When I lived in China, a decade ago, I often saw propaganda billboards covered in words that supposedly expressed the country’s values: Patriotism. Harmony. Equality. And … Democracy. Indeed, China claims to consider itself a democratic country. So do Russia, Cuba, Iran, and so on down the list of nations ranked by their level of commitment to rights and liberties. Even North Korea fancies itself part of the club. It’s right there in the official name: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

I thought of those Chinese billboards recently, when a postelection poll showed that many American voters touted the importance of democracy while supporting a candidate who had tried to overturn the results of the previous presidential election. According to a survey by the Associated Press, a full one-third of Trump voters said that democracy was their top issue. (Two-thirds of Harris voters said the same thing.) In a poll conducted before Joe Biden dropped out of the race, seven out of 10 uncommitted swing-state voters said they doubted that Donald Trump would accept the election results if he lost—but more people said they’d trust Trump to handle threats to democracy than said they’d trust Biden.

Almost all Americans say they support democracy. They even agree that it’s in trouble. But when researchers drill down, they find that different people have very different ideas about what democracy means and what threatens its survival, and that democracy is just one competing value among many. In the collective mind of U.S. voters, the concept of democracy appears to be so muddled, and their commitment to it so conditional, that it makes you wonder what, if anything, they’d do anything to stop its erosion—or whether they’d even notice that happening.

[Yoni Appelbaum: Americans aren’t practicing democracy anymore]

Americans perceive democracy through an almost completely partisan lens. In recent polls, Democrats tend to cite Trump—in particular, the likelihood of him seeking to subvert elections—as the biggest threat to democracy. They also point to gerrymandering, voter suppression, and Trump’s rhetoric about using the government to exact retribution as causes for concern. For Republicans, by contrast, threats to democracy take the form of mainstream media, voting by mail, immigration, and what they see as politically motivated prosecutions of Trump. Perhaps the best Rorschach test is voter-ID laws, which get characterized as “election integrity” or “voter suppression” depending on the perspective: Republicans see them as a commonsense way to make elections more accurate and accountable, while Democrats see them as a ploy to disenfranchise voters who don’t have state-issued identification. No surprise, then, that campaigning on a platform of preserving democracy didn’t work for Kamala Harris. Invoking the term to rally support assumes a shared understanding of what it means.

Even more troubling, American voters rarely prioritize democracy over other considerations. For the most part, we’re willing to overlook mischief that undermines democracy as long as our own team is the one doing it. A 2020 study in the American Political Science Review by Matthew H. Graham and Milan W. Svolik of Yale University found that only 3.5 percent of Americans would vote against a candidate whose policies they otherwise support if that candidate took antidemocratic actions, like gerrymandering or reducing the number of polling stations in an unfriendly district. Another survey found that when left-wing voters were presented with hypothetical undemocratic behavior by right-wing politicians—prohibiting protests, say, or giving private groups the ability to veto legislation—62 percent of them considered it undemocratic. But when the same behavior was attributed to left-wing politicians, only 36 percent saw it as undemocratic.

[Graeme Wood: Only about 3.5 percent of Americans care about democracy]

Some scholars have dubbed the phenomenon “democratic hypocrisy.” Others, however, argue that voters aren’t pretending that the antidemocratic behavior they’re supporting is democratic; they really feel that way. “People are pretty good at reasoning their way to believing that whatever they want to happen is the democratic outcome,” Brendan Nyhan, a political-science professor at Dartmouth, told me. That’s especially true if you can tell yourself that this could be your last chance before the other guy abolishes elections altogether. We just have to sacrifice a little democracy for the sake of democracy, the thinking goes. Graham, who is now an assistant professor of political science at Temple University, has studied the reaction to the 2020 presidential election and the “Stop the Steal” movement. “Our conclusion was that pretty much everyone who says in polls that the election was stolen actually believes it,” he told me.

