Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion Why American democracy will survive

Students panicked after Trump’s win, but our research on autocracy points to democracy’s resilience.

6 min
Rain falls around the U.S. Capitol, viewed from the banks of the Potomac River near Alexandria on Aug. 8. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
By
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Eva Bellin is the Myra and Robert Kraft Professor of Arab Politics at Brandeis University. Kurt Weyland is the Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

In the middle of the night after the election, one of our students dashed off an email, panicking about the future of American democracy. We quickly responded, reassuring her that although things did not look good, the United States was unlikely to follow the path of Turkey, Hungary, Tunisia or Venezuela. The following day, a good number of other students expressed the same concern, as did a fair number of our colleagues.