A criminologist explains how Americans achieve a post-Trump democracy

Now that the first criminal trial of Donald Trump is underway in a New York courthouse and is potentially the only one that will be decided before people start voting around Labor Day, there are two political objectives that I believe are necessary to implement if the United States is ever to “fix” what ails or troubles our American democracy:

1. Defeat Trump’s third attempt to become president and re-elect President Joe Biden to a second term of office. This will require aggressive election campaigning and coordination by anti-Trumpers, never Trumpers, Democrats and independents and has everything to do with saving our multiracial pluralistic democracy from its imminent demise should Trump and his minions retake control of the White House.
2. The second goal involves changing the anti-democratic elements of our political system, such as the Electoral College, which have been in the works since after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat. These political efforts will have to be expanded and more organized than they have been up to now. They are also predicated on the defeat of Trump and possibly the implosion of the Republican Party.

By no stretch of the political imagination will these objectives be easy. The first of these will be comparatively a lot less difficult to achieve than the second. However, the second of these will be impossible to accomplish without achieving the first.

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Regarding the 2024 election: To counter Trump and to establish a blue wave this fall, Biden and his re-election campaign should pivot and lean into anti-establishment populism that has increasingly attracted blue-collar workers. Much of the legitimate anger felt by such Americans has been captured by the propagandistic America First/MAGA movement. In turn, most of this anger has been successfully misdirected at the rule of law, the Democrats and Biden.

This same anger was also captured by the genuine ways in which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) did so in the Democratic primaries of 2016 and 2020. Unlike Trump and his cronies, Sanders was not gaslighting his constituents to win them over.

If “Middle Class Joe” can successfully recapture this anger like Bernie did, then the anger can be redirected back at Trump and GOP, where it justifiably and overwhelmingly belongs.

‘Make ends meet’

Most people in our body politic — Republicans and Democrats — understand that neither our political or economic systems are as healthy or as fair as they could be. At the same time, most Americans of both parties do not understand why these unhealthy and unfair realities still persist in the richest country with the strongest economy and the lowest inflation worldwide.

Similarly, because average Americans are better off today than they were four years ago according to the available measurements, many voters do not appreciate that millions of Americans are still suffering.

For example, millions of people — from families, to the elderly to single men and women experiencing homelessness — are struggling to “make ends meet.” And they are being stymied, paradoxically, by the relatively higher wages in more than a generation coupled with the higher costs of student debt, childcare, rent, mortgages, food and so on. Higher costs of entertainment, leisure activities and even going out for dinner factor in, too.

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On the one hand, Biden and the Democrats need to confront these realities. They need to explain what they have been doing to improve these social conditions such as canceling student debt. They must also explain what they’ll continue to do to improve these social conditions should Biden be re-elected, like establishing universal childcare for all families.

On the other hand, the Democrats need to emphasize what the Republicans have never done and will continue not to do to address these social conditions. In fact, it is Republicans’ lack of policies and resistance to improve these social issues in the past, present and foreseeable future that will continue to exacerbate them.

As political scientist Damon Linker wrote in an April 8, 2024, opinion piece for The New York Times, “Biden needs to meet the people where they are.” Because if America is not exactly broken as Linker claims, or is only half broken as I argue, there are still plenty of legal reforms that need to be realized across the political economy of the United States.

Hence, Biden — the idealist, the institutionalist, and middle of the road centrist — should continue to celebrate our vibrant economy as well as those bipartisan accomplishments during the first two years of his administration.

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That includes the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law in November 2021 that has already funneled billions of dollars into blue and red states alike. And the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law in August 2022, the most comprehensive climate legislation in U.S. history.

It must also include repeated mention of the bipartisan foreign aid bill passed by the House for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan over the weekend.

At the same time, Biden should also be underscoring all the negativity, chaos and counterproductive activities of the do-nothing and obstructionist Republican majority since they recaptured control of the House back in January 2023.

For example, Republicans have not passed any legislation whatsoever to run on, as Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) put it. Moreover, as obstructionists, House Republicans even tanked the toughest bipartisan bill in decades on “border security” introduced by the Senate earlier this year —for no other reason than Trump wanted it unaddressed so that he could have one issue of substance to talk about.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are forming yet another circular firing squad in what could lead to their third House speaker in seven months if the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) get their way.

Highlight Trump's idea void

To re-accentuate: Whether we are talking about lowering the costs of education, childcare, and medicine; protecting the rights of ordinary workers, consumers, or women’s reproduction; or expanding the basic necessities of health care and social security for all, Biden should be stressing what he has been doing. And what he intends to do when re-elected by focusing attention on a concrete Democratic platform with a reform agenda to address the broken parts of our political and economic systems.

The Biden campaign should further emphasize how neither Trump nor the GOP have ever had any ideas whatsoever, let alone an affirmative platform — recall that the Republican National Convention of 2020 had no new party platform at all — to address even one of these anti-establishment populist grievances. Besides deregulation of all things and tax breaks for corporations and the richest Americans, they have no other agenda other than feebly trying to cut medicare and social security for all.

With or without Trump, Republicans do have Project 2025. This not-very-covert authoritarian agenda to control the government Trump-style recommends repealing both the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

And should the insurrectionist-in-chief, who is facing 88 felony counts across four criminal cases, be elected to POTUS for a second time, both the agendas of the far right and the Supreme Court majority of gutting the Constitution of many of its checks and balances will continue as they have been doing officially since at least 2010.

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In sum, with a soon-to-be-criminally-convicted Trump back at the helm in the White House, corruption and lawlessness will run rampant. With a strongman presidency, the nation will become a legal oligarchy creating a nearly bullet-proof immunity for the morbidly rich, fuller personhood for corporations and less-than-equal rights for individuals.

Post-Trump, but not post Trumpism, there are several efforts that are already underway with the goal of countering the anti-democratic and rule of law authoritarianism. If incorporated as a whole, then they would transform our democratic political system from a “tyranny of a minority” to a “tyranny of a majority.”

This is the only way to overcome the duopoly of political power in the United States that is at the root or heart of what currently ails and threatens American democracy.

Institutionally, and in no particular order, these aspirational reformist changes include:

1. Doing away with the undemocratic Electoral College, political gerrymandering and all forms of bicameral filibusters.
2. Overturning Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, privately financed elections, Supreme Court decisions that facilitate political and economic corruption, and those parts of our legal infrastructure that are increasingly enabling, for example, regressive taxation, the lack of universal health care and the inadequate ecological protocols, debt relief, and international humanitarian engagement.
3. Expanding the number of the U.S. House of Representatives from the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the eight U.S. territories.
4. Employing the same types of dynamic practices of change, revision and innovation characteristic of the 50 state constitutions as a means of reforming our U.S. Constitution which comparatively has been largely static, if not stagnant, and which has not been meaningfully amended for more than one-half of a century.
5. Establishing a multi-party and proportionately representative democracy to replace our antiquated two-party or bipartisan representative democracy.

A tyranny of the majority — or direct rule by the people, which has nothing to do with mob rule or rule by the masses — in conjunction with the other constitutional and legislative reforms would expand the democratic representation of the people at the federal level not unlike at the state level. Where, for example, people have direct rather than indirect representative power by way of referendums and initiatives.

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To not institutionalize these political and economic changes, or to remain a tyranny of a minority as we have been for the last 250 years, will only perpetuate the dysfunctionality and extreme partisanship that has become synonymous with American democracy and its body politic.

If not countered or checked, our tyranny of a minority will also allow for future wannabe authoritarian presidents to pursue any of their uninhibited dreams of an illiberal democracy, at best, or a fascist regime, at worst.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.