How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

Forbearance means “patient self-control; restraint and tolerance,” or “the action of restraining from exercising a legal right.”

For our purposes, institutional forbearance can be thought of as avoiding actions that, while respecting the letter of the law, obviously violate its spirit.

“constitutional hardball”: playing by the rules but pushing against their bounds and “playing for keeps.” It is a form of institutional combat aimed at permanently defeating one’s partisan rivals—and not caring whether the democratic game continues.

Acts of forbearance—for example, a Republican-controlled Senate approving a Democratic president’s Supreme Court pick—will reinforce each party’s belief that the other side is tolerable, promoting a virtuous circle.

But the opposite can also occur. The erosion of mutual toleration may motivate politicians to deploy their institutional powers as broadly as they can get away with. When parties view one another as mortal enemies, the stakes of political competition heighten dramatically.

Losing ceases to be a routine and accepted part of the political process and instead become...

When the perceived cost of losing is sufficiently high, politicians will be tempte...

“cycle of escalating constitutional brinksmanship.”

On the one hand, Congress and the courts must oversee and, when necessary, check the power of the president. They must be democracy’s watchdogs. On the other, Congress and the courts must allow the government to operate. This is where forbearance comes in. For a presidential democracy to succeed, institutions that are muscular enough to check the president must routinely underuse that power.

Under divided government, where legislative or judicial institutions are in the hands of the opposition, the risk is constitutional hardball, in which the opposition deploys its institutional prerogatives as far as it can extend them—defunding the government, blocking all presidential judicial appointments, and perhaps even voting to remove the president. In

only twenty-three manifest filibusters occurred during the entire nineteenth century. A modest increase in filibuster use in the early twentieth century gave rise to the 1917 cloture rule, by which two-thirds (now three-fifths) of the Senate could vote to end debate. But even then, only thirty filibusters occurred between 1880 and 1917, according to political scientists Sarah Binder and Steven Smith. Filibuster use remained low through the late 1960s—in fact, between 1917 and 1959, the Senate saw an average of only one per congressional term.

the 150-year span between 1866 and 2016, the Senate never once prevented the president from filling a Supreme Court seat. On seventy-four occasions during this period, presidents attempted to fill Court vacancies prior to the election of their successor. And on all seventy-four occasions—though not always on the first try—they were allowed to do so.

Constitutional scholar Mark Tushnet describes the norm: “The House of Representatives should not aggressively carry out an impeachment unless…there is a reasonable probability that the impeachment will result in the target’s removal from office.” Since removal requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate, this means that impeachment should have at least some bipartisan support. After Johnson’s impeachment in 1868, there were no serious congressional efforts to impeach the president until the Nixon scandal more than a century later.

Roosevelt’s reliance on unilateral action posed a serious challenge to traditional checks and balances. His use of executive orders—more than 3,000 during his presidency, averaging more than 300 a year—was unmatched at the time or since.

Roosevelt’s presidency never slid into autocracy, however. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that many of Roosevelt’s executive excesses triggered bipartisan resistance.

McCarthy, a demagogue who loved the attention, began repeating the speech, realizing he had hit upon a political gold mine. Democrats were outraged. Moderate Republicans were alarmed, but conservative Republicans saw the potential political benefits and supported McCarthy.

Eisenhower initially resisted joint appearances with McCarthy, but at the insistence of the Republican National Committee, the two men campaigned together in Wisconsin a month before the election.

When Nixon asked Goldwater how many votes he had, Goldwater reportedly replied, “Ten at most, maybe less.” Two days later, Nixon resigned. Due in part to bipartisan cooperation, Congress and the courts had checked the abuse of presidential power.

The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion. The stability of the period between the end of Reconstruction and the 1980s was rooted in an original sin: the Compromise of 1877 and its aftermath, which permitted the de-democratization of the South and the consolidation of Jim Crow.

Racial exclusion contributed directly to the

partisan civility and cooperation that came to characterize twentieth-century American politics. The “solid South” e...

