How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

By the 1920s, British journalist H. W. Horwill concluded that there existed an informal norm “strong enough to prohibit the most powerful President and Congress, whatever the provocation, from taking a course which would make the Supreme Court the plaything of party politics.” President Franklin Roosevelt, of course, violated this particular norm with his 1937 court-packing effort. As constitutional scholars Lee Epstein and Jeffrey Segal wrote, Roosevelt’s norm-violating proposal was “extraordinary in its hubris.” Equally extraordinary, however, was the resistance it generated. At the time, Roosevelt was extremely popular—he had just been reelected in a historic landslide, and his Democratic allies enjoyed solid majorities in both houses of Congress. Few American presidents have ever enjoyed such political strength. Yet court packing triggered across-the-board opposition. Media criticism was fierce—the San Francisco Chronicle described the plan as an “open declaration of war on the Supreme Court.”