The danger in the United States, in Przeworski’s view, is the possibility that the Trump administration will use the power of the presidency to undermine the procedures and institutions essential to the operation of democracy:

That the incumbent administration would intimidate hostile media and create a propaganda machine of its own, that it would politicize the security agencies, that it would harass political opponents, that it would use state power to reward sympathetic private firms, that it would selectively enforce laws, that it would provoke foreign conflicts to monger fear, that it would rig elections.

Przeworski believes that

such a scenario would not be unprecedented. The United States has a long history of waves of political repression: the “Red Scare” of 1917-20, the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, the McCarthy period, the Nixon presidency.

Along similar lines, Anna Grzymala-Busse, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my inquiry:

My big worry is not simply that formal institutions have been eroded, but that the informal norms that underpin them are even more important and even more fragile. Norms of transparency, conflict of interest, civil discourse, respect for the opposition and freedom of the press, and equal treatment of citizens are all consistently undermined, and without these the formal institutions become brittle.

Trump, in Grzymala-Busse’s assessment, “articulates a classic populist message that we see in Europe: the elite establishment is a collusive cartel uninterested in the problems of ‘the people,’” and, she continued, he has begun to follow the path of European populist leaders:

Much of Trump’s language and actions are also familiar: there is a standard authoritarian populist template, developed in Hungary and faithfully followed in Poland and in Turkey: first, go after the courts, then the media, then the civil society, churches, universities.

The attacks on the courts, media and universities

are not simply the ravings of a lunatic, but an established strategy for undermining democratic oversight and discrediting the opposition.

Margaret Levi, another political scientist at Stanford, wrote me that she was

not sure Trumpism per se will survive Trump. But I do think it is the current embodiment of a right-wing populism that is likely to remain the basis of internal opposition within the Republican Party or be the basis of a split in the Party, leading to two new parties.

Some form of right-wing populism, Levi argued,

is already a competitive force in general elections. And it is once again a force in competitive elections in democracies world-wide.

She added that there was no guarantee that right-wing populism “will not transform into the fascist and Nazi forms.”

Unless the Democratic Party in this country and moderate parties in the rest of the world “find a way to address the populace’s underlying economic insecurity and deterioration in the perceived (and actual in many cases) standard of living, the possibility for irreparable damage does exist,” Levi wrote:

Otherwise, both confidence in democratic government, measured by the extent it is a reliable provider of needed goods and services, including domestic and international security, and its legitimacy, the normative belief in its right to rule, will decline significantly and dangerously — perhaps even to the point of no return.

While white identitarianism, anger over immigration and economic dislocation are often cited as causes of the emergence of right-wing populism, another argument is that there is a growing segment of the electorate that is alienated from cultural norms they see as imposed on them by a ruling elite — a repressive elite; politically correct and socially remote.

In a research paper published in the current issue of the Journal of Democracy, “Eroding Norms and Democratic Deconsolidation,” Paul Howe, a political scientist at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, describes the increasing size of the nihilistic segment of the American electorate.

This constituency of the disengaged and profoundly alienated provides a base of support in the United States and Europe for populist leaders who, in Howe’s view, fit the Trump mold:

They compete in the democratic process, yet with words and actions that convey disregard for core democratic principles such as the rule of law, minority rights, and checks and balances on executive power. At the same time, a number of these individuals are prone to brazen, dubious, and sometimes aggressive behaviors that suggest outsized egos, scant respect for others, and a degree of contempt for social norms.

Looking at data from World Values Surveys in recent decades, Howe finds that in the United States,

the rise of antidemocratic sentiment has less to do with dysfunction in the political arena than with corrosive changes that have reshaped the social and cultural landscape more generally.

These corrosive changes include an increase in the number of citizens who say it is O.K. to

claim government benefits to which one is not entitled; take a bribe in the course of one’s duties; cheat on taxes; and avoid a public-transit fare.

When answers to these questions were correlated with political attitudes, Howe found that

indifferent feelings toward democracy are interlaced with a broader set of self-interested and antisocial attitudes that are present among a substantial minority of the U.S. population.

He then argues that the

broader constellation of transgressive and antisocial attitudes among a subsection of the public is an important force behind rising disregard for democratic norms.

Clearly, a sense of isolation, actual isolation, the breakdown of the family, the rise of opiates, the disappearance of associations, a nation “bowling alone” and “coming apart,” have all played a role in creating an antisocial constituency. This very constituency has produced some of the strongest Trump supporters and backing for the so-called alt-right. As Howe writes:

Those with a high-school education or less are substantially more likely than those with a college degree to express skeptical views about democracy as well as tolerance of various antisocial behaviors, by variances that range from 5 to 30 percentage points across the questions.

Few people have looked at these issues as long and as hard as Ron Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. In “The Danger of Deconsolidation: How Much Should We Worry?” (published alongside the Foa-Mounk essay in the July 2016 issue of the Journal of Democracy) Inglehart raises this question:

What makes the United States so distinctive? One reason may be that in recent years U.S. democracy has become appallingly dysfunctional. It suffers from 1) virtual paralysis at the top, as exemplified by the willingness of Congress to shut down the federal government, regardless of the damage to the country’s credit, after failing to get its way via normal procedures in a budget standoff with the White House; 2) massive increases in income inequality — greater than those found in any other established democracy, with most of the population’s real income declining during the past few decades despite substantial economic growth; and 3) the disproportionate and growing political influence of billionaires, as money plays a greater role in U.S. politics than in almost any other democracy.

The economic boom in the post-World War II years “produced rising security and an intergenerational shift toward self-expression values,” Inglehart wrote, but “in recent decades most advanced industrial societies have experienced economic stagnation, rising unemployment coupled with massive immigration, and the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”

The resulting “high levels of existential insecurity,” Inglehart argues,

are conducive to authoritarianism, xenophobia, and rejection of new cultural norms. The economic stagnation and rising inequality of recent decades have led to increasing support for authoritarian, xenophobic political candidates, from Marine le Pen in France to Donald Trump in the United States.

While the contemporary explosion of right-wing populism is a recent phenomenon, its roots go deeper, best captured by Daniel Bell in his 1972 essay “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” which foreshadowed the Trump era.

American capitalism, Bell wrote,

has lost its traditional legitimacy which was based on a moral system of reward, rooted in a Protestant sanctification of work. It has substituted in its place a hedonism which promises a material ease and luxury, yet shies away from all the historic implications which a “voluptuary system” — and all its social permissiveness and libertinism — implies.

The conflict between “the principles of economics and economizing” and a culture “rooted in a return to instinctual modes” has produced a “disjunction which is the historic crisis of Western society. This cultural contradiction, in the long run, is the deepest challenge to the society.”