Wayne Selcher1
27 de maio de 2026
Em parceria com o Observatório Político dos Estados Unidos (OPEU), o Boletim Lua Nova republica, em cinco partes, a análise do professor Wayne Selcher, de Elizabethtown College, sobre a erosão do consenso democrático nos Estados Unidos. Este texto é o primeiro de uma série para o OPEU sobre as notícias políticas nos Estados Unidos. O texto foi originalmente publicado em 29 de fevereiro de 2024, no site do OPEU.
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Concerns about the Health of American Respect for Democratic Norms
Pessimism about America and Democracy
The worrisome shift toward a more conflictful political culture in the country preceded Trump’s Republican nomination in 2016, and the dissatisfaction in society is much deeper and lasting than him or his skillful role in harnessing and encouraging that discontent in national politics. A Yahoo News/YouGov survey in June 2022 stated that “Half of Americans now predict U.S. may ‘cease to be a democracy’ someday.” An NPR/Ipsos poll in early 2022 showed broad concerns in the public about the future of democracy in the U.S., concluding, “Overall, 64% agree that American democracy is in crisis and at risk of failing. Even more, 70%, feel the same about America itself.” This sentiment is stronger among Republicans, many of whom accepted Trump’s unproven and increasingly discredited claim that he won the November 2020 election. A 2022 Quinnipiac University national poll found that “nearly six in ten think the nation’s democracy is in danger of collapse,” which instability the respondents saw as a bigger threat to the country than foreign adversaries.
Many voters in both parties want to “upend” the system (part of the populist, anti-establishment appeal of Trump’s MAGA movement), to see real structural change from the current stagnation, but are divided about what sort of change is necessary and how to achieve it. For some of these highly discontented citizens, left or right, measures taken to strengthen the current democratic system may just entrench the power of the establishment that they wish to unseat. In the context of that frustration, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll in January 2022 noted that one-third of Americans agreed that violence against the government can be justified.
A significant driver in various sectors of public opinion now, although still a minority view, is that democratic norms may have to be infringed or sacrificed in order to “save the country,” as those various groups understand that term. This sense of urgency against an “existential threat” to the country is the broader context and reference point of Trump’s well-tuned (i.e., semi-ambiguous) statement to a large crowd of supporters just before the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Of course, some Republicans (at least initially) and most Democrats and independents understood that rally itself, the speech, and the subsequent invasion of the Congress as a threat to the existence of American values, norms, and democracy.
The Threat of Authoritarianism and Violence
In the greater public acceptance of authoritarianism in the context of the two sharply competing divergent visions for America’s future, a key risk for American democracy lies in the polarizing feeling that so much of ultimate worth is at stake in American society, and now threatened by the “other side,” that preserving democracy may become of lesser importance than “saving America” from the ruination caused by the highly-distrusted “other side.” Such “threats” are interpreted quite differently by both sides. At the moment, the feeling of extreme urgency and doubt about election integrity is definitely stronger on the political right and could easily be activated as a threat in a tightly-contested electoral situation full of rumors and conspiracy theories, given the extent of general concern about election integrity and election denialism already exhibited at all levels of government. A George Washington University Politics Poll in July 2021 found that
“Over half of Republicans (55%) supported the possible use of force to preserve the ‘traditional American way of life,’ compared to 15% of Democrats. When asked if a time will come when ‘patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands,’ 47% of Republicans agreed, as opposed to just 9% of Democrats.”
A University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats/NORC survey in April 2023 found “truly disturbing” levels of propensity to violence on the right and the left, a stark and careful assessment that deserves a verbatim presentation of the summary in full:
- The size of the pro-Trump “Insurrectionist Movement” remains highly stable. In September 2022, 5% of Americans believed force was justified to restore Trump to the presidency. Today that number is the same, at 5%. In our new survey, we also asked those who neither agreed nor disagreed about their leaning, and found 12% of these or 4 million lean toward agreeing that force is justified to restore Trump. This suggests our previous surveys have underestimated the true level of force for Trump by effectively counting all the ambivalent as not agreeing. When we add these 4 million from the ambivalent to the explicit support for force to restore Trump, we now have a more accurate estimate of the size of the insurrectionist movement–as of April 2023, about 17 million.
- Support for violence in addressing causes on the Left is also stable from September 2022 to April 2023 across a variety of grievances (restore abortion rights, protect minority voting rights, prevent police brutality against minorities), remains sizable, and comes predominantly from Democrats. Overall, support for political violence continues to extend across party lines.
- Support for political violence against members of Congress and on government officials grew from 9% (equivalent of 23 million adults) n January 2023 to 12.5% or (the equivalent of 32 million adults) in April 2023 and continues to come almost equally from the Right and Left. The 32 million breaks down as 10 million Republicans, 8 million Democrats, and 5 million Independents.
- Our new survey asked questions about commitment of the public to the US Constitution and remaining politically united as a nation and found disturbingly: 12% or 31 million adults agree that the “US Constitution should be ignored” (about evenly across parties), while 16% or 41 million adults favor the “United States having a national divorce.” Importantly, support for national divorce remains at disturbing levels when high consequences are added, with 7% (18 million adults) favoring a national divorce even if “thousands of people are injured or killed” and 7% (18 million adults) even if it means “China would replace the United States as the world’s only superpower.” Republicans are more than twice as likely to favor national divorce across all these questions.
- There is also good news. Our April 2023 survey found that 77% of the public supports bipartisan solutions to American political violence, a stable level since January 2023 and indicating that Americans are not polarized on this crucial issue and pointing the way forward for political leaders to work together to prevent political violence in the future.
To determine the sources of the most serious ongoing threats of political violence, an earlier NORC and University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats survey in August 2021 sought to identify the number and characteristics of those hard-core adherents who were most resolute about the need for violence or insurrection in American politics, a continuing threat.
“We found, most strikingly, that nine percent of Americans believe the ‘Use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency’. More than a fourth of adults agree, in varying degrees, that, ‘The 2020 election was stolen, and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.’ We also learned that 8.1 percent—that equates to 21 million American adults—share both these radical beliefs. From a statistical point of view, this number is extrapolated from a range between 6% (15 million) to 11% (28 million), where we have 95% confidence that the true number falls within… The research shows, two central beliefs occur among adamant insurrectionists statistically significantly than more commonly found in the general population:
63% believe in the Great Replacement: ‘African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.’
54% believe in the QAnon cabal: ‘A secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is ruling the U.S. government.’
…We are dealing with a mass movement with violence at its core that does not fit earlier patterns of right-wing extremism. For example, we are not dealing with disaffected and unemployed young men, but mainly highly competent, middle-aged American professionals… Concerning political affiliation, the adamant insurrectionists are not only Republicans. While 51% self-identify as members of the Republican Party, 34% see themselves as Independents and 10% as Democrats.”
Regarding the public as a whole, a team of political scientists from the Allegheny College Center for Political Participation (PA) measured authoritarian attitudes and tendencies in a nationally-representative sample of adults. They concluded that authoritarianism can be found in adherents of both parties.
“Across the political spectrum, Americans seek ‘tough leaders who will crack down.’ Majorities of every political stripe agree or strongly agree with the idea that solving the nation’s problems depends on strong leaders who will take action against those who would undermine American values. The exception is those who ‘lean Democratic’–but still, 49% of them support that idea too… For example, around 90% of Republicans would support tough leaders who crack down on groups that ‘undermine American values’–however the survey respondents define those values. More than half of Democrats take the same position. Perhaps even more notably, nearly half of citizens who strongly support the Republican Party and over a third of those who strongly support the Democratic Party endorse the view that it is acceptable to bend the rules’ for people like themselves to achieve political goals. …Many citizens prefer leaders who are willing to undermine democracy if it means protecting people like themselves from groups that threaten their values or status. Although most Americans do not subscribe to these beliefs, a substantial portion of the country does.”
