Sometimes, when you present an argument in writing and then talk about it with the public, you come to

realize there’s an even larger argument lurking beneath it. It comes up even when you think you might be
talking about something else. It might not be an argument
you wanted to make, and it is often uncomfortable to confront it, but it’s there.

In 2013 I wrote an essay called “The Death of Expertise,” which a few years later became a popular book
with that same title. It was about the disturbing ways in which people reject established knowledge and
argue with experts as if they know what they’re talking
about. Some of it was, of course, just the usual complaining from intellectuals like me about how people
should listen to intellectuals like me. Even as I wrote it, I had the sense that something even more chilling
was taking place, and I could tell from the comments from readers and at public discussions and lectures
over the years that others had the same fear. Maybe the rejection of knowledge wasn’t just about people
not knowing very much. Maybe it was just one of many arenas of social conflict threatening to undermine
the foundations of civic life in democracies. Maybe it was one of the many accumulating symptoms of the
decline of liberal democracy itself.

Everywhere I went, in the United States or abroad, discussions about knowledge and science turned to
darker concerns about the survival of democracy, and I was almost always asked the same question: How
long can we go on like this? Usually, I answered with what
now seems in retrospect to be unwarranted optimism. I told audiences that I was confident that when
faced with a major disaster, such as a war, or a depression, or perhaps even a pandemic— a possibility I
raised often while still thinking it unlikely— Americans would rise
to the challenge. This was before COVID-19 had a name.

And while some of these concerns were directly related to the rise of Donald Trump, even there (despite
my early and consistent opposition to Trump and his authoritarian political movement), I argued for a
calm approach. I reassured audiences and told them to trust in the culture of constitutionalism and the
resilience of democratic institutions. I could see that illiberalism was on the rise in other nations, but I
held out the hope— the exceptionalist belief, really—that the United States would hold firm even if other
nations wavered.

These assurances about the durability of Western democracy were sincere, but beneath them I also
harbored worries that had been growing for some time, many of them before the new wave of
authoritarianism in Europe, before the COVID pandemic, before Trump’s multiple attacks on democracy
and the rule of law, and before his fight to stay in power that culminated in the first successful breach of
the U.S. Capitol by hostile forces since 1814. In The Death of Expertise, I wrote that when voters abdicate
their responsibilities as citizens, they “lose control of important decisions and risk the hijacking of their
democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions
into authoritarian technocracy.” I did not, at the moment I wrote those words, foresee
the emergence of any one leader, whether Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Erdoğan in Turkey, Narendra
Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, or Trump in the United States. But I had long been worried about
the appearance of someone, or something, like all of them.

Some of this anxiety was perhaps just the natural extension of spending too much time observing
authoritarian regimes. In my early career, I was a scholar of the old Soviet Union. When you study (and
visit) repressive countries, you think hard about what makes your own nation different. You wonder
whether the freedoms you cherish— the ability to move about freely, to say what you please, to associate
with others at will, to worship if you so choose— are fragile and transitory. It’s a fear inherent in every
open society, I suppose. This is why we carve inspirational odes to democracy in the stone walls of
memorials to Jefferson and Lincoln: they are a tribute to our own doubts, a hope that marble and granite
will give permanence to those words and ideals even if we ourselves might not always defend them.
The blossoming of newly free societies at the end of the twentieth century also encouraged me to put
away some of my doubts. The collapse of the USSR and the great wave of democratization that followed
it in the 1990s was supposedly the “third” wave of human liberation, after the great social revolutions of
the eighteenth century and then the defeat of fascism in the 1940s. Heading into the new century, it
seemed that the only question was how fast democracy, in its various iterations, could now spread across
the globe. I did not believe that we had solved all of life’s problems— just one of the biggest facing us at
the time. There will always be authoritarian governments as long as there are corrupt and evil human
beings, but absent a nightmare like a nuclear war or mass starvation, I was confident that in the
postindustrial world, we were no longer arguing over whether liberal democracy— the kind based on
tolerance, trust, and inalienable human rights— was here to stay. The fall of the authoritarians and the
surge of liberal democracy might not be Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” but it was progress and it
was in the right direction. Maybe we’d finally learned our lesson as a species.

Or so I thought. I watched with sadness as the brief Russian experiment with democracy hardened back
into Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship, but I hoped that Russia was the exception. The idea that
democratization, particularly where it was already well established, could start to unwind still seemed to
me to be unnatural. And yet, here we are. (The condition of global democracy is now so precarious that
one group of Swedish scholars at the University of Gothenburg has called the early twenty- first century a
new “wave of autocratization.”) My particular assumption that the United States would always look like
the United States turned out— painfully— to be more a matter of pride than evidence.

In the 1990s, my Russian friends used to scoff at my advice as an American about their constitutional
issues, telling me that America was just too young a country to give anyone pointers about democracy.
Yes, I would always answer, Russia is an ancient country, but a young state, while America was a young
country but governed by a constitution that was established while Russia was still a land of tsars and
serfs. I was confident enough in this fact that I did not hesitate to lecture my Russian colleagues on the
virtues of liberal democracy.

I am more reticent to deliver such sermons these days.

There are signs of hope, even if they are small and inconstant. Illiberal populists, as it turns out, are pretty
lousy at governing, especially during a crisis that demands a steady and stoic engagement with science. In
the United States, in particular, voters saw a mismanaged pandemic become a politicized catastrophe that
eventually inflicted a 9/11-level death toll almost every day, and as of this writing has killed more
Americans than combat in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam combined. Partly as
a consequence of this disaster, Donald Trump was driven from office with a record voter turnout. His
party, however, gained ground, and if some forty or fifty thousand voters spread across just four or five
American states changed their votes, Trump would still be leading the charge against liberal democracy
from behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

Even if voters in the United States and elsewhere who once preferred such regimes are rethinking their
choices, the damage is already done. The citizens of the world’s democracies now must live with the
undeniable knowledge that they are capable of embracing illiberal movements and attacking their own
liberties as a matter of their own free will rather than as the result of disaster or foreign conquest. Worse,
the budding authoritarians who live among us now know it too. They have seen a demonstrated market
for what they are selling. They will be back, and the next time they will bring glossier and better-
packaged versions of dictatorship than the ragged prototypes this first wave of loud and pushy salesmen
offered.
From Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy by Tom Nichols.
Copyright © 2021 by Tom Nichols and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.