Americans have voted for Donald Trump for the second time, knowing well what he stands for and how he is. Not only did they know their candidate and what his presidency meant, but they also seemed to want more of the man who was convicted. The most impressive democracy chose a man who was charged with conspiring against the rights of the citizens. As The New York Times rightly wrote on Friday, post-election, “he is not a fluke who somehow sneaked into the White House in a quirky, one-off electoral college win eight years ago.” A burning question that comes to mind, therefore, is: If a country that was seen as a viable template of liberal democracy and a superpower committed to the world has elected a felon, is liberal democracy a misnomer?

Although writing off liberal democracy is a bit too early, one can’t help but think about the United States’ unique system in which economic liberalism collaborates with a two-party model and how, over the years, it has eroded the essence of democracy—mainly by denying political choices and options to the American electorate. In addition, it has increased the influence of the wealthy one percent by allowing them to fund and thereby control political parties and elections. When the Greeks started the idea of democracy, they envisioned a rule of the people where people had the power to govern themselves and where the people themselves mandated political decisions.

The American system is increasingly becoming a prisoner of a syndicate that has been controlling the political and economic landscapes of the US for quite some time now. The growing hyper-partisan polarisation that divides the country, even if mostly around election periods, cannot be good for its democratic well-being. After elections, the country painfully goes through several bouts of political gridlocks as partisan interests preside over the common good, making it difficult for the government to pass legislation. Once the hallmark of American democracy, political checks and balances have considerably weakened under the two-party model as partisan interests have overshadowed them.

For many, voting has receded to “crude signals”, and voting for a third party is a wasted protest vote. In addition, election manipulation and executive overreach are two growing problems in the American system that have been cited in several political literature lately. They explicitly explain how the system instituted laws to reduce voters’ access to the ballot, politicise election administration and control electoral competition through extreme gerrymandering.

For a long time, the two-party model was justified by the “median voter theory”, according to which, in a two-party system, both parties tend to converge in the middle to appeal to the median voter, which would then maintain political moderation deemed crucial for any liberal democratic polity. This election seems to have falsified this theory because Trump’s stance was anything but moderate. Likewise, news channels are increasingly talking about how the Democratic Party was rebuked for ignoring the suffering in Gaza, which The New York Times called “this era’s most progressive cause”. The Democratic Party seems to have missed the median voter’s psyche in this election. In a country where the executive power has grown significantly, threatening civil service independence and judicial oversight, Trump’s victory is worrisome.

Moving on to American liberalism, a 2019 book by Branko Milanovic called it a “Liberal meritocratic capitalism” where the rich tend to earn higher returns on their assets than the less wealthy, which they pass on to their offspring, resulting in a steep increase in inequality where social mobility decreases, and the wealthy increasingly exercise control over the state. Milanovic writes that “those who own the most capital, attend the best schools, and thereby earn the most, begin to think of themselves as meriting their good fortune by virtue of their superior talents and ideas” and not because of the capital that they hold which grants them access to impressive institutions and degrees. The book further states that the “real source of the political influence of the wealthy is not that they have better ideas about how to organise a society, but that they have more to spend on acquiring power, therefore the influence of the rich comes from funding political parties and election campaigns.”

Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, and the popular newspaper The Washington Post, both owned by billionaire supporters of Trump—Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—helped shape the pre-election political psyche. The two-party system is easier for that one percent to influence and control as it limits representation and diversity. This, in turn, wards off the messiness of varied ideas and opinions and the instability that multi-party democracy typically brings.

Our two largest political parties, the CPN-UML and Nepali Congress (NC) are enthusiastically propagating for the two-party model of late. If this continues unabated, Nepal is at the risk of becoming an oligarchy. Through the narrative of “bidhi ko shaashan,” autocratisation of the system can be easily achieved. As someone rightly said, “The electoral road to the breakdown of democracy is dangerously deceptive.” Many times, governments’ efforts to subdue democracy are approved by the legislature and are therefore “legal”. Elected autocrats can maintain a façade of democracy while parallelly eviscerating it, something that seems to be going on in India and, at times, even in Nepal.

Democracy is a rational system dependent on rational voters. Rationality cannot be maintained without information. Uninformed voters can unwittingly vote for oligarchs through democracy. Likewise, uninformed legislators can vote for “reforms” that mimic the first-world template of democracy without realising what is at stake. According to Freedom House, the US's democracy score is the lowest among developed democracies. Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France boast higher scores than the US. This is something that needs to be factored into the conversations on political reforms.