Was Trump’s Win a Victory or a Defeat for Democracy?

In December 2023, Time previewed 2024 as “The Ultimate Election Year.” It counted programmed elections in “at least 64 countries (plus the European Union).” In the final count, there were more than 64, including two that earned serious headlines.

Although his official deadline for a general election was January 2025, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak brought the date forward for a general election by a full six months. Similarly, French President Emmanuel Macron, in a moment of panic following a disastrous round of European parliamentary elections, called a snap general election in June. The results were equally disastrous for both Sunak’s and Macron’s fragile power base.

A number of other elections made headlines without producing significant surprises. Russia re-elected President Vladimir Putin with a very comfortable majority, even if few think of Russia as a model of democracy. Mexico elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who also happens to be Jewish, demonstrating a significant cultural shift in Mexico’s electoral tradition. Many think of that as a win for democracy.

But the “big” election everyone was waiting for in 2024 took place this week in the 50 United States (disunited during presidential elections for the sake of counting “electoral votes”). This contest was trumpeted (no pun intended) as the litmus test for the health of US democracy. Democrats consistently claimed that, if elected, former President Donald Trump would abolish democracy. Now that he has handily won the electoral vote and possibly the popular vote as well, there is little likelihood that Trump will call into question the democratic processes that got him elected, now for the second time.

We might, therefore, assume that nearly all observers are ready to take as a sign of the vibrancy of democracy the fact that most of these elections, including Trump’s, appear to have been conducted in a peaceful, orderly manner. Alas, some experts and pollsters persist in promoting the average citizen’s belief that the merit of democracy seems to be flagging.

In an article published by the Journal of Democracy in 2015, Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, began by stating bluntly: “Democracy has been in a global recession for most of the last decade.” Two years later, in 2017, the Pew Research Center Democracy Report issued this dire warning: “Scholars have documented a global ‘democratic recession,’ and some now warn that even long-established ‘consolidated’ democracies could lose their commitment to freedom and slip toward more authoritarian politics.”

In June 2023, Financial Times published a two-part piece, “Martin Wolf on saving democratic capitalism: the ‘democratic recession.’”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Democratic recession:

A concept borrowed from economics by political analysts to make their complaints about the difficulty of governing sound more scientific.

Contextual note

One could make the paradoxical case that what the experts mean by “democratic regression” is a form of democratic progression. Those who use the term present it as signifying a loss of faith in democratic processes. But who is guilty of this loss of faith? In their view it is not the leaders, the parties and marketing experts who now play a dominant role in elections. No, they are innocent. The guilty party is none other than… the demos. It’s the people, the citizens of democracy, who enjoy the right to vote. They appear to be using a form of critical thinking to assess the democratic failure of an electoral system that appears, in the political results it produces, either to ignore or betray the average citizen’s interests. Instead, what they see corresponds troublingly to the very concept Wolf invokes: not democracy, but “democratic capitalism.”

To be fair to Wolf, he asserts that reversing the trend he calls democratic recession and which he associates with Trump-style populist movements, requires governments to address underlying economic issues by creating more inclusive economic policies that benefit broader populations rather than just the elite.

But, as any of the classic capitalist theoreticians might have reminded him, capitalism is, by design, a system that concentrates economic power in an elite. As the economic elite consolidates its wealth, it systemically distributes it not to the public, but to a political elite that not only shares its values but allows that same economic elite to dictate its policies. All lucid populists, right and left, complain that politicians respond not to the electors but to the “donor class.”

Economic power secretes political power, embraces it and effectively controls it. If the vote is the only concrete and extremely constrained tool of expression the people possess, political campaigns and the corporate-controlled media constitute the shared tools of the elite. The power this represents is carefully and expertly managed.

The logic behind such a system of “power-sharing” is famously enshrined in the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that “money is speech.” Voting serves one simple purpose: to elect the individual members of the political elite which is destined to merge with the economic elite. Votes change the names on the governing roster. Money serves to get things done. The people losing faith in democracy are not mistaken when they feel they’re treated as paying spectators of a pre-scripted show.

Historical note

The Pew study appeared in 2017 following two dramatic historical events a year earlier. The Brexit vote in the UK took place in June 2016. That November, Trump shocked a world expecting Hillary Clinton, a bona fide member of the political elite, to waltz into the White House. The study offered the following analysis: “Roughly a quarter of people (median of 23%) across the 38 countries surveyed are committed democrats. About twice as many (median of 47%) are less-committed democrats. Relatively few (13%) are nondemocratic. A small share (8%) does not endorse any of these forms of governance.”

Rather than being alarmed, a careful reader might have concluded that 70% (23 + 47%) of more or less committed democrats sounds reassuring. But this kind of statistical analysis deliberately ignores the most fundamental and seemingly obvious reality: that whatever wavering exists concerning a population’s faith in democracy is likely to be proportional to the perception that the established democratic systems those citizens experience do not function democratically. Instead of losing faith, they are gaining in lucidity.

No one can pretend that Trump is a political thinker and even less a theoretician of democracy. The democratic process is a game he has learned to play. He was bold enough to invent his own rules, a bit like the American Basketball Association (ABA) when it shook up the sports world by rivaling the established National Basketball Association (NBA) and inventing the three-point shot before the startup league was constrained to disappear within the folds of the NBA, which enthusiastically adopted the innovation. Similarly, Trump’s rules appear to have put the radically demographic orientation of the Democratic party’s rulebook out of commission.

Trump’s political behavior reflects the fact that he’s an “artist” of the deal, a businessman combined with an entertainer. But how democratic was the procedure that put Kamala Harris on the ballot as the only viable alternative honest US citizens might vote for? She was selected after a primary process from which all serious competitors were excluded. She was pegged to win following the traditional demographic analysis of minority voter blocs the Democratic National Committee counted on to vote in lockstep.

Reviewing the philosophical history of the idea of democracy in an article published earlier this week, our collaborator Anton Schauble reminded us that “it is no longer a secret that the US is not a democracy, but an oligarchy.” A Princeton University study in 2014 provided statistical proof of that by examining the legislation Congress passed and comparing how well it reflected the interests of the elite as opposed to the stated preferences of the people. Schauble points out that instead of thinking of Trump as a democratic outlier, we should realize that “he is an oligarch from America’s oligarchy… But oligarchies like America produce Donald Trumps like cherry trees produce cherries.”

The journal Southern Living tells us that “around a thousand different types of cherries grow in the U.S.” and some are tastier than others. Harris and the Democratic party clearly left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths. Trump may be a crass vulgarian, but no one can deny he offers something with a strong taste.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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