Reading time: approx. 10 minutes Date: July 2, 2024

Donald Trump could end up in prison: He was found guilty on 34 counts by a Manhattan grand jury in May, and on July 11 it will be announced what sentence awaits the US presidential candidate. Trump doesn’t care: He announced that he is also willing to act as president from prison. Anyway, the Supreme Court has now ruled that as president – in “official acts” – he is immune from criminal prosecution.

The situation is crazy, even if we ignore such extreme possibilities. Donald Trump is the first former or incumbent US president to be found guilty of a crime, and also the first candidate of a major party to be a convicted criminal. Much more is at stake here than the question of who will win the next election. Since the USA is seen even by its critics as a model of a rich and free society that attracts millions of immigrants, the unrest surrounding the election between the aging Joe Biden and the convicted criminal not only brings the specter of a civil war closer, but also threatens massive changes in the global world order.

How can we grasp this danger?

I would like to approach this significant topic with a note on Alex Garland’s film Civil War, which has been out for a while – fiction often allows us to see social trends more clearly, which are blurred by the confusion of actual events such as absurd TV debates. Be patient, this short detour is worth it.

Civil War: Soldiers pose on the corpse of the US president

In the film, we are in the midst of a civil war between the US government, led by a president in his third term, and several independence movements, the strongest of which are the “Western Forces” led by Texas and California. A group of journalists travels from New York City to Washington during this war to interview the besieged president. Among them are experienced war photographer Lee Smith and Jessie Cullen, a young, aspiring photojournalist. Jessie struggles with herself because she is too scared to take photos; gradually her nerves and photographic skills improve as she slowly gets used to the violence.

The two journalists now enter the half-abandoned White House, and Jessie gets caught in the crossfire while taking photos. It is her colleague Lee who wants to protect her – and is fatally hit. Jessie captures Lee’s death in a photo. Emotionlessly, she moves on to the Oval Office, where a group of independence fighters is preparing to kill the president. Jessie photographs the president’s assassination, then captures the soldiers posing with their feet on his corpse.

We must not become desensitized to violence

What does this film have to do with the political present? First, it is a double Bildungsroman: At the beginning, Lee is the insensitive reporter only interested in taking good photos, while Jessie feels too much compassion to take such a “neutral” stance; in the end, Lee is shot while trying to protect Jessie, while Jessie fully adopts the distance of an observer and even takes a photo of Lee dying while trying to protect Jessie. We can learn from this: In times like these, neutral reporting is a trap to be avoided at all costs.

Emotional engagement is more necessary today than ever, desensitization to violence means that we are already part of a violent system. This applies to the war in Ukraine as well as to the war in Gaza and the West Bank, but also to the impending fascism and dealing with criminals who want to become president. There is no neutral democratic process with fascist and criminal participants. Only an engaged, positioning view can find the truth we are looking for.

2. The front does not run between the liberal center and the populist right

We can learn something else from the film. The political divisions driving the civil war are completely confused. The military alliance between liberal California and conservative Texas is an obvious political absurdity; the authoritarian president in his third term combines traits of a liberal Joe Biden and a populist Donald Trump; apart from a few casual racist remarks, the soldiers the journalists encounter on their way to Washington do not make a single statement that would clearly explain what they are fighting for. However, it would be wrong to dismiss this phenomenon as part of a commercial film strategy that does not want to alienate any (right, left, or liberal) viewers. What remains and stands out when we ignore the concrete political struggles is the possibility of a civil war – a threat that has haunted public life in the USA for about ten years, given the increasing disintegration of a common social basis.

And this is more and more our reality, and not only in the USA – the elections in Europe and in France show us this. We not only have the big front between the liberal center and the populist right, plus some elements of a new left (such as the student protests), but a series of strange diagonal alliances (the extreme left and the extreme right both reject support for Ukraine), plus a series of new divisions (the pro-Palestinian left is divided into peace activists who are against terror and those who support Hamas as a resistance group that should be exempt from criticism). The conflicts during the corona pandemic were also harbingers of these diagonal alliances.

On the one hand, the liberal center is right – on the other hand, it is the root of our crises

I assume that all these conflicts are pseudo-conflicts, so we should refuse to simply take sides. Trump’s populism is a reaction to the failure of the liberal-democratic welfare state. While we might and should support some measures advocated by the liberal center (abortion laws, minority rights), we should always remember that the liberal center is the root of our crises in the long run. This brings us to Gramsci’s well-known remark from his prison notebooks, which has been quoted for years and still characterizes our era: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. The struggles we are fighting today, from the populist right to cancel culture, I classify as such morbid symptoms.

In a chaotic situation like we have, we can react in different ways. Many voters want to survive the political storm in their safe haven and continue their daily lives as if nothing major is happening.

“The real verdict will be delivered by the people on November 5”

But when the state itself and its organs are directly involved in crimes, such a strategy no longer works. Let’s remember the scandal involving Jacob Zuma, the former president of South Africa: After he was sentenced to prison, he simply ignored the order to go to prison, and the state authorities were not willing to send the police to arrest him. Our media were full of comments about the inefficiency of the rule of law in a third world country. But what do you call a country where there is a serious possibility that a president will do his job from prison? Or is simply declared immune from prosecution in view of his crimes?

The mere possibility that this happens already reveals the semi-hidden truth of our global neo-feudal system.

Immediately after leaving the courtroom in Manhattan, Trump said, “The real verdict will be delivered by the people on November 5.” It is clear what he meant – to quote pollster Doug Schoen: “It’s not a great thing to be convicted of a crime, but what voters will be thinking about in November is inflation, the southern border, the competition with China and Russia, and the money being spent on Israel and Ukraine.” It’s true, “it’s not a great thing to be convicted of a crime,” but such a conviction makes one a criminal, and it’s a big bad thing when a criminal can be elected president of the (still) most powerful state in the world. There is no middle ground, no compromise between the two options at hand – you can even doubt that the great war can be endlessly postponed.

If Biden wins, part of the population in the USA could push towards civil war

Schoen is of course concerned with how the conviction will affect Trump’s standing with voters, and in this regard, both options are catastrophic. If Trump wins, it means the end of the rule of law as we understand it, including the separation of powers. Trump has already announced what radical measures he will take in case of his victory – these measures will restrict our freedoms so much that our usual notion of democracy will be ridiculously inadequate to describe our social life, not to mention the international consequences: no support for Ukraine, but full support for Israel.

It will de facto result in the USA becoming another BRICS state. If Trump loses, it could be even worse: A large part of the population will feel excluded from the public sphere – they will push towards civil war, secessionist tendencies will spread, as the power of the federal government will not be accepted as legitimate by them (already more than half of Republicans do not consider Biden a legitimate president).

Nothing but despair can save us

So is there hope? Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to Max Brod: “There is infinite hope – but not for us.” An ambiguous statement that can also mean: not for us as we are now, so we must radically change, be reborn. Kafka noted in relation to the October Revolution, “The decisive moment in human development is eternal. Therefore, the revolutionary movements of the spirit, which declare everything that came before them null and void, are right, for nothing has happened yet.”

Today, the fact that nothing has happened yet means that all the main options – new right-wing populism, liberal center, old social-democratic welfare state, religious fundamentalism, and even the naive idea that the rise of the BRICS powers will usher in a new multicentric world – are stillborn. The true utopia is the idea that a new world order will gradually emerge from the options available today that will be able to address our crises, from the decaying environment to global war. What Theodor Adorno wrote decades ago – “Nothing but despair can save us” – is truer today than ever.

This does not mean that we should simply sit down and hope: We should act in every conceivable way, without hope.