Photo: Amanda Walker via Flickr.

The past few years have seen dramatic challenges to liberal democratic systems of government around the world. It was not that long ago that hopes were rampant that democracy would triumph everywhere after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Francis Fukuyama notoriously declared that the victory of liberal democracy meant the end of history.

The prospect of a boring posthistorical liberal heaven without end turned out to be the illusion of the decade. Today publishers rush out titles on how democracies die and whether there is any hope of rescuing liberal democracy from a history that, far from ending, has instead turned cruel. The spectre that haunts Western states today is that of the German Weimar Republic (1919–1933), a brave experiment in democracy, liberalism and openness to progress that crashed and burned in the unspeakable violence of the reactionary Nazi conflagration.

History does not repeat itself, but it has been said that it does sometimes rhyme.

Weimar is a warning of how a vibrant democracy can fall victim to enemies from within who reject its fundamental premises. Major parties on the Weimar political spectrum like the Communists and Nazis never accepted the legitimacy of the Constitution, even as they contested elections. Both vowed to destroy the Republic, for diametrically opposed reasons. On the Right, traditional conservatives with deep ties to the powerful institutions of the state that preceded Weimar accepted the Republic only so long as its elections resulted in governments friendly to them and to the interests they supported.

Common ground between the warring sides of the spectrum was being eroded by the last days of the Republic. One side’s truth was the other side’s fake news. Civil debate and deliberation, staples of a functioning liberal democracy, had begun to degenerate into street battles between rival gangs of thugs. Trust in fellow citizens and in the institutions of the Republic were failing.

In 1933, parliamentary paralysis following successive inconclusive elections led conservatives to call Hitler to the Chancellery to form what purported to be a coalition of the Right, bringing together Nazis and more respectable right-wing parties. The conservatives’ catastrophic miscalculation was to believe they could control Hitler. Instead the Nazis immediately set about murdering or imprisoning opponents and declared the totalitarian Third Reich.

Contrary to common misconception, Weimar did not democratically vote the Nazis into power. In the Reichstag elections immediately preceding Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the Nazis’ previously meteoric rise had suffered a sharp reverse. Their momentum apparently broken, with defections and factionalism on the rise, they might well have continued on a downward spiral into eventual oblivion. It was the conservative parties, blinded by their extreme hatred and fear of the Left, that saved Hitler and doomed Germany and the world to the Nazi nightmare.

That is a chilling lesson for today of the Weimar debacle: when conservative parties in a bitterly polarized political system abandon faith that their values and goals can any longer be defended under liberal democracy, they may turn to nationalist-populist authoritarianism, the common thread linking the fascism of the 1930s to the various recent “strongmen” like Trump in the United States, Putin in Russia, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Erdoğan in Turkey. All of these purport to have a direct mandate from the “People” that may supersede institutional, legal and constitutional constraints, not to speak of the rule of law.

Conservative parties were once conservative about process as well as policy. The Eisenhower Republicans and the UK Tories in the 1950s accepted a grand compromise with the legacy of the New Deal and the postwar Labour government, behind the protective shield of Cold War unity. Alternation of left-centre and right-centre parties in office within this broad consensus posed no challenge to democratic legitimacy. Even the ideological triumph of Thatcherism and Reaganism in the 1980s did not challenge what might be called a procedural political consensus, still upheld by New Labour and Clinton Democrats in the 1990s, with no violent discontinuity resulting from party alternation.

In 1994 the first clear public notice of darker, more divisive forces rising within the Republican Party arrived with Newt Gingrich and his hardline “Contract with America” platform for the midterm elections of the first Clinton administration, which swept in a wave of uncompromising right-wingers and brought gridlock and shutdowns to Congress. Ever since, ideological polarization of the two parties in Congress has proceeded to the point where the traditional overlap in the centre, the ground for legislative compromise, has disappeared. This polarization is asymmetrical: for the most part, Democrats have not become more left-wing, but Republicans have become much more right-wing – and uncompromisingly so.

Trump Republicanism is a very particular kind of reactionary conservatism. Many analysts, including some on the Left, have claimed an economic class basis for Trump, discerning an abandonment of the working class by the Democrats, who are alleged to have become obsessed with the identity politics of race, gender, etc. to the exclusion of the old Left working-class agenda. This does not stand up to the evidence.

The working-class vote, in all its rainbow colours of race, ethnicity and gender, abandoned the Democrats neither in 2016 nor in 2020. Trump’s rise in the primaries and his election was associated most with White racial resentment of alleged minority gains. It was the White male working class that went over to Trump, but not mainly on economic grounds. It was their threatened status as standing above Blacks, other minorities and women that drove them into the arms of the Republicans. Far from a rejection of identity politics, it was a virulent assertion of White male working-class identity politics. This is a historical link to the Nazis, to whom Jews were the threat to Aryan supremacy. A century later, “Making America Great Again” means making multiracial America White again.

