Why don’t Americans value their democracy more?
What is the American future: authoritarian populism or “Golden Rule” representative democracy?
As the US stands on the cliff’s edge of yet another bitterly toxic presidential election, I am puzzling over the question: “Why don’t Americans value their representative democracy more?”
If US democracy further decays after this election, it won’t be due to a single event like a replay of the January 6 Capitol riot, or a single individual like Donald Trump. The history of democratic declines, whether in Weimar Germany or modern-day Hungary, Turkey, China, Israel and Russia, shows that the onset of authoritarian post-democracy is not necessarily launched by one event, like a military coup. It often occurs in stages of decay, with different actors advancing each stage.
In the US, it would likely include some chief elections officials and state attorneys general and legislators in key battleground states, willing to bend the election rules beyond recognition (like in Georgia this year). And the complicity of right-wing judges, including the increasingly extreme US Supreme Court willing to tip the scales of justice in a contested state, all of them flouting the unwritten yet crucial democratic norms and traditions that undergird the institutions of our representative governance.
It would also likely involve a rabidly motivated plurality of the US population who are the most dissatisfied, polarized yet the best organized – using the historically new communication technologies of digital media to find each other, connect, radicalize and strategize -- and who are willing to advance their anti-democratic goals through militant actions.
In short, if US democracy degrades further it’s because a critical mass of people no longer value democracy enough to defend it or to vote against those who threatened it. Even if Kamala Harris wins, it’s perplexingly disturbing that the election is even this close. And that so many people are willing to look passed Trump’s many violent threats against opposition leaders, and against longstanding democratic customs and constitutional foundations. These are the hallmarks of this Twilight Zone moment in history, as we wait to see if the heart and soul of America, the very Spirit of 1776, is going to unravel further.
The reasons for our democratic malaise
So why don’t more Americans care very much about their representative democracy? Why don’t they value it and let those values inform their political allegiances, and guide them to fulfill their indispensable democratic role? As a political reformer in the trenches for over three decades, I have found it a challenge to get the many dissatisfied Americans to pay attention to the rules, processes and institutions that determine the quality of our democracy or the vibrancy of our political representation. And it’s not because these matters are “too complicated.” Heck, the rules for professional football, baseball and basketball are far more complicated than the various rules and institutions of our democracy, yet large numbers of Americans master those.
New America’s Mark Schmitt has framed this juncture in a particularly helpful way. He stresses the importance of treating our representative democracy “as a thing we actively do—a way to create our world together, rather than a set of fixed rules and institutions.” So why aren't more Americans willing to roll up their sleeves and "actively do" democracy? Here are a few reasons that seem relevant.
1. The daily struggle for survival. For many people, the toil of their economic lives seems to not only consume their energy but it enmeshes them in daily complexities that make it difficult for them to see a direct connection between their own lives and politics. Without a sense of its connective sinews, the body politic withers.
Also, with so many ways today to entertain oneself and distract from these daily struggles through cable TV, digital media and video games, democracy has a hard time competing for people’s attention. The panopticon of media saturation has contributed to the information bubbles that people gravitate to. If democracy must be a thing that we “actively do,” people run out of time with their other pursuits, and certainly don’t make time for participation, especially deeper participation beyond voting.
2. Americans don’t like government. Another reason, somewhat related to the first, is that many Americans don’t like government. For many people, they really don't see what they get from it (recall the town halls during the early Obama years in which some seniors loudly complained “keep your government hands off my Medicare”). While this transactional perspective is somewhat understandable, the extreme disaffection of Americans in this regard is way more pronounced than in many other advanced capitalist democracies, to the point of being blindly misguided. Many of the loudest complainers would be in really bad shape without certain government forms of assistance, such as Social Security, which is the largest and most successful anti-poverty program in history, health care, the building of roads and other infrastructure, education, energy reliability, public safety, defense, the list is fairly endless. Yet many American’s can’t seem to acknowledge this in the midst of their own existential struggles.
And so it follows: if someone doesn’t value government, they are not going to value the rules that select their government. Instead they just try to ignore it all. Ironically, as the Republicans undermine government and make it look inept, it feeds the dislike for government which results in a nice little GOP merry-go-round – undermine government, then bash government, then win votes from those who don’t like government. It’s a lot harder to solve problems than manipulate and exploit them. And it’s a lot easier to win elections by condemning government.
