The irony of history: it was the common man who elected Donald Trump, and it is precisely on this man that the "cruelty" of American power now falls. But where there is an alert population, every attempt at dictatorship ends in rebellion.
When the familiar collapses, previous tools of analysis cease to work. Because they are designed to examine the details of ordered and relatively stable situations that do not change every second. When you enter a mode of disintegration, the details of the surface are carried away by the winds of history; and underneath shine larger and more stable volumes, for the analysis of which other analytical tools and other words are required.
Why did they start talking about "cruelty"
This is what is happening to my fellow analysts in the US right now. Caught in a completely unknown (for them – we, here in Eastern Europe, have seen such things) situation of a lightning-fast collapse of everything known, they begin to find the words with which to describe what is happening. More and more often they find themselves forced to use previously unused words such as "cruelty" and "shamelessness".
In a political context, I first came across the word "cruelty" many years ago, when I first read Karl Popper's classic work "The Open Society and Its Enemies". There, Popper writes that the greatest advantage of democracy is that it allows for “change of power without cruelty”. Why, I thought, ”cruelty”? It sounds somewhat fictional, unscientific; why not something like ”instability”, ”inefficiency”, ”illegitimacy”? Why these poetic flourishes?
Because, I only now realize, Popper's text was written during World War II - by a Jew who fled Austria to survive. He lived at a time when cruelty was a major feature in the lives of millions of people. Karl Popper is also the author of the historic sentence that describes the very essence of Western civilization: ”The West believes in the ordinary stranger”. After the war, this very man was placed at the foundation of democratic civilization. His are the rights and freedoms, he is protected by the law; he is owed respect, since the power of the rulers comes from him.
Irony of history: It was the ordinary person who elected Donald Trump
With its well-known irony, however, history has offered us a dialectical metamorphosis: it was this man who elected Donald Trump as president, and it is on this man that all that colleagues describe as the "cruelty" of the American government falls. Musk's people enter, say, an institution and fire several thousand people in a volley - without any explanation or consideration of employment contracts, laws, and the like. They close entire agencies and ministries, and explain to the rest of the unemployed that they are losers, drones, and idiots. This gang is also targeting the entire social security system (called a “pyramid” by Musk himself), as well as healthcare (which, of course, is for lazy losers).
Outside, leading figures in Trump’s entourage call their European allies “users” and explain that Denmark (which does not want to give them Greenland) is not a partner at all, but only wants to screw America. In this case, there is no cruelty so far, but there is that shamelessness that is characteristic of functionally illiterate neighborhood bullies: it is Denmark that lost the most soldiers (as a percentage of those who participated) in the US war in Afghanistan. And it was the European allies who triggered Article 5 (“all for one”) of NATO in favor of the US after 9/11. They participated in the decades-long wars of the Americans and in the end they didn't even present them with a bill.
When the consumer becomes a citizen
With cruelty and shamelessness, nothing but a dictatorship is built. The important thing is for people to be afraid of power (such is the role of cruelty), but also to know that this power has no brakes (such is the role of shamelessness). And - yes - if things go according to plan, everyone puts on their clothes and a dictatorship is built. This is what happened in Putin's Russia, for example.
However, where there is an alert population that has lived for a long time in conditions of democracy (i.e., a system that values the "ordinary stranger") - things rarely go according to the same plan. On the contrary. The moment things reach a point where public analysis is no longer concerned with sensationalism, but with the consequences of cruelty and shamelessness - there the otherwise meek population, which until yesterday perceived itself as a "consumer", suddenly becomes self-aware as a citizenry. It remembers the postulate of the philosopher John Locke that where the government breaks the rules, citizens have the "right to revolt". And it rises to revolt.
This is already happening – from the West Coast of the USA and Canada to the Balkans and the Caucasus. But about the rebellion – next time.
This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the DW as a whole.