The Trump administration’s tariffs are, by every reasonable account, an economic catastrophe in the making. So why are they happening?

One explanation is that this is simply democracy at work. President Donald Trump campaigned on doing more or less exactly what he’s just done, and the voting public elected him. So here we are.

That’s at best a partial story. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to see Trump’s tariffs as a symptom of democratic decay — of America transitioning into a kind of strange hybrid system that combines both authoritarian and democratic features.

Were America’s democracy functioning properly, Trump wouldn’t have the power to impose such broad tariffs unilaterally. Congress, not the presidency, has the constitutional authority to raise taxes — and tariffs are, of course, a tax on imports.

Yet the basic design of the American system has broken down, allowing the president to usurp far more authority than is healthy. In many policy areas, the presidency functions less like a democratic chief executive who operates under constraint and more like an elected dictatorship.

And historically, dictatorships — elected or otherwise — suffer from a fatal flaw: they have no ability to stop the people at the top from acting on their policy whims and, in the process, producing national disasters. This tendency is why democracy tends to produce superior policy outcomes over the long run; why America, and not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, won the 20th century.

The tariffs, in short, show the true stakes of democratic decline. It’s not just a matter of abstract principle, but the difference between stability and disaster.

America’s democratic decline caused the tariffs

When Donald Trump and Elon Musk began laying waste to the federal government in February, the political scientist Adam Przeworski declared himself “at a loss.” Though Przeworski is one of the world’s most eminent scholars of comparative democracy, author of many defining pieces in the........

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