SUMMARY: This blog post discusses the current state of democratic culture in the United States and the potential damage caused by Trump and the Republicans. It highlights the importance of democratic values and the struggle for a more perfect union. The post explores deep and surface democratic culture, as well as the deep culture of authoritarianism in the US. It also presents polling data that suggests a decline in democratic culture and growing acceptance of authoritarianism among certain groups. The author urges readers to share, like, comment, and follow the post to raise awareness about these threats to democracy.
KEYWORDS: Trump, Republicans, democratic culture, election democracy, United States, perfect union, deep culture, surface culture, authoritarianism, polling, political violence, conservative media, white supremacy, threats to democracy
COMMENT: Have you seen any evidence of a decline in our commitment to democratic norms?
A year out from Election 2024, there is alarming news everywhere. Did the Great Civics Lesson of 2016 not take hold? Do we not remember what a pre-Dobbs America? Do you really want all six conservative justices to be younger than fifty? Are we really willing to entrust our democracy to the Republicans and I2I4?
Is it really a horse race between Trump and his challengers in the primary? Is our political environment really business as usual in the run up to the 2024 election? Why can’t we believe that I2I4 and the Republican Party are really nazis when not only are they telling us that they are, they are demonstrating it through their actions?
Democratic Culture: The Struggle for a More Perfect Union
Part of the answer to these questions lies in our democratic culture. The United States is the oldest continuous democracy on the planet. We were founded on the principles of democracy and have lived by them for almost 250 years. It’s all we’ve known.
Sure, we’ve never had a perfect union, but we’ve made nearly continuous strides towards creating a more perfect union… until now. We have expanded the franchise almost since the beginning of the country. It has been painful, after all we fought a civil war to free and enfranchise our slaves. In fact, our history since then has been the struggle between the white supremacist slavers and those who truly believe that all people are created equal without consideration of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or sexual preference or orientation.
We fought the Civil War to free the slave, imposed racial equality on the former Confederate states during Reconstruction, endured racial violence and rampant discrimination during Jim Crow, and are now living through the counterrevolution to Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Yet, through it all, our culture of democracy has endured.
That deep belief in democracy has both helped and hindered us in our fight for creating a more perfect union where all people are indeed treated equally before the law.
Deep and Surface Democratic Culture
I’ve long defined culture as the degree of similarity that two people have in interpreting the same scene, event, idea, or thought. The more similar the interpretation, the greater the shared culture. But, even that practical definition falls short of capturing everything culture includes.
Culture are the characteristics that distinguish one group of people from another. It may include language, tradition, beliefs, dress, food, religion, and many other internalized ideas. Culture is passed from one generation to the next and, therefore, slow to change. It is passed from person-to-person and through institutions and media.
It can be either deep or surface level. Surface level culture are the things we see, like voting or marriage ceremonies. Deep culture is the things that we don’t see, like what constitutes fairness or justice. When we talk about democracy as a cultural artifact of the US, we are talking about the right to vote, the principle of one person-one vote, and equality before the law. That’s deep culture.
These ideas are so deeply engrained in us that many cannot conceive of the US as not being a democracy. Those people don’t see any harm or risk in electing Trump or the Republicans to office. It is simply inconceivable to them that they do not share this deep cultural belief in democracy. It has blinded many of the occasional disinterested distracted voters to the possibility that we will not always be a democracy.
The Deep Culture of Authoritarianism in the US
Given our history — Newt Gingrich’s permanent majority, anyone? REDMAP 2010? Jim Crow, the Civil War, the 3/5ths compromise — we’ve had many politicians and at least one political party willing to break our democratic norms to maintain control of our governments at any given time. The concept of democracy is far more solidly engrained in the minds of the voters than it is in the minds of the politicians.
Timothy Snyder said that would-be authoritarians will test the waters. They will say things to see the reaction they get, how well received they are. Trump has been doing this from the get-go from they’re sending criminals and rapists as he descended his golden escalator to the adulation of his paid-for audience to his American Carnage speech to his insurrection to his recent “they’re poisoning the blood of our country” speeches. We’ve tolerated him every step of the way, and the Republican Party has promoted and coddled him.
