How to Destroy Democracy: Break Public Trust in Its Institutions, the Presidency Included

Discrediting a sitting democratically-elected government by depicting it as illegitimate, incompetent, tyrannical, or all three is a pillar of the right-wing authoritarian playbook. The specific outcome of this strategy has varied throughout history, but when it is successful, freedom is always its victim.

The United States is the latest test case, courtesy of the Republican party and its supporters. We are witnesses to an unprecedented attempt to create an appetite and momentum for authoritarian rule by discrediting democratic institutions, including the courts, elections, Congress, and the presidency as we know them now.

Political scientists have a name for this process: delegitimation (sometimes written as delegitimization), which can mean that political subjects are accused of being unfit to govern, or that they are considered suspicious actors or even a threat to the stability of society, on racial or other grounds, as with terrorist cells or extremist groups.

We can update the discussion of delegitimation for our world of information warfare. Today, surrounding the target you wish to discredit with an aura of sleaze, corruption, and moral depravity, and repeating these messages 24/7, using every institution and tool at your disposal, is as important as any legislation or legal process you initiate against that target.

This also means that political operatives in Congress, federal agencies, and the courts must model contempt and disdain for those institutions as part of an attack on the system (here, democracy) and its head (here, President Joe Biden).  

I have written several times about the state of exception we live in due to the success of the Big Lie, or the claim that Donald Trump, and not Biden, won the 2020 election. Ranking among the most successful propaganda campaigns in history, the Big Lie has provided a fictional foundation for depicting the Jan. 6 coup attempt in a positive light as well as a basis for rejecting Biden's presidential authority.  

This is how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton felt empowered to have called Biden's assumption of office "an overthrow," and how the Texas GOP passed a resolution in 2022 that not only rejected "the certified results of the 2020 presidential election," but declared: "we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. as not legitimately elected by the people of the United States."

As a scholar of authoritarian takeovers, I cannot overstate the danger of labeling a sitting and legally elected president as "acting"--as though Biden were a temporary appointment, soon to be replaced. At a minimum, the effect is to psychologically prepare Republicans to accept any authoritarian action that seeks to remove "the occupier" as necessary and justified. As a case study of delegitimation of a sitting president, it is sadly fitting.

And so less than two years later we have the horrific spectacle of donors to a Kansas Republican Party fundraiser being invited to attack an effigy of Biden. While Kansas state and county officials distanced themselves from the incident, it does not take much to realize that this rehearses and normalizes physical violence against the president. At its most extreme, delegitimation denies the target the right to exist. That is what is performed here.

A donor at the Kansas Republican Party fundraiser about to attack an effigy of President Biden. Kansas City Star, March 14, 2024.

The need to negate the validity of Biden's presidency as part of a larger attack on American democracy is why, when the Hur investigation into Biden did not give the GOP the outcome it wanted, the party remained undeterred. To continue this campaign, the party is now exploring the option of initiating criminal referrals against him. That way they will create more headlines that soil Biden in voters' minds and link democracy with corruption and crime.

The process of delegitimation is not limited to attempts to take down Biden. No instrument of government in America, up to the Supreme Court, has remained untouched by this massive information and political warfare operation.

The behavior of Justice Clarence Thomas is a case in point. Thomas refused to recuse himself from adjudicating matters relating to Trump's eligibility to be kept on the ballot in Colorado due to Trump’s incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrection, even though Thomas’s wife, Ginni, is known to have been part of that plan to disrupt the peaceful transition of power.

The Supreme Court has no ethical watchdog of its own, leaving the justices to embody democratic norms through their conduct. We know that Justice Thomas is personally corrupt from exposés of the numerous gifts he accepted from billionaires.

By refusing to recuse, he was telling the country that as a Supreme Court Justice he rejects the idea that conflicts of interest might apply to him, and does not consider democratic principles of justice and professional ethics to have any validity or legitimacy.

Finally, the behavior of MAGA extremists in Congress can also be interpreted as furthering the delegitimation of our democratic institutions, including the one they serve in. When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others disrupt Congress, refusing to observe norms of decorum that are based on democratic principles of mutual tolerance (respecting differences of opinion) she is showing contempt for "the enemy."

This is what Italian Fascists did in the years when Benito Mussolini was prime minister of a democracy: they eroded the decorum and functionality of parliament from within, using violence, slander, and other means. Then Mussolini, at risk of going to jail from an investigation into his role in the assassination of his political rival, "solved" the problem by declaring dictatorship in 1925. He too had preached that democracy was corrupt, dysfunctional, and lacking in validity.

In the end, delegitimation is about destroying trust in democracy and its exponents. And trust, like democracy, can be quick to lose and slow to regain. Today’s GOP is counting on that.