Democratic Backsliding, Epistemic Degradation, and Ignorance as Governance Resource

1. Introduction: Insult as Diagnosis

Calling Donald Trump an “ignorant brute” sounds like a lapse into polemic. In fact, it is a condensed analytical diagnosis. Trump’s political project is not merely anti-liberal, authoritarian, or populist in the abstract. It is anti-epistemic, hostile to complexity, and actively invested in the production of ignorance as a political resource.

This matters because contemporary democratic backsliding does not proceed only through institutional capture or legal manipulation. It advances through the systematic degradation of public judgment, the erosion of shared standards of truth, and the normalisation of intellectual contempt.

Trump’s political style is not incidental to this process. It is pedagogical. He does not merely exploit ignorance; he models it, rewards it, and demands it as a form of loyalty. In doing so, he accelerates a broader shift in which democratic citizenship is hollowed out, not by repression alone, but by the cultivation of cognitive shortcuts, moral simplifications, and performative aggression.

Democratic backsliding, as political science has repeatedly shown, often preserves elections, courts, and constitutions while undermining the substance of democratic life (Bermeo, 2016; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). Trumpism fits this pattern precisely. What distinguishes it is the extent to which it treats ignorance as governance.

2. Ignorance as Governance Resource

Trump’s ignorance is not simply a lack of knowledge. It is an active refusal of learning, expertise, and institutional memory. His speeches, interviews, and policy interventions consistently reject nuance, procedural reasoning, and evidentiary standards. This is not accidental. It performs strength through simplification.

The CNN report on Stephen Miller’s articulation of a new US “mission statement” (Collinson, 2026) is revealing here. Power is explicitly framed as force, strength, and domination, detached from law, diplomacy, or institutional constraints. The world is reduced to a zero-sum arena in which complexity is weakness and ignorance becomes an asset as it allows power to be exercised without the constraints of established knowledge, institutional memory, or democratic justification, transforming ignorance from a liability into a governing resource

This worldview does not merely tolerate ignorance. It requires it, because sustained attention to facts, history, or interdependence would immediately expose its internal contradictions.

Trump’s foreign policy behaviour, as analysed in The Guardian (Smith, 2026), reinforces this point. Decision-making is driven less by coherent ideology than by impulse, personal grievance, and performative dominance. Expertise is sidelined, institutions are bypassed, and policy coherence is treated as optional.

What emerges is not chaos, but a recognisable authoritarian pattern: the concentration of judgement in the leader, paired with the degradation of all alternative sources of authority.

This is ignorance as a governance resource.

3. Democratic Backsliding and Epistemic Collapse

Democratic backsliding is increasingly understood as an incremental process that operates within legality (Bermeo, 2016). However, the appearance of legality alone does not explain why citizens accept, tolerate, or even celebrate democratic erosion. The missing link is epistemic.

Trumpism thrives in conditions of epistemic collapse, where shared criteria for truth, expertise, and accountability no longer hold. Trump does not merely lie. He destabilises the very idea that truth is knowable or relevant. Courts are “rigged,” journalists are “enemies,” scientists are “political,” and bureaucrats are “deep state operatives.” This is not persuasion. It is epistemic sabotage.

Once this sabotage succeeds, democratic mechanisms continue to exist, but they lose their meaning. Elections become expressions of identity rather than judgment. Institutions persist, but their authority is hollowed out. This is classic backsliding, but with an epistemic core.

Here, Trump differs from earlier authoritarian figures. He does not promise a coherent alternative order. He offers aggressive simplification as a substitute for understanding. Ignorance becomes a moral stance. Knowing less is framed as seeing more.

4. The Pedagogy of Brutality

Trump’s political communication functions as a pedagogy. It teaches citizens how to relate to power, knowledge, and each other. The lesson is brutally simple:

• Complexity is suspect.
• Expertise is elitist.
• Empathy is weakness.
• Aggression is ‘authenticity’.

This pedagogy reshapes democratic subjectivity. Citizens are encouraged not to deliberate, but to perform allegiance. Not to evaluate policy, but to mirror tone. Not to understand institutions, but to despise them.

The result is a public sphere stripped of the conditions necessary for democratic judgment. As Habermas warned decades ago, democracy depends on a shared communicative infrastructure. Trumpism systematically dismantles that infrastructure while claiming to speak “for the people”.

This is where the insult in the title becomes analytically useful. Trump does not simply behave like a brute. He teaches brutality as a civic virtue.

5. Ignorance and Authoritarian Internationalism

The consequences extend beyond domestic politics. Trump’s worldview aligns closely with a broader shift away from rule-based internationalism toward raw power politics. Mark Carney’s Davos speech (CBC, 2026) explicitly diagnoses this rupture, describing a world in which “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”.

Carney’s invocation of Václav Havel’s concept of “living within a lie” is particularly relevant. Trumpism thrives on precisely this dynamic. Citizens are encouraged to believe in narratives they privately know to be false, because public compliance becomes allegiance to the group. Over time, performance replaces conviction, and the lie stabilises itself.

Trump’s ignorance thus aligns with a global authoritarian trend in which true politics is replaced by dominance. The epistemic dimension is central. You cannot defend a rules-based order, or even a minimally coherent foreign policy, if ignorance is elevated to principle.

6. Why He Wants You to Be One Too

The most important claim in this essay is not that Trump is ignorant, but that his project depends on producing ignorance in others.

Democratic backsliding requires mass participation. Not active repression, but passive abdication. Citizens must stop asking difficult questions. They must accept simplified narratives. They must outsource judgment to the authority.

Trump’s repeated attacks on universities, journalists, civil servants, and planners are not random. They target the institutional sites where complexity is produced and defended. This is entirely consistent with broader authoritarian strategies identified in the literature: hollowing out intermediary institutions while maintaining the appearance of popular rule (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).

Ignorance here is not an unfortunate by-product. It is a governing condition.

7. Conclusion: Against the Normalisation of Stupidity

It is tempting to dismiss Trump as an anomaly, a vulgar interruption in an otherwise stable democratic trajectory. That temptation is itself a symptom of democratic fatigue. Trump is better understood as an accelerant. He intensifies trends already present: anti-intellectualism, market supremacy, epistemic fragmentation, and authoritarian simplification.

Calling him an “ignorant brute” is not name-calling. It is a warning. When ignorance becomes power, democracy becomes theatre. When brutality becomes authenticity, citizenship becomes performance. And when leaders demand ignorance as loyalty, democratic backsliding no longer needs tanks or coups. It proceeds through laughter, exhaustion, and the quiet withdrawal of judgment.

Trump does not merely want to rule. He wants a confused and stunned public incapable of ruling itself.

That is the danger. And it is structural, not personal.

References

Bermeo, N. (2016). On Democratic Backsliding. Journal of Democracy, 27(1), 5-19. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2016.0012

CBC. (2026). Read Mark Carney’s full speech on middlepowers navigating a rapidly changing world. Canadian Broadcasting Company. Retrieved 21 Jan 2026 from https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-carney-speech-davos-rules-based-order-9.7053350

Collinson, S. (2026, 21 Jan 2026). Trump’s new US mission statement: Strength, force, power. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/06/politics/trump-greenland-venezuela-colombia-miller-analysis

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How Democracies Die. Crown.

Smith, D. (2026, 21 Jan 2026). Self-interest over ideology as disparate inner circleshapes Trump foreign policy. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/10/trump-worldview-inner-circle-personal-whim