Trump surfing the symptoms of a democracy in crisis

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Regardless of the outcome of the US mid-term elections, a few things will remain the same. ­Debates about a crisis of democracy will gather pace for so long as Donald Trump is US President. Opining about this crisis coincides with not getting your way at the previous election. The other certainty is the focus will remain on superficial symptoms rather than the deeper causes of why democracy is under threat.

The heart of our democratic darkness is not a man in the White House with a bad tan, weird hair and an acerbic turn of phrase. Which is why Hillary Clinton’s chutzpah is equalled only by her cluelessness when she writes in her updated autobiography: “Our democratic institutions and traditions are under assault every day. There may not be tanks in the streets and the (Trump) administration’s malevolence may be constrained by its incompetence, but make no mistake, our democracy is in crisis.”

Not long after Clinton implored people to set aside partisanship and defend fundamental democratic values, she added a ­caveat when dealing with Republicans: “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to ­destroy what you stand for.”

If you watch CNN, you will get sloshed using “Trump” and “crisis of democracy” for your drinking game. This has become the low road for political analysts. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama is ­already predicting that if Trump is re-elected, we will see further polarisation and liberal institutions will be savaged even more. But wait up; Fukuyama also predicted that, following the fall of communism, free-market liberal democracy had won and would become the world’s “final form of human achievement”. Now, ­according to him, it all hangs in the balance.

In a recent interview with Christiane Amanpour, comedian Dave Chappelle looked beyond this Trump derangement syndrome. He said Trump gets “too much credit” for defining the era. “He’s not making the wave, he’s surfing it.”

What exactly is Trump surfing? An age of distrust in institutions, to be sure. This year’s Gallup poll found almost two-thirds of Americans do not trust the most important institutions in their country. The trust deficit sinks lowest for congress, where only 11 per cent of people express a great deal or quite a lot of trust, followed by television news (20 per cent), newspapers (23 per cent, big business (25 per cent) organised labour (26 per cent), public schools (29 per cent) and the presidency at 37 per cent. More than 60 per cent of Americans do not trust the churches or the Supreme Court either.

Trump is surfing other symptoms of democracy in crisis: rancour and polarisation that has been building for years from the distrust and the associated incivility and debased debates. And few are more uncivil than Trump. But, then, few have confronted the wall-to-wall media opposition he does. Or the deranged loathing from opponents such as Democrat senator Maxine Waters, who told supporters to form a crowd and confront members of Trump’s cabinet at a restaurant, in a department store or petrol station. “You push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome any more, anywhere!” Actor Robert De Niro wants to punch the President in the face.

To be clear, then, Trump uses social media precisely because it is not polite.

Trump is riding high in an age of identity politics, too, where Clinton’s attack on “deplorables” was a terrific own goal for Democrats. Trump gathers speed when Clinton disparages those “married white women” who voted for Trump because they couldn’t stand up to “a sort of ongoing ­pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever believes”.

Trump is surfing the backlash from decades of censoring political correctness, and more recently the #MeToo movement’s rejection of due process and natural justice. The witch-hunt of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh laid bare a stark raving crazy strain of illiberalism that will enrage millions of Americans for years.

If we have not yet reached peak intolerance, at a time of prosperity, let’s hope this is well north of base camp. How much more distrust and disillusionment among voters can a democracy endure? How worse will people’s rage be during a downturn? Consider a scenario when millions more ­inhale the ­addictive exhaust fumes of social media to confirm their moral righteousness, along with even deeper craters caused by identity politics. Already, these are harmful symptoms of modernity’s deeper psychosis.

Last week Ronald Reagan’s former speech writer, Peggy Noonan, implored politicians to cool it, to be nicer to one another, to devote a speech to saying something they admire about the opposing party. If only that would heal our democratic malaise.

The West faces a subterranean, decades-old shift away from a commitment to the core tenets of a liberal democracy: a free and open marketplace of ideas, the morality of free markets, due process and the rule of law, tolerance of difference and a respect for an independent judiciary and a free press. How much healthier would our democracy be if there were bi­partisan political support for these values?

Instead, liberal democracy is under siege by political leaders who fail to do so, and by an education system that has failed millennials. The annual Lowy Institute poll continues to find that more than half of Australians aged 18 to 29 disagree with the idea that democracy is preferable to any other kind of government.

The oldest among this cohort of young Australians were babies when the Berlin Wall fell. They have lived through unprece­dented prosperity, technological advancement, great leaps in medical discoveries and tremendous government spending on health and education made possible by taxes collected from big companies. Yet a YouGov-Galaxy poll by the Centre for Independent Studies found that 58 per cent of millennials have a favourable view of socialism, 60 per cent think capitalism has failed and 62 per cent think workers are worse off today than 40 years ago.

Roosevelt Montas, who runs the core curriculum at Columbia University, wrote last year that universities have a responsibility to “influence the political culture in a way that no other institution can. The crucial contribution we can make is to introduce students to the texts, ideas and norms of ­deliberative argumentation that gave rise to liberal-democratic politics in the first place … Instead, too many institutions offer incoherent curricula that leave students ill-informed about the underlying premises of our political order and ill-equipped to participate in the task of self-governance.”

Why wait until some students go to university? To produce a generation more capable of self-governance than us, what Montas calls “education for citizenship” should start in infant school, continue in primary school and get ­serious in high school.

In Australia, during the course of their schooling, students are meant to learn something called civics and citizenship. When they reach high school, no such compulsory subject exists. Given that future generations will be left to fix a political order in declining health, isn’t it time that a core subject about liberal democracy sat alongside maths, English, science, history and geography? Cursory virtue signalling about citizenship doesn’t cut it.

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