Don Leonard1
The United States (US) is the world’s oldest living constitutional democracy. It is backsliding. The proximate cause of this is the electoral viability of populist political outsiders who seek to circumvent or dismantle institutional constraints on executive power. This article explores the process by which democratic elections produced such backsliding, drawing empirical and theoretical insights from Latin America. It argues that distributional politics related to a middle-class living wage crisis are responsible for the political crisis facing US democracy. Central to this dynamic is a decades-long political consensus among the two leading political parties regarding neoliberalism. This consensus weakened the party system, eroding its social moorings by forcing working-class voters to look outside of the political establishment for credible alternatives. The article concludes that the only two pathways available to US democracy at this critical juncture are a Polanyian counter-movement towards a new social-democratic order, or a tragic descent into neo-patrimonialism.
Distributional politics, United States, Latin America, democratic backsliding, populism, US elections, party systems.
In what now reads like a prequel, Donald Trump’s first term as president of the United States (2017–21) was defined by his attempts to subdue the free press, criminalise his political opposition, and overturn the results of an election by coercing elected officials and inciting political violence. It was also defined by his being the first United States (US) president to be impeached twice, first, for soliciting political bribes from the Ukrainian government and then obstructing a congressional investigation into that bribery scheme, and second, for incitement of insurrection.
Just 100 days into his second term, President Trump had arguably done more to tear at the fabric of US democracy than during his first four years in office. By 30 April 2025, his administration had already begun purging the national security and federal law enforcement ranks of supposed non-loyalists, subverted core civil liberties such as habeas corpus in order to accelerate his deportation programmes, blackmailed leading institutions of higher learning by threatening to withhold research funds unless universities bent to his ideological agenda, eliminated the Department of Justice working group tasked with enforcing voter rights, and seized constitutionally mandated powers explicitly reserved for the legislative branch – such as the setting of trade tariffs – by assuming the pretext of a national emergency.
Meanwhile, the administration allowed billionaire and Trump megadonor Elon Musk to form a taskforce under the moniker Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Swiftly, Musk and his team of technicians set about dismantling congressionally mandated executive functions related to education, land conservation and environmental protection, human health and disease control, competition policy, disaster management, consumer financial protection, and foreign aid, among others. At the same time, DOGE agents raided the office of the Internal Revenue Service and accessed sensitive, legally protected financial data pertaining to US taxpayers for purposes yet unknown.
Towards the end of his first 100 days, President Trump threatened the lawful independence of the central bank. As domestic markets reeled under the prospect of a global tariff war and renewed price inflation, Trump began publicly attacking the chair of the US Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, for refusing to lower the central bank’s interest rate target.
President Trump carried out this 100-day agenda without a hint of protest from his co-partisans in the legislature or his cabinet. Quite the opposite, Republican congressional leaders and cabinet secretaries appeared more eager than ever to enable this dramatic expansion of executive power. Meanwhile, federal judges struggled to balance the White House’s clear violations of due process and probable contempt of court against recent US Supreme Court precedents establishing sweeping rights of executive branch privilege and immunity from prosecution.
As US democracy nears the ten-year anniversary of its first encounter with Trump as chief executive, attentive Latin Americanists and political scientists of all stripes have flagged these all-too-familiar patterns of democratic backsliding (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Lieberman, Mettler and Roberts 2021).
Whereas some Latin American societies managed to consolidate the political institutions they established during the so-called third wave of democratisation during the 1980s and 1990s, others succumbed to illiberal tendencies.3 These included the erosion of civil liberties such as press and speech freedoms, typically accompanied by attempts to consolidate executive power and extend presidential terms of office by manipulating the constitutional rules of the road.
Most of all, the region witnessed a resurgence of populism. Under this repertoire of political survival, leaders forge a direct, personal, often messianic relationship with constituents – one that is unmediated by representative (party) institutions and unconstrained by constitutionally mandated checks and balances across branches of government.
If the patterns of democratic backsliding we observe in the US today are so painfully recognisable to those familiar with the Latin American context, might some of the theories and empirical regularities that emerged from the region’s experience with democratisation help explain why these patterns emerged in the first place? Moreover, has the US shed its veneer of exceptionalism and revealed itself to be what it of course always has been – just one more American republic struggling to reproduce and deepen its democratic institutions?
What follows is not a comprehensive treatment of all factors known to influence patterns of continuity and change in political regimes. Rather, it is an analytic narrative derived from the Western Hemisphere’s past and present encounters with democratic backsliding.