Southern Democrats’ ideological proximity to conservative Republicans reduced polarization and facilitated bipartisanship. But

As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common.

Gingrich and his team distributed memos to Republican candidates instructing them to use certain negative words to describe Democrats, including pathetic, sick, bizarre, betray, antiflag, antifamily, and traitors. It was the beginning of a seismic shift in American politics.

DeLay brought routine norm breaking into the twenty-first century.

Just prior to Bush’s inauguration, DeLay gave the president-elect a reality check, reportedly telling him: “We don’t work with Democrats. There’ll be none of that uniter-divider stuff.”

President Bush governed hard to the right, abandoning all pretense of bipartisanship on the counsel of his political advisor Karl Rove, who had concluded that the electorate was so polarized that Republicans could win by mobilizing their own base rather than seeking independent voters.

congressional Democrats eschewed bipartisan cooperation in favor of obstruction. Harry Reid and other Senate leaders used Senate rules to slow down or block Republican legislation and broke with precedent by routinely filibustering

Bush proposals they opposed.

Senate Democrats also began to stray from the norm of forbearance in the area of advice and consent, obstructing an unprecedented number of President Bush’s judicial nominees, either by rejecting them outright...

the challenges to Obama’s legitimacy were different in two important ways. First, they were not confined to the fringes, but rather accepted widely by Republican voters.

For the first time in many decades, top Republican figures—including one who would soon be president—had overtly abandoned norms of mutual toleration, goaded by a fringe that was no longer fringe. By the end of the Obama presidency, many Republicans embraced the view that their Democratic rivals were anti-American or posed a threat to the American way of life.

Such extremism encourages politicians to abandon forbearance. If Barack Obama is a “threat to the rule of law,” as Senator Ted Cruz claimed, then it made sense to block his judicial appointments by any means necessary.

percent under President Obama. The Democrats responded with norm breaking of their own. In November 2013, Senate Democrats voted to eliminate the filibuster for most presidential nominations, including federal judicial (but not Supreme Court) nominees,

President Obama also responded with norm breaking—in the form of unilateral executive actions.

March 2015 brought another unprecedented event, when Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and forty-six other Republican senators wrote an open letter to Iran’s leaders insisting that President Obama had no authority to negotiate a deal over Iran’s nuclear program.

a sitting president. A third norm-breaking moment was the Senate’s refusal to take up President Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

why was most of the norm breaking being done by the Republican Party? For one, the changing media landscape had a stronger impact on the Republican Party. Republican voters rely more heavily on partisan media outlets than do Democrats.

When California Republican representative Darrell Issa declared that the GOP could accomplish more of its agenda if it were willing to work, on occasion, with President Obama, Rush Limbaugh forced him to publicly repudiate his claim and pledge loyalty to the obstructionist agenda.

Hard-line positions were reinforced by well-funded conservative interest groups. In the late 1990s, organizations such as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the Club for Growth became leading voices in the GOP, pulling Republican politicians toward more ideologically inflexible positions.

the party’s core white Protestant voters are not just any constituency—for nearly two centuries, they comprised the majority of the U.S. electorate and were politically, economically, and culturally dominant in American society. Now, again, white Protestants are a minority of the electorate—and declining. And they have hunkered down in the Republican Party.

“status anxiety,” which, he believed, is most likely to emerge when groups’ social status, identity, and sense of belonging are perceived to be

under existential threat. This

casting Democrats as not real Americans is a frontal assault on mutual toleration.

Republican politicians from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump learned that in a polarized society, treating rivals as enemies can be useful—and that the pursuit of politics as warfare can be appealing to those who fear they have much to lose.

Like Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, America’s new president began his tenure by launching blistering rhetorical attacks on his opponents. He

Trump administration’s first hundred days. Of news reports with a clear tone, the study found, 80 percent were negative—much higher than under Clinton (60 percent), George W. Bush (57 percent), and

Obama (41 percent).

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. Trump attempted all three of these strategies.

President Trump demonstrated striking hostility toward the referees—law enforcement, intelligence, ethics agencies, and the courts.