Have we just witnessed a blow to American democracy, or evidence of its strength?

“I can’t help but wonder if the American people have given up on democracy,” Jonathan Capehart said during the PBS election coverage right before President-elect Donald Trump’s victory speech.
During the same broadcast, New York Times columnist David Brooks spoke more reassuringly about the moderating elements of democratic institutions and the American people themselves — arguing, for instance, that the revulsion many would feel at witnessing hardworking, established migrant families being torn from local communities would “temper” impulses towards mass deportation.
Others remain far less assured. “We’re in for a long, exceptionally dangerous, endlessly trying four years with democracy’s warning lights flashing red more or less continually,” wrote Persuasion contributor Quico Toro in an article entitled, “The Unthinkable Plunge.”
Conservative author Marc Thiessen pushed back on post-election fears in The Washington Post, writing, “Democrats say Trump’s election is a blow to democracy. In fact, the opposite is true.”
He went on to catalog the opposition Trump faced in the Republican primary (“including two sitting Republican governors, three former Republican governors, a former congressman, a sitting U.S. senator and even his own former vice president”), before still winning the nomination “in a landslide.” His defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris was also significant, he added, even after all the threats and warnings she and others kept raising.
“That’s not a threat to democracy. That is democracy.”
Former President George W. Bush seemed to agree, saying in his statement congratulating Trump that strong turnout was a “sign of the health of our republic and the strength of our democratic institutions.”
It’s clear that voters on the right and left are defining what constitutes a danger to democracy very differently. Whereas the political right once emphasized activist judges and excessive executive orders as among their greater concerns with democracy, conservatives have now become far more attuned to threats from elite power structures crowding out or dismissing their own views and values. That includes federal bureaucratic agencies, but goes well beyond that to universities, legacy media, big business and tech companies.
The list of concerns about democracy on the political left is long, especially after the election. They include a conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court, reprisals from the new executive branch, voting rights, and the weakening of constitutional protections for minority groups. Together, these begin to resemble the same kind of fear that their views and values will be crowded out of current power structures.
While democracy concerns among progressives are sky-high following this U.S. election, Trump-supporting conservatives are enthusiastic about the recent electoral process, with concerns about the fairness and integrity of the vote more or less evaporating (demonstrating a long-standing “winner effect” experts have identified after elections).
So, which side is right? Maybe both to some degree. While acknowledging indicators of “democratic backsliding” across the world, Veith Selk, a political scientist at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, cautioned against overstating the concerns: “These developments are not harbingers of a global domino effect that will override electoral procedures and break down constitutional barriers. In fact, by many measures, the health of elections is quite robust around the world.”
Selk went on to highlight 2024 data confirming that the number of global elections where power changed hands has remained more or less stable over recent decades. Like so many things, the full truth seems to be more nuanced than an overly rosy or doom-and-gloom take on democracy would allow.
Whether surprised or disappointed by the results of an election, Brooks warned against lazily “blaming the voters” — an easy instinct when “your team lost.”
Following the will of the people is obviously the essence of democracy. “The democratic creed consists of the belief that ordinary citizens can influence political life,” Selk continued. “It holds that even though the big players call the shots, regular people also have their share of influence.”
“The voters are not always wise, but they are usually sensible,” Brooks said. “They know their own lives. They make sensible calls.”
Rather than finding some reason to condemn or write off voters’ judgment, this columnist encouraged a more “humble” posture, which asks, “what are they trying to tell us here?”
“Usually there’s a valuable lesson in there.”
One such lesson is now being widely acknowledged: the fact that for most voters, concerns about the economy and immigration trumped fears about “abortion access” or even democracy itself.
Yet, of course, fears about democracy remain very much alive among many who are mourning the loss.
It’s more than an election that some people are mourning. “I fear we’re forgetting that about the founding ideals of our country,” the national director of The Village Square, Liz Joyner told Deseret News. “These are special ideas that are so beautiful, but rather than staying close to them,” she worries we keep “drifting away.”
“That’s what scares me more than anything.”
The health of a governing system built on these ideals depends on other constituent parts, according to experts leading national initiatives to preserve democracy. Those include a healthy civic ecosystem, an educational and media ecosystem still aspiring for truth, and sufficient unity as a people around the continuing value of democratic institutions and ideals.
In a message encouraging Americans to accept the results of the election, Liz Cheney, a leading critic of Trump in recent years, called citizens the ultimate “guardrails of democracy” in their various roles, including in the “courts, members of the press and those serving in our federal, state and local governments.”
Representing those who remain concerned with the possibility of future democratic backsliding in the U.S., she concluded, “We now have a special responsibility, as citizens of the greatest nation on earth, to do everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years.”