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May 20 - May 24, 2025
What we had just lived through—a surge in politically motivated violence; threats against election workers; efforts to make it harder for people to vote; a campaign by the president to overturn the results of an election—was democratic backsliding.
A multiracial democracy is a political system with regular, free, and fair elections in which adult citizens of all ethnic groups possess the right to vote and basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and association.
A 2018 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that African American and Latino citizens were three times as likely as whites to be told they lacked the proper identification to vote and twice as likely to be told—incorrectly—that their names were not listed on voter rolls.
Could a young Black man cross state lines with a semiautomatic rifle, walk unmolested by police into a protest, fire into a crowd, kill two people, and go free?
Public opinion research shows that for the first time in U.S. history a majority of Americans now embrace ethnic diversity and racial equality—the two key pillars of multiracial democracy.
America also differs in another way: extremist forces actually ascended to national power, whereas in Europe they have been largely confined to the opposition or, in a few cases, coalition governments.
But only in America did such extremists actually win control of the national government and assault democratic institutions.
The threat facing American democracy was never simply a strongman with a cultlike following. The problems are more endemic than that. In fact, they are deeply rooted in our politics. Until we address those underlying problems, our democracy will remain vulnerable.
Designed in a pre-democratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them. Institutions that empower partisan minorities can become instruments of minority rule. And they are especially dangerous when they are in the hands of extremist or antidemocratic partisan minorities.
Electoral majorities often cannot win power, and when they win, they often cannot govern. The more imminent threat facing us today, then, is minority rule. By steering the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule.
Our institutions will not save our democracy. We will have to save it ourselves.
This is how democracy should work. As the political scientist Adam Przeworski memorably put it, “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.” Losing hurts, but in a democracy it is inevitable. And when it happens, parties must do what the Peronists did: accept defeat, go home, and then figure out how to win a majority in the next election.
Once parties learn to lose, democracy can take root.
How does a democracy get to where Germany is today, where the transfer of power is drama-free? What enables the norm of accepting defeat to take hold? Two conditions help. First, parties are most likely to accept defeat when they believe they stand a reasonable chance of winning again in the future.
A second condition that helps parties accept defeat is the belief that losing power will not bring catastrophe—that a change of government will not threaten the lives, livelihoods, or most cherished principles of the outgoing party and its constituents. Elections often feel like high-stakes battles, but if the stakes are too high, and losing parties fear they will lose everything, they will be reluctant to relinquish power. In other words, it is an outsized fear of losing that turns parties against democracy.
Such fears often arise during periods of far-reaching social change.
“fear of falling” can be a powerful force. When a political party represents a group that perceives itself to be losing ground, it often radicalizes. With their constituents’ way of life seemingly at stake, party leaders feel pressure to win at any cost. Losing is no longer acceptable.
Fear is often what drives the turn to authoritarianism. Fear of losing political power and, perhaps more important, fear of losing one’s dominant status in society.
Politicians who are committed to democracy, or what the political scientist Juan Linz called loyal democrats, must always do three basic things. First, they must respect the outcome of free and fair elections, win or lose. This means consistently and unhesitatingly accepting defeat. Second, democrats must unambiguously reject violence (or the threat of violence) as a means of achieving political goals.
But when semi-loyalists—tucked away in the hallways of power—lend a hand, openly authoritarian forces become much more dangerous. Democracies get into trouble when mainstream parties tolerate, condone, or protect authoritarian extremists—when they become authoritarian enablers. Indeed, throughout history, cooperation between authoritarians and seemingly respectable semi-loyal democrats has been a recipe for democratic breakdown.
A litmus test is how politicians respond to violent or antidemocratic behavior on their own flank.
First, they expel antidemocratic extremists from their own ranks, even at the cost of antagonizing the party base.
they fear dividing the party, and ultimately losing votes.
Second, loyal democrats sever all ties—public and private—with allied groups that engage in antidemocratic behavior.
Finally, when necessary, loyal democrats join forces with rival pro-democratic parties to isolate and defeat antidemocratic extremists.
History teaches us that when mainstream politicians take the more expedient path of semi-loyalty, tolerating or condoning antidemocratic extremists, the extremists are often strengthened, and a seemingly solid democracy can collapse upon itself.
