To critics, Trump threatened the bedrock of American government. He didn’t.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into links between Russia and the president’s campaign could have turned out so much worse for Donald Trump. It almost seemed certain that it would. But it didn’t. The end of the Mueller investigation has now made hollow the maximalist charges of collusion against Trump and his team.
The collusion claim was an indirect—or direct—way of saying that Donald Trump was illegitimately elected. For Mueller’s team to stop short of concluding that collusion had occurred, then, was the best possible result for American democracy. Citizens should be relieved, not disappointed, when the legitimacy of election outcomes is strengthened, however much we dislike them.
Conspiracy with Russia wasn’t the only thing that commentators—both liberals and Never Trump conservatives—got wrong, though. There was another, related charge that was graver and, on its face, more implausible: that Trump would (or could) destroy American democracy. And he would do so with the help of his Russian enablers. Here, the two claims came together—that the Russians wished to end the American experiment and that Trump provided the vehicle for their ambitious designs.
This was part of a grand narrative. But what if the narrative of American democracy under mortal threat—with or without Russian help—was fundamentally flawed from the very start?
Read: Will Donald Trump destroy the presidency?
Grand narratives are appealing because they help us comprehend the incomprehensible. In this case, they helped to make sense of the endless shock of Donald Trump’s victory. The democracy-is-doomed narrative is crumbling, and rarely do you hear it anymore—at least not with the full-throated zeal that became routine throughout 2017 and 2018.
It began before that, during the campaign. As TheNew Yorker’sAdam Gopnikwrote: “Hitler’s enablers in 1933—yes, we should go there, instantly and often, not to blacken our political opponents but as a reminder that evil happens insidiously, and most often with people on the same side telling each other, Well, he’s not so bad, not as bad as they are. We can control him.”This sort of thing continued for more than two years.
On January 4,2018, despite the helpful information that America hadn’t become a dictatorship in 2017, Vox’s Matt Yglesias wrote in an article titled “2018 Is the Year That Will Decide If Trumpocracy Replaces American Democracy” that “Trump has been extremely long on demagogic bluster but rather conventional—if extremely right-wing in some respects—on policy. But… this is entirely typical. Even Adolf Hitler was dismissed by many as a buffoon.”
Preemptively suggesting that your ideological opponents won’t accept the results of elections if they lose isn’t nearly as bad as, well, not accepting the results of elections, but it is still bad. In the case of the 2018 midterm elections, it also happened to be wrong. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote: “Remember, Donald Trump claimed—falsely, of course—that millions of immigrants voted illegally in an election he won. Imagine what he’ll say if he loses, and what his supporters will do in response.” Krugman went on, suggesting that those who voted for the other party were, in fact, voting for autocracy: “If we take one path, it will offer at least a chance for political redemption, for recovering America’s democratic values. If we take the other, we’ll be on the road to autocracy, with no obvious way to get off.”
Read: America’s slide toward autocracy
Claims such as these weren’t just overblown rhetoric from pundits in the heat of the electoral moment. They came with the imprimatur of some of the country’s most respected political scientists. Harvard University’s Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die in 2018, and the book became an alarmist bible (even though the book itself is more nuanced than its enthusiasts let on). In New York,Jonathan Chait wrote, “It is hard to read this fine book without coming away terribly concerned about the possibility Trump might inflict a mortal wound on the health of the republic.”
How could so many get it wrong? Underlying these various accounts of doom is a major analytical flaw. In some sense, the flaw is so obvious that I wasn’t entirely aware of it until I started thinking about this article. If we exclude cases of military conquest or occupation, as occurred during World War II, there is no clear case of a long-standing, established democracy becoming an autocracy. Democracies backslide—it is a spectrum, after all. But democracies, or at least certain kinds of democracies, do not “die.”
Germany is a touchstone for any conversation about the fragility of democracy. But Germany, when Adolf Hitler entered politics, was a young democracy, and the particular democratic configuration known as the Weimar Republic was even younger, having been established only in 1918. Young democracies are fragile. Moreover, Germany was suffering from historical afflictions that the United States—and, for that matter, most other countries—is not likely to experience again.
