Imagine for the moment genuine authoritarians, such as Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, or North Korea’s Kim Jung-un, suffering what President Trump suffered in the debate, an open and bruising argument about how effectively he governs. He bullied and insulted and still Biden won because Biden did not simply fold. And, Biden conveyed at moments the qualities admired by an electorate in a democracy, including respect for the process, empathy, and common sense.
Imagine those same authoritarians waking up to the kind of punditry directed at Trump the next morning; imagine having to endure Joy Reid on MSNBC comment that,
“At this point, he’s an angry autocrat who’s desperate to hold on to power. And who sees the legal threat ahead of him. And the potential seizure of assets in his future. And the potential foreclosure of Trump Tower. And he’s mad. And he does not understand why he has to even sit through a debate or sit for an election.”
The firmly authoritarian states, Russia, China, North Korea, must wonder at the challenges to Trump’s authority and the indignity of the New York Times exposé of his finances that conjures a genuine risk of multiple prosecutions. They must wonder at the kind of vulnerability that could get a leader-for-life into a lot trouble; something like a Belarus, for instance.
Churchill famously said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried…”. He also said, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise”. And so it proved on Tuesday night. Sure, the tenor of debate was pathetic, and Trump disgraced the dignity of the office of the president not to mention the intelligence of the audience through a barrage of familiar lies. But what a demonstration of democracy’s power to hold its leaders to account through public scrutiny. The audience walked away with a good understanding of the character and caliber of each man. And what to make of the audience? American civil society includes roughly as many Trump supporters as those who oppose him. But for all his support the only collective of people that Trump could call to his banner was the extreme-right Proud Boys. The rest were those he would exclude. The next morning, even Trump’s Republican supporters kept their distance. In a true autocracy, the Putins, Xi Jinpings, and Kim Jung-uns can call on the security forces and military to uphold their power. America’s military leadership has made it clear they serve America, not one political side or the other, and, when deployed, federal law enforcement from a hodgepodge of agencies had to be withdrawn because of public outrage. For all the bluster, Trump cannot compel the outcome he desires.
The Gorgon-headed threats to Trump multiply because American democracy does not have a single center of power. It is distributed across co-equal branches of government, holding each other to account, including an independent judiciary, as well as state governments, a free press, and through citizen direct action. Points of view can not be imposed from above but have to be debated and reconciled through compromise. When there is an attempt to force a single view, democracy is an open process that exposes dysfunctional choices even when the path forward is fraught with uncertainty. Trump was exposed to public view as a badly damaged person and a populist hack appealing to the worst impulses in a divided civil society rather than as a conciliator and unifier.
The debate also shone with promise; as when challenger Biden said we need law and order, yes, but also justice. Justice is not just about the rule of law as expressed through the use of force but also about that peculiar American notion imbedded in the Constitution of the “pursuit of happiness”, reflected today in the idea of freedom of opportunity for all no matter their background or circumstance. Trump is failing because he offers nothing someone who enjoys or aspires to democracy’s freedoms could embrace. Here’s to the protesters in Portland (not the agitators but the citizens demanding better from society and from their government), the marchers in Washington DC, and the fact-checkers.
America’s autocrats, populist demagogues, and fringe hate groups—the Donald Trumps, Joseph McCarthys, the KKK and the Proud Boys--can make democracy “imperfect and unwise”, and Trump is a particular danger because of the central authority that the presidency holds, but the evidence on Tuesday night is that, in the face of push back, Trump does not control the process or the message. Time and again the tide has turned against the autocrats and hate mongers. Democracy is alive and well in the distributed power of the People--where it counts--and a vaccine for what ails America is just around the corner in November.
