Reassembling the Scattered Majority to Defend Democracy

Donald Trump’s authoritarian MAGA movement is “an existential threat to American democracy,” writesSalon’s Chauncey Devega. That is not news, but it is an important reminder as we enter a general election year.

The dark force of Trump’s demagoguery, his dictatorial aspirations, his dishonesty, and his incendiary proclivities are notorious. His political base for ruling the Republican Party—what Devega calls his “diehard followers”—consists largely of (ultra)conservative white Christians. His rallying cry is tailored to their sense of divine favor, fear of displacement, and vision of apocalyptic salvation.

All of this is well known by now but perhaps not sufficiently assessed for its repercussions. Trump’s harangue to his diehard followers is more than just an angry lament. It is a recipe for violence that typifies his authoritarian cant and culminates in the destruction of democratic institutions.

A majority that would not abide the raw power of authoritarian rule cannot assemble itself except through democratic discourse.

Trump’s apocalyptic diatribe symbolizes his broader refrain of grievance, vengeance, and call to recover a glorified past. It gestures back specifically to a white America blessed by God, but “Make America Great Again” speaks plainly and poignantly to others who fear being left behind and unredeemed. It projects a dark determination to destroy an unholy adversary that would displace divinely entitled white Christians, an image that expresses vividly the angst of a wider segment of politically disaffected citizens. It is a spellbinding, hermetic discourse of restoration that mutates into a malignant formulation for rejecting democratic values and thwarting reasoned deliberation. To contest its backward slant on its own politico-religious terms of restoration is hopeless, even counterproductive. Recognizing its directionality, however, suggests the value of a forward-leaning alternative.

The symbolic force of redeeming a conservative white Christian nation paralyzes democratic community, strengthens a minority grip on politics, and scatters the majority. Not all white citizens fear displacement by an increasingly diverse polity. Not all Christians are evangelical or fundamentalist. Not all conservatives are retrogressive. Not all citizens are Christian nationalists or among the one third that believes God intended the U.S. to be a promised land for white Christians of European descent. The symbol is a consequential misnomer of loss and recovery. Somehow the scattered majority that thinks otherwise must be reassembled.

Reconstituting democratic community requires an affirmative alternative to demagogic recidivism—an affirming rather than a rejectionist disposition—that advances an ethos of equality, diversity, inclusion, fairness, tolerance, commonweal, liberty, rights, lawfulness, nonviolence, and deliberation. These are the positive ingredients of American democracy, the standards of an aspirational polity. They provide a measure of progress toward, or regression from, an ideal of collective self-governance under conditions of pluralism and for the common good.

Promoting democracy is more promising than denouncing fascistic populism. Resistance to authoritarianism is best carried out in democratic terms. Otherwise, it feeds the cycle of intolerance on which demagogic authoritarianism thrives and leaves the majority without a unifying bond.

The positive alternative of affirming democracy engages a three-dimensional discourse of bolstering, exercising, and adhering to its multifaceted ethos. Bolstering reinforces democratic values by clarifying their meaning, identifying their political legacy, illustrating their benefits, and otherwise conveying their importance and the significance of their absence. Exercising democratic values involves basing deliberative arguments on them, drawing on their perceived relevance and positive valence to warrant claims for or against a given practice and proposed policy. Adhering to democratic values means acting in accordance with them, guided by principles of equity, inclusion, rights, and lawfulness, for example.

Each of these three dimensions reinforces the others. Together they develop democratic culture and establish a bond of shared governance. They are basic parameters of democratic discourse, whether citizens are oriented conservatively or liberally. Not everyone respects these parameters but enough must to secure a working democracy.

Liz Cheney’s memoir and warning, Oath and Honor (Little, Brown and Company, 2023), is a compelling account of what goes wrong when democratic discourse is abandoned, democratic culture is violated, and democratic governance is breached. On January 6, 2021, the U.S. nearly lost its democratic institutions to authoritarian rule when a president who refused to acknowledge he had lost his bid for reelection provoked an insurrection aided and abetted by members of his political party motivated by personal ambition and disciplined by fear of reprisals. Cheney stood among the small number of congressional Republicans who resisted the onslaught, honored their oath to defend the Constitution, fought to secure the legal transfer of power, and voted with the Democrats to impeach the recalcitrant president and aspiring autocrat. She served as vice chair and one of only two Republicans on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capital. Her own party punished her by stripping her from her third-ranking position in the House Republican leadership and successfully targeting her for a reelection defeat in 2022. And they voted in the Senate against convicting the impeached Trump on the sole charge of incitement of insurrection.

The threat posed by Trump’s demagoguery remains. “I can tell you from my time working to support democracy overseas,” Cheney warns, “that the power to rally a mob must never be underestimated… A person with that kind of power—to intimidate and threaten and motivate others to carry out violent acts—does not just slowly fade into the background. He must be defeated” (p. 191).

Cheney’s account, written from the perspective of a Reagan conservative, not a MAGA authoritarian, puts the fragility of democracy on display. It underscores the continuing threat to democratic governance and an immediate need to mend the fabric of political culture. A majority that would not abide the raw power of authoritarian rule cannot assemble itself except through democratic discourse. It must speak, think, and act in terms of bolstering, exercising, and adhering to democratic values, of dissenting, debating, and deliberating productively, and of voting accordingly to insure against the loss of a democratic republic.