As elite complicity with Trumpism grows, a revival of democracy will require a social reckoning
With so many rich and powerful Americans leaning into self-preservation or even the benefits of authoritarian rule, the U.S. will need a cultural and economic reset as well as a political one
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
In a recent piece at his essential Democracy Americana blog, historian Thomas Zimmer highlights a misconception among journalists and politicos that both feeds Donald Trump’s corrupt rampage across our government and hamstrings the emergence of an opposition strong enough to stop him: that Trump’s election in 2024 provided him with wide latitude to act as he sees fit, up to engaging in a broad swathe of unconstitutional and anti-democratic actions. Zimmer rightly swats down this misconception from a couple directions, noting that every person who voted for Trump was hardly endorsing every bit of his agenda, and also hitting a pretty fundamental point:
Even if we stipulate that everyone who voted for Trump wanted exactly what is happening now, that still would not mean that the Trumpist assault on democratic self-government and the constitutional order is in any way legitimate or deserves deference. He was elected president, and as president, his highest duty is to ensure that the laws of the land be executed faithfully. His job is to uphold the constitutional order, not tear it down and remake it in his image. [ . . .] Democracy does not just mean elections. In widely accepted parlance today, democracy is defined, as a minimum, as a system of institutionalized popular sovereignty that plays by majoritarian rules and treats all citizens as equals. [italics added for emphasis]
As Zimmer suggests, the idea that a president can decide to be a dictator simply because he won the election would be a nonsensical and self-defeating vision of democracy, at odds with our actual governmental structure and centuries of precedent.
One enormous question, then, is why so many elites — not just journalists and elected officials, but also business leaders, university presidents, and others — have so quickly and en masse gotten comfortable with the idea that Donald Trump’s election win lets him do whatever he wants, up to and including subverting future elections? After all, as events of the past year have demonstrated, deference to Trump is increasingly indistinguishable from deference to the establishment of a dictatorship. What sort of American would be OK with this?
One persuasive argument I’ve read, and that draws from the experiences of other democracies that have been dragged into autocracy, is that many people in positions of power will seek to protect what they can, even at the price of sacrificing key values or particular demographics. For instance, we have seen multiple American universities paying Donald Trump what essentially amounts to shake-down money, and moreover agreeing to subject themselves to various forms of government intervention, all in the hope that they will buy protection for most of their operations, professors, personnel, and students. “Better to do this,” you can imagine them thinking, “than to risk having our university punished even more severely, or even shut down.”
Another explanation is offered by Zimmer and others, wherein Trump’s victory is understood to represent the triumph of “real” Americans whose true desires are embodied by Donald Trump. Crudely speaking, Trump can do what he wants because he has a sort of mystical connection with the real will of the American people. You don’t need to look too far under the surface to grasp that these real Americans are those who are white and conservative — in a stereotypical sense, salt of the earth, heartland types who are simply more American than, say, those who live in cities and are more likely to be minorities or naturalized immigrants. The fact that this is actually the belief of Trump and his allies gives this explanation a great deal of weight — it’s not like elites who internalize or defer to it have created this conception of Trump and his authenticity out of whole cloth. And when you consider that those in elite positions in American institutions are disproportionately white, you can see how a theory of Trump’s expansive power that rests in white privilege might gain easier purchase among this layer of American society.
Then there’s the explanation that might seem most obvious, if also most cynical: some of these elites have consented to Trump’s lawlessness either because they agree with it, or, in a slightly more nuanced fashion, they see the benefits as outweighing the harms. We might call this the “greedy, selfish bastards” theory: those with power who highlight the good and downplay the bad of the U.S. descending into authoritarianism, since they see an overall net benefit in terms of personal wealth and privilege.
Crucially, this indifference or even outright hostility to majority rule and the rule of law is likely rooted in what has already been the experience of such elites even before Trump made his first presidential run. The higher up the socioeconomic chain you go, the more you encounter people who are already intimately familiar with the quotidian distortions and corruptions of American democracy and society. They operate in a realm where democracy (as understood in terms of basics like deference to popular opinion, subordination to the public good, and accountability) is often operative or relevant in only a secondary sense. Instead, personal connections, knowledge of the minutiae of arcane laws, and a deep familiarity with the workings of government bureaucracy gain greater prominence. While this is far different from the system of personalist authoritarianism that Trump is pursuing (where the approval or disapproval of Trump himself could determine a supplicant’s fortunes), it’s nonetheless closer on the continuum to what he’s building than many of us would have thought.
