Worried about the decline of democracy in Latin America? Worry about the U.S., too
This column often deals with the threats to democracy in Latin America. But the U.S. congressional hearings on the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol made it clear — with amazing details — that the biggest democracy under threat in the Western Hemisphere is the United States.
According to testimony under oath from key aides to former President Trump, including his own, onetime ultra-loyal attorney general, Bill Barr, and some of Trump’s own children, what Trump did on Jan. 6, 2021, can’t be seen as anything other than a coup attempt. Trump tried to do what Latin Americans have long known as an “autogolpe,” or a “self-coup.”
As we all saw on TV, he incited his supporters to march toward the Capitol to protest against an election result that had been validated by the Supreme Court and more than 60 lower courts. And then, when the pro-Trump mob stormed into the congressional building chanting, “Hang [Vice President] Mike Pence,” the former president failed to call for an end to the violence for more than three hours.
Five police officers who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 died of their wounds or committed suicide in the days and weeks that followed.
As the committee’s vicechairwoman, Rep. Liz Cheney, said in her closing remarks on July 21, “The case against Donald Trump in these hearings is not made by witnesses who were his political enemies. It is, instead, a series of confessions by Donald Trump’s own appointees, his own friends, his own campaign officials, people who worked for him for years, and his own family.”
Among those who testified
under oath before the congressional committee were former Attorney General Barr, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump’s own children, Ivanka and Don, Jr.
They and others had bombarded Trump’s chief of staff on Jan. 6 with urgent messages asking the president to make a public statement urging his followers to stop the violence. But the former president didn’t do that, nor did he call for security reinforcements to help protect lawmakers inside the building.
But the most terrifying thing about Trump’s coup
attempt is that there is still a minority of Americans who are supporting him. While Trump’s popularity slipped somewhat as a result of the congressional hearings, nearly 41% of Americans still have a favorable opinion of him, according to a FiveThirtyEight average of polls.
I still know people who, when confronted with the fact that Trump tried to overturn a free election and still justifies his actions, reply with a “yes, but,” followed by one-issue justifications like, “He was strong on Venezuela.” It’s as if it didn’t matter to them if the United States became an autocracy, just like Venezuela.
Michael J. Abramowitz, head of FreedomHouse, a non-partisan research group that puts out an annual report on the state of democracy in 195 countries, told me that the U.S. score in the world democracy scale has been falling since 2011.
“In 2011, the U.S. score stood at 93 on a 100 point scale, which made us similar to other established democracies like France and Germany,” he told me. “Now, the United States has had its score reduced over 11 years to 83 points, and it’s equal to less robust democracies like Panama or Romania.”
Abramowitz declined to forecast whether the U.S. democracy score is likely to fall further this year, but — judging from the congressional hearing’s latest revelations — I wouldn’t be surprised if it does.
The hearings provided “convincing evidence that President Trump led an attempted coup d’état following his 2020 election loss,” Abramowitz says. “How we respond to this unprecedented insider attempt to subvert U.S. democracy will shape the country’s direction for decades.”
The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA,) one of Europe’s leading political think tanks, has already categorized the United States as a “backsliding democracy.”
“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale” as a result of the Trumpsupported attack on Congress, IDEA said in its Global State of Democracy 2021 report.
If Trump is not prosecuted for his effort to undermine America’s democracy, it will be a green light for future U.S. leaders to overturn certified election results. The United States would become just like the Latin American autocracies that we often write about in this column.