Left-wing or right-wing. Authoritarian leaning or bursting with democratic pretension. Without institutional constraints on executive power, democracy cannot endure. And these are precisely the kinds of constraints that populists despise most. Typically, populist leaders are political outsiders, at least in terms of not having held elective office. Consequently, they have little affinity for established political parties or the legislatures that these parties seek to dominate. Indeed, the political viability of populist candidates often rests on the public’s shared aversion to mainstream political institutions.
But if there was ever a populist experiment that generated hope for improving democratic outcomes, it was Hugo Chávez’s attempt to bring plebiscitarian democracy to Venezuela.
By the late 1990s, Venezuela had enjoyed four decades of more-or-less uninterrupted democratic rule. However, the liberal, representative form of democracy that emerged from the 1958 Punto Fijo Pact failed to enfranchise Venezuela’s poor or share with them the wealth derived from the country’s vast oil reserves. As Latin America underwent a region-wide debt crisis during the 1980s, extreme poverty in Venezuela rose sharply. Amid the economic misery and political disarray that ensued, a charismatic paratrooper brandishing a vision for a more direct, participatory form of democracy was swept to power in 1998, in what some regard as Venezuela’s last fully free and fair election (Hurtado 2010).
The central thrust of Chávez’s stated political project was the move away from representative institutions, such as traditional parties or the legislature, and towards a more direct form of democracy – one where individual citizens participate in their governance by voting in national referendums. In essence, Chavismo fused cultural repertoires of paternalism with the intellectual scaffolding of Bolivarian liberation – especially the visions of radical democracy espoused by nineteenth-century Venezuelan intellectuals Simon Rodríguez and Eziquiel Zamora (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 2023).
Both philosophically and strategically, this plebiscitarian experiment demanded a massive government effort to register and turn out historically marginalised Venezuelans. That is precisely what the Chávez regime did, with the help of a new constitution.
Article 56 of the 1999 Constitution, Venezuela’s first to be drafted by a constituent assembly and then ratified by popular referendum, required the government to issue national ID cards to millions of citizens that lacked official identification. Between 2003 and 2004, 8 million Venezuelans were issued new ID cards, allowing more than 5.5 million new voters to be added to the national register (Hurtado 2010). The implementation of Article 56 had a disproportionately positive impact on the ability of Afro-Venezuelans to become enfranchised (Jackson 2011). In total, voter registration during the Chávez years increased from 82 per cent in 1998 to 97 per cent by 2012 (Wilpert 2012).
Many scholars critical of the shortcomings of liberal, procedural democracy were understandably impressed by the efforts made by Chavismo to enfranchise Venezuela’s poor. According to one prominent theorist, Chávez’s populist discourse – one that characterised the political struggle as between noble masses and an entrenched, undeserving elite – fulfilled a necessary condition for achieving radical democracy by promoting the construction of class consciousness (Laclau 2006).
By some measures, Chávez’s project succeeded, at least initially. Rates of extreme poverty in Venezuela plummeted during the first ten years of the regime as the Venezuelan government laid claim to a larger proportion of national oil wealth and directed much of that revenue towards poorer citizens.
Yet rather than augmenting the institutional capacity of the Venezuelan state through conventional measures such as expanding the national health system, Chávez bypassed state institutions and created a network of ad hoc, highly politicised misiones (missions). These were government-subsidised neighbourhood cooperatives intended to deliver a broad spectrum of social services such as health care, education, and food. Early on, the misiones were extremely popular among poorer Venezuelans (Pérez 2013). Steadily, though, the improvisational, non-institutionalised nature of these co-ops manifested widespread dysfunction and frustration. Because the government failed to invest in the managerial capacities of misiones personnel, these untrained administrators – many of them young activists recruited from the political movement – lacked even basic accounting or project management skills (Daguerre 2011). Furthermore, many of the social services that did manage to reach intended beneficiaries took on familiar patron–client dynamics as the regime used the misiones to bolster its electoral chances in specific districts (Penfold-Becerra 2007).
Similarly, the gains in political participation that were achieved by Venezuela’s poor under Chávez quickly lost meaning as the executive branch grew more powerful and the political arena grew less competitive. The very same 1999 Constitution that provided for expanded voter suffrage also granted Chávez a longer term of office and altered the rules to allow him to run for a second consecutive term. Additionally, it strengthened his control of the legislature by eliminating the Senate and establishing a unicameral National Assembly. Institutions of horizontal accountability were further eroded by the new constitution’s granting of executive powers to make laws and call referendums without legislative approval (Corrales and Penfold-Becerra 2007).
