Why Trump Is a Lot Weaker Than He Thinks

Again and again my acquaintances, liberal and even some of my Republican friends are running scared about what Trump is doing to our democracy and its institutions. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not ignoring the mess Trump has created or even its impact on our culture, but I find that some, perhaps much, of the fear is overwrought.

So, one way to understand what’s going on in the US is, first, to step out of our democracy and look at parallels around the world. Trump is not unique, but in many ways comparable to what’s going on in other countries. Tom Carothers and Richard Youngs, specialists in foreign policy at the Carnegie Institute, published an article in Foreign Affairs in April 2017 about nations like Russia, Holland, Turkey and Indonesia where illiberal democracy is supposedly on the rise.

There’s no question that democracy has lost its momentum. That’s seen in the fact that there are only a handful of more electoral democracies in the world today than at the start of this century. It’s also true that many older democracies, like the US and the UK, are troubled.

There are a number of issues, however, that impact this gloom and doom. One issue is the theory that democratic transitions naturally move in a positive direction—and that established democracies don’t fall backwards. To a degree, these beliefs are driven by unconscious beliefs in evolution, a gross misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Back in the mid-twentieth century, George Gaylard Simpson, a giant of 20th Century biology, observed in a 1964 article in the journal Science that the fossil record shows very clearly that there is no central line leading steadily, in a goal-directed way, from a protozoan to man. Instead there has been continual and extremely intricate branching, and whatever course we follow through the branches there are repeated changes both in the rate and in the direction of evolution. Man is the end of one ultimate twig...

Evolution doesn’t move in a straight line—and that includes political—and social--evolution. It’s more than even two steps forward and one step backward.  The course is not compulsively linear, not a single straight line, but changes in both the rate and the direction. American history and politics show that to be completely true. Rather, evolution is more like a tree with branches going every which direction, some growing well, shooting off in different directions and others dying. All this is to say that the gloom and doom obscures reality. Journalists and politicians are oversimplifying negative trends and overlooking positive trends. Not a surprise, since the nature of liberal politics is a strong orientation to the negative and critical, not the positive.

Focusing on the negative
There’s a lot of nostalgia about the post-WWII as well as the 1990s and early 2000s as periods of strong liberal norms. ­Inevitably, many focus on a select set of highly negative global developments, like the Arab Spring and the rise of populism in the US, UK and Europe. But on average across the continent, the Afrobarometer reveals that Africans support democracy as a preferred type of political regime. Large majorities also reject alternative authoritarian regimes such as presidential dictatorship, military rule, and one-party government.  

And as Carothers and Youngs note, in spite of the dispiriting results of the Arab Spring, major surveys reveal that support for democracy in the Middle East is on a gradual upward trajectory.

And in the US, Trumpism has brought out a very positive openness and responsiveness to the need to support democratic orientations, not the current president and his attempts at autocracy. Trump may cast himself as a man of the people, but there is no overarching populist trend in the States.

Misconstruing Trump’s authoritarian surge
What’s going on today does not mean that Trump’s authoritarianism is succeeding as a type of political regime. Trump, like all authoritarian regimes, is struggling with profound internal challenges and weaknesses. In fact, it is Trump’s abject domestic political failures that cause him to focus outside the states on countries like China. His continued attempts to distract the American public from relevant issues related to our internal issues is an announcement of his failures and no long-term potential for authoritarianism.

The fact of the matter is that Trump is struggling desperately to achieve his promises to his base. But his success is profoundly limited—impacting, for example, rural America and farming negatively. The potential for financial difficulties is surfacing as a test for Trump, a test that thus far is seriously failing in spite of Wall Street trends.

Though the lens are far from rose-colored, a more nuanced perspective may not dispel the gloom, but it may help from the public from lapsing into disabling pessimism and the mistake of giving up on supporting our democracy. Fact of the matter, it’s a good reason to get involved in political issues and make certain you and your friends vote.