The drive toward re-establishing white supremacy is institutionally powered: Republican state legislatures have systematically gerrymandered House districts, exploiting the first-past-the-post voting system to impose minority rule over Congress. Add in red state laws ruthlessly suppressing the votes of Blacks, ethnic minorities and the poor, all disproportionately Democratic. In the eight presidential elections over the past three decades, only one produced a Republican majority of actual votes cast, even though the bizarre 18th-century contraption of the Electoral College produced three Republican “victories,” including that of Donald Trump in 2016 with a three-million-vote deficit in the actual, as opposed to Electoral College, world. When Trump lost in 2020 by more than seven million votes, the reaction of most Republicans was (and still is) to deny the legitimacy of the entire electoral process and simply declare their man the victor because he represents their declared “real America,” as opposed to the illegitimate America of the demographic (and Democratic) majority.

The Republicans are now objectively an antidemocratic party. Factoring in the obscenely extravagant influence of billionaires and megacorporations via an unrestricted political financing regime, one might see the Republicans simply as the party of plutocracy. But whiffs of American-style fascism also cling to Trump and his supporters, whiffs that became a stench with the attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol by a violent rabble, some sporting Confederate flags and neo-Nazi insignia, demanding that Congress, about to affirm Joe Biden’s election, be suppressed in favour of a Trump dictatorship.

Thankfully, the Trump coup, like Hitler’s failed 1923 beerhall putsch, was a fiasco, for the same reasons that Trump’s presidency was a fiasco: empty bluster and incompetence in execution. Yet Hitler’s failed putsch was the platform for the subsequent rise of his Nazi party. The Republican Party, far from being chastened by the Capitol debacle, has doubled down on the claims of massive electoral fraud, and these claims are believed by a majority of Republican supporters. It is also doubling down on its opposition to the Biden agenda with the same intransigence that a Republican-dominated Congress exercised against Barack Obama over the last six years of his presidency. If Republicans, assisted by crass manipulation and vote suppression, manage to snuff out the fragile Democratic majority in the midterm elections in 2022 and reassert Trump or another far-right demagogue – perhaps more dangerously competent than Trump – in the 2024 presidential race, American democracy will be definitely lost. The Republican Party will have been its historical gravedigger.

Perhaps the worst will not come to pass. Perhaps Joe Biden will succeed in his 21st-century New Deal and help revitalize the American economy and society, in which case the Republicans will have to radically reform themselves if they wish to play a responsible oppositional role. Otherwise they will still cripple democracy, even as self-marginalized critics. Liberal democracy needs a responsible, civil conservative force to balance progressive forces from the Left and alternate peaceably with them in office. That requires trust on both sides. Republicans have withdrawn trust from their opponents; Democrats, in light of that reckless withdrawal, have in turn learned to profoundly distrust Republicans. No good will come to liberal democracy from politics practised as war with no prisoners.

Republican America is the worst case of the Right gone wrong, but Boris Johnson’s weirdly Jacobin-like Tory party has also come unhinged from its traditional moorings, with the breakup of the post-Brexit United Kingdom a not inconceivable result.

These two examples offer a useful warning to post-Harper Conservatives in Canada: think twice before venturing onto that dark terrain described in medieval maps as “Here be Dragons.” The dragons threatening democracy are not mythical, but only too real.

For more on the current political climate of the American right, check out Good Policies Are Not Enough by Henry Milner.

In the 19th century, Karl Marx wrote that “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” In the 21st century, history (“the dead generations”) reappears in new forms. Groups defining themselves by specific identities reread and rewrite history for evidence of historical injustice.

What looks like interest in the past is actually ahistorical. We look to history as an armoury to find weapons to wield in current political struggles. Of course, the present has always employed the past in this way. Memory of war has always been used to inspire present-day nationalism. Today, culture wars rage in the United States over Confederate symbols and the American legacy of slavery and racism. In my town of Victoria, a firestorm of controversy was set off by the decision to warehouse a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald that had stood in front of City Hall, on grounds of his role in the official oppression of Indigenous people. Debates on these issues are typically rancorous and emotionally charged, on both sides.

To get a better perspective on the interaction of past and present in extremis, I visited perhaps the worst-case scenario. Berlin is a city where a very dark history threatens constantly to overwhelm the present. In Berlin – capital of the Nazi regime from whence the orders came unleashing a global war that killed at least 60 million people, 45 million of them civilians, and from whence the horrific mechanized genocide of the Holocaust was directed – the past indeed weighs like a nightmare on the present. The city was never the centre of German fascism: instead, it was known as “Red Berlin” for its citizens’ Communist and Social Democratic sympathies. Nevertheless, Berlin was to be the site for Hitler’s grandiose dreams of a monumental capital that would celebrate in concrete and steel the Übermenschen of the Third Reich.

In 1945, Berlin was Ground Zero: after years of relentless Allied bombing, the savage Battle of Berlin left almost no building standing. The German past as memorialized in its buildings and monuments from earlier eras had been all but eradicated. Berlin’s past would have to be reconstructed at the same time as its future was imagined. What would be remembered and what would be forgotten?