As Rachel Maddow points out in her book, Prequel, would-be authoritarians prey on fear. Fear of chaos, crime, disease, loss. They hype these fears in their rhetoric knowing that fearful people will react conservatively. Behavioral economics tells us that people abhor risk, except in the face of a sure loss. The goal of the authoritarian is to make it seem like there is a sure loss ahead of us, so people will take a chance on handing them the power of the government.
Polling the Decline in Democratic Culture and the Growing Acceptance of Authoritarianism
There is solid evidence that it is working, too. In a recent poll, The Public Religion Research Institute found these disturbing trends:
America’s Best Days are behind us and it’s been worse since the 1950’s
Talk about a June Cleaver finding! Of course, the big change since the 1950’s was civil rights, so what does that tell you? Aggregating the two results yields these percentages:
- REPUBLICAN: 70% in agreement.
- INDEPENDENT: 56%
- DEMOCRAT: 35%
Breaking it down by news source, though, is particularly illuminating if unsurprising:
- FAR RIGHT NEWS: 80%
- FOX NEWS: 66%
- NO TV NEWS: 57%
- MAINSTREAM NEWS: 46%
The corrosive effect of a conservative news bubble is plain to see. Where you get your news matters.
Because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right
This one they dubbed their support for authoritarianism question, and 38% of respondents agreed with it. They broke the support down by party:
- REPUBLICAN: 48% in agreement.
- INDEPENDENT: 38%
- DEMOCRAT: 29%
The only group to have a majority support the proposition? Hispanic Catholics at 51%. Is it any wonder the I2I4 is growing his Latinx support?
By news source:
- FAR RIGHT NEWS: 52%
- FOX NEWS: 53%
- NO TV NEWS: 40%
- MAINSTREAM NEWS: 32%
Luckily, these percentages are smaller, but still disturbingly high. The normalization of political violence is well underway.
Some other interesting findings among Republicans:
- FAVOR TRUMP: 54%
- DISFAVOR TRUMP: 32%
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Republicans favor Trump, so these percentages are of little comfort. And, pro-tip: if you still identify as a Republican, you favor Trump. You’re a nazi by association. Trump and his ilk need to be ostracized.
The racists get their say:
- WORSE SINCE 1950: 43%
- BETTER SINCE 1950: 31%
Seriously, I think it is safe to say that those believing things have gotten worse since the 1950s have an inner racist that is barely contained under the surface at best, so that tells you how far the racists are willing to go to exert white supremacy.
because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country
Agreement with using violence to right political wrongs has been growing. Only 15% of the respondents in 2021 agreed with the statement, now 23%. The insurrection, the violent rhetoric of the right, and MAGA acts of violence are making it all more acceptable to the average American. Eventually, we’ll reach a point where we believe political violence is inevitable.
Broken down by political party:
- REPUBLICAN: 33% in agreement up from 28% in 2021
- INDEPENDENT: 22%, up from 13%
- DEMOCRAT: 13%, up from 7%
The Trump divide of Republicans:
- FAVOR TRUMP: 41% agree with violence
- DISFAVOR TRUMP: 16%
While the same caveats as above apply here, it is somewhat comforting to see that the Liz Chaneys of the world don’t think political violence is justified to right all of the Democratic wrongs, for whatever that is worth.
Election deniers:
- DENIERS: 46% support violence
- ACCEPTERS: 13%
These results look about the same as those favoring and disfavoring Trump, so no surprise there.
The racist divide:
- WORSE SINCE 1950: 30%
- BETTER SINCE 1950: 14%
At least it is only a third of the racists who want to resort to violence today a year out from the election. Thank god for small miracles, amiright?
We can see that conservatives, MAGA, and Republicans are losing their democratic culture. They are de-consolidating right before our very eyes. All of those on the right are knowingly contributing to it. They want this. Anyone who has not openly denounced the Republican Party, left the party, condemned MAGA, still watches rightwing media, they want an authoritarian fascist white supremacist America. There is no other conclusion.