For some time now, political opportunists of all stripes have been scapegoating government to win elections, including some Democrats. Bill Clinton declared in his 1995 State of the Union Address that the “era of big government is over” and used the scapegoating of welfare mothers and black leaders Sister Souljah and Jesse Jackson as political stepping-stones. Once Clinton did that, and with the Newt Gingrich-led GOP already on the attack, there was no longer any major political force defending the role of government or promoting a vision of government as a potential force for good.
Obama initially tried to reassert the role of government in his ambitious health care plan, as well as in his administration’s bailout of banks, the financial industry, and auto companies following the economic collapse of 2008. But in the face of a furious counterattack by conservatives, Obama backpedaled. By the time of his 2012 reelection, with his health care plan under all-out assault, he had dropped most mentions of the salutary benefits of good government.
3. Human attraction to authoritarian leaders. But there’s another, more deeply psychological component to this. Why would so many people resonate to a political leader like Donald Trump, who shows such authoritarian tendencies and is the polar opposite of “pro-democracy”? The US – and many other nations – has long struggled between the poles of tribal authoritarianism -- which historically speaking was humanity’s default governance -- and something that looks like representative democracy. At its core, tribal authoritarianism has a quality to it in which impatient people just want to remove all obstacles to gaining what they want for themselves and their kin. If a strongman can accomplish the goal, the ends justifies the means. There is little patience or respect today for democratic process, consensus-building or strumming the strings of “E Pluribus Unum.” Trump unfortunately reflects a mindset that is shared by many Americans, including many former voters of Obama which have been called "Trump Democrats." These people want results, not process. And they want it for themselves and don’t seem to care a whole lot about the fate of others.
So the effectiveness of government is constantly battling against a denial that the process whereby you reach that effectiveness is important, if the goal is for more people and communities to have the ability to achieve “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
4. Racialized tribalism. Drilling deeper into that fatal attraction to authoritarianism, I believe there’s an element of racial alienation involved as well. With the political parties and key leaders now so politically polarized and rhetorically toxic, this raises a question of whether or not American voters themselves are also polarized into partisan camps. The answer, perplexingly, is both “yes and no.”
According to the American National Election Studies (ANES), a series of public opinion polls taken over the last seven decades by the University of Michigan, voters’ attitudes on a range of issues and topics have stayed remarkably consistent -- except in two important areas.
The first is over the trustworthiness and confidence in government, with more Americans today less trusting and consequently opposed to “big government” spending and higher taxes; and the second is over government assistance to African-Americans, minorities and immigrants, with more Americans today opposed to such policies than previously. And in the dominant public mindset these two are closely fused – “We don’t want big government wasting any of our tax dollars on those programs or on those people.”
One analysis of eight ANES surveys across nearly three decades (1992–2020), found that “white Americans’ beliefs about the trustworthiness of the federal government have become linked with their racial attitudes…racial prejudice, measured in terms of anti-Black stereotypes, informs white Americans’ beliefs about the trustworthiness of the federal government.” The study found that “the racialization of government trust…can introduce serious obstacles in the ability of government to enforce rules and regulations meant to sustain the general welfare, including the democratic process itself.”
These two axes of big government and race also are closely linked to issues of crime, public safety, immigration, schools and gun control.
If government = bad, then does democracy = useless?
For many Americans, so enmeshed in their own individual lives, their natural tribalism is fed by their innately human “fear of death,” which results in many people grabbing what they can for themselves, their families and their extended communities. Many people see themselves as nobly trying to solidify their own place in the world in the face of what they see as a relentless attack against them, which for some becomes sublimated as something the government is doing to them (despite the obvious examples of the many good things that government actually does or facilitates).
