Can Democracy Recover From Trump? New Research Reveals Answer

The pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States is deploy­ing masked troops to the streets of blue cities, work­ing to put friend­ly bil­lion­aires in charge of the media envi­ron­ment, and attempt­ing to jail his per­son­al ene­mies. Can any democ­ra­cy come back from this? Ear­li­er this year, two teams of researchers pub­lished papers try­ing to answer this exact ques­tion — and came to seem­ing­ly oppo­site con­clu­sions. Both papers focused on what they call “demo­c­ra­t­ic U‑turns:” where a coun­try starts out as a democ­ra­cy, moves toward author­i­tar­i­an­ism, and then quick­ly recov­ers. The first team’s con­clu­sions were opti­mistic: They iden­ti­fied 102 U‑turn cas­es since 1900 and found that, in 90 per­cent of them, the result was “restored or even improved lev­els of democ­ra­cy.” The sec­ond team focused on 21 recent cas­es and invert­ed the find­ings — con­clud­ing that “near­ly 90 per­cent” of alleged U‑turns were short-lived mirages.

Read more: https://www.vox.com/politics/464459/trump-american-democracy-u-turns [pay­wall]

Key Points

• Mod­ern demo­c­ra­t­ic back­slid­ing hap­pens through law and polit­i­cal maneu­ver­ing rather than coups, with elect­ed author­i­tar­i­ans chang­ing rules to cre­ate com­pet­i­tive author­i­tar­i­an regimes where elec­tions occur under unfair con­di­tions like Vik­tor Orbán did in Hungary.
• Research by Cheese­man, Cyr, and Bianchi found that of 21 post-1994 demo­c­ra­t­ic U‑turn cas­es, 19 coun­tries expe­ri­enced anoth­er decline with­in five years, with even excep­tions like Malawi and Mali even­tu­al­ly becom­ing non-demo­c­ra­t­ic again.
• Polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Dan Slater coined the term demo­c­ra­t­ic careen­ing to describe strug­gling democ­ra­cies char­ac­ter­ized by endem­ic unset­tled­ness and rapid ric­o­chet­ing between gov­ern­ing mod­els that may tem­porar­i­ly cease func­tion­ing but not van­ish entirely.
• Researcher Mari­na Nord warns that even if Amer­i­ca expe­ri­ences a U‑turn upon Trump’s depar­ture, the forces that made Trump pos­si­ble will remain open to exploita­tion by future polit­i­cal lead­ers, keep­ing democ­ra­cy at risk with­out solv­ing under­ly­ing causes.

Trump and the Global National Conservative Alliance

The Trump admin­is­tra­tion plays a lead­ing role in the Glob­al Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Alliance (GNCA), unit­ing right-wing move­ments world­wide under shared prin­ci­ples of nation­al sov­er­eign­ty, cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty, and oppo­si­tion to glob­al insti­tu­tions. This move­ment rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant shift away from Rea­gan-era con­ser­vatism toward nation­al­ist and pro­tec­tion­ist gov­er­nance mod­els that pri­or­i­tize Chris­t­ian val­ues and immi­gra­tion restric­tion over free mar­kets and glob­al leadership.

Israeli polit­i­cal the­o­rist Yoram Hazony pro­vides the intel­lec­tu­al frame­work for this move­ment through Nation­al Con­ser­vatism con­fer­ences, where Trump appointees, includ­ing JD Vance, have devel­oped their polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy around mutu­al loy­al­ty between fam­i­lies and tribes rather than abstract ideals. The con­fer­ences have rapid­ly become focal points for reshap­ing the transat­lantic right, bring­ing togeth­er fig­ures like Mis­souri Sen­a­tor Eric Schmitt, who declared that Amer­i­ca belongs to “sons and daugh­ters of the Chris­t­ian pil­grims.” At the same time, pan­els dis­cussed over­turn­ing same-sex mar­riage and attack­ing universities.

Hun­gary serves as the move­men­t’s Euro­pean hub through Budapest CPAC gath­er­ings, where Vik­tor Orbán pro­claimed Hun­gary had been “com­plete­ly healed” of pro­gres­sive dom­i­nance and urged atten­dees to “take back the insti­tu­tions in Wash­ing­ton and Brus­sels.” These con­fer­ences have fea­tured con­tro­ver­sial fig­ures, includ­ing known Hun­gar­i­an racists, along­side Tuck­er Carl­son, Steve Ban­non, and vir­tu­al address­es from Trump him­self, cre­at­ing what observers describe as a plat­form for shared hos­til­i­ty to lib­er­al­ism, mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, and LGBTQ+ rights rather than demo­c­ra­t­ic values.

The Her­itage Foun­da­tion has extend­ed this agen­da to Europe through closed-door work­shops with Hun­gar­i­an and Pol­ish part­ners dis­cussing pro­pos­als to dis­man­tle the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion and Court of Jus­tice. Her­itage pres­i­dent Kevin Roberts has explic­it­ly called for Euro­peans to “reclaim sov­er­eign­ty” from Brus­sels while work­ing with gov­ern­ment-backed orga­ni­za­tions like Hun­gary’s MCC to trans­form EU gov­er­nance struc­tures into a loos­er con­fed­er­a­tion that would weak­en demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions and cli­mate policies.

Exter­nal References:
— Toward a Nation­al­ist Inter­na­tion­al­ism: The Case for Build­ing a Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Alliance
— Project 2025: Trump­ism and the New Conservatism
— The Glob­al Rise of Con­ser­vatism: A New Polit­i­cal Pow­er Shift

Dis­claimer:
The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) uti­lizes AI through­out the post­ing process, includ­ing the gen­er­a­tion of sum­maries for news items, intro­duc­tions, key points, and, often, the “con­text” sec­tion. We rec­om­mend ver­i­fy­ing all infor­ma­tion before use. Addi­tion­al­ly, all images are gen­er­at­ed using AI and are intend­ed sole­ly for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es. While they rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als dis­cussed, they should not be inter­pret­ed as real-world photography.