This puts so-called conservatives in the strange position of supporting their man against the world's largest democracy, while simultaneously ignoring his affinity for autocrats. They have to because he has never hidden it: As president, he has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader, celebrated Chinese President Xi Jinping for making China a dictatorship again — suggesting the United States might “try it” — and said the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “totally understands it.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin with then-President Donald Trump in 2018. credit: AP
Trump sees himself as a man who makes deals with bad guys because, like many Americans, he is tired of the United States' involvement in “endless foreign wars.” fair enough. But there is no agreement, there is even less liberal democracy. Trump does not value or believe in the system, and therefore does not see anything in it worth defending.
Meanwhile, anti-Trump progressives have a strange blindness of their own. They seem to believe that Trump is the single, or greatest, global threat to freedom and peace. By focusing on him and his close friend Benjamin Netanyahu (a deeply flawed politician, and yes, Trump arguably admires the Israeli prime minister with the same strongman qualities shared by the other friends I mentioned), some progressives are ignoring the whole element of it. The totalitarian theocrats who surround the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, and are against Israel.
In doing so, they ignore not only Hamas, which has a stated goal of eliminating Israel, but also the Houthis, who hate the United States (a proxy for all Western liberal democracies) and could not resist jumping to support Hamas when it attacked Israel on October 7.
The Lebanese Hezbollah group has always been a party to these tensions, but it has recently become more publicly involved. We will not be allowed to forget ISIS. It asserted its brand of theocratic totalitarianism this week, expressing the ongoing hatred between extremists of Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam by killing 84 people and wounding hundreds of Shiite mourners commemorating Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer Qasem Soleimani in Iran.
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This blindness to tyranny in the Middle East is so acute that when some American TikTok users discovered Osama bin Laden's message to America last year, they began celebrating the former leader of the totalitarian al-Qaeda organization. The message was bin Laden's justification for flying planes full of innocents into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York – also full of innocents – killing thousands. TikTok eventually removed the hashtag behind the bin Laden trend when international media started reporting on it.
A recent study by the Network Contagion Research Institute found that “whether content is promoted or muted on TikTok appears to depend on whether it is consistent with or opposed to the interests of the Chinese government.” So it is likely that Chinese authoritarianism was not fundamentally opposed to Americans' alignment with theocratic totalitarianism against liberal democracy.
Between the pro-Trump mob and the anti-Trump mob, whether right-wing or left-wing, progressive or reactionary, many people are rallying in one way or another in favor of the totalitarians, dictators and autocrats.
As 2024 begins, this means there is only one real choice: not left versus right, or yes Trump versus no Trump, which are now functionally identical, but authoritarian versus democratic. Forget the US elections. There is a much bigger decision to make.
Parnell Palm-McGuinness is managing director at campaign firm Agenda C. She has worked for the Liberal Party and the German Green Party.
