On the Fifth of November

Whoever wins the presidential election in the United States, liberal democracies and nation states across the world face a theopolitical crisis

Why are the very things which helped create liberal democracy and the modern state – individualism and capitalism - now undermining them?  Does the church understand both its own culpability in this unravelling and its apocalyptic commission to practice a new politics?

Regardless of whether Donald Trump is elected for a second term as President of the United States on the fifth of November, his extraordinary success is an acute example of how liberal democracy is being destroyed from within. That a privileged and shady businessman, proven liar and sexual predator, who has ties to organised crime and has tried to overturn the previous election, is so popular among the Christan and secular Right belies the logic of modern evangelical politics and liberal democracy. Democracy is not dead but is taking new and disturbing forms.  The institutions of the state are barely holding back the crisis. And American evangelical political engagement ceased being properly evangelical long ago.

Consequentialist arguments that Trump may not do too much harm and may do some good are inadequate.  Democratic politics are built on the idea of holding power to account through the state: a process of selecting those of good standing, often from the business community and owners of capital, to represent the public and compromise with the other side. However, Donald Trump represents unaccountable power, the triumph of image over character, of instincts over interests, and scapegoating over consensus building. He almost broke the system last time and may break it decisively this time. His rise is often explained in terms of “populism”, but this idea merely captures a dramatic and paranoid style of politics rather than the character and causes of the coming storm.

Authoritarianism in Democracies

This populism is characterised by new forms of authoritarianism and kleptocracy emerging within democracies.  Authoritarianism is a political relationship of domination that, over time, generates univocal regimes of power.  It starts with little acts of domination (sacking dissenting officials, denying election results) which may eventually bend laws and institutions to create a consolidated authoritarian regime.  Kleptocracy denotes the phenomenon where business and politics entwine so it is impossible to be successful in one without the other.  To make lots of money you need political power; to get political power you need lots of money.  The global trend in politics is towards the rise of kleptocracy.

Seen in this light, Donald Trump is neither a marvel nor an exception but merely an emblem of a dramatic reversal in the world’s paramount democracy. Authoritarianism is the global norm to which America is reverting. According to the leading academic system for assessing democracy, 71% of the world’s population – around 5.7 billion people – live in non-democratic countries, which are often the countries of origin for kleptocratic networks which link autocracies to the global financial system.  This is an increase from 48% ten years ago.  One possible explanation for this big shift is the role of large authoritarian states, especially Russia and China, in opposing democracy and interfering in elections globally.  

However, the impact of such interference is overstated and does not explain why many established democracies have also seen significant declines in their level of democracy. In the UK, from 2019-2024, the government sought to suspend parliament over Brexit, break its own laws over migration (the Rwanda plan), corruptly award contracts to political allies via a “VIP lane” during COVID, and gloss over the fact that its professional services were integral to the global spread of kleptocracy. Even the problem of “Londongrad” - the spread of post-Soviet kleptocracy to the UK - was primarily caused by the provision of services by British professionals.

The New Global Authoritarianism

Across liberal democracies, we have seen declining trust in institutions and the increased prevalence of conspiracy theories.  But still these are symptoms, not causes. To make sense of these trends we must identify the features of a new global authoritarianism. Through the University of Exeter’s Global Authoritarianism Network we have identified three. Crucially, each began in open societies.

The first, most often mentioned, and yet probably least importance of these changes is technological.  There is now abundant evidence that the age of smart phones and social media where we are permanently switched-on is damaging mental health and leading to huge increases in anxiety among the young.  And we know that anxiety and a sense of fear leads to the stigmatization of others and support for strongmen rulers. Rather than being a great democratizer, social media places huge power in the hands of platform owners, their algorithms, and their advertisers.  But surely these mechanisms are primarily effective in accentuating already-existing tendencies of individuals to support oligarchs, doubt institutions, and follow conspiracy theories. 

A second feature of global authoritarianism is cultural.  Culture wars, where progressives and liberals go to war over race and history, are the manifestation of declining trust in institutions to resolve differences with compromise.  But the term “culture wars” is misleading as it implies well-defined groups when, in fact, our era is one of the erosions of traditional political tribes, previously based on class.  Recent trends towards new masculinist, fascist and civilizationist cultural movements are transnational and inchoate, tying Russian orthodox to American evangelicals, for example. Such movements offer opportunities to live out fantasies rather than undertake well-organised rebellions.