While Chávez was busy remaking the legislature as a subordinate branch of government, he was also packing the courts and removing disloyal justices to prevent the judicial branch from checking executive authority. He also seized control over government agencies charged with various forms of oversight, including the National Electoral Council (Monaldi and Penfold 2015). Finally, Chávez purged the government bureaucracy and the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) of dissenting voices to clear room for those that he trusted and thus deemed worthy of government largesse.
The central takeaway here is that even populist leaders who make explicit, tangible, credible commitments to deepening democracy eventually fall victim to what James Madison (the fourth US president and co-author of The Federalist Papers) called the gradual concentration of powers. They do so because the pursuit of their governing vision incentivises them to ignore, circumvent, or fully repeal constitutionally mandated checks on executive authority. All three of these strategies, formal or informal, weaken democracy. However imperfect liberal, representative democratic institutions may be, they offer one possible blueprint for how to resist the authoritarian tendency.
Returning to the previous case once more, briefly, it is notable that Venezuela’s current struggles with authoritarian populism emerged through fundamentally democratic mechanisms. Chávez won the 1998 presidential election in a landslide. Capturing more than 56 per cent of the national vote, his was the largest margin of electoral victory in the 40 years of Venezuela’s democratic history. According to most regional observers, area studies experts, and democracy indices, this election was also among the freest and fairest in Venezuela’s history. Yet, by the time Chávez died in office in 2013, Venezuela’s democracy score according to those same analysts had plunged deep into authoritarianism (V-Dem n.d.; Center for Systemic Peace n.d.; Freedom House 2025).
While no one could have predicted fully what a Chávez administration would mean for the future of Venezuelan politics, what was certain was that radical change was coming. At the centre of his candidacy was the proposal to convene – through national referendum – a constituent assembly for the purpose of re-writing the Venezuelan constitution. And within hours of being sworn in, Chávez issued just such a decree (Partlett 2013).
By itself, a constitutional assembly referendum represented a dramatic departure from the legally mandated process by which Venezuelan leaders were meant to go about institutional reform. According to the prevailing constitution, only the legislature could call for a referendum. And even then, there was no provision for amending the constitution through a popular assembly. Yet, the Supreme Court allowed the referendum, and the subsequent constituent assembly, to take place. In part, this was because of the electoral mandate Chávez received. However, the court did so on the condition that the assembly must be ‘bound to the spirit of the [existing] constitution in force, and therefore is limited by the fundamental principles of the democratic state of law’ (Landau 2013: 944).
In fact, the court’s stipulations carried no weight with the president or the members of the Chávez-dominated assembly.4 In one of its first acts, the assembly issued a national declaration of emergency and assumed the authority to fire judges. Faced with the prospect of being eliminated completely, Venezuelan Supreme Court justices voted 8–6 to support the constituent assembly’s declaration. Immediately announcing her resignation from the court, Chief Justice Cecilia Sosa remarked that ‘The court simply committed suicide to avoid being assassinated. But the result is the same. It is dead’ (BBC News 1999).
Less than a year after Chávez took office, one of Latin America’s most enduring democracies was already sliding towards autocracy. Venezuela’s backslide was not the result of bait-and-switch tactics or some other manipulation. This was precisely the populist agenda that Hugo Chávez had campaigned on.
A similar process is unfolding in the US.
In an election that produced the second-highest vote total in US history, Donald Trump won both the popular vote and the electoral college vote. Unlike the results of the 2016 presidential election, Americans cannot blame Trump’s 2024 victory on malapportionment or some other idiosyncrasy of the political system. Trump won unequivocally, and he did so on a platform committed to assuming emergency powers in order to carry out a draconian agenda of mass deportation. During the presidential campaign, he was also explicit about his commitment to a global tariff war and a wrecking-ball approach to reforming the federal bureaucracy. These are the very issues that are pushing the US towards a constitutional crisis.
