Democracies and accountability

Or the Love Song of Jack Smith and US liberals, with a nod to TS Eliot

In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.

This morning the tepid news of Jack Smith’s sad failure to get Trump before a court in four years for inciting the mob to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol, on national TV, inevitably rolled out.

Justice delayed, someone said.

It is another landmark in the end of the US republic in all but name, to go alongside the Republicans’ getting behind Trump after J6, there being no consequences at all for his actions, the open celebration of the insurrectionists at his rallies as political martyrs, and the supreme court decision that any action the Leader takes “in his capacity as president” — any action — is above the law.

When Augustus took power, he kept the Roman constitution intact, and insisted that he was just first (princeps) among citizens. No one was fooled, least of all his successors. Nero and Caligula had no illusions.

So, the game of academics denying the basic collapse of the foundational norms of democracy will continue for a while longer, perhaps until after the state of emergency and mass deportations promised and salivated over by Trump’s base unfold next year.

Many will say that this is illiberal ethnonationalist authoritarianism, reassuring themselves with casuistical distinctions that it is not “fascism”.