Boosted by President Trump’s claims of electoral fraud during the last presidential elections, thousands of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol the very same day Joe Biden was ratified as new President of the United States. After hours of tension, including the death of four assailants, the storm passed and normal life resumed, leaving a discredited President and a Republican Party in disarray.
While the image of American democracy will certainly take some time to recover, in reality, Trumpism is only another episode in the drama of traditional political parties. In recent decades, and especially after the Great Recession, the foundations of the democratic system in many European (e.g. Greece, Hungary, Poland, Spain) and North American (e.g. Mexico and US) countries, but also in Ecuador, Israel, Philippines or India, have been shaken by the rise of anti-establishment forces and the crisis of mainstream political parties.
But while the former is just a symptom, the latter constitutes the real cancer of liberal democracy. As recently explained in an article looking at the sources of electoral support for anti-establishment political parties, this distinction is extremely important when searching for a remedy, a cure. Because if, continuing with the medical metaphors, anti-establishment parties are just tumors in a carcinogenic democratic system, characterized by the disenchantment of citizens with mainstream political parties that have not managed to adapt to a new social reality and which therefore have failed to represent their new interests, then the treatment should focus on mainstream, rather than on anti-establishment, parties.
