What makes an illiberal demagogue click with American voters?
That’s the billion dollar question facing supporters of democratic values after Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in last Tuesday’s election. And it’s a line of inquiry that often winds its way back to the kitchen table, with questions of inflation, healthcare, and so on.
There’s a tendency—sometimes self-conscious, sometimes disingenuous—to separate quality of life issues like the cost of groceries and healthcare from the fight to protect our democratic institutions. Many critics allege that Trump’s opponents made a mistake in continually raising the alarm about the threat he poses to democracy. As one talking head intoned during CNN’s election night coverage: “democracy is a luxury when you can’t pay the bills.”
But it’s a false binary. Democracy is a quality of life issue. Free countries are more prosperous than their unfree counterparts. Strongmen who make snap decisions put their economies at risk on an arbitrary whim. The problem isn’t that Vice President Harris and the Democrats talked too much about democracy, it’s how they talked about it. Harris’s campaign treated the importance of democracy as self-evident. They said that freedom mattered, but they never finished making the case as to why.
Which Came First: The Chicken or the Price of Eggs?
So what is the connection between the welfare of institutions and the welfare of human beings? Sometimes freedom follows from health and wealth—as in the case of Taiwan and South Korea, which shook off harsh dictatorships as their people grew richer. Sometimes the advent of democracy produces a prosperous society—see the example of the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe like Poland and the Czech Republic.
To be sure, there are some poorer democracies. But there are hardly any autocracies in which the majority of the public is well off. And the handful of dictatorships that present themselves as economic success stories deploy an array of obfuscations. China is better off today than it was five decades ago, but a closed system means stagnation is inevitable. Behind the luxury shopping mall veneer of the United Arab Emirates is the ugly fact that most people who live in the country are disenfranchised migrant workers—not Emirati citizens.
In countries like the UAE, what we see is not real wealth but hoarding by a powerful few at the expense of the many. Accountability, free elections, and the rule of law are supposed to prevent this kind of predatory behavior, arbitrary decisionmaking, and other more severe abuses.
Evidence From the Trump Experience
Dictators and their imitators often work with bad information. They hear what they want to hear and tune out the rest, often with disastrous results for their subjects. This was one of the clearest ways in which Donald Trump showed his authoritarian colors as president.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump frequently sidestepped his advisors, bucking an important check on the executive’s decisionmaking power. There’s not a whole lot of difference between Trump’s pontificating about hydroxychloroquine and Belarusian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko’s prescription of hockey and vodka as coronavirus antidotes. President Trump’s baseless, stream of consciousness statements about the pandemic drove interest in pseudoscientific remedies and depressed vaccine uptake. That proved to be a lethal combination for thousands of Americans.
It’s not just COVID. As president-elect and soon again as commander-in-chief, Trump’s tweets on a whole menu of real world issues end up yielding tangible consequences. They can swing the stock market or endanger American troops. During his first term, Trump operated without any safeguards in this arena. Now, with Elon Musk lurking in the background of calls with world leaders, the next president will have an active enabler close at hand. The founders failed to impose any constitutional limits on the president’s ability to shitpost, and Donald Trump is exploiting their lack of foresight.
Don’t Throw in the Towel
Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election fair and square. It’s important for his opponents to take stock of how we got here. There will be tough conversations about President Biden’s decision to run for the White House again, what makes for a compelling candidate, and how the Democrats failed to present a case for something rather than against someone.
But this exercise in self-reflection can’t mean indulging in self-flagellation. The Democrats lost an election—likely a historically significant one. Nevertheless, when all of the ballots are counted, Trump will likely emerge with either the slimmest of popular vote majorities or even a mere plurality. Democratic candidates beat their MAGA competitors in swing-state senate races where Kamala Harris lost. All of that amounts to a completely legitimate win for Trump, but it hardly signals overwhelming support for his program or brutish style. No one should be running to abandon their values.
Trump’s flirtation with authoritarianism—his penchant for disinformation, his brazen threats against political rivals, the fact that he instigated an insurrection and tried to overturn the results of the last election—would all merit vocal condemnation on moral grounds whether he achieved a landslide or a narrow victory. But there’s a practical side to the case for democracy as well, and by not telling this story, Democrats (and democrats) allowed Trump and his enablers to frame democracy as a hobby for civics nerds rather than something with real-life consequences in everything from the economy to public health and national security.
This isn’t the be-all and end-all to cracking Trump’s appeal with American voters, but it’s a start. And we in America are in deep trouble so long as one party is nakedly hostile to democracy and the other is incapable of making a case for it.
Evan Gottesman is chief of staff at the Renew Democracy Initiative.
