By Miguel Muñoz on November 7, 2022
Ignacio Ramonet. photo: Jairo Vargas/ Público.
Journalist Ignacio Ramonet has recently published a new book entitled Trump, the Cult of Lies and the Assault on Capitol Hill (Clave Intelectual, 2022) In this interview with Público he offers some details of what the publication contains.
At the beginning of the book he writes: “The assault on the Capitol of January 2021 is a key event for the future of democracy, not only in the USA”. He calls it the “most impressive testimony to how sick the democratic system is.”
A few days ago, Joe Biden made a speech. And he essentially said, with respect to the midterms, which are this Tuesday, that democracy is under threat. He started his speech by saying, where’s Nancy? That’s what the guy with a hammer in his hand who broke into the Pelosi house and attacked the husband was saying. Where is Nancy? is what the assailants of the Capitol were saying on January 6, 2021, when they were also looking for her to literally execute her. The situation has been evolving in the worst way. And no one today guarantees us that the Republicans will not win on November 8 and we will have a situation that favors the return of Trump. A perspective in which someone who for the first time in US history attempted a coup d’état would return.
Do you think it is possible then that Trump will return to govern in the USA?
We do not know. There are still two years to go and many things can happen. But we have seen the weight that Trump has right now in the Republican Party. How he is determining the candidates and how he is choosing them. It is true that there is an anti-Trump current in his party, but at the moment we do not see who could be a candidate and run in the primaries against him. He has a colossal machine, colossal financial contributions, he has created his social network, etc. But the fact that his close friend Elon Musk has now bought Twitter also tells us that it is possible that Trump will return to this social network. Trump, before Instagram, Youtube or Facebook banned him, had about 150 million followers. He had a very important communicational power and he still has it today.
What would be this revanchist Trump that would come back? With a Supreme Court appointed practically by himself. Also based on a campaign based on many lies. That’s what Biden was also saying the other day, it’s the triumph of lies if the Republicans were to win on Tuesday. It is possible that they will win the House of Representatives and also the Senate. The latter chamber is less likely, but not impossible.
What lesson of what happened on Capitol Hill hold for other contexts. Jair Bolsonaro. We have seen how he was reluctant to explicitly recognize his defeat against Lula. Is there a risk in Brazil that the election results will not be respected and that it will happen as in the US?
It already seems difficult for the results not to be recognized. Implicitly Bolsonaro does not deny the results, without explicitly accepting them. But several important lieutenants of his, in particular the newly elected governor of Sao Paulo, have recognized Lula’s victory. What may happen in Brazil is a military coup d’état. What the Bolsonaristas are calling for right now is not that Bolsonaro does not recognize Lula’s victory. It is that the military take over the reins of state. So this is the danger of the coup d’état.
What happened on January 6 in the U.S., the fact of storming an emblematic building, had happened for example in Germany when the extreme right stormed the Bundestag. Or when Italian fascists stormed the headquarters of the CGIL, the country’s main trade union. All that was before. And then, once the Capitol was stormed, many people felt empowered to storm iconic buildings. Canadian truckers surrounded the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa. Extremist groups have been encouraged to move into the act on the basis of lies, to not recognize election results and on the basis of hoaxes. What I am trying to explain is that they are not only lies, but an articulation between some lies and also a social situation that favors the reception of those lies as truths. For example, the situation of the white middle class in the US.
Your book highlights that many working and middle class people voted against the interests of their class for identity reasons. And that when they were disappointed they began to embrace conspiracy theses. What leads a person to embrace this kind of thesis?
We analyze with a kind of basic Marxist gridiron, and I think scientifically and socially, that they vote against their social class. But they don’t think in terms of social class. They think, as Trump prompts them to think, in terms of racial or ethnic identity. Insofar as an ethnic category they feel threatened, because they are the poor whites surrounded by the socially rising non-white immigrants.
So they feel threatened and no longer have the status they had throughout the history of the United States, which is also the history of genocide, whereby the fact of being white was already a privileged status. Today they are losing it. Hence they also favor this thesis, which the extreme right in Europe is very much in favor of, of “the great substitution”. That is to say, immigrants are arriving drop by drop, but after a while they will replace us, as has happened in some territories, neighborhoods or regions. As they have replaced us from the electoral point of view in some local spheres, in unions or neighborhood organizations. They see themselves as a threatened ethnic group. That is why all this has a very racist dimension.
Are we in Spain safe from similar risks?
At the time of Obama, about eight years ago, the Tea Party seemed to us the most extreme right-wing thing we could imagine, the most irrational from the political point of view. With things so reactionary and far removed from progress, from the course of history. And today the Tea Party is almost a model democratic organization in the face of the new extreme right. In Europe, look at what has just happened in Italy. A century after the march on Italy, Giorgia Meloni is there vindicating Mussolini.
The extreme right has won the elections in Sweden, which was an example of social democracy. In France, the first party is Le Pen’s party. We see how that American model that seems distant or exotic and adapted to an American culture very little structured according to our academic and educational criteria. But the extreme right here is also on the rise. For the same reasons, the immigration issue is extremely profitable with these theories.
