The end of US democracy

I’ve held off posting this in the hope of coming up with some kind of positive response, but I haven’t got one.

When I wrote back in November 2024 that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompi there was still plenty of room for people to disagree. But (with the exception of an announced state of emergency) it’s turned out far worse than I thought possible.

Opposition politicians and judges have been arrested for doing their jobs, and many more have been threatened. The limited resistance of the courts has been effectively halted by the Supreme Court’s decision ending nationwide injunctions. University leaders have been forced to comply or quit. The press has been cowed into submission by the threat of litigation or harm to corporate owners. Political assassinations are laughed about and will soon become routine. With the use of troops to suppress peaceful protests, and the open support of Trump and his followers, more deaths are inevitable, quite possibly on a scale not seen since the Civil War.

The idea that this process might be stopped by a free and fair election in 2026 or 2028 is absurdly optimistic. Unless age catches up with him, Trump will appoint himself as President for life, just as Xi and Putin have done.

None of this is, or at least ought to be, news. Yet the political implications are still being discussed in the familiar terms of US party politics: swing voters, the centre ground, mobilisation versus moderation, rehashes of the 2024 election and so on. Having given up hope, I have no interest in these debates. Instead, I want to consider the implications for the idea of democracy.

The starting point is the observation that around half of all US voters at the last three elections have supported a corrupt, incompetent, criminal racist and rapist, while another third or more of US citizens have failed to vote at all. And Trump’s support has not been diminished to any significant extent (if at all) by his actions since returning to power.

Any claims that might be made to exonerate Trump’s voters or mitigate the crime they have committed don’t stand up to scrutiny. The US did not face any kind of crisis that might justify such an extreme outcome (as, for example, Germany did in 1933). Unemployment was at historically low levels. The short-lived inflation resulting from the pandemic was well below the rates of the late 20th century, crime was far below those rates. And so on. The only real driving factor was the resentment and hatred felt by Trump’s voters for large groups of their compatriots.

One part of this is fear of immigrants, particularly but not exclusively, asylum seekers and other undocumented immigrants. But this fear has long been a winning issue for the political right, in many countries including Australia. It has not produced anything like the turn to dictatorship we have now seen in the US.

In this context what matters is not the marginal groups of swinging voters who have absorbed so much attention: the “left behind”, the “manosphere” and so on. It’s the fact that comfortably off, self-described “conservative”, white suburbanites, historically the core of the Republican base, have overwhelmingly voted for, and welcomed, the end of American democracy.

This is something that, as far as I can tell, is unprecedented in the history of modern democracy, and threatens the basic assumptions on which democracy is built. While the last 200 years of modern (partial or complete) democracy have seen plenty of demagoguery, authoritarian populism and so on, these have invariably been temporary eruptions rejected, relatively quickly, by an enduring democratic majority. The idea that a party that has been part of the constitutional fabric of a major democracy for more than 150 years, would abandon democracy and keep the support of its voters was inconceivable. That’s why so many have refused to admit it, even to themselves.

Nothing lasts forever, but there is no obvious way back from dictatorship for the US. Viewed in retrospect, the the Republican party was a deadly threat to US democracy from the moment of Trump’s nomination in 2016 and certainly after the 2021 insurrection.

With the benefit of hindsight, Biden might have declared a state of emergency immediately after the insurrection, arrested Trump, and expelled all the congressional Republicans who had voted to overturn the election. But this would itself have represented an admission that democratic norms had failed. It was far more comfortable to suppose that Trump had been an aberration and that those norms would prevail as they had done at previous moments of crisis. That is no longer possible.

As I siad, I’ve held off posting this in the hope of coming up with some kind of positive response, but I haven’t got one. The best I can put forward is that the US, founded on slavery, has never been able to escape its original sin, and is unique in that respect. Every country has its original sin and a dominant group with its racist core. But only in the US (so far) has that core secured unqualified majority support. The downfall of American democracy should serve as a warning. For conservative parties, flirting with fascism is a deal with the devil that must be avoided. For the left, the nostalgic appeal of the “white working class” (implicitly male and mostly old) should not tempt us into pandering to racist and misogynist reaction.

I don’t know whether that will be enough to save us. At least in Australia, Trumpism is political poison. But until we understand that Trumpism is not an aberration but the course Americans have chosen, we will not be able to free ourselves from our past allegiance to an idea which is now an illusion.