Democracy at risk

American democracy has always been at risk. But Donald Trump’s unprecented attacks may signal its destruction.

Powerful elites have always fought against the creation of inclusive and just democracies. Their goal is to protect and enhance their own social, political and economic power. But throughout United States history, it is the mobilization of an engaged citizenry that has saved our democracy from dying.

Right-wing extremists including the Ku Klux Klan, Joseph McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, and the Tea Party Movement, as well as white supremacy, militia, Alt-right and neo-Nazi groups have tried to undermine American democracy. Each time, however, progressive social movements have been able to block them from amassing the power to control and destroyour political system.

The rise of Donald Trump changed everything. In 2016 and then again in 2024, significant numbers of well-funded and prteviously mainstream Republican candidates and politicians supported right-wing extremists like Trump.

Like other right-wing authoritarians ruling countries like Hungary and Turkey, Trump used the power of his presidency to systematically undermine democratic institutions, the rule of law, free speech, universities, science, elections and the very democracy that elected him.

An important document, “Project 2025,” published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation outlines the revolutionary plan that Trump would follow.Its hundreds of specific policy recommendations focus on cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, eliminating social programs that benefit the majority of Americans, ending environmental regulations, undermining the free press, ending legal protections for immigrants, LGBTQ+, and other vulnerable groups, iundermining DEI programs (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), and more.

But most fundamentally, “Project 2025” upholds a theory of political governance where power is concentrated in a single individual - the President of the United States - without the checks and balances of executive power built into the US Constitution. Trump implemented that theory, claimingunitary power for himself.

In their important book “How Democracies Die, ” Harvard professors Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky describe how democratically elected, mainstream politicians like Trump destroy democracy by centralizing and conslidating their own power, by refusing to accept the results of fair elections, by using violence and threats to intimidate critics, and by eliminating democratic rights and institutions.

It’s an open question today whether the belief in American democracy, its checks and balances, and the millions of Americans involved in the nationwide social movement of resistance to Trump will succeed in stopping his takeover of democracy; whether ordinary citizens can again save democracy; or whether Trump will suceed in turning creating yet another nation where democracy has died.