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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Will American democracy survive a second Donald Trump presidency? This is not a theoretical question. It is obvious that Trump is following the familiar game of turning a liberal democracy into an illiberal one. The latter is a label for a dictatorship — a regime in which decisions rest on the will of one person who is largely unaccountable to anyone else.
IN The spirit of democracyMrStanford’s Larry Diamond argued that liberal democracy consists of free and fair elections, the protection of civil and human rights of all citizens equally, and the rule of law that binds all citizens equally. Those are the “rules of the game”. But the effectiveness of those rules depends on the limitations of those who temporarily control the state. The most important such restrictions are the judiciary, political parties, bureaucracy and the media. The question is whether this will be sustained, first while Trump is president, and then in the long term.
In a recent discussion in New Republic, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard, authors How democracies dienote that the classic process of “collective abdication” or “institutional suicide” before an authoritarian takeover has already gone far. Trump has taken over the Republican Party. His control over the electoral base convinced her to support the “big lie” that he won the 2020 elections. The Supreme Court ruled that the president is immune from prosecution for his “official acts,” a doctrine that British jurist Lord Jonathan Sumption insists on placing the president above the law, thus making him more like a king than a citizen. Not least, we already see powerful individuals, such as Mark Zuckerbergkneeling before his new ruler.
What are they afraid of? That the president will arm the state machinery against them. This is what he and the people around him intend to do. His nominations strongly suggest this. So are plans to replace bureaucrats with people loyal to Trump outlined in the Heritage Foundation “Project 2025”. Such loyalty would be a powerful weapon of autocracy. This would make the bureaucracy obedient to the president rather than the laws to be enforced.
Yale’s Timothy Snyder, an expert on 20th-century European totalitarianism, describes the nominations for the heads of the Departments of Health, Justice and Defense, as well as heads of intelligence, as “decapitation blow”. This is partly because their likely incompetence and malevolence would seriously harm the functioning of the state. It is also due to the threat of politicization of the federal government, including legislation, against “enemy within” would cause great damage to democracy.
All these, Levitsky and Ziblatt add, are classic behaviors of potential autocrats. These come under the broad headings of “jumping referees” and “offsides”. Among the first would be further changes in the judiciary at all levels. Among the latter would be attacks of various kinds against independent media organizations, journalists, academic institutions and publishers.
In addition to all this, let’s recall the central project of removing undocumented immigrants. It seems likely to bring many elements of the new approach into one. Removing many millions of people would require a massive military operation, massive incursions into state and local jurisdictions, the creation of large detention camps, the suppression of protests and, not least, finding countries to dump the displaced people.
Could all this really happen? Perhaps. But the combination of such disruption with what is also likely to be considerable economic turmoil could turn public opinion strongly against Trump, who has margin of votes of only 1.5 percentage points and was never very popular. While it has passionate supporters, it also has passionate opponents. Moreover, if the constitution holds, he has only this mandate. All in all, his influence on public opinion and his party is likely to weaken from now on. Trump’s abilities as a populist demagogue are exceptional: it is very likely that it will be impossible for the parties to find a sufficiently charismatic replacement in 2028. His coalition is also showing signs of disintegration: Christian nationalists and nativists they are not natural bedfellows “technological plutocrats”, such as Elon Musk.
Then it is entirely possible that any autocratic pressure from Trump will go into overdrive and cause a strong reaction, even among ordinary people. After all, he hasn’t caught these others yet. People will need courage to mobilize. But we must hope that the American people will not lightly abandon the liberal and enlightened traditions of their country in the face of the attacks of today’s authoritarian and reactionary opponents. Yet it is now a deeply divided country, with polls showing that many Americans have already abandoned faith in their democracy. If this cannot be corrected, democracy itself may fail. (See charts.)
The key question now is how long the institutions of liberal democracy will survive, especially those that govern elections. Many of Trump’s supporters, like Trump himself, will fear retribution for the “retaliation” they seek to inflict. This gives them a great incentive to adjust the electoral rules of the game, with the help of the judiciary.
If they succeeded in subverting the US national election, it might even be “game over”. The global consequences of this would be devastating. Without the active engagement of the democratic USA, the health of liberal democracy in the world would be in great danger.
The famous Benjamin Franklin said that the US has a “republic if you can keep it”. We might find out soon if he can.