Concerning the Trump administration’s deportation programme, a constitutional crisis arose in the first 100 days when the administration failed to abide by an order from the US Supreme Court to repatriate an undocumented but legally protected migrant who was unlawfully deported (Alonso-Yoder and Valdez 2025). In response to the Supreme Court order, the administration has claimed that it lacks the authority to fulfil the court’s order. The underlying issue here is the refusal of the executive branch to recognise the power of the judicial branch to insist on due process in the apprehension and deportation of undocumented migrants, visa holders, and permanent residents whom the administration deems to be threats.
The administration has attempted to sidestep judicial branch concerns about due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act5 (typically reserved for war or invasion). In this vein, the Department of Justice under Trump has begun systematically reducing the capacity of immigration courts to fulfil due process claims by firing at least 20 judges and incentivising at least 18 more to retire early (National Immigration Forum 2025). And it also issued Proclamation 10886 (Peters and Woolley 2025), which declares a ‘National Emergency at the Southern Border’, to facilitate the deployment of US military personnel along the border as well as create military-run migrant detention zones.
Regarding the Trump administration’s tariff actions towards its trading partners, Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution6 specifies that only the legislative branch has the authority to regulate commerce and set tariffs. The president has circumvented this rule by declaring a national economic emergency related to the illegal importation of drugs into the US. While the veracity of that justification for invoking emergency powers has yet to be tested in the court system, the ability of the judicial branch to constrain attempts by the executive branch to declare emergencies without cause remains another potential pain point for US democracy.
Lastly, in terms of the administration’s moves to eliminate or severely curtail a significant portion of executive branch functions under DOGE, one constitutional issue at stake is the fact that most of these functions being targeted for cuts are congressionally mandated. For example, on 20 April 2025, the administration announced the dismissal of hundreds of scientists associated with the production of the 2028 National Climate Assessment (NCA) (Plumer and Dzombak 2025). The NCA is a key document that provides guidance to federal agencies and elected officials at all levels of government about how to mitigate and adapt to the global climate crisis. It is mandated by the Global Change Research Act, passed by Congress in 1990. While the administration has not outright cancelled the project as yet, repeated statements by the president referring to climate science as a ‘hoax’ raise concerns that the 2028 NCA is in jeopardy.
These are but a few of the constitutional fault-lines that emerged during the Trump administration’s first 100 days. While their outcomes are, at the time of publishing, unknowable, congressional Republicans appear willing to let the president carry out his agenda. And while the judicial branch has taken a stand on the question of unlawful deportation without due process, decades of judicial precedent suggest that the Supreme Court may be unwilling or unable to challenge the administration’s assertion of emergency powers moving forward.
While the US does not have a poverty crisis of the same magnitude as the one which gripped Venezuela in 1998, it does have a living wage crisis. That crisis helped propel Donald Trump to the White House.
With a national income that is expected to exceed US$30tn at purchasing power parity in 2025 (IMF 2024), it is a stylised fact that the US is – and will likely to remain for some time – the wealthiest society on earth. Despite all the political posturing around trade imbalances and the national debt, the basic structural problem facing the US economy is one of distribution. The tendency for returns to capital to exceed returns to labour, as one analyst put it, leaves capitalist economies susceptible to destabilising social and political forces (Piketty 2014).
In principle, the inequalities in income and wealth distribution caused by capital concentration need not lead to strife so long as the incomes accrued by the bottom half of the economic distribution do not fall too far below what might reasonably constitute a living wage. Unfortunately, a living wage crisis is precisely what has taken place in the US.
Despite decades of robust growth in labour productivity and national income, rising prices have caused the living wage line to converge with median incomes. This means that at least half of all Americans cannot make ends meet each month without taking on debt or second jobs, or making impossible choices about which essential goods and services to forgo.
In short, America’s middle class has joined the ranks of its working poor.
By the numbers, median personal income in the US was US$42,220 in 2023 (BEA 2024). In a nationally representative city like Columbus, Ohio, where prices fall at around 95 per cent of the national average (BEA 2024), a single adult with no children would need to earn US$46,634 before taxes in order to meet basic needs such as food, medical care, housing, and transportation (Living Wage Institute 2025). This represents a gap of US$4,414 dollars per year, or US$368 per month, between median earnings and the living wage line.
And recall that these figures are for a median-income individual. Half of all Americans earn less than US$42,000 per year and thus suffer an even larger living wage gap. If we define poor as ‘less than enough’, at least 50 per cent of Americans might now reasonably be thought of as poor. And the living wage gap increases by 300 per cent if you are an average US household, one comprising of two working adults earning the median household income and one child (ibid.).
