Should European democrats help American democrats? The Guardian recently published a call for such support from an anonymous former American diplomat. Some of the early responses were cool and guarded. For some, the tone of the appeal sounded like a command or an entitled demand. Europeans, it told us, are America’s debtors, and indebted to the USA for their liberation and freedom during WW2, the Cold War and beyond. We should help Americans now in their time of trouble because we owe them. Maybe this tone was a calculated device intended to jolt us out of our (perceived) complacent inertia, though, as one person commented, it ran the risk of sounding…Trumpian.
Maybe however we should park this question of entitlement and debt and consider the case for democratic solidarity in terms of morality and expediency.
On both these grounds, the case for solidarity is clear and compelling. The USA is currently experiencing a form of executive authoritarian coup by an alt-right populist leader backed by an oligarch junta of the hyper-rich. Some Americans desire and welcome the coup, others reject and resist. Trump and his regime, assisted and influenced by Putin, are already eager to export the coup to other democracies. The recycled deployment of the Trump/GOP cultural/civil war-machine becomes ever more obvious and direct. America has its courageous and insightful voices and thinkers in politics and civil society, some of whom inspire us here. There is courage elsewhere too – Canada and Australia have just shown us there is an effective alternative to defeatism and timid subservience in responding to Trump.
Taking a stand
Democrats of the world everywhere, but certainly in the UK and Europe, need to support and even stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with America’s courageous judges, politicians, journalists, academics, scientists and other public voices. We need to show them they are not alone, amplify their resistance, and support them by learning from their resistance and pushing back ourselves against the worldwide contagion and replication of threats which also confront us here. Helping democratic America and helping ourselves as democrats are a common struggle – attentive listening and solidarity are an important and necessary form of self-help. The worldwide autocratic threat is not ideologically uniform or monolithic, but it is networked and sometimes coordinated. Resistances need to be vigilant, informed and connected.
There is a vital strand of American DNA in progressive politics in the UK and around the world. A defeat of democracy in the USA would be an epochal setback for the world. Today the old world needs, because of and not despite its own perils, to set forth to assist the rescue of the new.
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