Dialectical Contributions to Democratic Breakdown

Multiple news stories over the past week confirm the precariousness of our situation

Presidential candidate Calin Georgescu talks to supporters and the media in front of a closed voting station where he was supposed to vote on Sunday, December 8, 2024 in Mogosoaia, Romania. Sunday would have been the runoff vote in Romania's presidential election, but last week the country's Constitutional Court annulled the first round of voting after intelligence showed far-right candidate Georgescu benefitted from a mass influence operation mounted by Russia. (Photo by Andrei Pungovschi/Getty Images)

What a week of news! In what follows, I don’t address the remarkable events in Syria over recent days. So here I’ll just say that I’m happy for the Syrian people released from the literal and figurative prisons of Bashar al-Assad’s Ba’athist tyranny. But I’m also concerned about what the future holds. I would be very surprised if a country with so many deep religious and ethnic cleavages could cohere into a stable nation with functional democratic institutions. We shall see.

In any event, what follows brings together a number of other news stories from over the past week—all of them shed an ominous light on the reverse of what we’ve seen in Syria: Not the fall of a brutal dictatorship but how a more authoritarian form of government could emerge in the United States—and how opponents of the incoming Trump administration could inadvertently contribute to its arrival.

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When democracies devolve into more dictatorial forms of government, they usually do so dialectically.

South Korea provided a helpful negative illustration of the point over the past week. Last Tuesday, President Yoon Suk Yeol—a highly polarizing, Trump-like figure—declared martial law in what appears to have been a hapless attempt at a self-coup. The move was reversed less than a day later, when the South Korean National Assembly voted unanimously (190-0) to declare it invalid.

These events confirm that overturning a consolidated liberal democracy is more difficult than one might suppose. The United States learned the same lesson with the events surrounding the insurrectionary riot against Congress on January 6, 2021. Donald Trump looked for ways to halt the transfer of power to the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. But the process is embedded in a series of institutions, with numerous people at the state and federal levels following well-established norms and procedures. A wayward president can certainly make a mess, even stirring up grassroots anger and violence against the process. But the process will continue to unfold unless some powerful counterforce (the military, overwhelming public opinion, multiple senior officials in charge of key public institutions) takes his side against the system.

That didn’t happen in Seoul last week, just as it didn’t happen here in early January 2021.

That’s because something crucial was lacking in both cases: A prior, dialectical process in which a party aligned with the liberal-democratic system begins evolving in an authoritarian direction, in part as a result of attempting to defend against the challenge posed by an anti-system (populist) party or political movement.

Some recent events give us reason to worry that precisely such a dialectical process may be unfolding as we approach the advent of the second Trump administration.¹