More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
On January 30, 1933, von Papen, one of the chief architects of the plan, dismissed worries over the gamble that would make Adolf Hitler chancellor of a crisis-ridden Germany with the reassuring words: “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.
We often tell ourselves that America’s national political culture in some way immunizes us from such appeals, but this requires reading history with rose-colored glasses. The real protection against would-be authoritarians has not been Americans’ firm commitment to democracy but, rather, the gatekeepers—our political parties.
“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.” For Hamilton and his colleagues, elections required some kind of built-in screening device.
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.
Republican leaders were forced to face reality: They no longer held the keys to their party’s presidential nomination.
The first sign is a weak commitment to the democratic rules of the game. Trump met this measure when he questioned the legitimacy of the electoral process and made the unprecedented suggestion that he might not accept the results of the 2016 election.
The second category in our litmus test is the denial of the legitimacy of one’s opponents. Authoritarian politicians cast their rivals as criminal, subversive, unpatriotic, or a threat to national security or the existing way of life. Trump met this criterion, as well.
The third criterion is toleration or encouragement of violence. Partisan violence is very often a precursor of democratic breakdown. Prominent examples include the Blackshirts in Italy, the Brownshirts in Germany,
The final warning sign is a readiness to curtail the civil liberties of rivals and critics.
On the eve of the election, the Washington Post published a list of seventy-eight Republicans who publicly endorsed Clinton. Only one of them, Congressman Richard Hanna of New York, was an elected official. And he was retiring.
Democratic breakdown doesn’t need a blueprint. Rather, as Peru’s experience suggests, it can be the result of a sequence of unanticipated events—an escalating tit-for-tat between a demagogic, norm-breaking leader and a threatened political establishment.
Seven years later, the state introduced a poll tax and a literacy test. Black turnout, which had reached 96 percent in 1876, fell to just 11 percent in 1898. Black disenfranchisement “wrecked the Republican Party,” locking it out of the statehouse for nearly a century.
Both sides in America’s early partisan battles—John Adams’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans—regarded each other as a threat to the republic.
Each side hoped to vanquish the other, taking steps (such as the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts) to legally punish mere political opposition. Partisan conflict was so ferocious that many feared the new republic would fail.
In just about every case of democratic breakdown we have studied, would-be authoritarians—from Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini in interwar Europe to Marcos, Castro, and Pinochet during the Cold War to Putin, Chávez, and Erdoğan most recently—have justified their consolidation of power by labeling their opponents as an existential threat.
partisan violence pervaded Congress. Yale historian Joanne Freeman estimates that there were 125 incidents of violence—including stabbings, canings, and the pulling of pistols—on the floor of the U.S. House and Senate between 1830 and 1860. Before long, Americans would be killing each other in the hundreds of thousands.
Likewise, presidents can circumvent the judiciary, either by refusing to abide by court rulings, as Lincoln did when the Supreme Court rejected his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, or by using the prerogative of the presidential pardon.
Viewing Chase’s behavior as sedition, Jefferson pushed for his impeachment. Although Republicans tried to wrap the move in legality, the impeachment was, by all accounts, a “political persecution from beginning to end.” The Senate acquitted Chase, setting a powerful precedent against impeachment.
Democrats were outraged. Moderate Republicans were alarmed, but conservative Republicans saw the potential political benefits and supported McCarthy. Republican senator Robert Taft passed on the message, “Keep talking.”
The McCarthyite assault on mutual toleration peaked in 1952. With Eisenhower installed in the White House, Republican leaders found McCarthy’s tactics less useful. And McCarthy’s attacks on the Eisenhower administration and, especially, on the U.S. Army, left him disgraced.
As a result, episodes of intolerance and partisan warfare never escalated into the kind of “death spiral” that destroyed democracies in Europe in the 1930s and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.
Racial exclusion contributed directly to the partisan civility and cooperation that came to characterize twentieth-century American politics. The “solid South” emerged as a powerful conservative force within the Democratic Party, simultaneously vetoing civil rights and serving as a bridge to Republicans.
America’s democratic norms, then, were born in a context of exclusion. As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party was likely to view the other as an existential threat.
House Minority Leader Bob Michel, an amiable figure who carpooled home to Illinois for congressional recesses with his Democratic colleague Dan Rostenkowski, was committed to abiding by established norms of civility and bipartisan cooperation. Gingrich rejected this approach as too “soft.” Winning a Republican majority, Gingrich believed, would require playing a harder form of politics.
“Time and time again,” one reporter observed, DeLay “has burst through the invisible fence that keeps other partisans in check.” DeLay brought routine norm breaking into the twenty-first century.
Just prior to Bush’s inauguration, DeLay gave the president-elect a reality check, reportedly telling him: “We don’t work with Democrats. There’ll be none of that uniter-divider stuff.”
President Bush governed hard to the right, abandoning all pretense of bipartisanship on the counsel of his political advisor Karl Rove, who had concluded that the electorate was so polarized that Republicans could win by mobilizing their own base rather than seeking independent voters.
Whereas the House had conducted 140 hours of sworn testimony investigating whether President Clinton had abused the White House Christmas card list in an effort to drum up new donors, it never once subpoenaed the White House during the first six years of George Bush’s presidency.
The president’s actions were not out of constitutional bounds, but by acting unilaterally to achieve goals that had been blocked by Congress, President Obama violated the norm of forbearance.
For most of the twentieth century, American parties were ideological “big tents,” each encompassing diverse constituencies and a wide range of political views.
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—...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In other words, the two parties are now divided over race and religion—two deeply polarizing issues that tend to generate greater intolerance and hostility than traditional policy issues such as taxes and government spending.
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. Trump attempted all three of these strategies.
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.
It is difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities gave up their dominant status without a fight.
First of all, evidence from other countries suggests that such a strategy often plays directly into the hands of authoritarians. 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.
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.
Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the “don’t” in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. 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. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved
...more
