Watching the first week of Donald Trump's presidency unfurl like Spud’s sheets in that Trainspotting scene, a dread crosses one’s mind: four years of this in one country would be bad enough. But what if this isn’t a blip? What if this is just the world now?
We interpreted the fall of the Soviet Union as the triumph of liberal democracy, rather than simply a system collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. But while some countries of the Eastern bloc have more or less made the transition, aided/bribed by the European Union, the countries of the former Soviet Union (Baltic states aside) have broadly come up with their own model: dynasties driven by machismo, front, chutzpah, and bullying.
In the past we could have condescended that these countries had never become democracies because they had never had the institutions on which to model a democracy – independent judiciary, free markets and the like. On these pages, Natalia Antonova has outlined why, in the absence of these things, wholesale lying becomes not just attractive but necessary. The need to tell the truth stems from accountability, and accountability implies oversight. How can one be a strong leader if overseen by others?
The Trump administration’s attempts to pull its own facts from thin air have been derided, but these are the same tactics that won the election, and time and time again we hear interviews with supporters who claim they don’t care about things like whether or not Sean Spicer’s crowd size estimates are accurate
Everything’s turning post-Soviet. Trump believes the media’s job is to cheerlead for his programme, and he gets aggressive when it doesn’t. He parades his family in a way that’s unseemly even for American politics. His youngest son, Barron, bears more than a passing resemblance to Alexander Lukashenko’s son Kolya, while his wife and daughters sport the same polished-to-an-inch-of-their-lives looks as the Azerbaijan’s Aliyevs.
His endless braggadocio at times overshoots that of your average dictator and shoots straight for the (literal) gold standard set by Turkmenistan’s late dictator Saparmurat Niyazov. Trump already has a giant gold tower with his name emblazoned across it: is it that unrealistic to imagine he’ll propose a rotating gold statue of himself, as the great Turkmenbashi famously did?
Why the hell not? Why not streets, towns, states? That’s what power is about, right? That’s a “legacy”.
This seems to be where history is headed: The Putins, Aliyevs, Lukashenkos and Turkmenbashis are not relics, but trailblazers, recognising long before the rest of us that liberal democracy, fun and all as it was, was a 20th century phenomenon. What matters is not an ideology, or a vision, or even a pretence at either, beyond one’s own self-aggrandisement. And now Trump is helping the rest of the world catch up with the former Soviet republics. It’s a grim thought, but at the moment, it’s all I’ve got.