How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.

The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture. America’s efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization. And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracies.

If a charismatic outsider emerges on the scene, gaining popularity as he challenges the old order, it is tempting for establishment politicians who feel their control is unraveling to try to co-opt him. If an insider breaks ranks to embrace the insurgent before his rivals do, he can use the outsider’s energy and base to outmaneuver his peers. And then, establishment politicians hope, the insurgent can be redirected to support their own program.

Three years later, in February 1992, a group of junior military officers rose up against President Carlos Andrés Pérez. Led by Hugo Chávez, the rebels called themselves “Bolivarians,” after revered independence hero Simón Bolívar. The coup failed. But when the now-detained Chávez appeared on live television to tell his supporters to lay down their arms (declaring, in words that would become legendary, that their mission had failed “for now”), he became a hero in the eyes of many Venezuelans, particularly poorer ones.

But back in 1993, Chávez still had a major problem. He was in jail, awaiting trial for treason. However, in 1994, now-President Caldera dropped all charges against him. Caldera’s final act in enabling Chávez was literally opening the gates—of prison—for him. Immediately after Chávez’s release, a reporter asked him where he was going. “To power,” he replied.

Years after Chávez’s presidential victory, Rafael Caldera explained his mistakes simply: “Nobody thought that Mr. Chávez had even the remotest chance of becoming president.” And merely a day after Hitler became chancellor, a prominent conservative who aided him admitted, “I have just committed the greatest stupidity of my life; I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in world history.”

After all, we like to believe that the fate of a government lies in the hands of its citizens. If the people hold democratic values, democracy will be safe. If citizens are open to authoritarian appeals, then, sooner or later, democracy will be in trouble. This view is wrong. It assumes too much of democracy—that “the people” can shape at will the kind of government they possess. It’s hard to find any evidence of majority support for authoritarianism in 1920s Germany and Italy. Before the Nazis and Fascists seized power, less than 2 percent of the population were party members, and neither party achieved anything close to a majority of the vote in free and fair elections. Rather, solid electoral majorities opposed Hitler and Mussolini—before both men achieved power with the support of political insiders blind to the danger of their own ambitions.

Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers.

Many authoritarians can be easily recognized before they come to power. They have a clear track record: Hitler led a failed putsch; Chávez led a failed military uprising; Mussolini’s Blackshirts engaged in paramilitary violence; and in Argentina in the mid–twentieth century, Juan Perón helped lead a successful coup two and a half years before running for president.

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.

Consider Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company. One of the richest men in the world in the early twentieth century, Ford was a modern version of the kind of extremist demagogue Hamilton had warned against. Using his Dearborn Independent as a megaphone, he railed against bankers, Jews, and Bolsheviks, publishing articles claiming that Jewish banking interests were conspiring against America. His views attracted praise from racists worldwide. He was mentioned with admiration by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf and described by future Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler as “one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters.” In 1938, the Nazi government awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.

Lindbergh—an advocate of “racial purity” who toured Nazi Germany in 1936 and was awarded a medal of honor by Hermann Göring—emerged as one of America’s most prominent isolationists in 1939 and 1940, speaking nationwide on behalf of the America First Committee.

The Democrats, whose initial primaries were volatile and divisive, backtracked somewhat in the early 1980s, stipulating that a share of national delegates would be elected officials—governors, big-city mayors, senators, and congressional representatives—appointed by state parties rather than elected in primaries. These “superdelegates,” representing between 15 and 20 percent of national delegates, would serve as a counterbalance to primary voters—and a mechanism for party leaders to fend off candidates they disapproved of. The Republicans, by contrast, were flying high under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Seeing no need for superdelegates, the GOP opted, fatefully, to maintain a more democratic nomination system.

Many Republicans latched on to the saying that whereas Trump’s critics took him literally but not seriously, his supporters took him seriously but not literally.

Once the election became a normal race, it was essentially a toss-up, for two reasons. First, intensifying partisan polarization had hardened the electorate in recent years. 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, making the kind of landslide election that we saw in 1964 or 1972 far less likely. No matter who the candidates were in the 2000s, presidential elections were close.

Had Republican leaders publicly opposed Trump, the tightly contested, red-versus-blue dynamics of the previous four elections would have been disrupted. The Republican electorate would have split—some heeding the warnings of the party leadership and others sticking with Trump. Still, Trump’s defeat would have required the defection of only a tiny fraction of Republican voters. Instead, the election was normalized. The race narrowed. And Trump won.

