I WATCHED THE INAUGURATION of Donald Trump as president of the United States on a large screen in a lecture hall in Cambridge, England. The room was full of international students, wrapped up against the cold – public rooms in Cambridge are not always well heated and there were as many people in coats and scarves inside the hall as there were on the podium in Washington, DC. But the atmosphere among the students was not chilly. Many were laughing and joking. The mood felt quite festive, like at any public funeral.
When Trump began to speak, the laughing soon stopped. Up on the big screen, against a backdrop of pillars and draped American flags, he looked forbidding and strange. We were scared. Trump’s barking delivery and his crudely effective hand gestures – slicing the thin air with his stubby fingers, raising a clenched fist at the climax of his address – had many of us thinking the same thing: this is what the cartoon version of fascism looks like. The resemblance to a scene in a Batman movie – the Joker addressing the cowed citizens of Gotham – was so strong it seemed like a cliché. That doesn’t make it the wrong analogy. Clichés are where the truth goes to die.
The speech Trump gave was shocking. He used apocalyptic turns of phrase that echoed the wild, angry fringes of democratic politics where democracy can start to turn into its opposite. He bemoaned ‘the rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation … the crime and gangs and drugs’. In calling for a rebirth of national pride, he reminded his audience that ‘we all bleed the same red blood of patriots’. It sounded like a thinly veiled threat. Above all, he cast doubt on the basic idea of representative government, which is that the citizens entrust elected politicians to take decisions on their behalf. Trump lambasted professional politicians for having betrayed the American people and forfeited their trust:
For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.
Washington flourished – but the people did not share its wealth.
Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.2
He insisted that his election marked the moment when power passed not just from president to president or from party to party, but from Washington, DC back to the people. Was he going to mobilise popular anger against any professionals who now stood in his way? Who would be able to stop him? When he had finished speaking, he was greeted in our lecture hall back in Cambridge by a stunned silence. We weren’t the only ones taken aback. Trump’s predecessor but one in the presidency, George W. Bush, was heard to mutter as he left the stage: ‘That was some weird shit.’
Then, because we live in an age when everything that’s been consumed can be instantly re-consumed, we decided to watch it again. Second time around was different. I found the speech less shocking, once I knew what was coming. I felt that I had overreacted. Just because Trump said all these things didn’t make them true. His fearsome talk was at odds with the basic civility of the scene. Wouldn’t a country that was as fractured as he said have found it hard to sit politely through his inauguration? It was also at odds with what I knew about America. It is not a broken society, certainly not by any historical standards.
Notwithstanding some recent blips, violence is in overall decline. Prosperity is rising, though it remains very unequally distributed. If people had really believed what Trump said, would they have voted for him? That would have been a very brave act, given the risks of total civil breakdown. Maybe they voted for him because they didn’t really believe him?
It took me about fifteen minutes to acclimatise to the idea that this rhetoric was the new normal. Trump’s speechwriters, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, had put no words in his mouth that were explicitly anti-democratic. It was a populist speech, but populism does not oppose democracy. Rather, it tries to reclaim it from the elites who have betrayed it. Nothing Trump said disputed the fundamental premise of representative democracy, which is that at the allotted time the people get to say when they have had enough of the politicians who have been making decisions for them. Trump was echoing what those who voted for him clearly believed: enough was enough.
Watching the speech over again, I found myself focusing less on Trump and more on the people arrayed alongside him. Melania Trump looked alarmed to be on the stage with her husband. President Obama merely looked uncomfortable. Hillary Clinton, off to the side, looked dazed. The joint chiefs were stony-faced and stoical. The truth is that there is little Trump could have said after taking the oath of office that would have posed a direct threat to American democracy. These were just words. What matters in politics is when words become deeds. The only people with the power to end American democracy on 20 January 2017 were the ones sitting beside him. And they were doing nothing.
How might it have been different? The minimal definition of democracy says simply that the losers of an election accept that they have lost. They hand over power without resort to violence. In other words, they grin and bear it. If that happens once, you have the makings of a democracy. If it happens twice, you have a democracy that’s built to last. In America, it has happened fifty-seven times that the losers in a presidential election have accepted the result, though occasionally it has been touch and go (notably in the much-disputed 1876 election and in 2000, when the loser of the popular vote, as with Trump, went on to win the presidency). On twenty-one occasions the US has seen a peaceful transfer of power from one party to another. Only once, in 1861, has American democracy failed this test – when a group of Southern states could not endure the idea of Abraham Lincoln as their legitimate president, and fought against it for four years.
