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The Trump administration also mounted efforts to sideline key players in the political
system. President Trump’s rhetorical attacks on critics in the media are an example.
37 percent of African Americans and 27 percent of Latinos reported not possessing a valid driver’s license, compared to 16 percent of whites.
11 percent of American citizens (twenty-one million eligible voters) did not possess government-issued photo IDs, and that among African American citizens, the figure rose to 25 percent.
Democracy’s fate during the remainder of Trump’s presidency will depend on several factors. The first is the behavior of Republican leaders.
The higher President Trump’s approval rating, the more dangerous he is. His
Judges are notoriously reluctant to block presidential power grabs in the midst of crises, when national security is perceived to be at risk. According
that is precisely what leaders such as Fujimori, Putin, and Erdoğan did.
1901, a routine White House press release was issued on behalf of new president Theodore Roosevelt headlined, “Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee, Alabama, dined with the President last evening.” While prominent black political leaders had visited the White House before, a dinner with a leading African American political figure was, as one historian has described it, a violation of “the prevailing social etiquette of white domination.” The response was immediate and vicious. One newspaper described it as “the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United
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47 percent of Republicans believed that Trump won the popular vote, compared to 40 percent who believed Hillary Clinton won. In other words, about half of self-identified Republicans said they believe that American elections are massively rigged.
The number of democracies rose dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s, peaked around the year 2005, and has remained steady ever since. Backsliders make headlines and capture our attention, but for every Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela there is a Colombia, Sri Lanka, or Tunisia—countries that have grown more democratic over the last decade. The vast majority of the world’s democracies—from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru to Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Romania to Ghana, India, South Korea, and South Africa—remain intact. And
The soft guardrails of American democracy have been weakening for decades; simply removing President Trump will not miraculously restore them.
The third, and in our view, most likely, post-Trump future is one marked by polarization, more departures from unwritten political conventions, and increasing institutional warfare—in other words, democracy without solid guardrails. President Trump and Trumpism may well fail in this scenario, but that failure would do little to narrow the divide between parties or reverse the decline in mutual toleration and forbearance.
North Carolina offers a window into what politics without guardrails looks like—and a possible glimpse into America’s future. When partisan rivals become enemies, political competition descends into warfare, and our institutions turn into weapons. The result is a system hovering constantly on the brink of crisis.
This grim scenario highlights a central lesson of this book: When American democracy has worked, it has relied upon two norms that we often take for granted—mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance. Treating rivals as legitimate contenders for power and underutilizing one’s institutional prerogatives in the spirit of fair play are not written into the American Constitution. Yet without them, our constitutional checks and balances will not operate as we expect them to.
The genius of the first generation of America’s political leaders was not that they created foolproof institutions, but that, in addition to designing very good institutions, they—gradually and with difficulty—established a set of shared beliefs and practices that helped make those institutions work.
that way.” In our view, the idea that Democrats should “fight like Republicans” is misguided. First of all, evidence from other countries suggests that such a strategy often plays directly into the hands of authoritarians.
Where institutional channels exist, opposition groups should use them.
brought to its knees by obstructionism, or if President Trump were impeached without a strong bipartisan consensus, the effect would be to reinforce—and perhaps hasten—the dynamics of partisan antipathy and norm erosion that helped bring Trump to power to begin with.
Where possible, opposition should center on Congress, the courts, and, of course, elections.
If Trump is defeated via democratic institutions, it will strengthen those institutions.
black-led nonviolent protest fortified the national civil rights agenda in Washington and broadened public support for that agenda. By contrast, violent protest led to a decline in white support and may have tipped the 1968 election from Humphrey to Nixon.
The most effective coalitions are those that bring together groups with dissimilar—even opposing—views on many issues. They are built not among friends but among adversaries.
Business leaders may not be natural allies of Democratic activists, but they have good reasons to oppose an unstable and rule-breaking administration.
This does not mean abandoning the causes that matter to us. It means temporarily overlooking disagreements in order to find common moral ground.
When we agree with our political rivals at least some of the time, we are less likely to view them as mortal enemies.
the fundamental problem facing American democracy remains extreme partisan division—one fueled not just by policy differences but by deeper sources of resentment, including racial and religious differences. America’s great polarization preceded the Trump presidency, and it is very likely to endure beyond it.
This usually happens when political leaders from across the spectrum have stared into the abyss and realized that if they do not find a way of addressing polarization, democracy will die. Often, it is only when politicians suffer the trauma of violent dictatorship, as they did in Chile, or even civil war, as in Spain, that the stakes truly become clear.
The alternative to learning to cooperate despite underlying polarization is to overcome that polarization. In the United States, political scientists have proposed an array of electoral reforms—an end to gerrymandering, open primaries, obligatory voting, alternative rules for electing members of
Congress, to name just ...
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We think it would be more valuable to focus on two underlying forces driving American polarization: racial and religious realignment and growing economic inequality.
First of all, the GOP must rebuild its own establishment. This means regaining leadership control in four key areas: finance, grassroots organization, messaging, and candidate selection. Only if the party leadership can free itself from the clutches of outside donors and right-wing media can it go about transforming itself.
Republicans must marginalize extremist elements; they must build a more diverse electoral constituency, such that the party no longer depends so heavily on its shrinking white Christian base; and they must find ways to win elections without appealing to white nationalism,
Resentment fuels polarization. One way of tackling our deepening partisan divide, then, would be to genuinely address the bread-and-butter concerns of long-neglected segments of the population—no matter their ethnicity.
Social policies that benefit everyone—Social Security and Medicare are prime examples—could help diminish resentment, build bridges across large swaths of the American electorate, and lock into place social support for more durable policies to reduce income inequality—without providing the raw materials for racially motivated backlash.
Comprehensive health insurance is a prominent example. Other examples include a much more aggressive raising of the minimum wage, or a universal basic income—a
Still another example is “family policy,” or programs that provide paid leave for parents, subsidized day care for children with working parents, and prekindergarten education for nearly everyone.
America’s expenditures on families is currently a third of the advanced-country average, putting us on par with Mexico and Turkey.
Not only do these sorts of policies have the potential to reduce the economic inequality that fuels resentment and polarization, but they could contribute to the formation of a broad, durable coalition that realigns American politics.
Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic. That is our challenge.
