Donald Trump has risen to power by cultivating people’s contempt for the most basic ideals of liberal democracy: equal rights in recognition of universal human freedom and dignity, the pursuit of truth through free and rational discourse, and the rule of law to protect these ideals. Now he is in a position to erode them not just in the minds of his supporters but in the very institutions of our government.
This may be unprecedented in modern American politics, but a popular revolt against the ideals of liberal democracy is not new to the world. And while it is irresponsible to reach for the fascism stamp whenever an unsavory political phenomenon rears its head, it is equally irresponsible to ignore the analogical power of history when the comparison is apt.
Consider the cases of Germany, 1918-1933, Spain, 1931-1936, and, now, sadly, the United States of America, 2009-2016. Different beasts, to be sure, but in each case a pioneering, progressive, and contentious democratic government served as the incubator of a radical right-wing, authoritarian politics of despair. Civil discourse and respect for the rule of law deteriorated. In their place swarmed apocalyptic visions, accusations of illegitimacy, the use of dehumanizing rhetoric to tar political opponents, the targeting of scapegoats and foreign enemies within, nostalgia for a non-existent past defined by racial purity and national glory, the invocation of states of emergency, and threats of violence.
As in the cases of Germany and Spain, everyone was aware of this threat, yet not enough took serious action to stop it until it was too late.
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was one of those who saw the European revolt against liberal democracy coming (even though he failed to defend it when the uprising happened in Spain). He saw that beneath the rise of anti-democratic politics in the interwar period, in the form of both fascism and bolshevism, lurked an even more troubling cultural phenomenon— one that appears to be as rampant in America today: the revolt of the masses.
In The Revolt of the Masses (1930), Ortega diagnosed his age with an acute sense of ‘taking for granted’ that had come to characterize people’s attitude to the entirety of civilization. The “mass-man,” as Ortega called him, was not just the average man in the crowd or part of the proletariat. He was a specific psychological type, characterized by “the sovereignty of the unqualified mind.” He could be found amidst all strata of society, and was as likely to be a real estate mogul as he was an unemployed factory worker.
The mass-man treated the fruits of modern liberal society—its educational values and institutions, its system of legal rights, its bodies of knowledge and technological instruments— as natural resources that existed solely for him to exploit. He failed to understand how they had come into being and how his existence was conditioned by them. Unconcerned with methods of inquiry and argument or in recognizing a social reality beyond his own, the mass-man could believe his own ideas were good as anyone else’s, his version of the truth as valid as the next guy’s, and his sense of injustice as demanding of redress as any other.
The revolt of the masses, as Ortega defined it, was essentially a mental revolt. It entailed a refusal to accept responsibility— for one’s own existence, one’s circumstances, one’s history, and one’s future. That’s why it makes perfect sense that Trump and his supporters deny climate change and due process alike. Just as they refuse to acknowledge that the earth is vulnerable to corporate recklessness and rapaciousness, so they refuse to understand that the precarious project of liberal democracy cannot endure if half the country dismisses the distinction between truth and falsehood and shows gleeful disdain for human rights.
It is here, in the twin contempt for rational discourse and the universality of human dignity, that the mass-man’s mental revolt of willful irresponsibility becomes explicitly political and politically destructive. It attacks the most fundamental ideals— not just the practices that fall short of those ideals but the ideals themselves— by which we have pursued life in common for nearly two and half centuries.
Ortega saw that democratization could actually undermine democracy. Throughout the nineteenth century, the ideal of liberal democracy had inspired groups of elites to make it a reality. But, rather than continue to motivate people to reform and protect democratic institutions, this ideal had become a wholly internalized psychological state, turning “aspirations and ideals into appetites and unconscious assumptions.” The democratic spirit had become unconscious and preponderant to such an extent that it now motivated people to exercise their democratic right to “attack and castigate institutions by which those rights are sanctioned.” Ortega called this self-negating political attitude “hyperdemocracy.”
If we consider Trumpism in light of Ortega’s diagnosis, then suddenly the reality of a populist revolt spearheaded by New York billionaire makes sense. What more fitting mascot could the mass-man have than Donald Trump, a man who refuses to take responsibility for anything, from his business dealings and duties as a citizen to his public utterances and private actions. “The spoiled child of human history” Ortega explained, in reference to the mass-man mentality, “is the heir who behaves exclusively as a mere heir. In this case the inheritance is civilization.” Trump is nothing if not a spoiled child. A spoiled child in the hulking frame of a 70-year-old, eating happy meals with gilded cutlery, reaching up girls’ skirts, and bullying people on the schoolyard of Twitter.
Many of Trump’s supporters who recognize his odiousness and incompetence emulate his ethic of irresponsibility. This applies to those who voted for him as a nihilistic prank, as well as those who voted for Trump in spite of what they knew and reviled about him, as though they didn’t have a choice and had been coerced into doing something against their better judgment.
For Ortega, the mass-man’s irresponsible attitude toward civilization and his hermetic sense of self-satisfaction was due to an ignorance of history. By historical ignorance, he meant that the European of 1930, as true of the American of today, lacked historical consciousness. And we shouldn’t confuse nostalgic appeals to the myth of past national glory with an actual sense of history. These myths are seductive precisely because the mass-man ignores the historicity of his own existence and the society in which he lives.
“There is no hope for Europe,” warned Ortega, “unless its destiny is placed in the hands of men really ‘contemporaneous,’ men who feel palpitating beneath them the whole subsoil of history, who realize its present level of existence, and abhor every archaic and primitive attitude. We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.” The same might be said of America. Our past — with its legacies of slavery, genocide, and the oppression of women and minorities — is a burden of inheritance that we must acknowledge and accept, so that we may overcome it. Until we can collectively agree upon that as a country, we will remain a nation of spoiled children.
Now is the time for us, we slightly-more-than-half-of the American voters, to show Trump and his supporters that they do not have the monopoly on the politics of rage. We must show them that it is possible to mount an angry, popular dissent in an ailing democracy— not just against Trumpism but against the very real indignities and injustices of global capitalism that Trump exploited to his advantage— without declaring war on the ideals that form the basis of the liberal democratic project.
Over the next four years, we must redefine what we mean by the revolt of the masses.
