Der Spiegel: Aggressive Nationalism Is Back In America

From the opening to the English version of Germany’s Der Spiegel‘s cover story this week:

In the moment of his triumph, when Donald Trump began making his way to the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan in the early morning hours of Wednesday, the chanting started — aggressive and loud, bellowed out by a group of frenzied men. It spread through the crowd and was aimed at Trump’s erstwhile opponent, Hillary Clinton. “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

Trump, after all, had promised to do just that — to throw his political adversary in prison as soon as he had taken the oath of office on January 20, not unlike the way Vladimir Putin deals with his enemies in Moscow or Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara. And thus, the zero hour of the new American era began just as the campaign had ended: with a threat that contained little in the way of reconciliation and was reminiscent of distant dictatorships — even as Trump later sought to rein in the chants by speaking of “binding the wounds of division” and of coming “together as one united people.”

His followers saw his victory as a signal, as the beginning and not as the end. They bared their teeth and cheered as the Empire State Building radiated red in the night sky with a gigantic image of their leader projected onto the facade.

On that evening, America experienced a revolution. The successful postwar Western model, rooted in mobility, enlightenment and inclusion has been convulsed by this angry protest vote. It was a vote of no-confidence in globalized capitalism, an expression of America’s partition into liberal cities and backward rural areas. With this election, the country’s white majority has sought to affirm and protect its identity.

The political system has experienced a delegitimization of democracy that makes it impossible to simply carry on as before. It is a delegitimization aimed primarily at the elite, Hillary Clinton first and foremost — a woman who represents this system more than any other politician.

This election was about more than simply a change in government. It completed an epochal shift. The Trumpian revolution is an overthrow of the neoliberal conservatism of the Republicans, of the faith in free trade and of the advantages of a multicultural society. On Tuesday evening, aggressive nationalism returned to the White House.

The full piece does offer glimmers of hope.