Will US democracy survive Donald Trump’s second presidency? This is not a theoretical question. It is evident that Trump is following a known playbook for turning a liberal democracy into an illiberal one. The latter is a label for a dictatorship — a regime in which decisions rest on the will of one person largely unaccountable to anybody else.
In The Spirit of Democracy, Larry Diamond of Stanford argued that a liberal democracy consists of free and fair elections, protection of the civil and human rights of all citizens equally, and a rule of law that binds all citizens equally. These then are the “rules of the game”. But the effectiveness of those rules depends on constraints on those who temporarily control the state. The most important such constraints are the judiciary, political parties, bureaucracies and the media. The question is whether these will hold, first while Trump is president and then in the longer term.
In a recent discussion in The New Republic, Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die, note that the classic process of “collective abdication” or “institutional suicide” in the face of an authoritarian takeover has already gone a long way. Trump has taken over the Republican party. His control over its electoral base has persuaded it to endorse the “big lie” that he won the 2020 election. The Supreme Court has decided that a president is immune from criminal prosecution for his “official acts”, a doctrine that the British jurist Lord Jonathan Sumption insists puts the president above the law, and so in effect more like a king than a citizen. Not least, we already see powerful individuals, such as Mark Zuckerberg, kneeling before their new ruler.