Democracy, Stability and Domestic Policy in the 2024 American Election

The US Presidential election is only a few months away and for the third time in a row American voters will be faced with the primal question of whether they want Donald Trump in the White House. A paradox of the Trump Era, which is now entering its 9th year, is that with regards to domestic policy, Trump has changed everything, while also changing nothing.

During the four years he was President, Trump brought a level of avarice, ignorance, buffoonery and contempt for democracy to the White House that had never been seen before. However, from a policy perspective, he did many of the same things that Jeb Bush, John Kasich or Ted Cruz would have done if they, not Trump, had won the Republican nomination and then the general election in 2016. The three major domestic policy accomplishments of Trump’s presidency, appointing conservative judges, including to the Supreme Court, passing a massive tax cut that shifted wealth upwards and loosening environmental and other regulations were exactly what any other Republican would have done, and indeed what all recent Republican presidents, going back to Ronald Reagan, have done.

This paradox is relevant for the coming election as well. If Biden is reelected, we can expect him to pursue the center-left kinds of policies we saw in his first term that, although larger in scope, would not have been out of place in the Obama administration. Accordingly, a second Biden term will look a lot like his current term-an experienced and aging President who knows how to work with Congress trying to pass as much as possible given the likelihood that at least one chamber of Congress will be in the other party’s hands. Similarly, if Trump wins, he will push, like any Republican President, for more tax cuts and more deregulation. Both would appoint as many judges as possible that share their ideological, and partisan, perspective.

That is where the normalcy ends because the domestic issues that are at the absolute heart of this election are democracy and stability. If Biden is reelected, American democratic institutions, which have been in crisis for several years now, will live to fight another day. To be clear, a Biden victory does not guarantee democracy will survive in the US, but it keeps that possibility alive…