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This paper addresses Trump's failed self-coup, its authoritarian backwash, and threats to democracy. It analyzes his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which contributed to his 2020 election loss and deepened the political polarization that led to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. The essay also discusses how the forty-year acceleration of economic inequality and sociopolitical de-democratization generated a legitimacy crisis of the hegemonic, neoliberal regime that opened way for Trumpist ethnoracial nationalism. The Trump presidency and pandemic increased the intensity of the political-economic contradictions and transparency of the attenuated relationship of democracy and capitalism. In the consequent "interregnum," fundamental threats to democratic electoral institutions persist, yet a clear, realistic vision of an alternative democratic regime and the political bloc to bring it into being have yet to be forged. The fate of American democracy rides on overcoming the remarkable denial and normalization of the Trump coup attempt and on forging new safeguards for electoral institutions. Preventing a recurrence, however, requires a progressive transformation of Trumpism's de-democratized seedbed – neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of whether the social impacts, especially increased socioeconomic inequality, and formalization of democracy generated by the neoliberal economization of politics is an important albeit not singular driver of resurgent ethnocracial populism and illiberal democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unplanned, exponential economic growth has been the liberal standard for evaluating economies, societies and effectiveness of political leaders and for addressing problems of all sorts. In the later twentieth century, the American conservative movement revived market liberalism to restore growth after the long post- World War II boom ended. The neoliberal policy regime stressed the growth imperative to the exclusion of other social ends, which were alleged to undermine innovation and growth. Neoliberalism conflates growth with development, precludes sustainable growth, and trends toward plutocratic dedemocratization. This immoderate policy regime denies the reality of the commons and disregards the interdependence of nature and culture and individual and society. This paper addresses crisis tendencies, which have been exacerbated by neoliberal policies, and concludes with a departure point for an alternative. John Dewey's naturalism stressed the need to secure the commons, biotic and social, and to balance individualism with community, efficiency with social justice, and markets with planning to cultivate uncoerced cooperation and preserve democracy, in the face of crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since democracy is a social construction, historical periods, such as Fordism and globalization, shape the ways in which democracy is conceptualized and practiced. While High Fordism engendered a form of democracy based on sophisticated social control, it also contemplated the enhancement of subordinate groups' substantive participation in decision making processes and the economic life. This form of democracy was changed by the end of Fordism and the emergence of globalization. Under globalization, the practice of democracy encounters the crisis of the social state and political representation, the emergence of transnational state forms largely free from direct control from their constituencies and hypermobility. These new conditions have been heralded as ideal for the growth of democracy by neo-liberal theories. Reflexive Modernization and Critical Theory accounts sharply reject this optimistic view. For them, the end of the Fordist era ushered in a crisis of democracy. For Reflexive Modernization the path to substantive forms of democracy goes through the reaffirmation of individuality over class in a society centered on increasingly deregulated markets.