For digital autocrats, freedom is the absence of law. They do not allow market regulations to guarantee users’ rights, protect children, prevent hate speech or limit the abuse of their monopolies. They do not allow it in the United States, but they do not intend to tolerate it in Europe, where any initiative limiting the margins of action of their companies is considered an attack on freedom of expression, or even an interference in the sovereignty of the American superpower.
Their freedom is not that of citizens, but that of billionaires. To Lenin’s famous and insidious question, American technology companies and the far-right government that represents them so well respond in unison with the same totalitarian cynicism. Freedom for what? For unlimited economic profit, to put Donald Trump in the White House or to prevent united European liberal democracies from setting limits on their greed.
The offensive was fully deployed with the second and most unleashed Trump presidency, but the pernicious ideas that fueled it came from afar and explain its rise to power over the past decade. Fifteen years ago, the ultimate arbiter of the United States Constitution, the Supreme Court, based the right of corporations to finance election campaigns on the incredible argument of protecting free speech. If in a country like the United States, founded on the principle of equality between citizens, a few billionaires can form parliaments and governments or place as president the most clown, the most famous and the most lying of their number, we should not be surprised that they now want to do the same in Europe, a boring territory with sovereign pretensions to resist their authoritarian pretensions.
This monstrous conception of freedom parallels the particular authoritarian conception of what a democracy should be, understood only as a procedure for gaining power and in no way as a representative government of the majority, organized with the rules of the rule of law and the division of powers, which is a way of life that is both pluralistic and tolerant. Trump only recognizes election results when they favor him and denounces the system every time he suffers a defeat. He wants freedom for himself and his people, for his businesses and for breaking the law, but he denies his adversaries the opportunity to exercise their rights. This democracy and freedom of Trumpism, incompatible with the rules-based European order, is a source of division and exclusion, a mere facade that differs little from Bolshevik concepts.
The convergence of methods between Bolshevism which has now disappeared and the Trumpist far right has its correlation in the hold over the European Union exercised by Putin, the heir of Soviet totalitarianism, and Trump, the last avatar of the far right that rose in Europe a hundred years ago. For both, the improbable dream of a united and strategically independent European continent is an unbearable nightmare.
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