By now, we all know the Democrats’ “defense of democracy” push for the presidential election fell flat. But why?
One reason is that the talk of threats to democracy felt completely irrelevant to most people’s number-one concern going into the election: the economy, specifically the skyrocketing cost of living these past few years: groceries, housing, consumer goods, and more. But there’s also the fact that the way Democrats talk about democracy is out of touch with the way most Americans think about it.
As a raft of surveys make clear, most everyone in America feels like the country’s democracy is under threat — even Donald Trump supporters. A lot of that has to do with both parties suspecting the other side’s leadership of plotting to subvert it in different ways. But a large and under-discussed part of what drives this is the widespread feeling that American democracy is not delivering a decent life for its citizens and has been captured by big money.
In the last New York Times/Siena College poll before the election, of the 76 percent of respondents who said American democracy was under threat, 14 percent of them gave as the reason “the government/government corruption/nonspecific politicians/leaders.” That was the second-most popular answer after “Donald Trump,” which 21 percent picked. A higher share of both Trump voters (19 percent) and nonvoters in 2020 (11 percent) chose that first one as the threat than any other option. That fairly large shares of non-Democratic voting Americans name corruption and American leadership in general the chief threat to democracy is reflected in other surveys, too.
In a late 2023 Pew study where only 27 percent of adults said the political system was working very or somewhat well, there were a host of alarming metrics: the share of the public that trusted the federal government was among the lowest in seven decades, “corrupt” and “divisive” were the two most common words…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
