In the game Jenga, players take turns removing wooden blocks from a racquet tower and then stacking them back up. Each moved piece makes the base more wobbly; Each block placed on top makes it more unbalanced until it finally falls.
This, I argue, is essentially how we should think about the turn of the 2024 election for American democracy: an already battered tower of state will be at risk of falling completely in on itself, with catastrophic results for those who survive in its shelter.
We live in an age where democracy Once considered “consolidated”. – meaning so secure that they cannot collapse into authoritarianism – are beginning to bind and even collapse. As recently as 2010, Hungary was considered one of the post-communist world’s democratic success stories; Today, it is now understood to be the only dictatorship in the European Union.
Hungarian democracy did not die of natural causes. It was killed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who seized control of almost every aspect of state power and turned it into a tool. Not just the obvious, like Hungary’s public broadcaster and judiciary, but other areas — such as its tax administration and offices regulating higher education.
Piece by piece, Orbán — whose support Trump regularly touts — subtly takes one democracy and replaces it with something different.
In this, he was a trailblazer, creating a blueprint for the transition from democracy to dictatorship that has been followed, with varying degrees of success, by leaders of countries as diverse as Brazil, India, Israel and Poland.
The central question of this election is whether voters will empower former President Donald Trump to resume efforts to keep the United States on the list.
A predictable crisis
Trump’s statements and policy documents like Project 2025 amount to a systematic urbanist program to turn government into an extension of his personal will. Their most basic proposal, a revival of Trump’s never-implemented Schedule F order, would allow the shooting. 50,000 above career civil servants.
It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to dismiss as so much internal Washington drama, but the stakes are sky-high: Beyond disrupting the basic functions of government that millions of people depend on, the politicization of the civil service is an important step toward integration. Power is needed to build a dictatorship.
Democratic collapse these days isn’t about canceling elections and declaring yourself a dictator, but stealthily hollowing out a democratic system so it’s harder and harder for the opposition to win. This strategy requires full control over the state and the bureaucracy: it means having the right workers in the right places who can use their power to subvert the core functions of democracy.
Trump and his team plan to do just that. They discussed everything from suing local election administrators to using regulatory authorities.Revenge against corporations that crossed him” – All actions that would depend, crucially, on replacing nonpartisan public servants with loyalists who would resist such orders.
It is hard to say how far Washington can go down the road to Budapest. That will depend on a variety of factors that are difficult to predict, from the qualifications of Trump’s chosen appointees to the resistance he faces from the Judiciary.
But even with a reasonable chance of avoiding the worst, the danger remains serious. With concrete plans for despotism already in place and the recent granting of criminal impunity from the Supreme Court, there is every reason to consider a second Trump term an extinction-level threat to American democracy.
This attack on democracy did not come out of nowhere. My recent book on democracy, responsive spiritArgues that the growing political antagonism in America is a perennial outgrowth of its defining conflict over race and national identity — the beginnings of the current conflict stemming largely (though not entirely) from reactions to Barack Obama’s 2008 victory.
The perception among some Americans that they were losing their country to something new, defined by a more diverse population and more equal social hierarchies, created the idea of a strongman who could bring about change quite attractive to a significant portion of the American population. These voters came to form a plurality, if not a majority, of Republican primary voters — creating the conditions for Trump’s rise.
In 2016, Trump seized on this reactionary discontent and married it to a full-scale agenda of backlash against the current political system. His policies and political rhetoric—on everything from immigration to gender to trade to foreign policy—were calculated to push America’s once divisive and mainstream ideas to the brink.
As powerful as this politics has proven to be, perhaps Trump never really expected it to take him to the White House. He did very little transition work — nothing like Project 2025 existed. His team jumped from second to the challenge called in their favour.
The president himself was unfamiliar with how American democracy works and was not interested in the details. So in his first term, he haphazardly shook its foundations—blatantly attacking basic democratic norms of behavior and installing an incoherent policy process that made it very difficult to count on any hope of impartial, stable governance.
The result? Growing tension among citizens and declining trust in government institutions, as the government becomes legitimately less reliable. There have been several near-miss crises — people forget how close we were to nuclear war with North Korea in 2017 — and then two very real ones: a Response to the grumbling epidemic and democracy-shaking riots in the Capitol.
When critics warn of Trump’s threat, the constant response is that democracy has already survived Trump’s four years in office. Indeed, democracy has not emerged since Trump’s first term.
And, perhaps more importantly, there are many reasons to believe that a second Trump term will be far more dangerous than the first — starting with the level of authoritarian preparation that has already gone into it.
A child raised in a saboteur
If Trump’s first term resembled the random destruction of a child, a second would resemble the deliberate destruction of a terrorist. With the benefit of four years of governing experience and four more years of planning, Trump and his team concluded that the problem with their first game of Jenga was that they simply had not removed enough blocks of democracy.
I don’t think that, in another four years, Trump can successfully use these plans to build a fascist state that will jail critics and stay in power indefinitely. That’s partly because of the size and complexity of the American state, and partly because it’s not really the kind of authoritarianism that works in democracies these days.
But in those years, he managed to dismantle so many of the fundamental building blocks of American democracy that the system could really be pushed to the brink of collapse.
He could very well create a political environment that tilts electoral contests (more) in favor of the GOP — accelerating. Dangerous and destabilizing party conflict Above the very rules of the political game. He can compromise media outlets, especially Govt or Billionaire owned ones. He can undermine the government’s ability to do basic things, from controlling pollution to safely stockpiling nuclear weapons.
The damage can be immediately catastrophic as we saw in the first term: political violence and mass death (from war, a crank-controlled public health system, or any number of others). But even if the worst-case scenario is avoided, the structural damage to the towers of American democracy could be long-lasting – undoing the complex and mutually supportive mechanisms that work to keep democracy alive.
When government reliably and impartially delivers core services, people have greater confidence in all of its functions — including the conduct of fair elections. When they believe in elections more, they tend to believe in them as a means of resolving major policy differences. When they trust election results, they tend to give the next government a baseline level of legitimacy, thereby making it easier to deliver key services reliably and impartially. The stable house of democracy is built by combining these functions.
John Rawls, the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century, described it as a long process of trust-building that begins with a fundamental belief in democratic ideals. When people of all political stripes fundamentally trust the system, he argues, they begin to operate within its rules—giving others more confidence that they, too, can follow the rules without being cheated.
“Gradually, as political cooperation continues to succeed, citizens acquire increasing trust and confidence in each other,” Rawls wrote in his book. Political liberalism.
Trump’s second term risks replacing Rawls’ virtuous cycle with a vicious cycle. As Trump undermines the government, following the Urbanist playbook with at least some success, much of the public will justifiably lose their already-shattering faith in the American system of government. And whether such a disaster can last is anyone’s guess.
