We need a new theory of democracy — because this version has failed

According to polling data, 62 percent of Americans favor the government being responsible for the health coverage of all people in the country. Sixty-five percent of Americans polled favored the infrastructure bill passed during Joe Biden’s presidency. In a poll taken just last year, 63 percent of Americans wanted to increase trade with other countries, and 75 percent worried that tariffs would raise consumer prices. Another poll found 83 percent of likely voters, including 80 percent of Republicans, supported providing federal housing assistance after a natural disaster.

Yet in 2024, a near-majority of voters chose a president who would not only not improve medical access, but would adopt a policy to drop coverage for at least 10 million Americans who are currently insured. His other policies include neglecting infrastructure (with the exception of ICE detention facilities), and rescinding unspent funds from the Biden infrastructure bill. FEMA has been cut, and the president has imposed the highest tariffs since the Smoot-Hawley Act almost a century ago.

What explains this behavioral disconnect on the part of voters? There are several theories I propose to analyze.

Ignorance theory

One correspondent of mine writes that “most Americans did not know who and what they were voting for,” adding that few people would have looked at the 982-page Project 2025, a “daunting document.” I must admit that I, too, was not masochistic enough to read it.

But accurate news summaries of that plan, the “Mein Kampf” of the current Republican Party, were ubiquitous in the months before the election. And Donald Trump was hands-down the most publicized candidate in history, whose every utterance was almost universally reported, including his intention to decree tariffs. He had 100 percent name ID and had already been president for four years, when his atrocious handling of matters like the COVID pandemic should have given anyone not living in a Trappist monastery, shut off from all communications, ample warning about his likely policies.

Terms like “ignorance” and “low-information” are often used to describe much of the electorate, but ascribing Trump’s election to voters not knowing who he was or what he stood for is not credible. Indeed, it runs afoul of the entire basis of both political science and economic decision-making: the rational choice model of human behavior, whereby people are assumed to understand their own material interests.

The agrarian rebellion of the 1880s and 1890s was led by farmers at a time when literacy was far from universal and rural areas were incredibly isolated by today’s standards. Yet these political insurgents seemed to know precisely which powerful interests were keeping them in debt. Likewise, industrial workers seeking union recognition during the 1930s grasped that their material interests were not improved by submitting to the dictates of Henry Ford and his fellow industrial moguls.

By contrast with today, consider Owsley County, Kentucky, one of the poorest counties in the U.S., whose residents’ life expectancy is almost 10 years shorter than the nation’s average. Two-thirds of its residents are enrolled in Medicaid, as one might expect from the poverty. Yet the county’s voters went 88 percent for Trump in 2024, which was no fluke. In the 2016 governor’s race, 70 percent of the county voted for Republican Matt Bevin, whose signature campaign theme was cutting Kentucky’s Medicaid program.

These voters freely chose to deny themselves medical insurance. Aside from flatly contradicting the rational choice model, their action makes nonsense of the latest fad among Democratic Party operatives and ideologically aligned pundits, “abundance liberalism”: If we offer all kinds of goodies to the public, they will flock back to the Party of FDR. One of the abundance nostrums, making things cheaper through deregulation, is laughable. Engaging the GOP in a bidding war over deregulation is like getting suckered into a hot dog-eating contest with Joey Chestnut. If people reject their own medical coverage, dangling them offers to attend community college for free probably won’t work.

While it is unquestionably true that ignorance can lead to poor decision-making, that cannot provide a full explanation of recent voting behavior. Why were voters in previous eras, however lacking in education or information, aligned with their own material interests when that is no longer the case? If sheer ignorance is responsible for tectonic political upheavals (and America’s current turn to fascism is certainly that), then so much for the consent of the governed on which democracy is based. Approval made in abysmal ignorance is hardly informed consent.

Svengali theory

This notion posits that large portions of the American electorate are systematically brainwashed by Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group and other Republican propaganda organs. This behavioral model is a staple of democratic pundits; left-of-center media watchdog websites frequently run excerpts of Fox News shows to demonstrate intentionally biased reporting, and how it is carefully designed to mislead its consumers..

Propaganda undoubtedly has an effect; Jen Senko’s “The Brainwashing of My Dad” clearly demonstrates how some people, particularly the elderly, are vulnerable to being influenced by glitzy production, flashing chyrons announcing bogus breaking news, and algorithm-driven scripting scientifically designed to build up fear, rage and helplessness.

But how big a factor was Republican media in Trump’s victory, which was based on the remarkable turnout of 77 million people voting for him? How many people did propaganda convert into Trumpers who otherwise would have voted for Kamala Harris or stayed home?

