How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

by Steven Levitsky

Survey evidence suggests that many Tea Party Republicans share the perception that the country they grew up in is “slipping away, threatened by the rapidly changing face of what they believe is the ‘real’ America.” To quote the title of sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s recent book, they perceive themselves to be “strangers in their own land.”

Essentially too many POCs

we presented three strategies by which elected authoritarians seek to consolidate power: capturing the referees, sidelining the key players, and rewriting the rules to tilt the playing field against opponents.

During his first week in office, President Trump summoned FBI Director James Comey to a one-on-one dinner in the White House in which, according to Comey, the president asked for a pledge of loyalty.

The Office of Government Ethics reported receiving 39,105 public complaints involving Trump administration conflicts of interest between October 1, 2016, and March 31, 2017, a massive increase over the same period in 2008–2009 (when President Obama took office), when just 733 complaints were recorded.

PolitiFact classified 69 percent of his public statements as “mostly false” (21 percent), “false” (33 percent), or “pants on fire” (15 percent). Only 17 percent were coded as “true” or “mostly true.”

When unwritten rules are violated over and over, Moynihan observed, societies have a tendency to “define deviancy down”—to shift the standard. What was once seen as abnormal becomes normal.

Republican leaders, having paid a heavy price for their association with Trump, might end their flirtation with extremist politics.

Aged like milk

Building coalitions that extend beyond our natural allies is difficult. It requires a willingness to set aside, for the moment, issues we care deeply about. If progressives make positions on issues such as abortion rights or single-payer health care a “litmus test” for coalition membership, the chances for building a coalition that includes evangelicals and Republican business executives will be nil. We must lengthen our time horizons, swallow hard, and make tough concessions. This does not mean abandoning the causes that matter to us. It means temporarily overlooking disagreements in order to find common moral ground.