The Big, Fat Authoritarian Outlier
America is uniquely well-positioned to get its democracy back.
Donald Trump's intensifying assault on rights and freedoms could easily lend itself to despair. The United States has transitioned to authoritarianism. But this hardly means that its new regime will last. Trump is a long way off from making it durable in the way that other autocrats have.
Compared to other places that succumbed to strongman rule, America stands out. Decades of research on democracy and authoritarianism suggests that the country should not be where it is right now. According to our collective knowledge about what makes a country democratic, the United States has everything going for it.
Of course, there are good reasons why it shifted to authoritarianism when it did. But relative to other authoritarian countries, the US is an exception. It is, in fact, the single biggest exception in world history.
That is not to say that America has always been democratic; for most of its history, it was not. But after 1965, when the Voting Rights Act extended full suffrage to African-Americans, it finally achieved the status of a full democracy.
The point, for our purposes here, is that the United States as it exists today has no business being authoritarian.
This is not some trivial matter that is only of interest to academics. It has major implications for whether Trump can succeed or if his bid to destroy the republic can be rolled back.
There is a common thread linking the factors above. One way or another, they all create the foundation for a strong, well-organized civil society.
The fact that the US has nearly every single attribute which favors democracy means that Trump and his allies face a very difficult task ahead of them.
It also means that if Americans act, they can exploit these favorable conditions to bring Trump down. For what all of these things add up to is the potential—the huge potential—for a massive civil resistance movement that ends his regime.
The amount of space needed to fully address this topic is too large to cover in a single post, so I will have to break it up into segments. Additional installments will appear over the next week or two.
Today, we examine the role of climate, culture, and economic development.
Climate
Representative democracy first arose in Northwestern Europe. One reason why was its unusual climate; a combination of cool seasons and plentiful freshwater sources enabled self-sustaining farming by nuclear families. Other, more difficult climates required centralized agricultural systems, which concentrated power in the hands of rulers.
The dispersal of economic resources in Northwestern Europe empowered local communities to fend off despotic landlords and monarchs and press for individual rights.
The United States benefited from a similar climate, with all of the favorable prospects it entailed for representative democracy.
The point, for our purposes here, is that the United States as it exists today has no business being authoritarian.
Political Culture
Climate aside, other scholars attribute democracy’s emergence to political culture, or the attitudes people hold regarding how and by whom power should be exercised.
Traditional cultures place great importance on religious and social conformity along with deference to authority. As you might imagine, these values are not particularly receptive to individual rights. By contrast, so called secular-rational cultures, which prioritize secularism and individual striving, are more amenable to democracy.
Political cultures also differ according to how much they emphasize survival versus self-expression. Survival values emerge out of a sense of economic and political insecurity and, as a consequence, favor rigid constraints on individual autonomy. People on the edge of starvation tend not to have the patience to accommodate their non-binary child.
The attitudes which arise in such environments often persist even after these precarious circumstances disappear.
Self-expressive cultures, on the other hand, take existential security for granted. As a result, they encourage tolerance, expansive rights, and political participation.
Parsing worldwide data on political attitudes, political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel devised a “world cultural map” depicting where different countries stand on the two cultural dimensions above. The United States barely meets the threshold for a secular-rational culture (represented by the vertical axis). But when it comes to survival versus self-expressive values, it sits firmly on the latter end (horizontal axis).
In fact, nowhere does there exist another authoritarian regime in a society that is as secular-rational and self-expressive as America’s (denoted by the red square). Going by its position on the world cultural map, in other words, Americans should not be living under authoritarianism.
Economic Development
As theories of democracy go, this one finds the most evidentiary support. Put simply, as societies grow richer, they become more democratic.
To begin with, the educated and urbanized populations that arise from economic development tend to be more politically moderate and tolerant of difference than are peasant societies. This makes people more willing to accept election victories by the opposing party, which is essential for democracy’s survival.
Economic development also gives rise to twin processes which empower the people against their overlords. Much like certain climates do, economic prosperity disperses wealth away from kings, aristocrats, and oligarchs and puts it in the hands of the broader population. This serves to undercut the ability of rulers to suppress dissent.
At the same time, development creates a bourgeoise and working class who push for self-government and defend it once achieved.
As the world’s richest country, the United States enjoys every advantage that economic development brings—and, as a result, is exceptionally well-placed to restore its democracy.
The Politics of Backlash
Not all scholars agree that prevailing economic and cultural conditions in the US work to democracy’s benefit. Many experts attribute Trump's rise to an economy that has left too many people behind. This, they contend, has led to widespread resentment that Trump exploited to win power.
Others see a cultural backlash behind Trump's rise. Sometime in the past two decades, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris maintain, a “tipping point” was reached in which white Christians reacted to their waning influence by developing a “latent authoritarian reflex.” This explains why so many of them voted for Trump.
The notion that Trump rode to power on a wave of resentment, whether economic or cultural, has achieved something of a consensus among social scientists. Popular as it is, however, it does not stand up to the evidence.
In Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge, Berkeley political scientist M. Steven Fish assembles a mountain of data that disproves the backlash thesis. Over the past three decades, the US has enjoyed higher economic growth, higher disposable incomes, faster-rising incomes, and lower joblessness than most other rich democracies. Income inequality, while relatively high, remained steady during this time. Meanwhile, American workers, including working class whites, consistently report high levels of personal happiness, job security, and job satisfaction.
Yet, despite being in a better economic position, the United States lost its democracy while other rich countries managed to keep theirs. Economic resentment, in other words, cannot explain America’s authoritarian turn.
The cultural resentment argument, for its part, also fails to withstand scrutiny. American attitudes have liberalized dramatically in recent decades, with decisive majorities now holding favorable views of immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community.
Nor does Inglehart and Norris’s “tipping-point” thesis pass muster. When in the past century, Fish asks, have conservative whites not felt that they were losing their cultural hegemony? Conservative resentment toward change has been a defining feature of every era going back a hundred years. Why, then, has the United States only recently “tipped over” into authoritarianism?
Neither economic nor cultural backlash, then, can explain the country’s slide into autocracy. Far from undermining America’s democratic prospects, its economy and political culture enhance them.
The Upshot
There is a common thread linking the factors above. One way or another, they all create the foundation for a strong, well-organized civil society. As I have noted before, America’s civil society is more robust and capable than that of any other country which has ever descended into authoritarianism. The factors we have examined here are a big reason for that.
By dispersing power among local communities and away from the state, climate and its various knock-on effects helped establish the basis for a politically active citizenry.
Thanks to a political culture that favors individual rights, this citizenry is more likely to mobilize in defense of self-government.
If culture makes people want to defend democracy, economic development, along with the bourgeoisie and working class to which it gives rise, ensures that civil society has the ability to get it done.
Next time, we will consider some other auspicious attributes that promise to help Americans cast off their tinpot dictator.
Wait, you argued against the common theories about the rise of Trumpism, but then you didn't offer an alternative theory? Nor did you promise one in the next installment.