Kurt Weyland, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, rests his case for democracy not on the system’s vulnerability but on what he sees as its enduring strength. His book, “Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat,” published last month by Cambridge University Press, has gone virtually unnoticed in the popular media. Surveying 40 examples of populist leaders elected in Latin America and Europe since the late 20th century, Weyland argues that only seven overturned their country’s democratic system. And each of those instances occurred under conditions that are unlikely to occur in the United States any time soon.
Trump’s rise has prompted scholars to amplify examples of states that transitioned from democracy to competitive authoritarianism, such as Peru under Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s and in Hungary under Viktor Orban in the 2010s. A Supreme Court brief by “experts in democracy” urging Trump’s removal from the presidential ballot observes: “While the Cold War was marked by democracies collapsing via coups and wars, the majority of decline and failure today occurs under democratically elected politicians who use their popularity to undermine constitutions, laws, and norms from within.”
Weyland goes this far with the doomsayers: Populism fits uneasily with liberal democracy and can threaten its foundations. He defines populism as a style of charismatic leadership based on the populist’s “redemptive mission” and “direct emotional connection” to supporters. Drawing authority from the force of their personality, populist leaders circumvent existing institutions once elected and often try to “engineer their own self-perpetuation.”
Usually, however, they fail. Weyland contends that the many instances where populists hold power and liberal democracy emerges intact, such as Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy and Carlos Menem’s Argentina, are given short shrift by scholars. Comparing those cases of democratic resilience with the minority of cases where democracy fell under populist rule, Weyland detects several patterns that should temper fears of a Trumpian autocracy in the United States.
First, democracies with a strong separation of powers between different institutions and branches of government were especially difficult to overthrow. But rickety institutions can also be a major obstacle, Weyland argues. A would-be authoritarian must achieve overwhelming popularity to set them aside. That’s possible only if one or more crises hit and the populist successfully resolves them, or — in the case of left-wing populists in Latin America — a resource bonanza enables massive expansion in government largesse.
For all the complaints about “counter-majoritarian” features of the U.S. Constitution, such as the Senate and the Supreme Court, it’s precisely this division of authority that stands in the way of the democratic backsliding highlighted in other countries. Raw majoritarianism makes it easier for populists in power to rewrite the rules to suppress their opposition. As Weyland notes, Hungary — the most prominent example of revived authoritarianism in the West — “constituted Eastern Europe’s ‘most majoritarian’ democracy” before Orban won office.
Trump, by contrast, was frequently blocked by Congress from 2017 to 2021. And as Weyland observes, he “did not push his ostentatious penchant for transgression so far as to disrespect court orders as populists elsewhere, ranging from [Hugo] Chávez in Venezuela to [Vladimir] Meciar in Slovakia, have frequently done.”
That’s partly because…
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