Democracy Is Not Self-Evident: From the Twilight of “Post-Truth” to the Dawn of “Post-Democracy”

The executive order that Trump signed on Thursday evening, January 27, 2017, in the Pentagon building, under the name and pretext of “Protecting the Nation [America] from Foreign Terrorist Entry,” is far more horrific and brutal than what had earlier leaked in the news and raised concerns.

In addition to a 90-day visa issuance suspension, during these 90 days, the “entry” of nationals from 7 Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, is comprehensively barred, even possibly if they hold green cards or long-term work or student visas.

Moreover, the restrictions imposed on nationals of the countries on this list could, after 90 days, extend to more countries based on a report from the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department regarding the level of other countries' cooperation in providing information on their nationals.

This is a cruel and brutal order; an interpretation some American legal experts have made. Just imagine someone living in America with their family on a long-term work or student visa or with a green card. Now, if this person or some members of their family are currently on a trip outside America, for the time being, and perhaps it will turn out permanently, they cannot return to America, and at least nearly 600,000 current residents of America are potentially in such a situation. This is straightforwardly and simply “brutal.” As anti-human as the sudden, overnight separation of the people of East Berlin from the people of West Berlin after the Second World War.

The world of hope in democratic politics has now harshly collided with the wall of a reckless and ruthless reality: Democracy is not self-evident. As Obama said in his farewell address, whenever we take democracy for granted, it is put at risk, and now we see not only is it put at risk, but it can also drag the world into danger along with its own fall.

One item in the costs of the failure of the experiment of representative democracy in the 20th century was the rise of Hitler and the lives and worlds that burned, turned to ashes, and were scattered to the wind. Who can say this time that the price the world will pay will be cheaper?

The rise of Trump will divide the history of new democracies into two periods: before and after him. Trumpism will provoke its own political and intellectual reactions and civil resistances, and very likely, serious and powerful civil movements will form in America and across the world against this wave of danger, error, folly, impudence, and brutality.

The very possibility of Trumpism finding its way to seize the throne of the empire is a sign of the decline of the sun of representative democracy and the beginning of an era that the editors of The Economist rightly called the era of “post-truth.” But this era is not only the age of post-truth, but also the twilight of representative democracy.

The world has now once again fallen onto the steep slope of aggressive error, danger, folly, and impudence and is heading toward a new threshold. Will this threshold open onto a cold, harsh, and long polar twilight, as happened with the eruption of the conflagrations of the Second World War, which Max Weber had predicted after the First World War by observing the widespread political apathy and culturalism in Europe, or will the blade of human creative imagination this time tear the ominous curtains of this dark dusk and pull the sun of “post-democracy” politics out from beyond the dark horizon of the “post-truth” era?

Will post-truth politics result in global totalitarianism, or will the fundamental values and ideals of democracy be reconstructed in a new form within a “post-democratic” politics? The outcome of this game of life and death will be determined not only by the folly and impudence of Trumpism, but also by the resolve, sense of timing, political effort, and intellectual struggle of every single aware and responsible individual across the world.

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Democracy Is Not Self-Evident: From the Twilight of “Post-Truth” to the Dawn of “Post-Democracy”

Mohammad Mehdi Mojahedi

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