A Good Week for Democracy

These past days have been a yet another reminder of the old adage attributed to Lenin that there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen. In dizzying order we’ve witnessed a near-assassination of former president Donald Trump followed by the announcement by current president Joe Biden that he would not run for re-election followed by the rapid ascent of Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic Party nominee and a sharp re-jiggering of both national polls and prior assumptions.

Yes, a handful of past U.S. presidents have declined to run for a second term. In March of 1968, in the midst of a wrenching and seemingly unending conflict in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson stunningly announced, “I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year. With America’s sons in the fields far away, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the Presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” 1968 was another one of those years where decades seemed to happen weekly, and in the months following LBJ’s announcement, the country would be rent by the dual assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and witness a summer of civil unrest and violence unparalleled since.

That was 56 years ago, in living memory of many but more distant from today than that day was from the start of World War I. It is also not the first time that a presidential nominee has been selected by the party leaders and not by an open primary system. In fact, the Fox News et al mantra over the past week that replacing Biden with Harris constitutes some sort of anti-democratic coup because the nominee will not have gone through the primary process ignores history. From the 1920s until the nominating reforms of the 1970s, all presidential candidates were chosen by a combination of party insiders and primaries; until the 20th century, there were no primaries and every candidate, every single one was chosen by party insiders; the “people” had no direct voice or input.

Change and tumult are not inherently good or bad. Too much change too quickly is destabilizing; too little creates sclerosis. The past weeks have been a lot, but arguably a good a lot. Prior to this week, a pall of legitimate despair was descending on the United States at the prospect of two widely disliked and unpopular candidates. Since the Republican Convention and the ascension of Harris, the popularity of both candidates has gone up measurably, which will of course surprise and dismay those who are opposed strongly to one or the other, but a more positive, passionate and engaged electorate is good for society and good for democracy, period.

It has also been a stellar period for democracy globally. After years of warnings about the rising tide of authoritarianism everywhere, we have seen in country after country robust elections with surprisingly moderate results. Yes, as Anne Applebaum reminds us in her new book Autocracy, Inc., there is a cohort of autocrats who are working loosely in concert to bend the global order to serve their perpetuation of power.

The question then is cup-half-full or half-empty as it applies to democracy and autocracy. To no one’s surprise, I am squarely in the half-full camp, or more than half-full, with democracy perhaps not brimming over, but certainly frothing gracefully toward the top.

A gaggle of the world’s largest multi-ethnic and teeming democracies all had peaceful and fair elections in the past months, with Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and above all India producing either stable transitions to more moderate governments or startling rebukes of entrenched parties that expected to win. Narendra Modi in India has frequently been placed in the Applebaum autocracy camp, and yet his party suffered serious setbacks in precisely the areas of the country where its nationalist, autocratic playbook had been most prominently deployed. In Europe, the anticipated surge of the far right, animated by animosity to immigration, amounted to barely a ripple in the European Union elections. And in France and Great Britain, while the far right did indeed do better than ever, it failed to establish a meaningful place in government.

How one reads the political moment in the United States and the world is, of course, contingent on future outcomes and on personal temperament. Should Trump win the presidency, many will despair for democracy; should Harris, a fair portion of Americans will also despair and rage. But that is not quite the same as democracy itself being imperiled. Yes, it is fashionable in the U.S. now to warn that democratic norms are eroding in the face of partisan intolerance and alternate fact-universes. Maybe. Or maybe the noise and tumult, which has been a feature at multiple points in the American past, are indicative of an efflorescence of democracy and a harbinger of systemic shifts that are simultaneously risky and yet healthy.

I don’t want to dismiss how unsettling the present moment can feel. But there is no dearth of voices emphasizing the precariousness of our systems and the risks everywhere. There is a dearth of voices suggesting that maybe things aren’t so precarious, regardless of who wins the presidency in November. Yes, regardless, the president of the United States has considerable power, too much power in my opinion; the imperial presidency is a structural problem that has evolved over decades of Cold War and the war on terror and in the face of congressional inaction. But too much U.S presidential power is not yet anywhere near the autocratic power of Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Erdogan in Turkey or even Orban in Hungary. We rightly fear creeping autocracy and should. But we should not overstate its likelihood in the United States. Time will tell, but time has not yet told.

Take, by way of example, one irony of a Supreme Court that in a series of decisions in June appeared to enhance the powers of the presidency in its decision on immunity (Trump v. The United States). At the same time, the court also overturned the Chevron doctrine of the 1980s, which had enabled administrative federal agencies to make sweeping rules and regulations and set a high bar for legal challenges to their authority. Undermining the authority of government agencies directly undermines the power of the presidency; autocrats need unfettered levers of control, yet in the absence of the Chevron doctrine, future presidents will have less power not more, even as they may have more power and not less because of the immunity decision. Cup half-full? Cup half-empty? Eye of the beholder?

It’s been a good week for democracy. It’s also been a good year for democracy. And even if our democracy is deeply flawed, it’s unequivocally better than most alternatives. We’ve taken many moments to despair. Let’s take a moment to hope.