One implication of America’s living wage crisis is that a smaller and smaller subset of Americans have the disposable income required to maintain even modest amounts of savings. A 2024 survey found that only 41 per cent of Americans would be able to cover a US$1,000 emergency without resorting to taking out a loan, borrowing from family or friends, or being forced to cut back in other areas (Gillespie 2025). This was down from 44 per cent just one year prior.
Another implication is that few Americans report positive perceptions of financial wellbeing. In a Pew survey conducted in 2019, just before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, only about half of all Americans responded that their personal financial situation was in good or excellent shape. By 2024, that number had fallen even further to 41 per cent (Pew Research Center 2024).
Despite this increasingly sombre economic picture, Democratic and Republican candidates took very different positions on the US economy during the 2024 election. While Kamala Harris’s campaign floated several measures intended to reduce prices for highly visible expenses such as food and housing, her broader message aligned itself with the Democratic Party platform, which claimed that the economy she would inherit from the administration of President Joe Biden was ‘the strongest in the world’ (The American Presidency Project 2024). Conversely, Trump characterised the US economy of 2024 as ‘a cesspool of ruin’ (Picciotto 2024).
Trump’s framing resonated with working- and middle-class Americans. In an election where the economy was reported as the top issue among voters, with more than 80 per cent reporting that it was ‘very important’ to them (Nadeem 2024), Trump carried middle-class voters with family incomes of between US$50,000 and US$100,000 per year by six percentage points according to exit poll data (NBC News 2025). This segment represented America’s largest income bracket, encompassing an estimated one-third of all voters in the last election. Trump won by identical margins among those working-class families earning between US$30,000 and US$50,000 per year. Many of the families in this income bracket earn too much to qualify for government assistance, but not enough to get by each month. Conversely, Harris’s campaign carved out narrow victories among smaller voter blocs – those families making less than US$30,000, and those making over US$100,000.
In other words, Harris and the Democrats lost the middle-class vote. And they lost it to a candidate who has made credible commitments to undermine and even undo America’s democratic institutions.
This raises a question as old as the democratisation literature itself. How essential is a robust middle class to the reproduction of democratic norms and institutions? Was Moore (1966) correct when he penned the axiom ‘no bourgeoisie, no democracy’ ?
Many of our leading models of income distribution and democracy describe the centrality of the middle class to the reproduction of liberal political institutions.
Median voter theory, articulated by Hotelling (1929) and formalised by Downs (1957), describes a majoritarian electoral arena where voters and their policy preferences are arrayed along a single (left-right) continuum. In this arena, candidates compete for a winning majority of voters, and voters rank candidates based on their proximity to that voter’s preferences as arrayed along the policy continuum. In such an electoral arena, the candidate who can capture the support of the median voter will win the election. In that sense, the median voter is seen as politically decisive.
Roberts (1977) applies the median voter theorem to preferences over tax redistribution and, thus, size of government. Unlike non-democratic regimes, where political participation is typically reserved for economic elites, under democracy, the decisive voter is the statistically middle-class, median-income voter. Because income distributions tend to skew towards the wealthy, any tax rate that is applied evenly across society invariably results in redistribution that favours the median-income voter. The maths underpinning this insight is elegant in its simplicity. Because average income is greater than median income, the more unequal the society, the more the median-income voter must gain from redistribution through taxation.
Writing in the context of democratisation’s third wave, Rueschemeyer, Huber Stephens and Stephens (1992) contribute to this distributional politics model of democracy by introducing socioeconomic class. Within the context of capitalist development, the middle class play a decisive role in deciding regime outcomes, according to Rueschemeyer et al. Under a three-class model where the working class always support democracy for its redistributive features, and the oligarchy always oppose it for the same reasons, the middle class may side with the working class and favour democracy so long as the working class do not threaten the institutional foundations of capitalist development – a project the middle class typically profit from.
Boix (2003) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) formalised these propositions, deriving a voter utility function that combines personal consumption and indirect utility through government transfers, as well as spending on welfare-improving goods and services. In Chapter 8, Acemoglu and Robinson’s (2006) model explores conditions under which inequality reaches an inflection point where the middle class forges a political coalition with the poor against the elite, thus bringing about democracy.
This stylised review conceals much nuance within each of these models. But what unites them is their emphasis on the economic rationality of the middle-class, median-income voter who – in most cases – could reasonably be expected to favour democracy over more illiberal outcomes because of its greater prospects for redistribution.
