Democracy under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History

by Lawrence R. Jacobs

Overview

Donald Trump's presidency offered Americans a dire warning regarding the vulnerabilities in their democracy, but the threat is broader and deeper-and looms still.

"January 6th was a disgrace," Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell solemnly intoned at the end of Donald Trump's second impeachment trial on February 13, 2021. As to the culprit, Senator McConnell declared that "there is no question that President Donald Trump is practically and morally responsible." Before Trump even ran for President, his disdain for the rules, procedures, and norms of American democracy and the US Constitution was well-known and led prominent Republicans to repudiate him as "unfit" for the GOP nomination. Given the clear-eyed assessment of candidate Trump, why did the Republican Party nominate him as its presidential candidate in 2016 and then stand by him during the next eight years, nominating him three times?
Much of the attention paid to Trump's rise to power has focused on his corrosive personality and divisive style of governing. But he alone is not the problem. The vulnerability is much broader and deeper. The ascendance of Trump is the culmination of nearly 250 years of political reforms that gradually ceded party nominations to small cliques of ideologically motivated party activists, interest groups, and donors able to exploit the more open primary system that began in the 1970s?. Trump's rise is not an aberration, but a predictable outcome of trends deeply rooted in American history that have only accelerated in the last few decades.

In the updated paperback edition of Democracy under Fire, Lawrence Jacobs provides a highly engaging, if disturbing, history of political reforms since the late-eighteenth century that over time dangerously weakened democracy, widened political inequality as well as racial disparities, and rewarded toxic political polarization. Jacobs' searing indictment of political reformers concludes with recommendations to restrain the unbridled ambition of politicians who thrive on division and instead generate broad citizen engagement with tangible policy making.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197778906
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/11/2024
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Lawrence R. Jacobs is founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance (CSPG) and holds the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Table of Contents

Chapter One. The Making of Democratic Vulnerability

Part I. A New Synthesis: Democracy and Order
Chapter Two. Strong Democracy and Political Representation, 1776 to 1787
Chapter Three. The American Form of Democracy, 1796 to 1836

Part II. Abandoning Democratic Institutions
Chapter Four. Progressive Frustrations: Institutional Limits and Reform Prophesies, 1880s to 1920s
Chapter Five. Political Elites and the Failure to Protect Democratic Institutions, 1960s to 1972

Part III. Reviving American Democracy
Chapter Six. The Ills of Primary Elections and Democratic Deformation
Chapter Seven. Renewing American Democracy and Restraining Political Elites

Editorial Reviews

01/24/2022

Jacobs (Who Governs?), the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, contends in this unconvincing diatribe that the primary elections process is the cause of the country’s current political dysfunctions. Calling Donald Trump “a singular threat to American democracy,” Jacobs claims that Trump’s rise was a predictable product of a presidential nominating process “that sidelined party officials and senior officials and deferred to a relatively small number of ideologically motivated party activists, interest groups, and donors.” Though he briskly runs through the rise of political parties in the U.S. and the evolution of the primary system, Jacobs fails to convincingly explain why increasing the influence of party bosses or superdelegates would be more democratic and less likely to lead to a candidate like Trump reaching the White House. The book’s dense prose (“The history of democratic rules and procedures is contingent within the parameters of institutional development”) doesn’t help matters, but readers will be most disappointed by Jacobs’s failure to consider other factors in Trump’s rise, including social media algorithms, the Citizens United campaign finance decision, and race-baiting precedents set in earlier campaigns. This incomplete analysis falls short. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2022-01-11
A political scientist scrutinizes the underappreciated role of America’s primary-election system in the nation’s ideological polarization and the rise of Donald Trump.

Jacobs, the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, argues that primary elections undermine democracy, offering a timely but pedantic blend of a scholarly history of primaries and a critique of their enduring harms. Fearing rule by “the mob” instead of the gentry, James Madison and other framers made no mention of primaries in the Constitution, and as late as 1968, party bosses still controlled the selection of most delegates. That began to change with the election reforms of the 1970s, following Richard Nixon’s defeat of Hubert Humphrey, who ran in no primaries. The reforms weakened the influence of the old-school bosses and strengthened “a new network of party activists, organized groups, and donors.” These groups demand loyalty to their favored policies rather than to a party and, like Trump supporters, tend to be more ideologically extreme than voters in general. The author’s tightly structured arguments often read like expanded PowerPoint presentations without bullet points, as he covers the “two profound shifts in the party system in the past 50 years; the “three features” of strong democracy in the 1780s; the “four critical junctures” for election rules; “the five extraordinary consequences” of the rise of presidential primaries; and other enumerations. Jacobs also describes the “three sturdy barriers” to reforms he supports, such as having more unpledged “superdelegates” to nominating conventions, and he recalls historical injustices in the Jim Crow South, where Black voters were barred from casting ballots. All of this material will have high appeal for primary-election wonks, but it gives the sense that its natural readership consists of people who will be tested on the material at the end of the semester.

An informative but starchy history of primaries and how they have hurt democracy and enabled Trumpism.

Kirkus Reviews