An Absurdity Called Trump

We assume that in a democracy all speech is equally legitimate. That’s why freedom of belief, thought and expression are guaranteed in the broadest possible sense. However, an exception can be found precisely in the speech that negates this possibility.

After the horror represented by the Nazi regime, Germany outlawed the Fascist parties. By definition, Fascist ideology excludes all others. It is a kind of speech that turns its back on the possibility of different opinions, a speech where the end justifies the means and where the logic of violence imposes itself as a method of dissuading dissidents.

Voltaire’s excellent democratic argument, which goes, “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it,” meets its absolute limit in Fascist ideology. Therefore, even though it may appear to be a paradox, democracy requires that you be intolerant toward intolerance.

It is extremely dangerous for liberty when there are individuals bearing racist and xenophobic rants, and when they publicly incite hatred, invoke blunt pathologies of power, and proclaim themselves to be the saviors of a “nation beset and threatened” by foreigners and minorities.

Hence, it is not enough to say that Donald Trump has found a “niche” of poorly educated, impoverished, middle-class voters hit hard by the recession in their homeland. Doing so simply de facto negates the responsibility citizens have to reject any speech that runs counter to human rights.

What must be understood about a person like Donald Trump is that evil carries on. Fascism has not been eradicated, not in arrogant Europe nor in the United States of America, a country that historically proclaimed itself the global defender of liberty and now is resurfacing as a dangerous threat during a crisis of inequality, poverty and environmental degradation.

What is happening in a country like the United States of America, where for eight years speech about hope, the courage for collective social transformation, and commitment to diversity was successfully established; a country where now a sociopath has become the presumptive Republican candidate for the presidency?

Why does the “Hispanic” population, vilified and threatened, vote for Trump? Why is it in this society, which has many universities considered the best in the world, that openly intolerant, racist and xenophobic speech has arisen? Why is it in the country with many of the best museums and concert halls in the world that someone like Trump can come forward as a choice for change?

These questions were already posed in the 1930s about Hitler. Clearly, the answers arrived too late. Today, American society has the responsibility to say “no” to the possibility that evil triumphs yet again. After all, that is the basis of Trump’s campaign: the historic temptation to destroy others, to make hatred a tool for suppressing your adversaries and subjecting and humiliating the defeated.

The absurdity of the Trump campaign is not only the appalling aspects of the man himself. It is also the fanatic and even frenzied fervor he awakens in millions of Americans. The hope, it must be said, is that democracy can prevail and rid itself of the seemingly inevitable Republican candidate. If not, what began as a bad joke today threatens to become a dangerous and macabre chapter of history.