UT Expert Remains “Bullish” on U.S. Democracy as Trump Heads to the White House
Professor says unity can be worse than polarization
By Benton Graham, Fri., Dec. 6, 2024
For six years, former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s regime violently repressed its citizenry in the name of a war on drugs and silenced much of the press. Rights groups have estimated that around 30,000 died as a result of the Philippine drug war. It’s a bleak picture to liken Donald Trump’s United States to Duterte’s Philippines, but Jason Brownlee said it is a useful comparison for U.S. democracy. Why? Because in 2022, Duterte stepped down from power after his term expired.
“I’ve been thinking about the Philippines a lot today with these cabinet picks and the way Trump is handling the Republican Party,” said Brownlee, who is a professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. “It reminds me of the way politics in the Philippines can be dominated by personalities, and the party can surrender to the individual.” Duterte is a “good example of the way a president can be outrageous, terribly violent, but still not stay in power permanently.”
In other words, a lot of bad, traumatic things, such as mass deportations and rising economic inequality, are likely to happen in the next four years under Trump. But Brownlee remains confident that U.S. democracy, which became a hot topic for both parties during the 2024 election, will not crumble.
Brownlee has written three books dealing with questions of authoritarianism and democracy with a focus on the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and internal politics in the global South. He said that it’s important to consider how we even define democracy. In one definition, the people have authority. It includes universal suffrage and “a thick set of rights.” But he said a definition coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter is more commonly used among political science scholars and poses a simple question: Are there competitive elections between multiple parties? To Brownlee, the answer in the United States remains yes.
Brownlee acknowledges that his views are not universally agreed upon among his peers, saying that he is “bullish on the stability of democracy overall” compared to others in his field.
For example, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors in the Department of Government at Harvard University, sounded the alarm about democracy in a New York Times op-ed in October. “Donald Trump poses a clear threat to American democracy. He was the first president in U.S. history to refuse to accept defeat, and he illegally attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, on the brink of returning to the White House, Mr. Trump is forthrightly telling Americans that if he wins, he plans to bend, if not break, our democracy,” they wrote.
Just last week, Trump joked with his Republican colleagues about running for a third term. “I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, 'He’s so good we’ve got to figure something else out,’” the New York Times reported him saying.
In such a scenario, Brownlee would be concerned about the conditions of the vote. “Was it still a competitive struggle with an uncertain outcome? Or would the seeking of a third term cement some lasting tilt toward single-party (or single-person) dominance?”
As for January 6 and claims of a stolen 2020 election, Brownlee said that the election result was honored and Joe Biden assumed the presidency, despite Trump’s rhetoric about a stolen election.
Brownlee pointed to September 11, 2001, as a more threatening time for democracy, as nationalism swelled and the country unified behind George W. Bush. He said he is most concerned about democracy “when you have a moment of national unity, not when you have a moment of polarization.”
Broadly, he doesn’t see democracy as an issue that will resonate strongly with voters. Democrats – a party that he described as center-right on the global political spectrum – “didn’t have a new economic message to deliver, and so they went for this democracy message, which was not a winning strategy,” Brownlee said.
Instead, he thinks it’s important to consider how our political system has come to favor economic gain for a small set of people. “The United States has a very developed and sprawling administrative state,” he said. “We’ll see how far Trump and his associates go in trying to dismantle that state, but so far what I see is an agenda for plunder and profit-making more so than for autocracy.”
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