How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

Consider this extraordinary finding: In 1960, political scientists asked Americans how they would feel if their child married someone who identified with another political party. Four percent of Democrats and five percent of Republicans reported they would be “displeased.” In 2010, by contrast, 33 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans reported feeling “somewhat or very unhappy” at the prospect of interparty marriage. Being a Democrat or a Republican has become not just a partisan affiliation but an identity.

The civil rights movement, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, put an end to this partisan arrangement. Not only did it democratize the South, at long last, by enfranchising blacks and ending single-party rule, but it accelerated a long-run party system realignment whose consequences are still unfolding today. It was the Civil Rights Act, which Democratic president Lyndon Johnson embraced and 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater opposed, that would define the Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party of racial status quo.

But the sorting of the American electorate into liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans cannot alone explain the depth of partisan hostility that has emerged in America. Nor does it explain why this polarization has been so asymmetric, moving the Republican Party more sharply to the right than it has moved the Democrats to the left.

In 1950, nonwhites constituted barely 10 percent of the U.S. population. By 2014, they constituted 38 percent, and the U.S. Census Bureau projects that a majority of the population will be nonwhite by 2044.

These new voters have disproportionately supported the Democratic Party. The nonwhite share of the Democratic vote rose from 7 percent in the 1950s to 44 percent in 2012. Republican voters, by contrast, were still nearly 90 percent white into the 2000s. So as the Democrats have increasingly become a party of ethnic minorities, the Republican Party has remained almost entirely a party of whites.

This is an extraordinary change. As the political scientist Alan Abramowitz points out, in the 1950s, married white Christians were the overwhelming majority—nearly 80 percent—of American voters, divided more or less equally between the two parties. By the 2000s, married white Christians constituted barely 40 percent of the electorate, and they were now concentrated in the Republican Party. 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.

For one, the changing media landscape had a stronger impact on the Republican Party. Republican voters rely more heavily on partisan media outlets than do Democrats. In 2010, 69 percent of Republican voters were Fox News viewers.

But why is this?

In 2012 alone, the Koch family was responsible for some $400 million in election spending. Along with the Tea Party, the Koch network and other similar organizations helped elect a new generation of Republicans for whom compromise was a dirty word. A party with a core that was hollowed out by donors and pressure groups was also more vulnerable to extremist forces.

Unlike the Democratic Party, which has grown increasingly diverse in recent decades, the GOP has remained culturally homogeneous. This is significant because the party’s core white Protestant voters are not just any constituency—for nearly two centuries, they comprised the majority of the U.S. electorate and were politically, economically, and culturally dominant in American society.

The struggle against declining majority status is, in good part, what fuels the intense animosity that has come to define the American Right.

As Ann Coulter chillingly put it, “The American electorate isn’t moving to the left—it’s shrinking.”

Wow this is such a loaded statement

The danger of such appeals is that casting Democrats as not real Americans is a frontal assault on mutual toleration.

But war always has its price. The mounting assault on norms of mutual toleration and forbearance—mostly, though not entirely, by Republicans—has eroded the soft guardrails that long protected us from the kind of partisan fight to the death that has destroyed democracies in other parts of the world.

Interesting that they attribute most of this to race and religion, and resulting status anxiety. That feels simplistic, is that really all? Is there a more rigourus view n this? Fits todays culture wars though. But in away just oils it down to a battle of demographics that are grafually changing against republicans

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.

he dismissed Comey after it became clear that Comey could not be pressured into protecting the administration and was expanding its Russia investigation. Only once in the FBI’s eighty-two-year history had a president fired the bureau’s director before his ten-year term was up—and in that case, the move was in response to clear ethical violations and enjoyed bipartisan support.

“If the president can immunize his agents in this manner, the courts will effectively lose any meaningful authority to protect constitutional rights against invasion by the executive branch.”

On the unlimited nature of the pardon

During his first week in office, President Trump signed an executive order authorizing federal agencies to withhold funding from “sanctuary cities” that refused to cooperate with the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. “If we have to,” he declared in February 2017, “we’ll defund.” The plan was reminiscent of the Chávez government’s repeated moves to strip opposition-run city governments of their control over local hospitals, police forces, ports, and other infrastructure. Unlike the Venezuelan president, however, President Trump was blocked by the courts.

Senate Republicans did eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, clearing the way for Neil Gorsuch’s ascent to the Court, but they rejected the idea of doing away with it entirely.

This is i nteresting

The push for voter ID laws was based on a false claim: that voter fraud is widespread in the United States. All reputable studies have concluded that levels of such fraud in this country are low.

Scholars have just begun to evaluate the impact of voter ID laws, and most studies have found only a modest effect on turnout. But a modest effect can be decisive in close elections, especially if the laws are widely adopted.

Efforts to discourage voting are fundamentally antidemocratic, and they have a particularly deplorable history in the United States. Although contemporary voter-restriction efforts are nowhere near as far-reaching as those undertaken by southern Democrats in the late nineteenth century, they are nevertheless significant.

But if the Commission proceeds with its project unchecked, it has the potential to inflict real damage on our country’s electoral process.

But after the president fired James Comey in May 2017, some GOP senators moved toward containment, making it clear that they would not approve a Trump loyalist to succeed him.

Although Senators Graham, McCain, and Corker hardly joined the opposition (each voted with Trump at least 85 percent of the time), they took important steps to contain the president.

The higher President Trump’s approval rating, the more dangerous he is. His popularity will depend on the state of the economy, as well as on contingent events. Events that put the government’s incompetence on display, such as the Bush administration’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, can erode public support. But other developments, such as security threats, can boost it.

