There’s a phrase you hear a lot these days: “defend democracy.” You’ll see it on placards, news tickers, protest flyers. It’s the shorthand for a moral good, like justice or peace. But after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, with the full backing of tens of millions of voters, you have to ask: defend it from whom?
Larry Alan Busk’s Democracy in Spite of the Demos was recommended, and it’s not an easy read, but it is a necessary one. It tells a story most political theorists are afraid to tell: that our deep faith in “the people” might be misplaced. That slogans like “democracy now” or “give people a voice” are not always the solution. In some cases, they’re the problem.
This is a book written before Trump’s second term, before Project 2025 began reshaping the state into a weapon of revenge. But it might as well have been written for this moment. Busk asks the question no one else dares to: what if the people want fascism?
He doesn’t mean that as an insult. He means it as a challenge. Political thinkers, from Hannah Arendt to Chantal Mouffe, have built careers around the idea that democracy is a good in itself. That it’s about participation, pluralism, open debate. But when faced with mass support for racism, climate denial, or authoritarian strongmen, they fudge the issue. They say “that’s not real democracy.” Busk’s reply is simple and devastating: yes it is. You just don’t like what the people said.
What makes the book stand out is its refusal to sentimentalise the demos. Busk doesn’t fall back on elite rule or technocratic fixes. He reaches instead for the Frankfurt School. Adorno, Marcuse, the hard-nosed critics of 20th-century ideology. Their insight was that people aren’t simply misled. They’re shaped, by capitalism, by media, by structures of power. There’s nothing irrational about it. Public opinion obeys the logic of spectacle, not reason.
Take climate change. The vast majority of Britons accept it’s happening, but only two-thirds believe humans are responsible, and nearly a quarter think the whole thing’s exaggerated. That’s not ignorance; it’s ideology. The fossil economy doesn’t need outright denial anymore, just enough doubt to delay action. Or take the January 6th rioters in the US. They weren’t “hijacking” democracy. They were acting out its darker possibilities: mass mobilisation in the name of a lie.
This is where Busk is most clear: you can’t build a political theory on blind faith in the people. You have to reckon with what the people are, what they believe, and why. That means dropping the comforting illusion that democratic participation is always good. Sometimes, it reproduces the worst of what already exists.
What Busk gives us is a bracing dose of political realism. Something the left could use more of. He cuts through the liberal fluff and the populist daydreams alike. The question he keeps circling is this: what if we stopped treating the people as a moral ideal and started looking at them for what they are. Shaped by history, soaked in ideology, sometimes dangerous?
In an age where Trump can be re-elected with open calls for retribution, where immigration policy and administration picks are dictated by trolls, and where democracy itself becomes a vehicle for authoritarianism, this question isn’t academic.
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