Trump’s triumph, democracy’s downturn
What Trump’s election teaches us about safeguarding democracies
Much has been said about Trumpism (Trump’s particular brand of politics) and the conditions that have enabled it (the prime suspect; the secular decay of and distrust in political institutions, including journalism, political parties and state agencies). In many ways, Trump follows the ‘road more travelled’ by staple authoritarian regimes seen across Eurasia (most notably Russia, but also Turkey, Kazaksthan, Azerbajan and Belarus) Eastern Europe (Hungary and to some extent Poland and Slovakia), and increasingly in the Global South (such as Bolsonaro in Brazil, Milei in Argentina, Kagame in Rwanda, and the juntas of Thailand and Myanmar).
Several books exist on each of these countries and their non-democratic tendencies. No need to rehash all that history. In this blog post, I will rather direct attention to a future with Trump as a ‘near-and-present’ danger, and what a future where Trumpism has triumphed, twice — becoming the majority position in the US democracy, may hold for democracy at home.
While American elections, and presidential elections in particular, are an extreme case, there are still several lessons to be drawn — especially as the American democracy sets standards and norms for so many other democracies and ‘like-minded’ countries around the world. If we want to preserve democracy, here are three key lessons to be drawn from the latest American elections:
(Let me add: I am not the first to make these points; some of which may seem self-evident to many of you. Still, Trump’s campaign and election win are so shattering to any norms and accepted wisdom that it is necessary to repeat, again and again over the next 4 years, the norms we earlier took for granted and considered part-and-parcel of modern-day liberal democracies)
First: The cartelized two-party representational system is fundamentally flawed.
Large political parties across the West, especially in two-party systems, have over the last 50 years become state-like institutions that act like the carriers, representatives and spokespeople of the state, rather than, as envisioned by the early parliamentarians, as spokespeople of their constituencies, members and/or stakeholders (including voters). In this way, they more and more resemble the parties of one-party (communist) regimes as seen in the USSR or DRC, with the major difference that they every 2 or 4th year have to compete for wielding this state power. The political contests for government power, through election cycles, are less and less a contest between different voter groups and their interests, but rather a contest between parties for voter groups and their interest…
For this reason, I place much greater faith in the multip-party parliamentary systems largely seen across the European continent, and to some extent the Anglosphere (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and the East Asian democracies (e.g. Japan and South Korea). This is a system that incentivises closer voter representation, contact with each party’s constituencies and a stronger separation from the state (as each party expect to control a smaller segment of the state apparatus, in a coalition, and for a shorter period, before handing it over to some other coalition).
It also means we should promote more active party participation, involvement and broad-based membership. Just like most other democratic systems and institutions, a broader membership and representation, is expected to counteract the tendencies for centralization, extreme positions and capture by any vested interest. Member-driven and responsive parties are simply expected to be more democratic. As the case of the Republican party demonstrates, structures for power-sharing and deliberation within parties are key for achieving such outcomes at the state/government level.
Conclusion: Don’t allow dominant (majoritarian) parties to cartelize the state and monopolize organized (party) politics through ‘winner-takes-all’ election systems…
Second: ‘Economic issues are not simply about The Economy, stupid’
In the political discourse, and policy discussions in particular, The Economy is not reducible to a distinct issue. Questions around the state of the national and/or personal economy are not so easily separated from other policy, social or emotional issues — including questions around personal and national identity. Economic identities cannot be reduced to personal interests or identities, such as class or ethnicity. Rather, issues around the economy are interpreted through ideological and collectively defined concerns, that are not entirely economic in nature. Economic and material concerns are fundamentally shaped by broader political identities.
That is to say, while material concerns clearly reconfigured lines of voting and re-aligned political coalitions, and may well have tipped the scales of the American election, not all questions around material well-being can be grouped into a single category of economic policy. Take the issue of inflation. On the personal level, inflation is not solely experienced through the pocketbook; it also manifests in anxieties around your prospects for a prosperous life and insecurities about your place in that future. Economic figures like inflation=2,5% (even headline figures like increasing/decreasing inflation rates) do not figure when decisions are made in the voting booth; the lived experience of inflation and its broader implications for everyday life do.
While Democrats were clearly mistaken to expect personal identities, such as belonging to a racial, gender or minority group, to determine voting intentions, they also failed to realize the significance of political identities. People vote neither solely based on economic ‘class interests’ such as income group or occupation, nor based on collective identities, such as race or ethnicity. Rather people judge issues based on their values and ideological beliefs and to the extent they identify with those issues.
For the economic analyst class, this means accepting and acknowledging that the crude economic measures they estimate and produce do not translate to people's experience of economic issues. It requires taking into account the multiple ways economic ‘headline figures’ enter into the lived lives of the economy; not just as financial facts, trends or trajectories but as broader concerns for people's future prospects.
For the political analyst class, this means coming to terms with the concept of identity (personal and group-level) and realising that individual (and group) decision-making are fundamentally influenced by the question of ‘who we are’, ‘what do I identify with’ and ‘how am I implicated’. The false separation between interests and emotions, preferences and prestige, political decisions and reactions, has to go.
As Francis Fukuyama has tried to hammer into the profession and research tradition at least since his 2018 book ‘Identity’; we should never underestimate the presence of emotions like personal dignity, prestige and recognition in the political process, and their intimate link to economic development and policy.
(Nor should we forget the all-encompassing place of the economy in personal and political discourse, which now means that any decision these days is transformed through the prism of economic utility or calculation, but this is a big issue probably deserving of a separate post).
