Donald Trump…Democracy’s Best Friend?
Choice is considered one of democracy’s great virtues. Not only do those in a democratic society get to choose their leaders, but they can also choose whether they wish to participate in the process that will determine those leaders.
But because it is voluntary, democracy is also an unforgiving system. Those who choose not to participate cede control of the government to those who do. Apathy, therefore, becomes a tacit vote for one’s opponents, which should—but generally does not—preclude complaints about injustice from those sitting on the sidelines.
And in the United States, sit on the sidelines is what many do. For decades, voter turnout, even in the contest for president, was one of the lowest of any functioning democracy across the globe. Since 1980, the active percentage of the “voter eligible population” in presidential elections, as tabulated by the United States Election Project, often hovered near a mere 50% and has exceeded a not terribly impressive 60% only three times: 2004, (barely) in the middle of the Iraq War; 2008, for Barack Obama’s first term; and 2020, when Donald Trump ran for reelection.
Of the three, the last was by far the most robust, 66.9%, four points higher than in 2008, with a record-smashing 160 million votes cast in the middle of a ferocious pandemic. (If one uses “voting age population” as the yardstick, 2020 was the first election that cracked 60% turnout since the Vietnam War.) It does not take a wizard pollster to discern that Trump’s repeat candidacy was the spur to the huge wave of 2020 voting.
It also indicates that when the stakes are high enough, Americans will endure long lines, bad weather, the risk of disease, and even attempts to prevent them from casting ballots, while when the stakes don’t seem high, many will opt to simply stay home on a sunny day.
Trump is therefore almost single-handedly responsible for bringing those stakes home to millions of Americans and presenting them with a stark choice in which the usual rationale for not voting, “the parties are the same, it makes no difference,” becomes much harder to justify.
He provoked this activism by refusing to hide extremism behind a veneer of reasonableness. Rather, he went full-on with angry, bitter, conspiracy theory politics, delivered with crude vulgarity, vindictiveness, and unapologetic narcissism, sculpting much of his rhetoric to appeal to archconservatives just this side of QAnon…or perhaps the other side as well. (He has yet to go on record as to whether the Democratic Party is filled with baby-eating pedophiles, but his campaign is just getting started.)
Because of his lack of pretense, anyone voting for Trump will have no doubts that he favors tossing aside the results of any election he or his chosen candidate does not win, pardoning felonious friends and persecuting innocent critics, educating children with half-truths or outright lies, forcing any woman who becomes pregnant to carry the child to term regardless of circumstances, allowing Americans of any age and mental state to carry whatever weapon they choose wherever they choose, and treating those who do not meet his definition of “normal” as if they have no civil rights. All of this will be done with treacly self-righteousness before a backdrop of American flags and in fervent defense of religious liberty, as if intolerance were the cornerstone of both James Madison’s and Jesus Christ’s teachings…although Trump is likely unfamiliar with either one.
He has totally cowed the Republican Party, making it clear that without his voters, Republican candidates cannot win an election for the proverbial dogcatcher. Thus, whether or not he is personally the nominee in 2024, Trump’s fracturing of political norms will survive his departure. But it remains an open question whether his absence on the national ticket will evoke the same level of passion that those who oppose him showed in 2020.
As such, those on both the left and the right who want him to disappear from national politics may well be misguided, albeit for different reasons. On the left, they fear that with Trump at the head of the ticket, a Republican Party that was become anti-democracy as well as anti-Democrat might win; on the right, they fear that with Trump at the head of the ticket, it will be impossible for them to win.
The latter group is more likely correct. To win, Trump will have to flip at least three swing states that went for Biden in 2020, which means he will either need to persuade tens of thousands of voters to switch to him or persuade tens of thousands of voters who chose Biden to stay home, while all of his voters turn out.
Neither is probable.
The notion that a candidate for president who is also a defendant in four criminal cases, three of them involving felonies committed against both the people and government of the United States, will not lose any votes—in fact, gain some—is both deeply frightening and highly improbable. After Trump’s ascension in 2016, Republicans have underperformed in each of the three national elections since. That felony indictments against the party’s leader will reverse that trend would imply that a growing segment of the American electorate has totally lost faith in democratic institutions, which the 2020 turnout and 2022 midterms belie.
Of course, there is risk here as well. Doomsday scenarios may be unlikely, but that is not the same as impossible. But this doomsday scenario cannot come to pass unless the fervor of 2020 is quenched.
Trump makes that less likely. He reminds the American public virtually every day of who he is and what his party has become. He is therefore the best choice to be the catalyst needed to provide the incentive for Americans to remain sufficiently fervent to steer the nation back to a path of reasonableness.
If he does, Donald Trump, that very stable genius, might turn out to have both threatened and saved democracy at the same time.