The anti-bullying movement is brilliant, but all that glitters is not gold in Trump’s defeat

The welcome tidal wave that has finally swept Trump away has brought to the surface some flotsam, a few unsavoury characters such as that El Sayed from Michigan, and a few proponents of a social and political model that reeks embarrassingly of pre-chewed socialism and reckless fiscal populism – as if the touch of political Islamism already noted were not enough. More generally, there are no clear stances on Israel, save for a widespread prevalence of prejudice and hostility towards Jewish self-defence – indeed, the reversal of traditional militant solidarity into its opposite; the war against the ayatollahs is criticised not for its erratic conduct but for its impact on the price of diesel per gallon; no clear pro-Ukrainian stance has emerged, although ultimately it is the Democrats – along with the very few Republicans who have survived The Donald’s cynical treatment – who, alongside Joe Biden, had erected an impregnable bulwark against Putin’s anti-European and anti-Western pretensions, which speaks volumes about the foreseeable failure of the new Yalta.

All that glitters is not gold. However, one can take comfort in the fact that the American political system is made up of individual figures who submit themselves to the electoral verdict with ruthless regularity, of limited terms of office for the executive branch, of various levels of separation between federal and state power, a division of functions and checks and balances that has ultimately proved vulnerable to attack but not easily dismantled, despite the legal bullying of Trump’s inner family clique, the MAGA movement, and the institutional court of the Democratic despot, and despite their threats against judges and the free press.

It is not coalitions of parties that govern – with their programmatic addenda and divergent promises that can paralyse the workings of the democratic system; these are typically European risks, of which we shall have a taste should Marine Le Pen succeed in Paris – but rather institutions and individuals, and their point of reference is not the coalition but the so-called ‘tent’, an archipelago of positions within which it is possible to accommodate even the eccentric, the vague, and the bizarre, without this necessitating a damning judgement on the political bloc of which the ‘tent’ – which, by its very nature, is far from set in stone – is an expression. Indeed, it is to be hoped that American democracy will, following the monstrous and self-destructive experience of Trumpian political corruption, return to a system of governance centred on the rejection of ideological radicalisation and on the pragmatism of governing from the centre of the system, through the workings of that complex machine known as the establishment.

Following the electoral blow, there should be a renewal of the political culture of the bipartisan system represented by the congressional-presidential complex, in which the space for demagoguery – now torn apart by left-wing neo-populist experiments and other reckless ventures – closes in on itself, as happens with genuine restorations. Perhaps this is too much to hope for, but it is better than despairing and resigning oneself to the survival of Trumpism without the Trumps.