Donald Trump, if elected President, claims he will be a dictator—but only on day one—to block refugees he describes as vermin and to eviscerate environmental regulations. Trump calls rioters convicted of crimes during the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building patriots who are being held as hostages and he pledges to issue them pardons if elected. Trump also threatens to use the Justice Department to punish political enemies including Joseph Biden, the radical left, disloyal Republicans, the press, which he calls the “enemy of the people,” and secret Marxists in the government. If Trump evokes the antiquated 1807 Insurrection Act, he could in theory use the U.S. military and National Guard as police within the United States claiming he is suppressing civil disorder and insurrection. Undocumented immigrants and political opponents could end up in Trump detention camps. Critics charge that Trump is a threat to the future of democracy in the United States. His promised actions echo those of elected leaders in other countries that have been labeled illiberal democracies.
Illiberal democracy is a relatively new term for an old idea—the use of democratic practices like winning an election to achieve undemocratic ends such as suppression of political dissidents, selectively banning immigrants, overturning religious freedom, and imposing slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Christian nationalists who believe the United States should be declared a Christian nation seem to be willing supporters of an illiberal, anti-democratic Trump.
The earliest reference to the term illiberal democracy that I've found is in a 1995 book Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, London) that included a chapter titled: “Understanding Illiberal Democracy: A Framework.” The term was later used by Fareed Zakaria in a 1997 article in the journal Foreign Affairs. Zakaria argued that unlike in Western democracies such as the United States, Great Britain, and France—where electoral democracy is coupled with civil liberties such as freedom of speech and religion and the right to a fair trial—in much of the world elected governments ignore or actively repress civil and human rights.
In 2018, Freedom House argued that illiberal democracy, a term embraced by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, had become “the new normal in the region that stretches from Central Europe through Eurasia. In Central Europe, governments that disdain independent institutions and seek to fuse the ruling party with the state are no longer exceptional.” Freedom House identified 19 countries as declining democracies marked by “The government’s takeover of the judicial system, politicization of public media, smear campaigns against nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and violations of ordinary parliamentary procedure.”
Unfortunately, illiberal democracy under different names has a long history in the United States. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French sociologist and political theorist published his observations about the United States in Democracy in America. “I do not imagine that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere . . . [A]s long as the American democracy remains at the head of affairs . . . it may be foreseen that the freer the white population of the United States becomes, the more isolated will it remain.” De Tocqueville concluded that democracy for whites in the United States was rooted in the oppression of the Black population. Forty years later, after post-Civil War Reconstruction, de Tocqueville’s observations were confirmed as Southern whites, led by former Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan, disenfranchised Blacks, and with the acquiescence of the federal courts instituted Jim Crow segregation that remained in effect until the 1960s.
In the decade after World War I, the Ku Klux Klan was resurgent and illiberal democracy in the United States was busy targeting Blacks, immigrants, political dissidents, and organized labor. Republican Warren G. Harding was elected........