“If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
— David Frum
Last week, President Trump gave his version of the State of the Union (SOTU). The much shorter version of his message is that everything’s super-great.
SOTU speeches from presidents of either party are usually boring affairs — after all, they’re legally mandated reports to Congress about how things are going, and they usually become recitations of wishlist items and pats on the back for the incumbent’s party. Presidents don’t have to deliver them in person; they could just send Congress a written document with the same content, but then they wouldn’t get the opportunity for a prime-time campaign commercial. My stepfather, Lyle Lahey, was a centrist northern Democrat who was a political cartoonist for a daily newspaper in Green Bay, Wis., and as such, he had to watch each State of the Union so he could draw a cartoon about it for the next day’s paper. He did not like Reagan, but he once complained that whenever he watched President Reagan give the annual speech, he would find himself liking him just a bit.
Trump must have been hoping viewers would react similarly, because his speech set a record for State of the Union length, easily outdoing previous SOTU motormouth Bill Clinton.
Heading into SOTU Day, Americans were feeling pretty sour, with 57 percent of respondents telling the Marist Poll that the state of the union “is not very strong or not strong at all”; that’s up four points from a year earlier.
But the Marist numbers that stuck out to me were the 78 percent who “believe there is a serious threat to democracy,” with only 22 percent who do not think democracy is in jeopardy. Says Marist, “Regardless of party, at least six in 10 (91 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents, and 61 percent of Republicans) report democracy in the United States is in peril.” In fact, across every single subset of registered voters included in the poll — by party, age, race, education, income, region, generation, size of community — a solid majority believes American democracy faces a serious threat.
Certainly people on the left, center, and right have different ideas about what or who is threatening democracy, but on the far left and the far right, the solution tends to be the same: less democracy is the only way we can save our democracy. We have to kill the patient to save him.
Republicans for years have been trying to rein in voting by groups they think will support Democrats. (When critics point this out, Republicans correctly note that Southern Democrats for decades went to ludicrous lengths to prevent Black people from voting.) (That doesn’t make the GOP’s actions right; it just means that attacking the franchise is a bipartisan dirty trick in these United States.)
Regardless of party, at least six in 10 (91 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents, and 61 percent of Republicans) say U.S. democracy is in peril.
On the left, our modern-day Exhibit A is David Van Reybrouck, whose 2018 book with the giveaway title Against Elections argues that democracy is too, well, democratic. Instead of letting adult citizens vote, we should instead use a process called “sortition,” in which a group of citizens are selected by lot and, if they pass certain tests (breathing? check; able to spell their own name? check), they serve for a period on a body that makes decisions that sortition supporters think they will like more than those made by normally elected officials.
Which brings to mind William F. Buckley’s puckish comment that he “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.”
Van Reybrouck seems to be fully in the “kill the patient to save him” camp; he writes that “We must decolonize democracy. We must democratize democracy.”
The publicity materials for his book brags that “Van Reybrouck makes the compelling argument that modern democracy was designed as much to preserve the rights of the powerful and keep the masses in line, as to give the populace a voice.” He’d get some pushback on that from conservative and former Republican David Frum, who in 2018 told the Los Angeles Review of Books,“Historically we can see that, to make democracy work, you need to have buy-in from people with higher status and more wealth than their neighbors. You don’t have to work as hard for democracy to get buy-in from people who have less, because democracy ultimately speaks in their name.”
I would argue that you don’t democratize democracy by making it less democratic, but if you think I’m making too much of an eight-year-old book, consider that the book has won praise from The Times of London, the Financial Times, Kirkus, Bloomberg, The New York Times Book Review, Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, and other grandees of the left.
The best spin you can put on this idea is that its supporters want to make democracy less messy and more predictable. The worst is that they don’t understand that democracy is by default loud, messy, argumentative, and always vulnerable. Because that’s how people are, and 320 million of them are only going to be quiet and well-organized if we adopt a North Korean-style republic. It’s why adults are supposed to educate each successive generation in the history and reasons for democracy — and the awful alternatives.
Meanwhile, on the right, President Trump has been petitioned by folks on the far right to declare a national emergency and take personal control over the 2026 election, which his party is currently on track to lose in spectacular fashion. The president has denied he has intentions of doing so. But then again, in August 2025, he publicly mused about canceling elections “if we happen to be in a war with somebody.” Anyway, the latest news is that we’re at war with Iran.
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
— W.B. Yeats