To put it another way: democracy is civil war without the fighting.3 Failure comes when proxy battles turn into real ones. The biggest single danger to American democracy following Trump’s victory was if either President Obama or Hillary Clinton had refused to accept the result. Clinton won the popular vote by a large margin – 2.9 million votes, more than any defeated candidate in US history – and she ended up the loser thanks to the archaic rules of the Electoral College. On the night of the election, Clinton was having difficulty accepting that she had been beaten, as defeated candidates often do. Obama called her to insist that she acknowledge the outcome as soon as possible. The future of American democracy depended on it.
In that respect, a more significant speech than Trump’s inaugural was the one Obama gave on the lawn of the White House on 9 November, the day after the election. He had arrived to find many of his staffers in tears, aghast at the thought that eight years of hard work were about to be undone by a man who seemed completely unqualified for the office to which he had been elected. It was only hours after the result had been declared and angry Democrats were already questioning Trump’s legitimacy. Obama took the opposite tack:
You know, the path this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forwards and others think is moving back and that’s OK …
The point is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy … And that’s why I’m confident that this incredible journey that we’re on as Americans will go on. And I’m looking forward to doing everything I can to make sure the next president is successful in that.4
It is easy to see why Obama felt he had no choice except to say what he did. Anything else would have thrown the workings of democracy into doubt. But it is worth asking: What are the circumstances in which a sitting president might feel compelled to say something different? When does faith in the zig and zag of democratic politics stop being a precondition of progress and start to become a hostage to fortune?
Had Clinton won the 2016 election – especially if she had somehow contrived to win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote – it is unlikely Trump would have been so magnanimous. He made it clear throughout the campaign that his willingness to accept the result depended on whether or not he was the winner. A defeated Trump could well have challenged the core premise of democratic politics that, as Obama put it, ‘if we lose, we learn from our mistakes, we do some reflection, we lick our wounds, we brush ourselves off, we get back in the arena’.5 Licking his wounds is not Trump’s style. If the worst-case scenario for a democracy is an election in which the two sides disagree about whether the result holds, then American democracy dodged a bullet in 2016.
It is easy to imagine that Trump might have chosen to boycott the inauguration of Hillary Clinton, had he lost. That scenario would have been ugly, and petty, and it could have turned violent, but it need not have been fatal to constitutional government. The republic could have muddled through. On the other hand, had Obama refused to permit Trump’s inauguration, on the grounds that he was still occupying the White House, or that he was planning to install Clinton there, then democracy in America would have been done for, at least for now.
There is another shorthand for the minimal definition of a functioning democracy: the people with guns don’t use them. Trump’s supporters have plenty of guns and, had he lost, some of these people might have been tempted to use them. Nevertheless, there is a big difference between an opposition candidate refusing to accept defeat and an incumbent refusing to leave office. No matter how much firepower the supporters of the aggrieved loser might have at their disposal, the state always has more. If it doesn’t, it is no longer a functioning state. The ‘people with guns’ in the minimal definition of democracy refers to the politicians who control the armed forces. Democracy fails when elected officials who have the authority to tell the generals what to do refuse to give it up. Or when the generals refuse to listen.
This means that the other players who had the capacity to deal democracy a fatal blow on 20 January were also sitting beside Trump: America’s military chiefs. If they had declined to accept the orders of their new commander-in-chief – for instance, if they had decided he could not be trusted with the nuclear codes – then no amount of ceremony would have hidden the fact that the inauguration was an empty charade. One reason for the air of mild hilarity in our lecture hall in Cambridge was that the rumour quickly passed around that Trump had been in possession of the nuclear football since breakfast time. The joke was that we were lucky still to be here. But none of us would have been smiling if the joint chiefs had decided that the new president was best kept in the dark. Even more alarming than an erratic new president in possession of the power to unleash destruction is the prospect of the generals deciding to keep that power for themselves.
Yet it is worth asking the same questions of the generals as of the sitting president: When is it appropriate to refuse to obey the orders of a duly elected commander-in-chief? Trump came into office surrounded by rumours that he was under the influence of a foreign power. He was certainly inexperienced, likely irresponsible and possibly compromised. American democracy has survived worse – if inexperience and irresponsibility in international affairs were a barrier to the highest office, then the history of the presidency would be very different. It is the knowledge that American democracy has survived worse that makes it so hard to know how to respond now. In Cambridge, we laughed for a bit, and then we sat in glum silence. In Washington, they did the same.
Trump’s inauguration allows us to sketch out three different versions of how a democracy like the United States could fail. The first is more or less unthinkable: Trump wins by the rules, and the American state refuses to recognise his victory. He is denied the keys to the White House by the sitting president and the military reject his authority. That is the route to civil war. Obama ruled it out of bounds almost the moment the result was known. The second is something that could have happened but didn’t: Hillary wins and Donald refuses to recognise her victory. Civil war does not necessarily follow. It all depends on how much violence Trump’s disappointed supporters are willing both to inflict and to endure. We will never know the answer to that question. My guess is that, for all the angry words, sustained violence was never likely. Some people might be prepared to kill for Trump. But to die for him? That’s something else again.
