The Future of American Democracy

My optimism is relative but robust!

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Longtime readers of Drezner’s World are no doubt aware of my relative pessimism regarding the current trajectory of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. economic policy. But I am not so solipsistic as to think that my areas of expertise is the most important challenges the country is currently facing. There is also the issue of, you know, whether the United States will remain a democracy that abides by the rule of law or not.

If you think this is an outrageous question, consider the events of the last nine months. During Donald Trump’s second term we have already seen him abuse his emergency powers across a wide array of policies. He has deployed the National Guard to two American cities despite the lack of any real emergency, the lack of any local or state official asking for their deployment, or (in the case of Los Angeles) the lack of any legal authority to order such a deployment. Even though the Constitution empowers the president with considerable control over the executive branch, Trump has vastly exceeded his constitutional authority not once, not twice, but multiple times, wreaking incomprehensible amounts of collateral damage.

To put it another way: it’s never a good sign when folks are asking less than a month into a U.S. presidential term whether the United States remains a liberal democracy. And very few of the signs since then have been positive.

So the question that has been dominating online discussion as of late is whether the United States will continue its illiberal ways and cease to be coded as a democracy. As absurd as this might have sounded a year ago, it’s a live question, as the CBC’s Alexander Panetta reported:

"If it continues like this, the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year's] data," said Staffan Lindberg, head of the Varieties of Democracy project, run out of Sweden's University of Gothenburg.

"If it continues like this, democracy [there] will not last another six months."

His project includes 31 million data points for 202 countries, compiled by 4,200 scholars and other contributors, measuring 600 different attributes of democracy….

The latest report still ranks the U.S. as a "Liberal Democracy," the highest of five tiers, one higher than Canada, which is classified as an "Electoral Democracy."

The report adds an important caveat: this year's version does not include events in 2025, meaning it does not cover the start of Donald Trump's latest presidential term.

But it refers to ongoing events in the U.S. as unprecedented, mentioning Trump pardoning 1,500 criminals who supported him; firing independent agency watchdogs without process; purging apolitical police and military brass; ignoring laws; and his unilaterally deleting federal programs, and even a whole organization, created by U.S. Congress….

In the last few days alone, Trump has smashed past several new milestones.

He's just called his predecessor's pardons void and vacated. He gave a bitterly partisan speech at the Department of Justice, demanding the prosecution of the media and certain adversaries. He threatened numerous universities with sanctions. He invoked a 227-year-old war measures law during peacetime — for the first time ever — to deport accused gang members without due process. And, most importantly, when that deportation plan wound up in court, he may have — although it's still in dispute — defied a court order, cracking the ultimate constitutional safeguard….

Lindberg said Trump is doing many of the same things as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India — only faster.

"It's the pace," Lindberg said. "He's trying to do in a few months what it took them eight to 10 years to achieve.… It's very dire."

As this debate has continued Dan Nexon is among the gloomier political scientists, as this thread makes clear:

To summarize, Nexon asserts the United States is already authoritarian, and that, “the ‘best’ scenario right now [is[ that the US. remains a ‘competitive authoritarian’ system. We have elections that are unfree and unfair, but not total and complete shams.” The worst scenario? The GOP consolidates its hold on the election machinery and 2024 is the last free and fair election for a good long while.

Not everyone is so pessimistic, however. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie, for example, argues that Trump’s authoritarianism to date has been far more performative — and that is a cultivated perception that can be deflated:

The president and his allies have made real strides toward authoritarian power in some areas — using broad executive discretion over immigration enforcement to turn ICE into a personal goon squad, for example — and suffered real setbacks in others. The president must also contend with his steady unpopularity and the real possibility that no amount of cultivated chaos from the White House will prevent a wipeout at the ballot box next year.

The administration-produced imagery in Washington is, then, a projection of sorts — a representation of what the president wants reality to be, drawn from its idea of what authoritarianism looks like. The banners and the troops — not to mention the strangely sycophantic cabinet meetings and news conferences — are a secondhand reproduction of the strongman aesthetic of other strongman states. It is as if the administration is building a simulacrum of authoritarianism, albeit one meant to bring the real thing into being. No, the United States is not a totalitarian state led by a sovereign Donald Trump — a continental Trump Organization backed by the world’s largest nuclear arsenal — but his favored imagery reflects his desire to live in this fantasy….

