Are Americans Giving Up on Democracy?

In the aftermath of a week during which President Donald Trump both referred to the European Union as a foe and held a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, now seems like a particularly ripe time to wrestle with our nation’s increasingly murky relationship with democracy and its foil, authoritarianism. Many of our assumptions about the norms of American political conduct both at home and abroad—norms we’ve taken as permanent planks—appear to be in flux, and our country needs to do some soul-searching.

Two recent studies, one from the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group and the other from the Pew Research Center, can help us do just that. They explore our nation’s reckoning with the dichotomy of democracy and authoritarianism, probing the American people’s commitment to democracy’s fundamental values, norms, and processes. The findings, and implications, of these two studies were also the foundation of a recent New America event, “Are Americans Giving up on Democracy?” It featured journalists and experts from across the political spectrum who discussed electoral reform strategies that may help the country organize more effectively.

In the midst of partisan gridlock and ideological re-appraisal, Americans seem to be holding onto their faith in democracy. The Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group found that “if given a direct choice, the overwhelming majority of Americans choose democracy” over “Army rule” or a “strong leader that does not have to bother with Congress or elections.” Echoing this notion, the Pew’s survey found that across 23 democratic ideals—for instance, the “rights and freedoms of all people are respected” and “people are free to peacefully protest”—a majority of respondents said that each is “very important for the U.S.” However, most respondents believed that only eight of the 23 “describe the country well.” The American public’s continued support for democracy provides hope in an unsettling time, but the gulf between their expectations for and lived experience with democracy is cause for concern.

Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, contextualized America’s current democratic moment within the broader arc of history. More specifically, he discussed patterns seen across countries that have chosen to abandon democracy in the past. The way Olsen sees it, people break up with democratic norms for one of two main reasons: either because of severe and crippling economic catastrophe, à la Venezuela and Chávez, or because of the feeling that people can’t live a life of their choosing within a particular ideological regime, à la the American Civil War.

Let’s look at these points in turn. While Trump’s recent claim that we’re experiencing “the greatest economy in the HISTORY of America” is debatable at best and myopic at worst, 2018 is certainly no 2008. Yes, the president’s mounting bellicosity toward China, the EU, and even Canada on the trade front is absolutely troubling. However, by a lot of measures, our economy still continues to grow: GDP is up, unemployment is down, and no signs of recession have registered on analysts’ radars.

Because the American economy, at least for now, checks out fine, we can move to Olsen’s second proposed catalyst of democratic decline: people’s perceptions of whether they can live the kind of life that they want, depending on who’s in the White House. Indeed, how possible is it really, the thinking goes, for Americans to achieve this in a time of mounting hyper-polarization, when the two options available to them seem increasingly extreme? New America Senior Fellow Lee Drutman, grappling with this question, asked if we’re “on an inevitable crash course between two very different values of what America should be.”

Two sets of related polling shed light on Drutman’s dilemma. Strikingly, a 2017 Pew study finds that “far more Americans say there are strong conflicts between partisans than between other groups in society.” In particular, 64 percent of the public sees very strong conflict between Democrats and Republicans, while only 27 percent sees very strong conflict between the rich and the poor—the two groups the public considers to be the second-most embattled. Another 2017 Pew Study finds that the divisions between Democrats and Republicans on fundamental political values are more pronounced than they’ve been since Pew began such polling in 1994. Additionally, “the magnitude of these differences dwarfs other divisions in society, along such lines as gender, race and ethnicity, religious observance or education.”

Are Americans satisfied with this trajectory toward intractable ideological tension, or do they want to shut Pandora’s box—trapping the partisan animus and ideological extremes that characterize the country’s winner-takes-all electoral system? Jocelyn Kiley, the associate director of U.S. politics at Pew, discussed the fundamental irony of the American people’s apparent answer to this question. Kiley noted that even though a “high percentage of Americans think that substantial changes need to be made to our political procedures,” “if you put before them any of a wide array of political procedures that have been debated at one point or another, [the proposed procedures] are extremely unpopular.”

Panelists debated what it would take for Americans to overcome this inertia—to move past the all-too-human paradox of desiring change yet refusing to readjust. Drutman called for a frank national conversation that rejects blind veneration for structural relics that may not make sense in a modern context. Olsen, for his part, identified ranked-choice voting, the elimination of the electoral college, and mandatory proportionality as promising electoral innovations that could allow a moderate middle to organize more effectively.

Pew’s polling suggests that support for electoral innovations—like increasing the size of the House and Senate—grows when bolstered by historical context. In this light, it may be prudent to conduct further polling in order to tease out other intricacies of potential public support. Indeed, working to implement electoral reforms that create openings for a moderate middle may improve citizens’ lived experiences within the American democratic system—and they may offer just the polarization off-ramp we need.