Word of the Week: Trash-talking Democracy

What I Saw at the SOTU

For some reason, I thought it a good use of my time on Tuesday to stay up and watch the entirety of the State of the Union address.

Most of the coverage in legacy media dismissed Tuesday night as a mostly boring affair. I’ve come to think these institutions are structurally incapable of covering Trump with the language and urgency needed, either because a.) they are “bothsidesing” every moment or b.) pulling punches to avoid his wrath or c.) they don’t really grasp the stakes of the moment or d.) they are now owned by Trump allies.

So here’s my take: the SOTU looked to me more like an authoritarian dominance ritual than an invited address to a coequal branch of government. Trump’s speech was a incoherent jumble of outright lies, overt racism, and language aimed at delegitimizing our democratic institutions.

It is on this last point that I wanted to write about today. For me, the most significant moment of the evening was when Trump accused the Democrats of cheating in elections and called for the passage of the SAVE America Act:

Yet they don’t want identification for the greatest privilege of them all: voting in America. No, it’s no good, no good. Both Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly agree on the policy that we just enunciated, and Congress should unite and enact this common sense, country saving legislation right now. And it should be before anything else happens.

And the reason they don’t want to do it, why would anybody not want voter ID? One reason, because they want to cheat. There’s only one reason. They make up all excuses. They say it’s racist. They come up with things. You almost say what imagination they have. They want to cheat, they have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat. And we’re going to stop it. We have to stop it, John.

“The only way they get elected is to cheat.”

This diatribe was greeted with full-throated cheers from the Republican delegation, who have seemed to collectively embrace the idea that there are only two possible outcomes in November: either they win, or the Democrats cheated.

Which brings me to the word of the week.

Trash-talking Democracy

“Trash-talking democracy” is a concept popularized by Susan Stokes in her book, The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Democracies, and in other work with coauthors. It’s a concerted strategy, often employed by autocratizing leaders, to delegitimize the core institutions of democracy like elections, courts, parliament, opposition parties, and independent media organizations. More formally:

Democratic trashtalk (n.) - “rhetoric that diminishes the public’s perceptions of the quality, fairness, or effectiveness of democracy or of its institutions as they operate in the speaker’s country” (see Cella et al.)

Budding dictators attack democratic institutions as corrupt, unresponsive, or captured by foreign interests. This provides the pretext for them to “reform” or ignore said institutions in ways that enhance their power and erode guardrails in the system. Cella et al. put it succinctly:

“When backsliders trash-talk democracy in the sense we develop here, they do not question democracy as a system of government. Rather, they claim that particular institutions in their country are in shambles. And the particular institutions they criticize are the ones they are trying to subvert.”

Much of Trump’s rhetoric in the the last twelve months (and even ten years) can be analyzed in this way. When Trump suggested that the Supreme Court may have been swayed for foreign interests in its recent tariff decision, that’s trash-talking democracy.

And yes, when he insists that he won the 2020 election, and that there is widespread voter fraud, and that Democrats are somehow cheating, he is trash-talking democracy.

Eroding Support, Toppling Guardrails

Trump’s behavior has analogs throughout the backsliding world, and this sort of language is usually the precursor to an authoritarian power grab. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics,” claimed that voting machines were rigged in advance of the 2022 election, which provided the grounds for him to deny the results when he lost. In South Korea, former President Yoon Suk-yeol accused the opposition-majority in the National Assembly of being compromised by North Korea, calling it “a monster that destroys the constitutional order of liberal democracy.” This was his justification for declaring martial law.

Empirically, trash-talking democracy works in that it erodes popular support for democratic institutions, which makes them easier to topple. In a recent paper in Comparative Political Studies, Stokes and her coauthors examine the rhetoric of, President Andres Manuel López Obrador, who eroded the quality of democracy in his country without attempting a full authoritarian reversal. López Obrador was an A+ democratic trash-talker. In lengthy morning press-conferences, he would routinely label the courts corrupt, and claim National Electoral Institute (INE) allowed electoral fraud (sound familiar?). The paper shows this sort of rhetoric softens the public up for authoritarian power grabs— Mexican survey respondents randomly exposed to López Obrador’s rhetoric were 7.4% more likely to agree that “the president should be able to fire judges who oppose him.”

The reason this matters is that normal citizens often play a decisive role in supporting democratic institutions when they are under attack. In South Korea, Yoon’s power grab was arrested (and he was, too) only because Korean citizens protested the declaration of martial law en masse, providing moral cover for the parliamentarians who were able to convene and overturn his decision within hours. Yoon has just recently been sentenced to life imprisonment for insurrection. Democracy FTW.

Conversely, citizens who have been sufficiently duped by democratic trashtalking can be core allies when an authoritarian power grab is afoot. This is the story of January 6th. Bolsonaro’s supporters attempted a similar move in 2023.

Trash-talking as Foreshadowing

One key idea I want you to take away is that democratic trash-talking usually gives us significant clues about what’s next. These guys don’t trash talk for fun, they do it because they have plans.

Trump and other Republicans have been denigrating elections for years now, and their most recent effort at “reform,” the SAVE American Act, is a thinly veiled attempt to disenfranchise voters just months before a pivotal election which will likely swing power back to the Democrats. It does not seem likely to pass, though copycat measures seem to be working their way through the states. My takeaway from the SOTU is that this a party and political movement completely prepared to disrupt the midterms to their own advantage, and delegitimize them if they lose.

In the long run, I do think we need to think critically about how we can restore confidence in our electoral institutions. That is one of Stokes’ prescriptions to fight backsliding and trash-talk— we need to consider measures to restore public faith in our institutions, for all parts of the political spectrum. In the US, we continue to live in an environment where roughly one in four Americans does not believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election. I don’t know how we can persist as a democracy where this proportion of the population rejects our election results. If we are to reform our voting practices, this should be done two or three election cycles out, giving states and voters years to prepare for the change as to minimize disruption and disenfranchisement. For Trump’s SAVE America Act, disruption and disenfranchisement is precisely the point.

That’s all for today. There is a new episode of the podcast up featuring Marcel Dirsus, a scholar of authoritarianism and writer of The Hundred on Substack. Marcel has an important book, How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive, which describes some of the inherent weaknesses of authoritarian regimes. We talked about these ideas as they apply to the Trump Administration and how Trump is viewed in Europe. Thanks to Mic and Jacob Boekelman for sponsoring the episode. You can find the links below as always.

Thanks for reading, sharing and supporting my work.

Rory