We’re witnessing American democracy in all its glory – not the rise of fascism

The US political system is facing challenges, but it is robust enough to overcome them – as it has often before power

If there is method to Donald Trump’s madness, then John Kelly would be the man to explain it. A former general in the US Marines, he was seen as a force of sanity when he went into the White House as Chief of Staff and started kicking out the likes of Anthony Scaramucci and Steve Bannon.
But what he saw, he now says, was a president who “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist”. In any other time, such a verdict, from such a well-respected source, could be devastating.
But this language has been used so often as to have lost its force. Kamala Harris has been calling Trump a fascist too, following an absurd line of attack that the Democrats have been running for months. “Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” Joe Biden asked at a speech in January. “It’s what the 2024 election is all about.” This is what The Washington Post thought the 2016 election was about. When Trump won, it adopted a new motto: “Democracy dies in darkness.”
But democracy, as it turns out, didn’t die. For all of Trump’s antics, the US economy prospered, employment hit a record high and poverty among African Americans hit an all-time low. A wider world, unsure how the mercurial Trump would react, was on good behaviour. This is why it’s harder to say that a Trump victory would lead to calamity: it didn’t last time. And, yes, he attempted to bend the democratic rules. But that ended not just in failure but in the strengthening – even a rebirth – of the system he tried to subvert.
It’s hard to cut through the hyperbole of the democracy-in-crisis narrative but James Gibson, a professor at Washington University in St Louis, has sought to do so in Democracy’s Destruction?, published last month. He looks at Trump’s attempt to cling on to power, with the president claiming “absolute proof” that the 2020 election had been rigged. This, it’s fair to say, was a serious challenge to the democratic system.
Trump accused the Supreme Court of being “weak” for ignoring his claim, but it was hardly alone. Some 86 judges, many appointed by Republicans and some by Trump himself – also did so. Mike Pence, his unflinchingly loyal vice president, point-blank refused to send the results back to the states after studying the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Trump howled, “hang Mike Pence” chants began, protesters came looking for him in the Senate chamber. But democracy and its institutions prevailed.
Prof Gibson then looks at surveys testing genuinely anti-democratic propositions in the aftermath of all this. Should the Senate be done away with? How many say that, no matter what, Biden would “never be my president”? Or refuse to recognise laws he passed? No more than 12 per cent went along with any of these statements; about the same as still believe that Nasa faked the moon landings. It’s not much of a basis to have serious concerns about the impending death of American democracy.
If anything, demand for democracy has been growing. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs Wade put abortion law back into democratic control by allowing each elected state legislature to decide their own rules. Even this decision did not lead to a majority wishing to constrain the Supreme Court’s independence, let alone abolish it. Americans may curse the result of their elections or the judgments of the Justices but they have faith in the system.
They fear for its future, to be sure. America has never been short of people drawing analogies to mayhem in Washington and the end of the Roman Empire. A poll at the end of last year found 72 per cent of Democrats saying that democracy is at risk in the presidential election – but so did 52 per cent of Republicans. Some see, in Trump, a would-be Caesar. Others see, in Harris, a vacuous puppet serving as a proxy candidate for a faceless machine. And one that also tried to defame and imprison Trump, to stop him running.
Even the lawfare backfired. After 34 convictions and charges ranging from fraud to election subversion, as well as being found liable for sexual assault, Trump is now running ahead in national swing-state polls (which is more than he managed last time). The only way to defeat a presidential candidate, it seems, is to have an election and field a more popular alternative. The basic democratic rules have proved unsubvertible.
What we are seeing is a rise in the number who confuse losing an election with a crisis in democracy. Britain had a fair share of this after Brexit, described by no less an authority as the Archbishop of Canterbury as standing in the “nationalist, populist or even fascist tradition of politics”. But the bigger trend is an attempt to shut down debate by calling the other side fascists; and, when this fails, claiming that fascism is winning. The rise of populism in Europe is, of course, all democratic. And a necessary, painful reminder to other parties not to keep important topics – like demographic change – off the agenda.
The balance between freedom and authoritarianism is certainly moving the wrong way, but this is generally due to democratic pressure. Those of us who opposed lockdown, the smoking ban and other incursions on liberty need to concede that they were depressingly popular – so we can’t very well say it’s undemocratic. It just means that the case for liberty needs to be made a bit better.
Whether you see Trump as a political antichrist or a necessary corrective to a broken system, it’s hard to find evidence that he is, in any meaningful sense, a fascist. The Harris campaign know this. They’ll also know voters have, by now, made their minds about Trump. At this stage, all that matters is how well each side persuades its supporters to get out and vote – which usually means saying that this is a contest between light and dark, good and evil. Between dictatorship and democracy.
Americans do all this very well. That’s why so many Labour activists are out there campaigning: they want to experience political campaigns fought with more passion, intensity and professionalism than they’d find anywhere else. But it doesn’t show a system in crisis. It shows that America, in spite of everything, can still lay on the greatest democratic show on earth.