Capturing the referees provides the government with more than a shield. It also offers a powerful weapon, allowing the government to selectively enforce the law, punishing opponents while protecting allies. Tax authorities may be used to target rival politicians, businesses, and media outlets. The police can crack down on opposition protest while tolerating acts of violence by progovernment thugs. Intelligence agencies can be used to spy on critics and dig up material for blackmail.

Most often, the capture of the referees is done by quietly firing civil servants and other nonpartisan officials and replacing them with loyalists. In Hungary, for example, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán packed the nominally independent Prosecution Service, State Audit Office, Ombudsman’s office, Central Statistical Office, and Constitutional Court with partisan allies after returning to power in 2010.

South Carolina, whose population was majority black, was a pioneer of vote restriction. The 1882 “Eight Box Law” created a complex ballot that made it nearly impossible for illiterates to exercise the franchise, and since most of the state’s black residents were illiterate, black turnout plummeted. But that wasn’t enough. In 1888, Governor John Richardson declared, “We now have the rule of a minority of 400,000 [whites] over a majority of 600,000 [blacks]….The only thing that stands today between us and their rule is a flimsy statute—the Eight Box Law.” 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.

Norms are more than personal dispositions. They do not simply rely on political leaders’ good character, but rather are shared codes of conduct that become common knowledge within a particular community or society—accepted, respected, and enforced by its members. 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.

Mutual toleration refers to the idea that as long as our rivals play by constitutional rules, we accept that they have an equal right to exist, compete for power, and govern.

second norm critical to democracy’s survival is what we call institutional forbearance. Forbearance means “patient self-control; restraint and tolerance,” or “the action of restraining from exercising a legal right.” For our purposes, institutional forbearance can be thought of as avoiding actions that, while respecting the letter of the law, obviously violate its spirit. Where norms of forbearance are strong, politicians do not use their institutional prerogatives to the hilt, even if it is technically legal to do so, for such action could imperil the existing system.

During the time when kings proclaimed divine-right rule—where religious sanction provided the basis of monarchic authority—no mortal constraint legally limited the power of kings.

The erosion of basic norms expanded the zone of acceptable political action. Several years before shots were fired at Fort Sumter, 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.

Mutual toleration was established only after the issue of racial equality was removed from the political agenda. Two events were critical in this regard. The first was the infamous Compromise of 1877, which ended the 1876 presidential election dispute and elevated Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency in exchange for a promise to remove federal troops from the South. The pact effectively ended Reconstruction, which, by stripping away hard-fought federal protections for African Americans, allowed southern Democrats to undo basic democratic rights and consolidate single-party rule. The second event was the failure of Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1890 Federal Elections Bill, which would have allowed federal oversight of congressional elections to ensure the realization of black suffrage. The bill’s failure ended federal efforts to protect African American voting rights in the South, thereby ensuring their demise.

The importance of these norms was not lost on outside observers. 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.

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. Such a transformation from watchdog into lapdog—think of Perón’s acquiescent congress in Argentina or the chavista supreme court in Venezuela—can be an important enabler of authoritarian rule.

The American system of checks and balances, therefore, requires that public officials use their institutional prerogatives judiciously. U.S. presidents, congressional leaders, and Supreme Court justices enjoy a range of powers that, if deployed without restraint, could undermine the system. 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.

We must conclude with a troubling caveat, however. The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion. The stability of the period between the end of Reconstruction and the 1980s was rooted in an original sin: the Compromise of 1877 and its aftermath, which permitted the de-democratization of the South and the consolidation of Jim Crow. 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. Southern Democrats’ ideological proximity to conservative Republicans reduced polarization and facilitated bipartisanship. But it did so at the great cost of keeping civil rights—and America’s full democratization—off the political agenda. America’s democratic norms, then, were born in a context of exclusion.

Although Gingrich was succeeded as Speaker by Dennis Hastert, the real power fell into the hands of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Nicknamed “the Hammer,” DeLay shared Gingrich’s partisan ruthlessness. He demonstrated this, in part, through the K Street Project, which packed lobbying firms with Republican operatives and instituted a pay-to-play system that rewarded lobbyists with legislation based on their support for GOP officeholders.