A September 2022 Axios-IPSOS poll highlighted the results that
“About one in three Americans prefers strong unelected leaders to weak elected leaders and says presidents should be able to remove judges over their decisions… In this poll, significant minorities of Republicans and Democrats supported non-democratic norms in about equal percentages–and Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say presidents should be able to remove judges when their decisions go against the national interest.”
As another worrisome internationally comparative measure of growing authoritarianism on both sides and tolerance for extra-constitutional solutions, and amid occasional derisive and often frivolous references to “Third World politics” in the national discourse, the longstanding Americas Barometer project at Vanderbilt University in their 2021 survey of the Western Hemisphere highlighted the irony that
“The share of Americans willing to tolerate a [military] coup increased from 28 percent in 2017 to 40 percent in 2021. That’s a 43 percent increase, and the highest rate we’ve seen in the United States since we began asking the question more than a decade ago. It’s also one of the largest increases we’ve seen in this measure across the Americas. Compared to other countries we study, the U.S. now ranks near the middle on this measure, just higher than Brazil and Mexico–countries with relatively recent histories of authoritarian rule.”
For another international perspective relative to such casual “Third World” references, the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, a business-oriented annual survey of 28 countries by a global communications firm, placed the United States as one of six in the “Severely Polarized” category, along with such fractured developing countries as Argentina, Colombia, and South Africa, and more so than Brazil. There was a large gap (23 points) in the United States in the percent of trust in NGOs, business, government, and the media between the high-income earners (higher trust) and the low-income earners (lower trust), the second largest income-based trust gap among all countries in that aspect of the survey. Overall, Republicans were definitely more pessimistic than Democrats about overcoming the differences in the country.
Explicit concerns about maintaining or strengthening democracy are normally rather abstract to voters and usually rank relatively low in citizens’ minds when they go to the polls. The degradation, simplification, and emotionalization of political discourse, overheated rhetoric, and acceptance of misinformation and authoritarian solutions to break the partisan impasse are aggravated by impatience and a widespread general lack of knowledge in the public about the characteristics, rules, nuances, and uncertainties of the democratic system and how elections are conducted and how laws are enforced. The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Civics Knowledge Survey observed in September 2022 that, among other basic civic weaknesses:
“Less than half (47%) of U.S. adults could name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial), down from 56% in 2021. One in 4 respondents could not name any. Asked to name the five rights protected by the First Amendment, fewer Americans could name any of the five than in 2021. For instance, less than 1 in 4 people (24%) could name freedom of religion, down from 56% the prior year.”
The “Big Picture”
Internationally-respected organizations (NGOs) that track and analyze democracy in the world have noted a sharp decline in the quality of American democracy in recent years, a democratic backsliding, in a globally comparative context, and have expressed alarm at the events of January 6, 2021, their sequel into the following years, and other events and trends that do not bode well for the health of American democracy. Their observations and conclusions provide good comparative insight into American political culture today, from a systemic perspective seldom considered objectively from within the turbulence of the intensely partisanship-obsessed social atmosphere of the United States.
Freedom House (U.S.A.) noted about the U.S., in its 2023 report on “Freedom in the World,” “…in recent years its democratic institutions have suffered erosion, as reflected in rising political polarization and extremism, partisan pressure on the electoral process, bias and dysfunction in the criminal justice system, harmful policies on immigration and asylum seekers, and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity, and political influence.”
The Fund for Peace’s (U.S.A.) Fragile State Index for 2021 observed that “the country which saw the largest year-on-year worsening in their total score [is] the United States.”
The Economist Intelligence Unit (UK) in its 2022 “Democracy Index” classified the United States as a “flawed democracy” and ranked it as the 30th most democratic country in the world, trailing well behind Canada at the 12th spot and down four places from the previous year. This widely-used global comparative index is based on the evaluation of five categories: electoral process and pluralism; the functioning of government; political participation; political culture; and civil liberties. The functioning of government was cited as a weak spot in recent reports, and the deterioration of American political culture has been the U.S.’s weakest point.
