Greed and Ambition: How Democracy Dies
Three months after the people voted out what many assumed to be a dictator in the making, Donald Trump, and democracy seemed safe, there was a riot on January 6th protesting the result of an election, the basic tenet of democracy. This riot seemed to put into question what had seemed assured from the last election: is our democracy falling into authoritarianism or is this just a bump that is expected in any long-term democracy? While the obvious answer is that our democracy is currently alive and well because of the aforementioned election happening on time, the actual state of democracy in the United States is far shakier than it initially appears. Currently U.S. democracy is in danger of dying because of the wealth disparity becoming alarmingly more apparent with institutions that formerly checked democracy slowly unraveling.
One of the major points in determining the health of a democracy is how wealthy that country is. Considering that the U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, this requirement should be easily met; however, reality is far from that simple. According to Adam Przeworski, “We found that the expected life of democracy in countries with shrinking inequality is about 84 years, while the expected life of democracies with rising income inequality is about 22 years” (4). What this suggests is that democracies that have higher income inequality among its citizens have a higher chance of collapsing into autocracies. This is especially worrisome as according to Pew Research, “The wealth gap among upper-income families and middle- and lower-income families is sharper than the income gap and is growing more rapidly.” What makes this gap alarming is that as the pool of people who have access to wealth grows less and less, the rest of the citizens have fewer resources to advocate for themselves, thus making it harder to maintain a democracy. This means that even if a country is wealthy, that wealth means nothing if it is concentrated in only a few hands.
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The biggest thing that determines whether a democracy will fail is whether or not the institutions in place can prevent an authoritarian from taking hold and not just the explicit ones either. As Steven Levistky and Daniel Ziblatt explain, often the institutions that hold democracy in check are the implicit rules, the norms that partisan elected officials uphold in order to “gatekeep” democracy from autocrats. These autocrats usually end up killing democracy by using democracy to get elected. The clearest example of an elected leader that threatened U.S. democracy is Donald Trump. Levsitky explains that Trump showed all the signs of an authoritarian leader in how he promoted violence, denied the legitimacy of the elections, and advocated against the press. However, despite these authoritarian tendencies, the Republican party still backed him instead of Hillary Clinton in order to preserve the party over country, going against the implicit norms of trying to keep democracy alive by backing an authoritarian leader. However, even though Donald Trump was voted out, democracy is still in danger as his ideas are still in place as evidenced by the continued polarization of the parties. Less and less are the parties able to agree on things and instead turn towards attacking each other. When the parties see each other as enemies, as they currently do seen in political attack ads as well as how devastated one side gets when they lose an election, they lose the ability to compromise, which is what democracy is founded on. Eventually, both parties will disregard the norms-the implicit institutions that helped keep democracy in place-so that they can win, which will allow the country to slip into authoritarianism.
The United States democracy is in danger as showcased by the increasing income gap between the rich and the poor and the failing of the traditional institutions that kept democracy in place. While issues were certainly highlighted by the Trump administration, they will continue on after him even as other presidents come into power unless our elected leaders finally hold themselves accountable to the country not party.
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Works Cited
Cheibub, Jose Antonio, et al. “What Makes Democracies Endure?” Journal of Democracy, vol. 7, no. 1, 1996, pp. 39–55., https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.1996.0016.
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Horowitz, Juliana Menasce, et al. “Trends in U.S. Income and Wealth Inequality.” Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project, Pew Research Center, 17 Aug. 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/.
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Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Penguin Books, 2019.