27 January 2017

27 January 2017

          It’s only a few days into the Trump presidency in the United States and my news feed informs me that it is losing – or has lost – its legitimacy with much of the American public. Now, since I’m neither a US citizen nor resident I have no say in this matter; his government’s legitimacy is a matter for those who are. I do, however, have a couple of observations.

          The election of a president like Trump, who has appointed an executive such as he has appointed, has been the natural, almost inevitable, product of the American system, in its political, economic, social, and cultural aspects – of what they used to call The American Way. It fits perfectly and should be no cause for surprise. It produced Trumpism. If this is the case, and it is, then this calls into question the legitimacy of the system itself, which indicates troublesome consequences to come.

          The second observation concerns Trump’s reaction to this widespread sense of his illegitimacy and consequent resistance to his nastier policies. I may be wrong, but it seems to be central to his character to see enemies rather than opponents, and to try to destroy his enemies. It seems likely that he’ll try to call upon all the mechanisms of coercion that come with his office to crush the members of his ever-growing enemies list and to impose his legitimacy by force on all involved in all things that matter to him.

          I don’t know how the various sorts of American people will respond to this. I wonder if the well-armed American public is docile enough to submit to him.

          If he deploys the US military along the border to intimidate the recalcitrant, and therefore enemy, Mexican government into doing his bidding, will any faction of the large Latino element amongst both the enlisted soldiers and officer corps mutiny? I don’t know. If he orders the military to perform any tasks involving crimes against humanity will the joint chiefs of staff stage a coup? I don’t know. If he engages in widespread state violence against the myriad groups who deny the legitimacy of his policies and executive actions will he provoke a civil war?

          When I taught US Pol & Gov at the University of Waikato I dispensed with the usual dreary bullshit about the enlightenment philosophies of Locke and Rousseau and Jefferson and their ilk as the intellectual underpinnings of the US political system and focused on P.T. Barnum and other American pioneers of flimflammery. With Trump we may have to add Bashar Al-Assad to the list of the US system’s most influential thinkers.