Why the Stakes in this Election Are So Enormously High

Democracy itself is on the ballot. If Trump wins, the extreme Right will be in a much better position than ever before to abolish it

iStock / credit: Hung Chin Liu

Time for closing arguments. “It will probably be the most important vote you ever cast,” Kamala Harris said at last week’s rally in DC; the same day, Bernie Sanders called it “the most consequential election of our lifetime” in a passionate plea to the Left to support Harris.

I know a lot of people find that kind of language irritating. To those who haven’t been paying attention much, or simply, for whatever reason, don’t believe the stakes are that high, it smacks of opportunistic hyperbole. And in a vacuum, no one likes to be told “You have no choice but to support me.” It is also reasonable to bemoan the fact that the actions of the Democratic Party – and America’s elite institutions more broadly – have not been commensurate with the threat.

And yet, it remains true that for the foreseeable future, the fate of democracy is on the ballot in every single election. And those who want to abolish democracy might only have to win once: If Trump emerges victorious from this election, the extreme Right will be in a much better position than ever before to impose its will on the country.

Democracy itself is on the ballot

If Donald Trump were to get back to power, we could no longer speak of the United States as a democracy. While America has never been the kind of stable, fully realized liberal, egalitarian democracy as which it likes to present itself, it is also true that the country has actually become significantly more democratic and more pluralistic over the past few decades. That is precisely what fuels the anti-democratic radicalization of the American Right, and why the forces that are fully in charge of the Republican Party desire to turn the clock back. If Trump returns to the White House, politics doesn’t stop, America does not become a totalitarian dictatorship overnight. But the political conflict would then no longer play out under conditions that are plausibly described as democratic.

We all need to grapple seriously and earnestly with the fundamental reality of American politics: The political conflict is defined by the question of whether or not the United States should be a democracy at all. In today’s widely accepted parlance, this means a system of equality before the law, in which all citizens have a right to participate in the political process as equals; a system playing by majoritarian principles, in which all sides clearly renounce violence and agree to respecting the rules as laid out in the constitution; a pluralistic system seeking negotiation and compromise between differing interests in which the status of the individual is not determined by what they look like, what they identify as, who they pray to, who their parents were, or how much wealth they have accumulated.

As of right now, only one of the two major parties in the United States, the Democratic Party, for all its many flaws, is a (small-d) democratic party. The other one is firmly in the hands of an ethno-nationalist movement that is determined to impose its fundamentally anti-pluralistic and anti-egalitarian vision by increasingly authoritarian measures.

This situation is so acutely dangerous because the fault lines in the struggle over whether or not the democratic experiment should be continued at all map exactly onto the fault lines of the struggle between the two parties. Democracy itself has become a partisan issue. Therefore, in every election, democracy itself is on the ballot.

In a functioning, stable democracy, the stakes shouldn’t be that high. Elections should be competitions between political factions who disagree with each other but accept the legitimacy of their opponents and are committed to upholding the democratic system. In America, that’s evidently not the case. It has become dogma on the Right to see Democrats as the “enemy within,” a fundamentally illegitimate, “Un-American” faction out to destroy the nation, an enemy that must not be allowed to govern. Polite society likes to pretend we are having policy debates over taxes, health care, or “the economy,” that the parties ultimately agree on the end goal for America, that they only differ on the best path to get there. But right now, these debates are almost always defined by the underlying struggle between two fundamentally incompatible visions of what “America” is, and who has a right to belong.

This is not an entirely new situation. There has simply never been a consensus that America is defined by egalitarian ideas. The central fault line in U.S. history has been the one between those who do abide by these democratic aspirations – and those who aren’t willing to envision “real America” as anything but a land defined by white Christian patriarchal domination. But the fact that this struggle now overlaps so clearly with party lines is indeed the result of a rather recent reconfiguration of the major party coalitions. The establishment of the civil rights order in the 1960s catalyzed and sped up this process of party realignment or partisan sorting by which those opposed to gender-egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy ultimately united in the Republican Party. Their voices have dominated the GOP since at least the 1970s. While Democrats came to (mostly and somewhat reluctantly) embrace the idea of extending the democratic promise, at least in principle, conservatives were willing to tolerate democracy only as long as it wouldn’t undermine what is supposedly the “natural” order manifesting in clear hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth.

