How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

and if, on those grounds, they had endorsed Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump might never have ascended to the presidency.

Dont buy this at all. Would probably have actually given him more votes, not less

Not only was the country increasingly sorted into Republicans and Democrats, with few truly independent or swing voters, but Republicans and Democrats had grown increasingly loyal to their party—and hostile to the other one. Voters became less movable,

Wouldnt this actually contradict their claim?

Virtually the entire establishment—politicians, media, business leaders—backed Vargas Llosa, but ordinary Peruvians viewed him as too cozy with the elites, who seemed deaf to their concerns. Fujimori, whose populist discourse tapped into this anger, struck many as the only real option for change. He won.

THis is literally the same scenario they advocated for o stop Trump. Didnt work here either

The quiet silencing of influential voices—by co-optation or, if necessary, bullying—can have potent consequences for regime opposition. When powerful businesspeople are jailed or ruined economically, as in the case of Khodorkovsky in Russia, other businesspeople conclude that it is wisest to withdraw from politics entirely.

Enfranchisement empowered African Americans: More than two thousand southern freedmen won elective office in the 1870s, including fourteen congressmen and two U.S. senators.

One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion.

Crises are hard to predict, but their political consequences are not. They facilitate the concentration and, very often, abuse of power. Wars and terrorist attacks produce a “rally ’round the flag” effect in which public support for the government increases—often dramatically;

The USA PATRIOT Act, signed into law by George W. Bush in October 2001, never would have passed had the September 11 attacks not occurred the previous month.

Indeed, elected autocrats often need crises—external threats offer them a chance to break free, both swiftly and, very often, “legally.”

For demagogues hemmed in by constitutional constraints, a crisis represents an opportunity to begin to dismantle the inconvenient and sometimes threatening checks and balances that come with democratic politics.

For example, Argentina’s 1853 constitution closely resembled ours: Two-thirds of its text was taken directly from the U.S. Constitution. But these constitutional arrangements did little to prevent fraudulent elections in the late nineteenth century, military coups in 1930 and 1943, and Perón’s populist autocracy.

Even well-designed constitutions cannot, by themselves, guarantee democracy. For one, constitutions are always incomplete. Like any set of rules, they have countless gaps and ambiguities. No operating manual, no matter how detailed, can anticipate all possible contingencies or prescribe how to behave under all possible circumstances.

“God has never endowed any statesman or philosopher, or any body of them,” wrote former U.S. president Benjamin Harrison, “with wisdom enough to frame a system of government that everybody could go off and leave.”

If the constitution written in Philadelphia in 1787 is not what secured American democracy for so long, then what did? Many factors mattered, including our nation’s immense wealth, a large middle class, and a vibrant civil society. But we believe much of the answer also lies in the development of strong democratic norms.

Democracy, of course, is not street basketball. Democracies do have written rules (constitutions) and referees (the courts). But these work best, and survive longest, in countries where written constitutions are reinforced by their own unwritten rules of the game.

British Constitution better then?

Because they are unwritten, they are often hard to see, especially when they’re functioning well. This can fool us into thinking they are unnecessary. But nothing could be further from the truth. Like oxygen or clean water, a norm’s importance is quickly revealed by its absence.

It means that even if we believe our opponents’ ideas to be foolish or wrong-headed, we do not view them as an existential threat.

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. The Federalists saw themselves as the embodiment of the Constitution; in their view, one could not oppose the Federalists without opposing the entire American project. So when Jefferson and Madison organized what would become the Republican Party, the Federalists regarded them as traitors, even suspecting them of harboring loyalties to Revolutionary France—with which the United States was nearly at war. The Jeffersonians, for their part, accused the Federalists of being Tories and of plotting a British-backed monarchic restoration. 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. It was only gradually, over the course of decades, that America’s opposing parties came to the hard-fought recognition that they could be rivals rather than enemies, circulating in power rather than destroying each other. This recognition was a critical foundation for American democracy.

justified their consolidation of power by labeling their opponents as an existential threat.

How does this work if youre the opposition then and the authoritarian in the existential threat?

To be “godly,” after all, required wisdom and self-restraint.

Think of democracy as a game that we want to keep playing indefinitely. To ensure future rounds of the game, players must refrain from either incapacitating the other team or antagonizing them to such a degree, that they refuse to play again tomorrow. If one’s rivals quit, there can be no future games. This means that although individuals play to win, they must do so with a degree of restraint.

In politics, this often means eschewing dirty tricks or hardball tactics in the name of civility and fair play.

Norms of forbearance are especially important in presidential democracies. As Juan Linz argued, divided government can easily bring deadlock, dysfunction, and constitutional crisis. Unrestrained presidents can pack the Supreme Court or circumvent Congress by ruling via decree. And an unrestrained Congress can block the president’s every move, threaten to throw the country into chaos by refusing to fund the government, or vote to remove the president on dubious grounds.

When the perceived cost of losing is sufficiently high, politicians will be tempted to abandon forbearance. Acts of constitutional hardball may then in turn further undermine mutual toleration, reinforcing beliefs that our rivals pose a dangerous threat.