In the first years after the war, amnesia and denial were everywhere, from the “good Germans” who swore they knew nothing of the genocidal crimes of the regime, even those who lived next door to the death camps, to the former Nazis who resumed positions in state and society while neither admitting to nor apologizing for their previous conduct.

A further complicating factor was the postwar east-west division of Germany into the Communist-bloc DDR and the NATO-bloc Federal Republic, given brutal physical form in the wall that divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the DDR regime, the Nazi past was seen through two different rear-view mirrors, each with particular Cold War distortions: DDR propaganda depicted West Germany as a haven for ex-Nazi war criminals while the West depicted the Communist police state as the linear successor to Nazi totalitarianism. Fighting the Cold War on German soil was not conducive to recovering a clear and honest picture of the pre–Cold War German past.

In the 1960s, a tectonic shift began deep within German society, precipitated by a generational conflict as young Germans began to question their parents’ role in the Nazi era and demand an accounting for the responsibility of Germany for its war crimes and especially for the Holocaust. This transformation was not easy and has never been complete. But the overall result has been remarkable: an admirable honesty about its national history distinguishes Germany. Nothing like this coming to terms with past misconduct can be seen in Japan, where accounting for the atrocities of the Japanese war of aggression in China (such as the infamous “Rape of Nanjing”) or apologies and compensation to the Korean “comfort women” who were made sex slaves for the Japanese army have generated significant nationalist backlash.

In Germany, Holocaust denial is a criminal offence, and only on the far fringes of the extreme right can one encounter any refusal to face German responsibility for organized mass murder and genocide. This is not an admission of collective blame that passes down from generation to generation – itself a racist conception of blood guilt – but rather a recognition that for today’s Germans, mostly born long after Hitler’s rule, honest memory of past horrors is the best antidote to ever again repeating that dark history.

A prime example of how memory can be made to serve the present is a large block in central Berlin south of Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The Nazis used the block to house the headquarters of the Gestapo, the SS and the SD (the SS security service). This was in effect the directing centre of the entire Nazi police state apparatus. After 1945, with the structures reduced to rubble, one option was simply to raze and build anew, covering over the block’s hideous past: to forget rather than to remember. Several abortive proposals along such lines came forward, but none were accepted.

Then, in the late 1980s, a temporary exhibit called The Topography of Terror was opened in one part of the empty block, documenting the rise and fall of the police state in the 1930s and 1940s. Visitors flocked to the exhibit, which is now a permanent memorial. Here one can see the crimes of the Nazi terror apparatus documented, with high information content relying not on multimedia glitz but on text and stark black-and-white photographs. Instead of telling visitors what to think, The Topography of Terror encourages them to think for themselves about what they see. Memory and history are recovered from the ruins, but the razed grounds remain as a reminder of the temptation to forget.

The long-debated project of a national Holocaust memorial finally came to fruition in 2005 with the opening of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman. A “controversial” design with no explanatory text, it is an installation of blank pillars of varying heights in undulating rows on a grid across a large expanse of Berlin cityscape. Visitors wander through the rows, sometimes dwarfed and lost to sight, at other times visible to the nearby city streets.

Some critics decry its anonymity, suggesting its message is inexplicable. But the Holocaust was itself inexplicable. As for the anonymity, the Jews were murdered not for who they were but for what they were; the Memorial brings home the terrifying impersonality of their extermination. Besides, underneath the memorial is another presentation in which the victims are given their names and personhood back. Jewish families from across Europe are shown in family photos, with information on their occupations, their homes, their marriages and children, and then the precise date and place they were murdered. Above and below ground taken together, I found the Memorial deeply moving. This despite the trivialization by tourists posing amid the pillars for selfies and the junk stands popping up around the perimeter. One can memorialize the past but never account for how the present will deal with it.

An even more remarkable example of teaching the present about the past are the Stolpersteine or “stumbling stones,” small plaques installed in sidewalks in front of buildings that once housed those who fell victim to the Third Reich’s extermination machine. The plaques carry the names of the former residents, their birth dates and the dates they were deported to their deaths. Thousands now appear all over Berlin. This is not an official memorial project. It began as a guerrilla installation in 1996 by one man, artist Gunter Demnig, but has now become institutionalized. Neighbourhoods take the initiative and new Stolpersteine are installed after approval of authenticated names. In Berlin one now walks daily over these haunting memories literally embedded in the material of everyday life.

It is necessary to remind ourselves just how unusual, even unique, this German memorialization of their national crimes is. Try to imagine a National Mall in Washington, D.C., that, instead of its celebratory monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, featured a searing memorial to the enslavement, segregation and lynching of African Americans, or the cultural genocide campaigns against America’s Indigenous peoples.