But wait a minute, we are about to hold an election – isn’t that what democracy is all about? How can the outcome of a democratic election possibly be a threat to democracy? Even leaving aside the question of how democratic American elections are, as they are certainly not held on a level playing field: This whole notion that as long as you have elections, you have democracy, reveals an incredibly naïve understanding of politics. Democracy is not just a bunch of formal procedures, it does not just mean elections. It comes with substantive commitments. It is defined, as a minimum, as a system of institutionalized popular sovereignty that plays by majoritarian rules and treats all citizens as equals. An election outcome that undermines that system – because it empowers forces that are explicitly vowing to install minority dominance via autocratic rule, for instance – is therefore very much not good for democracy. If we take seriously the substantive core idea of democracy, then it is absolutely a cause for concern – and normatively bad! – that one party wants to make it harder for certain groups to vote, condones and incites political violence against the “enemy within,” and pursues an exclusive ethno-nationalist vision of society that entrenches clear hierarchies and structures of domination.

The fact that we can’t just complacently rely on elections to always produce outcomes that sustain democracy is one of the main reasons why we create rules and institutions tasked with upholding and fostering a democratic political culture and defending constitutional self-government. For instance, have you heard, there is literally a clause in the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution that disqualifies insurrectionists from holding political office. Weird, isn’t it, that it doesn’t say anywhere in the constitution that this clause is nullified if the insurrectionist in question is the leader of a party, or if the Supreme Court is dominated by partisan operatives – and yet, Donald Trump is still on the ballot.

We are here because of a system-wide failure to hold Trump accountable and mount an effective defense against the onslaught of authoritarian minority rule. The much vaunted “guardrails” have failed spectacularly. And so, we are left with an election as the desperate last stand of a democracy under siege. The fundamental question before the American people is whether or not the Republican Party’s aggressive turn against the democratic experiment and open embrace of anti-democratic extremism in the pursuit of power is an electorally viable strategy? Will the party that remains largely united behind the man who spearheaded a coup attempt and promises to dismantle democracy have to pay a severe price – or be able to consolidate power?

If the leader of a radicalizing, increasingly fascistic movement can attempt to nullify the results of a democratic election and end constitutional government via a multi-level, multi-month coup attempt that ultimately led to a violent insurrection and then just return to power four years later, without ever facing any real consequences and while explicitly declaring his intent to establish a vindictive autocracy, democracy will not persist.

A second Trump presidency would be very, very different from the first

We already had four years of Trump in power, and the Republic didn’t fall, did it?

I am still getting this response a lot. It is the anti-“alarmist” mantra. But the idea that a second Trump presidency would basically just be more of the same, a kind of rerun of the first, is diagnostically not plausible at all, and it is politically dangerous.

This would simply not be the same Right that came to power in 2017 – or, to be more precise: The balance of power within the rightwing coalition has shifted dramatically, leading to a much more extreme threat. That starts with Trump himself. The notion that he has always been the same, just Trump being Trump, is massively misleading and obscures the rather drastic radicalization of the Right’s undisputed leader. Beyond Trump, the Right more generally has significantly radicalized. The idea that more drastic action is urgently needed has been spreading fast into the center of conservative politics. The summer of 2020, specifically, escalated this perception of imminent threat: It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to view the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd as supposedly irrefutable proof that “the Left” has started its full-on assault, justifying calls for ever more extreme action in response.

Crucially, a new Trump regime would also operate under conditions that are vastly more favorable to its political cause. Almost all the factors that inhibited the extreme Right during the first Trump presidency are no longer present; all the guardrails that kept Trump and the more extreme rightwing factions in check after 2017 have been vastly weakened or destroyed entirely:

• In 2017, the radical Right was not ready for power. They didn’t have any plans or strategies, Trump world didn’t have a clue how government worked, the extremists didn’t have the personnel to bend the state to their will and harness its powers. This will not hinder them this time. They won’t have to rely on the “adults in the room” or let the hated bureaucrats of the “deep state” do their jobs. This time around, they have initiated vast planning operations – “Project 2025” being only one of several – that have produced detailed policy plans, expertise, and an armada of ideological loyalists ready to go to work.

• During Trump I, the courts played a key role in opposing the radical Right. But that was a very different judiciary. Several federal courts are in the hands of Trumpist judges. And most importantly, Trump can now count on a hard-right 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. Let’s remember this was not the case until Amy Coney Barrett’s ascension to the Court in late October 2020, towards the very end of the Trump presidency. The 6-3 Court is a game changer. Not that we needed more evidence, but the Court’s almost unprecedentedly extreme ruling to declare Trump functionally immune from criminal prosecution should have erased any lingering hope that the Roberts Court “would not go THAT far.” If given the chance, they absolutely will.

