To pivot away from the senile delinquency playing out in the White House and to look at the social landscape beyond the immaculately trimmed north lawn is to witness an even more chilling set of developments unfolding before our eyes: the partial systemic failure of the world’s most self-aggrandising democracy.
There are three great estates on that landscape that supposedly stand aloof from the cut-and-thrust of hoi polloi politics, yet are foundational to the health of democracy, and so are often drawn into the fray: the courts, academia and the media.
Many political commentators have noted how the Trump regime (it feels a better fit than “administration”) has seen a mendacious village idiot who signally lacks the empathy that Illinois governor JB Pritzker considers the hallmark of civilisation, cynically manipulated by Silicon Valley oligarchs applying their nihilistic “move fast and break it” ethic to governance.
Pritzker delivered a speech to graduates at Northwestern University in 2023, starting it by saying: “The best way to spot an idiot: look for the person who is cruel.” No names necessary.
Educated at Duke University, admitted at the Illinois Bar, and a venture capitalist with a personal net worth estimated in May at $3.7bn, “Jay Bob” represents a salient against which the waves of the Maganaut assault are breaking: Ivy League old money, real business acumen and political suss.
But look closer, and behind such salients — Bernie Sanders’ “Fight Oligarchy” rallies in February notwithstanding — the headlands of the world’s most powerful society are eroding with stunning rapidity.
Many pundits, especially on the other side of the Pond in Europe, have charted with concern the president’s wrecking-ball spree since assuming office, some even inviting alarmist comparisons to the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party: attaining power legitimately, but then immediately embarking on rule-by-decree to bypass the legislature; the bowdlerisation of state oversight bodies and the stacking of key posts with fanatical loyalists; the expansionist desire for mineral-rich lebensraum; the designation of internal enemies that require detention, expulsion, eradication; the assault on venerable institutions.
But what the president is doing is less critical than how the US’s keystone judicial, academic and media institutions have responded. Part of the problem is arguably that the US is not a modern democracy, but an antiquated democracy in which the president retains certain powers of fiat.
He can control, shape, and even gut federal agencies by executive order (Congress can override these, but it’s currently in Republican hands); he can direct agencies that enforce regulations to implement significant policy changes; and he can declare an emergency, which confers special powers.
Critically, all of these are subject to judicial review to ensure their constitutionality — but the separation of powers is not sheer: the president is able to nominate federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, albeit with the advice and consent of the Senate (yet the Republicans also control this house). To outsiders, that makes it all feel very 19th century, more like a Latin American presidential-command republic than a modern republic with proper checks and balances, particularly the judiciary.
Yet, as expert on presidency-judicial relations Prof Paul M Collins Jr of the University of Massachusetts noted in an article in academic journal The Conversation this month, instead of “upholding Trump administration policies, federal judges — including those appointed by Trump — are blocking implementation of much of the president’s second-term agenda”.
He cited Trump-appointed judge Fernando Rodriguez shooting down the president’s attempt to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport people accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua criminal cartel; the judge ruled against the president’s claim, stating that cartel activities in the US did not amount to an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” into the US.
Collins said it was “an example of what happens when a president overreaches his authority, and takes legal positions that even his own judicial appointees cannot support”.
Regarding the estate of academia, the current sea-change in the US feels more like a version of French author Michel Houllebecq’s best-selling 2015 satirical novel Soumission (Submission), in which he tells the story of a middle-aged literature historian at the Sorbonne, the famed Parisian academy.
A fictional Muslim Brotherhood Party manages to get its presidential candidate elected after striking an electoral alliance with the Socialist Party and a right-wing party to prevent the far-right National Front taking the lead. François, the academic, is initially unconcerned, as he focuses on his ivory tower pursuits, but he becomes alarmed as the Brotherhood surges towards victory.
On their win, there is a brief spat of reactionary violence during which François flees to seek solace in an abbey. Meanwhile, the new Brotherhood-led government introduces sweeping political changes, privatising the Sorbonne and putting the academic out to pasture on pension as only Muslims can now teach there.
François feels aggrieved that lesser talents are securing their careers at the Sorbonne by converting to Islam. The novel ends with him on the verge of capitulating and following their example to secure his academic future.
Playing on mainstream French society’s insecurity over its inability to assimilate many Muslim immigrants, intriguingly, Submission can be read from either conservative or liberal perspectives. For the right, it reads like a warning of the fulfilment of their “great replacement theory” that white Westerners and their values are being substituted by threatening others (a key Maga theme). For the left it reads as a cautionary tale against the suborning of the independence of the universities.
As the supposed pre-eminent incubator of young talent and ideas, academia is a natural playground for ruling parties and factions with competing ideologies. But in the era of neoliberalism, many universities have become a weird amalgam of medieval trappings (caps and robes, tenured professorships, ivy-clad chapels) and corporate callousness (weapons research, monetised outputs, the muffling of dissident voices). Often, the result is snooty bureaucracies that stifle free inquiry in favour of what keeps the gravy-boats full.
