But Trump
proved to be as autocratic as advertised. Following the playbook of
Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Viktor
Orban in Hungary, he worked to corrupt key state agencies and subvert
them for personal, partisan, and even undemocratic ends. Public
officials responsible for law enforcement, intelligence, foreign policy,
national defense, homeland security, election administration, and even
public health were pressured to deploy the machinery of government
against the president’s rivals.
Trump did more than politicize state
institutions, however. He also tried to steal an election. The only
president in U.S. history to refuse to accept defeat, Trump spent late
2020 and early 2021 pressuring Justice Department officials, governors,
state legislators, state and local election officials, and, finally,
Vice President Mike Pence, to illegally overturn the election results.
When these efforts failed, he incited a mob of his supporters to march
on the U.S. Capitol and try to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s win. This two-month campaign to illegally remain in power deserves to be called by its name: a coup attempt.
As we feared, the Republican Party failed to
constrain Trump. In a context of extreme political polarization, we
predicted, congressional Republicans were “unlikely to follow in the
footsteps of their predecessors who reined in Nixon.” Partisan loyalty
and fear of primary challenges by Trump supporters outweighed
constitutional commitments, undermining the effectiveness of the
system’s most powerful check on presidential abuse: impeachment. Trump’s
abuses exceeded Nixon’s by orders of magnitude. But only ten of 211
Republicans in the House voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the
failed coup, and only seven of 50 Republicans in the Senate voted to
convict him.
Trump proved to be as autocratic as advertised.
American democracy survived Trump—but barely.
Trump’s autocratic behavior was blunted in part by public officials who
refused to cooperate with his abuses, such as Georgia’s secretary of
state, Brad Raffensperger, or who refused to remain silent about them,
such as Alexander Vindman, a specialist on the National Security
Council. Many judges, including some appointed by Trump himself, blocked
his efforts to overturn the election.
Contingent events also played a role in defeating Trump. The COVID-19 pandemic was his “Katrina moment.” Just as President George W. Bush’s
mishandling of the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane eroded his
popularity, Trump’s disastrous response to the pandemic may have been
decisive in preventing his reelection. Even so, Trump very nearly won. A
tiny shift in the vote in Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania would have
secured his reelection, seriously imperiling democracy.
Although American democracy survived Trump’s
presidency, it was badly wounded by it. In light of Trump’s egregious
abuse of power, his attempt to steal the 2020 election and block a
peaceful transition, and ongoing state-level efforts to restrict access
to the ballot, global democracy indexes have substantially downgraded
the United States since 2016. Today, the United States’ score on Freedom
House’s Global Freedom Index is on a par with Panama and Romania, and
below Argentina, Lithuania, and Mongolia.
MOUNTING THREATS
Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election did not
end the threat to American democracy. The Republican Party has evolved
into an extremist and antidemocratic party, more like Hungary’s Fidesz
than traditional center-right parties in Europe and Canada. The
transformation began before Trump. During Barack Obama’s
presidency, leading Republicans cast Obama and the Democrats as an
existential threat and abandoned norms of restraint in favor of
constitutional hardball—the use of the letter of the law to subvert the
spirit of the law. Republicans pushed through a wave of state-level
measures aimed at restricting access to the ballot box and, most extraordinarily, they refused to allow Obama to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by Associate Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016.
Republican radicalization accelerated
under Trump, to the point where the party abandoned its commitment to
democratic rules of the game. Parties that are committed to democracy
must, at minimum, do two things: accept defeat and reject violence.
Beginning in November 2020, the Republican Party did neither. Most
Republican leaders refused to unambiguously recognize Biden’s victory,
either openly embracing Trump’s “Big Lie” or enabling it through their
silence. More than two-thirds of Republican members of the House of
Representatives backed a lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court seeking to
overturn the 2020 election, and on the evening of the January 6
insurrection, 139 of them voted against certifying the election. Leading
Republicans also refused to unambiguously reject violence. Not only did
Trump embrace extremist militias and incite the January 6 insurrection,
but congressional Republicans later blocked efforts to create an
independent commission to investigate the insurrection.