Yet however admirable the displays of German historical honesty may be, they have not been accomplished without strains, and some of these are growing more prominent. On the right-wing fringes of German politics, the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party, rooted in the economically neglected regions of the former East Germany, has been steadily rising. The AfD has stressed insistently that Germans once again should be proud, not ashamed, of their history. In one sense this is understandable: no country can carry on forever on the basis of a national narrative of guilt and shame. But what the political mainstream has insisted on is that frank recognition of the wrongs of the German past are a significant part of what Germans can be proud of today and in the future. To the AfD, national pride can only be restored on the basis of historical amnesia. A growing minority of Germans apparently agree with this diagnosis, pointing to a coming kulturkampf (culture war) that will be neither pretty nor instructive.

There is another development, this time arising in the political mainstream, that calls into question the role of history from another direction. In May 2019 the German Bundestag overwhelmingly passed a (nonbinding) resolution that the German government “resist” the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which it defined as not just anti-Israeli but also anti-Semitic. The resolution threatens to criminalize support for BDS as hate speech. Israel has made a global assault on the BDS movement a centrepiece of its diplomacy abroad, meeting with some success in North America. The German resolution went further than any other response in Europe.

Clearly, German guilt over the Holocaust was very much in play. As a statement from Social Democrats and Greens put it, “In view of Germany’s historical responsibility, it is of great value that a large majority of the German Bundestag, across faction boundaries, has repeatedly committed itself to the security and the protection of Israel as well as to the fight against anti-Semitism.”

The following month the director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and a distinguished scholar of Jewish history, Peter Schäfer, resigned or was fired from his post, after adding his name to a petition signed by 240 Jewish intellectuals opposing the Bundestag resolution. The petition argued that “boycotts are a legitimate and nonviolent tool of resistance” and urged the continued funding of Israeli and Palestinian organizations “that peacefully challenge the Israeli occupation, expose severe violations of international law and … defend the principles and values at the heart of liberal democracy and rule of law, in Germany and elsewhere.”

Israeli ambassador Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, who earlier had vociferously attacked the Jewish Museum for an exhibition on Jerusalem that showed a city peopled with Palestinians as well as Jews, doubled down on the “any criticism of Israel equals anti-Semitism” trope and demanded that the German government officially enforce the Bundestag resolution.

There is seemingly no end to the ways in which the ghosts of the past can be conjured up for the political battles of the present, and no end to the potential perversions of historical lessons that can result.

Until recently, some Canadians referred respectfully to the “Mother of Parliaments” in the United Kingdom and deferred to British practices of government as often superior to our own.

We are unlikely to hear such favourable references again in our time. With the Brexit debacle, we are more likely to see the U.K. as a beloved aunt or uncle whose once mature deportment has given way to embarrassingly self-destructive foolishness.

There is, however, a possible way out, ironically involving the very mechanism that sent Britain down the Brexit rabbit hole in the first place: another referendum. The referendum that committed Britain to exiting the European Union was a very blunt instrument of plebiscitary democracy in a country that had traditionally defined the Crown-in-Parliament in opposition to more populist forms of government. It might seem counterintuitive to advise more of the same medicine to a country suffering blunt force trauma from the first dose. Realistically, there is no alternative.

Parliament will be presented with one of three possible options following the conclusion of negotiations with the EU: some form of either a “soft” or a “hard” Brexit, or a crash-out no-deal Brexit. While varying in their degree of undesirability, all options are poor. But Parliament is incapable of breaking out of this Hobson’s choice. The parties that actually make Parliament function are structurally incapable of coping with the issue of Britain’s relationship with Europe. That was why former Prime Minister David Cameron made his reckless decision to call the Brexit referendum, a rash attempt to resolve a permanent schism in the Tory party between the Eurosceptics and the Europhiles. Cameron insouciantly assumed that the result would discredit Boris Johnson, potential challenger for PM at the head of the Eurosceptic faction. Instead the result blew Cameron out of his job and his country toward the cliff edge.

For a century, British party politics have been mainly aligned along a right-left Tory-Labour axis. Sometimes parties steal ideas from each other but their broad right-left ideological profiles have remained largely intact. As Eric Shaw reports from the U.K. elsewhere in this issue (see page 36), Europe has been the anomaly in this familiar pattern, cutting across both parties and both sides of the spectrum.

Although the Leave campaign was headed by right-wing Tories, Labour has always contained a heavily Eurosceptic left that views Europe as a capitalist roadblock to a socialist Britain. The present Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has decades of experience with this grouping. Corbyn did not join the Leave campaign, given its right-wing slant, but was notably tepid on the Remain front. Since the result, he has argued that Brexit having been definitively decided by the people, the best answer is to elect a Labour government. Given the fierce splits over Europe in both parties, it is difficult to discern how putting Labour on the government benches would somehow make Parliament more coherent on Brexit, whatever else it might accomplish.

Nor do the splits within each party on Europe necessarily fit into partisan ideological categories. There are Remainers and Leavers on both the left and right sides of the Tory party, even if the most vociferous Brexiteers come from the far right. Within Labour, the old Blairite group still not reconciled to Corbyn are mostly Remainers, but it is also the case that young people, especially London-based, are both strong supporters of the Corbyn left and equally strong Remainers, while Leave sentiment can be found in all corners of Labour. Yet partisan loyalties also forbid any enduring likeminded cross-party alliances on Europe.

