American Institutional Exceptionalism and the Trump Presidency.

• Author: Murtazashvili, Jennifer Brick
• Position: Donald Trump

After Donald Trump's election in November 2016, scholars decried the death of democracy (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018), democratic backsliding (Slater 2018), and the rise of authoritarian tendencies in American politics (Mounk 2018; Snyder 2018). Daron Acemoglu (2017) claimed that American political institutions are incapable of defending against a modern "strongman" like Trump and that civil society is "our last defense" against Trump. Others offered more nuanced insight into how the populist Right's policies portend the expansion of the government's coercive authority (Trantidis and Cowen 2020). In the moments up to Trump's loss in November 2020 (and his subsequent failed legal challenges to certify votes), scholars and commentators too numerous to mention raised the specter of a "coup," election violence, and state failure. The Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, was dubbed a "coup" by many in the media, though the term insurrection seems to be more appropriate.

Trump's election raised many reasonable fears, especially regarding populist pressure on civil liberties, economic freedom, and openness to immigrants. Despite those fears and the chaotic scene on January 6 that left one police officer dead, an inescapable conclusion is that predictions of the death of democracy, fascism, and coups were off the mark by a large margin. Our argument here is that this is because American institutions are robust--exceptional even--in dealing with populists. Our argument consists of three interrelated points. First, Trumpism and the policies we associate with it are an expected feature of majoritarian democracy. One of the reasons why Trump seemed like such an outlier is that scholars and pundits alike ignored or forgot what we know about voters in majoritarian democracies. Second, Trump did almost nothing to expand the institutional powers of the presidency and, given his more limited use of executive orders than previous presidents, arguably reduced them. Third, American exceptionalism still holds, though in our view what is exceptional about the United States is its formal and informal institutions.

One of the most significant aspects of American institutional exceptionalism is the robust set of constraints on majoritarian democracy. Trumpism illustrates the prescience of the Framers' preoccupation with political constraints to attain liberal democracy, which is an argument that resonates with the theories of populism advanced by James Buchanan (1975) and William Riker (1982). Of special significance is the role of federalism and self-governance articulated by Vincent Ostrom (2008) as a constraint on populist pressure in national politics, an underappreciated constraint given the tremendous focus on what Republicans in the Senate were doing (or not doing, as the case may be) to counterbalance Trump's policies. Nevertheless, a focus on formal institutions is not enough: America's exceptional institutions include a robust tradition of private-property rights and social rules that encourage individualism, each of which provide additional constraints on populist pressure on civil rights and liberties. In addition, wealth contributes to democratic stability, a point made by W. H. Hutt (1964), who argues that constraints on majoritarian democracy are especially significant in troubled economic times--a situation that provides insight into the much-discussed behavior of voters in America's Rust Belt region. The latter is significant insofar as there is a strong case to be made that economic anxiety fueled anti-immigrant sentiments, thus making constraints on political majorities an even more significant safeguard on electoral democracy.

Illiberalism Is a Feature of Majoritarianism

One of the central ideas in classical liberalism is that the tyranny of the majority is an inherent feature of democratic policy making. It is this recognition that gives rise to classical liberals' concern regarding constraints on political majorities as well as the reason for their defenses of markets and self-governance as ordering principles of economics and politics (Pennington 2011). Because democracy and government are considered a necessary evil, public-choice scholars have argued for constraints on majoritarian democracy to ensure protection of individual liberties, both political and economic (Buchanan and Tullock 1962; Brennan and Buchanan 1985). Thus, although Nancy Maclean (2017) has advanced a well-known argument that public choice is an antidemocratic research agenda, it is more accurately described as a principled approach to constitutional design whose overarching objective is to design constitutional rules to ensure liberal democracy: elections, in other words, cannot come at the cost of our political and economic liberties (Fleury and Marciano 2018; Munger 2018).

There are legitimate reasons to question majoritarianism, and they have to do with voters. Bryan Caplan (2006) offers one of the clearest explanations. According to Caplan's theory of democracy, voters have irrational beliefs that they cling to because the psychic costs of changing their minds (and admitting they might have been wrong) are substantial. Voters also face few direct penalties for expressing their irrational beliefs at the ballot box. Thus, there are few self-enforcing mechanisms to compel voters to behave rationally. Caplan provides many examples, including voters' beliefs about protectionism. Although it is widely accepted that protectionism benefits special interests (Magee, Brock, and Young 1989), nearly half of American voters support protectionism. The standard economic analysis of protectionism shows that it harms most of them, but because voters do not easily see or feel the costs of protectionist policies and feel immediate discomfort when they abandon their deeply held political views, they continue supporting these policies that end up hurting their pocketbooks.

Caplan's theory is a simple and powerful one that rationalizes much of the support for Trump, including for his controversial steel policies (as well as why one of Joe Biden's first executive orders was to "buy American" in federal contracts). Trump won in 2016 because he won the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin--something no Republican had done since 1988. Even though steel has been on the decline for decades, Trump promised to bring back steel and, more importantly, to bring back jobs. Of course, the entire steel industry is a rather small part of the U.S. economy. The largest steel producer in the United States, Nucor, has revenues of about $20 billion a year and employs only around twenty-five thousand workers. Many voters who supported Trump for his promises about steel were clearly unlikely to benefit, but they supported him anyway. Indeed, protectionist policies, many of which are inherently based on an antiforeign bias, have long been considered a central (and socially costly) feature of democratic policy making (Olson 1982). These policies are illiberal, but there is nothing antidemocratic about them.

Another example is Trump's immigration nationalism. Among his justifications for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border was that immigrants who enter the country illegally increase crime and even terrorism. In reality, there is no evidence that immigrants who entered the country illegally commit more crime than any other group in the country or that they increase the risk of terrorism in any meaningful way (Nowrasteh 2016). In fact, migrants who arrived here by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border have never committed a terrorist attack in the country. Trump even took a page from John Maynard Keynes in arguing that the border wall would create jobs. Even Keynesians, though, argue that it is critical to assess the return on public investments (Stiglitz 2010): a border wall has almost no economic return beyond some temporary construction work, but the bigger issue with any such analysis of a border wall is that immigration, whether through the legal route or by individual initiative outside of legal channels, arguably has positive benefits to the U.S. economy, including the strengthening of local economies (Powell 2015).

But the economics of immigration is not necessarily clear, despite recent efforts by Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell (2020) to demolish intellectual arguments against immigration. Much of the conversation depicts Trump's immigration policy as xenophobic or racist. Perhaps it is. The available evidence suggests that for some groups in the United States, the economic fear is rational. As George Borjas (2018) explains, though social scientists often present immigration as good for everyone, research tends to exaggerate the benefits and minimize the costs. And economic assimilation occurs for only some waves of immigrants. Measured by wage improvement, the native-immigrant wage gap often persists (Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson 2020). It is also clear that for some groups, labor-market impacts are harmful. Immigrants are sometimes depicted as doing the jobs natives don't want, but a more precise description would be that natives do not want to do those jobs at the prevailing wage. (1) Aggregating impacts also "hide away" specific groups hurt by immigration. This much is clear from the Mariel Boatlift in 1980. A majority of the Marielitos were high school dropouts, resulting in a dramatic nosedive in low-skill wages in Miami in the 1980s (Borjas 2016). Immigrants are also people, not simply labor-market inputs, so they come with positive and negative externalities, (2) and their arrival has consequences for fiscal policy given the nature of the American welfare state.

All of this suggests that Trump's base and its fear of migrants could be motivated by rational economic fears or the desire to have higher wages because constraints on immigration have basically the same effect of any policy to increase native wages. Regardless...