Donald Trump’s re-election as President of the United States (US) has reignited debate on the key questions of our times. The global rise of right-wing populists, who gain power via the ballot box but have limited regard for democratic norms, suggests that beyond its minimalist criterion i.e. citizens freely electing governments, democracy is in trouble. Phrases like illiberal democracy, electoral autocracy, and democratic recession have entered the lexicon to explain this phenomenon. Until Trump’s victory, 2024, a year when nearly 40% of the world population headed to the ballot box, was being billed as the year of some democratic respite. Trump’s victory, however, has raised the stakes. It serves as a reminder of just how disenchanted the majority is with the status quo and the credibility of democratic institutions of representative institutions to be truly representative. A robust resilient defense of democracy must confront this reality.
Trump rode to power whilst being remarkably forthright in his disregard for democratic norms, challenging the legitimacy of the electoral process, promising to persecute his “enemies from within” while overseeing the largest deportation program in American history, mixing in along the way large doses of racism and misogyny. It is well established in democratic theory that democratic erosion occurs when institutional manipulation trenches a particular political actor or party in power. Trump’s electoral rhetoric and the tenor of his early appointments, suggested that democratic erosion is inevitable. Writing in the New York Times weeks before the election, Steven Levitsky and David Ziblat, authors of How Democracy Diesnoted that Trump was one of the most authoritarian candidates running for national office since World War II. Yet he won even the popular vote. This has opened the floodgates of commentary quickly to declare that citizens don’t care. They are willing collaborators in this moment of democratic crisis. It is as though economic anxiety combined with racism and misogyny of the masses have come together to defeat the elite commitment to democracy.
But is there a different interpretation? The American voters, like many others across the globe, are calling to question the credibility and legitimacy of the elite guardians of democratic institutions. Could this be the moment, therefore, of “dissatisfied democracy” rather than democratic recession?
It is almost trite to point out, given how self-evident it is, that the working classes abandoned the Democratic party because the nexus of power and capital within which it is entrenched has alienated it from its voter base. In the words of one analyst, democrats approach working classes like “missionaries or anthropologists” whom they want to make “like us”. Of course, the profound irony is that Trump with Elon Musk in tow is likely to deepen the oligarchic hold on democracy. It is bewildering that the Republican party willingly became captive to Trump, even as his politics became more radicalised.
This irony notwithstanding, Trump, like his fellow populists, has successfully appropriated the democratic project. A pre-election poll by the Pew Research Center, for instance, showed sharp divergences in the views of Kamala Harris supporters and Trump supporters on the electoral process. Importantly, these have widened since 2020. Ninety per cent of Harris supporters were confident that the election will be run smoothly while only 57% of Trump supporters believe so. All this played out in the elections. A cnn Exit poll shows that amongst voters who viewed American democracy under threat, a significant majority voted for Trump. For Trump’s voters, his questioning of the electoral process is a “democratic corrective”. This is why when Trump claimed, “I am not the fascist, they (who scorn us) are”, it resonated.
Citizens, on this reading, are not rejecting democracy. They are rejecting its forms of governance and the elites who speak in its name. While this does entail a willingness to tolerate some form of autocracy, and worse, participate in demonizing the “other”, it is likely that this tolerance would weaken if there is a credible alternative. This is why the defense of democracy cannot come from a morality play that demonises the populist as the fascist, the petty tyrant. No doubt egregious, anti-democratic acts must be called out loudly and actively resisted. But for this resistance to be credible, it must be accompanied by an alternative political imagination. This is the democratic lesson that Trump’s re-election offers the world.
The contrast with India is instructive. In the 2024 general elections, the pushback to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s authoritarian excesses came from the masses, at the intersection of class and caste. Economic anxiety and a recognition that democratic red lines had been crossed were the catalyst. However, this was a rebuke to the BJP rather than an open embrace of an alternative offered by the Opposition. This is why, despite the newly acquired spring in their steps, parties continue to struggle with breaking the BJP dominance even in state elections that seemed a done deal in June.
Both democracies have delivered a clear message. Something is broken. But it is not a call to abandon democracy. For democracy’s defenders, Trump’s re-election ought to serve as a catalyst for a deeper reckoning to work toward a more responsive and accountable democracy.
Yamini Aiyar is a visiting senior fellow at Brown University. The views expressed are personal
