America is a democracy. That is why Donald Trump is not Vladimir Putin, because unlike the Russian president, he will eventually come up against checks and balances in the judiciary, Congress, the press, the governors and the Federal Reserve.
There are limits to Donald Trump’s power that do not hinder Vladimir Putin’s, but the political similarities between these two men today are staggering.
Both know only too well how a lie hammered into the heads becomes a debated truth, so that it is no longer clear which is the bigger liar of the two, the one who claims that “Nazis” are governing Ukraine or the one who insists that Joe Biden “stole” his re-election in November 2000.
Both hate freedom of the press, and while Vladimir Putin has put an end to it, Donald Trump is determined to weaken it by denouncing it as the primary weapon of the occult power that supposedly dominates America.
Both see the judiciary as nothing more than an instrument of the executive, which Putin has turned into a machine for locking up his opponents, and which Trump has set out to control by making sure he has the support of the Supreme Court.
Both govern by confusing the powers of money and the state in a system of oligarchy that post-communist Russia reinvented thirty years before Donald Trump imported it to the United States.
Both want to bury the concertation of nations and international law by subordinating them to the interests of the great powers and their desire for territorial expansion in Greenland and Ukraine.
Finally, both of them are securing popular support by defending morality, religion, the division of roles between the male hunter and the housewife, and all the national, cultural and religious traditions of the past, whose decline is disturbing a large part of societies on all five continents.
Behind this conservative mask, what Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin embody is a return to the law of the jungle based on a rejection of the state as a referee, of the law whch they rename ‘regulation’, of the redistribution of income and of the desire to moralise international relations. As with Mr Xi, Mr Modi, Mr Orban and so many others, with them we return to the omnipotence of money and the brutality of social and international relations that dominated the world until the end of the First World War and the defeat of Nazism.
This “reactionary international”, to use Emmanuel Macron’s words, draws its strength from the intellectual exhaustion of the major parties that had rebuilt the post-war world. Because it fills a vacuum, it will not weaken any time soon, and that is why it must be fought by rallying the coalition of democrats everywhere against the coalition of the oligarchy, the power of a few rich and powerful.
As during the war, but probably for much longer, we need to unite all democrats, right and left, against those who would like to see an end to democracy and are no longer afraid to say so. This must be done without delay in Europe to ensure that the European Union, a bastion of the rule of law, does not fall into the hands of the admirers of Donald Putin and Vladimir Trump.
(Photo: Kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons 2019)
