Perhaps the Rumors of Democracy’s Demise Were Premature

Before the midterms this month, experts who measure the health of democracies saw the United States experiencing “the most dramatic decline in American history,” in the words of one global index.

Warnings also came from judges ruling on election-related cases. In late October, Judge David O. Carter blocked the Justice Department from ordering California officials to segregate the ballots of 20,000 voters who were on a list of suspected noncitizens that Carter found to be unreliable. “If the executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger,” he wrote.

Against the backdrop of such fears, the November election became not just a referendum on President Trump, but also a crucial test of American democracy. In the end, the country passed. Turnout was the second highest for a midterm in more than a century, and Republicans, including Trump, have accepted the results. Even last week, when Democrat Scott Colom was declared the winner of the tight race for Senate in Mississippi, there were no challenges or protests in the historically Republican state.

Does one free and fair election mean the concerns that preceded it were overblown? There’s little question that Trump’s hyperaggressive use of presidential power and his family’s self-enrichment have served as a shock to the county’s democratic traditions. But the election suggests that American democracy has the resources to heal. The point is not that Democrats were the victors. It’s that the popular will won and reflected a wholesale turn against the administration in power.

Leading up to the midterms, scholars debated whether the country was sliding into a soft form of authoritarianism in Trump’s second term, akin to Hungary under former Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The answer was yes, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way argued in an article published in October. They cited Trump’s leveraging of federal power to cow law firms, prosecute political opponents, pressure news media outlets to alter their coverage, and steer political donations toward his own super PACs. It was all an effort to entrench himself and his party in power, Levitsky and Way wrote, as was Trump’s mid-decade gerrymandering push.

On the other side of the debate, Kurt Weyland, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, said that while Trump was transgressive, he was not transforming the U.S. government into an authoritarian regime. For the most part, the laws and traditions protecting free expression and civil society blocked his undemocratic initiatives. The United States was not turning into Hungary under Orban or Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “The mayor of Istanbul is sitting in prison” for opposing Erdogan, Weyland said. “James Talarico isn’t in prison.” In fact, he is headed to the Senate.