In the 1930s, newspapers were as influential as electronic media is today, and were largely owned by right-wing interests like William Randolph Hearst, Robert McCormick or the Chandlers. Many of these press barons were no mere “conservatives”; they took a friendly line towards Nazi Germany in the 1930s. There is no neutral estimate of political endorsements for the presidential election of 1936, but Franklin D. Roosevelt guessed that 85 percent of the press endorsed his opponent, Alf Landon. Yet FDR won a crushing 61 percent of the vote.

If present-day Americans are deemed uniquely vulnerable to political propaganda, it is not as if they have no choice in the matter, unlike the people of North Korea. There are hundreds of cable channels and uncountable numbers of internet sites in all shades of political views.

To the extent that calculated mendacity delivered through the media can swing elections, the implications are grave for democratic theory. If there is no “marketplace of ideas” where one can objectively shop in the manner of comparing prices at Home Depot versus Lowe’s and, instead, insidious manipulation determines outcomes, then human beings are no more capable of exercising free will than so many laboratory rats.

The Fox News effect might go a short distance in explaining the rot of our democracy, but it is more likely a symptom of decay rather than the primary cause. For the most part, it preaches to and mobilizes the converted.

Politics-as-entertainment theory

In the Roman Empire, the games at the Circus Maximus were an amusement and a distraction, a token to the proles as a substitute for being able to exercise any political power. But what if politics itself in America has degenerated to the level of entertainment in the minds of voters? A friend who teaches at a state university related to me that a student of his said he supported Trump “because he’s funny.” How did stand-up comedy rather than policy ideas come to be a criterion for choosing a president?

The origin of this mentality was first described, in tentative fashion, by American historian Daniel Boorstin in his 1961 book ”The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” He said that the reproduction of an event can become more “real” than the event itself. This  process creates “pseudo-events,” primarily intended for diversion and profit, which distance the spectator from reality. For our purposes, the determining pseudo-event may have been the reality-TV franchise “The Apprentice,” in which Trump, a bankrupt six times over, presented himself as a savvy businessman, and people bought it.

In 1967, French philosopher Guy Debord wrote “Society of the Spectacle,” which expanded the idea of the pseudo-event into a comprehensive social dysfunction: “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation,” he wrote, meaning that images are presented to the public as ostensible entertainment, but really as a kind of anesthesia, turning human beings into passive receptors for whom seeming (usually on a TV screen) is more important than being or doing. Why else would ostensibly serious people think Oprah Winfrey could or should become president, or, God help us, Kid Rock a senator? 

Neil Postman’s 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” continued this theme, arguing that politics had already been reduced to entertainment and that political ideas were sacrificed to images and representations. Thus, according to the media’s fairy tale, candidate George W. Bush was a guy you could have a beer with, whereas Al Gore was a supercilious stiff, a bit of idiocy that may (with a little assist from the Supreme Court) have gotten Bush elected. Never mind not only that Bush was a recovering alcoholic whose policies were uniformly disastrous; he was even re-elected on the strength of a fictitious gunslinging cowboy persona, despite his assiduous avoidance of the Vietnam War. 

We have now reached the stage where Trump’s unconstitutional actions are not perceived for what they are — a mortal threat to democracy and common decency. Instead, sending National Guard troops into D.C., denying lawfully appropriated funding to universities, imposing tariffs on a country to punish it for prosecuting an ex-dictator — all these gambits are seen as reality-TV stunts to divert attention from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Celebrity journalist Michael Wolff evidently understands Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin purely as a matter of getting Epstein out of the headlines – and he might not be wrong, making that a pseudo-event if ever there was one.  

Of course, the Epstein case itself is no longer “real,” but a plot device to keep viewers tuning in to see what befalls the protagonist, in the manner of someone being voted off the island. But the key matter is that in all historical cases of self-rule, from the Greek city-states onward, the community has required the active participation of citizens who understand the stakes, whereas, if Boorstin, et al., are correct, the American public has now been reduced to spectators gawking at images and pseudo-events rather than citizens absorbing ideas or cogent arguments.

The reader will notice there is no great difference between the Svengali theory and the entertainment theory, except that while one involves the conscious use of electronic media to deceive and brainwash, the other holds that the very nature of the various media turns involved citizens into a passive audience, literal consumers rather than citizens.

“This-is-who-we-are” theory.

All the previous theories have elements of truth, but there is something unsatisfactory about them. One instinctively feels that far-reaching changes do not occur through the accident of people failing to pay attention or through passive acceptance or because they are brainwashed into voting for change that will damage them materially.  

It is difficult to argue that Trump fell from the skies, like the alien pods in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” upon a populace too ignorant, too manipulated or too electronically stupefied to know what was happening. That, however, is the conclusion of virtually all of American journalism, because there is a deep-seated taboo that has become all the stronger for being tacitly accepted. This is the shibboleth that no fault must ever attach to the electorate. It’s a unique case: We may harshly judge politicians, institutions, sports teams and so forth. Why not the voters? It’s vacuous to say we’re in a historic political crisis, but that somehow the voters bear no moral responsibility.

