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The Failed Autocrat
American democracy survived Donald Trump’s onslaught. His attempted coup, if we can call it that, ultimately amounted to little more than bluster, comedy, and, finally, on the 6th of January, rage. The invasion of the Capitol Building by enraged Trump supporters was a fitting closing scene of his presidency, for Donald Trump had spent the previous four years cutting deep scars into American democracy. What better way to conclude his term than by inciting an extremist mob into assaulting the figurative seat of American democracy itself? There has, perhaps, been no clearer indication of just how low Trump has brought the United States of America and its democracy.
With tens of millions of people voting for a tyrant-in-the-making, America’s flirtation with authoritarianism could, in different circumstances, have proved fatal for its democracy. Had democracy fallen, it would not have been an anomaly. Rather, it would have fit in with a well-established global trend. According to Civicus Monitor, an alliance of groups that assesses civil liberties across the globe, 87% of the world’s population now live in nations deemed “closed”, “repressed” or “obstructed”, a 4% increase on 2019. Some academics now characterize recent years as amounting to a “democratic recession”.
The term reflects the fact that multiple democracies across the world have, for decades, been drifting toward…
