When Elites Fail, Democracy Falters

sentiment are meant to be only part of a system governed by institutions and norms that protect the common good.

That gap is often where the problems begin.

When institutions fall short, as they did in Brazil, voters can grow skeptical of accruing power to bureaucrats and elites who failed.

So voters move to replace institutions with a government that feels more like democracy as they’d thought it would be: direct rule by the people.

That often means electing leaders like Mr. Bolsonaro, who promise to dismantle the establishment and rule through personal authority.

No one wants to believe their leaders are defying their wishes. This creates an opening for an outsider to rise to power by scapegoating foreign or moneyed interests and by promising to restore the people’s will.

The European Union, which never managed an identity that wasn’t associated with bankers and technocrats, has been easy to cast as an enemy of popular will.

In Latin America, institutional failures were graver, with corruption rotting out political parties. Voters were aware of this corruption because justice systems became strong enough to root it out. curity, when our capacity for lofty ideals is weakest.

When people believe they are at risk of targeted violence, their sense of community narrows, according to research by Daphna Canetti-Nisim, a University of Maryland political psychologist. They grow more supportive of policies to control minorities and less supportive of pluralism. Those impulses can be exploited. The grisly campaign of vigilante violence by President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines pins his country’s problems on an undesirable social class — in his telling, a vast army of drug dealers and users — and promises to control them through force.

In Europe and the United States, there is a sense that white Christians are under siege. White voters, who have embraced President Trump’s nationalism, have grown more afraid of minorities.