Yet what we saw in the 2024 US presidential election was the exact opposite: middle-class, median-income Americans voting for the candidate espousing smaller government and highly constrained democracy.
So what are we to make of these outcomes? If the gap between mean and median incomes is large at both the individual and the household level, why have middle-class voters not turned out in droves for larger government and increased redistribution? Are the distributional politics models wrong? Do they merely serve as a materialist-rationalist baseline from which to judge aberrant electoral behaviour? Or do they suggest something deeper about the conditions under which we expect the middle class to abandon, or at least become ambivalent about, core democratic values such as the sanctity of elections and the peaceful transfer of power?
If you accept the broad generalisation that Democrats tend to favour larger government and more redistribution, whereas Republicans tend to favour less of both, then between 1952 and 1980, US politics worked about how the median voter models described above would expect. At least among America’s white majority. While Democrats consistently carried the majority of African American voters at all education levels, no Democratic presidential candidate between the elections of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower (1952) and Ronald Reagan (1980) carried the majority of white voters with college degrees (Brownstein 2016). College-educated, typically higher-income white voters tended to go Republican over this period, while white Americans without college degrees tended to vote Democratic.
Today, we see something quite different. Beginning in the 1980s, the political arena underwent what journalist Ronald Brownstein (2016) calls ‘the class inversion’ among white Americans voting for the presidency. Democratic candidates Walter Mondale (1984), Michael Dukakis (1988), and Bill Clinton (1992 and 1996) drew about evenly from college-educated and non-college-educated white voters. By the 2000s, the class inversion was complete. In nearly every election of the new millennium, Republicans commanded substantial leads among white, working-class Americans without four-year degrees (Jones 2019). In the 2020 presidential election, where white Americans without four-year degrees made up 42 per cent of the electorate, the Republican candidate carried these voters 65 per cent to the Democrats’ 33 per cent.
How did Democrats lose so many working- and middle-class voters?
Americans do not always vote based solely on economic issues as the model above would suggest. However, when surveyed, Americans typically report that economic issues are their number one priority. What would happen if political candidates from opposing parties start agreeing with one another about the economy’s ‘big questions’?
This is precisely what Thomas Frank (2007) discovered in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. He explores how a state that was once a bedrock of the American left became a haven for right-wing politics. This transformation, he argues, was largely driven by the consensus that both parties arrived at in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, on a set of ‘pro-market’ economic policies such as balanced federal budgets, the culling of welfare rolls, and the expansion of free trade with countries like Mexico and China. This consensus forced politicians on both sides of the aisle to differentiate themselves based on social issues such as family values, abortion access, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights, rather than economic issues.
To be fair, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Democratic politicians regularly campaigned on a host of redistributive economic policies that disproportionally favoured lower- and middle-income Americans. However, an overarching ideology regarding the supremacy of the free market as the primary means of distributing even basic goods and services such as housing, health care, childcare, and transportation emerged during the Reagan administration and persisted across all subsequent administrations, Democratic and Republican alike.
Consider President Barack Obama’s closing argument to the American people regarding health-care reform. Both he and Hillary Clinton had campaigned vigorously on this topic during the 2008 Democratic primaries. Both had staked their candidacies on the issue of bringing affordable health insurance to the 40 million Americans who were then uninsured, as well as reining in the rising costs faced by the privately insured middle class. Yet even though the 2008 election gifted Obama, a Democrat, a sweeping mandate for change – one that was only deepened by the global financial crisis, capitalism’s greatest disaster since the Great Depression – he elected to frame his case to the American people for his Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the language of competition and consumer choice (St Onge 2017). This was more than just rhetoric. Against those who were clamouring for a more ambitious approach that involved creating a public option, something Obama indicated that he himself would have preferred, he was unwilling to take that fight to the Republicans. Instead, the ACA consisted of a series of health-care exchanges to be regulated by the federal government but serviced by for-profit insurers. Americans could receive a subsidy from the federal government to purchase this coverage if their wages were low enough, but this was a far cry from affordable, universal coverage.
Between the difficulties the Obama administration encountered communicating a bill as complicated as the ACA to the American people, and the popular outrage his administration aroused over the bailouts the federal government extended to Wall Street, it is little wonder that his party lost substantial ground in the 2010 mid-term elections.