If you fear the decline in our democratic cultural norms, please consider doing one of the following:
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Image Attribution
This image was generated using Poe’s StableDiffusionXL bot using the prompt, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump walking away from a burning White House
The Psy of Life 
Calico, allowing for media misrepresentation, I thought it was the high court that overturned the Roe -v-Wade decision?
My point, obviously not clearly made (sorry), was that the person in the street carries the load, irrespective of who is in government.
I doubt the Greek people of yester year and the Americans of today would agree on what makes a Democracy. I look forward to your comment.
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Howdy Jon!
SCOTUS is the third co-equal branch of our government. Its decisions are government decisions. Its members are appointed by the President and approved by the Congress.
When Barak Obama created the AMA millions got healthcare that hadn’t had it before. When Congress granted the child tax credit during #COVID19, millions were lifted out of poverty. When LBJ created Medicare and Medicaid, he literally lifted the elderly out of poverty, with Head Start, he gave millions food and improved their education. When Bill Clinton changed welfare as we know it, millions lost benefits. When the Republicans give billions in tax breaks to the wealthy, the middle class pays more in taxes. When the federal government subsidizes fossil fuels, it props up a failing and dying industry that worsens our climate.
Who is in office matters. The policies and laws they pursue and implement matters. It touches everyone’s lives whether they know iit or not.
As for the Greeks, their democracy was a direct democracy that involved a very limited number of people actually voting and participating. They would actually recognize a republic just as we recognize their direct democracy.
That our democracy isn’t a more perfect union, doesn’t mean that who we elect to office doesn’t matter and that all politicians and government are the same. Again, do you prefer a pre or post Dobbs America? It is a direct result of our elections and who is in office.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Calico, I thank you for your fulsome comment, some of which I agree with. However, I still believe that it is the masses who carry the load and that those ‘super beings’ we elect (be they of the Left or Right), escape the consequences of their actions.
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Howdy Jon!
That elected officials are not held accountable by their electorate, especially Republican elected officials is true. It is the result of several factors not the least of which is the vast majority of us don’t understand what the government does and who does it. For an illuminating look into what the rural conservative Christian believes to be true but isn’t, I refer you to my post on Arlie Hochschild’s book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.” She spent five pre-Trump years in Southern Louisiana cultivating relationships with the folks that live there to discover why they vote against their own best interest.
The upshot of it all is that white people would rather suffer the consequences of electing Republicans who stimulate their inner racists than face their inner racist.
In that, we are in agreement.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Calico, it is scary to think you may be correct. If the electorate votes without knowing what the outcome could be, we are in deep shit. An unknowing and uncaring electorate, leads us where?
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It leads us straight to Trump or his ilk. This is the Great Civics Lesson where we learn as a country how our government works and what our role is in it.
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Calico, os America truly a “democratic culture”? You have a two party system, who’s common denominator is WEALTH and both federal and state governments, that can be and are over ruled by a high court that has political affiliations!
Be they of the Left or Right, does government have any REAL impact on the people in the street?
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Howdy Jon!
Culture refers to beliefs, behaviors, concepts, and traditions as well as other aspects of our lives that people hold in common. To the degree that Americans believe that all people are created equally before the law and that one person gets one vote, then yes, we have a democratic culture. Your point about how effectively our system reflects the constituents that elected is well taken. To that point, America is more of an oligarchy since it can be demonstrated that the government is more responsive to the needs of corporations and the wealthy than it is to the average citizen.
Does the government have an impact on people on the street? Just think about the effect that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade and reinstituting abortion bans has affected the lives of people. Of course, government has an impact on the individual lives of people.
It is part of the anti-democratic segment of our society’s strategy to curtail the influence of the individual on government to suppress the vote. The belief that government doesn’t matter in individual lives discourages people from voting, which is exactly what allows corporations and the wealthy through lobbyists to have such outsized (per capita) influence.
