What was staged in the Capitol, Washington, DC, on 6 January 2021 was a hybrid event: part religious, part political. At the centre of it was the image of the QAnon shaman, Jacob Anthony Chansley, alias Jake Angeli, described picturesquely by Chris Cuomo of the CNN as the ‘horned heathen’. Angeli is no politician. Nor did he conduct himself as one. Even in that mayhem, he did not forget to lead a prayer of thanksgiving for saving America from Biden and Co., standing in front of the House Speaker’s chair.
The desecration of the temple of American democracy has its roots, in the corruption of Christianity in that country. It was Feuerbach who said, ‘All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy’. On that precarious day in the annals of American democracy, the corollary to this aphorism came to view. Democracy could regress to theocracy, unless responsible vigilance is exercised and its spiritual base preserved. When a secular democracy regresses to a theocracy, its culture-hero will not be a Pope, but a horned heathen, who carries Jesus on his lips and anarchy in his heart.
The Roman Capitol too was a hybrid of religion and politics. It began as a religious site – remember the great temple of Jupiter Capitolinus? In due course, it came to house the seat of political power. In that sense, the US Capitol is a reminder of the need to be wary of the interface of religion and politics in the dynamics of a modern State.
There is another aspect to this Janus-faced symbolism of the Capitol. The memory of Abraham Lincoln is associated with it. Lincoln did not want paucity of resources to dilute the grandeur of this temple of American democracy. But that grandeur is alloyed with slave labour. Freedom and slavery meet, somewhere, in the Capitol, reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ caustic remark that Americans are so fond of freedom that they buy and sell it in their markets.
Against this backdrop, let’s ask: what’s the malady plaguing American democracy today. Is it Trump? Or is it Trumpism?
What is Trumpism? It is pre-modern Messianism spiced with assertive subjectivism, ensconced in a fabricated framework of alternate reality compacted of fantasies and falsehoods. This feeds on an infantile extrapolation of faith. Faith is ‘the assurance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen’. In the religious context this applies largely, though not exclusively, to metaphysical realities.
How does it work when it is applied to secular and empirical contexts? What happens when the dynamics of faith are imported into an ambience of make-believe? Who can, in that case, tenant the boundary between faith and phantasmagoria? Between belief and delusion?
Trump incarnated himself as a champion of faith – remember the optics in front of St. John’s? – with a messianic mission to save America from the radical left, from alien anarchists and from anti-Christian conspirators. The details of this image-makeover need not detain us here. Millions of Evangelical-Charismatic Christians have come to believe that Trump is God’s instrument to accomplish ‘a special purpose’ for America. Many video messages to that effect by self-styled Christian preachers and prophets-on-hire, were put in circulation. To those fed on this delusional diet, Trump’s faith – that he was destined to win – was, and still is, the truth. Trump could not lose. But he lost. That means only one thing. The election was stolen from him.
There is yet another aspect of the religious nurture that makes matters still worse. The members of a religious community stay focused on a single source of existential coherence. They are deaf to contrary voices, blind to disparate evidence. Their monochrome sense of reality is comprehended in a homogeneous framework. Exposure to anything else is tantamount to promiscuous infidelity. Nothing outside of what emerges from the accredited source has any validity. This explains why 80% of the Republicans still believe in Trump’s version of what happened, starkly blind to the evidence that stares them in the face.
Let’s return to the Capitol. It is not merely a monumental piece of architecture, redolent with historical memories. It is a profound idea worked into an edifice. What happens to the edifice when the idea is eroded? The Capitol encapsulates US democracy. Its symbolic grandeur is inseparable from the integrity and wholeness of American democracy. It is nobody’s case that US democracy is in good health. If any doubt remained, the anarchy staged in the Capitol on 6 January dispelled it.
Democracy, like religion, is a meta-narrative. It is only as powerful as it is embraced by a people as their way of life. Like religion, democracy cannot countenance counter-paradigms. President Trump is, in theory, a product of democracy. But, like Hitler, he is not obliged to be democratic. As Arthur Koestler said, ‘Hitler used perfectly legitimate democratic means to murder democracy’.
Murdering an ideology is different from eliminating an antagonist. The weapon you use for the former purpose may be termed, for want of a better expression, ubiquitous pseudo-alterity. You infuse a people with your version of reality, irrespective of its factual content. It is naïve to assume that the real challenge before American democracy is the riotous mob that overwhelmed the Capitol. No, that is a fleabite in comparison. The real danger, which those who care for democracy in America need to address, is the ubiquity of Trumpism. Fighting ubiquity involves a different order of difficulty in comparison to impeaching a former incumbent of the White House.
That brings us to a question that assumes great significance. Why did Trump choose to boycott Biden’s inauguration, and refuse to facilitate a smooth transfer of power?
Recall the sequence. Trump took off aboard Air Force One as the President of the United States. He left Washington, DC, in authority. Had he been part of the transfer of power, he would have evaporated from the scene as a spent force. There would have been closure to a spell. Legally Trump has ceased to be president. Not symbolically. This, Trump knows, is vital to keeping Trumpism going. So, one is still left with the eerie feeling that Trump is somewhere out there, like a spore of bacteria. It is only a matter of time before the petrichor of a favourable climate causes it to burst back into life. The Republican senators know this. It scares them.
If a religious analogy is permissible, I would liken Trump’s departure to the Ascension of Christ. It’s pregnant with undertones of a second coming.
Now that I have invoked the Bible, I cannot help reminiscing the Great Deluge. The earth was submerged. A great deal perished. But, inside Noah’s ark, the animals of the old world awaited the world beyond the deluge. They reclaimed their share of the nascent world. There is no radical break in history. The old will survive. Rest assured, we haven’t seen the last of Trump. Trumpism could well be just beginning!
The impeachment of Trump could, if handled aright, puncture the truth-denying bubble in which over 70 million Americans voters still languish. But its gains could prove short-lived. The radical task to be undertaken lies beyond the impeachment. That mission is the revival American democracy. Fighting Trump is a part, but not the whole, of it.
In this, sentimentality should play, at best, only a marginal role. Sentimentality distorts truth. The issue is not the desecration of the Capitol, but the denigration of democracy. Trump is guilty not, primarily, of instigating a mob, but of outlawing truth so as to undermine the democratic culture. The mob is a creation of Trumpism, surcharged with falsehoods. Falsehood is a greater enemy, in the long run, than the mob. Arm the same people with truth, they’ll be responsible citizens.
Fortunately, the foundation still exists on which the re-construction work can happen. It is a slur on American democracy that the insurrection happened. But it is a proof of its strength that democracy survived the mayhem. The outcome would be different, if the same cultic, hysterical outbreak were to happen in most Afro-Asian countries. So, all is not lost. But care must be taken to ensure that this does not breed smugness.
No democracy is safe if it is abandoned to demagogues and rabble-rousers. There can be no ‘government for the people’, if the people do not cherish and protect their democratic institutions. Liberty, equality and fraternity can exist only on the foundation of truth. Power-brokers are poor custodians of truth. Why is that? Because they are more at home with the kaleidoscopes of untruth that dance in tune with the serenades of seductive expediency.
