United States | The democratic crisis, beyond Trump and the midterms

In the aftermath of the last US midterm elections, democracy seemed to have won the round. In Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona, Republican candidates subscribing to the “big lie”, the fable that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats from Donald Trump, have bitten the dust, depriving them of the possibility of interfering in the results of the presidential election in 2024.

Christophe Cloutier-Roy

Acting Director of the Observatory on the United States of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair

Not welcoming this joyful news would make us sad piss-vinegar. Unfortunately, as long as political polarization continues to wreak havoc, the question of the survival of democracy will continue to arise in the United States, even if we see the end of Trump’s political career.

Polarization, a danger for democracy

With the victory of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, these are the sixth midterms sequences ending in a change in control of at least one chamber of Congress. Obviously, alternation is desirable in a democracy. In the United States, however, in a context of rigid and unsurpassable bipartisanship, periods of greater electoral competitiveness historically coincide with exacerbated partisan polarization; when both parties can hope to take control of the institutions of the federal government at each election, cooperating with the adversary is tantamount to risking giving him an advantage, hence the systematic recourse to obstructive tactics and Manichean rhetoric demonizing the ‘opponent. This dynamic is not new: in their 2020 book Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracypolitical scientists Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman^⁠1 recall that the visceral hatred that the federalists and the republican-democrats had for each other at the turn of the 19^e century nearly cut short the American democratic experiment.

Mettler and Lieberman thus describe polarization as a threat that occasionally challenges the sustainability of democracy in the United States.

As Steven Levitski and Daniel Ziblatt point out in How Democracies Die, another seminal work of American democratic collapsology, a step is taken when the adversaries cease to see each other as legitimate opponents, but perceive each other as enemies who must be removed from power at all costs, even if it means circumventing the fundamental requirements of democracy. Let us remember in this respect that many elected Republicans who will sit in the 118^e Congress more or less openly endorsed the insurrection of January 6, 2021, presented by some as a movement of patriots who came to defend (supreme irony!) American democracy.

DeSantis is not the solution

Current concerns about the future of democracy are inseparable from the figure of Donald Trump, president twice impeached by the House of Representatives and who has nevertheless announced that he is embarking on the race for the presidency of 2024 However, for the first time since 2016, the prospect of a future without Trump is beginning to take shape within the Republican Party thanks to the emergence of the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. In the days following his triumphant re-election, DeSantis received a host of high-level support within the Grand Old Party and the conservative intelligentsia.

The Republican primaries are far from beginning, but if the young (44 years old) governor were to choose to launch and obtain the nomination of his party, we must now get rid of the idea that he could operate a turn compared to the directions of Trumpism. DeSantis is an ultraconservative who distinguished himself during his time in the House of Representatives (2013-2019) by participating in the creation of the Freedom Caucus, this group of hardliners with which the current Republican leader Kevin McCarthy risks have mesh to leave.

The Floridian is opposed to abortion, gun control measures and, while he believes in climate change, he does not believe in the need to act to counter or mitigate this threat (in a state particularly exposed to rising water !).

As governor, he authorized redrawing of constituencies that diminishes the electoral weight of African-American communities in his state, in addition to using LGBTQ+ rights activists and irregular migrants as scapegoats, much to the delight of his electoral base. However, as Mettler and Lieberman point out, the exclusion of certain groups constitutes a threat to the sustainability of American democracy in the same way as polarization.

It is therefore doubtful that a candidacy for the governor of Florida in 2024 is a solution to the current democratic crisis. Far from being a moderate, DeSantis is a politician who seeks to shape Trumpism-without-Trumpism. That being said, the results of the November 8 elections show us that the American electorate currently has little appetite for this kind of program.

1. Robert C. Lieberman will give a lecture on the state of American democracy on December 2 in Montreal.