One paradox of America’s debate over democracy is that many of its most ardent professed defenders also seem most convinced of its frailty — and perhaps, if Donald Trump wins a second term, its imminent demise. Can a governing system portrayed even by its champions as weak and decrepit maintain the public’s confidence?
Kurt Weyland, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, rests his case for democracy not on the system’s vulnerability but on what he sees as its enduring strength. His book, “Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat,” published last month by Cambridge University Press, has gone virtually unnoticed in the popular media. Surveying 40 examples of populist leaders elected in Latin America and Europe since the late 20th century, Weyland argues that only seven overturned their country’s democratic system. And each of those instances occurred under conditions that are unlikely to occur in the United States any time soon.
Trump’s rise has prompted scholars to amplify examples of states that transitioned from democracy to competitive authoritarianism, such as Peru under Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s and in Hungary under Viktor Orban in the 2010s. A Supreme Court brief by “experts in democracy” urging Trump’s removal from the presidential ballot observes: “While the Cold War was marked by democracies collapsing via coups and wars, the majority of decline and failure today occurs under democratically elected politicians who use their popularity to undermine constitutions, laws, and norms from within.”
Weyland goes this far with the doomsayers: Populism fits uneasily with liberal democracy and can threaten its foundations. He defines populism as a style of charismatic leadership based on the populist’s “redemptive mission” and “direct emotional connection” to supporters. Drawing authority from the force of their personality, populist leaders circumvent existing institutions once elected and often try to “engineer their own self-perpetuation.”
Usually, however, they fail. Weyland contends that the many instances where populists hold power and liberal democracy emerges intact, such as Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy and Carlos Menem’s Argentina, are given short shrift by scholars. Comparing those cases of democratic resilience with the minority of cases where democracy fell under populist rule, Weyland detects several patterns that should temper fears of a Trumpian autocracy in the United States.
First, democracies with a strong separation of powers between different institutions and branches of government were especially difficult to overthrow. But rickety institutions can also be a major obstacle, Weyland argues. A would-be authoritarian must achieve overwhelming popularity to set them aside. That’s possible only if one or more crises hit and the populist successfully resolves them, or — in the case of left-wing populists in Latin America — a resource bonanza enables massive expansion in government largesse.
For all the complaints about “counter-majoritarian” features of the U.S. Constitution, such as the Senate and the Supreme Court, it’s precisely this division of authority that stands in the way of the democratic backsliding highlighted in other countries. Raw majoritarianism makes it easier for populists in power to rewrite the rules to suppress their opposition. As Weyland notes, Hungary — the most prominent example of revived authoritarianism in the West — “constituted Eastern Europe’s ‘most majoritarian’ democracy” before Orban won office.
Trump, by contrast, was frequently blocked by Congress from 2017 to 2021. And as Weyland observes, he “did not push his ostentatious penchant for transgression so far as to disrespect court orders as populists elsewhere, ranging from [Hugo] Chávez in Venezuela to [Vladimir] Meciar in Slovakia, have frequently done.”
That’s partly because Trump, with an average approval rating in the low 40s during his time in office, never had an overwhelming democratic mandate. The less popular the executive, the less likely his power grabs are to succeed. When Fujimori shut down the Peruvian Congress in 1992, ending the country’s democracy less than two years after his election, Weyland notes, he commanded over 80 percent approval. That popularity wasn’t manufactured; it was earned through Fujimori’s phenomenal success in repressing a bloody domestic insurgency and taming hyperinflation.
Supermajority support was possible for presidents in earlier eras of U.S. history — and may still be possible under extraordinary conditions — but could a figure as deliberately polarizing as Trump ever marshal it? As Weyland puts it: “Even a bold feat of charisma may no longer overcome the profound fault line cleaving contemporary American politics.” The precise features of Trumpian behavior that make him irresistible to his base also ensure that he will always face a powerful and well-resourced opposition.
None of this is cause for complacency about a second Trump term. America’s separation of powers is too strong for any one president, much less one as undisciplined as Trump, to suppress his political competition along the lines that, say, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has in Turkey. But given Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election, no one can discount the risk that with his reelection — and the backing of a more brazen coterie of advisers — he would court chaos and provoke unrest, with severe consequences.
One of Weyland’s examples of a failed populist assault on democracy is in Honduras in 2009 under Manuel Zelaya, who attempted a power grab without the economic preconditions that made such maneuvers successful in other Latin American states. “When the obstinate president kept disrespecting legislative and judicial prohibitions,” Weyland writes, “the military finally ejected him, forestalling his assault on liberal pluralism but interrupting democracy in the process.”
This example shows how populists “can provoke trouble for liberal pluralism not only through their own nefarious actions, but also by challenging their powerful opponents among elites and prompting them to defend their interests with all means, even by overthrowing democracy themselves.” The Constitution’s extraordinary checks on majorities, plus polarization, make the modern populist formula for democratic subversion especially unlikely to succeed in the contemporary United States. Other formulas may still be available.
