Teflon Trump is just the start of the West’s post-democratic apocalypse

Mass disillusionment has prompted a chilling disregard for institutions that underpin our freedom

The great political question of the moment in America is not if Donald Trump will be convicted in the Senate impeachment trial. (Answer: almost certainly not.) Nor is it: will the proceedings themselves damage his chances of reelection? (Answer: almost certainly yes – but not very much.)

The question is actually, why do so few American voters seem to care about the incident that provoked the impeachment, or, for that matter, about any of the countless instances of the president’s outrageous behaviour?

To answer that query – or even to begin to understand it – requires a wider examination of not just this individual presidency, or even just that particular country. There is a transformation taking place in the political cultures of many developed societies which may be of historic significance for the West, of which the Trump personality is simply one very notable manifestation.

But let’s look at the American example first because it is so stark and because, as is frequently claimed, what happens there often anticipates what will occur elsewhere. It may be difficult for a British (or any European) onlooker to comprehend precisely why that national indifference to the Trump presidential style is so shocking. Let me try to explain.

Americans are schooled (literally) to regard their democratic institutions and the document that created them – the Constitution – as sacramental. There is a reason for all those references to the Founding Fathers, and the careful semantic examination of their intentions, which feature constantly in the pronouncements of leading politicians on all sides of American party politics.

It is rooted in the fact that the Constitution is a sacred text: it does not simply outline a form of political organisation, it is secular theology. The particular brand of modern democracy inaugurated by it, and the elected offices which are designed to uphold it, are the foundation of national identity.

Indeed, they are the only source of common identity that this population of disparate, displaced people possess.

In other words, the agreement to uphold the Constitution is what makes you American, wherever you or your forebears came from. It is worth saying, in case you think this sounds flippant, that there is some basis for the enormous reverence in which the documents that founded America’s nationhood – the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution (“We the people…”) – are held. They are perhaps the finest expositions ever written of the 18th century doctrine of a social contract between government and people.

Indeed, one is taught at school in the US that the Constitution is exactly that: a contract in which the people’s rights (as enumerated in the appended Bill of Rights) will be guaranteed in return for obedience to the law. So for those educated in the tradition of American patriotism, this is, or was, a very serious business.

But increasingly, the populace does not seem to take either the ignorance of its president on basic constitutional principles, or the rules of behaviour that have always been considered appropriate for the highest office of government, with any great seriousness at all. (Even though the inaugural oath made him, as it does every president, promise to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution of the United States of America.)

This is particularly startling because the very citizens who used to be seen, and would still see themselves, as fervent patriots, are the ones who will apparently remain loyal Trump supporters however many blatant transgressions he makes against the traditional standards of presidential conduct. So what is going on here?

Something very drastic must have happened to the American psyche over the past generation to have created this paradoxical interpretation of patriotism which can accept contempt for the fundamental national values that once united the population.

And indeed, something very terrible has happened. The great unwritten promise of America – not inscribed in the Constitution but always tacitly understood – was the doctrine of limitless opportunity.

Much analysis of the Trump phenomenon, and many of the explicit claims made by the man himself, attribute his popularity to the crisis of the “left behind”. The economic stagnation of the Rust Belt and the collapse of working class employment has produced an endemic sense of hopelessness most Americans have

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion never known or ever expected to know. Not since the Depression, which is now too far back for most living memory, have vast expanses of the US been so lost to economic decline.

As everybody seems to agree, this is the secret of Trump: his “make America great again” pitch is a specifically economic one. The protectionist “bring the jobs home” refrain paints him as a saviour of the people.

Whatever else he says or does – demanding that a foreign power give him dirt on an electoral opponent, expecting the US Attorney General to act as his own private lawyer, threatening his security service chiefs if they refuse to do his bidding – can be written off because he promises to reinstate the American dream of selfimprovement and self-determination.

That much we know. But not many commentators seem to have extrapolated the full consequences of this or seen what it might mean for more volatile countries. Because, it is not Trump’s magical personality that has smashed through the old monumental beliefs and standards: it is the post-industrial apocalypse.

So here are the real questions for all of us, with America leading the way: is the post-industrial economy going to produce a post-democratic age?

Will the collapse of the old livelihoods with their promise of endless improvement to standards of living, bring such disillusion that it will break the modern political settlement? And if it does, how are the freedoms we now regard as “natural rights” to be guaranteed once respect for the institutions is gone?

We – as well as the Americans – had better come up with some better answers than Trump’s pretty soon.

Will the collapse of the old livelihoods with their promise of improved standards of living break the modern political settlement?