This is the banality of authoritarianism. Many of the politicians who preside over a democracy’s collapse are just ambitious careerists trying to stay in office or perhaps win a higher one. They do not oppose democracy out of deep-seated principle but are merely indifferent to it. They tolerate or condone antidemocratic extremism because it is the path of least resistance. These politicians often tell themselves they are just doing what’s necessary to get ahead. But, ultimately, they become indispensable partners in democracy’s demise.
But they can also undermine it another way: through constitutional hardball—behavior that broadly conforms to the letter of the law but deliberately undermines its spirit.
If a behavior is not explicitly prohibited, that behavior—no matter how inappropriate—often becomes permissible.
Denying the president’s ability to fill a Supreme Court vacancy clearly violated the spirit of the Constitution.
Some rules are designed to be used sparingly, or only under exceptional circumstances.
Finally, politicians may design new laws that, while seemingly impartial, are crafted to target opponents.
The catalyst was the emergence of the Populist Party, which appealed to disaffected poor white tenant farmers and sharecroppers who felt neglected by the wealthy merchant class that dominated the Democratic Party.
In 1898, a group of prominent Democrats, including the state party chairman, Furnifold Simmons, the gubernatorial hopeful Charles Brantley Aycock, and the Raleigh News & Observer publisher, Josephus Daniels, launched what became a violent crusade to restore white rule.
As one Democratic leader acknowledged at a rally, “We cannot outnumber the negroes. And so we must either outcheat, outcount, or outshoot them.”
On November 10, they launched a violent coup. In one of the most brutal domestic terrorist attacks in American history, a mob of at least five hundred white supremacists, armed and dressed in their paramilitary red shirts, marched through the streets of Wilmington, shooting bystanders, attacking Black churches, and burning the city’s only Black-owned newspaper to the ground.
The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) established birthright citizenship and formal equality before the law, giving rise to contemporary rights of due process and equal protection. And the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited restrictions on the right to vote on the basis of race.
Although nearly all Republicans favored suffrage protections for Blacks in the South, many of them were less inclined to grant similar protections to immigrants in their own states: Irish Catholic immigrants in the case of northeastern Republicans; Chinese immigrants for western Republicans. Senator Henry W. Corbett of Oregon argued that extending the right to vote to Black men was “blessed” by the “Great Ruler of the universe,” but that the same did not apply to Chinese immigrants. In short, the coalition for a genuinely multiracial democracy was fragile.
Other forms of exclusion, including in the North, remained legal.
These laws were unprecedented in that they gave the federal government the authority to intervene in states to protect basic civil and voting rights—an essential component of multiracial democracy.
Overall, nearly two thousand Black Americans had been murdered in acts of terror during the ten years that followed the end of the Civil War, a rate of killing roughly equivalent to that of Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s.
Even in South Carolina, where the notorious Eight Box Law (a system in which voters had to deposit ballots in separate boxes for each office and all miscast ballots were disqualified, effectively disenfranchising illiterates) already restricted suffrage, Democrats continued to worry.
As Democrats in southern state legislatures devised their schemes, they learned from one another (and from many northern states, such as Connecticut and Massachusetts, where literacy tests targeting Irish immigrants were already in place).
For example, the local registrars who administered literacy tests, and were almost invariably (white) Democratic appointees, judged illiterate Blacks more harshly than whites.
The South succumbed to nearly a century of authoritarianism. Black disenfranchisement undermined political competition and locked in place single-party rule across the South. In every post-Confederate state except Tennessee, the Democratic Party held uninterrupted power for more than seventy years. In five states, the Democrats were in power continuously for more than a century. In the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, “Democracy died save in the hearts of black folk.”
But the Republican Party has done more than walk away from voting rights. It has, in the words of the sober-minded British publication The Economist, “walked away from democracy.”
Paradoxically, the roots of the GOP’s transformation lie in its reaction to the very multiracial democracy it helped construct.
Operation Dixie,
Eventually, the Republicans would become what the former GOP strategist Stuart Stevens calls America’s “de facto White Party.” Indeed, the GOP won the largest share of the white vote in every presidential election after 1964.
Multiple issues triggered evangelical leaders’ entry into politics, including opposition to gay rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