The neoliberal consensus that has defined US government policy over the past four decades extends far beyond the embrace of private health care, free trade, or the weakening of social safety nets. It has also entailed the abandonment of the federal minimum wage by failing to index it to inflation, the gradual defunding of public universities by state legislatures, and the deregulation of whole sectors of the US economy including media, telecommunications, and banking and finance (Gerstle 2022; Harvey 2007: 51). Sadly, these cuts to the American safety net occurred precisely at the moment when American workers displaced by trade needed them most (Autor, Dorn and Hanson 2013).
Economically, the legacy of the neoliberal order is mixed. On the one hand, the US has experienced a tremendous expansion of national wealth over the past 40 years. On the other hand, this economic growth came alongside an equally massive expansion of income inequality and a contraction of the government services and safety nets that would have helped lower-income Americans weather the economic changes. Politically, the bipartisan consensus that undergirded this order chipped away at the credibility of mainstream candidates on both sides of the aisle among working-class voters, driving them towards radical political outsiders.
The US is not the only country in the Western Hemisphere to undergo neoliberal structural adjustment over the past four decades. Indeed, while the so-called Washington Consensus concerning market liberalisation was slowly working its way through America’s domestic political channels, these reforms were adopted more rapidly and in some cases more deeply in parts of Latin America between 1985 and 1995 (Escaith and Paunovic 2004).
Principal conduits for the transmission of this neoliberal orthodoxy from the global North to the South included the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – international financial institutions dominated by US government representatives. In the early 1980s, interest rates on dollar-denominated debt soared due to US monetary policy – specifically the so-called Volcker Shock. At the same time, the value of Latin American commodity exports on global markets plummeted. In desperate need of foreign exchange currency, and unable to find creditors in private markets, Latin America turned to the Bretton Woods institutions for bailouts and loans. The World Bank and the IMF, in turn, made their financial assistance conditional on the implementation of market reforms. These included the slashing of government programmes in the name of austerity, the liberalisation of trade and capital flows, and the privatisation of state-owned enterprises.7
The political consequences of Latin America’s experiment with neoliberal structural adjustment have been long-lasting. One of the most relevant legacies for the present US context is the collapse of party systems in many Latin American countries. In Changing Course in Latin America, Roberts (2014) finds that in countries where right-wing parties were in power during the ‘critical juncture’ when the bulk of neoliberal reforms were enacted, traditional leftist parties were often able to remain in opposition to market reforms. Under these conditions, democratic norms and the party systems that uphold those norms remained comparably stable.
This is in contrast to those countries where left-wing parties were in power during the critical juncture. Neoliberal reform was often imposed through ‘bait-and-switch’ tactics whereby labour-mobilising parties campaigned on progressive themes only to implement pro-free market policies once in office.8 Party systems subsequently underwent a process of de-alignment as popular support for representative institutions collapsed.
These establishment institutions of the left were replaced in many cases with one variety of populism or another.9 And in each of the Latin American cases where populism re-emerged, the health of democratic institutions subsequently declined – often precipitously (Center for Systemic Peace n.d.).
Roberts’ analytical framework (2014) nicely accounts for the Venezuelan case in the crucial years leading up to Hugo Chávez’s successful presidential run in 1998. When the centre-left Acción Democrática party found itself in power during the critical juncture of the late 1980s and early 1990s, its leader President Carlos Andrés Pérez attempted to implement the terms of an IMF loan including austerity measures, privatisation, and subsidy cuts. He did so despite having campaigned in 1988 on a much more social-democratic platform emphasising poverty reduction and job creation.
While it lies beyond the scope of his theory, the analytical framework advanced by Roberts (2014) also accounts for many of the populist dynamics on display in the US. Presidents Clinton and Obama not only failed to deliver a liveable bargain to unionised and non-unionised factory workers displaced by import competition. Rather, they prioritised the geopolitical advantages associated with free trade agreements. On the one hand, Democrats sought to balance against the rise of China through trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the Trans-Pacific Partnership. On the other hand, they sought to foster mutual interest through trade interdependence by welcoming China into the World Trade Organization. While they embraced free trade, Democrats failed to augment the redistributional capacity of the US state so that the losers from trade liberalisation could be made whole.
Edelman (2021) provides helpful insights on the reasons why the Democratic Party’s consensus regarding neoliberalism weakened America’s party system and contributed to the rise of authoritarian populism under Donald Trump. Decades of economic restructuring and financialisation, he argues, devastated rural and small-town America, turning many areas into ‘sacrifice zones’ marked by job loss, failing local institutions, and social decline. This economic and social ‘hollowing out’, Edelman finds, had crucial social and political effects. It fuelled resentment and made these regions fertile ground for authoritarian populist politics. In this view, economic distress and racial resentment are deeply interconnected phenomena that help drive the shift towards populism in the US.
