America is at risk of abandoning its founding principle of government, “by and for the people,” in favor of a system older than democracy itself: rule by one man.
Pretty much everybody understands that the United States and the old Soviet Union both had governments based on ideology or principle. The main notion of the US was expressed in the Declaration of Independence and has guided us toward what Lincoln called “a more perfect union” for 249 years:
“[T]hat all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
We call it democracy. It’s larger than any one president, any one Congress, any collection of Supreme Court justices or governors. It’s a foundational principle that’s held together by our Constitution and the laws we’ve passed over the years grounded in these core ideas.
For the Soviet Union, the idea was Marx’s, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” To accomplish this, they put together a single-party state that provided housing, medical care, food, employment, and education to every Soviet citizen; in exchange the populace was expected to work hard and never challenge the power or legitimacy of the state.
Everybody understood these basic structural differences. Both were governments being driven not by personalities but by philosophy.
Although one could argue that FDR and Stalin both had widespread support and, upon their deaths, left their nations shaken, neither was truly what you’d call a cult leader. Truman and Khruschev stepped in and each country kept humming along because both countries claimed guiding ideas larger then either of those men.
But there’s a third form of government that is rarely acknowledge in the American press or high school civics classes, except in history: rule by a popular strongman. When, on April 13, 1655, Louis XIV said, “L’état, c’est moi” (“The state is me” or “I am the state”) he summed up that perspective.
Saddam Hussein called it Ba’athism, but in reality he was the government of Iraq. Pol Pot called it communism, but in reality he was the government of Cambodia. Putin claims Russia is a democratic republic with a free-market economy, much like the US, but in reality he is the government of Russia.
From the earliest days of political science, scholars have warned of regimes where the ruler and the state become one and the same, something political scientists call a “personalist dictatorship” or “personalist rule.” (Jim Stewartson does a deeper dive into this here.)
Niccolò Machiavelli, in The Prince (1513), observed that in such systems the survival of the government was entirely bound up in the survival of the man at the top: “In a principality where the people have no share in government, if the prince is destroyed, the state is likewise ruined.” He understood that once power is concentrated in a single figure, the institutions around him become little more than ornaments.
A century later, the French jurist Jean Bodin gave this reality a new name: personalist sovereignty. In his Six Books of the Republic (1576), Bodin defined it as “the absolute and perpetual power of a republic, which is vested in a prince or in the people.” When that sovereignty was vested in a prince, the fiction of shared governance disappeared: the prince was the republic.
Modern scholars have only refined this insight. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, in their classic Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), argued that “the essence of the totalitarian state is that power is monopolized by a single man or a small group, and that all institutions are subordinated to this monopoly.”
Political scientist Juan Linz later described this even more bluntly:
“Personalist rule emerges when power is concentrated in the hands of one individual who dominates not only the state apparatus but also the party, the military, and the economy.”
Whether the label is Ba’athism, communism, or “sovereign democracy,” the reality is the same. When one man becomes the state, when his survival is the survival of the regime, you are no longer looking at a republic, a democracy, or even a functioning ideology. You are looking at a personalist dictatorship, a form of government as old as Machiavelli’s princes and as modern as today’s autocrats.
This is what Donald Trump is trying to turn America into, using the template Putin, Hitler, and Viktor Orbán — all personalist dictators — provided him.
This explains why he’d fire people with genuine expertise, from the State Department to the CDC to our intelligence agencies and beyond, and replace them with incompetent toadies.
Their first loyalty in a democratic republic would be to the truth, to the people, to serving a “we society” nation with their best diplomacy, science, or spycraft.
But in a personalist dictatorship, the job of every person in the government isn’t to serve the citizens who provide the “consent of the governed” but, instead, to exclusively serve Dear Leader.
This explains the mass firings, the slavish Cabinet meetings where Trump’s toadies slobber all over him, and the casual lies that are routinely told by the White House press office and senior Republican officials. It tells us why Republican members of the House and Senate only speak up for principle when they’re willing to also abandon their reelection plans.
It also explains the fragility of our current government, given Trump’s age and poor state of health.
When nations run of, by, and for Dear Leader lose that leader, the result is typically chaos and a major change in that form of government, unless the leader has first so successfully co-opted the entirety of the state systems that they’ll continue following the corrupt structures Dear Leader had put into place.
When a democracy loses a leader, in other words, the system continues. But when a personalist dictatorship loses its strongman, the system shatters.
Franco ran a personalist dictatorship in Spain right up until 1975, when he died and democracy returned to that European nation. Although defeat in war took them down, the loss of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo all signaled political transformations in Germany, Italy, and Japan. The same was true of Hussein’s Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya, although their removals left power vacuums that led to arguably worse forms of government as opportunists and predators stepped in to fill the void.
Understanding these dynamics should inform Democrats and the few remaining Republicans who haven’t pledged their entire loyalty to Trump and Trumpism. The only true north of his reign has been self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, things that require cult-leader-level charisma to maintain, so if Trump suffers death or incapacity before his term is out the power vacuum will be massive.
Already, Republicans are jockeying for the position of inheritor of the MAGA crown in an effort to replicate Trump’s one-man rule. JD Vance is assuring us he’s had plenty of “on the job training.” Marco Rubio is trying to play the statesman on the international stage, although Trump keeps sabotaging his efforts, from bringing peace to Ukraine to preventing India from dumping America in favor of an alliance with China and Russia.
Other opportunists and hangers-on, from Ted Cruz to Steve Bannon to Tom Cotton, are trying to position themselves as rightwing power brokers, although given how completely the Party has sold out to America’s rightwing billionaires and Middle Eastern autocrats, the final decisions about the fate and future of the leadership of the GOP will probably be made by a handful of morbidly rich men.
Democrats, meanwhile, are learning the lesson of fighting fire with fire, in this case the need for a “big” personality to take on the massive cult following — among the Republican base and within our now-corrupted government institutions — Trump has created. This is why Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker are getting such traction: both are punching back at the bully.
And they’re probably right about the way they’re going about it. In this era where spectacle and outrage have replace newsworthiness as driving forces propelled by social media, search site, and news site algorithms, it’s going to take a big personality to take down Trump or his successors. Somebody who can dominate the news cycle day after day while pounding a pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian message.
We’ve seen this in America before. When the GOP destroyed the economy with the Republican Great Depression, the huge personality of FDR stepped up and used the force of his own personal charisma and magnetism to put the nation back on track. Republicans squealed that FDR was “imposing socialism,” but he largely ignored them and focused on what was best for average working-class Americans, literally creating the modern middle class.
Right now, the only organizing principles held by Republicans are fealty to Trump’s whims and their own personal greed (and that of their billionaire donors). “Conservative” principles of efficiency in government, defense of democracies around the world, and fiscal responsibility at home have all been thrown overboard in favor of raw power, corruption, and a willingness to burn down the institutions of the Republic if it keeps them in charge one more election cycle.
To the extent that Democrats can forcefully point this out and strong, genuinely progressive politicians can step up into leadership, there’s a huge opportunity here to reclaim political power and put America back on the small-d democratic path. Particularly if or when Trump is no longer a factor in the GOP’s political equation, leaving his Party lost in the wilderness.
If Democrats rise to that challenge, they can lead America back toward democracy and progress. But if they hesitate — or if too many cling to the illusion that Trumpism is just another policy debate — then history will record that the oldest democracy in the modern world fell not to an ideology, but to the vanity and greed of one broken man and an opposition that failed to understand and then meet the moment.
We can’t let that happen.