The disturbing implication of the political-science research is that if the typical forms of incipient democratic backsliding did occur, at least half the country likely wouldn’t notice or care. Stacking the bureaucracy with loyalists, wielding law enforcement against political enemies, bullying critics into silence—these measures, all credibly threatened by President-Elect Trump, might not cut through the fog of partisan polarization. Short of tanks in the streets, most people might not perceive the destruction of democratic norms in their day-to-day life. And if Trump and his allies lose elections or fail to enact the most extreme pieces of their agenda, those data points will be held up as proof that anyone crying democratic erosion is a Chicken Little. “This is a debate that’s going to be very dumb,” Nyhan said.

You might think that, in a democracy, support for democracy itself would be nonnegotiable—that voters would reject any candidate or leader who didn’t clear that bar, because they would recognize that weakening democracy threatens their way of life. But that simple story isn’t always true. The job of genuinely pro-democracy politicians is to convince voters that democratic norms and institutions really are connected to more tangible issues that they care about—that an America with less democracy would most likely also be one with more economic inequality, for example, and fewer individual liberties.

The alternative to making and remaking the case for democracy is a descent into apathetic nihilism. Just look at the Chinese media’s coverage of the U.S. election. A video shared by China News Service said that whoever won would merely be “the face of the ruling elite, leaving ordinary people as mere spectators.” The state broadcaster China Central Television claimed that the election was plagued by “unprecedented chaos.” That kind of talk makes sense coming from democracy’s enemies. The danger is when democracies themselves start to believe it.

Darcy Graham equals Duhan van der Merwe's Scotland try-scoring record in a comfortable nine-try victory over Portugal at Murrayfield.

The central contradiction of Donald Trump’s reelection is this: He owes his victory to the fact that millions of voters appear to have seen him as the stability candidate who would usher in a return to pre-COVID normalcy. But he has put forward a second-term agenda that would be far more radical and disruptive than anything he accomplished while in office.

To much of the country, the notion of Trump as the return-to-normal candidate is laughable. His first term involved two impeachments, intense national protests, a flailing pandemic response, and, as a capstone, a violent attempt to defy the results of the 2020 election. But many voters, perhaps most, see things differently in retrospect. In a New York Times poll conducted toward the end of Trump’s first term, just 39 percent of voters said that the country had been better off since he took office; in a version of the poll conducted in April of this year, nearly 50 percent did. An NBC poll conducted weeks before last Tuesday’s election similarly found that a plurality of voters believed that Trump’s policies had helped their families and that Biden’s had hurt them.

In 2016, Trump voters wanted change—disruptive, confrontational change—and believed that their man would deliver it. They described Trump as a “middle finger” to the establishment and “a wrecking ball” aimed at the status quo. Eight years later, voters once again overwhelmingly said they want change, but the kind of change was very different: a reversion to the perceived better times of the first Trump administration, before inflation and a border crisis took hold under Joe Biden. “In my assessment of the dynamics of this election, what I see and hear is an electorate that seems to be craving stability in the economy, in their finances, at the border, in their schools and in the world,” the Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote last year, summarizing the findings of her frequent focus-group discussions. Trump seized on this dynamic, encouraging voters to remember how good they had it when he was in office.  

[Annie Lowrey: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

“Less than four years ago our border was secure, inflation was nowhere to be seen, the world was at peace, and America was strong and respected,” he declared at a rally earlier this year.

Even as Trump promised a return to happier times, however, he campaigned on an agenda that seems bound to generate conflict and chaos. His promise to carry out the “largest deportation effort in American history” would involve law-enforcement raids at workplaces and homes across the country. His plan to purge the federal government of insufficiently loyal bureaucrats would leave agencies struggling to carry out their basic tasks. His proposal to impose heavy tariffs on all imports would raise consumer prices and could trigger a series of retaliatory trade wars. Some of his ideas, such as directing the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents and inviting the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptic to help set federal health policy, depart so flagrantly from established political norms that the consequences are impossible to predict. Given all that, how did Trump win over so many voters who just want things to go back to normal?

One answer is that even Trump’s own voters don’t think he’ll act on many of his proposals. As my colleague David A. Graham wrote last month, “Trump exists in a strange zone where voters hear what he’s saying and then largely discount it, perhaps as a result of his past dissembling, or perhaps because the ideas just seem too extreme to be real.” In one poll taken right before the election, just two-thirds of his supporters said the former president was “serious” about mass deportations; only 38 percent and 21 percent, respectively, said the same about using the military against U.S. citizens and prosecuting his political opponents, both of which Trump has said he would do. When asked why they don’t take Trump’s proposals seriously, voters tend to give the same answer: The media made many similar warnings last time, heading into Trump’s first term, and things never got all that bad. The economy kept humming; the Affordable Care Act never got repealed; the U.S. didn’t get into any major wars.

