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The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture. America’s efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization. And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracies.
Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers.
Building on Linz’s work, we have developed a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media. Table 1 shows how to assess politicians
“History will teach us,” Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the great number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
The rise of parties in the early 1800s changed the way our electoral system worked. Instead of electing local notables as delegates to the Electoral College, as the founders had envisioned, each state began to elect party loyalists. Electors became party agents, which meant that the Electoral College surrendered its gatekeeping authority to the parties. The parties have retained it ever since.
One was a dramatic increase in the availability of outside money, accelerated (though hardly caused) by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling.
The other major factor diminishing the power of traditional gatekeepers was the explosion of alternative media, particularly cable news and social media.
Levels of voter fraud in the United States are very low, and because elections are administered by state and local governments, it is effectively impossible to coordinate national-level voting fraud.
Trump was precisely the kind of figure that had haunted Hamilton and other founders when they created the American presidency.
This is because a demagogue’s initial rise to power tends to polarize society, creating a climate of panic, hostility, and mutual distrust.
Polarization can destroy democratic norms.
Progressive pastor William Barber, leader of the Moral Mondays movement, described the new districts as “apartheid voting districts.”
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 a few—that might mitigate partisan enmity in America.
Seeking to diminish minority groups’ influence in the party—and we cannot emphasize this strongly enough—is the wrong way to reduce polarization. It would repeat some of our country’s most shameful mistakes. The founding of the American republic left racial domination intact, which eventually led to the Civil War.
As our colleague Danielle Allen writes: The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economies that empower all have been achieved.
This is America’s great challenge. We cannot retreat from it.
Means-tested programs create the perception among many middle-class citizens that only poor people benefit from social policy. And because race and poverty have historically overlapped in the United States, these policies can be racially stigmatizing.
America’s expenditures on families is currently a third of the advanced-country average, putting us on par with Mexico and Turkey.
