On Optimism: Four Reasons Why Our Democracy Will Endure
This reflection first appeared in Protect Democracy’s substack, If You Can Keep It. We invite you to learn more about this non partisan movement on the Protect Democracy website.
You already know the top news for the week. The likely presidential nominees are much clearer.
There are lots of reasons why the prospect of a major party re-nominating an autocrat should get you down. But I’m not going to focus on any of those today.
Because, truth is, I’m not entirely pessimistic about our democracy. And I suspect you aren’t either. To steal from my colleague, the writer Max Potter, none of us would be here if we were fatalists. If we didn’t all believe, on some level, that our democracy can make it through these tough times and come out better on the other side, we would have buried our heads in the sand by now. We would have found some way to insulate ourselves from the potential consequences of a more authoritarian government. You wouldn’t have subscribed to this briefing, and I wouldn’t be writing it.
As heavy as the threat of authoritarianism can feel sometimes, democracy still overwhelmingly has the upper hand. The way I see it, there are four big things that all of us in the pro-democracy coalition have going for us this year:
One: the pro-democracy coalition is a majority
Unlike in many other backsliding countries, places like Hungary or Russia, the authoritarian faction in the United States is distinctly minoritarian. It seeks power without seeking majority support (see Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s excellent Tyranny of the Minority).
That’s a dangerous dynamic, for reasons we all know, but it also means that the pro-democracy coalition is inherently larger than the authoritarian one.
Contrary to popular belief that Trumpism is winning, it has faced loss after loss, in the ballot box, in court, and in public opinion. In 2018, the electorate responded to an autocrat in the White House with a historically large midterm rebuke. In 2020, we did what very few countries have achieved: we removed that autocrat from power using the ballot box. And in 2022, voters rejected every major election-denying candidate aiming to take control over a state’s election administration. (Worth noting this wasn’t particularly ideological — non-election-denying Republican candidates fared reasonably well in 2022.)
Polling has consistently found that a decisive chunk of voters is willing to put aside ideology and vote against candidates who threaten democracy. In 2022, the margins of victory often came from voters rejecting anti-democratic candidates (as reflected in our polling and reported on by the New York Times). And today, many of the autocratic faction’s animating ideas — such as the claim that the president should have blanket immunity to commit crimes — are wildly unpopular.
This reality, that authoritarianism is unpopular and therefore Trump is starting from a position of weakness, is already evident in the primary results so far. See Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and one eloquent former Trump-supporter on CNN: “I am 74 years old, I lived in a constitutional democracy all my life. I want to remain that way.”
None of this is to say autocratic candidates can’t win elections in this country. We know for a fact they can (especially with how our electoral system advantages them). But this pro-democracy majority makes the electoral window narrow for authoritarians in any given election — the “fundamentals,” as pundits put it, are against them.
Two: the media is learning how to talk about authoritarianism
According to political scientists, the United States is uniquely vulnerable to authoritarianism in part because our electoral system is binary — it reduces everything in politics down to two (and only two) sides.
As a consequence, over decades, we all learned to think about politics in binary terms, left and right. Even neutrality needed to be “bipartisan” to be taken seriously. When Donald Trump first ran for office, he benefited from this instinct, as critiques were presented as biased and points of concern reflexively paired with counterpoints of support. When we published The Authoritarian Playbook: How reporters can contextualize and cover authoritarian threats as distinct from politics-as-usual in 2022, it still felt like swimming upstream to insist that the health of our democratic institutions was, by definition, not a partisan viewpoint (even when the threats to democracy are coming disproportionately from one party).
Though the late and great Blake Hounshell wrote, when covering our report, that "the democracy beat is now everyone's beat," covering authoritarianism requires specific attention and resources. Actual teams of reporters focused on threats to democracy have been launched at just about every national newsroom, and even at smaller outlets throughout the country.
And importantly, in addition to finding breaking stories and explaining them clearly, journalists seem to be given more license by editors to infuse political reporting with much-needed context to those threats. See Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman on Trump’s promise to “go after” Biden; Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett on Justice Department control; Ned Parker, Peter Eisler and Joseph Tanfani on political violence; Riley Beggin on democracy’s guardrails; Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley on Trump’s immigration plans; the entire cast of The Atlantic on what Trump could do if he were to return to the White House; The Economist on the personnel plans; and many, many others.
They each treat their subject as a serious issue meriting direct reporting, and not simply a political wrestling match between two sides. Objective, but not neutral.
(That said, it takes resources to do this well. And it’s been a tough week for the fourth estate. One small thing you can do for our democracy today: subscribe to your local newspaper.)
Three: the institutional guardrails are currently holding
Beyond elections, many of the other core institutions of democracy are still working, even in the face of unprecedented strain.
On one of the most important questions facing our democracy — is the president above the law? — the courts are, almost across the board, doing their job. As Justin Florence and Genevieve Nadeau write in The Bulwark:
All told, our judiciary has agreed time and again that Trump is not above the law. In each and every one of these decisions, from more than fifteen different judges, in no fewer than seven different courts, in opinions joined by judges appointed by Democrats, by Republicans, and even by Trump himself, his arguments for immunity have been rejected. In civil cases and criminal cases; cases about criminal investigation and cases about congressional oversight; cases based on conduct before he was president and while he was president; cases while he was in office and after he left; cases in trial courts and in appellate courts; cases in state court and cases in federal court. Over and over and over again.
And, so, in various cases civil and criminal, our courts are working to deliver accountability for alleged wrongdoing, including by a former president. We’re not out of the woods — above all, the public’s overwhelming interest in legal resolution before ballots are cast is both critical and threatened — but we’re beginning to make progress.
Taking solace in institutional processes plodding along while it feels like the world is burning seems pollyannaish, but it isn’t. Democratic institutions are supposed to be able to weather hard times. Our judiciary wasn’t built only for uncontroversial disputes. The guardrails against abuses of power aren’t decorative. That they are holding — for now — matters immensely.
Four: the pro-democracy coalition is gaining momentum
Perhaps more importantly, the guardrails aren’t just holding, they are in many ways stronger than they were four or eight years ago. Much of that is thanks to hard work across the pro-democracy coalition. Two key examples among many:
First, we successfully reformed the Electoral Count Act so that the central legal pretense used to attempt to overturn the last election is no longer a viable path this time around.
Second, a wave of successful defamation suits against many of those who intentionally or recklessly spread lies about the last presidential election makes it less likely that the next one will face similar attacks. As The Guardian recently wrote:
“The lawsuits are designed in part as a strategy of deterrence. Those pressing the libel suits hope that anyone contemplating a renewed assault on next year’s presidential election, in which Trump is once again likely to be the Republican candidate, will look at the potentially devastating costs and think twice.”
At Protect Democracy, we have been preparing for years to protect a free & fair election in 2024 (more on our organizational strategy in the graphic below) and we are only one of the countless groups and individuals preparing to step up this critical year.
And just as we are all working to defend our democracy, there are also growing efforts to reform and improve it. Donald Trump will likely be the nominee in November after roughly 230,000 people voted for him in two states. That’s .07 percent of the country. Not seven percent — seven-hundredths of a percent.
— Ben Raderstorf, Protect Democracy Policy Advocate
