He may be capable of random cruelty and stupidity, but Trump is no Nazi dictator

The election of Donald Trump was, despite everything, a sign of the health of the American democratic process. The electoral college did not differ from the popular vote in any substantial way. The outcome will be the first since 2012 that won’t be disputed.

Everybody knows who won. The result clearly and unambiguously represented the will of the American people. Unfortunately, the American people have clearly and unambiguously chosen antagonism. They have voted for their own division. While Trump won the popular vote and the electoral college there is still a large part of the country who is appalled by their choice.

It is pressingly important, at this moment of genuine crisis, to be clear-eyed about who and what America is facing. It has certainly not helped that in the warm-up to the election, serious intellectuals and politicians compared Donald Trump and his movement to fascism. The imprecision of this analogy is glaring. Trump has never been as remotely organised or principled as the fascists. He is both more dangerous and less.

When I wrote my book The Next Civil War, trying to reckon with the perils facing the American Republic, I studied and met with all manner of far-right groups in the United States.

They were a splintered assortment, constantly shifting their beliefs. Yes, fascists were a part of them, but there were also proud boys, European identitarians, small and large militias, second amendment absolutists, and good old-fashioned anti-regulation businesspeople.

What held them together was anti-government patriotism. Anti-government patriotism is the sentiment Trump emerges from and it is much broader than anyone imagined. Trump’s followers are the most racially diverse coalition ever assembled by a Republican candidate for president. What unites these disparate groups is a fundamental declining trust in American institutions of all kinds across a wide spectrum of American life.

The core proposition of anti-government patriotism is that freedom, the most American principle, can exist only in opposition to the government. That idea goes back to the founding of the country: The Revolution defined itself against government, as did the Confederates during the Civil War, and Constitutional Sheriffs of more recent years.

Defining patriotism as opposition to the state is an entirely American idea and a unique contradiction that makes little sense in a British or European context. Far-right movements in Europe want to take over government, not dismantle it. Historically, fascists used the power of the state as the embodiment of racial unity. They had plans, and used governments to enact those plans. Anti-government patriots want the mechanics of government rendered crippled and useless. It’s a big difference.

If his first term as president is any guide, it is worth noting that Trump has a very limited interest in the mechanics of the state. As president, Trump failed to fill one-third of State Department jobs that required confirmation of the Senate, even though the Republicans controlled the Senate. These are not the actions of a man who wants to wield power in any substantial way.

Many are worried about the powers behind Trump, such as Project 2025, Elon Musk and JD Vance. Again, if history is any guide, the kind of dedicated application required to enact such massive policy initiatives will simply be beyond their capacities. Susie Wiles, his new chief of staff is a capable politician, but Trump’s first administration was filled with hundreds of people who thought they could control Trump. Many for their own ends and they ended up federally indicted. Nobody ever learned the lesson of their predecessors: Trump serves only himself.

Expect random acts of cruelty and stupidity. He could, out of a casual instinct one morning, decide to crash the international economy by instituting large-scale tariffs. He will almost certainly make life unnecessarily miserable for American Muslims. Women will be degraded. He’ll give the Supreme Court to his followers.

But what he properly represents is not evil as such, but its close cousin chaos. Every federal institution will be weakened or turned into a personal service aimed at pleasing him. Law will be replaced by piratical loyalty. Ultimately, Trump is closer to a 19th-century South American caudillo than a 20th-century autocrat like Hitler or Mussolini.

In reality, he is dangerous in the way that a toddler with an Uzi is. The inevitable suffering caused by his vast narcissism and indifference will be scattershot.

The real danger to the survival of the American Republic will come from the blue states. Whatever platitudes Biden spills about the peaceful transition of power and respecting the other side, Democrats have woken up in a country that has chosen an outright criminal as its leader. When the 6 January rioters are pardoned and released, with some of them perhaps even being brought back into government, the question will become a very basic one: what does treason mean in the United States today?

It is inevitable that the residents of New York and California will start to ask themselves where their loyalties should lie, and the answer won’t be with the presidency. The election of Trump is a sign of fundamental differences that cannot be papered over: not only is the government no longer theirs, but many will feel that the country isn’t.

If the United States were any other nation on Earth, they would begin the process of breakup and separation today. But the specific mechanism of the Fourteenth Amendment, enacted after the American Civil War renders any such discussions null. It declared that no law can supersede or abrogate the rights of American citizenship, which means you can’t even justify a vote for separation.

The resistance will come at the state and municipal levels. Local government, even on the county level, has much more power than in comparable countries. Blue states will be quite capable of resisting federal attempts to impose abortion bans, for example. Even a Republican Congress won’t be able to alter that. The American right has, for decades, argued for “state’s rights”. Expect the left to make the same argument for the next four years.

For countries to survive, for their political processes to have legitimacy, a basic national solidarity has to underlie their decisions. Politicians need to be loyal to the country above their personal or party loyalties. The voters need to want their government to function. Those basic conditions of democracy are no longer being met. The election of Donald Trump is a massive vote against American institutions as such.

The American people have decided, in a free and fair election, that their country is broken, and they want to break it some more.

Who’s going to tell them otherwise? And who knows where it will end?

The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future is published by Avid Reader Press