• Trump was also hampered by resistance from within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. But the GOP has been purged of anyone daring to oppose Trump. Elected leaders like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney who publicly held the line that nullifying the results of a democratic election and engaging in a violent insurrection was disqualifying have been ostracized. Starting in 2025, the rightwing regime could count on a fully Trumpified party. And the radical Right is now clearly in control of the power centers of conservatism as well – nowhere is this more obvious than at the Heritage Foundation, the nerve center of movement conservatism since the 1970s, now a thoroughly Trumpified outfit; or at the Claremont Institute, formerly a hub of conservative Straussian thought, now the center of the most aggressively Trumpist forces in the rightwing intellectual sphere. At Heritage and Claremont, there is no more talk about “conservatism” – “counter-revolution” has become the battle cry, and redrawing the boundaries of the nation to exclude the “enemy within” is the goal.  

• Finally, resistance to the rightwing regime – not just coming from liberals or the Left, but also potentially fueled by whatever skepticism still remains among Republicans – would face a level of violent threat that is far beyond anything the country experienced during the first Trump presidency. On the state level, Republicans seek to outlaw “left”-coded protests via so-called “riot laws” that also explicitly condone vigilante violence against the “rioters.” The percentage of people on the Right who see political violence as necessary has drastically increased; violent threat against lawmakers, election officials, judges – against anyone who dares to defy Trump – has exploded; all strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – are embracing rightwing vigilante violence in an increasingly open and aggressive fashion. The majority of Americans may want to resist. But it would be far harder and far more dangerous this time.

For all these reasons, no one should indulge the idea that a second Trump presidency would merely be a repeat of the first. It would be qualitatively something very different.

A menace and a clown

A crucial part of Trump’s “superpower” as a political force has stemmed from the fact that America’s mainstream – political elites, media, key institutions – have simultaneously refused to take him seriously as an authoritarian menace while also buying into MAGA mythology far too much. Somehow, a lot of people in positions of power and influence steadfastly refuse to accept Trump’s most radical, most aggressive announcements as an acute threat. But the same circles then also perpetuate the idea of Trump being the strong leader and tribune of the people: He channels the Volk, and therefore is to be given wide latitude; as he supposedly embodies and gives voice to a populist uprising of “regular folks,” his message is to be amplified; the will of the true people must not be impeded.

The challenge with Trump has always been to get the balance right between rejecting the populist strongman self-mythologizing and acknowledging what a clown and buffoon the guy is – while also emphasizing that he is nevertheless acutely dangerous.

Let’s not be lulled into a false sense of security by the clownishness, the ridiculousness of it all. Some of history’s most successful authoritarians were considered goons and buffoons by their contemporaries – until they became goons and buffoons in power. But let us also not perpetuate the image of strength and domination the radical Right wants to project, the false bravado. This election is about making sure this clown doesn’t get back to the kind of power where his clownishness pales entirely compared to his menace. Successful authoritarians are not remembered for being buffoons – because the disruption they brought, the suffering they caused, the horror they unleashed in power drowns out everything else. We need to make sure Trump is remembered as a buffoon. There is still a chance to make it his defining legacy that he forced people to grapple what the Right has become, ridicule it – before turning away in disgust until it changes.

Democracy deserves to be defended

I wish I could say “the choice is between evil and good, between dictatorship and perfect democracy.” We all know it’s not quite so simple. Politics never is. Even as a best-case scenario, there will be a lot of muddling through. But at least we will get to do that: Muddle through, keep arguing, keep fighting. The struggle over democracy is not just one among many issues. It defines the political conflict, it’s an overarching concern that transcends and permeates nearly all areas of public policy. It sets the conditions for all the collective action challenges, including guns, health and welfare, abortion, fundamental rights for vulnerable groups, the climate emergency. It defines the terrain on which all those who seek to transform this nation into the kind of egalitarian, pluralistic society it never has been yet will have to operate.

Last week, a video clip made the rounds on social media showing an elderly Black woman in Mississippi waiting in line to vote. She recalled her experience growing up in an apartheid system in the Jim Crow South, how Black people were systematically excluded from political participation. But here, in 2024, she was excited, enthusiastic: “I’m about to vote free, I got victory in my feet.” I say this as a straight white man whose right to equal participation has always been a given, whose fundamental liberties have never been in doubt: Don’t we dare forget the sacrifice and struggle of those who had to fight – and are still fighting! – for every inch of democracy.

Democracy can feel tiresome, boring, frustrating. It is all about constantly negotiating and re-negotiating conflicting interests and sensibilities. Not exactly the most rousing stuff. But it is the day-to-day implementation of the grandest and noblest of ideas: That all people are equal.