Opinion: Are Americans fed up with democracy?

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Democracy can be exhausting and frustrating, especially representative democracy, which takes the immediate responsibility of ruling out of the hands of ordinary citizens and puts it in the hands of representatives, who govern from far away.

Nothing seems to get done. All you hear about is arguing and squabbling. Your point of view never seems to matter, and you feel helpless as you watch the world change around you. Everything seems out of control. The government appears completely ineffective and out of touch with you. Why should you want democracy? What is it doing for you?

The 2024 Best Countries report from U.S. News & World Report asked people from 36 countries to respond to the statement, “My country’s leader should have total, unchecked authority.” A total of 57.4% of Americans agreed. Let that sink in. Almost 60% of Americans believe our president should not be bound by the Constitution, the law, congressional action, or the courts.

Democrats keep warning that President Donald Trump is an autocrat, but the problem is that this is precisely what many Americans want. Democrats need to change if they’re going to persuade Americans to abandon their support for authoritarianism.

Psychologists tell us that the attraction of authoritarianism has deep, personal roots. As Joseph Pierre points out in Psychology Today, people are drawn to authoritarianism when they believe that their way of life is threatened, when they think they are losing everything that they value. This leads to a feeling of powerlessness.

America’s demographics are changing; the country is not as white as it once was, and whites often feel they are no longer in a dominant position. The traditional American family is no longer dominant. The role of men in society is changing, with women challenging men in the workplace and even in the bedroom.

America’s foundational Christianity is no longer sacrosanct, with minority religions gaining strength. Even the definition of male and female is no longer as clear and accepted as it once was. For many in America, this is just too much to handle. They feel as if “their” America is being taken away from them. They don’t understand that life is always about change, and we can’t live in the past, especially an imagined past that ignores the problems that have been with us all along.

As Pierre says, authoritarianism offers relief, a solution to the feeling of being powerless and seeing the world you thought you knew melt away. It is “about wanting to be on the side of authority that protects and preserves the values and national identity that one holds dear and embracing a leader who isn’t afraid to trample the egalitarianism of democracy underfoot to do so.”

In other words, those who embrace authoritarianism feel they have been losing, and they want to be on the winning side for a change. Instead of feeling like others are controlling them, people who embrace authoritarianism wish to be, as Pierre explains, “on the side that is doing the controlling.”

Understood this way, it is no longer difficult to grasp why so many Americans are not worried when Trump says he doesn’t know if he is bound by the Constitution. And it is easy to see why those same Americans are thrilled when Trump says, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.” They want someone to put them on the winning side, whatever it takes. And Trump has told his supporters that they will win so much, “they’ll get tired of winning.”

Our Constitution was designed to limit what our president can do, but many Americans no longer support those limits. Our Founders knew that the checks and balances and separation of powers could be frustrating, but they feared that a government without these limitations would be dangerous. They proposed a complex system of government designed to protect our fundamental rights, but it was not designed to keep the world from changing around us.

As James Madison said in Federalist 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Having a president with total, unchecked power might sound nice, but it could be a problem if he is not an angel.

What happens if unchecked power creates more problems than it solves? What do we do if we let the Genie out of the bottle and unleash his power with the hope that our wishes will be granted, and then we discover we have been deceived? How, then, do we put the Genie back in the bottle?

Solomon D. Stevens is the author of “Religion, Politics, and the Law” (co-authored with Peter Schotten) and “Challenges to Peace in the Middle East.” He wrote this for InsideSources.com.