When Cameron called the referendum, he unleashed the demons of populism. The overnight transformation of a once-deferential parliamentary monarchy into something peculiarly akin to a Jacobin-style people’s democracy is remarkable. When the Supreme Court ruled that the final Brexit deal would have to be submitted to Parliament for approval, the Daily Mail ran the bewigged judges’ pictures over a blaring headline: “ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE.” One could almost imagine aristocrats being carted through jeering crowds to the guillotine. By any traditional reading, this is very un-British.

That the expression of the people’s will is definitive and not to be questioned quickly became the conventional wisdom, shared even by many of those wary of what Brexit might bring. Perhaps opening the populist Pandora’s box is irreversible.

The problem with the definitive referendum has become apparent as negotiations have dragged on and warnings of the severe consequences of any possible outcome have become known. Leave voters were told there would be a Brexit bonus, one that could fully fund the National Health Service. Instead there will be a multibillion-pound Brexit deficit. They were told there would be an end to free movement of people; EU negotiators have made it clear there will be no access to the single market without free movement of people. They were promised that Britons could “take back control”; they are now told that any access to Europe will come with continued imposition of European rules, but without the political representation they have as EU members. Boris Johnson made the claim that Britain could “have its cake and eat it.” It can’t, of course, as any fool should have known.

The price tag for any post-Brexit relationship in terms of lost business and corporate relocation to the continent is huge. Johnson’s riposte, “Fuck business,” is a bizarre mutation of Conservative philosophy, but one that Brexit supporters should seriously ponder.

There are yet worse demons. Not only did the result set old against young and London against the English countryside, but it also dramatically set England against its Celtic hinterlands. Scotland and Northern Ireland both voted Remain while the English heartland was dominantly Leave.

When Cameron agreed to the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland while campaigning against Scottish independence, he helped release the long dormant demons of English nationalism. He then cynically used these to gain a majority in the 2015 election against Labour: a notorious Tory ad depicted Labour leader Ed Miliband as a tiny figure in the pocket of the then Scottish Nationalist leader. Once roused, inward- and backward-looking Little English nationalism could not be stuffed back into the Great Britain box. Its voice was loud and clear in the Brexit vote.

The prospect of another Scottish referendum post-Brexit was threatening enough to the union. But the biggest challenge is posed by Northern Ireland. The Leave votes were cast in complete indifference to the consequences for the still fragile Ulster peace. The 1995 Framework Agreement depended in large measure on the virtual erasure of the border with the Irish Republic made possible by common membership in the EU. Any Brexit, hard or soft, imperils this open border. Theresa May has tried to square the circle with fantasy solutions that please neither the EU nor or the Irish government. And any possible compromise will be shot down by the intransigent Democratic Unionist Party that holds May’s minority government in a death grip.

The DUP may be the dying hand of the past. Certainly Loyalists have to ponder the indifference shown by the Brexiteers to their concerns. The right wing of the Tory party used to be in sentimental thrall to the Irish Protestants – wrecking, for example, Gladstone’s Home Rule in the late 19th century, and later blocking compromise with the Catholic community during the Troubles. No more. An economically straitened post-Brexit Northern Ireland could expect little help from a U.K. itself battered by Brexit, with no fairy godmothers of the Tory right. Even Loyalists might begin to see their economic and political future better served by joining a now secular Republic firmly situated in the EU.

In this dystopian future, the United Kingdom could shrink into a backwater Little England, shorn of Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as of a seat at the table of Europe.

This brings us back to the original referendum. Along with a negative will to leave, voters expressed a positive desire for a Brexit that would answer their needs. Such an outcome has been demonstrated to be nothing more than false advertising by the Leave campaign. Lacking both legitimacy and competence on this issue, Parliament cannot mend the problem. It can, however, call for a second referendum in which the same people who voted for Brexit will have a chance to examine the actual Brexit on offer and reconsider.

Quebec offers a pointer. In 1980 the Parti Québécois put a referendum on sovereignty-association to the voters. Quebecers could express their will for sovereignty, which was theirs alone to decide. Association with the rest of Canada could only be the result of negotiation and could not be credibly promised in advance by the PQ. Yet sovereignty was tied to an association that alone would make it work. The PQ provided a fair answer to this conundrum by promising, in the event of a Yes vote, a second referendum after the conclusion of negotiations with Canada. Quebecers could then accept or reject the actual form that sovereignty would take.

In 1995 another sovereignty referendum eliminated the option of a sober second look. The late Jacques Parizeau, as PQ Premier, enthused that once people voted for sovereignty they would be like “lobsters in the pot.” We now know that Parizeau had plans to declare unilateral independence following even a 50 per cent plus one Yes vote: the lobsters would be boiled, like it or not.

Those who voted Leave in anticipation of promised benefits that vanished almost as soon as the result was announced might ask themselves: who shows the most respect for the people, those who give them a second chance when the details are complete, or those who would treat them like lobsters for dinner?