Senate obstructionism spiked after 2008. Senate “holds,” traditionally used to delay a floor debate for up to a week to allow senators extra time to prepare, became “indefinite or permanent vetoes.” A stunning 385 filibusters were initiated between 2007 and 2012—equal to the total number of filibusters in the seven decades between World War I and the end of the Reagan administration.

March 2015 brought another unprecedented event, when Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and forty-six other Republican senators wrote an open letter to Iran’s leaders insisting that President Obama had no authority to negotiate a deal over Iran’s nuclear program. Opposed to the Iran deal and angered by Obama’s decision to use an “executive agreement” rather than a treaty, Senate Republicans intervened in diplomatic negotiations, long the domain of the executive branch. Florida senator Bill Nelson, a moderate Democrat, described the letter as “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.” Cotton and his allies had brazenly sought to undermine the authority of a sitting president.

the Democrats becoming predominantly liberal. By the 2000s, the Democratic and Republican parties were no longer ideological “big tents.” With the disappearance of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, areas of overlap between the parties gradually disappeared. Now that most senators and representatives had more in common with their partisan allies than with members of the opposing party, they cooperated less frequently and voted consistently with their own 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.

By the 2000s, then, Democratic and Republican voters, and the politicians representing them, were more divided than at any point in the previous century. But why was most of the norm breaking being done by the Republican Party? 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.

This perception may explain the rise of a discourse that distinguishes “real Americans” from those associated with liberals and the Democratic Party. If the definition of “real Americans” is restricted to those who are native-born, English-speaking, white, and Christian, then it is easy to see how “real Americans” may view themselves as declining.

The move reinforced fears that the president would eventually pardon himself and his inner circle—something that was reportedly explored by his lawyers. Such a move would constitute an unprecedented attack on judicial independence. As constitutional scholar Martin Redish put it, “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.”

The relationship between Donald Trump and his party is equally important, especially given the Republicans’ control over both houses of Congress. Republican leaders could choose to remain loyal. Active loyalists do not merely support the president but publicly defend even his most controversial moves. Passive loyalists retreat from public view when scandals erupt but still vote with the president. Critical loyalists try, in a sense, to have it both ways: They may publicly distance themselves from the president’s worst behavior, but they do not take any action (for example, voting in Congress) that will weaken, much less bring down, the president. In the face of presidential abuse, any of these responses will enable authoritarianism.

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. Moynihan applied this insight, controversially, to America’s growing social tolerance for single-parent families, high murder rates, and mental illness. Today it can be applied to American democracy. Although political deviance—the violation of unwritten rules of civility, of respect for the press, of not lying—did not originate with Donald Trump, his presidency is accelerating it. Under President Trump, America has been defining political deviancy down. The president’s routine use of personal insult, bullying, lying, and cheating has, inevitably, helped to normalize such practices. Trump’s tweets may trigger outrage from the media, Democrats, and some Republicans, 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.

Two National Rifle Association recruiting videos were released in the summer of 2017. In the first video, NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch speaks about Democrats and the use of force: They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the “resistance.” All to make them march, to make them protest, to make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, to burn cars, to shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding, until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness. And when that happens, they use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight the violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.

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.

The strength of the American political system, it has often been said, rests on what Swedish Nobel Prize–winning economist Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed: the principles of individual freedom and egalitarianism. Written into our founding documents and repeated in classrooms, speeches, and editorial pages, freedom and equality are self-justifying values. But they are not self-executing.

The Republican Party has been the main driver of the chasm between the parties. Since 2008, the GOP has at times behaved like an antisystem party in its obstructionism, partisan hostility, and extremist policy positions. Its twenty-five-year march to the right was made possible by the hollowing out of its organizational core.

Not unlike their German counterparts, Republicans today must expel extremists from their ranks, break sharply with the Trump administration’s authoritarian and white nationalist orientation, and find a way to broaden the party’s base beyond white Christians. The CDU may offer a model: If the GOP were to abandon white nationalism and soften its extreme free-market ideology, a broad religious conservative appeal could allow it to build a sustainable base, for example, among Protestants and Catholics, while also potentially attracting a substantial number of minority voters.

Some Democrats have suggested the party focus on recapturing the so-called white working class, or non-college-educated white voters. This was a prominent theme in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s traumatic 2016 defeat. