Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
On Wednesday John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, went on the record with a devastating account of Trump’s presidency and a dire warning about what will happen if he gets a return trip to the Oval Office. The Times quotes Kelly as saying, “’Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.’”
Kelly’s public statement was both courageous and important. It was quickly amplified by Vice President Harris who, used an appearance on CNN Wednesday night, to suggest that she agreed with Kelly’s assessment.
Kelly now has joined a growing list of Trump insiders who have issued such warnings and labelled Trump a fascist. For example, Retired U.S. Army general and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley has warned that Trump is “fascist to the core.”
Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said this about his boss, "Any elected official needs to meet some basic criteria: They need to be able to put country over self. They need to have a certain level of integrity and principle. They need to be able to reach across the aisle and bring people together and unite the country. Donald Trump doesn't meet those marks for me."
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And having initially eschewed calling Trump a threat to democracy and instead labelled Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, “weird.” Vice President Kamala Harris now seems to talk about that every day. When she downplayed that line of attack her popularity grew; since she has put it at the center of her campaign things have not gone as well.
Every day, MSNBC and other progressive media outlets focus like a laser on Trump’s authoritarian threats. On October 15, Chris Hayes, one of MSNBC’s prime time hosts, put it this way, “Let's not sugarcoat it: Trump is running a textbook fascist campaign.”
Despite all the noise about Trump’s anti-democratic/anti-constitutional campaign, Trump does not seem to be paying a political cost. If we are to avoid a second Trump term, and what will almost certainly be a sustained assault on democracy, we need to understand why.
In the remaining days, the Harris campaign needs to recalibrate and tie the issue of Trump’s fascist tendencies to the issues that Americans care most about. Sadly, preserving American democracy doesn’t seem to be one of them.
While surveys suggest that many people think that “weakening democracy in the United States poses a critical threat to its vital interests,” it seems that they are not going to take that concern into the voting booth.
Let’s look at some of the reasons why that is the case.
First, there is no doubt about what is top of mind for most voters. To quote James Carville, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The Pew Research Center reports that “As concerns around the state of the economy and inflation continue, about eight-in-ten registered voters (81%) say the economy will be very important to their vote in the 2024 presidential election.”
“Among Trump supporters,” Pew notes, “the economy (93%), immigration (82%) and violent crime (76%) are the leading issues…. For Harris supporters, issues such as health care (76%) and Supreme Court appointments (73%) are of top importance. Large majorities also cite the economy (68%) and abortion (67%) as very important to their vote in the election.”
Note the absence of any reference to the need to preserve democracy. And when voters express concerns about democracy they are divided about who they trust to protect it.
Some even support Trump because they think he will “restore American freedom.”
Evidence from around the world suggests that authoritarians often ride to power in times of economic uncertainty and when people experience personal economic problems.
A study in England found that “negative economic shocks cause the adoption of authoritarian values through a frustration-aggression mechanism. Large economic shocks hinder individuals’ expected attainment of their goals as economic providers and consumers and this interference increases generalized aggression.”
The inflationary period that produced a sharp rise in prices in this country from 2020 to 2024 is one such shock. Many progressives and the Harris campaign do not seem to have caught on to that fact.
Moreover, scholars of the rise of fascism in Europe point to important role played by the inflation that “took hold in Austria and Germany during the 1920s (peaking in 1922 and 1923 respectively)” in explaining how and why Hitler came to power. They argue that “soaring price rises could lead to political radicalisation.”
Beyond inflation, Americans seem to be much more concerned about immigration than about democracy. Trump is stoking fear that Democrats care more about taking care of immigrants than about the needs of “ordinary Americans.”
Political scientists Steven V. Miller and Nicholas Davis suggest that there is “a correlation between white Americans intolerance, and support for authoritarian rule. In other words, when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy.” They explain that “exclusionary rhetoric,” like the kind Trump regularly uses, “targeted toward nonwhite groups is accompanied by lower baseline support for democracy.”
NBC News highlights one of their most important findings. “White people who did not want to have immigrants or people of different races living next door to them were more likely to be supportive of authoritarianism. For instance, people who said they did not want to live next door to immigrants or to people of another race were more supportive of the idea of military rule, or of a strongman-type leader who could ignore legislatures and election results.”
Another reason why ringing the alarm about the danger Trump poses to democracy is not gaining traction is because, like almost everything else, that danger is seen and interpreted through a hyper partisan lens. We are living in an era of what Stanford University’s Henry Finkel labels “political sectarianism.”
Finkel says that political sectarianism is “the tendency to adopt a moralized identification with one political group and against another. Whereas the foundational metaphor for tribalism is kinship, the foundational metaphor for political sectarianism is religion, which evokes analogies focusing less on genetic relatedness than on strong faith in the moral correctness and superiority of one's sect.”
Sectarians value loyalty to their group more than loyalty to abstract principles or the political system as a whole. Preserving democracy is less important than making sure that your team wins.
A third reason that Trump’s threats to democracy may not be costing him support is because support for democracy is a special concern of elites. As a result, the issue of preserving democracy gets folded into ongoing “culture wars.”
For a long time, we have known that support for democracy is higher among more well educated people and support for authoritarianism is greater among less well educated people. But today education marks a bitter cultural divide.
Harvard’s Michael Sandel, among others, has pointed out the widespread resentment that people in this country who do not go to college feel toward those who do, especially those who attend “prestigious” schools. If that is right, the more that Harris and the liberal intelligentsia ring the alarm bell about democracy’s doom, the more that others may see it as part of a project of political and cultural imperialism.
It may appear to millions of Americans that well educated people living in cosmopolitan places are telling them how they should live and how they should be governed.
Finally, many people seem not to take what Trump says with the same level of seriousness as do those of us who think that, if he is again president, he will do what he is now saying he will do.
In the end, knowledge of Trump’s threat to democracy is already baked in; few who have not already been moved by that knowledge will be moved by it now. Hopefully Kelly’s statement will change that.
But, it will have a better chance of doing so if the Vice President uses the remaining time in her campaign to focus on the issues that matter to voters. If she continues to talk about democracy, she needs to explain why preserving the American form of government is essential to preserving American prosperity and the economic well-being of all of us.
