Two Ways To Understand the Peril Facing American Democracy
To fully comprehend Trump 2.0, we must look abroad.
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Among his critics, reactions to Donald Trump’s second presidency seem to fall into two broad categories. The first contextualizes the current moment within America’s political history by studying previous episodes of political turmoil and conflict. The second tries to understand it through the experiences of other countries that have seen their leaders entrench themselves and embrace an expansive understanding of their power.
Anecdotally, the former mindset seems more common among Americans, including many leading intellectuals. The United States, after all, is a big country, and takes considerable and justified pride in its exceptionalism. For people born and brought up firmly within American political culture, it is only natural to try to answer questions about America’s present primarily by using its past as a framework.
Conversely, one can expect transplants to the United States and outside observers—even sympathetic ones—to be less inclined to see America as an island unto itself, whose success and endurance are a natural default. Rather, it might come to them naturally to juxtapose the American experience against that of other countries.
A representative of the first camp, Yuval Levin, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has argued that by the standards of modern presidencies, Trump’s has been less transformational than the bombastic headlines and delirious media cycles suggest. Yes, the southern border has been closed, and immigration enforcement has escalated dramatically. Extraordinary foreign policy moves have been made in global theaters from Gaza through Iran to Venezuela. Yet, Levin argues, “Trump has signed fewer pieces of legislation than any president in the modern era.” His executive orders are almost as ephemeral as his Truth Social posts, waiting to be rolled back by the next Democratic administration.
Furthermore, U.S. history itself is complicated, “a union of liberal and illiberal forces,” as the George Mason University economist and polymath Tyler Cowen puts it. Trump can be seen as a continuation of this mixed, complicated set of political traditions. Even the undisputed heroes of the American story—think Lincoln or FDR—were abusers of civil rights and put the U.S. constitutional system under stress. “Certainly, we are returning to some bad and illiberal behaviors of the past,” Cowen argues, “and it is right to be concerned. Yet this seems to be more a feature of the ebb and flow of American politics than a decisive turn away from liberalism.”
A focus on American history alone, clear-eyed as it may be, risks breeding a certain complacency. America may seem to contain multitudes, but its political history is only a narrow subsection of the human experience. The United States has seen a lot throughout its existence and its political institutions have survived and adapted. Today, despite ill-advised and irresponsible policies, the nation remains a powerhouse of economic vibrancy and innovation unparalleled in human history. It faces few immediate external threats. Thanks to its massive internal market, it can expect to thrive even if the rest of the world struggles economically.
Despite these undeniable strengths, however, the United States is just a nation composed of fallible, flawed human beings. It may be a big, successful, and powerful one, but it is not immune to challenges commonly observed in other democracies—especially those that share some of the specific characteristics of the American system of government.
That is precisely where a comparative perspective can be helpful, even if it leads to a set of conclusions that are considerably more “hair on fire” than what one may be able to conclude by judging America’s turbulent present solely by the standards of its (frequently turbulent) past.
One simple observation, visible on indices of democratic quality and the rule of law, is that parliamentary democracies, monarchies, and republics tend to perform better than presidential and semi-presidential systems. In fact, parliamentary systems tend to be more stable and are, on average, associated with better economic outcomes.
While the United States may have dodged the pattern for a long time, it is not unthinkable that it will eventually run out of luck. Just a few months before Trump’s descent down the golden escalator, Matt Yglesias suggested that the U.S. system might fail just like its various clones, most prominently in Latin America.
He pointed to the gridlock that emerges when the executive and legislative branches are controlled by different factions. Because of the separation of powers, there is no formal way of negotiating conflicts between them. In a situation of extreme polarization, what ensues are irresolvable stand-offs and constitutional crises. This scenario, frequent during the Obama years, may materialize again following a possible Democratic takeover of Congress this fall. What is even worse, however, is that the United States has also witnessed a gradual erosion of the legislative branch, opening the door to executive aggrandizement—a path that canonically leads to democratic decline.
The fact that Trump’s rule by executive decree might be reversed by his successor is no consolation. There is a term for a form of government in which incumbents serially abuse executive power yet can be occasionally voted out and replaced by another faction: competitive authoritarianism. While different from outright dictatorship, it still tends to yield poor outcomes—and it represents very much a departure from the constitutional architecture envisaged by the Founding Fathers.
Likewise, even if Trump has neither a long-term agenda nor a path toward an effective consolidation of power, he and his ilk are inflicting enormous damage on the United States. Judging by the experience of other countries, including those that have fought off authoritarianism, the path to recovery will likely be long and difficult.
If Viktor Orbán is voted out of power this spring—a big if—it would be foolish to expect Hungary to immediately switch to being a well-functioning liberal democracy. It is more likely that his successor will discover a plethora of ticking policy bombs, cadres of Fidesz loyalists across the public administration, and oligarchs banking on Orbán’s return. Even if the next government does address such challenges effectively, the tools it has will likely be illiberal (purging public administration of Fidesz loyalists, cracking down on Orbán-friendly business interests, etc.). As a result, the now-broken norms of political behavior are more likely to perpetuate in their brokenness instead of being glued together in a moment of national kumbaya.
It is hard to see how it can be otherwise in the case of the United States. Many norms have been broken of late—norms surrounding corruption and conflicts of interest, integrity of federal criminal law, and the peaceful transfer of power. Consider, for example, Trump’s immediate reaction to the Supreme Court’s recent tariffs ruling, calling the majority justices “unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.”
Inflammatory rhetoric aside, for ten months the federal government was collecting revenue—amounting to $200 billion—from tariffs that were illegal. While the Court is to be applauded for pushing back against the administration, Trump has now simply invoked a different statute—using a similarly novel and expansive interpretation—in order to continue with his favorite tariff policy, still without authorization from Congress.
Perhaps his effort to collect tariff revenue without Congress will eventually be thwarted by litigation. Yet even then, the United States will have reached a point where it appears perfectly acceptable for an administration to do illegal things, knowingly, without much in terms of political or other repercussions. Barring a fundamental shift in public opinion and political culture, how does one come back?
Well, perhaps a major cultural shift is the only thing that can help. After all, comparative work suggests that incumbent entrenchment works best when backed by public opinion—which is why “populist discourse increases support for executive aggrandizement by framing the president as the genuine representative of the people and by portraying institutional opposition as corrupt.”
While the base of Trump’s support appears fanatically solid, it is limited and declining. Nor has his effort gone far enough to derail and divide the opposition or render their work inherently fruitless. There is still a possibility of flushing the Trump phenomenon out of the system and restoring a commitment to broad political liberalism, as envisaged by those who founded the nation 250 years ago. However, the fact that the United States has muddled through with some success in the past is not a guarantee that it will do so again. And, if anything, the awareness of the possibility of failure, informed by the experience of less fortunate nations around the world, might help generate the sense of urgency that the current moment demands.
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist at American Purpose.
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Yes, indeed. Those of us Americans who have lived or served overseas in environments of institutional fragility (to speak euphemistically) know that functioning impersonal institutions are not the state of nature but the precarious product of a continuing collective decision made in our politics. Once that collective decision frays and comes apart, as it appears to have done here under Trump if not before, institutional decline becomes inevitable. In living within institutions that don't do what they're supposed to do but instead respond to the interests of those in power or the interests who control them, the United States will cease to be an exceptional nation, if it ever was. We'll become one of the general mass of poorly run big countries for whom the people are an afterthought if they enter the political equation at all.
This goes back to the older saying that democracy takes a long time to create, as 2-3 generations, but short time to destroy as a house of cards