Although Trump catalyzed this
authoritarian turn, Republican extremism was fueled by powerful pressure
from below. The party’s core constituents are white and Christian, and
live in exurbs, small towns, and rural areas. Not only are white
Christians in decline as a percentage of the electorate but growing
diversity and progress toward racial equality have also undermined their
relative social status. According to a 2018 survey, nearly 60
percent of Republicans say they “feel like a stranger in their own
country.” Many Republican voters think the country of their childhood is
being taken away from them. This perceived relative loss of status has
had a radicalizing effect: a 2021 survey sponsored by the American
Enterprise Institute found that a stunning 56 percent of Republicans
agreed that the “traditional American way of life is disappearing so
fast that we may have to use force to stop it.”
The threats to American democracy are mounting.
The Republican turn toward authoritarianism has accelerated since Trump’s departure from the White House.
From top to bottom, the party embraced the lie that the 2020 election
was stolen, to the point that Republican voters now overwhelmingly
believe it is true. In much of the country, Republican politicians who
openly rejected this lie or supported an independent investigation into
the January 6 insurrection have put their political careers at risk.
The newly transformed Republican Party has launched a major assault on democratic institutions
at the state level, increasing the likelihood of a stolen election in
the future. On the heels of Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign, his
supporters have launched a campaign to replace state and local election
officials who certified the 2020 election—from secretaries of state down
to neighborhood precinct officers—with Trump loyalists who appear more
willing to overturn a Democratic victory. Republican state legislatures
across the country have also adopted measures to restrict access to the
ballot box and empower statewide officials to intervene in local
electoral processes—purging local voter rolls, permitting voter
intimidation by thuggish observer groups, moving or reducing the number
of polling sites, and potentially throwing out ballots or altering
results. It is now possible that Republican legislatures in multiple
battleground states will, under a loose interpretation of the 1887
Electoral Count Act, use unsubstantiated fraud claims to declare failed
elections in their states and send alternate slates of Republican
electors to the Electoral College, thereby contravening the popular
vote. Such constitutional hardball could result in a stolen election.
The U.S. business community,
historically a core Republican constituency, has done little to resist
the party’s authoritarian turn. Although the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
initially pledged to oppose Republicans who denied the legitimacy of the
2020 election, it later reversed course. According to The New York Times,
the Chamber of Commerce, along with major corporations such as Boeing,
Pfizer, General Motors, Ford Motor, AT&T, and United Parcel Service,
now funds lawmakers who voted to overturn the election.
The threats to American
democracy are mounting. If Trump or a like-minded Republican wins the
presidency in 2024 (with or without fraud), the new administration will
almost certainly politicize the federal bureaucracy and deploy the
machinery of government against its rivals. Having largely purged the
party leadership of politicians committed to democratic norms, the next
Republican administration could easily cross the line into what we have
called competitive authoritarianism—a system in which competitive
elections exist but incumbent abuse of state power tilts the playing
field against the opposition.
IMPEDIMENTS TO AUTOCRACY
Although the threat of democratic breakdown
in the United States is real, the likelihood of a descent into stable
autocracy, as has occurred, for example, in Hungary and Russia, remains
low. The United States possesses several obstacles to stable authoritarianism
that are not found in other backsliding cases. Take Hungary under
Orban. After winning election in 2010 on an ethnonationalist platform,
Orban and his party, Fidesz, packed the courts and the electoral bodies,
suppressed independent media, and used gerrymandering, new campaign
regulations, and other legal shenanigans to gain advantage over the
opposition. Some observers have warned that Orban’s path to authoritarianism could be replicated in the United States.
