The good news for America is our democracy’s not dead.
The bad news? It appears to be in critical condition.
Almost a year and a half into the Trump presidency, our democracy is strapped to the gurney and being rushed down a seemingly endless hall toward the ER.
Whether our democracy survives the surgery will depend on our ability to identify and correct the life-threatening symptoms that have been known to flat line democracies in the
past.
Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer some invaluable insight on just what these symptoms look like in their book “How Democracies Die.”
In the book, Levitsky and Ziblatt analyze 20th century democratic governments that experienced the fatal plunge into autocracy — although some maintained the superficial guise of a democracy.
A key observation they make is, “Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders — presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought
them to power.”
They point out that the erosion of democracies happens when established political parties fail to keep radical and demagogic individuals out of their ranks and ally themselves
with them in the name of political expediency. Such fateful pacts have a tendency to backfire on the establishment parties that once served as the moderating forces of governance.
They cite well known examples such as 1930s Germany, where establishment parties paralyzed by infighting led to Weimar leaders who reluctantly partnered with Adolf Hitler. Germany’s very own establishment politicians played a pivotal role in Hitler’s rise by choosing to do business with him in a relationship they assumed they’d be able to manage. One of the most horrific tyrannies of human history would come to show how wrong that assumption was.
Should a demagogue gain power, the authors note that the crucial question then becomes whether or not a nation’s democratic institutions will be able to act as a check against any antidemocratic moves by the demagogue.
The authors highlight some of history’s more recent examples, such as Hugo Chavez riding a wave of populism to his 1998 election victory in Venezuela. They note how Chavez was particularly adept at using his legal authority to chip away at the country’s laws. The extreme backlashes they prompted from opposition parties ultimately served to make his dangerous push toward authoritarianism easier.
The scorched-earth partisan warfare that has become such a common theme of American politics is something the authors warn against as it creates a polarized and dysfunctional
climate that a would-be authoritarian may eventually exploit.
The authors argue that protecting democracies from the aforementioned pitfalls are unwritten democratic norms, or “guardrails,” that enable a democracy to stay on track.
Using historical examples from both Europe and Latin America, they highlight how a constitutional system that is devoid of certain unwritten norms can eventually send democracy into a tailspin.
Damaging America’s democratic norms is what Trump is trying to do, with his disturbing attacks on the U.S. justice system and threats to jail opposition figures as just a few of the
clearest examples.
Although there is no question Trump is doing serious damage to norms that have long ensured our democracy can function, Levitsky and Ziblatt make an important distinction that Trump is not the sole cause of this erosion of norms, but he is a symptom of a steady erosion that has been decades in the making.
In the book, the authors do a masterful job at describing the racism that has been at the heart of American politics since its founding.
The book gives an especially detailed overview of the evolution of the American political system since Reconstruction, describing how America’s tragic bargain of racial exclusion was made to appease the South following the Civil War.
The authors then take us through the Civil Rights era, the more inclusive democratic system that emerged from it, and the dark transformation of the GOP that followed soon thereafter — a GOP led by figures such as Newt Gingrich who would take up the mantle of scorched earth, all-or nothing political warfare that in time came to poison America with debilitating levels of polarization.
