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What Is the Future of American Democracy?
Debating the Threats of a Second Trump Presidency on U.S. Democracy
Another Trump Presidency Would Be Dangerous, But Won’t Endanger American Democracy
By Roger Berkowitz – Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights, Bard College
A second Donald Trump presidency promises or threatens, depending on your point of view, to be the most transformative in recent history. Unlike his first administration, where Trump was by his own account “too nice,” he now insists that he will rapidly implement radical policies to fundamentally change American life.
Trump’s Radical Policies
Already, Trump has upended the politics of abortion and the Supreme Court. In a second term, Trump plans to use an emergency declaration to mobilize the military on the southern border and deport undocumented immigrants, potentially even using the military against civilians.
The former president is set to make his 2017 tax cuts permanent for businesses and wealthy individuals. He is also proposing massive tariffs. Combined, these proposals—lower taxes, fewer undocumented workers, and tariffs—would likely lead to inflation and higher interest rates, making repayment of government debt more expensive and squeezing discretionary federal entitlements.
Most radically, Trump would reclassify federal civil service employees to deny them nonpartisan status and job protection. New rules by the Biden administration will make it difficult to reclassify Schedule F employees and if attempted, would likely lead to lengthy legal challenges. Still, Trump has made no secret of his goal to turn the federal agencies into a tool of unprecedented presidential power. Indeed, Trump fundamentally believes everything is about power. He is willing to risk chaos and violence to undo political correctness, cancel culture, and race-based policies.
The Erosion of Democratic Norms
A second Trump presidency augurs is a massive power shift from educated cultural and political elites to a resurgent Jacksonian democratic movement with contempt for the establishment. He believes that “winning” and destroying American liberalism justifies risks tearing the country apart, from attempting to overturn an election to his shameless lies.
The threat Trump poses is that in his power-hungry zeal to destroy liberal America, he will run roughshod over the American tradition of limited government. Limited government depends on dispersed institutional power to restrain the human urge to accumulate centralized power. Not only Congress and the courts, but also state governments, universities, businesses, unions, the independent legal system, and the free press are institutions that wield power and can oppose the power concentrated in a president. Trump’s challenge to this American dispersion of power is his corrosive cynicism, lies, and rule-breaking which normalize criminality and undermine faith in institutional norms.
The populist attack on elite institutions is part of American democratic history. None of this is necessarily undemocratic. But Trump’s boorish lack of character that eviscerates all limits and norms threatens to radically weaken the constitutional and institutional foundations of American freedom. If the criminal and mob-like mentality of power over principle takes root, we will lose the very idea of the republican form of free government guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. This loss of integrity and ideals is what Trump threatens—unless, of course, the institutional bastions of American freedom can be reinvigorated and preserved.
Looming Concerns for the 2024 Election
By David Finkel – Steering Committee, Jewish Voice for Peace-Detroit
“Democracy is on the ballot” has been a mantra of Joe Biden’s and now, Kamala Harris’ presidential campaigns. But it’s important not to look at the problem from a narrow standpoint. It runs much deeper than a single electoral outcome and highlights the slowly decaying political structures of the republic.
The menace manifested by the far-right takeover of the Republican Party, and now the quasi-monarchist “presidential immunity” rulings of the Trump-packed Supreme Court, is way beyond specific policies promised by Trump and J.D. Vance—as ominous as some of them are—on civil service purges, mass deportations, criminalization of pro-Palestine dissent, women’s reproductive choices, and the overtly Christian-nationalist agenda driving Project 2025.
There’s a multi-state, lavishly funded plan to engineer what I call a “Grand Theft Election,” coordinated and organized in ways that dwarf Trump’s improvised, often comic, although ultimately deadly previous efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Through networks of local election officers primed to withhold certification, voter eligibility challenges, and strategic voter suppression on a massive scale, Republicans have put in place an apparatus designed to throw the election outcome into chaos and generate multiple intractable legal challenges.
Unless the margin of victory for either side is unexpectedly wide, close to half the country or even more, may regard the incoming presidency as illegitimate and illegal. The potential consequences for the U.S. and the world are difficult to calculate.
Yet Threats To American Democracy Run Deeper than One Election
How is such a scenario even possible in what’s supposed to be the “greatest democracy on earth?” In this limited space, I will suggest and summarize a few factors.
- American representative democracy is structurally shaky. The powerful U.S. Senate, for example, is the most unrepresentative elected legislative body in the more-or-less democratic world, and its bizarre rules of procedure make it even more so. Also, the notorious Electoral College reduces presidential elections to a small handful of battleground states, making the national vote purely symbolic.
- Thanks to the Supreme Court with its cancellation of election financing laws, the Democratic and Republican parties are not so much actual political parties as they are giant money-sucking apparatuses beholden to megadonors elected by and accountable to no one.
- Institutions designed to preserve U.S. political stability have instead become the opposite. These include the substantial delegation of authority to the states, the presumed alternation of political power between two establishment political parties, the presumed political neutrality of the courts, and more. These structures can now act as agents of manipulation and obstruction of democracy, particularly with the mutation of the Republican Party into something resembling Germany’s far-right party, AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland).
