How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

Although Ted Cruz claimed there was a long “historical precedent” for changing the size of the Supreme Court, that precedent died shortly after the Civil War.

The Democrats represented the New Deal coalition of liberals, organized labor, second- and third-generation Catholic immigrants, and African Americans, but they also represented conservative whites in the South. For its part, the GOP ranged from liberals in the Northeast to conservatives in the Midwest and West. Evangelical Christians belonged to both parties, with slightly more of them supporting the Democrats—so neither party could be charged with being “Godless.”

But the sorting of the American electorate into liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans cannot alone explain the depth of partisan hostility that has emerged in America.

Voters are ideologically sorted in Britain, Germany, and Sweden, but in none of these countries do we see the kind of partisan hatred we now see in America.

As the political scientist Alan Abramowitz points out, in the 1950s, married white Christians were the overwhelming majority—nearly 80 percent—of American voters, divided more or less equally between the two parties.

In his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian Richard Hofstadter described the phenomenon of “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 leads to a style of politics that is “overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic.”

In Chapter 4, 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.

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

President Trump also tried to punish or purge agencies that acted with independence.

President Trump also attacked judges who ruled against him.

The move reinforced fears that the president would eventually pardon himself and his inner circle—something that was reportedly explored by his lawyers.

The Trump administration also trampled, inevitably, on the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), an independent watchdog agency that, though lacking legal teeth, had been respected by previous administrations.

Alternately harassed and ignored by the White House, Shaub resigned, leaving behind what journalist Ryan Lizza called a “broken” OGE.

Trump did not replace Comey with a loyalist, largely because such a move was vetoed by key Senate Republicans. Likewise, Senate Republicans resisted Trump’s efforts to replace Attorney General Sessions.

In a February 2017 tweet, he called the media the “enemy of the American people,” a term that, critics noted, mimicked one used by Stalin and Mao.

Although Trump dropped the libel issue, he continued his threats.

There was one area in which the Trump administration went beyond threats to try to use the machinery of government to punish critics.

Unlike the Venezuelan president, however, President Trump was blocked by the courts.

Although President Trump has waged a war of words against the media and other critics, those words have not (yet) led to action. No journalists have been arrested, and no media outlets have altered their coverage due to pressure from the government.

Senate Republicans did eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, clearing the way for Neil Gorsuch’s ascent to the Court, but they rejected the idea of doing away with it entirely.

Because the minority share of the electorate is growing, these changes favor the Democrats, a perception that was reinforced by Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, in which minority turnout rates were unusually high.

Scholars have just begun to evaluate the impact of voter ID laws, and most studies have found only a modest effect on turnout.

The risk, as one study shows, is that the number of mistakes—because of the existence of many people with the same name and birthdate—will vastly exceed the number of illegal registrations that are uncovered.

Although contemporary voter-restriction efforts are nowhere near as far-reaching as those undertaken by southern Democrats in the late nineteenth century, they are nevertheless significant.

Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity did not carry out any concrete reforms in 2017, and its clumsy request for voter information was widely rebuffed by the states.

But the president has talked more than he has acted, and his most notorious threats have not been realized. Troubling antidemocratic initiatives, including packing the FBI with loyalists and blocking the Mueller investigation, were derailed by Republican opposition and his own bumbling.

Overall, then, President Trump repeatedly scraped up against the guardrails, like a reckless driver, but he did not break through them. Despite clear causes for concern, little actual backsliding occurred in 2017. We did not cross the line into authoritarianism.

The backsliding of democracy is often gradual, its effects unfolding slowly over time.

Democratic institutions depend crucially on the willingness of governing parties to defend them—even against their own leaders. The failure of Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme and the fall of Nixon were made possible, in part, when key members of the president’s own party—Democrats in Roosevelt’s case and Republicans in the case of Nixon—decided to stand up and oppose him.

Active loyalists do not merely support the president but publicly defend even his most controversial moves. Passive loyalists retreat from public view when scandals erupt but still vote with the president. Critical loyalists try, in a sense, to have it both ways: They may publicly distance themselves from the president’s worst behavior, but they do not take any action (for example, voting in Congress) that will weaken, much less bring down, the president.

