Nowadays it’s the Musk interview, stupid

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the American historian Francis Fukuyama called it the end of history. Liberal democracy had triumphed as the ideal system of government having seen off aggressive nationalism by the defeat of fascism in 1945 and the implosion of communist totalitarianism in 1991 – which was only half true as Communist China was unscathed.

Liberal democracy evolved from Ancient Greece to the system of government under the separation of powers in 18th century Britain and the rights to liberty, equality and fraternity that inspired the American and French revolutions and the values enshrined in the American constitution of 1787.

According to US President Joe Biden liberal democracy in the US would be in jeopardy if Donald Trump became president which was, he said, the reason he passed the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris as she had a much better chance to defeat Trump.

Liberal or representative democracy is the system of government that prevails worldwide today. It holds that governments operate under the rule of law that change smoothly after free and fair elections that return governments under the principle of majority rule.

In liberal democracies government is constrained by the separation of powers whereby those making the laws are different from those executing and interpreting them and in which the state cannot encroach on individual fundamental rights including freedom of expression, assembly and association.

All these rights are sustained by economic freedom to acquire and enjoy private property in a market economy and civil rights are protected by an independent and impartial judiciary.

Liberal democracy is deeply rooted in American constitutional government not only for historical reasons but also because the US is a nation of immigrants – or as Alfred Hitchcock once said, a nation of foreigners.

So the question is whether the election of Donald Trump to a second term as US president poses a threat to liberal democracy in the US and right on cue a few days ago Elon Musk interviewed Donald Trump on X in a two hour conversation. Despite the fact that Musk indulged and kowtowed to Trump and even asked him for a job if he got elected, the conversational format of the interview did cast a flood of light on the man and his politics.

Trump sounded more like an old man without dentures than the superman president he fancies himself to be. The interview covered a wide area of policy interspersed with self-praise, alternative facts, insult for his enemies and bravado about surviving the assassination attempt on his life a month ago.

Elon Musk began the interview as he closed – full support for Trump’s alternative right-wing values and policies. He admitted to having been a political moderate – even left wing – but he now fully identifies with and supports Trump for president unreservedly.

Trump questioned why the US should pay so much more for the defence of Europe when the European Union trades to the economic detriment of the US. Unlike Europe, the US is an ocean away from Europe and is not threatened by Russia; so if Trump is elected Europe would have to pay a lot more for its own defence and that of Ukraine.

He was, however, unsound on climate change. The point about Trump and other climate change deniers is that they are in denial about the problem. A US president in denial about the state of planet Earth’s fragile atmosphere is bad for the planet and Musk should have put it to Trump that he is in denial about climate change. Everyone knows that summers are much hotter year on year and there is incontrovertible scientific evidence that burning oil and gas is causing climate change. 

Trump was at his most populist when he talked about illegal immigration. He joked with Musk that he was saved by illegal immigration in the attempt on his life at the rally in Pennsylvania. Apparently, the bullet struck his ear and not his head because he turned his head for effect as he broached the subject of illegal immigration in his speech.

Trump told Musk that illegal immigration is not strictly Latin American immigration though that too was a problem. It is unlawful immigration from Africa and the Middle East and Asia via Latin America that was the problem according to Trump.

It was immigration into the US of lunatics and criminals and terrorists who would be excluded if they arrived and sought to enter lawfully but who are off-loaded into the US, he claimed. His claim was reminiscent of the days when malefactors used to be transported to America and Australia from Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. He seemed to be saying that other countries were deliberately dumping their undesirable citizens on the US.

Musk said he was in favour of lawful immigration and that he was himself an immigrant. But he agreed that a state without border control is not a state – ignoring that in the EU there are open borders across the entire EU comprising 27 states.

Musk is not a journalist and he is not the publicly funded BBC that strives to be impartial. He has views about politics, and he wants those views to prevail by getting politicians like Trump elected. He is entitled to identify completely with Trump’s alternative right-wing views if he wishes.

However, he needs to be careful not to allow platform X to be a vehicle for spreading falsehoods more widely than otherwise would be the case by his own uncritical participation in interviews such as the one with Trump last week.

Musk must know that the reason social media platforms are not regulated is that they are not responsible for their content. In his interview with Trump, he was not only responsible for the content of X which he owns but also for its wide dissemination to his millions of followers.

Alper Ali Riza is a king’s counsel in the UK and a retired part time judge