The third scenario is the one that actually happened: Trump wins and the American political establishment decides to grin and bear it. Some reluctantly clamber aboard his administration in the hope of providing a steadying influence. Others grimace and wait for the worst to pass. They believe that Trump’s words can be absorbed and tamed by the flexibility of America’s democratic institutions. It is a gamble – what if Trump cannot be tamed? – but it is not a reckless one. The alternative – refusing to accept Trump as president – looks far more reckless. It is not the same gamble as the catastrophic one taken by the German political establishment in 1932–3, when politicians who thought they could tame Hitler ended up consumed by him instead. Twenty-first century America is nothing like Weimar Germany. Its democratic institutions are much more battle-hardened. Its society is much more prosperous. Its population has many better things to do than take up arms against democracy.
As I write, the bet is not yet settled. But the odds still look favourable for the survival of democracy. It is possible to argue that since Trump was elected, American democracy has been working as it is meant to. There has been an ongoing contest between Trump’s disruptive menace and a system designed to withstand a lot of disruption, especially when it emanates from demagoguery. The demagogue is discovering the world of difference between words and deeds. He is ensnared by institutions that have pushed back against his demands for personal loyalty.
Congress has not proved as biddable as he might have hoped. The courts have also provided a barrier to executive action. Where vacancies arise, Trump has been relatively successful in filling them with judges sympathetic to his cause, such as it is. This contrasts with his inability, or unwillingness, to re-populate the bureaucracy of the federal government, where many posts remain vacant. Yet there are too many courts and too many judges for such a strategy to be decisive in the short term. As with any American president, the effects of his impact on the judiciary are only likely to be felt long after he is gone. Any populist revolt that seeks to rely on the courts to get things done is likely to be a pretty muted uprising. Trump has his acolytes and his fellow travellers, but so do all presidents. Beyond his narrow circle, which is shrinking all the time, the institutions of American democracy are proving relatively resistant to capture.
For Trump’s committed supporters, however, this outcome is not so different from the first scenario. They argue that the American state did not deny him power by refusing to recognise his victory because it did not need to do anything so explicit. Instead, the ‘deep state’ set out to undermine Trump’s presidency from his first day in office. The betrayal is all happening behind the scenes. On this account, democracy ceased to work a long time ago, because no president who set out to challenge the authority of the political establishment would be allowed to get away with it. There has been no coup against Trump. Yet talk of a coup has been incessant since the moment he took office, with his supporters accusing his enemies in his own party as well as the liberal establishment of organising a plot to bring him to heel. The conservative political commentator and rabble-rouser Rush Limbaugh calls this ‘the silent coup’.6 It is almost as though no one knows what a coup means any more.
For Trump’s diehard opponents, by contrast, we are living through a warped variant of scenario two. Although Trump won, he never acknowledged the consequence of his own victory: that he was meant to start behaving like a president. He refused even to recognise that he had lost the popular vote, claiming that it had been stolen from him by voter fraud. For the first time in history, the winner would not accept the result of a presidential election. Political science has little to say about that because it does not fit with any known theory of democracy. President Trump brooks no criticism and there is no fact he will not dispute if it suits him. It began with his inauguration, when he let it be known that the crowds in attendance were huge, despite all evidence to the contrary. He governs from outside the bounds of democratic civility, which requires recognition that there can be truth on the other side. He is making a mockery of the system that is tolerating him.
So while Trump is locked in a battle with America’s democratic institutions, there is another contest going on among the people who refuse to accept that this is the real story. Theirs is the shadow world of conspiracy theories and alternative facts. It rests on the assumption that the true picture of what is happening can only be understood by imputing anti-democratic motives to the leading actors. Democracy may look like it’s working, but it isn’t really, because the other side is no longer playing by the rules. Under the terms of this mutually intolerant form of partisanship, political order has already broken down but no one is admitting it yet. Instead of civil war without the fighting, we have the verbal jousting without the civil war.
The existence of this netherworld of partisan conflict makes it hard to know how much trouble American democracy is in. If there had been empty chairs on the platform on the day of Trump’s inauguration – or indeed no ceremony at all – then the threat to democracy would have been visible for all to see. The battle lines would have been drawn such that no one could dispute them. The same would be true if the event had broken down in violence, as some feared it might. We would know where we stood. But nothing happened that day to signal that the game was up. The affront to democracy was cartoonish. Everything else took place as it should, according to the rules of the game. The protests were angry but respectful. The dignitaries just about kept their dignity. If something is fundamentally amiss with American democracy, it is hiding in plain sight.
