Since Donald Trump’s election victory, the Democratic Party and numerous pundits have been arguing about why Kamala Harris lost. Some have argued that Harris failed to emphasize progressive economic policies. Others have insisted that she should have more explicitly disavowed the left. Perhaps most convincingly, writers like Financial Times columnist and data reporter John Burn-Murdoch have noted that this has been an unfavorable time for incumbents globally, from the United Kingdom to Japan, as an electorate angry with the economic dislocations of recent years has rushed to toss out sitting governments that they blame for inflation and other ills.
Whatever the direct cause of Trump’s victory, though, one thing is clear: Millions of people in the United States see Trump as a reasonable choice for president. This is disturbing, since Trump has repeatedly and forcefully attacked democracy and regularly presents himself as an authoritarian strongman. Why aren’t voters taking the fact that they just actively chose to live under an authoritarian regime more seriously?
Maybe it is because, in the places where they spend 40 or more hours a week, they already are.
Many American workplaces are hierarchical. Decision-making is opaque. Mechanisms of accountability are either nonexistent or weak and deceptive. Yet, at the same time, many workers are enthusiastically told how democratic their workplaces are, much to their frustration. Workplace culture in the U.S. teaches employees that arbitrary rule is normal and that democracy is a deception and a lie. In that context, Trump can seem like an acceptable alternative to the status quo.
Trump’s authoritarianism has not alienated his most ardent supporters or his voters. In 2020, he organized a violent, unsuccessful coup attempt to cling to power after losing the election to Joe Biden. He has already promised to pardon those who rioted and stormed the Capitol on his behalf. He’s vowed to be a “dictator” on “day one” of his presidency. (When asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity if he had dictatorial designs, he responded, “Except for day one. After that, I’m not a dictator.”) His core promise for his second term has been to deport some 30 million undocumented people using “bloody” militarized door-to-door raids. Robert O. Paxton, probably the world’s leading scholar of fascism, has said that Trump fits the definition of a fascist leader. His promise to burn down constitutional safeguards and govern without checks and balances appears to be a feature, not a bug. Trump’s tough-guy hatred of rules is, for his partisans, part of his appeal.
In Ilana’s book “The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned To Be Citizens in the Office,” she argues that people don’t just know how to govern and be governed by other people, they have to learn this — and many Americans learn this in the workplace. To research this book, Ilana interviewed more than 200 people about their experience of work during the COVID-19 pandemic. She talked to people in a wide range of jobs: people who worked for large corporations, family-owned businesses, nonprofit organizations, employee-owned associations, federal and local government and people who were self-employed.
During the pandemic, the U.S. government, led by Trump, did not provide clear mandates or instructions on workplace safety or workplace responses to COVID-19. This was in part because Trump did not want to acknowledge that the pandemic was a serious danger, because he feared it would hurt his reelection chances. It was also in part because early COVID-19 cases were concentrated in Democratic-run states like New York, and Trump hoped that Democratic governors would be held responsible for the resulting chaos and deaths.
With few or conflicting guidelines, workplaces were often left to fend for themselves, trying to decide whether employees should work from home, which employees should work from home, and how masking and social distancing were to be implemented in the workplace. Employees and employers alike were forced to think more often about how and why decisions were being made, and think about this more directly and more clearly than they do during normal times. People reflected on how workplace processes had to change. But they also thought more deeply about how the pandemic revealed and highlighted problems with the way workplace decisions had always been made.
Even in normal times, these decisions could affect people’s lives in profound ways. During the pandemic, the stakes were much higher. Workers’ lives and the lives of their loved ones could be at risk if employers made poor decisions. For example, Noah interviewed a Safeway meat cutter for Mic.com in 2021. His employer demanded that he return to work in January, before vaccines were available. Like many people during the pandemic who realized that their employers considered profits more important than their safety, he became part of the “great resignation” and quit.
The meat cutter felt he had only two choices: obey or quit. This is an example of how the logic of employment contracts has shaped what we think our options are. Authority, decision-making and even who gets to be part of a workplace and in what capacity all are based upon contracts. This is not the robust social contract of the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, guaranteeing liberty and autonomy in a polity. It’s a much narrower agreement, which mandates obedience in return for compensation, with few provisions for negotiation — unless perhaps you’re one of the roughly 11% of U.S. workers who belong to a union.
The workplace, then, presents a contradiction for American workers. American culture places a high value on freedom and individuality. At the same time, American workplaces are relatively unregulated hierarchies compared to most peer countries. The U.S. is virtually the only wealthy democracy without guaranteed paid time off, for example. The Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond has written that America has a “low-road capitalism” of “union-busting … poverty wages, gig jobs, and normalized insecurity.”
The contradiction between rhetorical freedom and actual subordination leads to a great deal of anxiety around authority. People in the U.S. put a lot of energy into thinking about, and figuring out, when it is OK to tell someone else what to do, which became very clear during the pandemic. Retail workers Ilana interviewed struggled to figure out how best to tell customers that they needed to mask in the store. Workers didn’t know how to tell their coworkers that they needed to be more cautious. Workplaces, where lines of authority are clearer and commands are supposed to be made and obeyed, can become particularly intense sites for feelings of empowerment, disempowerment, frustration, betrayal and fantasy.
