In the 1930s, the United States stood on the edge of democratic breakdown. The Great Depression had gutted public faith in capitalism. Fascism was ascendant across Europe. And here at home, homegrown demagogues were rising fast. Figures like Father Charles Coughlin, Huey Long, and Charles Lindbergh tapped into popular resentment, broadcast conspiracy theories, and preached salvation through authoritarian strength. Each in his own way exploited economic despair and cultural fear, offering Americans a vision of order grounded in blame. But none of them ever reached the presidency. The center held.
That was due in large part to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Whatever his flaws—and they were many—Roosevelt understood power, timing, and the architecture of democracy. He didn’t just win elections; he offered the American people an alternative to despair that wasn’t built on scapegoats or slogans. He used the office of the presidency not to dominate but to reform, not to divide but to rebuild. Roosevelt met the demagogues of his day with a combination of political cunning and moral purpose. He absorbed the energy of popular discontent and redirected it into institutional solutions. He offered tangible relief, imperfect but real, and by doing so, preserved the legitimacy of American democracy at a time when the authoritarian path was beginning to look attractive to many.
Fast forward nearly a century, and another celebrity populist—less articulate, less capable, more erratic—succeeded where Roosevelt’s opponents failed. Donald Trump rose to power on grievance, branded himself as a savior of “forgotten Americans,” and transformed the Republican Party into a vehicle for personal loyalty and cultural backlash. He denigrated democratic norms, encouraged political violence, and attempted to overturn an election. Trump, like Long and Coughlin before him, used new media, conspiracy, and resentment to build a movement. The difference was not in the demagogue himself. The difference was that Trump wasn’t facing an FDR. More crucially, he wasn’t facing a system strong enough to stop him.
Roosevelt’s enemies were charismatic, but also self-destructive. Coughlin descended into overt antisemitism and fascist sympathies and was eventually silenced by the Catholic Church. Long was assassinated before he could seriously challenge Roosevelt on the national stage. Lindbergh destroyed his own credibility by praising Nazi Germany, accepting a medal from Hermann Göring, and accusing American Jews of dragging the country into war. Roosevelt, for all his patrician distance, understood the threat each man posed—and met it not with repression but with strategy. He maintained support from the working class without veering into nativism or demagoguery. He offered real programs, redefined government’s role in the economy, and carefully defended the legitimacy of liberal democracy without inflaming reaction.
More than that, Roosevelt operated within a system that still worked. Political parties still served as gatekeepers, filtering out extremists. The press, while partisan, still operated within a shared informational framework and retained public trust. The American public had not yet been disillusioned by decades of elite failure, nor drowned in the noise of fragmented media. Democracy still had deep institutional roots. Roosevelt had his enemies, but he also had a functioning government, a relatively coherent public sphere, and the ability to channel discontent constructively.
Trump, by contrast, succeeded not because he was strong, but because the system was weak. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue in How Democracies Die, Trump did not emerge from nowhere. He was the product of decades of institutional decay and democratic erosion. By the time he descended that golden escalator in 2015, the immune system of American democracy was already compromised. The two core norms that Levitsky and Ziblatt identify as pillars of democratic stability—mutual toleration and institutional forbearance—had already been eroding. Republicans and Democrats no longer saw each other as legitimate rivals, but as existential threats. Partisan loyalty outweighed democratic commitment. Political actors had grown accustomed to using every tool at their disposal—filibusters, gerrymandering, court-packing—to win at any cost.
Parties, which once functioned as gatekeepers, had lost control of their nominating processes. As Levitsky and Ziblatt point out, Trump’s capture of the Republican nomination in 2016 was made possible by primary reforms that left the party vulnerable to populist insurgency. No smoke-filled room of party elders could block him. And once he won, the Republican establishment—cowardly, opportunistic, or both—mostly fell in line. The press, weakened by decades of corporate consolidation and now fractured by digital disinformation, was incapable of countering Trump’s propaganda machine. Social media created echo chambers and rewarded outrage. The shared civic reality that Roosevelt could once address through fireside chats had been replaced by a storm of conspiracy and performative grievance.
Trump’s rise, then, was not a violation of the rules—it was the culmination of their collapse. He didn’t invent the forces he rode to power. He exploited a system already broken, a democracy already in decline. The norms had already eroded. The center had already begun to give way. He simply pressed where it was weakest.
Roosevelt, facing equally dangerous men, led from within a functioning center. Trump was the symptom of its failure.
Huey Long once claimed he would let the country suffer under Roosevelt for four years, then come back to save it. Trump didn’t wait. He capitalized on America’s suffering, cynicism, and division—and rode it straight into the Oval Office. And unlike Long, there was no Roosevelt waiting on the other end to absorb that discontent and offer an alternative. There was no civic center strong enough to contain him.
The lesson is not that demagogues always fail. It’s that democracies only survive when people, institutions, and norms rise to stop them. Roosevelt understood this. He led within the system, but he also strengthened it. He offered not just hope, but competence, clarity, and a vision of government that was both moral and effective. Trump, by contrast, took the fragments of our civic life and shattered them further.
Levitsky and Ziblatt remind us that democracies rarely die by coup. More often, they die slowly, from within, as norms erode and institutions buckle. That process was well underway long before Trump arrived. What he did was expose just how fragile our commitments had become.
The center didn’t hold—not because Trump was too strong, but because the foundations had already crumbled. If we want to prevent the next collapse, we have to rebuild those foundations—deliberately, structurally, and urgently. That means restoring democratic norms, defending truth, strengthening institutions, and offering real answers to real problems. It means ensuring that the next demagogues, however flawed, once again find themselves facing a center that knows how to stand.
Roosevelt’s era proved that democracy can survive despair—but only if it is defended. This era reminds us that without that defense, it can fall. We still have a choice. But we are running out of time.
