Democracy Lost: Can America Recover from 2025?
The USA appears to be racing – not sleep-walking – into an un-American future. Since the 2024 election, the current Trump administration has treated the nation’s universities, sciences, medical research, foreign humanitarian aid, human rights, the Democratic Party, and even democracy, as among its enemies. Advances in education, policies, and technologies addressing research, climate change, alternative energy policies, vaccine research, and more have been attacked. All have been seriously set back during the first year of Trump’s second administration – but perhaps the greatest victim of all is American democracy, the democratic norms, practices, and principles that have defined the United States over the last century.
In fact, this past year of 2025 might well be recognized in future years as the time at which the US lost its democratic status across the world. Most commentary on the Trump administration is focused squarely on the damage Trump himself is doing to the leadership, trust, and respect of the USA on the world stage. That is understandable. However, this Trumpian focus might well deflect attention from broader threats stemming from the loss of democratic norms, practices, and principles in such areas as law, institutions, culture, and politics. Let me try to explain.
I agree that Donald Trump might be an enabler or facilitator of this democratic backsliding, but in major ways, domestic and foreign policy is being driven by initiatives that seem to be controlling Trump rather than being led by Trump.
Domestically, policy and related initiatives seem to be guided by Project 2025 – a Heritage Foundation initiative that some have called Trump’s blueprint for the country, or a ‘right-wing wish’ list for the second term.[1] Importantly, during the campaign, Trump denied even having read this Project 2025 document, and I don’t doubt that claim, since he does not seem to read. But those surrounding him in the Oval Office have read this document and appear to be shaping his policies on a day-to-day basis.
This is not some new conspiracy theory as it seems to be well-understood that this blueprint is being followed as if it were the mandate for the administration. However, the mandate is checkered with ad hoc add-ons based on the President’s trust in his own intuition. For example, consider the cutting off of support to USAID to bulldozing the East Wing and building a monument to himself. We can add the unbelievable push to slap his name on famous buildings, such as the John F. Kennedy Center. And these actions are done despite widespread opposition and rules and procedures that are ignored in the process. America – a nation of immigrants – has increasingly staked its future over the past year on demonizing immigrants, particularly from countries that do not reinforce a Christian nationalist vision. Trump ran on his opposition to immigration, but Project 2025 goes far beyond this focus.
With respect to foreign policy, progress in American foreign policy since the Second World War has been jettisoned in the National Security Policy of the United States of America (November 2025).[2] It is fair to question whether democracies can have a foreign policy given changes in administrations and the multiplicity of power centers shaping policy. However, through NATO, for example, the US has shaped hard-won alliances with European nations that are central to liberal democracies around the world. Suddenly, the Trump administration is treating its historical allies, such as Canada and Denmark, along with most nations of the EU, as if they are aligned against the USA. You can see this in Trump tariff policies, and his support for far-right parties across Europe, such as Germany’s AfD, and in aligning the USA with autocratic regimes, such as Hungary, Turkey, and most shockingly, Russia. The leaders of liberal democracies are insulted by the President when they disagree with Trump’s administration, while the president seems to follow the lead of autocrats portrayed and celebrated as being strong leaders, such as in providing a red-carpet treatment to Putin’s visit to Alaska even as Putin came accused of war crimes, such as tied to adduction of children from Ukraine.
Astonishingly, it is common knowledge that US support for Ukraine became far more problematic since Trump’s election as it appears to vacillate with every meeting between Putin and Trump. Support for Russia’s narrative undermines the defense of a brutal, unprovoked invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine in ways that violate fundamental rules of law in international affairs. It concretely jeopardizes Central European nations as well as all of Europe and other sovereign nations around the world in undermining the significance of fundamental protections of national sovereignty.
While it is increasingly obvious that the Trump administration cannot keep parroting the Russian narrative of the war being provoked by the NATO countries, the US President has shifted to parrot new Russian narratives about the overwhelming certainty of Russia winning the war, which justifies a surrender of Ukrainian territories to the aggressor. This narrative ignores major advances and initiatives of Ukraine across and behind the front lines as the nation has become able to build its own weapons, such as drones, and gain more support from EU nations, and other non-US NATO countries, such as the UK. But, a once upon a time world-leading democracy – the USA, is finding itself increasingly aligned with Russia in the war of aggression on Ukraine. Clearly, Trump has been influenced for any of several reasons by Putin. Moreover, the President’s position appears to be at odds with most Americans who indicate growing support for Ukraine.[3]
I realize these notes abbreviate and simplify a complex history since the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of 2022, but I wish to simply underscore the degree that American foreign and domestic policies have abandoned clear support for democracy at home and abroad. This takes me to my main argument, which is the degree this shift might well be a product of the increasingly weak foundations of US democratic policy and practices.
