President Trump’s ideology leans toward authoritarianism, not democracy.

In the late 18th century, the French writer de Tracy coined the term “ideology” to refer to the science of ideas. Ideology most often refers to a set of ideas or beliefs held by a group. America has a national ideology called democracy. Our Founders personally committed themselves to the practice of our ideology when they wrote and approved our Constitution. Abraham Lincoln expressed our nation’s ideology in one of the greatest speeches in our nation’s history, the Gettysburg Address. He succinctly described it as a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” In times of crisis, ideology needs to be expressed, and Lincoln did that.

Nevertheless, as Harvard scholars Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have pointed out, our democracy has experienced an important new beginning in the practice of electorate expansion. They also point out that American democracy lags behind other democracies in some respects because too often a minority of the population rules over a majority. For example, while most democracies have abolished their electoral system, the United States still maintains an electoral system, even though it allows a minority of the population to override the will of the majority. . There are many other improvements that need to be made, some of which are pretty bad.