Like many people, I have spent much of the time since Trump’s inauguration thinking about Trump. Perhaps that is a mistake. America may not be the right place to anticipate the end of democracy, however much its current president commands our attention. The world watched transfixed on 20 January 2017 because it was so hard to look away. The theatre of Trump’s presidency is compelling and it is absurd. Less compelling and potentially less absurd versions of the same drama are playing out elsewhere. The battle lines may be drawn more clearly in countries where elections are won by anti-establishment politicians from the left rather than from the right, or where democratic institutions are less entrenched or more easily co-opted. If the demise of democracy ultimately requires a full-blown military–civilian showdown, or an overt authoritarian takeover, then there are many places where it is more likely to happen than the United States. This book will therefore not just be about America: we will also look at Delhi and Istanbul, Athens and Budapest. Trump’s presidency could be a vast distraction from the greater threats posed to democracy elsewhere.
But America still matters. What if the distraction is the real story? I don’t mean this as a conspiracy theorist might. I am not suggesting that Trump’s clownish antics are a deliberate attempt to throw people off the scent of a more concerted assault on democratic institutions. I still believe that with Trump what you see is what you get. The problem is that what you see is so hard to fathom. He is both ludicrous and threatening, familiar and peculiar, inside and outside the bounds of what a democracy can tolerate. My confused reaction to his inauguration – shock followed by the absence of shock, all in the space of fifteen minutes – was not a one-off. That is still how it feels. Trump, more than any other democratic politician in recent history, is capable of evoking contradictory emotions at the same time. He is ridiculous and he is deadly serious. He is incomprehensible and he is as open as a child. He is a reason to panic and he is a reason to keep calm and carry on.
Trump matters because of where he comes in the history of American democracy: not at the end, but somewhere in the middle, which may yet turn out to be the beginning of the end. The US is not just the world’s most important democracy; it is also one of the oldest. It is an open question when to date the start of democracy in America. Some of it begins at the beginning, with the founding of the republic in 1776. But no republic founded on slavery can be a true democracy in the modern sense. Even with slavery abolished, many citizens were still disenfranchised. It was only in the twentieth century, with the enfranchisement of women and later the civil rights movement, that something close to what we now think of as democracy finally arrived. That makes current American democracy no more than one hundred years old, and perhaps no more than fifty or sixty. By political standards, that is not elderly. It is not youthful either, given how many democracies have been snuffed out before they have even got going. It is middle-aged. Ancient Athenian democracy lived to be two hundred before it expired. By that measure, democracy in America is not even halfway done.
It is never easy to think about death – least of all one’s own death. But when you are middle-aged it is time to start. You know it is coming – it is no longer possible to believe, as when one is young, that mortality is something that only happens to other people. To be middle-aged is to have survived long enough to recognise the signs. Dramatic collapse is possible – it’s happened to others. At the same time, treating every ache and pain as a signal that the end is at hand is laughable. Hypochondria is a malady in itself. Life is still to be lived and the best may yet be to come. That’s where American democracy is now.
The history of political thought is littered with comparisons between the artificial lives of states and the natural condition of human beings. These analogies are often bogus and disreputable. Reflecting on the mortality of the body politic can simply be an excuse to argue for continuity at all costs. ‘The king is dead! Long live the king!’ But there is still something for politics to learn from how people grow old. Democracy in America has reached a tired and crotchety middle age. It is not immune from hypochondria. Fearing death from the slightest cause is not the same as thinking seriously about death. It makes concerted action more difficult because it can breed a sense of helplessness. It can also breed the sort of recklessness that comes with feeling you have little left to lose. There are many different ways to experience a mid-life crisis. America may now be going through a number of them all at once.
The glaring flaw in any analogy between the lifespan of political regimes and those of human beings is that we know roughly how long humans can live for. Or at least we think we do. With states we really have no idea. Just because Athenian democracy died at two hundred doesn’t mean that’s the natural condition of democracy. Even if American democracy is somewhere in the middle of its existence, we lack any reliable way of knowing whether it is nearer the beginning or the end.
At the same time, doubts are starting to grow about the human side of this equation. In a few places, including Silicon Valley, a tiny number of privileged human beings are starting to contemplate the possibility of their own immortality. Technological advances mean that the first individuals to buck a natural life span – whether by extending their lives for two hundred years, or two thousand, or for ever – may already be alive. Perhaps American democracy is soon going to look more mortal than some of the people who inhabit it. The need to keep the state alive was always premised on the idea that it could outlive its citizens: that’s what gave them the imperative to die for it when called upon. What if it is called upon to die for them? The logic of longevity may be changing.
The inauguration of Donald Trump saw an old man with the political personality of a child come to the head of a state in uncomfortable middle age at a point when human mortality is no longer an absolute given. It is time to think again about what it means for democracy to live and die.
We will return to Washington. But first, we need to go back to Athens.