Conclusion: Don’t anticipate voters’ intentions solely based on economic interests or group-based identities, at the expense of political identities. These identities are broader than any individual material issue, yet narrower than any of established group identities.
Third: Political campaigns and elections do not substitute for democratic process
When the election campaign and their election tours cannot be easily distinguished from primetime entertainment or comedy (or a running circus for that matter), elections get reduced to a fantastical spectacle, and the electorate (the participants in an election) becomes reduced to a passive audience (with rights representing viewership, rather than citizenship). Once the analogy for an election becomes a show, the audience will judge candidates based on their merits as an entertainer, rather than as a leader. Likewise, the election and political campaigns will be judged on criteria of entertainment and performance.
More worrying still is the performative role it has on the democratic process. If voters start seeing the democratic process as an external event, show or spectacle, they may very well forget the role, responsibility, even agency, they are ascribed in democracies — as voters, citizens and members of a democracy. The legal rights inscribed in citizenship include the right to vote: This includes judging candidates based on their skills and abilities in 1) being responsive and attentive to your interests and concerns and 2) fit and competent to run the country for the next few years. It does not involve judging their ability to entertain or capture attention for a shorter period. In other words, a candidate’s performance during the road show that is now ‘the professionalized political campaign’ is a poor proxy for these two capabilities.
Conclusion: Don’t turn voting and the democratic process into a performance, replacing deliberation and debate with campaign shows/ rallies.
Epilogue — knowledge in an era of state-sponsored conspiracies
In these final few paragraphs, I turn to an issue closer to my profession, and which I consider fundamental to maintaining democratic institutions across the world: Trust in institutionalized knowledge.
A recurrent lesson drawn from studies of the revolutions in information technology (the latest influencing my thinking being Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus) is that the Information Age is not an age of knowledge-informed decisions. That is, the rise of universally accessible information technology has not translated into an era where independent and institutionalized knowledge is universally elevated (the difference between institutionalized-independent vs. centralized-dependent knowledge is fine-grained, with the short version being that the former is formally separated from ‘the clients of knowledge production’, locally and relationally diffused knowledge systems and (usually) entrusted in larger scientific institutions such as universities).
Rather than seeing the spread of scientific knowledge the ubiquitous access to information has lead to a broad distrust in the institutions producing that knowledge. I explain this by the rapid spread of and increase in information availability has not been matched by an equal rise in information-processing capacity, information-to-knowledge transformation and nourishment of the ‘love of wisdom’ (formerly reserved to philosophers, but nowadays largely ascribed to PhD-holding university graduates).
(Sidenote: Even the oft-cited ‘knowledge economy’ does not seem to improve the dissemination of knowledge, as it advocates a strict division of labour and specialization into narrow knowledge domains, which oftentimes prevents rather than enables generalized knowledge of general phenomena. Again this is a topic for another post)
As a result, we find ourselves in an environment where distrust and disinformation are the name of the game. In democratic systems that entrust the individual to make informed decisions and premised on a high level of general trust and knowledge of current affairs, this is bad news. A combination of growing distrust in formal institutions (including governments, the media and academia) and rapid growth in (mis)information flows put significant strain on established knowledge infrastructures, which is traditionally the formalized system for transforming information into knowledge. This knowledge infrastructure now seems to be in desperate need for re-constructed and -envigoration.
There are many things said and done in this. I will therefore concentrate on pointing to two potential institutionalized solutions. In this, I will primarily draw on a piece by organizational researcher Ali Aslan Gümüsay (Management Schools of the World, Unite! Published in the Organization Studies journal — and if there is one body of knowledge that should have anything to say on organizing such pursuits in the face of great adversity, it should be this).
I fundamentally agree with the author that in the pursuit, preservation and stewardship of knowledge, academics need to become better coordinated, acting collectively, and in a cooperative manner. He proposes two new forms of academic organizing relevant to our current knowledge deficits:
Deep engagement and rapid response research collectives.
“Deep engagement task forces are research clusters that work on a societal concern over an extended period. They bring together diverse expertise on a specific topic to orchestrate knowledge generation and accumulation across disciplinary boundaries, including the intellectual boundaries in our own community.” These could form to tackle pressing global issues, such as those suggested by the UN Agenda 2030, or the Global Priorities Institute.
Whereas deep engagement clusters are about “forming cohesive entities and profiles to address enduring societal challenges, rapid response task forces are about disruptive challenges and crises — from Covid-19 to the war in Ukraine” and other pressing conflicts, these clusters are designed for rapid action and responsiveness. Again, Gümüsay point out, no researcher will be “able to do so individually.”
More important than how they are designed is what these collectives produce. Here I quote the author at length:
The collectives should “offer a range of output — from rather traditional formats such as reports and policy papers to less conventional formats such as agile research sprints, collaborative prototype developments, hackathons, and multistakeholder events — to foster both descriptive analysis and prescriptive advice. This requires a rethinking and reevaluation of what scholarly output is and should be. We need knowledge, not only to better understand situations but also to recommend and even legitimize action.”
Fundamentally, we need competent authority in the face crises and threats. But like all preparedness, these systems, buffers and protections must be in place before an emergency or disaster event arises. This is why the academic community must start thinking seriously about building up (or infrastructuring) the collectives and the ‘intellectual capital’ to be ready the next time a undoubtedly authoritarian candidate emerges and anti-democratic sentiments start taking hold within our own societies. This is my key lesson from the US elections, not only this year, but ever since 2016.