President Donald Trump’s disparaging characterisation of the Obamas did not surprise me as in 2016, he did two important things that signalled his political orientation. By January of that year, he had come to grasp the importance of social structures, i.e. the durable and resilient nature of his ethnic support base and felt compelled to share his observation with us. ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?’ Secondly, later in the year, he patented the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
Mr. Trump’s comments drew my attention as he was suggesting that he believed that the institutional base that makes the USA a liberal democracy was at the very least receding: that is, as it has been throughout Guyana’s modern political history, there is not a sufficient public opinion to hold governments accountable. A specific expression of this problem is the reason that Cheddi Jagan was kept from government for three decades.
In the case of Guyana, in 1951, the British Waddington Report stated that ‘race is a patent difference and is a powerful slogan ready to the hand of unscrupulous men who can use it as a steppingstone to political power.’ Three years later, the British Robertson Report claimed, ‘We do not altogether [believe that] a comprehensive loyalty to British Guiana can be stimulated among peoples of such diverse origins.’
In 1861, John Stuart Mill, the eminent British philosopher, told us why this may be so. ‘Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow feeling (the essence of nationhood) … the united public opinion necessary to the working of a representative government cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another’ (‘Of nationality as connected with Representative Government’).
Globally, until about the middle of the 20th century the difficulties Mill identified remained a political problem for deeply political divided multiethnic societies trying to become democratic but was resolved somewhat by inclusive forms of political institutionalisation. However, just as they can be ameliorated they can also develop, and the present growth of migration has given rise to their use as a means to political power.
In 2007, one discerning scholar suggested how this development may gradually materialise. ‘…. a minority group that votes as a bloc is something of a curiosity when it makes up 1% of the population of a state but could become an existential threat to democracy when, [as in Guyana] it makes up about 40%’ and is not sensibly constitutionally accommodated within the management of the state. (Orr, Scott. The Theory and Practice of Ethnic Politics: Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2007).
The USA appears to be fertile ground for this development. ‘The ethnic and racial composition of the United States in 2025 tells a powerful story about the nation’s evolution into an increasingly diverse society. While White Americans still constitute the majority population, their share has been declining steadily …. This demographic transition carries profound implications for everything from electoral politics and consumer markets to educational curricula and healthcare delivery systems’ (https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/us-population-by-ethnicity/).
A 2025 NBC poll assessed that in 2024, MAGA was supported by 70% of those who claimed to be Republican and 40% of the voting population (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5248710-trump-maga). But a February 2025 poll put these numbers at 52% and 36% respectively (https://hempfarm.substack.com/p/maga-by-the-very-low-numbers).
Factually.com identified the key MAGA-era ideologies as ‘white cultural and political dominance, nativist immigration positions, conspiracist grievance politics, and a fusion with radical legal and religious narratives, etc.’ (https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/maga-movement-hate-groups).
MAGA’s rhetoric and symbolism is said to echo historical white supremacist movements, portraying the current movement as a rebranding of older racial dominance projects rather than an entirely new phenomenon. Some contend that although MAGA lacks the overt paramilitary trappings such as those of the Ku Klux Klan, its goals of preserving white cultural and political dominance and its choice of symbolism and tactics represent a continuity of white supremacist strategy (Ibid).
And we are told that by 2020, ‘MAGA had become a culture war machine. It weaponized grievance, dramatized spectacle, and turned every institution into a battlefield. Universities, media, science, all were cast as enemies of the people. The movement’s emotional engine was resentment; its narrative arc was decline and betrayal’. Now, in Trump’s second term, MAGA has hardened into something more coherent and more exclusionary. National conservatism is no longer just a slogan: it is becoming a doctrine rooted in ethnonationalism.
‘At the dawn of a second Trump administration, the threat white Christian nationalism poses to the promise of multiracial, multifaith democracy are plainer than ever … This survey illustrates how this dangerous political theology is driving support for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and how thoroughly it has established itself as an ideological keystone in both the Republican Party and American evangelical churches’ (https://prri.org/press-release/across-all-50-states).
Throughout the developed world, racist/nativities politicians have been emphasizing policies based on national identity, border security, stricter immigration and cultural assimilation policies. Indeed, in Guyana anti-democratic voices have got to a stage where they are questioning the entire liberal democratic order, although it is not clear, if not by liberal means, how else, if at all, one is to manage a free society!
Every so often various interests and individuals will come along to test the resilience of the political systems and the systems should be designed to appropriately respond. Troubling though the present political situation in the USA is, my position is that it will not lead to a destruction of the liberal democratic state.
Firstly, it is difficult to perceive that those who have been socialised at such a level of political freedom for nearly 250 years will allow its destruction with nothing better in sight. Secondly, unlike Guyana where the following element are essentially theoretical, the major pillars of America’s democracy – the rule of law, separation powers, substantial federalism, independent judiciary and various levels of non-majoritarian representations, etc. – are real and allow sufficient inclusivity and checks and balances to make the destruction of the liberal democratic state highly improbable.
Finally, unlike Guyana, as the figures suggest the core MAGA numbers are not as substantial or stable and America still has a substantial united public opinion with which to hold governments accountable. And by its current behaviour, that opinion is also suggesting that over the centuries it has been instilled with the necessity of keeping its powder dry in the event of any budding autocratic revival.