Republicans who adopt this strategy may back the president on many issues, from judicial appointments to tax and health care reform, but draw a line at behavior they consider dangerous.

They work with the president wherever possible while at the same time taking steps to ensure that he does not abuse power, allowing the president to remain in office but, they would hope, constraining him.

But after the president fired James Comey in May 2017, some GOP senators moved toward containment, making it clear that they would not approve a Trump loyalist to succeed him. Republican senators also worked to ensure that an independent investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election would go forward. A few of them pushed quietly for the Justice Department to name a special counsel, and many of them embraced Robert Mueller’s appointment. When reports emerged that the White House was exploring ways of removing Mueller, and when some Trump loyalists called for Mueller’s removal, important Republican senators, including Susan Collins, Bob Corker, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain, came out in opposition. And when President Trump leaned toward sacking Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, having recused himself, could not fire Mueller, GOP senators jumped to Sessions’s defense. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley said he would not schedule hearings for a replacement if Sessions was fired. Although Senators Graham, McCain, and Corker hardly joined the opposition (each voted with Trump at least 85 percent of the time), they took important steps to contain the president.

When an elected leader enjoys, say, a 70 percent approval rating, critics jump on the bandwagon, media coverage softens, judges grow more reluctant to rule against the government, and even rival politicians, worried that strident opposition will leave them isolated, tend to keep their heads down. By contrast, when the government’s approval rating is low, media and opposition grow more brazen, judges become emboldened to stand up to the president, and allies begin to dissent.

The higher President Trump’s approval rating, the more dangerous he is.

We fear that if Trump were to confront a war or terrorist attack, he would exploit this crisis fully—using it to attack political opponents and restrict freedoms Americans take for granted. In our view, this scenario represents the greatest danger facing American democracy today.

Presidential norm breaking is not inherently bad. Many violations are innocuous.

Norm breaking can also be democratizing: In the 1840 presidential election, William Henry Harrison broke tradition by going out and campaigning among voters. The previous norm had been for candidates to avoid campaigning, preserving a Cincinnatus-like fiction that they harbored no personal ambition for power—but limiting voters’ ability to get to know them.

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.”

Because societal values change over time, a degree of presidential norm breaking is inevitable—even desirable.

Government officials are not technically required to divest themselves of their holdings, but only to recuse themselves from decisions that affect their interests.

False charges of fraud can undermine public confidence in elections—and when citizens do not trust the electoral process, they often lose faith in democracy itself.

The idea that presidents should tell the truth in public is uncontroversial in American politics.

Given this norm, politicians typically avoid lying by changing the topic of debate, reframing difficult questions, or only partly answering them.

Citizens have a basic right to information in a democracy. Without credible information about what our elected leaders do, we cannot effectively exercise our right to vote. When the president of the United States lies to the public, our access to credible information is jeopardized, and trust in government is eroded (how could it not be?). When citizens do not believe their elected leaders, the foundations of representative democracy weaken. The value of elections is diminished when citizens have no faith in the leaders they elect.

In 1993, New York’s Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former social scientist, made an incisive observation: Humans have a limited ability to cope with people behaving in ways that depart from shared standards. 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. Moynihan applied this insight, controversially, to America’s growing social tolerance for single-parent families, high murder rates, and mental illness.

Even if Donald Trump does not break the hard guardrails of our constitutional democracy, he has increased the likelihood that a future president will.

We have experienced political catastrophe before, when regional and partisan enmities so divided the nation that it collapsed into civil war. Our constitutional system recovered, and Republican and Democratic leaders developed new norms and practices that would undergird more than a century of political stability. But that stability came at the price of racial exclusion and authoritarian single-party rule in the South.

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 although European democracies face many problems, from weak economies to EU skepticism to anti-immigrant backlash, there is little evidence in any of them of the kind of fundamental erosion of norms we have seen in the United States.

Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Obama presidency, U.S. governments maintained a broadly prodemocratic foreign policy.