If you follow the president on Truth Social or spend any amount of time on Elon Musk’s X, you’ll see endless amounts of far-right A.I. slop — computer-generated creations pulled together from the nearly infinite detritus of the internet and meant to give form to the bugbears, obsessions, wishes and desires of the reactionary imagination.

I think the military occupation of Washington, along with much of the Trump administration’s imagery about itself, serves the same semiotic purpose as that slop. It represents the world as Trump wants it to be. You could say it is a reality, but it is not yet our reality. We still have the capacity — and more important, we still have the time — to turn ourselves away from this particular vision of the real.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World finds itself more sympathetic to Bouie’s position than Nexon’s, for a number of reasons.

For one thing, the electoral math favors Democrats next year. It remains the case that Donald Trump and his policies are manifestly unpopular. Furthermore, the typical midterm voter — i.e., older and better educated — now leans more Democratic than Republican. GOP gerrymander efforts will yield fewer gains than they believe, given that Democrats are now prepared to retaliate. Simply put, the political tide is against Trump and the GOP next year.

Additionally, the election machinery remains largely in the hands of the states. That messy federalism will make it next to impossible for Trump to use the federal government to tip the election scales. It is possible that deep red GOP states will muck around on the margins, but that will not affect the outcome in crucial swing districts or key Senate seats.

Another reason to be optimistic is that the Trump administration’s success in the courts has been more limited than is commonly realized. Indeed, the Atlantic’s Michael Scherer points out that Trump’s success rate in court is less than meets the eye:

A legal resistance led by a patchwork coalition of lawyers, public-interest groups, Democratic state attorneys general, and unions has frustrated Trump’s ambitions. Hundreds of attorneys and plaintiffs have stood up to him, feeding a steady assembly line of setbacks and judicial reprimands for a president who has systematically sought to break down limits on his own power. Of the 384 cases filed through August 28 against the Trump administration, 130 have led to orders blocking at least part of the president’s efforts, and 148 cases await a ruling, according to a review by Just Security. Dozens of those rulings are the final word, with no appeal by the government, and others have been stayed on appeal, including by the Supreme Court.

Trump’s Department of Justice has been so bad at actual prosecutions that they are running into the heretofore unthinkable: not being able to secure federal indictments. As Quinta Jurecic notes in the Atlantic:

Over the past month, federal prosecutors in D.C. have failed at least five times to persuade a grand jury to indict a D.C. resident for allegedly attacking federal law enforcement. These are not the only embarrassments suffered recently by federal prosecutors in the District, and judges have begun to lose their patience over missteps and sloppy cases. Despite the president’s promise to “take our capital back,” his law-enforcement surge is struggling in court….

Filing federal-felony charges against someone starts a ticking clock. Prosecutors have 30 days to secure an indictment from a grand jury, and the refusal of jurors to indict Summers, Dunn, and Reid might suggest more trouble ahead for other cases yet to reach this stage. Grand jurors can decline to indict because they don’t believe the government has adequately made its case; they can also decline simply because they don’t like or trust the prosecutor and don’t agree with what the government is trying to do. Despite its reputation as a rubber stamp, this is the core democratic promise of the grand jury, and its power in the face of government overreach….

And grand jurors are not the only people in D.C.’s federal courthouse who are losing their patience with Trump’s crackdown. Also less than pleased are magistrate judges, the workhorses who assist Senate-confirmed district judges with managing the court’s workload. “The time and resources of the court are stretched beyond belief,” Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya commented during a hearing. After one defendant was detained unnecessarily for days, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui lambasted the government for its “inexcusable” and “egregious” delay.

Short of an unprecedented economic Golden Age — a possibility that seems highly unlikely given the current administration’s inept economic policies, labor immobility and deep public pessimism about the state of the country — Trump and the GOP will lose the midterm elections and lose them badly. No doubt, that sets up some potential constitutional clashes in the future. But a crushing midterm defeat also has its own gravitational effect. The midterms could very well nudge Trump into lame duck status.

I am not going to deny that a large swathe of elites has already bent the knee to Trump in recent months. What I will suggest is that the voters and the courts have shown themselves to have more spine than the elites.

Hopefully, 14 months from now, the illiberal powers that be will find themselves less powerful than the present. And I think there are valid reasons behind that hope.