Americans are rapidly giving up on democracy
Back in the run-up to the 2020 election, a group of political scientists ran down the most recent data on public support for democracy and authoritarianism. While there were plenty of reasons for concern, particularly about growing illiberalism in the Republican party, the overall picture showed signs of reassuring stability: the share of people saying things like “it’s very important to live in a democracy” and “democracy is preferable to any other form of government were high and steady. Public belief that democracy was a “good” way of running the country hovered around 90 percent for the entirety of the Trump era up until that point.
But then came the election, and the attack on the Capitol, and the relentless lies from Trump and his GOP allies about the integrity of the 2020 vote count. A new report, released this week by the Bennet Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, updates the data on some of those same questions. That data shows something alarming: the share of Americans who’ve lost faith in democracy, and who say that a “democratic political system” is “bad” for the country, has more than doubled since 2019. Today 26 percent of adults call democracy a bad way to run the country, by far the highest level in the several decades pollsters have been asking the question.
“The pandemic has brought good and bad news for liberal democracy,” said lead author Alberto Foa. “On the upside, we see a decline in populism and a restoration of trust in government. On the downside, some illiberal attitudes are increasing, and satisfaction with democracy remains very low.”
Publics in our peer nations in Europe, with similarly well-established democracies, have not recently soured on the democratic project the way Americans have, although the pandemic has made them somewhat more favorably disposed to strong executive leaders and government by expert consensus. That suggests that our recent election, and Republicans’ farcical attempts to first undo the results and then lie about them, are eroding confidence in our political system above and beyond the damage wrought by the pandemic.
For the latest data I don’t have crosstabs by demographics or partisanship to see which groups are turning against democracy the fastest, although previous years’ data give some clues. In 2019 Republicans were about 3 times as likely as Democrats to have a negative opinion of democracy, with the most conservative voters. Similarly, those with less than a high school education were about 4 times more likely to call democracy “bad” than those with a masters’ degree or higher.
One of the more troubling splits is by age, and not necessarily in the direction you’d expect: roughly one in five adults under 30 said democracy was bad, compared to just 7 percent of those over age 65.
Similar splits are apparent in more recent data on a slightly different question: whether or not democracy is the “best” form of government. Last summer 16 percent of adults said it wasn’t, with higher percentages among Trump voters (21 percent) and young adults (25 percent).
One of the lessons of our disastrous mid-2000s foray into “nationbuilding” overseas was that in order to convince people in autocratic nations of the value of democracy, you had to win the battle of “hearts and minds.” Right now the forces of democracy are losing that battle here at home.