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But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.
Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Chávez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.
Because there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.
“We’ve engaged him for ourselves….Within two months, we will have pushed [him] so far into a corner that he’ll squeal.” A more profound miscalculation is hard to imagine.
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.
“the great demagogue of the day, a man who resembled…a Latin American dictator, a Vargas or a Perón.”
Schlesinger on Huey Long
“the nearest approach to a totalitarian state the American republic has ever seen,”
“I’m the constitution just now.”
In 1934, he was said to have “received more mail than all other senators combined, more even than the president.”
can take this Roosevelt….I can out-promise him. And he knows it.”
“old and honorable American tradition of hate the powerful.”
There is one thing more powerful than the Constitution….That’s the will of the people. What is a Constitution anyway? They’re the products of the people, the people are the first source of power, and the people can abolish a Constitution if they want to.
“I have here in my hand a list of 205 names that were made known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”
“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power….This party does not need another generation of cautious, prudent, careful, bland, irrelevant quasi-leaders….What we really need are people who are willing to stand up in a slug-fest….What’s the primary purpose of a political leader?…To build a majority.
“the things that came out of Gingrich’s mouth…we had never [heard] that before from either side. Gingrich went so far over the top that the shock factor rendered the opposition frozen for a few years.”
GOPAC produced more than two thousand training audiotapes, distributed each month to get the recruits of Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” on the same rhetorical page.
former press secretary Tony Blankley compared this tactic of audiotape distribution to one used by the Ayatollah Khomeini on his route to power in Iran.
Gingrich and his team distributed memos to Republican candidates instructing them to use certain negative words to describe Democrats, including pathetic, sick, bizarr...
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transformed American politics from one in which people presume the good will of their opponents, even as they disagreed, into one in which people treated the people with whom they disagreed as bad and immoral. He was a kind of McCarthyite who succeeded.
because it has been a home to bipartisan cooperation. Here in a place where Democrats have the majority, Republicans and Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the people we represent. The spirit of cooperation I have seen in this hall is what we need in Washington.
“change the ground rules…there [is] no obligation to confirm someone just because they are scholarly or erudite.”
“taking up arms for Al Qaeda”
“launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist!,”
“This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America….I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.”
McCain had delivered a gracious concession speech in which he described Obama as a good man who loved his country, and wished him “Godspeed.”
When McCain mentioned Obama, the crowd booed loudly, forcing the Arizona senator to calm them down. Many looked over at Sarah Palin, who stood off to the side in grim silence.
Challenges to President Obama’s legitimacy, which had begun with fringe conservative authors, talk-radio personalities, TV talking heads, and bloggers, was soon embodied in a mass political movement: the Tea Party, which started to organize just weeks after President Obama’s inauguration.
The difference? The Tea Party questioned President Obama’s very right to be president.
Paul Broun warned of a coming dictatorship comparable to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. He later tweeted, “Mr. President, you don’t believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism.”
claimed that President Obama “has become a dictator.”
Sarah Palin had used the expression “real Americans” to describe her (overwhelmingly white Christian) supporters.
“THIS WILL CURDLE YOUR BLOOD!!! The name of the book Obama is reading is called The Post-American World and it was written by a fellow Muslim.”
“I do not believe Barack Obama loves the same America that I do, the one the founders put together.”
Rudy Giuliani openly questioned the sitting president’s patriotism, declaring: “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America.”
“I do not know if Barack Obama was born in the United States of America….But I do know this, that in his heart, he’s not an American. He’s just not an American.”
At least eighteen Republican senators and House members were called “birther enablers” because of their refusal to reject the myth. U.S. Senators Roy Blunt, James Inhofe, Richard Shelby, and David Vitter, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and 2012 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee all made statements endorsing or encouraging the birther campaign.
“I have people who actually have been studying it,” Trump claimed, “and they cannot believe what they are finding.”
Trump on Obama's birth certificate
2011 Fox News poll, 37 percent of Republicans believed that President Obama was not born in the United States, and 63 percent said they had some doubts about his origins. Forty-three percent of Republicans reported believing he was a Muslim in a CNN/ORC poll, and a Newsweek poll found that a majority of Republicans believed President Obama favored the interests of Muslims over those of other religions.
Sarah Palin advised the Republicans to “absorb as much of the Tea Party movement as possible.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell echoed this sentiment when he declared that the “single most important thing we want to achieve [in the Senate] is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
“reckless and relentless tool” of obstruction and adding that “today’s pattern of obstruction…just isn’t normal; it’s not what our founders envisioned.”
Obama on ending the fillibuster for nominees(though not Supreme Court)
“We can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job,”
“Whenever they won’t act, I will.”
In 2010, in the face of Congress’s failure to pass a new energy bill, he issued an “executive memorandum” instructing government agencies to raise fuel efficiency standards for all cars. In 2012, in response to Congress’s inability to pass immigration reform, he announced an executive action to cease deportation of illegal immigrants who came to the United States before the age of sixteen and were either in school or were high school graduates or military veterans.
In 2015, President Obama responded to Congress’s refusal to pass legislation to combat climate change by issuing an executive order to all federal agencies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and use more renewable energy. Unable to get Senate consent for a nuclear treaty with Iran, the Obama administration negotiated an “executive agreement,” which, because it was not formally a treaty, did not require Senate approval.
The president’s actions were not out of constitutional bounds, but by acting unilaterally to achieve goals that had been blocked by Congress, Preside...
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As the New York Times editorialized, “This sounds like John Calhoun’s Secessionist screed from 1828, the South Carolina Exposition and Protest.”
“jaw-dropping….I couldn’t help but reflect, would I have signed such a letter under President George W. Bush? I would never even have contemplated that.”
state politics has become “more polarized and more acrimonious than I’ve ever seen it….And I worked for Jesse Helms.”