What we are witnessing in many corners of the Americas is not merely a backlash against decades of leftist participation in the neoliberal consensus. Rather, we are witnessing a backlash against the liberal democratic institutions which enabled those left-wing parties to remain in power despite their having lost their social moorings as the representatives of working- and middle-class citizens.
This article has argued that the patterns of democratic backsliding which we observe in the US today have their roots in a distributional crisis, one born of the gap between wages and the cost of basic necessities for middle-income workers. This distributional crisis created an opening for a populist outsider to not only reach high office, twice, but to begin tearing out the guard-rails of liberal democracy. As populists always do.
The scope of this analysis does not allow us to conclude with any certainty as to whether this distributional crisis is a sufficient condition for the rise of authoritarian populism in the US, or whether the weakening of the party system over 40 years of neoliberal consensus was a necessary condition.
What is clear, however, from Donald Trump’s electoral success, is that the populist opening created by America’s distributional crisis generated real popular demand for the kinds of authoritarian backsliding that we are witnessing today. This ‘demand-side populism’ stands in contrast to the ‘supply-side’ explanations posited by Kenny (2023), who emphasises populism’s strategic advantages for rational, power-seeking elites. A certain measure of strategic calculus is certainly at play. After all, Trump was never going to become president moving through the party ranks as a traditional politician. These findings align more with Naseemullah and Chhibber (2024), who emphasise that populism is a consequence of unmet democratic ideals rather than a primordial cause of democratic backsliding.
Is there hope for US democracy?
With President Trump regularly invoking the memory of President William McKinley (term of office 1897–1901) and praising the economic policies of the gilded age, one cannot escape the notion that the US is experiencing some kind of historical supercycle where the balance of power between state and markets oscillates every hundred or so years. Just as unfettered capitalism under nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century liberal economic orthodoxy triggered a Polanyian movement towards social democracy (Polanyi 1944), perhaps the US is headed for a new New Deal moment.
Much like the current president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) (term of office 1933–45) also altered the economic purpose of American political institutions in his first 100 days. He did so by (1) stabilising financial markets still reeling from the 1933 banking crisis; (2) promoting full employment through federal infrastructure programmes such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority; (3) transforming the structure of the mortgage market so as to put home ownership within the grasp of everyday Americans; (4) delivering desperately needed aid to farmers through the Agricultural Adjustment Act; and (5) engaging in a variety of other institutional reforms, including the codification of workers’ rights to collective bargaining under the National Industrial Recovery Act (Fraser and Gerstle 1990).
Many mistakes were made during this period of intense experimentation, and many deserving Americans were deliberately excluded from these and other lucrative federal programmes. However, the speed and scope of FDR’s first salvo suggests that economic and political fortunes can reverse rapidly when the right combination of systemic crisis and inspired leadership converge.
There is, however, at least one other logical possibility.
In the absence of a coherent, credible commitment by American progressives to bridge the living wage gap by raising wages or reducing out-of-pocket expenses for basic necessities through state intervention, it is just as likely that support for populism will continue thriving under new leaders and taking new forms.
Even Donald Trump cannot live forever. Waiting in the wings are a cohort of ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) Republicans who appear eager to take the mantle of Trump’s movement deeper into the twenty-first century. To do so, and to orchestrate the efficient reproduction of their political survival, they will need to construct a new set of institutions whereby authoritarian populism becomes normalised.
If this eventuality were to play out, the outcome could closely resemble what scholars of postcolonial Africa have described as neo-patrimonialism. Sharing many elective affinities with populism, including its emphasis on loyalty to leaders over institutions, personalistic rule, and the concentration of executive power, where neo-patrimonialism differs is in terms of its need to institutionalise the vertical networks of resource distribution that connect clients to their patron. In the absence of Trump’s charismatic persona and his ability to play on identities and fears, ‘Trumpistas’ will need to refocus on distributing public resources to key private interests if they hope to retain power.
Should such circumstances transpire in the US, we would do well to solicit comparative knowledge from postcolonial societies in other parts of the world like Ghana that appear to have escaped the event horizons of patrimonialism and birthed new hope for democracy.
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