Trump under fire after ‘assault on democracy’

Is this how civilisation collapses? Top politicians are calling for Donald Trump’s removal amid fears he will incite more violence. Joe Biden called it one of the darkest days in US history. A shirtless man in a fur hat with Viking-style bullhorns mounted the dais of the evacuated chamber. Flexing his biceps for the remaining spectators, he grinned in triumph. They had taken the Senate. On the day the US Senate was due to certify the results of last November’s election, supporters of President Trump, convinced his defeat was fraudulent, stormed the Capitol, in what some have called an attempted coup. One man put his feet up on the desk of Nancy Pelosi; another stole a podium. Others attempted to break down a door to confront armed police. Legislators from the world’s most powerful democracy fled before a tide of invaders. In the chaos, four people died, including one woman who was shot by police. Eventually, the authorities were able to restore order, securing the Capitol. At last, the senate returned and voted to certify Joe Biden’s victory. To some, however, his win seems diminished — overshadowed by the violence, polarisation, and loss of faith in institutions evident from Wednesday’s scenes. Biden promises a return to America’s political norms, but he faces doubts about whether Trump’s supporters will ever let that happen. Some wonder if America, and even the wider liberal world order it supports, have declined irreparably. To the declensionists, tattooed, fur-clad barbarians in the Capitol, may recall the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410AD, sometimes seen as marking the end of the Roman Empire. Others might point to the much earlier attempt by the Roman Tribune, Tiberius Gracchus, to stand for re-election in 133BC, against the established norms of the Roman Republic. Some see this as the beginning of the Republic’s decline into dictatorship. That, too, led to violence in a Senate, though then the Senators were responsible; they themselves beat Gracchus to death. The US, whose founders modelled it on the Roman Republic, can only support such comparisons up to a point, but it has its own precedents for violence on the Senate floor. In 1856, a pro-slavery Democrat beat Senator Charles Sumner within an inch of his life after taking offence to Sumner’s speech attacking slavery. The attack was proof of the violent split over slavery in the US, and only stoked it further. Following Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election, the US fell into civil war when the Confederacy of southern states seceded. One of the invaders was photographed waving a Confederate flag in front of the congressional portrait of Sumner. Declensionists’ concerns are larger, however, than one man and his most fervid fans. Hostility to liberal democracy is on the rise across the world. From growing inequality to climate change, to large-scale migration, to pandemics, a range of pressures is being placed on increasingly complex, interdependent societies. Many institutions appear to stand discredited in the present’s glare. America, some suggest, may find itself overwhelmed, if not by barbarians, then by the forces that give birth to them. Is this how civilisation collapses? Decline and fall This is the way the world ends, say some. The rise in hostility to mainstream institutions and the increase in political polarisation evident in America and elsewhere suggest that civilisation is not equipped to confront its current challenges. Those who study civilisational collapse suggest that many trends bode poorly for the survival of civilisation as we know it. As these trends worsen, people’s loyalties to society will decline, and mobs of the kind seen on Wednesday will grow larger. Not so, say others. Biden not only won a vote in the Senate on Wednesday, but also control over it. The majority of the American population wants a return to normality, and Biden will be well placed to implement a programme to restore it. The current chaos is the last gasp of the defeated. Political violence was common in the USA in the 1960s and 70s, but it receded. The chorus of condemnation of both protestors and the president is proof that the centre can hold. KeywordsFraudulent - Intentionally false and meant to harm or deceive.