If Trump wins, it will not be in spite of democracy, but because of it

On Monday, Republicans across Iowa will meet to begin the process of selecting their party’s nominee for the presidency. With the Iowa caucuses, after seemingly endless preliminary skirmishing, the first act of the 2024 US election is now officially under way.

A caucus is different from a primary, which is simply a ballot. At a caucus, registered Democrats and Republicans (and, in some states, independents too) meet for a face-to-face discussion about who they should support, as a preliminary to casting their vote. In an era of mass politics, there is something quaint yet reassuring about the idea of citizens convening, in the depths of winter, in schoolrooms and meeting halls of towns and villages across the state – sometimes in gatherings of as few as half a dozen – to participate in such a pure exercise in democracy.

US President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump.Credit: AP

We can expect to hear a lot about democracy this year – this is, after all, the year when more people will cast ballots in free elections across the globe than ever before in human history. A triumphant year for democracy, then? Hold your horses; there are many who want to convince you otherwise.

We will also hear a lot about threats to democracy. Since 2016 – the year the British people chose Brexit and Americans chose Donald Trump – we have seen an avalanche of books arguing that democracy is in peril – so many that democratic pessimism has become something of a cottage industry within the publishing world. While contributors to the oeuvre have included conservatives such as Jonathan Sumption, most of the doomsayers have come from the left. Predictably, the villains are right-wing demagogues (Trump, Boris Johnson, et al.), who deviously manipulate credulous populations to win elections (Trump 2016, Johnson 2019) and achieve other outcomes, such as Brexit, of which the left intelligentsia disapproves. This, so it is said, is the evil of “populism”. And, so goes the tortured argument, the very exercise of democracy is itself a threat to democracy.

It was in this vein that President Joe Biden launched his re-election campaign last week, with a speech that was almost entirely about Trump. “Democracy is on the ballot,” he declared. His campaign would be all about rescuing American democracy from the threat posed to it by Trump and his supporters, who were “doing everything in [their] power to try to destroy our democracy”.

Biden is playing a high-stakes game in defining the campaign not as a choice between different policies, or different philosophies of government, but as an existential decision. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about,” he said. The message could not have been clearer: only by voting for me can you show your faith in democracy.

A Trump supporter in Urbandale, Iowa, ahead of Monday’s caucuses.Credit: AP

Trump will, almost certainly, be Biden’s opponent this year, whatever the political and legal systems throw at him. Whatever may be said about Trump’s behaviour after the 2020 election (and, like most people, I consider his conduct to have been utterly disgraceful), if the American people choose to reinstate him in the White House, while that may be an appalling outcome for many, it will also be a democratic one: not a negation of democracy, but the result of it.

One device commonly used to deny the legitimacy of democratic outcomes is to blame it all on populism. Which is curious, since populism must surely mean that the popular will has prevailed. How is that not democratic? The liberal elite have their answer at the ready. (I use the word “liberal” here in the corrupted, modern American sense of the word.) “Aha!” claim those who cannot utter the word “populism” – or even “popular” – without an ill-concealed curling of the lip. The electorate has been misled by scheming demagogues.

Sure, there are plenty of lies told in election and referendum campaigns – none more so than in a system as robust and often belligerent as America’s. ’Twas ever thus. But how can it possibly be claimed – except by the most closed-minded partisan – that parties of the right are inherently more dishonest than parties of the left? (Or vice versa?) In recent memory, the most egregious and systematic lie told in an Australian election campaign was Mediscare in 2016 – a deception so serious that it almost changed the government.

There is an unmistakable cultural condescension about elite scorn for popular opinion. Usually, politicians are smart enough to keep it under wraps, but every once in a while it slips out – like Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” blunder, which probably cost her the presidency. Or some of the language used by some leading Yes advocates about the No campaign in the Voice referendum. It wasn’t even a dog-whistle; they left no doubt that they regarded No voters as red-necked, bigoted and stupid. Is it any wonder that everyday citizens – whether in America, Britain, Australia or elsewhere – feel the contempt in which such self-anointed left-wing opinion leaders hold them, and react accordingly?

Weather forecasts for Iowa published at the weekend predicted temperatures below minus 20, massive blizzards and the worst snow conditions since 1942. Yet tens of thousands will brave those conditions to turn out to caucus. These good people will be showing a much more real, practical commitment to democracy than the snobs who like to entertain Manhattan dinner parties by mocking them as rubes from the “flyover states”.

If opinion polls are correct, most of them will have come out to support Trump. Whatever you may think of the man himself, what happens in Iowa tonight will be as quintessentially democratic as anything can be.

George Brandis is a former Liberal senator for Queensland. He served as attorney-general from 2013 to 2017 and was later appointed high commissioner to the United Kingdom.

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