The newly important American political axis: Democracy vs. autocracy
By the time the summit arrived in December, its thesis was already becoming alarmingly salient. NATO had begun raising the alarm about Russia’s military movements in mid-November; in early December, The Washington Post reported that Russia planned to invade Ukraine with overwhelming force. The demand that democracy be defended and fought for was suddenly very literal.
To some extent, it seems obvious that the administration’s response to Russia’s aggression and eventual invasion was streamlined by the binary that Biden had been presenting. The invasion isn’t nuanced in general, but it was also an explicit demonstration of the contrast between political systems. And in the wake of the invasion, we’ve seen our typical political spectrum explicitly subsumed in significant ways by the one Biden spoke about on Jan. 20, 2021.
Democracy vs. autocracy is, in fact, an important political axis in the United States.
Biden’s comments at his inauguration were broadly about the rise of autocracy in the world, the expansion of ambition by people like Russian President Vladimir Putin and the retraction of free elections at the hands of people like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. But he was clearly also speaking explicitly about the attempt by Donald Trump to subvert the results of the election in our own country and the violence that had unfolded two weeks before, where Biden stood as he spoke.
Trump does not sit at the far end of the “democracy” side of the axis, though it’s not exactly clear where he sits otherwise. He has, however, helped amplify sympathy for a more-autocratic view of American politics. He’s repeatedly elevated dishonest claims about election security as he endorses new restrictions on the right to vote. He’s lashed out at independent governmental institutions and actors, and advocated repeatedly for infusing apolitical organizations and decision-makers with political considerations.
His party has often followed his lead. Republican legislators at all levels of government are questioning how expansive voting access should be. Often, these are small tweaks, ones that they generally believe to be disadvantageous to the left. Sometimes that belief stems from an understanding of who is newly burdened by the changes. Sometimes it’s based on the delusion that the left regularly commits rampant fraud in elections, a theory that would seem to be undercut pretty severely by the fact that the Democratic Party’s hold on power is so tenuous.
These restrictions are not autocratic, certainly, but they are movements away from open democratic elections. As the GOP has become more reliant on the disproportionate power of rural states in the electoral college and the Senate, we hear more direct arguments against democracy crop up at times. Shortly before the 2020 election, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), for example, explicitly argued against the idea that the United States was a democracy but, instead, a system of “carefully balanced power” — one that he praised explicitly as a check on the will of the majority. It was a useful argument given that any second term for Trump would almost certainly depend on winning a majority of electoral votes while losing the popular vote, and it was an argument specifically offered in response to a vice-presidential debate in which Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) amplified her ticket’s concerns about the threat to democracy posed by a Trump victory.
The invasion of Ukraine has clarified the differences between the poles of this axis. Numerous figures in American politics and media have emerged as defenders of Putin’s attack, either by denigrating Ukraine — often carrying over rhetoric elevated by Trump as he sought to defend himself against impeachment in 2019 — or by excusing Putin’s actions. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has repeatedly amplified Putin’s position on the situation, to the Kremlin’s apparent glee, even as he’s at times forced to malign Putin personally. Others, often but not exclusively on the right, have similarly used the invasion as a moment for denigrating the American government or rationalizing Putin’s worldview.
It’s useful to step back and look at the forest here. What are you doing when you rationalize the Russian invasion? You’re making excuses for an autocratic nation to subsume or kneecap a democratic one. If your position is that people have a right to self-governance, it’s hard to see how such rhetoric is defensible. If, instead, you hold the position Lee used to bolster his argument, that democracy is just a means to an ends, then however you get to those ends is fine. You’re somewhere on the axis, but not at the democracy pole.
These nuanced cases shouldn’t distract from the fact that there are some who clearly believe that autocratic power would be preferable in the United States to democratic elections. If you asked Trump whether he should get to hold power as long as he wanted or be subject to open elections every four years, what do you think he would say? Perhaps he would pay lip service to elections held on his terms. Autocracies often include elections, after all; Putin has been “reelected,” but not in any election that should be considered credible. Kim Jong Un is the “elected” leader of North Korea, too. But it’s clear that Trump’s sympathies are with the autocratic end of the axis.
On Tuesday, he offered an endorsement in an upcoming election.
“Now with what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine, among many other things, the great and wonderful people of Hungary need the continued strong leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orban more than ever,” Trump wrote. “He is TOUGH, SMART, AND LOVES HIS COUNTRY. In the upcoming Election next month, he already has my Complete and Total Endorsement!” That this “endorsement” was identical in tone and content to his endorsements in American elections should not be missed. Nor should the use of Russia’s invasion as a rationale for cementing the power of an emerging autocrat (who, naturally, has been upheld as an ideal in the past by Tucker Carlson).
The question of how robust democracy should be in the United States predates the country’s founding, and the tension between democracy and autocracy has been important before, as it was a century ago. But we should not use that history to assuage any worries about how the tension manifests today. The breadth of participation in democracy we see today was born only with the civil rights movement — after the global surge in autocracy at the time of World War II.
It is an important fight in the moment, as exemplified in Ukraine. But it’s also a fight, to Biden’s point, that doesn’t only unfold through use of arms.