In late 2018, I interviewed Svetlana Mintcheva, director of programmes at the National Coalition against Censorship in the US, about the state of academia in the country halfway through Trump’s first presidency, especially the fad for “deplatforming” people whom a select intellectual clique wanted to silence.
“It’s funny that in society at large, these institutions are not dominant. What is dominant is big corporations, big money, and Donald Trump, right? At the same time, you have these small enclaves of liberal power that are thinking that they have social power and they can police their own little enclaves — but they are powerless in society at large, and when they are policing discourse so strictly, they are isolating themselves and becoming more and more … marginal.”
She said that liberal academia was possessed of “a kind of dogmatic mentality where you have to be very pure, very politically correct, otherwise you’re out — and there’s fear, fear not so much of the political other who we don’t even talk to, but fear of your friends and peers”.
In March this year, Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong kowtowed to Trump’s demands that the academy — founded in 1754 and thus older than the US itself — roll back its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies to unfreeze $400m in federal funding.
The German-owned Politico news organisation cautioned: “Colleges and universities across the country are capitulating to President Donald Trump with staggering speed, moving to slash progressive policies and crack down on student activism as they face compounding threats from an administration hell-bent on reshaping higher education.”
Though Mintcheva did not invoke the term “wokeness” and its associated ideologies of critical race theory and gender-fluid identity, the intriguing possibility is that because so many US universities caved in to the wokeness trend, they created the submissive mentality that is now allowing antiwokeness to prevail.
This suggests a fundamental spinelessness and lack of ethical compass in some US academies; once the privileged preserve of intelligent debate, they now bend like reeds whichever way the prevailing wind blows.
But not every academy has bowed the knee. Significantly, Harvard president Alan M Garber refused to submit, on grounds of academic freedom and constitutional guarantees, to Trump’s anti-DEI demands — despite an April freeze on $2.2bn in grants and $60m in contracts.
Founded in 1636, Harvard is 140 years older than the Declaration of Independence, making it the senior of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution, and thus it treats with disdain intrusions onto its turf by the Johnny-come-lately American state.
John S Rosenberg opined in the independent Harvard Magazine that it was “all hands on deck” for universities to “aggressively” resist the “multifront assault on higher education”. On April 22, Garber and 611 other academic leaders signed a statement addressing the “unprecedented government overreach and political interference”, calling for a “constructive engagement” with the regime.
The health of the last estate that concerns us, that of the mainstream legacy media, has already been in crisis for many years, though the US media landscape is, at first glance, impressive for its sheer scale and wealth.
Two decades ago, a senior editor at the Los Angeles Times complained about how budget cuts had meant they had had to reduce their news staff to what she considered a dangerously light complement of 385 in the US, plus 20 foreign bureaus; this while Africa’s then-largest newspaper, Joburg’s Sunday Times, made do with about 20 journalists and a single foreign correspondent, so I laughed at her fears — but further cuts in the coming years were to prove far deeper.
While attending a fellowship at Duke University in North Carolina in 2010, I had the opportunity to attend a de facto annual national journalism congress, held by the Society for Professional Journalists that year in New Orleans. Whereas in SA, such conferences are modest affairs, the New Orleans event was remarkable for the sheer amount of money represented in the room, and as a result, for the number of high-end outfits such as satellite companies selling their wares to journalists; in contrast, I have used a satellite phone only once in my career, while covering a war in the Middle East.
But the size and wealth of the US news media had disguised an uncomfortable truth. Like the vast seas of wheat and maize in the Midwestern breadbasket states, the fourth estate was monocrop territory, with very little editorial biodiversity: in many states, the sole statewide TV station owned all mainstream radio stations and all big city newspapers. It was a very nutrient-poor diet for news consumers.
And since then, the great challenges of digital and social media have gutted circulation across the board, with total weekday circulation of US dailies plummeting from 55.8-million in 2000 to 20.9-million by 2022, leading to the death of some great regional titles such as the Rocky Mountain News that often editorially outperformed the celebrated New York Times.
I recently chaired a debate for the Institute for Security Studies on fake news, and one of the research elements that was presented was that in the US, in terms of media consumption — and this was counterintuitive — conservative consumers read far more liberal media than liberal consumers read conservative media. That suggested a retreat by those holding Western liberal values, and not just the conservatives, into an enclave of their own.
This wholesale withdrawal of society into mutually exclusive laagers has attracted much comment about echo-chamber polarisation, in which people only listen to narratives that reinforce their prejudices. Mintcheva had already argued six years previously that US society had arrived “at a point of polarisation which has come to the point of fracture”, with liberals and conservatives not even able to agree on the basic truth of facts.
The biggest danger is that, despite small projects seeking common ground, it seems nobody knows how to heal this rift.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.