Thirty years ago, the Soviet empire fell, largely because many in its orbit considered Western-style democracy and rule of law superior to Soviet communism. America’s openness and strong political institutions won the admiration of millions of people who wanted to live under a political system in which a leader’s legitimacy depended on him winning genuinely competitive, free, and fair elections.
The United States remains the dominant world power in many ways. The country has abundant natural resources, its economy remains dynamic, its financial system is strong, its technologies set global standards, its popular culture still inspires and its armed forces are able to project power in all regions of the world. In all these ways, the US advantages today are even greater than they were in 1990.
But American democracy has become a pitiful spectacle, and US allies can only be horrified. It is not simply that the current American president is deeply unpopular. An average of recent opinion polls put Joe Biden’s popular approval rating at about 39%, below the level of Donald Trump at the same point in his presidency. Nor is it the beating Biden can expect his party to take in November’s midterm elections, thanks to rising inflation, crime and turmoil on the US-Mexico border.
The problem is not a paralyzed Congress either. There is still legislation moving forward in Congress. The bipartisan passage of a (very) modest gun reform bill and possible progress on a scaled-down plan to spend billions of dollars more on infrastructure show that lawmakers have not exhausted all hopes for legislative progress.
But two major issues are exacerbating sharp political divisions in the country, undermining the integrity of American political institutions, sparking anger and stoking warnings of conflicts to come.
First, new revelations are emerging about Donald Trump’s final days as president and the actions of many of his closest followers. A U.S. House of Representatives committee tasked with investigating the insurgency around and inside the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, has uncovered clear evidence, provided and in many cases corroborated by inside Trump administration figures, that the Former President Trump tried to mount a violent coup d’état after the last presidential election. What he failed to accomplish through fraud, he tried to achieve by force.
However, no one in Washington is confident that Trump or his enablers will be held legally responsible for this blatant insurgency, and current opinion polls suggest that Trump remains the favorite to win the GOP nomination as their 2024 presidential candidate. How can Americans expect the rest of the world to take their democracy seriously when 70% of Republican voters don’t accept Joe Biden as a legitimately elected president – and many say they are prepared to support a man who tried to engineer a live televised coup. ?
There is good reason to fear that the 2024 presidential election will provoke lethal violence in the United States, and there are Americans in large numbers who will reject the election’s legitimacy, regardless of who wins. Another defeat by Trump or a Trump-backed candidate will lead to even louder cries of fraud — and possibly even efforts by Trump-allied state election officials to reverse the election result. If Trump wins, voters who hate him will insist he won thanks to manipulation of the electoral process and repeated lies told to the public. Voters on both sides will accuse those on the other side of choosing to live in an alternate reality. Even if primary voters opt for fresh faces, eliminating both Trump and Biden from the fray, the problem of election legitimacy will persist.
But while presidents are elected to terms of just four years, and their critics can always pin their hopes on the next election, US Supreme Court justices are appointed and confirmed to serve terms for life, and at least half a century has passed since the The Supreme Court has stirred up partisan passions as the current court has been doing in recent weeks.
After the controversial (and historically unusual) early leak to the press of a full draft court opinion, last month the Supreme Court voted to reverse precedent and overturn a ruling on a 50-year-old lawsuit that granted American women the right to to abortion. We haven’t seen so many Americans lose a right of this magnitude guaranteed by the Supreme Court in 150 years. Two-thirds of Americans oppose the decision. More importantly, the decision has caused a seismic political shock that will divide opinion across the country and within each of the 50 US states on one of the most emotionally charged issues of national life.
Opinion polls suggest the Supreme Court decision has further weakened confidence in the integrity of the country’s highest judicial body, an institution that has long enjoyed much wider public support than presidents or Congress. Even there, the threat of violence is real. In June, a Californian was indicted for trying to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Prosecutors said the man was outraged that the right to an abortion would be denied. He himself said he feared Kavanaugh would loosen gun laws.
Whatever the case, the January 6 insurrection has already clearly shown the risk that those who question the legitimacy of the country’s political institutions will resort to violence. The Department of Homeland Security has alerted local law enforcement and intelligence agencies to unusual levels of domestic extremism — from groups on both the right and the left — and a recent study found that domestic support for “participation in a political revolution, even if its purposes are violent,” is at an all-time high among young Americans: nearly 40 percent.
With the two major parties now led by deeply unpopular men, and with so many incendiary political issues provoking so much popular anger and so much contestation of the legitimacy of US political institutions, the world is right to fear that the American democracy, which Ronald Reagan once described, once “a city shining on top of a mountain”, today is corroded from within.