Of course a paralytic Parliament may not call a second referendum, leaving the march of the lemmings undisturbed. And if it is called, there is no guarantee that even a bad Brexit might not win out over a return to Europe. If so, at least the lobsters will have chosen their fate knowingly. There would also be a chance to go back to the EU and say, “Please forget our bout of temporary insanity. Everything’s fine again.”

A second referendum will no doubt be an ugly, divisive affair. Whatever the outcome, the losing side will find it difficult to reconcile with the winners. But that was also the consequence of the first vote. It seems to be the only possible route out of the Brexit maze – a democratic antidote to democracy run amok.

In the spring of 2016 I was travelling in the Persian Gulf. In Abu Dhabi I decided, with some apprehension, to visit the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. Opened in 2007, this mosque is advertised as one of the world’s biggest, with the largest central chandelier, the largest carpet, etc. I wondered if I might be confronted with a Disney theme park, a vulgar display of wealth by nouveau riche oil sheikhs. After all, oil was discovered in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) only a couple of generations ago. Prior to the discovery the locals eked out a precarious subsistence desert existence, while today many Emiratis are counted among the top 1 per cent on the globe.

After I made my way across a vast parking lot under the brutal midday desert sun (record highs were being recorded across the Gulf) and past the checkpoint where women visitors were being scrutinized for appropriate head coverings and lengths of sleeves, I caught my first glimpse of glittering white domes and minarets. From a distance a bit like a Hollywood set for an Arabian Nights epic, but rather beautiful against the brilliant blue sky.

On closer approach, my apprehensions quickly gave way to something very different: stunned admiration for an astonishing architectural and aesthetic achievement. The Grand Mosque draws on the legacy of the extraordinary Islamic artistic tradition but brings it into the 21st century with the latest building materials and techniques incorporated seamlessly into a remarkable conceptual unity – a place of worship that, like the great cathedrals of Europe, puts secular artistic tools into the service of a striving toward the eternal. Every detail conforms to a standard of good taste, without a trace of vulgar display. No more than a decade old, the Grand Mosque already reasonably stands comparison with the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, Angkor Wat, the Parthenon.

Yet appreciation quickly gives way to doubts, not about the mosque itself, but about the context of its construction. The UAE is in many ways an unsettling place. As little as 12 per cent of the population consists of actual Emiratis, who lead lives of extravagant leisure while most of the work is done by the more than 80 per cent who come from abroad and have no citizenship rights or even security of residence. Many of these are manual workers and tradespeople, but many others are highly paid business and professional types working in the burgeoning financial sector in the UAE’s spectacular high-rise office towers.

One Pakistani driver in Dubai told me that he was supporting an extended family at home on wages he could never match there, but he cautioned that he could be expelled at a moment’s notice for any misstep. That goes as much for the European and North American investment bankers at the top. It’s all a little like H.G. Wells’s dystopian vision in The Time Machine of a future in which an effete minority are maintained at leisure by the underground toil of the Morlocks. To keep this system going, the UAE is a repressive surveillance regime that crushes any signs of dissidence or even criticism. Its foreign policy is closely aligned with that of Saudi Arabia, including participation in the horrific Saudi-led military assault on Yemen, one of the worst (and most unaddressed) humanitarian catastrophes of our day.

Not a pretty context for the production of the exquisite Grand Mosque. But does this negate the cultural achievement? After all, the Parthenon was constructed by an Athenian democracy that excluded women, foreigners and slaves. Indeed, much of the economic surplus that enabled the Parthenon to take shape came from Athenian silver mines where slaves toiled in unspeakable conditions. Yet the greatness of the Parthenon remains indelible after two and a half millennia.

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin described history as a triumphal procession of rulers stepping over the prostrate. Spoils, called “cultural treasures,” are carried in this procession. Yet these treasures have an origin that one cannot contemplate “without horror,” since “they owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries.” Benjamin concluded with this chilling aphorism: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Yet even as radical a critic of capitalist society as Jean-Paul Sartre could write a lengthy treatise on Gustave Flaubert in which he recognized that though Flaubert was a bourgeois writer in a bourgeois age, his Madame Bovary transcends its origins. If every document of civilization is indeed at the same time a document of barbarism, one should forget neither side of this equation. Yes, Aristotle – unconvincingly – justified slavery as “natural.” That surely cannot mean that this seminal Western philosopher should be consigned to a Politically Incorrect trash bin. But neither is uncritical adulation of Aristotle as cultural icon acceptable any longer.

All this is a roundabout way of coming critically at a worrying contemporary tendency to aggressively project the cultural wars of the 21st century back onto the past and onto the Western cultural canon. Of course every generation has the right, perhaps the duty, to redefine the legacy of the past for today. Failure to do so leads to cultural stultification. But what is worrying are demands to erase and silence the past where it conflicts with current preoccupations. Feminists are right to identify and decry the sexism that runs rampant through the philosophy, art and literature of the past. But it would be self-defeating to silence the voices that still speak to us across the years. Happily, many feminists realize that it is far more radically subversive to reread the past and reengage in the continuing dialogue, but in a new, critical light.