Polarization can destroy democratic norms. When socioeconomic, racial, or religious differences give rise to extreme partisanship, in which societies sort themselves into political camps whose worldviews are not just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain.

But when societies grow so deeply divided that parties become wedded to incompatible worldviews, and especially when their members are so socially segregated that they rarely interact, stable partisan rivalries eventually give way to perceptions of mutual threat. As mutual toleration disappears, politicians grow tempted to abandon forbearance and try to win at all costs. This may encourage the rise of antisystem groups that reject democracy’s rules altogether. When that happens, democracy is in trouble.

So in February 1937, two weeks into his second term, Roosevelt unveiled a proposal to expand the size of the Supreme Court. The “court-packing scheme,” as his opponents called it, took advantage of a gap in the Constitution: Article III does not specify the number of Supreme Court justices.

Had Roosevelt passed his judicial act, a key norm—that presidents should not undermine another coequal branch—would have been demolished.

Even amid a crisis as profound as the Great Depression, the system of checks and balances had worked.

Far from accepting one another as legitimate rivals, Federalists and Republicans initially suspected each other of treason.

The lame-duck Federalist Congress reduced the size of the Supreme Court from six to five to limit Jefferson’s influence over the Court. With its new majority, the Republican Congress repealed the move, and a few years later, it expanded the Court to seven to give Jefferson another appointment.

This is nteresting, didnt know this

It took several decades for this hard-edged quest for permanent victory to subside. The demands of everyday politics and the rise of a new generation of career politicians helped lower the stakes of competition.

The post-Revolutionary generation grew accustomed to the idea that one sometimes wins and sometimes loses in politics—an...

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.

The Civil War broke America’s democracy. One-third of American states did not participate in the 1864 election; twenty-two of fifty Senate seats and more than a quarter of House seats were left vacant. President Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus and issued constitutionally dubious executive orders,

This is interesting compared to George will

Woodrow Wilson, the son of a southern Confederate family,

Explains a lot

In 1866, the Republican Congress reduced the size of the Supreme Court from ten to seven to prevent President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat whom Republicans viewed as subverting Reconstruction, from making any appointments,

Well atleast we havent done this yet

Gradually, though, as the Civil War generation passed from the scene, Democrats and Republicans learned to live with one another. They heeded the words of former House Speaker James Blaine, who in 1880 advised fellow Republicans to “fold up the bloody shirt” and shift the debate to economic issues.

Paradoxically, then, the norms that would later serve as a foundation for American democracy emerged out of a profoundly undemocratic arrangement: racial exclusion and the consolidation of single-party rule in the South.

Do we like tbhjs then? Ends and means

In his two-volume masterpiece, The American Commonwealth (1888), British scholar James Bryce wrote that it was not the U.S. Constitution itself that made the American political system work but rather what he called “usages”: our unwritten rules.

This is interesting idea. Its not our Constithtion that is great, but how we act with eachother essentially. Amazon vs Microsoft

Under divided government, where legislative or judicial institutions are in the hands of the opposition, the risk is constitutional hardball, in which the opposition deploys its institutional prerogatives as far as it can extend them—defunding the government, blocking all presidential judicial appointments, and perhaps even voting to remove the president.

Under unified government, where legislative and judicial institutions are in the hands of the president’s party, the risk is not confrontation but abdication. If partisan animosity prevails over mutual toleration, those in control of congress may prioritize defense of the president over the performance of their constitutional duties. In an effort to stave off opposition victory, they may abandon their oversight role, enabling the president to get away with abusive, illegal, and even authoritarian acts.

Trump era

Consider six of these powers. Three are available to the president: executive orders, the presidential pardon, and court packing. Another three lie with the Congress: the filibuster, the Senate’s power of advice and consent, and impeachment. Whether these prerogatives are formally stipulated in the Constitution or merely permitted under the Constitution, their weaponization could easily result in deadlock, dysfunction, and even democratic breakdown. For most of the twentieth century, however, American politicians used them all with remarkable forbearance.

By the early twenty-first century, administrative resources at the executive’s disposal were so vast that legal scholar Bruce Ackerman described the presidency as a “constitutional battering ram.”

The Constitution does not prohibit such action.

But doesnt say they exist either. George Will argument

In eight years, he issued only eight executive orders.

O wow, so it started early, right away essentially

Throughout his life, Washington had learned that he “gained power from his readiness to give it up.”

Great line

As historian Gordon Wood put it, “If any single person was responsible for establishing the young Republic on a firm footing, it was Washington.”

The only instance of Supreme Court impeachment in American history occurred in 1804, when the Republican-dominated House of Representatives voted to impeach Justice Samuel Chase, an “ardent Federalist” who had campaigned against Jefferson and criticized him during his presidency. 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.

The Supreme Court’s size was a more frequent target of partisan machinations during America’s first century. Beginning with the Federalists’ move to shrink the Court to deny President-elect Jefferson an appointment, the U.S. Supreme Court changed size seven times between 1800 and 1869—each