The same people who argue that Donald Trump represents a mortal threat to democracy are also doing everything they can to Trump-proof and render the election of Donald Trump as meaningless as possible.
European diplomats and their advisors boasted of how they planned to “Trump-proof” the international order, starting with aid to the Ukrainian war effort. On one hand, European leaders were recognizing the immovable democratic reality that the present-day Republican Party represents: none failed to swear loyalty to the Trumpian proposition that Europe ought to pay more for its defense. On the other hand, they continued to cast Trumpism as a “threat to democracy,” albeit one that could be neutralized with the help of a few political tricks. They proposed a $100-billion five-year funding plan for the Ukrainian war effort, shifted authority over the arms-contributing nations from the U.S. to NATO itself, and declared Ukraine’s path to NATO membership “irreversible.”
Even in the best of circumstances, “Trump-proofing” would appear to be a counterproductive strategy. Leaders do not get to lay out the policies of their elected successors. Were NATO to reconfigure itself in such a way as to stymie the verdicts of American democracy, it would alienate many more Americans from the alliance than President Trump has thus far managed to. And the roll-out was poorly timed. A few days after the summit, a gunman in Butler, Pennsylvania, would try to Trump-proof the West in his own way: by sending the former president to kingdom come.
But Europeans are less worried than one would think by that kind of threat to democracy. Wrapped up in a collection of American-style arguments over corruption and populism and ethnic strife, they have adopted a style of politics that a decade ago seemed unique to the United States: mixing up domestic and foreign policy, constitutionalizing policy differences, suppressing dissent over dubious experimental policies, failing to distinguish between loyal opposition and treason, refusing to surrender power when they surrender power…
In an extraordinary essay published in Le Figaro in mid-July, the political philosopher Pierre Manent described a situation in which the rhetoric of “defending democracy” was itself becoming a threat to democracy. The excommunication of the National Rally creates a powerful governing tool for the political class, “a means of social and moral control that it uses to undermine the sincerity and the freedom of the civic conversation.”
In a functioning democracy, Manent points out, voters choose between competing visions for the community. But in today’s hyper-moralized democracy the choice is between “the legitimate community and those excluded from the legitimate community.” The ruse is self-defeating. If one party to the elections is illegitimate, then the government is, too: We didn’t vote to install it, voters will say, but to exclude the alternative. That is why the National Rally has been able to attract voters without ever having developed a coherent plan for governing. The establishment’s attempt to delegitimize the main party of the French working class has boomeranged back on the establishment itself.
…the most truculent members of NATO tend to be the most lightly armed. Between them, he notes, the Baltic states—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—have fewer than 50,000 soldiers and not a single main battle tank.
Pierre Manent wrote first for Le Figaro and then had his essay translated into English:
Perhaps the dissolution of the National Assembly, along with its consequences, will turn out to be the “extrinsic accident” that, according to Machiavelli, requires cities to “become aware of themselves” and to refound themselves. In the confusion and the lightning flash of this summer, a light has been lit: we must return home. Salvation will not come from “Europe,” which withdraws as soon as an emergency knocks on the door, and still less from the people-humanity that finds unity and energy only in hatred. Salvation will come only from “us,” from the French people governing ourselves according to the representative republic, the regime whose authority our higher courts have time and again obscured and whose functioning they have hindered. No one will come to our aid if we do not want to govern ourselves.
