Trump Poses a Test Democracy Is Failing

Ordinary citizens play a critical role in maintaining democracy. They refuse to re-elect — at least in theory — politicians who abuse their power, break the rules and reject the outcome of elections they lose. How is it, then, that Donald Trump, who has defied these basic presumptions, stands a reasonable chance of winning a second term in 2024?

Milan W. Svolik, a political scientist at Yale, anticipated this question in his 2019 paper, “Polarization versus Democracy”: “Voters in democracies have at their disposal an essential instrument of democratic self-defense: elections. They can stop politicians with authoritarian ambitions by simply voting them out office.”

What might account for their failure to do so?

In other words, exacerbated partisan competition “presents aspiring authoritarians with a structural opportunity: They can undermine democracy and get away with it.”

Svolik and Matthew H. Graham, a postdoctoral researcher at George Washington University, expand on Svolik’s argument and its applicability to the United States. Supporters of democracy, they contend in their 2020 paper, “Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States,” can no longer rely on voters to serve as a roadblock against authoritarianism:

Graham and Svolik cite survey data demonstrating that “Americans have a solid understanding of what democracy is and what it is not” and can “correctly distinguish real-world undemocratic practices from those that are consistent with democratic principles.”

Despite this awareness, Graham and Svolik continue,

The authors have calculated that “only 3.5 percent of voters realistically punish violations of democratic principles in one of the world’s oldest democracies.”

Graham and Svolik go on:

Graham and Svolik tested adherence to democratic principles by asking respondents whether they would vote for a candidate who “supported a redistricting plan that gives own party 10 extra seats despite a decline in the polls”; whether a governor of one’s own party should “rule by executive order if legislators don’t cooperate”; whether a governor should “ignore unfavorable court rulings by opposite party-appointed judges”; and whether a governor should “prosecute journalists who accuse him of misconduct without revealing sources.”

“Put simply,” Graham and Svolik write, “polarization undermines the public’s ability to serve as a democratic check.”

Graham and Svolik’s analysis challenges the canonical view of the role of the average voter as the enforcer of adherence to democratic principles. In their 1963 classic, “The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations,” Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, political scientists at Stanford and Harvard, wrote:

The democratic citizen, Almond and Verba continue, “is called on to pursue contradictory goals: he must be active, yet passive; involved, yet not too involved; influential, yet deferential.”

Trump and his allies in the Republican Party have correctly been the focus of those seeking to identify the instigators of political disruption. As Barton Gellman wrote in his December 2021 Atlantic article “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun”:

In the most recent issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, five political scientists, Suzanne Mettler, Robert C. Lieberman, Jamila Michener, Thomas B. Pepinsky and Kenneth M. Roberts, write:

As president, the authors continued, “Trump exacerbated all four threats, imperiling the pillars of democracy, including free and fair elections, the rule of law, the legitimacy of opposition, and the integrity of rights.”

In an earlier article in the September 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs, “The Fragile Republic: American Democracy Has Never Faced So Many Threats All at Once,” Lieberman and Mettler argue that

Trump, Mettler and Lieberman argue,

How much of a danger do Trump and his allies continue to represent? I asked Pepinsky how likely anti-democratic politicians are to use democratic elections to achieve their ends. He replied by email:

Lieberman, in turn, stressed in an email the key role of white discontent as a factor in the crisis American democracy faces:

But, Lieberman continued,

The efforts by Republicans to take over control of elections through state laws giving local legislatures the power to overturn election results — as well as by running candidates for Secretary of State who espouse the view that the 2020 election was stolen — are troubling, to say the least.

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University — and the author of “Delegitimization, Deconstruction and Control: Undermining the Administrative State” in the current issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science — wrote by email that he is “more worried about declines in democracy driven by formal changes in the law than by events like January 6th.”

Moynihan pointed out that at 3:32 a.m. on Jan. 7 — hours after protesters incited by Trump swarmed the U.S. Capitol — a majority of House Republicans

It is now possible, Moynihan continued,

Partisan polarization has not only pushed Americans into mutually exclusive political parties, but also into two warring civic cultures.

In a March 2022 paper “Good Citizens’ in Democratic Hard Times,” Sara Wallace Goodman of the University of California-Irvine examined the growing disagreement among voters over what the obligations of a good citizen are.

Goodman compared voter attitudes on what constitutes “good citizen” norms in 2004 and in 2019. A strikingly high level of agreement between Republicans and Democrats in 2004 had nearly disappeared by 2019, according to Goodman’s research:

In his March, 2022 article “Moderation, Realignment, or Transformation? Evaluating Three Approaches to America’s Crisis of Democracy,” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America and author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” argues that neither moderation nor realignment is adequate to address current problems in American democracy:

Drutman makes the case that moderation is futile because

What about a realignment in which the Democratic Party regains its majority status more firmly?

Drutman replies in his essay:

In fact, Drutman’s basic argument is that “there is no feasible solution to the current crisis within the two-party system itself, given the escalating polarization and the extremist trajectory of the Republican Party.”

The current two party system, according to Drutman, fosters the “kind of polarization, which involves not just (or not even) policy agreement but instead deep distrust of fellow citizens, is a very typical precursor of democratic decline.” Conversely, “in more proportional systems, out-party hatreds are rarer and tend to only be directed toward extreme parties.”

Drutman acknowledges the many roadblocks that face the kind of transformation to a multiparty system he proposes. He argues, however, that

Still, the relentless, insidious and secretive assaults on democracy that now permeate American culture may not be amenable to procedural solution.

Gerald J. Postema of the University of North Carolina describes the current embattled climate in his June 2021 essay, “Constitutional Norms — Erosion, Sabotage and Response”:

The erosion of democracy is now self-evidently a global phenomenon with exogenous and endogenous causes. A brief list from the Hague Journal of the Rule of Law gives the idea:

It’s a lot to ask voters to adjudicate everything on this list. So the question that remains is this one: Is the Trump version of this phenomenon the worst we are going to get or are there people watching and waiting in the wings who will make it much worse?

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