The Daily Dose: Illegitimate Rule

Donald Trump has lost his legitimacy. This has implications.

Last Wednesday, Homeland Security agents stormed the office of Democratic representative Jerry Nadler. There, they detained one of his staffers on the ridiculous pretext that the aide was “harboring rioters.”

Also last week, ProPublica reported that the Trump administration was fully aware that most of the Venezuelan immigrants it deported to a Salvadoran gulag had never been convicted of a crime in the US. Those immigrants, you may recall, were not granted a hearing before a judge as the constitution requires. The government simply plucked them off the street and put them on a plane.

Both of these events are related: They provide further confirmation that Donald Trump is an illegitimate leader.

I do not mean that he is illegitimate according to me, Neil Abrams. I am instead referring to how political scientists conceive of legitimacy, a concept first developed by the German sociologist Max Weber. If you are a ruler and wish to gain the obedience of your followers, coercion and rewards will only get you so far; the minute you stop using force, or run out of money to buy them off, they will stop obeying.

For this reason, leaders seek legitimacy: the belief among their followers that the person in charge has the right to rule over them. This way, people will comply with your directives without having to be coerced or bought off. Even better, they will continue obeying even if they disagree with what you are telling them to do.

Legitimate authority comes in different forms. Under traditional authority, leaders derive their right to rule from age-old custom—think of tribal chiefs, for instance. If the leader violates those customs, they can be removed. By contrast, charismatic leaders such as Hitler and Stalin command authority because of their subjects’ belief in their extraordinary and superhuman qualities. Accordingly, charismatic authority can be lost if the leader can no longer demonstrate their divine-like powers.

Today, however, a different type of legitimate authority predominates throughout the world, and that is rational-legal authority. Societies nowadays have formal, written rules that are set forth in a constitution and code of laws. These rules determine how the leader is chosen—typically through free and fair elections—and how they must govern once in power. Whereas traditional leaders lose legitimacy by violating custom and charismatic leaders do so by failing to prove their supernatural abilities, leaders in rational-legal systems lose their legitimacy by breaking the rules.

Well, Donald Trump is breaking the rules. Every day, he is violating constitutional rights—for instance, by deporting people without due process and arresting Congressional aides for looking at an ICE agent funny. He is also exceeding the constitutional limits on his power by, for example, serially defying court orders and appropriating Congress’s spending authority.

In fact, he is breaking the rules so frequently and so egregiously that, by any reasonable standard, he has lost his legitimacy—and, by extension, his right to rule. As a result, the only means he has left to command obedience is by dispensing rewards, which he is rather limited in doing, and deploying coercion, to which he is resorting in increasingly unhinged ways.

But here is the thing: If Trump has lost his legitimacy, he can be removed—not just through constitutionally-defined procedures such as elections and impeachment by any available (nonviolent) means.

This is true first as a matter of fact: The people are not going to sit there and let you continue to rule over them while you are breaking the rules with abandon. It is also true as a matter of right: Leaders who trash the constitution should not get to insist that everyone else obey it.

This holds implications for how the Democrats should conduct themselves. Now that Trump has sacrificed his right to rule, interminable debates over whether the party should capture the center or tack left are a waste of time and effort. Nor is there a need for the party to fine-tune its healthcare and tax policies.

Instead, the path to power—and to restoring the constitutional order—lies in one thing and one thing only: exposing the president's loss of legitimacy and relentlessly attacking him for it. This is how an opposition party takes back their country from an illegitimate, authoritarian ruler. It would be nice if the Democrats started acting like it.