impatient with the republican restrictions on mob rule. Comprising only a dwindling quarter of the American electorate (since half of Americans don’t vote), the Trump loyalists long for the incoherent libertarian free-for-all and for the Handmaid’s-tale theocracy they took themselves to have been voting for since the 1980s. They want the GOP to act on the cultural issues that their wily, amoral politicians had proffered only by way of manipulating these rabid “conservatives” into voting against their economic interest.

That’s the source of these Republicans’ resentment, which drove them to favour Trump, an anti-politician who was reckless and self-absorbed enough to destroy the liberal, republican establishment that the GOP’s overheated rhetoric had all along equated with a sinister bastion of socialism. The unleashing of this Republican fury means the hounding of new scapegoats, not just the liberal elites but the “deep state” along with experts like the scientists who tell them to wear masks or to get vaccinated to fight Covid-19. The old rural, blue-collar, “real” Americans presume they know better, which is why they succumbed to the Trumpian temptation.

That temptation was to use Trump’s egregious mental disorders to force direct democracy onto the GOP and onto American society. The cult of Trumpism means that even if Donald Trump fades from the scene, the craze of populist control over the government will endure in the fevered Republican brain. In the meantime, these radical neofascists, anarchists, and fundamentalists use fealty to Trump as the test of their totalitarian lock on their party. Trump the masterful entertainer dominates the dregs of American society, but via the two-way perversity of the master-slave dynamic, that low-informational class of voter holds America hostage in turn.

Rational Self-Constraint: The Antithesis of Trumpism

The evident downside of direct democracy suggests a paradox. In one scenario the majority is wise enough to deserve political power, in which case no democratic government would be needed to run the populace, and the wise masses would live happily and peacefully in a state of anarchy. In the opposite one the population would lack sufficient wisdom, in which case their direct democratic control over society would lead swiftly to catastrophe and once again the government would fall.

In neither case would a direct or pure democracy be sustainable, which suggests that the concept is incoherent. Real-world democracy rests on the assumption that the voters are wise enough not to crave their downfall, but not so wise that they could be entrusted with significant political power. Voting provides the illusion of control, because the rule of law and the republican system of loopholes create a shadow elite that holds all the cards.

What would it mean to be a wise enough citizen to deserve to participate in a democracy? The ancient Greek answer is that just as the liberal society would need to be moderated by the rule of law, the individual’s character should be moderated by reason. Obviously, this respect for reason is just what Trump’s cultists lack.

To be sure, these Trumpians would protest that they’re more informed and rational than Democrats. But Trumpians mistake their obedience to Republican principles (to white supremacist, libertarian, Fox News, or Christian fundamentalist ones) for obedience to logic, philosophical skepticism, or to scientific methods. Just because a paranoid conspiracy theorist can deduce the skin color of the aliens that secretly rule human societies, based on scraps of fantasies and gibberish, doesn’t mean she’s in contact with reality. Games run on rules, too, but that doesn’t mean you’re rational just because you’re playing some arbitrary game.

After all, the point of rational self-constraint is to develop truth-preserving character traits (virtues). Supporting Donald Trump is possible only with wanton vice, not with virtue. Reason and evidence indicate that Donald Trump lost the election in 2020 and that he tried to foment an insurrection because his narcissism makes it impossible for him to lose gracefully. Reason indicates that Trumpism is a giant fraud and that the Trumpian Party’s experiment in direct democracy will be disastrous for the US because the cultists lack the self-understanding to operate in good faith.

You know some folks haven’t spent enough quality time evaluating themselves when they’re manifestly hostile and sanctimonious rather than quiescent and humble. Those with the greatest self-knowledge are the humblest because they understand that we’re all small, wayward creatures with grand ambitions, like children pretending to be adults.