It’s true that the most dire predictions for the first Trump presidency never materialized. But there’s a very specific reason for that: The institutions and people surrounding Trump prevented him from acting on his worst impulses. The courts struck down more than 70 of Trump’s policies in his first three years alone. The ACA was narrowly saved by a handful of moderate Republicans, most prominently John McCain. Trump’s own vice president refused to negate the 2020 election results. Trump’s staffers repeatedly thwarted his more bizarre ideas and musings. “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job,” a senior national-security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper in 2019.

[Daniel Block: The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning]

In this sense, the “deep state” that Trump blames for his problems deserves some of the credit for his reelection. The limited damage of Trump’s first term reflected an entire apparatus of staffers, civil servants, and institutions that prevented him from doing everything he wanted to do.

Things will likely be different this time. The Supreme Court recently held that presidents are immune from prosecution for anything that qualifies as an “official act,” which it hinted is a broad category. The Republican congressional caucus has mostly purged itself of anyone willing to defy Trump. And Trump’s inner circle is focused on staffing the government with loyalists. The guardrails are largely gone.

“I will govern by a simple motto,” Trump proclaimed in his victory speech last week: “Promises made, promises kept.” Americans often fault politicians for not keeping their word. Swing voters who opted to give Trump a second chance might soon find themselves raising the opposite complaint.

In a recent interview, the former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made an offhanded comment that connected a few dots for me. Ramaswamy was talking with Ezra Klein about the potential for tens of thousands of government workers to lose their job should Donald Trump be reelected. This would be a healthy development, he argued. It could happen, he said, by reinstituting the Trump executive order Schedule F—which stripped certain civil servants of their job protections, allowing them to be fired more easily—and installing a government-efficiency commission to be led by Elon Musk. Ramaswamy said Trump should get rid of 75 percent of federal-government employees “on day one.” Up for debate, he argued, is whether some of those people would eventually be rehired. “That’s not the character of, certainly, what Elon did at Twitter, and I don’t think it’s going to be the character of what the most important part of that project actually looks like, which is shaving down and thinning down the bureaucracy.”

Ramaswamy’s invocation of Twitter is meaningful. In 2022, after acquiring the social network, Musk infamously purged Twitter’s ranks and fired 80 percent of its employees in the first six months, and then made a series of management decisions that ultimately threw the company into further financial disarray. Listening to Ramaswamy speak and hearing the respect in his voice as he cited the centibillionaire’s tenure, it became clear that he sees a blueprint for the Trump administration. Should Musk be appointed as a federal firing czar, it will likely not be because of his electric cars or rockets or internet-beaming satellites: It will be because he acted out the dream of draining the swamp, albeit on a smaller scale. Musk’s purchase of Twitter is not just a Republican success story; it is the template for the MAGA federal government. Even Musk’s mom said as much in a recent interview with Fox News: “He’s going to just get rid of people who are not working, or don’t have a job, or not doing a job well, just like he did on Twitter … He can do it for the government, too.”

Musk’s argument for gutting Twitter was that the company was so overstaffed that it was running out of money and had only “four months to live.” Musk cut so close to the bone that there were genuine concerns among employees I spoke with at the time that the site might crash during big news events, or fall into a state of disrepair. “I am fully convinced that if Musk does what he is saying he will do, it will be an absolute shitshow,” a trust-and-safety engineer at a different tech company told me in 2022. Musk did fire most of the trust-and-safety employees, as well as those in charge of curation and “human rights,” and the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team. The purge of these people in particular delighted some right-wing commentators, who saw Musk’s dismissals as a long-overdue excision of the woke bureaucracy inside the company. “Nothing of value was lost,” one MAGA account tweeted at the news of the firings.