So the question of “why don’t more Americans care very much about their democracy?” becomes more one of why aren’t more Americans willing to agree to what I have long called the Golden Rule of Representation: "Give unto others the representation you would have them give unto you.” Fair and democratic representation is the very foundation of mass human aspiration, the vehicle through which “life, liberty and prosperity” can be realized. Yet in many ways US democracy has been failing that test. Instead, our shaky political system is plagued by a “winner take all” mentality in which each side tries to win all the representation, and deny representation to the other side. Some leaders and their followers even try to deny participation, in the form of obstructed voter registration, for those perceived as being from “the other side.”
Political reformers like myself are always butting up against these attitudes, biases and prejudices. Though I have found that these qualities are more fierce and stubborn in the US than in other countries. In my travels and studies of many EU member states, I find there to be much more respect for, and expectations for, representative democracy and what government could and should deliver to its citizens, than in the US. In Europe (with perhaps a qualifier of in western and central Europe more than in eastern), where you have multiparty democracy founded on the bedrock of proportional representation, robust public financing of campaigns, free media time for parties, citizens assemblies, greater levels of civic literacy* and other thoughtful pro-democracy design features, the government does far more to provide or facilitate the quality-of-life services that many Americans never obtain for their own lives. Despite the myth of overtaxed Europeans, those French, Germans and Dutch etc. actually get more for their taxes than Americans do. I remember being in Stockholm and meeting an American who lived there with his Swedish wife, and he told me, “If Americans knew what Swedes received for their taxes, we would probably riot.”
Maybe some Americans would, but I’m not sure all would. There is something about many American’s deeper character traits – dissatisfied and angry, tribal and bitter, resentful of other’s gains, enamored of authoritarian populists, lacking in empathy for outsiders, and armed to the teeth – that seems to "trump" all. While there has always been a tension between the Haves vs the Have Nots, a new element of unrest has been added, based on a growing awareness that inequality and economic unfairness is not the natural order of things. Instead it is caused by defective institutions and bad policies. America has a lot of these, if the goal is to create “liberty and justice for all.” And yet that sentiment does not seem to transform into one that is ready for fundamental change in our antiquated, 18th-century-based political institutions. Instead, that sentiment is running down the dark rabbit hole of authoritarian populism. Alienation leads to objectification which leads to Fox News and Facebook digital hideouts, and other online meetups of misinformation and incitement.
What we have in common
What the historical human experience shows is that, while democracy can be noisy and messy, and can sometimes result in confusion and inefficiency, if implemented with the right institutions democracy is capable of fostering remarkable things. While democracy is not a guarantee of prosperity, the most prosperous societies all have been democracies. China and Russia have a long way to go before the wealth of their people catches up to the US, Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia or Canada. In part that’s because representative democracy confers the advantage of popular legitimacy to a government, which in turn makes it the best partner for the animal spirits of capitalism that can be harnessed by social agreements and regulations to foster a broadly-shared prosperity.
Only representative democracy allows the “genius of millions” to flower, in both the business and political realms, even as it harnesses that economic potential for the good of all. Those who see China’s “consultative dictatorship” as a new political model that is challenging the primacy of western-style representative democracy are quite wrong. No one is trying to sneak across the border to get into China or Russia as a way to better their economic and political lives. That fact alone is telling.
Certainly, some national democracies function better than others, in part because they use different political practices and institutions. The details of specific institutions and practices are important, since in a true democracy the political system must rule over the economic, not the other way around. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s “python democracy,” which strangles the very institutions that give democracy life, or Donald Trump’s “mob boss democracy” which demands loyalty to The One while bullying the institutions into submission, are not an innovation on democracy. They are just a return to the flawed human default of authoritarianism and tribalism, which is where we began and evolved away from starting in ancient Athens, the early Roman Republic, Enlightenment Europe, and in young America in 1789, which launched a centuries long era of democratic flourishing.
I do not believe that this democratic flourishing is over, but the pace forward is not guaranteed. In a “back to the future” retrenchment, we could well return to a new era of authoritarian post-democracy, especially if we don’t nurture and continue to perfect the Golden Rule: “Give unto others the representation and democracy you would have them give unto you.”
Some good points however Obama bailing the banks not Main Street was a primary reason for Counties all over the Midwest flipping from Obama to Trump. Please don’t t give Obama a free pass.
great stuff! Knowing these uniquely American traits, what should pro-democracy advocates do to navigate this sometimes maddening american political environment?