- Most importantly, in my view, and deserving much more extended treatment, are the results of four decades of bipartisan, neoliberal, capitalist policies that enriched elites and parts of the upper middle class while leaving whole regions and sectors of the population stranded and, quite rightly, angry. That’s the biggest reason why Trump’s fantasies and delusions get a popular hearing, and in that regard, the Clinton-Obama era Democrats have themselves to blame.
The Democratic Challenges of Donald Trump
By Roger Berkowitz – Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights, Bard College
While Donald Trump resembles an American demagogue in the model of Huey Long, he is perhaps better compared to the most radically democratic of American presidents, Andrew Jackson. In American politics, Jacksonians are suspicious of big business, big government, and elites in the military, academia, and government. They reject solutions to problems based on social and natural sciences and prefer common-sense approaches, often rooted in local community values. There is a strong belief among Jacksonians that most of our leaders are corrupt.
The Consequences of Trump’s Patterns
Understood as a Jacksonian, Trump presages a shift in power away from elite cosmopolitans and toward parochial, nativist, and prejudiced interests. That kind of power shift is unsettling for those who have become convinced that expert-driven cosmopolitan universalism is morally and practically superior to common-sense, grounded community folkways. Such a transformation in the power structure will change American society, but it is not antithetical to American democracy.
The danger Trump poses is less to American democracy than to the fabric of the nation, the common world that holds a diverse country together. What is dangerous is not his Jacksonian populism but his boorish resentments, his affinity for conspiracy theories, his anger and hatred, and his willingness to insult and demean. Trump’s insistence that he won the 2020 election, his impotent obsession with the size of his rallies, his claims that Haitian immigrants eat dogs and cats, and his wild lies about opponents from Kamala Harris to Liz Cheney threaten to split the country and unmoor it from our American idealism and pragmatism.
The problem with consistent lying by a president is not that the lies he tells will be believed; many, if not most, of his supporters know Trump is lying and go along with it because they think it is in their interests to do so. The real danger is that Trump’s constant lying gives rise to cynicism. When nothing is believed and everything is seen simply as a position of power, the consequence is, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”
Why Weakening Institutions Is Wrong
In his hunger for power, Trump is willing to tear down institutions and norms like the Justice Department, the FBI, our universities, the military, the free press, and scientific reliability. He is right that these institutions have become captured by elite interests—how many Trump supporters teach at an Ivy League university, write for The New York Times, or work at the FBI?
I can understand the impulse to tear down an unjust system. But tearing down the system does not usually result in a more just system. Often, it hollows out the traditions and institutions that sustain common sense and leaves the country vulnerable to mob rule. As Arendt writes, “a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
The True Threat to American Democracy Isn’t Trump’s Character
By David Finkel – Steering Committee, Jewish Voice for Peace-Detroit
Viewing Donald Trump and the forces around him through the lens of 19th-century “Jacksonian democracy” invites some skeptical inquiry. We should remember, of course, that “Jacksonian democracy” itself was overtly genocidal toward Native American peoples, and not exactly “democratic” to the enslaved Black population. Admittedly, when Trump engages in his vilest tropes (such as “They’re eating the dogs” and “If I don’t win…the Jewish people will have a lot to do with it”), one can hear echoes of what we might have thought were bygone eras.
The Illusion of Anti-Elitism and Power Dynamics
The differences, however, are more salient. Trump, Vance, and those around them are not a shift away from “the elites.” The Heritage Foundation (authors of Project 2025); the massive right-wing media ecosystem around Fox News, Sinclair, etc.; the Koch Network that funds the likes of Americans for Prosperity, Moms For Liberty, and many more front groups; and billionaires Leonard Leo and Elon Musk—all these forces and the money they command are as “elite” as any so-called “cosmopolitan” elements.
Equally to the point, Andrew Jackson’s 1820’s America was not a leading global power. Yes, it aspired to the conquest of Mexico and Cuba, among other places, partly in the name of white supremacy. However, the Jacksonian movement wasn’t linked to an international network of ruling or rising authoritarian leaders with explicitly anti-democratic ideologies. Much less did it have the elective affinity that Trumpism today displays with the Christian nationalism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, assorted far-right parties in Europe, or other ethno-religious supremacist ruling forces in places from India to Israel.
In short, the fundamental threat posed to American democracy by Trumpism isn’t his boorishness, narcissism, and generally disordered behavior. It’s the forces that aspire to rule America permanently on a program that they know is unpopular—unlimited corporate power and enormous reverses of democratic and civil rights—which can only be achieved through systematic voter suppression and intimidation, as well as outright election theft when necessary.
The Safeguards of American Democracy Are Failing
That’s the far-right threat to democracy posed by today’s mutant Republican Party. But it’s important to reiterate that it’s not the only threat. The fabled “institutions” that are supposed to safeguard representative democracy in this country are themselves decaying. Tens of millions of people in our vastly unequal society, left behind by the neoliberal market-supremacist transformation of the economy in recent decades, see nothing in the hollow political debate that speaks to their needs.
The vast majority of Americans have no voice in shaping or controlling the gargantuan military budget or most of the other decisions that profoundly affect our lives. For that matter, most have very little, if any, say in their work conditions, except for the small minority who are unionized. When people are reduced to spectators rather than active participants in political life—our major parties aren’t even membership organizations!—it’s no wonder that Hannah Arendt’s warning is prescient: that the population “is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge.” To begin overcoming the malady of U.S. democracy, we need to diagnose it accurately.
