'Something Higher'

Exploitation of the fears and insecurities of Republican voters by unscrupulous politicians has fuelled the rise of Donald Trump and harmed the United States’ position as a bastion of democracy.

- Paul Thomas

If you were making a list of nations with a long-standing bipartisan commitment to democratic principles and practices, Central Europe and Latin America wouldn’t be well represented.

Turbulent histories, fragile state institutions and elites that have tended to put class before country have made it hard for democracy to put down deep roots in those regions. So, although democratic backsliding (Dirty Dancing, September 1) in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Honduras and Bolivia is disturbing, particularly since it suggests the great democratic tide that started to surge in the 1970s has turned, it doesn’t come as a complete shock.

The US is another matter. If democratic backsliding there doesn’t qualify as a shocking development, it’s hard to imagine what would.

This, after all, is the nation that regards itself, with considerable justification, as the wellspring of democracy. Having achieved independence via a revolutionary, anticolonial war, America adopted a written constitution, a democratic system and the belief, sometimes referred to as “American exceptionalism”, that its origins and history make it uniquely qualified and obligated to promote democracy.

Americans, said Abraham Lincoln in the 1863 Gettysburg Address, have a duty to ensure “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth”.

It would be easy to blame President Donald Trump for all the recent troubling, if not sinister, developments in US politics. Everything about him – the redneck rallies, the “enemy of the people” onslaughts on the media, the calls for those who get under his skin to be jailed, sacked, roughed up or put out of business, and his affinity for tyrants – gives the impression that he finds democracy’s checks and balances and the rule of law to be intolerable restrictions.