In one of the more substantive entries in the “democratic spring” genre, Francis Fukuyama strikes a tempered note — pointing once again to the setbacks facing Russia and the People’s Republic of China but also observing possible challenges within established democracies.
For Fukuyama, perhaps the biggest “question mark” for the survival of “liberal democracy” is the United States: Republicans could very well capture at least one house of Congress in the midterms, and “Donald Trump’s MAGA followers” have taken over the GOP and thus threaten democracy. Fukuyama ends with a call to action: “Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf. The problem is that many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies begin to take their form of government for granted.”
I hope it’s not too contrarian to say that struggle taken to a certain extreme might — far from saving it — actually endanger democracy. As partisan conflict escalates into sentiments of existential war, the very mechanisms of democracy are tested. In the United States, successive policy failures and deeper social disruptions have fed into an escalatory spiral of norm-breaking.
Hence, the electoral denialism of 2000, 2004, 2016, and 2018 helped expand the Overton window for election delegitimization. The incessant claims that the 2016 election was “hacked,” that the presidency was “illegitimate,” that American democracy had been “subverted” — those were the vanguard for Trump’s full-frontal assault on the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
More broadly, the attempt to lean into a “struggle” for American democracy has also justified assaults on other branches of government, including the Senate and the Supreme Court. Court-packing — which used to be regarded as a beyond-the-pale threat to the separation of powers and the integrity of the judiciary — is now treated in the press and among leading Democrats as a respectable opinion. New York’s Jerry Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, is a proponent of Court-packing. In the Georgia Senate debate, Raphael Warnock didn’t directly answer when asked about this issue; Warnock also supports nuking the filibuster, another attack on checks and balances.
To call this “whataboutism” is to miss the point, which is that endlessly sharpened struggle poses grave risks to the democratic order. (It’s quite possible to oppose overthrowing presidential elections and nuking the filibuster and packing the Court.)
In terms of promoting “liberal democracy,” ideology might sometimes be less important than the overall conditions that allow for democratic stability and freedom. Seen in this light, efforts to turn Afghanistan into a democracy didn’t fail because there weren’t enough ideologically committed “liberal democrats” living there. Instead, Afghanistan’s corruption-soaked central government lacked enough state capacity and legitimacy; there was too little institutional musculature and political trust for a robust democratic order.
A related point might apply to securing a democratic order: Torching civic infrastructure (or parts of American cities) in order to “resist” a political leader injures the conditions for a functioning democracy. Protecting democracy means recognizing the limits of anathematization and confronting the dissatisfactions that give rise to demagoguery and political alienation.
While it’s tempting to treat “saving democracy” as a partisan slogan or fund-raising pitch, a more lynx-eyed defense of a democratic order requires attention to those deeper questions of institutional credibility and the broader conditions of civil flourishing.