How Important is Democracy to You?

I have been writing about Donald Trump’s attack on American’s trust in our political system.  Unfortunately that trust is already very low.  More concerning, there is a significant percentage of Americans who don’t trust democracy itself. 

Americans’ support for our government, in fact, has reached historic lows.  When polled, less than 19% of Americans say that they “trust government to do the right thing all of the time or most of the time,” an abysmal showing.  True, trust in our government has been declining steadily since the 1960s, when it was well over 75%, but how low can it go before the breaking point?

Lack of faith in one’s own specific government (while jarring at this level) is one thing.  Far more dangerous, it seems to me, is the level of trust people hold for democracy itself, that is, for the entire concept of democratic rule.  Until recently, I would not have worried about societal trust in democracy; democracy, it has always seemed to me, is the only game in town.  As it turns out, however, my opinion has a great deal to do with my advanced age.

The World Values Survey has been collecting enormous amounts of data from around the world since 1981.[1]  May 2017 data shows that when you ask Americans born before World II to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how "essential [it is for them] to live in a democracy,” 72% of them check "10," the highest value. But among Americans born after 1980 (the milennials) less than 30% check the 10.  Furthermore, 

In 2011, 24% of U.S. millennials (then in their late teens or early twenties) considered democracy to be a "bad" or "very bad" way of running the country.  (Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk)

Think of those figures!  Only 30% of young people in the United States feel that living in a democracy is “essential.”  24% think it’s a bad way to run a country![2]

As a person born just as World War II was ending, I find those figures both astonishing and profoundly disturbing.  Worse, that decrease in trust is occurring not just in the United States but across the industrialized world.

Furthermore, the same World Values Study data finds

that explicit support for authoritarian regime forms is also on the rise. In the past three decades, the share of U.S. citizens who think that it would be a “good” or “very good” thing for the “army to rule”—a patently undemocratic stance—has steadily risen. In 1995, just one in sixteen respondents agreed with that position; today, one in six agree.

And, finally, in another poll, people were asked three questions:

• Would you support army rule?
• Do you support a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress and elections?
• Would you support non-democratic rule?

Combining the data, over 50% of all people (not just milennials) expressed support for at least one of the antidemocratic options.  I find this last figure so staggering that I’m leery of taking it on face value, but it comes from a reliable pollster.

If the last paragraphs of statistical information have become a statistical blur, here’s the summary:

  1. Approximately one-third of millennials don’t believe that democracy is essential.
  2. If the US democratic government isn’t working well, over half of Americans would support

•  military rule,
• a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress and elections, or
• some other form of non-democratic rule.·     

Trust has been declining steadily so we certainly can’t blame all this on Donald Trump.  Furthermore, if Americans express these levels of discontent with democratic government, it’s not surprising that significant numbers of people will vote for or still support a president who is undermining government and democracy.

What about the future?  We have already elected a demagogue—“a political leader who gains power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people.”  “Only I can fix” what is wrong with government, he has claimed.  And the governing Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the demagogue’s governance.  Fortunately, President Trump is inexperienced and unfit to be a leader.  He may be a demagogue, but he is an ineffective one, unable to do as much damage as he might.

Here’s one future scenario I consider a realistic possibility: President Trump will continue to erode confidence in our democracy.  We might console ourselves that we’ll probably vote Trump and the Republicans out in the next several years.  But that isn’t much comfort.  Confidence in our democratic institutions has already been deeply damaged.  The next time the country is facing a crisis—economic, political, social or international—a citizenry open to a “strong political leader” could elect a demagogue with much more political savvy who’s empowered by an even more polarized Congress.  At that point it will be only a short step to either some form of authoritarianism or political chaos.

My friends will tell you that I am not ordinarily given to catastrophe-scenarios, but I don’t see too many ways this turns out well.

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[1] As far as I can tell from a limited search, the WVS is considered reliable.  See here for one evaluation.

[2] I can’t find any comparable polls of young people in the 1940s or 1950s, so it’s possible that these statistics are just because millennials are young and young people tend to be more cavalier.  Anecdotally, however, it’s hard to believe that large percentages of young people rejected democracy during WWII or, even less, during the affluence of the fifties.  I was one of those young people in the sixties; many of us certainly questioned government but that was this government (that went to war in Vietnam); belief in and support for democracy was strong.