Social networks have created the idea that you finally discover that your ideas that you did not dare to express because you were ashamed, because they were not within the realm of what was acceptable, it turns out that there are thousands of people who have them. Of any kind. Then you think that you are not alone as a thinker of such a twisted idea. This encourages to assert oneself in a society that demands it, to have personality and communicational identity. These channels favor this. This wild expression has been correcting itself lately. And in particular after the assault on Capitol Hill, the big networks decided to moderate much more in order to eliminate those who spread hoaxes or racist theses. But now we see how Elon Musk, by buying Twitter, says that he is going to restore freedom, that freedom of expression is very limited. We don’t know what this issue is going to be.
On the other hand, in the book we talk about a character named Alex Jones. He has a television channel and he is the one who was attacking Hillary Clinton. He accused her of killing children, eating them, sucking their blood…. I tell it in the book, that a guy in the background in Minneapolis heard that, took his car and went to Washington to go into the pizza place in question to free the children.
You are very critical of social networks and the way they are used. What can a citizen do in this context to inform himself with a certain degree of rigor?
The information situation today is very difficult. In this universe we are describing here, what is in crisis is the truth. That is to say, in particular, I am developing almost a chapter on the crisis of truth, the history of truth. This is a reality today. Today it is literally impossible to know whether something is true or false.
We are facing one of the biggest geopolitical crises of the last 60 or 70 years, which is the war in Ukraine. Look how many confused people there are. I am not saying that nobody has the absolute truth, but it is very difficult to know some things. For example, who bombs the Zaporiya nuclear power plant? We don’t have a convincing answer for rational reasoning. Because if it’s the Russians, why would they bomb themselves who are there? And if it’s the Ukrainians, why do they say it’s the Russians?
There is a crisis of truth. There is a crisis of information. It seemed that if we had social networks we were going to get rid of the big media that belonged to corporations or to the States. Now you see where we are. Worse than ever. Perhaps what needs to be said is that getting information has always been difficult. It has never been easy.
We have always hoped that a technology would come along that would allow us to be well informed. A technology or a policy like the democratization of information at the time of the McBride Report. But today the democratization of information has taken place and we are in a very important confusion. I repeat, getting information has always been difficult.
I wrote an article some time ago called Informing oneself costs money. Not only does it cost money, because you have to subscribe to different information media, but also because you have to spend a lot
of time consulting different sources. There are sites specialized in revealing the origin of photographs or videos. Today you can find out, but it takes a lot of time. A normal citizen does not have that much time. He wants to open the TV news and be told the truth. That is not possible today.
Two years of permanent confrontation, of permanent trade with the screens and locked up for months having relations with people without knowing each other has provoked the emergence of organizations like QAnon.
QAnon is the paradigm of all these theories and an important part of the book is dedicated to it.
QAnon is all of this. Because QAnon is the Church of Trumpism for which Trump is the prophet and the Pope. It’s not American, it’s all over the world. I am sure there is a Spanish QAnon. I have seen that a few weeks ago there has been a big terraplanist congress in Barcelona, which is a rational city, and in Palma de Mallorca. We are not safe from these theories.
And how far do you see QAnon and these conspiracy networks going? Will they run out of steam or will they increase?
They are on the rise. There is one important thing that I underline. In this story of what is truth and what is a lie, there has been a Copernican shift. Until now we have operated with the conviction that if you repeat a lie it becomes the truth. The problem is that now it works the other way around.
Today, if you repeat a truth a thousand times, it becomes a lie. This is much more difficult to combat. You can’t say that two and two don’t make four. You have to keep saying that two and two are four. But there are people who will say no and that two and two is Pizzagate. That’s the questioning of the dominant narrative.
Trump imposed the alternative truth. That relativism means there is now a new generation. Look at the far right, it’s young. Meloni, for example. The extreme right is creating its own intellectual construction and we cannot just despise it without being interested in how it works and where it comes from. That is a little bit the intention of this book, how the extreme right is constructed. With myths and with social realities such as the sexual crimes that have taken place in the United States. They are legion and it authorizes someone to say that there are pedophiles among us.
In the summer of 2020 I had the opportunity to chat with you. You told me that the pandemic had put the neoliberal model in crisis. How do you assess the way out of the crisis seen now in perspective?
I believe that yes, the pandemic has challenged globalization. It has to be understood as the financial power dominating the economy. It does not dominate manufacturing or industry, but the functioning of finance. This no longer works. Two small examples, but they show that globalization has stopped. Covid has had consequences for inflation, the war in Ukraine has added more elements to it. But, look, Liz Truss comes to power in the UK. She does it with a Thatcherite program, who invented globalization. With massive unfunded tax cuts to automatically lift the economy. And who revolts against that model? Not the left and the unions, but the markets themselves. It is the markets themselves, which no longer believe in a globalizing solution to the world’s current economic problems.
The second example is China. This year it is going to have the weakest growth in the last 40 years. It is not enough to provide jobs for the next generation. What is the current Chinese project? Not to bet everything on exports, which was one more factor of globalization, but to bet everything on the domestic market. There are two examples, not at all trivial, that show that globalization no longer works as it used to.
Source: Publico, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US