Donald Trump is a crook. He was convicted in May 2024 of financial fraud. He is not the victim of some “deep state” plot but a flat-out criminal tried in court and condemned by a jury of twelve fellow citizens in the State of New York.Footnote 1
Nevertheless, in November 2024, 77 million Americans voluntarily and enthusiastically elected Donald Trump to be president of the United States for a second time. In shock, many other millions of American politicians, pundits, activists, and ordinary citizens have been grieving and arguing non-stop about how that could have happened.
For the anguished, Trump’s behavior since entering the White House in January 2025 has only made things worse. Some of them believe that, unlike earlier presidents, Trump regards his victory as a mandate for disrupting government agencies and practices. They fear that he will shatter some of both, thereby undermining safety nets and environmental protection, and they are sure that he will misuse and corrupt others, promoting autocracy and maybe even fascism, at home and abroad.
Moreover, they see that, by firing thousands of federal employees and impounding enormous budgets approved by Congress, he plans to eliminate parts or all of government offices such as the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for International Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Department of Education. All of these were created by Acts of Congress that have not been repealed or amended by majority votes as constitutionally required in both Houses on Capitol Hill.Footnote 2
In other words, if Trump will ignore those Acts and their intent, which add up to properly enacted laws of the land, he will coldly violate the separation of powers that the Founders built into the Constitution between the Executive and Legislative Branches of government.Footnote 3 On that score, the Constitution assigns to Congress the power to legislate in various areas of public need and policy,Footnote 4 whereas the president’s signature designation is as the administrator (“Executive”) of decisions and apparatus created by Congress.Footnote 5
Transfixed by such a gloomy analysis, anxious critics mainly blame Trump’s victory in 2024 on the Democratic Party for failing to inspire enough Americans to vote against him. That party’s leaders, they say – from former President Joe Biden, to former Vice President Kamala Harris, to former Majority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer, and to former Speaker of the House Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi – were out of touch with ordinary folks. Moreover, in public life, they did not fight as aggressively as MAGA (Make America Great Again) Republicans like Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC), and then-Senator J. D. Vance (R-OH) were willing to do.
Common Sense
This book takes a different approach to where America is now. Instead of attacking Trump as a flagship of disaster – which I believe he is – I will argue that things shifted in America to make it possible, or even inevitable, for a politician to behave like Donald Trump to begin with. That is, I will explain how American society, especially in recent decades, opened a place in its thinking and acting for a demagogue like Donald Trump to take center stage in public life and get away with it.
My aim, then, is to explain that what dropped America into a democracy pothole was a shortage of “common sense,” which too few voters exercised on Election Day. In Chapter 8, “Common Sense,” I will discuss why not enough of this political resource is available now. When I get to that, I will not accuse anyone in particular. The point is not that some Americans are born stupid and lacking in common sense,Footnote 6 but that many of us, in all walks of life, lack some measure of common sense because modern information instruments – including radios, movies, televisions, computers, and smartphones – together muddle our thinking and confuse our consciences.
On my way to saying that, I will assume that readers already know how important common sense has been in American history, because they know that vital expressions of it informed the Founders’ devotion to “self-evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Wherefore, on the basis of that dedication to straight and accurate thinking about what they regarded as obvious truths, in the Constitutional Convention, the Founders set up an astonishingly successful republican form of government almost two hundred and fifty years ago.
The new government, whose historical foundations I will discuss, and which many Americans and Europeans immediately admired, was a matter of separating powers, setting up checks and balances, and safeguarding fundamental civil rights. It was based on ideas endorsed by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, and many of their colleagues, the best of which, as long-term insights and convictions, are still sensible and capable of serving the country well today.
Of course, what the Founders wrought, and what the erratic tantrums and toxic prejudices of people like Donald Trump may undo, was, and still is, a collection of institutions and practices that were never perfect. For example, many Americans now confess that the Founders’ original creation shamefully excluded from political participation almost all women, Blacks, and Native Americans.
Fortunately, however, that system underwent several crucial upgrades enshrined in constitutional Amendments like Thirteen to Fifteen, Nineteen, and Twenty-Six. It therefore fostered, over time, increasing levels of equality for many men and women who were previously excluded.
On the other hand, in recent years the Constitution has been flagrantly misinterpreted by Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Barrett. Such judges, who are all later-day Republicans, have issued retrograde decisions such as those which legalized unlimited campaign contributions, which discontinued federal supervision over states that still underwrite racism, which authorized personal acts of discrimination in public accommodations, and which revoked a nationwide women’s right to abortion.
All of this backsliding indicates that American public life needs some serious upgrading now. Instead, the country got Trump again, who more and more resembles a rogue president.
