One risk of electoral systems is that an opponent of democracy can come into office through election. In history elections have indeed served as a path to power for autocrats and dictators. While Adolf Hitler is the best-known case of a dictator who came to power through an election, many others have more recently done the same (Putin, Miloševic, Erodagan).
Yet a candidate for the presidency who openly stated that he does not plan on leaving office has now been elected in the United States. After attempting a coup in 2019 and 2020, then being convicted of a felony tilting his previous election in his favor, voters in the United States elected Donald Trump for a second term to be their president. Despite his requests during the 2020 campaign cycle to be elected for “12 more years” and “for life,” voters invited him back into a position of power. Despite his use of the claim that the nation was in a state of emergency for his own ends in his first term, voters have given him the levers of power of the nation-state once again. Despite his tax cuts and other policies benefitting the wealthy much more than the general populace, voters wanted more of the same.
The election of an autocrat-wannabe to office was a long time in the making, and is an outcome of the slow erosion of democratic mechanisms over many decades in the United States. The election of a friend to white supremacists and misogynists is no surprise to those who know the past few decades of U.S. history, despite the successes of diversity efforts and social movements like the #MeToo movement.
Trump practices many tactics and strategies that are common to autocrats and dictators-in-the-making. Corrupting elections and spreading disinformation. Strengthening executive power and politicizing independent political bodies. Scapegoating the vulnerable and stoking violence. His approach to political power is straight out of the authoritarian’s playbook.
Resistance to Trump administration efforts to stay in power despite constitutional limits on U.S. presidents to two terms will certainly emerge within his own administration, as it did during his first administration. Resistance to his efforts to destroy the constitutional balance of powers to consolidate his own power can be strengthened in many ways.
During the next few months leading up to Trump taking office and the four years (or more) of his administration, I will introduce some resources for those who wish to continue to support the electoral democracy model of democratic governance and analysis of developments as they unfold. Many posts in past years on this blog will be useful for thinking about how to protect democratic governance from an international perspective, and also from the viewpoint of local democracies at other scales besides the nation-state.
Please feel free to click on the “Defend Democracy” at the top section on “Series” on the left column of the home page if you are interested in learning more about how democratic modes of power relations have been defended in the past in the United States and other regions. See also the series on “Misnaming Democracy” if you are interested in places and times where what looked like democratic practice was not distributing power widely and equally to voters and others. And the series on “Other Democracies” will introduce you to social relations (Mutual Aid, Abolition, Social Movements, etc.) and mechanisms (Mass Assemblies, Listening, etc.) that are democratic in nature, and also show you ways that groups often systematically excluded from electoral democracies (Indigenous communities, slum dwellers, etc.) have practiced democratic governance.
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