Wednesday 9 November 2016

President Trump — A Victory for Democracy?


Image credit.

I understand, Donald Trump has won the Presidential election. When I speak of a victory for democracy, I am not ipso facto revealing myself as a raving supporter of Trump. What I am suggesting is that — as in the case of the Brexit, and unlike the referenda in the Netherlands and France or Ireland that were undemocratically ignored by the EU — this time, the people have been able to express a vision of politics opposite to the one they are being asked by the political establishment to take for granted.

We witness the expression of the leanings of large sections of the population that are otherwise ill-represented (by the parties) and largely impotent in the political arena.

Democracy is not about micromanaging a society, instead it is all about expression and control of visions of society and their impact on the life of the people. If the benefits of economic success and growth are no longer reasonably dispersed among the entire population we do have a major democratic concern.

If democracy proves able to represent broad concerns and trends in the population, especially when politicians have drifted far away from these popular inclinations, democracy is doing its job, helping the demos to name its troubles and do something about them.

Notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary, the Democrats and the Republicans have become a power monolith driven more by special interests than by the existential sorrows of the populace, so much so that a wide democratic current calling the political status quo into question is being demonised as "dangerous populism".

I do think that the balance between capital and labour is out of whack, with inordinate advantages and egotistical excesses accruing to the former at the expense of the latter. Trump's victory may usher in the release of new energies and the budding of new forms suitable to organising the-hard-to-organise, restoring perhaps a rough equilibrium between those who take advantage of the concentrated benefits (accruing to well organised special interests) and those ill-represented and ill-organised who are bearing the dispersed costs of the benefits that go to the few.


See also: The Trump Victory is a Historic Moment.

For a philosophical background of the position taken in this post, read my The Political Logic of Freedom. And Politics — The Dismal Practice.

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