Just suppose that the great majority of Trump voters are not oblivious or deluded, that they more or less understand his policies and like them, as well as his performative cruelty, vulgarity and general jackassery. In that case we can assume that his epic corruption, so blatant it would make Boss Tweed blush, doesn’t bother them. We can also suppose that his violent language that usually results in death threats does not trouble their consciences, as it retaliates against people his voters regard as evil or even demonic.

Trump supporters may value these qualities in a politician more than whether he tries to provide them health care or education, things that may poll well only in isolation from other priorities, thereby explaining the voting behavior in Owsley County and other Trump strongholds.

While our mainstream journalists studiously avoid seeing Trump as a reflection of the moral state of the American people, publics in other countries certainly do. In just seven months since his inauguration, the favorability of the U.S. (not just of its president) has collapsed to the point where this nation is now less popular than China in the eyes of the rest of the world. Imagine how positively we will be viewed after three-and-a-half more years of Trump’s depredations. The world may well look at the American people the way our grandparents or great-grandparents looked at the Germans of the 1930s.

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I believe that willful, conscious and knowing support of Trump and his policies is a greater factor than conventional wisdom would have it, and more likely to have been politically decisive than accidental or zombie-like support.

A recent report on voter registration shows a drastic falloff in Democratic registration and commensurate gain in Republican registered voters since 2020. Evidently, Americans approved of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, or at least it didn’t concern them. Preliminary data show a continuing edge in Republican registration even after Trump’s inauguration, when one might have expected a falloff.

But why should Democrats have imagined that younger people would support them overwhelmingly? Considering that they grew up in a stagnant culture suffused with right-wing propaganda, holding liberal views is by no means certain. Why should Democrats have assumed that newly naturalized citizens would be progressive, rather than importing, out of pure habit, the machismo and caudillismo of Guatemala or Honduras, or the authoritarianism of South Asia?

This possibility has unpleasant implications, as it suggests that your neighbor or work colleague might not be unduly troubled if you are hauled off to prison for a social media post or deprived of your pension for being photographed at a demonstration. No doubt this is why journalists avoid discussing it: It’s rude and unpleasant, like describing an autopsy at a dinner party. Perhaps Trump is exactly who most of us are, and we don’t want to acknowledge it.

What have the American people done? The spectacle we have witnessed in the last several years, involving not only Trump but a Congress replete with bizarre creatures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace and dozens of others, cannot but suggest that modern conditions in America have uncovered weaknesses in democratic theory that could make it a self-liquidating form of political organization.

Political philosophers from Plato through Thomas Hobbes, and even our own constitutional framers (who constructed an indirect democracy, hedged with checks and balances), all had the same critique of majoritarian democracy: The masses were ignorant and emotional, and their passions could be inflamed by a demagogue who would then rule as a tyrant claiming to embody to will of the people.

Anyone writing critically these days about democracy is likely to be perceived as attacking motherhood or profaning the Holy Spirit. Yet any thinking person can see there is something wrong when the supposed will of the people results in malicious investigations of political opponents, censorship of national institutions like the Smithsonian, and the suppression of academic freedom. Through approval or indifference, these actions may be acceptable according to majority rule, but that does not make them legitimate.

I am not condemning democracy; I am pointing out its flaws. It is an inherently fragile system, like civilization itself, and periodically needs to adapt its rules to thwart those forces that would undo it.

The Weimar-German constitution of 1919 was very liberal — far more so than the U.S. at the time, which was groaning under Prohibition, with most Black citizens excluded from voting and the Klan dominating many state legislatures — yet it collapsed in little more than a dozen years. An exemplary lesson having been learned by the near-total destruction of Germany in World War II, the Bonn constitution of 1949 contained multiple well-designed safeguards against extremism, and the country flourished remarkably well for 75 years. But now an extremist group, the Alternative for Germany or AfD, may become that nation’s biggest political party, just as the Nazis did in the waning days of Weimar.

That example illustrates a crucial fact: As the oldest constitutional republic in unbroken existence on earth, the United States is uniquely vulnerable to tampering and disruption because of its sheer age and its sclerotic resistance to change. Knee-jerk appeals to what the founders supposedly wanted or intended are no longer sufficient; does any other democratic system make its rules according to what its leading citizens are presumed to have thought a quarter-millennium ago?

If the current president of the United States, elected by 49.8 percent of the people in a high-turnout election, appears eager to accept advice from Vladimir Putin on how to run future American elections, and seeks to impose the result by decree, I rest my case: Our democracy has comprehensively failed.