What if Trump Does Everything He’s Promised—and the People Don’t Care?

But in most societies across history, that’s just not what voters do. Voters are thinking about a variety of different things. They vote, in part, in an expressive way, sometimes to express their frustration, their anger. They vote out of partisan loyalty. Or very often they vote because of particular issues. Those issues may be social or cultural. They may be economic. But very rarely do any but a small minority of voters—in any society, not just the United States, in any society—vote for democratic procedures. I know in the United States, we have this idealized vision of citizens defending democracy. But, like it or not, my view is that democracies are defended by elites. And, uh, if elites abdicate, as Daniel put it, and leave it to voters, you’re going to get an outcome where voters weren’t voting for authoritarianism, but they were voting against incumbents. Because voters in democracies all over the world, especially the West, are very discontent today and are voting out incumbents like never before. And so voters voted for a change, they voted against the incumbent, and now they’re gonna get authoritarianism. But I don’t blame that on the voters. Blame that on the elites that allowed us to get that far.

ZIBLATT: The way a democracy is supposed to work is that voters, if they’re not happy with the incumbent, are supposed to vote the incumbent out of office. And so, in some sense, that’s what has just happened. [It] is a sign of democratic success at some level. The issue is not why did voters vote out the incumbent, the incumbent party. The issue is why was the only way that people could have to express that dissatisfaction [was] to vote for somebody who is anti-democratic? Why was that the only choice on offer? That’s an elite failing at some level, that he’s even in this position, that Trump was a viable candidate to begin with—an elite failing, going back to the failure to convict after the 2021 impeachment, and the failure to filter him out over the last several years, and so on.

So that’s one thing. A second issue, though, is that one can imagine a scenario in which voters might have understood the risk a little bit more. But I don’t blame voters here. I blame elites again—in particular, social elites. I have in mind the relative silence over the past year of too many business leaders, too many religious leaders, and too many important labor unions—in particular, the Teamsters. When discussions were made public of the plans to round up migrants in an undifferentiated way that doesn’t distinguish between legal and illegal migrants, the failure of so many religious leaders, for example, to publicly and loudly condemn this and raise the stakes of what was involved, meant that many voters didn’t fully understand the stakes of these plans. Indeed, if you look around the world, in Germany back in January of 2024, when plans came out to have what was called the forced remigration of Germans of migration background, there were mass and peaceful demonstrations against this. Not only people in the streets, but importantly, social and political elites—civil elites—came out and publicly condemned this. And over the course of the year, the radical right party, the AfD [Alternative for Germany], has lost a quarter of its support in national opinion polls. This was in part because important people in society raised the stakes and made the case for the dangers of this agency. So, it’s true the Harris campaign tried to make the case. But the case was not made sufficiently vigorously by important civil society leaders.