The European Council on Foreign Relations polled many European countries in January 2021 and concluded “although a majority of Europeans are happy with Biden’s election, many do not trust the American electorate not to vote for another Donald Trump in four years. Looking at the results for Europe as a whole, 32 per cent of all respondents to ECFR’s poll agree that, after voting for Trump in 2016, Americans cannot be trusted–and only 27 per cent disagree with this statement (the rest do not have an opinion on the issue) Most strikingly, 53 per cent of German respondents say that, after Trump, Americans can no longer be trusted–making them clear outliers on this point.”
The Varieties of Democracy Index (Sweden) Democracy Report 2023 referred to the United States as undergoing “substantial autocratization” over the last 10 years (one of 33, along with Indonesia and Brazil among the other most populous states, and Greece among established European democracies), also noting a decline in academic freedom in the United States. The United States was ranked 23rd in the world on their Liberal Democracy Index for 2022, with a significant decline from its assessment in 2012. (“Liberal” is used here in the European rather than the American sense, referencing “liberty.”)
Western Europe’s Alliance of Democracies’ Democracy Perception Index for 2023 questioned national samples of the populations of 53 countries about the state of democracy in their countries. The results noted in a graph that, among the publics in 53 countries responding to the question “Is there enough democracy in your country?” the United States fell well below the middle level in satisfaction (i.e., heavily “not enough”), near Mexico, Chile, and Italy. The broad global survey also noted that the United States was one of the five countries in which concern for the negative effects of inequality on democracy grew the most from the previous year.
Among other issues, Americans scored above the survey average on concern about corruption’s negative effects on democracy in their country, fifth in the survey in concern about the negative effects of global corporations on democracy in their country, fifth in concern about foreign interference in elections, among the most critical regarding negative effects of social media, and above the world average in concern about unfair elections. Ironically, “Out of all the democracies labelled as ‘free’ by Freedom House, the U.S. has the highest share of people who fear the influence of Big Tech companies (65%).” [Number 3 among all countries surveyed, right below India and the Philippines and above Pakistan.] “Across the 53 countries surveyed, an average of 51% of people say that the United States has a positive impact on democracy around the world, while 33% say it’s negative… in most Western European countries, as well as in Canada and Australia, opinion is very evenly divided.”
The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (Sweden) in its Global State of Democracy Initiative noted in 2023 that, in comparing 2021 to 2012, while the country was definitely categorized as “democratic,” there were declines for the United States in several key attributes of democracy over the period: representative government, fundamental rights, checks on government, impartial administration, and participatory engagement.
Wither American Democracy?
A scholarly look at system changes over time can show the great extent to which national unity (and hence democracy) has been weakened by the events, characteristics, and trends noted earlier in this paper. The Vanderbilt University Project on Unity and American Democracy created the Vanderbilt Unity Index to attempt to measure the levels of American unity over time in a comparable way, by calendar quarters since 1981, based on “five inputs, including publicly available survey data on strong presidential disapproval, political and ideological extremism, social trust, political and social unrest, and measurements of Congressional polarization.” Graphs of the results over that time period (Figures 6 and 7) show a continual decrease in the level of national unity after 1993, albeit with some quarterly variations in the general downward trend over the decades. There is a greater slope of the curve after about 2005 and wild fluctuations start in 2017. The authors refer to the latter period as “consumed with divisive political rhetoric and critique of democratic institutions.” Work on refining the Index is ongoing.
In a world context, except under Trump’s business and personal relationships-oriented transactional style of foreign policy, democracy has been a major component of American foreign policy since World War II under both parties. Domestic political polarization and dysfunction are weakening the American position and effectiveness in the world, and diminishing the position of the United States as a model. Authoritarian alternatives are presenting democracy with steep challenges worldwide, as well as in the U.S. Authoritarian rivals, especially Russia and China, have picked up on and exploited the confusion, dysfunctions, and vulnerabilities of the troubled American democracy by using social media worldwide to spread their message and undercut the United States, particularly regarding the genuineness, worth, and effectiveness of its democratic system.
