Are Trump Supporters Losing Faith in Democracy?

W hen I was on Senate staff in the final years of the Bush administration, a faction of die-hard ideological conservatives — soon to be known as the “Tea Party” — had coalesced around Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. I called them the “Alamo faction,” because they would rather go down in glorious defeat than compromise on any of their principles. Among the main targets of their ire were “earmarks”: the specific appropriation of different pots of money for a mind-boggling array of special interests.

Earmarks are one of the ways in which Congress sells out to special interests, though unfortunately they are not the main way, about which more presently. I hated earmarks as much as anybody, but I didn’t share the Alamo faction’s diagnosis of the underlying malady. Where they saw a problem of personalities — and stoked a lot of conflict within the Republican conference in the Senate — I saw a much larger institutional dysfunction with deep historical roots and an almost inescapable gravitational pull, like that of a black hole.

President Trump campaigned against “the swamp” of Washington, D.C., and it’s a phrase that Trump supporters use a lot, though it’s not always clear to me what they mean by it. For myself, I use the phrase in a specific way: “The swamp” is government by special interests, which the New Deal basically turned into our system of government. It is the system of legalized bribery through which special interests get the federal government to create cartels and monopolies in one sector after another, limiting competition in order to force massive wealth transfers from an unsuspecting public to them and their well-paid lobbyists, usually off the books. It is an unintended but inevitable outcome of 100 years of progressive government, and politicians are forced to play by its rules whether they like it or not, just to keep their seats. No senator or group of senators is in a position to change the system, because it is kept in place by a federal judiciary dedicated to enforcing the progressive interpretation of the Constitution, rather than the one that was actually ratified.

That, however, is not what Trump loyalists mean when they decry “the swamp.” We know this because most of them have no problem with special-interest rackets that can wear the “America first” label, such as the Jones Act, which has ruined the U.S. maritime sector for the benefit of a few decrepit shipyards; or the federal sugar program, which stealthily inflates the price of everything that contains sugar for the benefit of a few sugar growers; or the ethanol program, which is environmentally ruinous, raises the price of food, and puts crushing pressure on the rest of the motor-fuels sector, all for the benefit of Midwestern agribusiness. These programs are all legalized conspiracies to defraud the public on a massive scale, and they would be criminal violations of the antitrust laws if government officials weren’t in on the conspiracy.

But what do Trump loyalists mean by “the swamp”? One possibility occurred to me recently after an exchange with a dear friend about a link she’d shared describing Mitch McConnell’s recent “disgraceful” speech. In this address, delivered immediately after the Senate acquitted Trump, the Senate’s Republican leader blamed Trump for the events of January 6, while explaining that he had voted to acquit on jurisdictional grounds only. I served the Trump administration loyally and have defended it consistently since leaving the government, but I also think that McConnell is the greatest Republican leader in the history of the Senate, and I said so. She shot back, “So now you are part of the swamp, too.”

That’s when it hit me. Maybe what Trump and his supporters mean by “swamp” is “the establishment.” I can understand why: By 2012 and certainly by 2016, the GOP establishment was clearly out of touch with mainstream GOP voters. And the rest of “the establishment” often seems bent on undercutting America and American values.

But that establishment also consists of the two political parties; the precious parliamentary procedures they use to conduct business in Congress; the acceptance of compromise and coalition-building as vital prerequisites for getting anything done; and a fundamental belief that our institutions and their procedures are the real protectors of the American republic and matter more than any particular leader. The establishment, in other words, is the messy day-to-day business of democracy itself — including most of the constitutional system that has survived from ratification to the present day.

Many Trump voters appear to believe that this establishment no longer protects them and cannot be trusted, that it is full of enemies of the people, wrongdoers who must be exposed and defeated if the republic is to be saved. Steve Bannon quips about putting their heads on spikes. Though obviously meant metaphorically, the image is one of violent revolt, recalling the French Revolution’s dirty street rabble roused to a murderous frenzy. And Trump, whether intentionally or not, has fanned those flames.

Since the early days of the Trump administration, I have thought that charges of “fascism” against Trump and the vast majority of Trump supporters were as ridiculous as the charges of “white supremacy.” But there is one way in which the history of fascism has important lessons for today.

Fascism took root in Europe only in nations where democratic government was relatively new, often scarcely older than the peace treaty that ended WWI. But where democracies had deeper roots and could count on popular legitimacy — as in England and France — fascist movements never emerged from the fringe. So we can see that an essential precondition of the fascist movements of the 20th century was public mistrust in the democratic forms of government.

In America, trust in government has been at record lows since the tail end of the George W. Bush presidency, hovering at around 20 percent.

In historical context, this is a frightening trend. People need to believe in something. If they can’t believe in democratic institutions, with their modest procedures and unsatisfying compromises, they will look for an alternative.

How did we get here? One hundred years of progressivism have left us with a constitutional system that elevates special interests over the public interest. The swamp of progressive government is sapping the vitality of our democracy. But Trump and too many of his supporters increasingly confuse the swamp of progressive government with democracy itself.

History suggests that America, like other great powers before it, may one day enter into a prolonged decline and fall. At some point, it may be impossible to deny that our democratic government has become irredeemably corrupt and is exploiting Americans for the benefit of capitalists and foreign enemies. It will be more and more tempting to conclude that institutions and procedures can no longer be defended, that we must fall back to a stronger line of defense — identity and community — and fight back however we can, whatever the collateral damage to our institutions.

That apocalyptic vision is increasingly common on both left and right. It is the weirdly common ingredient in both the Trump diehards’ worldview and that of Antifa. But democracy cannot be defended by abandoning compromise, just as equity cannot be secured by abandoning equal protection of the laws. Our democratic institutions may be rife with dysfunction, but they are still a beacon of freedom, they still allow hundreds of millions of Americans to live as they were meant to live, and they are still worth defending with our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.