Eric Chenoweth

, American citizens and citizens of the world have faced a startling new situation. On that day, the United States, the longest continuous representative democracy in the modern world, elected to a four-year term as president the authoritarian-minded Donald J. Trump. A man having little or no knowledge of, experience in, or appreciation for representative government and having no stated adherence to the system of alliances the United States forged to make it " the leader of the free world, " Trump promised to upend U.S. domestic and foreign policy and reshape the international order. He has done so. Put together with the decade-long rise and strengthening of dictatorial leadership and nationalist and chauvinist parties in a number of countries, Trump's election has brought about a broadly acknowledged crisis of world democracy. Given its position and role in the world, the United States is now center stage in that crisis. The most alarming story in the election, however, is the Russian Federation’s intervention to affect the outcome in favor of Donald Trump. It is in this story that one finds the confluence of factors contributing to the crisis of American democracy: an authoritarian-minded president is elected by a minority of voters due in large part to the intervention of a hostile foreign power.

There have been many who prognosticated democracy's doom. It now may seem strange that one of France's most brilliant political theorists, Jean François Revel, an ardent defender of Western liberal democracy, once feared that democracy might not survive the threat posed by the Soviet Union and its disciplined pursuit of world power. While the Soviet threat was not imaginary, democracy survived its most potent postwar adversary. Today, however, we must again wonder: even without such a global threat as Soviet communism, could democracy still perish? Is it vulnerable, as Revel wrote, to internal enemies " seeking to abolish it legally " ? Could modern democracy, like ancient democracy before it, end up being a historical anomaly? These are not frivolous academic questions. We face a clear and present danger. For the first time in American history, an explicitly authoritarian candidate has gained the nomination to the US presidency of one of America's two major parties. We can hope that the majority of the voters will save American democracy from its grave threat. Certainly, the danger his candidacy poses merits the largest possible repudiation in the general elections (see also my earlier article, " The Authoritarian Temptation "). Yet, hope is no substitute for analysis. The following is an analysis of how an authoritarian has a realistic chance to be president of the most established democracy in the world.

This article examines the authoritarian features of the candidacy of Donald Trump for the Republican Party nomination and argues that his nomination puts at risk American democracy in a manner similar to other ideological threats described by Jean Francois Revel.

Reflections on Unfinished Revolutions: Proceedings of the IDEE Seminar "25 Years After 1989: Reflections on Unfinished Business" held in Warsaw, Poland in October 1989. Papers, Responses, and Discussion. An invaluable resource on the 1989-91 Revolutions and the 25-year transition from communism. See also http://idee-us.org for individual seminar papers.

A Special Report with findings, recommendations and description of an IDEE seminar held in Warsaw, Poland in October 2014 that included 22 veterans of the 1989-91 revolutions who have continued to play important roles in their countries' political and social lives.

The author describes the ongoing effort of the AFL-CIO to support the Solidarity movement in Poland from 1980-89 through financial, political, lobbying, and moral solidarity, reflecting its consistent international policy supporting democracy and opposing communism.