The longer and enduring trends in culture are ones of “expressive” and “soverign” individualism under the forces of secularism and post-modernism. It is remarkable how conservative Christian politics have reflected these trends while claiming to rebel against them.  Rather than finding foundation in a natural and common law under God, they live within the “immanent frame” where foundations for rules are highly contingent trends and fashions – rules founded on sand rather than rock. Rather than admitting their own guilt and asking for forgiveness as the church is supposed to preach, many “Christian” participants in January 6th reverted to scapegoating others.

The capitol riots were more the simulation of an actual rebellion than a rebellion itself. Although five people tragically died, no one was killed by the protestors. Tactical chaos rather than well-executed strategy was the order of the day for both Trump and his supporters. Jean Baudrillard would probably say that the Capitol Riots did not take place. The point here is not to diminish the trauma of Janaury 6th but to recognise it’s form as something fantastical as much as real. In postmodern culture, history is trumped by narrative (forgive the pun!).  President Trump’s well-documented gilded origins and corrupt business are superseded in the minds of many of his voters by his personal self-representation on The Apprentice and in the media as a self-made millionaire and man of the people.  It is not that his voters believe everything he says but that they enjoy his affirmation of their prejudices. While disregarding objective facts, Trump simulates their “truth”.

A third and no-less important feature is economic.  Capitalism has long been in tension with democracy as it generates unequal property rights, private profit and corporate power; in sharp contrast with democracy’s equal citizenship rights, public goods, and the diffusion of power. For much of recent history this tension was positive and productive. In a relatively brief period in the early to mid-twentieth century under the force of social change brought about by two world wars and the end of empires, capitalism was brought to heel by democracy.  This was the era of national service, public ownership, trade unions, social welfare, the new deal, and crucially the international regulation of capital (known as the Bretton Woods system) inspired by the ideas of the economist John Maynard Keynes. 

These things were extremely popular in the 1940s-1960s and coincided with high growth and improvements in education and healthcare.  One of the few things that most conservatives and progressives agree on today is that this was a “golden age”, although in fact it was always a precarious one, relying on high levels of tax and debt, and failing to overcome deep social divisions and urban decay. 

No Hope from Right or Left

More importantly, what this era also relied upon were the institutions of the social democratic state and the idea of a moral economy which, following the Christian rationalist Adam Smith, had long limited the excesses of capitalism.  But this Smithian moral capitalism has been undermined by the ideas of the New Right conservatives who shifted the moral blame for decline from capitalism to labour.  From 1970s and 1980s, deregulation, first internationally and then nationally, undermined the institutions of a social democracy and ideas of a moral economy. The story of Trump’s rise in New York City, long-ruled by Democrats, is emblematic of the failure of the Left to prevent the emergence of system-breakers from within.

The victory for capital over labour was decisive and the state itself was transformed by capitalism.  It has become fragmented by outsourcing to the private sector and internationalized by having to conform to the demands of the global economy, especially capital markets.  This is the environment where figures like Trump become celebrated millionaires despite their reliance on massive tax breaks and connections to organized crime.  Today, tech entrepreneurs like Trump’s new ally, the oligarch Elon Musk, may eventually become the world’s first trillionaires, having personal wealth more than that of many large countries. The supporters of Make America Great Again actually loathe the federal government and state institutions; some of them look to its replacement by something called the “network state” (globally assembled pockets of territory, authorty and rights funded by private capital).

These new polities are fantasies of the elite. They may eventually become realities only for a privileged few in a world more dystopian than today. Figures on the Right like Trump, Musk and J.D. Vance offer no hope because, while their rhetoric is for the “little guy”, the “common people” and conservative values, they are in fact entirely representative of the trends towards oligarchy, deinstitutionalization, and conspiracy. Those that claim to save democracy are destroying it. 

But it’s not just the conservatives. The Biden-Harris administration has done little more than rearrange the deckchairs on the sinking ship; Macron and Starmer offer no more with low approval ratings and declining levels of trust in government across most of Europe.  The Left shows little sign of a new big idea to repurpose the divisive economic and cultural trends which its luminaries – the Clintons, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder among others – accentuated through their support for markets freedoms, deregulation and cultural secularism.