Democracy is being weakened if not broken by a combination of factors. It is not simply Donald Trump, even though he may play the greatest personal role, but how can the President and his administration so blatantly ignore major legal, institutional, cultural, and political traditions of American democracy (Figure)? How can this happen?
Legally, fundamental principles of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights are being ignored in actions being taken to remove immigrants from the US, and even use the US military for his own domestic political purposes.[4]
Institutionally, checks and balances built into the US Constitution have been weakened through such means as partisan appointments to the federal courts, including the US Supreme Court and blatantly ignoring rules and procedures in creating and implementing a variety of over 200 executive orders, such as in riding roughshod over guidelines in building the new East Wing ballroom! Checks and balances in the US – the country that made them famous – are being marginalized, if not eliminated.
Culturally, as discussed in a seminal work by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba in 1963, America used to be characterized by a ‘civic culture’ that embraced compromise.[5] In stark contrast, today, the political culture has been characterized by a toxic polarization of opinions between MAGA Republicans and Democrats and a shift to a deeper division over the very facts of the case seen in a shift to what I have called ‘cognitive politics’ over what is the truth.[6] Debates between MAGA Republicans and Democrats veer to insanity when the very facts of the case are at odds.
A second cultural shift is growing disrespect of once accepted norms of democracy. Much of the work public officials is constrained by accepted norms of practice, not by strict legal dictates. But these norms are increasingly ignored. For instance, a norm that a president represents all the people, not just those who supported the president’s election. This norm was jettisoned in the acceptance speech of Donald Trump to the office in his second term in making a highly partisan speech.
Another cultural issue is the demise of ‘democratic elitism’.[7] Since the second world war, surveys often found that the American public would often express support for abstract democratic principles, such as freedom of expression, but at the same time they would not support concrete actions, such as allowing a communist (post the second world war) to speak at their child’s high school. Many democratic theorists were not overly worried about this lack of support for concrete democratic practices because – the story goes – the educated elites of the country would be supportive. Democracy will survive. But in Trump’s administration, we can find so-called educated elites who reflect the general public of yesteryear in not supporting democratic practices, such as protesting, while still espousing diffuse democratic principles. Ironically, since Trump’s campaign attacked the integrity of elites, we can no longer trust elites in the government and society to protect basic freedoms and constitutional principles in their concrete actions.
Finally, I would add a demise of political principles that have been part of American democracy for decades, such as the prominence of a two-parties that are both çatch-all parties in that they each include a heterogeneous range of opinions among their party’s membership. The MAGA movement has created a far more homogeneous and intolerant MAGA-Republican Party, far from a tolerance for a wide range of opinions.
Linked to this has been a marginal role for extremes in American politics. Congressional districts were kept geographically small by the founders to isolate extreme movements, as they were traditionally tied to geographical locations. Today, publics are networked in ways that can broaden the geography of extreme movements in ways that traditional brakes on extremism are not as effective. That said, the Internet continues to enable networked individuals to hold any institution or movement more accountable in a Fifth Estate role, and also enable political movements to scale in unprecedented ways, such as in the ‘No Kings Day’ protests, offering resistance to extremism.[8]
And, perhaps most importantly, the politics of the US has been decidedly pluralist, with different elites being influential in specific areas, such as education, while other elites dominate other areas of specialization, such as healthcare. This pluralism of elites has been a major brake on the development of a more general power elite anticipated by C. W. Mills and others. However, in many ways, the MAGA movement has undermined this pluralistic separation of influence as the same principles of distrusting established elites are being applied to all sectors of society, from education and healthcare to the military.
I have only sketched an outline of my concerns. This is work in progress. My main point is that we cannot only focus on the role of Donald Trump. We have other problems to deal with, including the demise of legal, institutional, cultural, and political norms, policies, and practices that have supported democracy in America. They are breaking down and more attention needs to be paid to guarding and repairing these before we lose what democracy we have retained.
Notes
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c977njnvq2do
[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf
[3] https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/12/majority-americans-favor-more-support-ukraine-ukrainian-victory/409925/
[4] https://www.acslaw.org/mazars-and-vance-and-president-trumps-ongoing-assault-on-our-structural-constitution/
[5] https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt183pnr2
[6] https://billdutton.me/2023/08/03/cognitive-politics/
[7] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-Democratic-Elitism-Critique/dp/0819111856
[8] Dutton, W. (2023), The Fifth Estate. New York: Oxford Un Press. Discussion of the impact of networking on new protest movements and democracy are a focus of a project on Democratic Innovations: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5395022