But Orban was able to consolidate power
because the opposition was weak, unpopular, and divided between
far-right and socialist parties. Moreover, with the country having
only recently emerged from totalitarian rule, Hungary’s private sector
and independent media were far weaker than their American counterparts.
Orban’s ability to quickly gain control of 90 percent of Hungarian
media—including the largest independent daily and every regional
newspaper—remains unthinkable in the United States. The path to
autocracy was even smoother in Russia, where media and opposition forces were weaker than in Hungary.
Rather than autocracy, the United States appears headed toward endemic regime instability.
By contrast, an effort to consolidate
autocracy in the United States would face several daunting obstacles.
The first is a powerful opposition. Unlike other backsliding countries,
including Hungary, India, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela, the United
States has a unified opposition in the Democratic Party. It is
well-organized, well-financed, and electorally viable (it won the
popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections).
Moreover, due to deep partisan divisions and the relatively limited
appeal of white nationalism in the United States, a Republican autocrat
would not enjoy the level of public support that has helped sustain
elected autocrats elsewhere. To the contrary, such an autocrat would
face a level of societal contestation unseen in other democratic
backsliders. As Robert Kagan has argued,
Republicans may seek to rig or overturn a close election in 2024, but
such an effort would likely trigger enormous—and probably
violent—protests across the country.
An authoritarian Republican government would
also face a much stronger and more independent media, private sector,
and civil society. Even the most committed American autocrat would not
be able to gain control of major newspapers and television networks and
effectively limit independent sources of information, as Orban and
Russian President Vladimir Putin have done in their countries.
Finally, an aspiring Republican autocrat
would face institutional constraints. Although it is increasingly
politicized, the U.S. judiciary remains far more independent and
powerful than its counterparts in other emerging autocracies. In
addition, U.S. federalism and a highly decentralized system of elections
administration provide a bulwark against centralized authoritarianism.
Decentralized power creates opportunities for electoral malfeasance in
red—and some purple—states, but it makes it more difficult to undermine
the democratic process in blue states. Thus, even if the Republicans
manage to steal the 2024 election, their ability to monopolize power
over an extended period of time will likely be limited. America may no
longer be safe for democracy, but it remains inhospitable to autocracy.
UNSTABLE FUTURE
Rather than autocracy, the United States
appears headed toward endemic regime instability. Such a scenario would
be marked by frequent constitutional crises, including contested or
stolen elections and severe conflict between presidents and Congress
(such as impeachments and executive efforts to bypass Congress), the
judiciary (such as efforts to purge or pack the courts), and state
governments (such as intense battles over voting rights and the
administration of elections). The United States would likely shift back
and forth between periods of dysfunctional democracy
and periods of competitive authoritarian rule during which incumbents
abuse state power, tolerate or encourage violent extremism, and tilt the
electoral playing field against their rivals.
In this sense, American politics
may come to resemble not Russia but its neighbor Ukraine, which has
oscillated for decades between democracy and competitive
authoritarianism, depending on which partisan forces controlled the
executive. For the foreseeable future, U.S. presidential elections will
involve not simply a choice between competing sets of policies but
rather a more fundamental choice over whether the country will be
democratic or authoritarian.
Finally, American politics will likely be
marked by heightened political violence. Extreme polarization and
intense partisan competition often generate violence, and indeed, the
United States experienced a dramatic spike in far-right violence during
Trump’s presidency. Although the United States probably isn’t headed for
a second civil war, it could well experience a rise in assassinations,
bombings, and other terrorist attacks; armed uprisings; mob attacks; and
violent street confrontations—often tolerated and even incited by
politicians. Such violence might resemble that which afflicted Spain in
the early 1930s, Northern Ireland during the Troubles, or the American
South during and after Reconstruction.
American democracy remains at risk. Although the United States probably won’t follow the path of Putin’s
Russia or even Orban’s Hungary, enduring conflict between powerful
authoritarian and democratic forces could bring debilitating—and
violent—regime instability for years to come.