Precisely Planned Chaos

Politics, says a wise friend, is not of much interest to him at the moment. He is interested in literature, music, life. And I understand what he means. You only had to look at the so-called debate between Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz. When politics shrinks the world and the small-scale arguments crumble in the face of the magnitude of the problems and questions, then the stage of decline of a form of politics that conveys confidence that something can change has been reached.

And trust is an essence of democracy. But I feel differently right now. I am fascinated by what is happening in the USA, for example - just fascinated in a different way than the first time, during Donald Trump's first presidency. Back then it was disgust, revulsion, resistance. Today it is the attempt to understand not only what is happening, but how it is happening.

I see the precision with which the Trumpians have prepared themselves, for example their manual " Project 2025 ," which is a guide to a coup , but with the tools of the Constitution, to a large extent. It is, I think, quite clear that what Trump wants is an overthrow - an overthrow of the existing order and logic and practice of democracy.

Decrees replace debates, the executive dominates the legislative and judicial branches, although it remains to be seen what the role of the courts will be and whether Trump will abide by possible rulings and orders. Trump does not rule like a president, as the American podcaster Ezra Klein summed it up, he rules like a king. In many ways, what is happening in the USA is the end of politics as we knew it - and as it is being presented in the German election campaign, albeit with the dwindling confidence of amateur actors who are increasingly running out of lines.

Deliberately stoked despair

It is a pitiful and regrettable political atrophy in terms of performance and program, which also has to do with the extremely mediocre quality of the two candidates presented, who met at lonely desks. It is difficult to say which task the two are really suited to. So there is certainly nothing to sugarcoat. In Germany there is massive underpressure, in the USA massive overpressure in the political sphere, both of which are bad for a functioning democracy.

The Brazilian philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger , who I like so much, speaks of a "high-energy democracy" as a goal - but he did not mean the high-voltage democracy that Donald Trump and especially Elon Musk are currently igniting in order to keep the system running at overspeed until it breaks. Not only is the damage that this causes not important to them, it is part of the plan - rule must hurt, for rule to work there must be victims.

This is the philosophy of domination and the cruelty with which they disrupt the international networks of aid, support and humanity that the American agency USAID maintained all over the world. Millions of people were without HIV medication overnight , stuck in the middle of medical trials, research was stopped, progress was halted.

The despair that resulted was by no means a regrettable side effect, but rather it was intentional, in some ways it was the goal, because authoritarian rule requires fear, fear is the means of power that replaces politics or makes it impossible. Fear, then, is present as a constant in large parts of the world, fear also within democracy, where the so-called enemies are pursued with vengeance and the democratic apparatus is destroyed by mass dismissals - dominance is shown in violence against people, their lives, their fate.

conviction and hard work

So where does this certain fascination come from for what Donald Trump and especially Elon Musk are doing right now, despite all the disgust and abhorrence for the real - to use the word - evil that drives them and that they embody? It is probably the precision with which they proceed, again especially Musk, whose brutal dismantling of the state is intended to produce chaos and will produce chaos and will be correspondingly disastrous - but all of this is presented to us with the precision of a plan that ultimately wants a different form of state and no longer democracy.

This clarity is what is fascinating, the performative professionalism that is necessary to change things. Musk, who expects his employees to work 120 hours a week, was just making fun of "the other side" who take weekends while he and his crew just slog away. It's their own fault, Musk said, that they are leaving the field for two days in this battle that is won by attendance and hard work.

So what if we, "the other side," were just as professional, worked just as hard, were just as ruthless in some ways, and defined the processes in such a way, grasped the concepts in such a way, thought about the ideas so big that fundamental changes seem possible, become possible? Trump, as Ezra Klein said, and I think he's right, Trump wants people to believe that he has the power to make everything different.

It is this belief that is in many ways the basis of his power, it is this belief that is often lacking on "the other side". So how can this belief come about? Through conviction and hard work, as the example of Musk shows. All of this is necessary for a policy that can resist what the authoritarian international is doing right now. It is high time. We must start yesterday.