Not with Trump. The guy is immune

Security crises are, therefore, moments of danger for democracy. Leaders who can “do whatever they like” can inflict great harm upon democratic institutions. As we have seen, that is precisely what leaders such as Fujimori, Putin, and Erdoğan did. For a would-be authoritarian who feels unfairly besieged by opponents and shackled by democratic institutions, crisis opens up a window of opportunity.

But given President Trump’s foreign policy ineptitude, the risks are especially high. We fear that if Trump were to confront a war or terrorist attack, he would exploit this crisis fully—using it to attack political opponents and restrict freedoms Americans take for granted. In our view, this scenario represents the greatest danger facing American democracy today.

Norm breaking can also be democratizing: In the 1840 presidential election, William Henry Harrison broke tradition by going out and campaigning among voters. The previous norm had been for candidates to avoid campaigning, preserving a Cincinnatus-like fiction that they harbored no personal ambition for power—but limiting voters’ ability to get to know them.

Fun fact

Trump’s first inaugural address, for example, was darker than such addresses typically are (he spoke, for example, of “American carnage”), leading former President George W. Bush to observe: “That was some weird shit.”

Haha!

Although his claim of “millions” of illegal voters was rejected by fact checkers, repudiated by politicians from both parties, and dismissed as baseless by social scientists, the new president repeated it in public and in private. No major politician in more than a century had questioned the integrity of the American electoral process—not even Al Gore, who lost one of the closest elections in history at the hands of the Supreme Court.

False charges of fraud can undermine public confidence in elections—and when citizens do not trust the electoral process, they often lose faith in democracy itself.

This

A survey conducted in June 2017 asked, “If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote, would you support or oppose postponing the election?” Fifty-two percent of Republicans said they would support postponement.

Whoa, thay is crazy

Perhaps President Trump’s most notorious norm-breaking behavior has been lying.

President Trump’s routine, brazen fabrications are unprecedented. His tendencies were manifest during the 2016 campaign. PolitiFact classified 69 percent of his public statements as “mostly false” (21 percent), “false” (33 percent), or “pants on fire” (15 percent). Only 17 percent were coded as “true” or “mostly true.”

For our political system, however, the consequences of his dishonesty are devastating.

Citizens have a basic right to information in a democracy. Without credible information about what our elected leaders do, we cannot effectively exercise our right to vote. When the president of the United States lies to the public, our access to credible information is jeopardized, and trust in government is eroded (how could it not be?).

In 1993, New York’s Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former social scientist, made an incisive observation: 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.

but the effectiveness of their responses is limited by the sheer quantity of violations. As Moynihan observed, in the face of widespread deviance, we become overwhelmed—and then desensitized. We grow accustomed to what we previously thought to be scandalous.

Writing this book has reminded us that American democracy is not as exceptional as we sometimes believe. There’s nothing in our Constitution or our culture to immunize us against democratic breakdown. We have experienced political catastrophe before, when regional and partisan enmities so divided the nation that it collapsed into civil war. Our constitutional system recovered, and Republican and Democratic leaders developed new norms and practices that would undergird more than a century of political stability. But that stability came at the price of racial exclusion and authoritarian single-party rule in the South. It was only after 1965 that the United States fully democratized. And, paradoxically, that very process began a fundamental realignment of the American electorate that has once again left our parties deeply polarized. This polarization, deeper than at any time since the end of Reconstruction, has triggered the epidemic of norm breaking that now challenges our democracy.

Great smmary of US thesis so far

And although European democracies face many problems, from weak economies to EU skepticism to anti-immigrant backlash, there is little evidence in any of them of the kind of fundamental erosion of norms we have seen in the United States.

The 1990–2015 period was easily the most democratic quarter century in world history—partly

President Trump’s is the least prodemocratic of any U.S. administration since Nixon’s. Moreover, America is no longer a democratic model. A country whose president attacks the press, threatens to lock up his rival, and declares that he might not accept election results cannot credibly defend democracy.

In this future, America’s reputation in the world would be quickly restored. The Trump interlude would be taught in schools, recounted in films, and recited in historical works as an era of tragic mistakes where catastrophe was avoided and American democracy saved.

O but to dream

It is difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities gave up their dominant status without a fight.

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. Congressman David Price, a Democrat from Chapel Hill, said the legislative crisis taught him that “American democracy may be more fragile than we realized.”

North Carolina offers a window into what politics without guardrails looks like—and a possible glimpse into America’s future. When partisan rivals become enemies, political competition descends into warfare, and our institutions turn into weapons. The result is a system hovering constantly on the brink of crisis.

This grim scenario highlights a central lesson of this book: 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. Yet without them, our constitutional checks and balances will not operate as we expect them to.

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.

George will

History quickly revealed that the founders were mistaken. Without innovations such as political parties and their accompanying norms, the Constitution they so carefully constructed in Philadelphia would not have survived. Institutions were more than just formal rules; they encompassed the shared understandings of appropriate behavior that overlay them. The genius of the first generation of America’s political leaders was not that they created foolproof institutions, but that, in addition to designing very good institutions, they—gradually and with difficulty—established a set of shared beliefs and practices that helped make those institutions work.

freedom and equality are self-justifying values. But they are not self-executing. Mutual toleration and institutional forbearance are procedural principles—they tell politicians how to behave, beyond the bounds of law, to make our institutions function. We should regard these procedural values as also sitting at the center of the American Creed—for without them, our democracy would not work.