American domestic discord facilitates the effectiveness of disinformation operatives from rival countries who attempt to influence U.S. public opinion in negative ways. One startling measure of how far American political alignments have shifted on the right is that when Tucker Carlson, a conspiracy-minded talk show host, commentator, and admirer of hard-right leaders overseas (Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, etc.), and highly popular among the conservative base, was fired from the Fox News TV network in April 2023, he was offered a job (which he did not accept) by state-run Russian media and praised by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for his criticism of US policy in Ukraine.
American and some foreign scholars of comparative democracy and comparative instability and violence have issued statements of concern about threats to American democracy. Considering the power held by the states in the federal system, and some authoritarian tendencies at that level, Grumbach devised ways to measure levels of democracy, a “State Democracy Index” using 51 indicators and covering all 50 states for 2000 to 2018. Respected organizations are measuring and analyzing the malaise of U.S. democracy, threats of gradual breakdown (a key scenario to avert), and possible reforms. The degree of severity led Professors Suzanne Mettler (Cornell) and Robert C. Lieberman (Johns Hopkins) to warn that “Scholars who study the rise and fall of democracy elsewhere recognize four conditions that pose threats to the sustainability and survival of democracy: political polarization; conflict over who belongs as a member of the political community (particularly along lines of race, ethnicity and national origin); high and growing economic inequality; and excessive executive power,” noting that the United States is currently facing all four factors, for the sixth time.
From the global perspective of the business and financial world, Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group, an international political-risk consulting firm, noted in his January 2023 global outlook that “the U.S. remains one of the most politically polarized and dysfunctional of the world’s advanced industrial democracies heading into 2023,” which he considered one of the top ten global risks for 2023. In August 2023, Fitch downgraded the U.S. national long-term credit rating from AAA to AA+, citing “a steady deterioration in standards of governance,” such as “the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance relative to ‘AA’ and ‘AAA’ rated peers over the last two decades that has manifested in repeated debt limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions.”
Such warning assessments in internationally comparative contexts should make Americans aware, going into the campaigns and elections of 2024, that their country is entering dire straits and is not as unique, exceptional, stable, and forever democratic as the nationalistic myth has proclaimed for so long. Democracy is not the default method of dealing with authority and conflict in human history. It cannot be taken for granted. Blaming the “other side” in a partisan manner is not the answer for systemic repair. Americans customarily thank military veterans for the freedoms they enjoy, but should be aware that most democracies that fail do so because of internal causes, such as violation of democratic norms, institutional weaknesses, high inter-group animosity, sharp domestic conflicts, subversion, or failure to deliver, not because of foreign invasion.
Note 1: I would like to thank my Political Science colleagues Professor Oya Ozkanca, PhD and Professor Fletcher McClellan, PhD, both of the Department of Political Science, Elizabethtown College, PA, USA, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.
Note 2: For a complementary earlier analysis, see my article “Is the United States ‘Exceptional’?,” available in PDF, posted here on the Social Science Research Network, and originally published in August 2021 in English on the Brazilian academic site OPEU (Political Observatory of the United States) and in Spanish in PDF in January 2022 in an academic journal of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, Contextualizaciones Latinoamericanas. Also useful for the current topic is my article for OPEU, “Suggested Cost-Free Online Sources for U.S. Politics and Foreign Policy.”
* Este texto não reflete necessariamente as opiniões do Boletim Lua Nova ou do CEDEC. Gosta do nosso trabalho? Apoie o Boletim Lua Nova!
Referência imagética: A crowd-erected gallows hangs near the United States Capitol during the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol (Credit: Tyler Merbler from the United States/Wikimedia Commons)
- Wayne A. Selcher, PhD, é professor Emérito de Estudos Internacionais no Departmento de Ciência Política, na Elizabethtown College, PA, USA, e colaborador regular do OPEU. É fundador e editor da WWW Virtual Library: International Affairs Resources, um guia para pesquisa on-line sobre os mais diversos tópicos. Contato: wayneselcher@comcast.net. ↩︎