One major source of frustration and anger that many interviewees discussed with Ilana was committees. Committees, or working groups, are often presented as a kind of democratic workplace mechanism, allowing at least some employees to provide management with feedback and to shape decisions.
The problem, though, according to many Ilana spoke to, is that committees do not tend to fulfill this democratic promise. People felt that they were not listened to, and that decision-makers would not even explain why they had disregarded feedback. Decisions seemed to be arbitrary and incomprehensible. Why did workers have to return to the office? Why was masking required for some and not for others? Why was masking required for employees but not for customers?
Workers were consulted haphazardly, their feedback was ignored and then decisions were imposed by fiat. The opinions of some groups seemed to matter more than others, and it often felt like the wishes of consumers mattered far more than the health of workers. Teachers in many school districts would explain that they were surveyed about returning to school weeks after parents were surveyed, and sometimes even on the very day that a decision to return to in-person classes was made. The pretense of democracy (during but also before the pandemic) was experienced as intensely alienating and frustrating. Employees felt like they were being lied to and manipulated.
In these circumstances, open authoritarianism can feel like a relief. If you are going to be told what to do and can’t discuss or offer feedback that someone will actually listen to, maybe it is better not to even have the pretense of democracy.
Open authoritarianism is, of course, what Trump offers. Like many employees, Trump is contemptuous of decision-making by committee. Even before he began his second term, he was arguing that he should be allowed to make recess Cabinet appointments to circumvent the Senate confirmation process. And, of course, on his reality show The Apprentice, Trump was marketed as a decisive boss who made firm, abrupt decisions about hiring and firing, all on his own. The buck, supposedly, stopped with him, for better or worse.
As on television, so in the White House: Trump is good at acting as if he has the answers, and providing simple explanations for his decisions, which can feel satisfying to his followers even if those decisions are nonsense or based on lies.
During the 2024 campaign, for example, Trump blamed virtually everything on undocumented immigrants. He said they were the cause of high crime, gun violence, insufficient disaster relief (“They stole the FEMA money … so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season”), high housing prices (“[immigration] is driving housing costs through the roof”), low wages and struggling schools. He then offered a single cure: mass deportations.
Virtually all of these claims were lies. A 2024 study funded by the National Institute of Justice, looking at Texas data, for example, found that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.” Moreover, Trump’s solutions are counterproductive: Mass deportations would be hugely expensive and cause substantial industry disruption. But the decision-making process feels clear, straightforward and transparent. Trump sees a single problem and has a single solution. The decision-making process creates a sense of empowerment familiar from workplaces, where the boss says “do that” and it gets done, without any of the shilly-shallying around committees and consensus.
The philosopher George Lakoff has argued that this top-down, simple problem/simple solution decision-making process resembles the ruling style of strict fathers in conservative families. But it also mirrors workplace dynamics, in which people have little say in governance. Trump’s decisions are (supposedly) clear; lines of authority are (supposedly) direct.
Those who support him may have little control over their own workplaces (either because they are employees or because they can’t control their workers in the full-blown way they wish). But in identifying with Trump, they can fantasize that they are the strong boss who gets stuff done. That can be more satisfying than investing in a democratic process that, in their practical workplace experience, is an ineffectual sham.
People’s experience of workplace democracy can be disempowering and alienating when there is no feedback for why certain decisions were made and when people are consulted but ignored. Even when workplaces are structured to seem more democratic, in practice they don’t always feel democratic to people. And authoritarian bosses can still seem to respond to feedback and change their minds for clear reasons when they realize that their decisions are very unpopular. When the only kind of leader who seems responsive when people raise concerns also rules like a tin-pot dictatorial boss, people will gravitate to a tin-pot dictator.
If we want a culture and a polity that trusts democracy, we need a culture in which democracy is validated in the place where most of us spend the bulk of our time — work.
How could we boost democratic decision-making at work? One obvious answer is to empower unions. Union voters did in fact reject Trump soundly, according to Fox News exit polls, voting for Harris 55% to 43% (about the same margin as they voted for Biden over Trump in 2020). Another is to work at an employee-owned association, where the workplace is organized to take employees’ views seriously.
Addressing the limitations of committee decision-making and opacity could help as well. Employers who care about democracy need to listen to employee input and, just as importantly, need to explain why that input did or did not affect final decisions. People can generally accept that their preferences aren’t always going to win out in the workplace. But they want to feel like they have been heard, and they want to understand how decisions are made. Thoughtful engagement and communication are crucial to accountability and to democracy.
Of course, authoritarians like Trump often do all they can to reduce democracy in the workplace. Trump has promised to fire large numbers of career civil service employees and replace them with loyalists and political apparatchiks. In his first term, he took steps to make union elections take longer and generally tried to make it harder to unionize. He also suspended union elections early in the pandemic, weakening workers’ rights just as safety on the job was most threatened.
The erosion of workplace democracy elevates authoritarian leaders who attack workplace democracy, and so on, creating a vicious cycle. Reversing that requires electoral victories. But it also requires a commitment to real democracy on the job.
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