The civilization/barbarism dialectic will continue to play out at the cultural level as in some sense it always has: there were once ignorant Christians who wanted to burn ancient writings as “pagan,” just as today vandals like the Taliban and the Islamic State smash cultural treasures that fail to conform to their crude ideas of Islamic truth. The past and its voices will survive.

When culture is politically weaponized, things get even messier, not to say nastier. To politicians and leaders of social protest movements, culture is often seen as an asset to be deployed on the political game board, history a field to be cherry-picked for advantage in the present.

Take the current fracas in the United States over the Confederate flag and monuments honouring Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee. Donald Trump (a man whose immense historical ignorance has constantly been on display) may inveigh against those demanding the removal of Confederate monuments as the enemies of “history,” but history is the last thing involved in this war of partisan symbols. Most of the monuments date from the 1940s and 1950s. They were the frantic efforts of that generation of white Southerners to rewrite 19th-century history to combat the emergent 20th-century civil rights movement against slavery’s stepchild, segregation. The Lost Cause, according to this fraudulent revisionism, was not the defence of slavery but the assertion of states’ rights and white Southern identity.

Today the monuments serve to validate the resurgent white supremacists gathering behind the Trump presidency. This is a travesty of both culture and history. Yet as much as one might wish to see the whole sinister nest of Confederate symbols swept from the public eye, there is still need for fair analysis of Robert E. Lee, a very complex human being, given his key role in American history. And no understanding of American political thought could omit John C. Calhoun with his theory of concurrent majorities in a federation, despite his role as attack dog for the slaveholders.

This brings me to a Canadian reflection of these debates, the recent calls from Ontario teachers to remove the title of Sir John A. Macdonald from schools named after Canada’s first, and arguably greatest, prime minister. The ostensible grounds are Sir John’s role in the creation of the discredited residential school system and his failure to alleviate Native starvation on the prairies on his watch.

It is easy to empathize with Native people who cringe at the celebration of a man who had a leading hand in policies of cultural genocide and enforced Native suffering. However, the calls for renaming – which have come from non-Native sympathizers rather than from First Nations activists more interested in real-world solutions than symbolic victories – ignore historical context and the degree to which Macdonald reflected the general prejudice of white society as a whole rather than leading or initiating it. But we can refuse to excuse Macdonald on Native policy, while still recognizing and honouring his unique role in Confederation and building the Canadian state.

Indeed, without Macdonald the northern half of the continent might today be part of the benighted Trumpian Republic to the south. I’m okay with naming a few schools to honour that achievement. But do remember: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

This has been called the post-truth age. Science, reason, logic, facts have been losing their substance, fading into ideology, myth, conspiracy and paranoia.

Now, thanks to some 63 million Americans minimally literate enough to cast a ballot, we have Donald Trump. Con man, egomaniac, pathological liar, sexual predator, manifestly unfit by character for high public office. Yet here he is, alleged “leader of the free world” with his finger on the nuclear trigger. He has suddenly driven America to the brink of destroying the liberal international order painstakingly built up over the past seven decades; of reversing the hopeful efforts to deal with threats to the global environment; of returning race hatred, misogyny, bigotry and intolerance to the very centre of American values. And all the while, together with his glitzy family and grisly entourage, he schemes to make as much money as he can from his latest, greatest scam.

I would call what I have just written “facts” backed by a plenitude of evidence. Others would denounce these words as “fake news,” or “alternative facts.” Half of America agrees that Trump is a monster. The other half thinks he is a messiah – and perhaps the caudillo who will enforce their will and their values on a hostile world. Trump and his followers live in an alternative looking-glass universe from which communication comes in Orwellian Newspeak: black is white; love is hate; peace is war; Barack Obama is an alien; Vladimir Putin is a good guy.

There are commentators who seek to normalize the abnormal, to legitimate the illegitimate. Trump, they assert, will be housetrained by the experience of office; his adult appointees will civilize him. Such illusions have a long history. When the conservative fool Franz von Papen brought Adolf Hitler to the German Chancellery in 1933, he assured his anxious associates that “within two months, we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak.”

While Trump has in his first few months backtracked on some of his more egregious foreign policy stands, this represents less a civilizing process than recognition of the alarming ignorance of his earlier understanding of the world. But it in no way diminishes his narcissistic confidence in himself. He has got where he is by regularly ignoring the experts and party elders who sought to moderate him. Why would he suddenly change course now?

All his adult life he has run a private company, surrounded by yes men and trophy wives who fawningly stroke his ego and reassure him of his brilliance and invincibility. The only thing that has changed is that he has just accomplished the biggest hostile takeover in corporate history and is basking in a CEO office like no other on earth. But this is an office that attracts opposition and criticism, lots and lots of it. And Trump can neither abide nor handle criticism.

