Mick Hartley

An interesting piece from Lee Smith – The Arab-isation of American Politics. He's talking about the current obsession with crowd numbers: not only Sean Spicer and the Trump crew obsessing over the crowd size at the inauguration, but equally the anti-Trump protest groups, and their belief that somehow the size of the crowds they attracted showed that Trump wasn't really the legitimate democratic choice. But liberal democracy – American democracy – isn't about the size of demonstrations. 

Trump was fairly elected with a plurality of the electoral college, and the outgoing president transferred authority to the incoming commander-in-chief peacefully. In other words, the mechanisms of democracy functioned properly. So why do so many Americans mistake what typically signals a failure of democracy for democracy itself?

In part, the talk about crowds is a sign of how American perceptions and expectations have been subtly and pervasively altered by our engagement with the undemocratic, and traditionally autocratic, Arab societies of the Middle East, especially since the beginning of the Arab Spring uprisings a little more than six years ago. Certainly, those bloody events should have reminded us that the politics of the ballot box are preferable to the politics of the street. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the massive protest movements of the Arab Spring were regarded across the American political spectrum, left and right, as genuine outpourings of democratic feeling….

Crowd politics is the opposite of electoral politics. In democratic societies, crowd politics are generally hostile to electoral politics and procedural government, and often presage their destruction. Consider, for instance, the crowds outside the Duma before the Bolsheviks took over, or Mussolini’s spectacles, Hitler’s even bigger spectacles. Crowds are not what democracy looks like. Rather, they are a consequence of the absence or the breakdown of democratic procedural norms.

Mass demonstrations are not a sign of a healthy democracy. Rather, as signs at the march more correctly advertised Saturday, they are a symbol and a means of “resistance.”

Adopting and retooling Arab tropes like “resistance”—often armed and typically directed at Israel—is hardly a new fashion for the progressive camp. Indeed, the romance with resistance dates back to at least the 1960s, when the European left seemed to hitch its wagon to the Arab cause, as a tip of the spear in the fight against capitalism, imperialism, etc. In fact, Europeans were simply paying lip service to Arab political and cultural ideas, embodied primarily in the Palestinian national movement….

Americans cherish lots of easy fantasies about mass-protest movements, which we imagine are cool like May ’68 in Paris. Americans can afford to be sentimental about protest movements because we have been fortunate that, even including the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movement, we have suffered relatively few casualties, and because everything turned out OK in the end….

Another tragedy then may come. The West, the United States, has been damaged by a series of tragedies that began Sept. 11, 2001, and have not stopped since. The deepest of these wounds were all self-inflicted. As the Trump era begins, we are likely to pay even more dearly for losing faith in our own ideas. What makes democracy possible is not pride in crowds but rather the sound skepticism that warns us of the danger of mass politics and the need for the judicious procedural tempering of the enthusiasms that our system is designed to generate but never to abruptly enforce. Otherwise, our self-pity and obsession with identity politics, or what the Third World calls “sectarianism,” combined with the widespread loathing for these things on the part of the electorate that chose Donald Trump, is apt to be a death sentence for our democracy.