Democracy was on the defensive before Trump 2.0. Now it may be dying

The experts have been charting a continuous global democratic decline since 2006. Now we have entered the days of the dictators. Not every country is a dictatorship, of course. But autocracies worldwide outnumber democracies for the first time in over 20 years, according to the annual V-Dem Institute report from Gothenburg University.

The planet is undergoing the “third wave” of autocratisation in a century, according to the scholars of such things. The first was the rising fascism of the 1930s. The second was consolidating communism in the Cold War during the 1960s and ’70s. And today, among the 200-or-so nations on Earth, only 25 full democracies remain, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit definition.

Hot tip: America is not among them. And hasn’t been since 2015. It was rated as a “flawed democracy” even before Donald Trump was elected the first time. It takes more than regular ballots to make a democracy; even North Korea conducts elections.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator’,” Trump said this week. US business magazine Forbes called this a “bizarre comment”.

Not so. The American electorate knew for years that Trump had no regard for the US Constitution or election laws; he claimed the 2020 election had been “stolen”.

In the week before last year’s election, seven in 10 Americans told CNN’s pollster that they didn’t believe he’d concede defeat if he lost the election. Yet, they proceeded to vote him back into office anyway. So Trump is right. A lot of Americans were prepared to vote for a dictator. And now he’s consolidating power like one. He says he’s not actually a dictator. But asked whether he has a duty to uphold the Constitution, he replied: “I don’t know.”

Far from respecting the separation of powers, he’s gathering as many as he can unto himself. He’s appropriating powers that the Constitution reserves for the Congress, in setting tariffs, for instance. He’s defying the courts where it suits him, which is in 57 of 165 court rulings studied by The Washington Post last month, or about one-third.

He’s imposing armed National Guard forces on states and cities over the objections of their governors and mayors. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said Trump was a “wannabe dictator” for his plan to take control of Chicago law enforcement. But no one is stopping the president.

He’s arbitrarily dictating terms of private sector business transactions, one after another, from Intel to Nvidia, without any clear legal authority, prompting cries of “socialism” from traditional conservatives. More to the point, Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist and an adviser to former Republican presidents, calls it “crony capitalism”.

Trump is not the cause of the “third wave” of autocratisation. He’s a symptom of it. And now a leader of it.

An expert on democracy and extremism, Lydia Khalil, points out that there are three essential ingredients for democratic erosion: conditions that provide an opportunity; political actors who exploit these conditions; and pathways for their campaigns against democracy. Trump didn’t supply the conditions. America did that without him, setting up polarisation, inequality, dysfunction, an anti-government ideology, discontent with immigration, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness that improvement could be possible.

Democracy was on the defensive. Joe Biden liked to say that the government “needs to show democracy can deliver”. It was too little, too late. Trump was the political actor to exploit these conditions. He’s now walking the pathway to centralise power in an autocratic presidency.

Khalil points out that democracy is not a fixture or a practice. It’s a system. Trump is the culminating point of America’s democratic system failure. This week, Khalil launched a new interactive online tool for the Lowy Institute to explain how the democratic system works. And how it fails.

“I want people to recognise that we all play a part, you can’t just blame the media or an autocratic leader, it’s made up of many interconnected parts,” Khalil says. And, as it happens, this week illustrated how the Australian system is under attack from powerful antidemocratic forces: “It was a big week,” says Khalil, Lowy’s program director on international challenges. “A very big week.”

There were two events that dominated the news. One was Iran’s covert interference program, exposed by ASIO. The intelligence agency concluded that Iran paid local criminals to conduct violent attacks on Jewish institutions in Sydney and Melbourne.

Why? To foment division, suspicion and unrest. The Albanese government responded by expelling Iran’s ambassador to Canberra and proscribing as a terrorist organisation Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. These actions, however, won’t prevent Iran from continuing its malicious campaign against Australia. Tehran will just need to be more circumspect to get away with it.

The second was the violent outburst of a so-called “sovereign citizen”, a local radicalised in Australia. Under the influence of a fringe American-made ideology that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the state, he ambushed police officers seeking to serve him an arrest warrant. He allegedly murdered two and injured a third. It’s the second set of police killings by so-called “sovereign citizens” in Australia in three years.

“Foreign interference and violent extremism are becoming much more intersected,” Khalil explains. “Fomenting the conditions to lead to violent extremism is a strategy of foreign interference.”

The leading practitioner is Moscow: “Russian information operation campaigns in the US and Europe use bots to polarise, to confuse, to sow discord, and to pollute the information environment. People get confused and lose their epistemological certainty.” In other words, they can no longer tell conspiracy from reality.

“Any events that are highly divisive – Israel-Gaza, transsexuals, COVID – the Russians promote the divisions and sit back and watch the results.”

The growth of the self-described “sovereign citizen” movement is, itself, an example of these foreign influence campaigns turbocharging local suspicions and divisions. This ideology was born in 1970s American anti-government conspiracy mongering and lingered on the fringes of society, but “when COVID hit, it went gangbusters”, says Khalil.

The enforced isolation and sudden state repression triggered people who might have been vulnerable to conspiracy thinking, including in Australia.

“A lot of people were captured by these ideas during COVID, and it didn’t recede. With foreign interference and domestic political violence, it’s not either or, it’s not one or the other,” Khalil says. “It’s both.” Both are sources of – and the product of – the rising tide of far-right ideology that is tearing communities apart. And helping create conditions for the rise of dictators.

Democracies are especially vulnerable to these harms. Open societies with free speech and open internet access are ready targets for online disinformation and exploitation, whether they’re state-driven by Russia, Iran or China, or whether they’re profit-driven by Meta, Google or X.

Australia, which remains one of the final 25 full democracies long after the United States, France, Hungary and South Korea have been relegated by the Economist Intelligence Unit to the ranks of “flawed democracies”, is a pioneer in trying to protect itself from the worst online harms. Its law to deny under-16s access to social media, to take effect in December, will be a major test.

Australian democracy is in relatively good health. But we are enjoying the calm before the storm. Khalil is troubled by the emergence of what she calls “facilitating conditions”. Specifically, growing inequality, notably intergenerational inequality as the younger generations feel left behind, and the polarisation that it can create.

And every existing problem is about to be intensified by AI. For example, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has said that school nurses reported last year that kids aged 10 and 11 are spending five to six hours a day addicted to AI companions. These were sexualised chatbots inciting them to commit sexual acts. And if online conspiracy theorists today are having trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality, how will they cope with high-quality deepfake video?

Australia’s last line of defence is the eSafety commissioner. And she is about to become the prime target of the great wannabe dictator, Donald Trump. He said this week that any country seeking to regulate US technology companies would be hit with “substantial additional tariffs on that country’s exports to the USA”, plus export restrictions on high-grade US semiconductors.

Khalil counsels against despair. Democracy, she reminds us, is a process, and one that can renew itself. “If you can catch democratic erosion early enough, it’s like seawalls against a rising tide – you can put up the wall before your house collapses.” And beware of the dictators riding the crest of the third wave, determined to sabotage yours.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.

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