Given President Trump’s disregard for long-standing political norms and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, many Americans fear that he is hostile to democracy. According to this view, the 49.8 percent of voters who supported him in 2024 must simply be unaware of the existential threat he poses to our republic. The logic, to Trump’s critics, is therefore simple: Once voters fully grasp that democracy is under threat from creeping authoritarianism, then surely they will turn against Trump.
Yet this strategy has largely fallen flat. Why? The consulting and pro-democracy organizations where we work have spent the past few months with conservative Trump voters across three counties in Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina. We learned that many do indeed revere America’s founding design, including the Constitution, free and fair elections, the Electoral College, and the rule of law. But these voters feel that government institutions have drifted from their founding values and priorities, which they classify as faith, or the belief that moral authority precedes political authority; family, the primary unit of social life and obligation; freedom, mainly from government overreach; and place, or the importance of local community over national abstraction. The people we spoke with explained that by forsaking these values, the country’s political institutions have lost touch with the moral ethos that they believe should guide public life, and that these institutions were designed to protect.
Our research involved conducting in-depth interviews with and observing the daily lives of dozens of people along with their friends, families, and neighbors to better understand how they think about American democracy right now. Our goal was not to persuade or judge, but to figure out why public trust in national institutions has plummeted to historic lows and what might be done to build it back up.
We learned that the central question for the conservatives we met is not “Should America be a democracy?” Instead it is: “Has American democracy remained faithful to what makes it legitimate?” Democratic institutions are legitimate, in the view of conservatives, when they honor and protect the faith, freedom, families, and communities of their constituents. When institutions and the politicians who inhabit them fail to appreciate the centrality of these core values, they become illegitimate.
One participant, Sarah, a 30-something mother of three in rural Wyoming, grew up poor, the daughter of a single teen mom. From the time she was 10, her local church fed her family, cared for her when her mother couldn’t be around, and surrounded her with people who treated her with dignity. In 2008, at age 18, she strongly considered voting for Barack Obama for president. She appreciated his care for struggling Americans and believed his promises of change. The parents of her boyfriend at the time didn’t argue with her. Instead, her future in-laws listened and then asked: Who brought you out of poverty? The answer, Sarah realized, was not the federal government, but her church community—a view that she believed put her closer to the priorities and policies of conservatives rather than Democrats.
[Christopher Beam: The ‘democracy’ gap]
Nearly 20 years later, Sarah told us that virtually every major institution she has encountered in her life, including public schools, hospitals, and various federal agencies, has squandered her trust and fallen short of what her church gave her. Having witnessed the shortcomings of the public-school system firsthand as a teacher, Sarah now homeschools her children. When neurologists dismissed her young son’s recurring seizures, she turned to networks of mothers online to crowdsource a diagnosis and treatment plan, which largely entailed avoiding certain government-sanctioned products and chemicals. (When we met her, her son hadn’t had a seizure for more than a year.) During the coronavirus pandemic, Sarah watched policies that seemed designed for urbanites arrive in her rural town without the consent of residents or evidence of their local efficacy. She threw herself into local activism, showing up to county meetings, local boards, and precinct caucuses. She now aligns herself with a chapter of the right-wing Freedom Caucus.
Across Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina, we heard stories like Sarah’s: Conventional institutions had failed participants, and faith and values-aligned organizations filled the gap. This is why calls to restore power to government institutions ring hollow, and why the Democratic Party’s faith in institutions can appear naive and godless. As Thomas, a rural South Carolinian who comes from a family with a long history of military service and civic engagement, told us: “Democrats see government as their god, while conservatives see their god as God, and government as sort of secondary.”
Disappointment and distrust in much of government—owing to the ways these institutions have seemingly abandoned the priorities that made them just and meaningful—have hardened into a worldview, one that dismisses democratic rules and norms as expendable if they don’t reinforce what’s morally essential. As Sam, a small-business owner in Michigan, put it: “Political norms are just like culture, right? Norms just mean how we have always done things. So I think that’s fine to disrupt.”
Which brings us to Trump. How can people with such a strong attachment to faith and family vote for someone who criticizes religious leaders and defies so many ethical standards? We learned that these voters evaluate Trump not as a model of their values, but as a defender of them. “I don’t like him as a person,” Cindy, a 50-something nurse in South Carolina, told us. “But I like him as a president.”
A number of respondents expressed gratitude for the way Trump has worked to protect their communities and livelihoods, particularly in coal country. Sarah told us, for example, that when Trump returned to office, her husband, a land surveyor in Wyoming, was nearly unemployed and the family was worried about making ends meet. But thanks to the president’s reversal of Biden-era restrictions on coal mining, her husband is now overwhelmed with work. Such moves have made Trump a hero in parts of the country where Americans have been unwilling or unable to pivot away from coal.
This view of Trump as a protector of the country’s core values and interests also helps explain how participants reconcile the president’s interventionist policies and growing executive power with their stated preferences for small, local governance. Many of the people with whom we spoke justified Trump’s aggressive use of federal power as a necessary response to hostile institutions that have violated their constitutional mandate. When the FBI investigates Trump, when government agencies mandate vaccines, and when the Department of Education influences local curricula, voters say these institutions have exceeded their legitimate authority. In cracking down on these institutional breaches, Trump is not breaking the rules but defending the foundation the rules were meant to protect. “Do I think Trump’s all the time, great? No. But I do think he’s fighting for everyone right now,” Kyle, a 20-something delivery driver in rural Wyoming, told us.
[Peter Wehner: The American pope vs. the American president]
Our research suggests that activists seeking to protect American democracy from authoritarian influences are pursuing a failing strategy. They are defending largely abstract democratic processes, such as norms and rules, on the assumption that everyone agrees that they are legitimate and worth saving. But such arguments are unlikely to resonate with voters who have come to believe that many of these norms and processes have abandoned the country’s bedrock values. Calls to defend democracy promise to alienate anyone who feels that democratic institutions have somehow failed them. Few care to preserve a system they feel stopped serving its purpose long ago.
The post Why Calls to ‘Save Democracy’ Don’t Work appeared first on The Atlantic.