Democracy
I won’t summarize Defending Democracy in this “Introduction” but will let it speak for itself in coming chapters. I will only insist here that scholars should maintain a special consideration for democracy, because to write plain-spoken books and articles about its potential demise under the leadership of someone like Donald Trump is one way to help all of us to pitch in together and avoid the political disasters that devastated rank-and-file Europeans only three generations ago.
On that score, as historians grimly explained after World War II, many Europeans did not dissent strongly enough in the 1920s and 1930s to prevent the rise of terrible political regimes – fascism, communism, and totalitarianism – in Western society.
The moral of their story, delivered especially by people who survived unspeakable tyranny in Hitler’s Third Reich, was straightforward. History shows us that some people are capable of every sort of atrocity. But we must not let abominable aspects of history repeat themselves. We must not yield an inch to political poison. Every occasion calls on us to promote civility and mutual respect. And every event demands that we will shun bigotry and brutality.
Ergo, ordinary people, across the board, must permanently hold democracy in mind. And while we do that, we must lobby for, organize for, demonstrate for, vote for, and pay for only candidates to public office who will support democracy wherever possible.
Such imperatives do not assume that democracy is flawless. No system of government is. But every day challenges us to defend that system wisely, deliberately, unswervingly, and tirelessly, else in difficult times, it will not be available to defend us.
The Mission
To that end, starting in Chapter 1, “Crisis,” I will explain how we can avoid repeating Europe’s twentieth-century disasters by putting up a strong defense, which means by sensibly exercising our citizenship rights. The good news is that we have it in our power to save ourselves. The more challenging news is that a great many of us must accept that mission before it is too late.
Moreover, we must not slacken. Donald Trump and his loyalists are not going to start behaving better, as we shall see. Therefore, we must be in this for the long haul. Free-riding is out of the question when a hooligan like Trump holds the national scepter and the biggest megaphone. In words of one syllable, if we don’t do what needs to be done, no one else will do it for us.
Reports and Essays
Before starting to discuss where we are and how we got there, I should arrange some technical matters. I am an academic. I want to explain at the outset, therefore, that this book is not what scholars call a “research report.” That is, I have not selected, say, a political issue, or a contested election, or a legislative face-off, or a confrontation between ideologies, and then studied it intensively by collecting data or conducting experiments in order to report what I found.
This book is, instead, an “essay.” Essays deal with general matters that cannot be represented by specific events, or practices, or ideas, or institutions, as if something exactly there, at that spot or moment, is the main point and can be interpreted usefully if investigated with techniques such as conducting surveys, comparing committee votes, ranking policy preferences, checking documents, and interviewing protagonists.
Essays are in fact like mosaics, containing many pieces which, when seen together, offer a special picture, or a sort of gestalt, for our consideration. In this case, with Trump always, figuratively, in the room, I will comment on ideas and events that relate to American democracy – which is a very large and complex enterprise – and I will illuminate those items by reference to the views of impressive thinkers who have studied major aspects of democracy very seriously.Footnote 7
This means that I am not proposing in this book what scholars sometimes call a “theory” – that is, a systematic but compact explanation – about what such items mean. I am, instead, offering a wide-ranging survey which incorporates some “terms” that together, I hope, will help us to think sensibly about the present condition of American politics.
Footnotes
I should explain here also a further technical point, about footnotes, because we live in an era where partisan language and intense reporting create an enormous and confusing flood of information and disinformation. Footnotes in this essay direct readers toward relevant sources but, because many pieces of the mosaic I am assembling are themselves contested at great length – especially between what we call the Right and the Left – such footnotes cannot possibly cite all the sources which discuss those items.
For example, Chapter 4, Footnote footnote 1 refers to recent books which consider how “populism,” generated by social and economic grievances, may bear on the current crisis of democracy. The books offered in that footnote are a sample of relevant thinking, no more. Even together they do not demonstrate conclusive understandings – that is, certainty – on this particular matter, which is populism, in a marketplace for ideas that, as we shall see in Chapter 6, “Information” and Chapter 7, “Dysfunction,” backs up every idea, including some that are quite false, with books, newspaper editorials, op-ed articles, think tank reports, blogs, talk radio, television chatter, podcasts, and social media excitement.
Put it this way. I am not using footnotes to “prove” the matters I discuss, as if this book were a research report on whether corona vaccines work or don’t. I am simply presenting many points of fact and judgment which together, and while supported by some thinkers who I believe are serious, offer what I regard as a sensible argument – especially about democracy and citizenship – for readers to see and consider.
Bear with me, then, as I start this essay with the federal election of 2020, which Trump claimed then, and still claims now, that he won.