[Read: I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside]

Twitter did not self-destruct as my sources feared it would (though parts of it have, perhaps most memorably when Musk tried to host Spaces events with Trump and with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, only for them to glitch out). Small-scale disruptions aside, the site has mostly functioned during elections, World Cups, Super Bowls, and world-historic news events. But Musk’s cuts have not spared the platform from deep financial hardship. His chaotic managerial strategy for Twitter has been to rebrand the site as X, alienate many of its most important advertisers, institute a dubious paid subscription program, and dabble in AI features in the hopes of someday turning the platform into an “everything app.” The end result has been calamitous for the company’s bottom line. Soon after taking over, ad revenues plummeted 40 percent, and the bleeding hasn’t stopped. According to estimates, last year, X lost about 52 percent of its U.S. advertising revenue. A recent Fidelity report suggested that the company may have lost nearly 80 percent of its value since Musk bought it (for arguably way more than it was worth). If this keeps up, some have speculated that Musk may have to sell some of his Tesla stock to keep the company afloat. Musk’s financiers have also been left with massive loans on their balance sheets in what The Wall Street Journal has called “the worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis.”

Trump and Ramaswamy don’t seem to care about any of this. What matters is that Musk has turned X into a political weapon in service of the MAGA movement. X, as I wrote last week, has become a formidable vector for amplifying far-right accounts and talking points; it is poisoning the information environment with unverified rumors and conspiracy theories about election fraud. The far-right faithful do not care that his platform has occasionally labeled pro–Kamala Harris accounts as spam, temporarily banned journalists, restricted accounts that have tweeted the word cisgender, and complied with foreign-government requests to censor speech. Nor do Republican lawmakers seem to care that Musk is wielding his platform to get Trump elected, even after they spent the better part of a decade outraged that tech platforms were supposedly biased against conservatives. Their silence on Musk’s clear bias coupled with their admiration for his activism suggest that what they really value is the way that Musk was able to seize a popular communication platform and turn it into something that they can control and wield against their political enemies.

This idea is not dissimilar from the vision articulated by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the conservative policy proposal to reshape the federal government in a second Trump administration. Project 2025 is a dense, often radical, and unpopular set of policy proposals that, as my colleague David A. Graham notes, “would dissolve the Education Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, slash Medicare and Medicaid, ban pornography, establish federal abortion restrictions, repeal some child-labor protections, and enable the president to lay off tens of thousands of federal career workers and replace them with political appointees.” Put another way: If Trump were elected and decided to make Project 2025 a reality, his administration would take an existing piece of bureaucratic infrastructure, strip it of many of those who can check its power, and then wield that power to ideological ends and against their political enemies.

The parallels between this element of Project 2025 and Musk’s Twitter are stark. They should also be alarming. The federal government is not a software company, nor should it be run like one. Perhaps there is bloat in our departments and agencies, but civil servants labor over daily technical problems that are crucial to a functioning country—such as census taking, storm tracking, and preparing for pandemics. To simply cut these people with abandon (and replace others with political appointees) could have severe consequences, such as stifling disaster response and increasing the likelihood of corruption.

Consider also the financial dynamic. Last week in a virtual town hall, Musk said that the Trump administration’s second-term agenda—which includes tax cuts, slashing the federal budget, and tariffs on imports, “necessarily involves some temporary hardship,” but would ultimately result in longer-term prosperity. “We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk added. The line is similar to his justification for the layoffs at Twitter, which at the time he called “painful” and necessary so that Twitter could balance its budget. But Musk bought the platform with no idea of how to turn it into a profitable business. His primary interest seems to be prioritizing shitposting and trolling rather than finding advertisers or making good on his ideas to turn X into a WeChat-style commercial app. Musk has never appeared interested in understanding the mechanics of a social network or the complexities of content moderation or even the specifics of the First Amendment. His incuriousness about the thing he ended up in charge of has been exceeded only by his desire to use it as a personal playground and political weapon.

Before Musk officially took over Twitter, the tech oligarch at least feigned an interest in running the company with an eye toward actual governance. “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” he tweeted in 2022. Trump, however, has made no effort to disguise the vindictive goals of his next administration and how he plans, in the words of the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, to “merge the office of the presidency with himself” and “rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies.” In other words, he plans to run the Elon Musk Twitter playbook on the entire country.