Ironically, perpetuating the belief that it doesn’t matter which party holds office promotes anti-democratic behavior and allows corporations and the wealthy to continue their outsized influence.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Because, the people are, ignorant, uneducated about the important issues surrounding the country’s, wellbeing, i.e. voting rights for all citizens, women’s rights to abort, same-sex marriage, and a lot more of the, more, “debatable issues”, that is, exactly why, authoritarian leaders like Trump is able to, sway the masses, that’s how the Capitol Hill takeover occurred, because, these followers lacked the, sense of, judgement, even at the faces of the lies of the Republican Party, falling apart, they still, faithfully, follow the political party, down that, cliff, and besides, the Supreme Court is made up of, primarily conservative justices now too, with the majority of the Congress being, Republicans, that’s why, U.S. is now, a total mess, and, on top of that, it’s still, trying to play the, role of the justice of the world, combating China and Russia. It’s exactly identical in the country Iblove in right now, and, if the voters don’t come to their senses, then, the countries all over the world will, slide down, into, that abyss, eith, no way out or, up.
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Howdy Taurus!
A lot of the ignorance of the masses is deliberate. Much of the world’s media is aligned with political movements filtering the information they publish. People are like the proverbial black box, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. When Fox News viewers were paid to watch CNN, their political views moderated, according to one study. When they went back to Fox News, they reverted to their old political views and ways.
Belief is a powerful thing. Authoritarians work hard to manipulate what people believe by flooding the airwaves with their lies. Hearing something just one time gives it the veneer of truth even if it is a blatant lie. This is true for everyone. It’s how we’re built. We evolved in an environment that didn’t lie to us. It’s only people who lie. Okay, apes will lie, too, but they have a very limited capacity. That’s a #ScienceFact, by the way.
If you’re not dealing with reality, you’re crazy. Living in an authoritarian world means you’re living the authoritarian lie, which isn’t reality, which means everyone is crazy.
Huzzah!
Jack
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As worrisome, even depressing*, as these poll results may be, they do make clear the stark choice.
*Of course, they want us depressed, hopeless, worn out, passive.
It amazes me that any Hispanic person can support Trump given what he is promising to do to them and their families. Do they thing he’s just kidding? And Black people? Don’t they get it that the White Supremacists want them back on the auction block, or at least share cropping in a Jim Crow world? Do they still expect the traditional and institutional guard rails will work when the clear intent is to blast through all the barriers to their authoritarian desires? I guess the poll results answer that question.
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Howdy Bob!
Those cross tabs were some of the most depressing results of the poll. I think it gets down to what you believe will happen. Our culture blinds us to some of the worst possibilities. Even though there is real oppression and systemic racism in the US and, I imagine, PoC encounter it on a daily basis, PoC still have rights and freedoms and recourse. It is difficult to imagine going from that to having the Brown Shirts kicking in your front door on Kristallnacht and dragging you kicking and screaming to concentration camp. We both know that is what Trump is dreaming about when he talks about using the DoJ as the instrument of his retribution.
Back in 2017, there was real palpable anger at Trump and some of the things he was doing, but there was also an air of fun-and-games. It was easy to make fun of him, to make him into a joke. It was like a contest to come up with the worst nicknames for him. That sense has passed. Now, he’s all but a normal permanent fixture in our world, which makes the threat to democracy all the harder to accept.
I don’t really get it, but the capacity of the human mind to ignore the painfully obvious and blatant is tremendous.
Huzzah!
Jack
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The normalization of Trump and Trumpism has been deliberate on the part of the GOP, and a tragic failure on the part of the media. Some important voices in the media have awakened to that and begun to get away from “both sides ism” to focus on the threat, as case of better late and never.
The human ability to block awareness of stuff we don’t want to think about is amazing wen it allows us to go on doing business as usual. It is as true with regard to the threat of authoritarians as it is of climate change. And, scapegoats are so much easier and simpler to get excited about. We may have made a world beyond our cognitive abilities to manage.
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Howdy Bob!
I know this has come up before in our discussions, but it continually amazes me that the very qualities that allowed us to evolve to be the dominate species on the planet are the very ones that will cause our demise. That cognitive skill of ignoring reality and scapegoating help preserve the small group and promote its success. Now that we no longer are competing in small bands of 100 or so individuals but are living in mega-societies, those very traits are killing us. In that sense we have made a world that we cannot manage. In that sense, we truly are mad.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Or, it will have us back at the level of social systems we can manage. It is the core of my solution to the Fermi Paradox. For critters like us, evolving in this kind of planet and chemistry, the only pathway from the technology of the village blacksmith using charcoal for fuel to the technology and industrial organization that can get off the planet is through fossil fuels which are addictive and ultimately lethal, unless the species sees the problem soon enough to switch to other energy sources fa sooner than we have. If we make it through this with enough tech and social scale (but with a much smaller population), we might still have a chance. It looks to be a close run thing.