The other side of narcissism is deep insecurity. Criticism, especially if comes in the form of derision, is fuel to the flame of his vanity. Nothing drives him to greater fury than being the object of laughter. This is a volatile combination of combustibles that flares in predawn Twitter tantrums against Saturday Night Live; or in darker hints of authoritarian intolerance when he attacks the “lying” media as the “enemies of the people.”

Media critical of Trump are enemies of the people because, as Trump assured his followers in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “I am your voice!” In the populist narrative, he is the tribune of the masses, the articulation of their seething anger, their strong arm – and their boot.

Populism posits the people as a monolith with a unified will, needing only the right leader to voice and enforce that will. The paradox is that populist political movements are called into being by the division of the people. The people must struggle against the elites, the power bloc, the Establishment. These sinister forces claim to represent the people, but to populists they subvert the unity of the people, hence must be denied membership in the people. Trump populists refer to themselves as the only “real” Americans; the 66 million who voted for Hillary Clinton are fake Americans, like the fake news that supports their un-American views. Worse, this bears an undeniable racial charge: “real” Americans are white. Hence the Birther movement (which Trump himself led) that insisted that an African-American Democratic president could not, literally, be a “real” American but must be an alien Muslim imposter. Hence also the insistence that mass voter fraud exists and that minorities (“illegal aliens”) must have their votes suppressed.

Now that a populist tribune is in the White House, the possibility of authoritarian rule is imminent. Checks and balances have always been at the heart of the American system of government. Already some of these seem to be working to contain Trump. His flagrant Muslim-ban executive orders have been stymied by the courts. His promise to repeal and replace Obamacare initially failed in the House of Representatives when his own Republican majority splintered in two directions. But a string of such defeats might well be the trigger that sets off open authoritarianism. One scenario would see the Big Man overriding those very “elitist” mechanisms of restraint he condemned on the campaign trail, claiming draconian measures are necessary to “drain the swamp,” and rousing his followers to form intimidating street mobs in support. Perhaps another terrorist attack could be Trump’s Reichstag fire.

In this scenario, the institutional response should come from Congress, which has the power to impeach and remove a president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” A compelling case might be made for removing Trump (even short of future authoritarian abuse of his constitutional powers, the questions of foreign “emoluments” from his business interests abroad, or of smoking guns being found in his sinister Russian connections, could figure in articles of impeachment). However, this almost certainly will not happen given the Republican stranglehold on the House and the fierce, remorseless partisanship of that party. Only in the event that the Democrats regain control of the House in 2018 could impeachment become a possibility, but ruthless gerrymandering by the Republicans along with minority vote suppression makes the prospect of a Democratic seat majority unlikely even with a popular vote majority.

What makes the next four years truly threatening is that a legitimacy crisis has become general. Since at least the late 1990s, Republicans have regularly painted Democrats, especially liberal Democrats, as illegitimate. In 2016 populism dovetailed with partisanship to deliver the mass of regular Republican voters to Trump, despite his aggressive assault on the party mainstream during the primaries.

But Trump carries little or no legitimacy among Democrats or independents on the left. Three million more Americans voted for Clinton, a democratic mandate denied by the 18th-century relic that chooses the president, the Electoral College. The story of Russian covert interference in the election on Trump’s behalf is already a scandal that may yet grow worse. Then there is FBI Director James Comey’s ill-considered but fateful intervention in the flimsy Clinton email matter. Finally, there is Trump’s arrogant and reckless disregard for decency, leading a campaign that featured calls for his opponent to be locked up or even assassinated.

The result of all this: the widespread slogan “Not My President!” During the George W. Bush years, many hated his war in Iraq but nonetheless acknowledged that he was still their President, like it or not. No more. Blue-state America is joining red-state America in seceding from democratic trust. Not since the Civil War era has the fabric of democracy been stretched so thin.

Against this turbulent backdrop, perhaps the single most bizarre feature of the Trump ascendancy looms like a huge question mark: the open hostilities that have broken out between Trump and the intelligence agencies. Some in the White House have begun warning of the “deep state,” with dark intimations of plots to overthrow the people’s tribune. During the Cold War there was speculation that a left-wing party coming to office in the West might fall victim to a coup orchestrated by the secret state in the name of defending capitalism against Communism. Now we have fallen down a rabbit hole into a weird world in which a Republican President is being investigated by the FBI for evidence that he is a Manchurian candidate of the Russians, while Democrats howl “subversion” in tones that they once would have labelled McCarthyite.

The “deep state” might be an appropriate analysis of Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan or Thailand, but it is a doubtful concept to apply to America. Power in the American system tends to be fragmented and diffuse and this goes for the intelligence agencies as well. They could never agree to get a coup together to take out a president, however much some may despise him. What they can do, however, and are doing, is to leak damaging classified information that keeps an already chaotic White House continually wrong-footed. It has been said that the United States has become less a democracy than a “vetocracy.” In his stumbling approach to governing, Trump has contrived to add one more set of influential forces ready to veto his initiatives.

Getting rid of Trump during his term may be a pipedream, but we can at least hope that he will continue to be his own worst enemy.