Unthreatening

I have, I will admit, grown weary of the assertion that Donald Trump, and those people who are willing to toady to him, are "threats to democracy."

The central threat to democracy in the United States is the impression that the system hasn't solved people's problems in the past, isn't solving them now and has no intention of solving them in the future.

All Donald Trump had done initially was tell Republican voters that this impression was correct, because the system had been captured by people who were intent on using it to enrich themselves and leave the public (or more specially, the average Republican voter section of the public) holding the bag. And for all that people point to the events of January 6th as evidence that then President Trump is an authoritarian at heart, again, the reason why so many people still back him is that even if they agreed that it marked him as an authoritarian, the authoritarian who has an answer to one's woes seems like a better ally than the democrat who's working on behalf of someone else.

For all that people may be of the opinion the democracy may be the best way to organize a government, democracy is still a means, rather than an end. And like any other means, it has no rights. Donald Trump pulled off two interesting political innovations: he freed himself from the need to appeal to the Republican donor class, through a combination of his own money and prodding the major news media to consistently keep his name in the headlines, and he was able to successfully make a case that his failures were not his fault. This second point is especially important. Despite it being a matter of public record that Republicans in Congress intended to oppose President Obama on pretty much everything they felt they could get away with, his inability to get certain things done was still seen as a failure of his own leadership. President Trump had no such problems. If the Democrats stood in the way of something he wanted he was able to make them into the villains, and plead victimhood (usually on behalf of his supporters) in a way that I don't think that other Presidents have been able to get away with. (Whether they'll be able to get away with it in the future remains to be seen.)

The idea that there is some sort of obligation to democracy has to be discarded. As much as salespeople often get on my nerves, I understand that many of them are good at their jobs, and I've come to understand a lot about politics through the lens of what I understand makes a good salesperson. And I have yet to be in a situation in which a salesperson attempted to sell something to me by making the point that I had an obligation to the item being sold.

As a matter of history, democracy in the United States would likely be regarded as an abject failure by many modern standards. From the outset, where it was designed with the idea that high-status minority (landowning White men) could be trusted to actively look out for the welfare of the rest of the stakeholder community, to today, where it's plagued by structural problems and the inability/unwillingness of the public to wield effective oversight, if one were to design a system from the ground up, it's unlikely that any incarnation of the one we currently have in the United States  would be the first choice. And something that's so clearly a kludge when things are working in its favor can hardly be expected to hold up well in the face of the social distrust that has come to dominate so much of the United States.

Even many of the defenders of democracy don't laud its affirmative benefits; rather they point to examples such as Russia and China as examples of what the authoritarianism they perceive will make things worse. But to the same degree that one man's trash is another man's treasure, one person's oppression is another person's law and order. People have often shown themselves willing to trade another person's interests in order to advance their own.

Democracy is not an effective way of mutually hostile groups deciding who will obtain spoils at the other's expense; otherwise, there would be no need for wars. American democracy has, at some point, to start clearly and openly bringing benefits to a broad swath of the overall public on their own terms. In the past, this has been accomplished by shifting the costs of those benefits to others. That's not going to remain tenable forever. But one way or another, it should be understood that if people don't feel that the current system of democracy is what best advances their interests, then they'll look for, and support something that will. Blaming the person that sells them on it is unlikely to change that.