Tyranny in the Name of Freedom

Happy 250th, USA

There’s a saying that if fascism came to America, it would come draped in the flag and carrying the cross. It would arrive disguised as a plea for liberty.

That was on my mind as Dear Leader Donald Trump bathed in a sea of stars and stripes this weekend. The celebration for America’s 250th independence anniversary was a guns-blazing, bible-thumping, fighter jet-roaring, ego-stroking spectacle of performative patriotism.

From Mount Rushmore, the President rattled off personal grievances and attacked his Democratic opponents as a “communist menace.” The American story he told was about “the blood of heroes,” a tale of supremacy and domination. He cast himself as a star-spangled deity, bravely carrying the founders’ torch of liberty single-handedly into battle.

The founders were neither righteous crusaders nor perfectly enlightened egalitarians. They were products of their time: wealthy aristocratic slave-owners who thought the franchise should be limited to landed white men and advocated for the brutal extermination of the Native Americans.

But they were also visionaries who possessed that rare ability to peer beyond their dysfunctional society, to manifest a new social contract based on inalienable rights and the rejection of arbitrary executive power. They understood well the emancipatory nature of democracy and the ever-present threat of the demagogue.

The founders accused King George III of “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,” “obstruct[ing]” the Administration of Justice”, “excit[ing] domestic insurrections,” and “sen[ding] swarms of officers to harass our people.” Reading that now calls to mind Trump’s tariffs, weaponisation of the Justice Department, January 6, and ICE raids.

Alexander Hamilton warned that the republic could be subverted by a populist who “flatter[s] the prejudices of the people, and excite[s] their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.”

Many of them distrusted political parties because they feared intense factionalism would encourage demagogues to place loyalty to party above loyalty to the republic. Partisanship, Washington wrote, “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption.”

So yes, this President has transgressed their core uniting ideals to the utmost extreme. He’s made a joke of checks and balances, trampling over Congress and turning the US Supreme Court into his partisan plaything. He’s weaponised every institution at his disposal and accused his political opponents of “seditious behaviour punishable by death.” He’s vastly enriched himself and his family by leveraging the offices of state, admitting recently that: “almost anything my kids do - if they buy a truck - they have inside information.”

Trump and his cronies espouse a warped notion of liberty as the exclusive exercise of individual power. Successive generations of Americans have identified different threats to liberty: Jefferson feared monarchy. Hamilton feared faction and disorder. Lincoln confronted slavery. Franklin Roosevelt warned that concentrated wealth could become a private form of tyranny. Trumpism identifies a different enemy altogether: the institutions that constrain power itself.

Trump has it that liberty is most threatened by forces that challenge the supposedly righteous few. Political opponents like the “seditious” and “communist” Democrats, woke college campuses, witch-hunt special investigators or Congressional committees, pesky journalists, peaceful protestors and state regulators.

Palantir owner and Trump mega-donor Peter Thiel captured this mindset well when he said: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Democracy to these types is a limitation on individual dominion, a violation of their god-given right to build and conquer. Freedom to them is the right to escape the laws of the land and the will of their fellow citizens – who may collectively vote against their interests.

So Trump’s elite-led populist movement has pulled on dark threads from the early fabric of American history to justify their authoritarian ambitions. They’ve recast the founders as the war heroes of a nostalgic myth. They endorse a brutal arena of supremacism, where the powerful divide and dominate.

They ignore the genuinely exceptional story of the USA: the story of a safe haven for the world’s persecuted, with peaceful democratic transfers of power and universal laws that bind citizens and rulers alike, with checks and balances to impede the whims of would-be tyrants. Those are ideals worth fighting for.

Donald Trump stood beneath the faces of four presidents and claimed their mantle. But the founders’ greatest achievement was never the words they wrote in 1776. It was their willingness to imagine an entirely new political order. They broke from the past instead of worshipping it. They put democratic ideals into practice.

Jefferson wrote that “the Earth belongs to the living.” Perhaps the most faithful tribute America could pay its founders is not to mythologise them, but to emulate them – to recognise that democracy is never finished, and that every generation has both the right and the responsibility to become founders in its own time.

Two hundred and fifty years ago Americans asked what kind of democracy could replace a king. Trump's America poses a new question: what kind of modern democracy can survive this new Trumpian tyranny? That is no longer an exclusively American question. Democracies across the world - including Britain - should be asking how resilient their own institutions really are.