The Left has failed to come to terms with the fact that the very things that were the solutions it advanced in the mid-twentieth century – channeling capitalism through the state and expanding the franchise to all according to the principle of the sovereignty of the individual – are no longer feasible in new technological, cultural, and economic conditions.  The limitations which the Left placed on capitalism and individualism, of the public ownership of the economy and the collective bargaining of trade unions, are vastly diminished.  And the mediating institutions of church and civil society have themselves been corrupted both by their relationships to the state and their emphasis of rights over responsibilities.  This now looks like an existential crisis even if Harris triumphs on November 5 and progressives win elections elsewhere. 

Apocalyptic Alternatives

This crisis of democracy - and the dystopian images of the tech “broligarchy” and generative AI - raise the question of the apocalyptic. Far from the Hollywood-style zombie version, our age is apocalyptic because it is one where the revelation that the previous order is breaking down is becoming undeniable. Our times are “apocalyptic” in that events are unveiling the violent character of those things – the democratic state, business and individual rights – that have previously been seen as benign. They are also apocalyptic in that a rupture in the system is visible where liberal democracy will continue in form while its content, both conservative (“values”) and progressive (“rights”), change markedly.

But the apocalyptic imaginaries of secular broligarchs and the Christian Right are far removed from the apocalypse of Christian scripture - especially that of the Apokalpysis (the Revelation of St John). The notion of a sovereign individual, a singleton, or New Israel imposing order by force run contrary to the biblical Christian apocalypse centred on the person of Christ.  This vision of the apocalyptic is hopeful because it is universal; the world is being transformed, not replaced.  In this vision, God “will wipe every tear” from our eyes as “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev 21:4). It is a vision not of sovereign individuals or nations, a Christian empire or a secular matrix, but of a sovereign God and “bride”, the church.

In biblical theology, we cannot possibly know the means by which such transformation is achieved nor the church’s precise role. But we know that it is a category error par excellence to seek sovereignty anywhere other than in God. From this apocalyptic perspective, the first step of response is for Christians, members of the world’s largest identity group, to repent for their own role in democracy’s decline, including preaching conspiracy theories and distrust of institutions.  The church can take credit for the revolution which invented the idea of the individual and created the bases upon which democracy emerged. But that democracy required that power is diffused by formal and informal distance between church and state - and that humility and compromise are prioritized over the imposition of a particular agenda. 

Remember the Fifth of November

In Britain, November 5 is when we remember the gunpowder plot by English Roman Catholics in response to the repression of them by a protestant government – a 400-year-old example of the tyranny and violence which may occur when the state becomes a vehicle for a particular Christian Nation. Wars of religion required a theopolitical fix which, as Christendom ends, is now breaking down. Where churches – in Protestant dominionist, Catholic integralist or Orthodox symphonia terms - have sought to impose their own understanding of Christian law on increasingly multicultural societies, they have eschewed their new covenant commission to remain distant from power and become complicit in the decline of faith in democracy.  But liberals of all kinds, Christian pluralists, and secular progressives have also overstated our earthly capacity to limit the state’s excesses via the slow progress of just institutions, natural law and/or virtue. 

The point here is not that liberalism is wrong or has been defeated. Redemptive trends over the long-term towards greater inclusion, protection and provision are real - they are what have caused Trump-style backlashes. Research shows that migration will not cease in the face of draconian policies and contiues to drive development. Collective movements of nonviolence offer more effective forms of resistance to dictators than armed militia and insurgents. Economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in recent decades. These are the global trends against autocracy and kleptocracy which MAGA and its supporters kick back against.

These supporters are right that the state is in crisis and has often threatened liberty. But they are wrong that either conventional nationalism or, conversely, a network state are the answer. It is religious communities that offer theopolitical alternatives. For Christians, the church is its own polis, both “theocratic” and democratic: a political and security actor itself according to its biblical mandate to radically include others, protect the weak, and share provisions among its members – and a witness to others of that model of community.  It is in the action and witness of the global church – the world’s biggest people group – that the insecurities of individualism, the violence of capitalism, and the abuses of the state may be countered. The tribe or nation, state or empire, is at best a tertiary actor and, at worst, the enemy of the church.

If that thought seems naïve in the era of generative AI, sovereign individuals, and kleptocratic regimes, it perhaps merely indicates our failure of political imagination: the need for a new Christian realism. Such theopolitical thought understands that the nation state and democracy offer the most unstable of order; peace and justice are found in inclusive, protective and provisioning communities of faith.