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But in much of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, U.S. governments used diplomatic pressure, economic assistance, and other foreign policy tools to oppose authoritarianism and press for democratization during the post–Cold War era. The 1990–2015 period was easily the most democratic quarter century in world history—partly because Western powers broadly supported democracy.
Measures to reengineer the electorate would likely be accompanied by elimination of the filibuster and other rules that protect Senate minorities, so that Republicans could impose their agenda even with narrow majorities.
This resistance could lead to escalating confrontation and even violent conflict, which, in turn, could bring heightened police repression and private vigilantism—in the name of “law and order.”
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.
Although the racially gerrymandered districts, the 2013 voter law, and the reform of the election boards were later struck down by the courts, their passage revealed a Republican Party willing to leverage its full power to cripple its political adversaries.
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.
When French thinker Baron de Montesquieu pioneered the notion of separation of powers in his 1748 work The Spirit of the Laws, he worried little about what we today call norms. Montesquieu believed the hard architecture of political institutions might be enough to constrain overreaching power—that constitutional design was not unlike an engineering problem, a challenge of crafting institutions so that ambition could be used to counteract ambition, even when political leaders were flawed. Many of our founders believed this, as well.
The strength of the American political system, it has often been said, rests on what Swedish Nobel Prize–winning economist Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed: the principles of individual freedom and egalitarianism. Written into our founding documents and repeated in classrooms, speeches, and editorial pages, freedom and equality are self-justifying values.
In the wake of the 2016 election, many progressive opinion makers concluded that Democrats needed to “fight like Republicans.”
Immediately after President Trump’s election, some progressives called for actions to prevent him from assuming office.
After Trump was installed in the White House, some progressives called on Democrats to “take a page from the GOP playbook and obstruct everything.”
Scorched-earth tactics often erode support for the opposition by scaring off moderates. And they unify progovernment forces, as even dissidents within the incumbent party close ranks in the face of an uncompromising opposition. And when the opposition fights dirty, it provides the government with justification for cracking down.
Anti-Chávez forces then boycotted the 2005 legislative elections, but this did little more than allow the chavistas to gain total control over Congress.
In response, unlike their Venezuelan counterparts, the Colombian opposition never attempted to topple Uribe through extraconstitutional means. Instead, as political scientist Laura Gamboa shows, they focused their efforts on the congress and the courts. This made it more difficult for Uribe to question his opponents’ democratic credentials or justify cracking down on them.
The lesson is this: Where institutional channels exist, opposition groups should use them.
As much as a third of the country would likely view Trump’s impeachment as the machinations of a vast left-wing conspiracy—maybe even as a coup.
And if partisan rifts deepen and our unwritten rules continue to fray, Americans could eventually elect a president who is even more dangerous than Trump.
Opposition to the Trump administration’s authoritarian behavior should be muscular, but it should seek to preserve, rather than violate, democratic rules and norms. 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.
Public protest is a basic right and an important activity in any democracy, but its aim should be the defense of rights and institutions, rather than their disruption. In an important study of the effects of black protest in the 1960s, political scientist Omar Wasow found that 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. We should learn from our own history. Anti-Trump forces should
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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. And they can be powerful partners.
When major businesses join progressive boycotts, they often succeed.
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.
A political movement that brings together—even if temporarily—Bernie Sanders supporters and businesspeople, evangelicals and secular feminists, and small-town Republicans and urban Black Lives Matter supporters, will open channels of communication across the vast chasm that has emerged between our country’s two main partisan camps. And it might help foster more crosscutting allegiances in a society that has too few of them. Where a society’s political divisions are crosscutting, we line up on different sides of issues with different people at different times.
When we agree with our political rivals at least some of the time, we are less likely to view them as mortal enemies.
First, they can take society’s divisions as a given but try to counteract them through elite-level cooperation and compromise.
These “Group of 24” meetings were just casual dinners in members’ homes, but according to Aylwin, they “built up trust among those of us who had been adversaries.”
Chile has been one of Latin America’s most stable and successful democracies over the last three decades.
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. The evidence of their effectiveness, however, is far from clear.
Its twenty-five-year march to the right was made possible by the hollowing out of its organizational core.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.
The egalitarianism, civility, sense of freedom, and shared purpose portrayed by E. B. White were the essence of mid-twentieth-century American democracy.