It’s close enough, at any rate, that many of those well-versed with insider paths of power have not been shocked by their consciences or by patriotism into denouncing Trump’s moves as alien and un-American. This has also dampened their reaction to Trump’s more direct attacks on the rule of law and democracy that affect ordinary Americans, since they themselves are more accustomed to a system somewhat closer to what Trump is now seeking to impose. At some level, they feel able to navigate the new reality, even if they dislike it — and are indifferent to those who will either fail to prosper or be punished by the new regime.
But just because there are sociological or economic explanations for the lack of elite resistance to Trump is not to excuse them. In a piece looking at the notion of “civic virtue” as understood by the Founders and as it might be understood today, Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall zeroes in on a key point that deserves wider acknowledgment and discussion. He notes a recent article by Financial Times columnist Edward Luce, in which a variety of society elites (“lawmakers, private sector executives, retired senior military figures and intelligence chiefs, current and former Trump officials, Washington lawyers and foreign government officials”) told Luce that “Trump would only be restrained by powerful voices opposing him publicly” — yet nearly all declined to speak on the record. Marshall is scathing in his assessment:
[Y]ou profited by this system, this republican system, what you have was made possibly by it. So you have an obligation to defend it when it’s under severe threat. That’s the civic virtue that’s important, that’s real. Needless to say these are apparently quite notional obligations because hardly any of these people appear to feel under any obligation. But an obligation shirked doesn’t make the obligation any less real.
Key for me is the idea that people with immense power have “profited by this system,” and so in turn have “an obligation to defend it when it’s under severe threat.” As Marshall notes elsewhere, we often accord social esteem to such people not just because of their accomplishments, which may in themselves benefit the public, but also because their roles bring with them “incurred obligations.”
At a minimum, we are witnessing on a broad scale the fracturing and crumbling of this social compact, as so many of those with the power and megaphones to make their voices heard in defense of democracy simply. . . . aren’t doing anything. And whether the specific move is to comply or to more actively accommodate themselves to Trump regime power plays and illegalities, we can see how they effectively lend their prestige to the normalization of what is, at this point, an obvious effort to impose right-wing authoritarian rule on the nation. It is a vast complicity with reactionary forces that gain advantage to the degree they can appear non-threatening and relatively normal when compared to the governance we have previously experienced. And of course the complicity is all the greater when we take into account those like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are using their vast wealth gained through the labor and spending of the citizenry to now actively support those who aim to crush our collective voice, and to gain power and wealth through supporting a lawless president.
Reviving or re-centering the idea of social obligation, not only on the part of those who have benefited most from our society, but among all of us, would be an important project even in the best of times. But in light of the personalist, dictatorial rule that Trump is gunning for and that so many in the GOP support, it’s become essential. In the fascistic Trumpist vision, the obligations primarily flow one way — all Americans must support the president or face his wrath. In return, Trump will supposedly serve as the will or embodiment of his supporters, and act in their interests — but we know at this point that this fantastical vision is pure fraud, as the presdient openly schemes to loot the Treasury, eviscerate health care for his voters, embroil the U.S. in insane South American wars, and wreck educational opportunity for millions. And while the MAGA vision may also superficially put forward an idea of tribal loyalty among conservative white Americans, this only highlights the degree to which it relies on denying a connection with the full U.S. citizenry. In response, an insistence that we are all linked and mutually obligated to each other both repudiates Trump’s narcissistic vision and MAGA’s blinkered one, while aiming us back towards the reality and profundity of all being together in the same national boat.
It may be speculative at this point, but it’s worth sparing a thought for what the consequences might be of such a momentous betrayal by America’s rich and powerful, and by those with higher professional and class status. To me, it feels increasingly likely that any successful political pushback and defeat of Trump and the far-right forces arrayed around him will necessarily involve a substantial social and economic earthquake as well. When those who have gained so much from our free society and pathways to power turn so readily against America’s majority when a deranged strongman threatens and cajoles them, when they show so little loyalty to shared values and implicit responsibilities, it is natural to question why so much status was ever granted them in the first place, and why such riches were allowed to accumulate into what turned out to be war chests for a battle against majority rule and liberty.
Whether it’s as pragmatic as taking a hard look at raising taxes to curb outsize political power by fascism-friendly multi-billionaires, or a more values-driven deep reflection on elevating those who serve the public good (teachers, journalists, scientists, union organizers) but have been denigrated in the age of Trump, or an understanding of how right-wing churches have perverted Christianity into a mockery of religion, any honest grappling with how we got into this mess — and how to get out — will likely shake our society to its foundations.