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Howdy Bob!
We tend to make short-sighted short term decisions that serve our narrow best interest. Given those parameters, I don’t see us really being the first to resolve the Fermi Paradox.
Maybe enough human beings will survive the climate disaster AND remember the lessons pre-disaster in order to begin again. It seems like a good plot for your international sci-fi best seller.
Huzzah!
Jack
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The trick in that scenario is in the remembering in a more functional form than tales told around the campfire of an age of magic and wonders, and wizards who challenged the gods and were destroyed.
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Unfortunately, we are likely to carry forward our ability to make up reasons for something happening and try to use those as if they are effective. See my other comment. In a complex work, we seek to simplify it.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Yep.
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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ― Arthur C. Clarke
We do, indeed, life in an age of magic and wizards. Most people really don’t know enough of how computers, TV sets, even radios work to regard them as anything but magic. Even complex systems like the economy, interest rates, inflation, and supply chains approach that status. That is why it is so easy, for example, to blame a President for things that really are beyond their effective control. He’s the wizard who could fix it if he wanted to. Then there are vaccines and diseases. If you don’t know what that ballot scanning machines is doing and how, it is easy to imagine it can change votes.
The aspiring autocrat always promises magic solutions, and relieves his followers of any responsibility to understand and think.
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Howdy Bob!
Most of us can’t even explain the way zippers work — me included — much less the complex inner workings of computers and cars. We live in a bubble of ignorance about the world around us, much like our hunter-gatherer ancestors did. You didn’t need to understand the biochemistry of plants to eat fruit, nuts, and berries. You didn’t need understand the aerodynamics of a spear to throw it well.
They also didn’t understand the complex geological dynamics that caused volcanic eruptions or earthquakes or atmospheric dynamics that caused severe storms and droughts. They did what we do in the face of such things: make up simple, yet comprehensible, explanations for not only the cause but how to control the cause.
Right now, MAGA is doing the equivalent of sacrificing a virgin to appease an angry god.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Knowledge is a strange thing. For the hunter gatherers, it wasn’t too hard to know what things they could reliably control, which things they could reliably influence, and which they could not do either of those. The first two categories could be addressed with technology and strategy, i.e., thinking. The others called for either gambling, meaning trying things like prayer or ritual. Sometimes, that appeared to work. It was chance (or shrewd timing by the practitioner), giving a random reinforcement schedule. Things learned on random reinforcement are very hard to unlearn. Hence, religion. The forces that could not be controlled got named and stories made up about them to explain their behavior.
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And viola, on the sixth day god created confirmation bias.
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LOL! Yes, and it works pretty well in a world were change is slow, where what was true in the past very largely remains true, and habits continue to serve. Confirmation bias is backward looking, like a lot of the historical statistics that actuaries have relied on to predict risks, or the weather records on rainfall maximums for which city storm drain systems are designed. When the rate of change in important variables increases, it can get you in real trouble.
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Our world has changed, we have not, and cynical politicians exploit the mismatch between reality and cognition for their personal gain. The lesson for a democracy is don’t elect wolves to use Mike Johnson’s analogy.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Anybody who wants the job badly enough to lie to get it shouldn’t get it.
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Usually when you’re found to have lied in a job interview or on your resume, kinda like George Santos did, you lose your job immediately, but when you lie about the effects that giving a giant polluting corporation tax breaks to relocate to your state, you don’t. In fact, people enthusiastically vote for you for a second term. Funny how that works.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Ain’t capitalism wonderful? Promise them jobs and they don’t ask questions.
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Even if the jobs never materialize.
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And, either their local and states services get less funding, or their local and state taxes increase to make up for the huge tax breaks the company got.
The consumer always pays for everything.
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