The following little story is a true story. It happened on August 9, 1974. In the morning, the president of United StatesRichard Nixon, after two years of scandals almost daily for the Watergate case. That afternoon, an American citizen was trying to explain to a foreign friend what had happened: “I was trying to explain to a foreign friend what happened in the Watergate case.Nixon had to resign because in my country we do not allow a president to lie to us”. The person who uttered these words had voted for Nixon in the 1968 presidential election and also in the 1972 election.
Fifty years have passed since Nixon’s resignation, and the principle that a politician is finished if he lies to his fellow citizens no longer applies.. On the contrary, lying has become an asset, and those who handle it with virtuosity are more likely to be able to access to power and to maintain it.
A paradigmatic case is that of Donald Trump: convicted felonsexual abuser, misogynist, responsible for fomenting the attempted coup that was the assault on the Capitolxenophobe, admirer of dictators (including Putin), professional of hate, egomaniac and, to top it all off, a master of deceit.
And the most representative of the times in which we live is that everybody knows that Trump lies all the time. The most of the world’s 75 million people who have elected him president. And that raises the presumption that some (or all) of those voters have elected Trump precisely because he is all that he is.
Thus, uphold the truth as a central and inexcusable element of politics in democracy has become a Herculean task. If ensuring that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, “eat the dogs and cats” of their neighborsInstead of expelling you from public life is a passport to the White House, our world has become very complex.
If promoting the assault on Capitol Hill puts you in control, through the vote, of the executive, legislative and judicial branches (there is a six-to-three Trumpist majority among the Supreme Court justices), it is hard to imagine how to face those nearly 75 million voters, if not through a large electoral mobilization of those who are still trying to defend the dignity of democracy. But these people have not mobilized.
Trump has succeeded in 2024, roughly, one million more votes than in 2020. But Kamala Harris has obtained nine million votes less than Joe Biden. Seven million fewer people voted this time than four years ago and, based on the numbers, they must all be Democratic voters who have not felt sufficiently concerned.
Now the reflection is not only American. The liberal democracies are in danger.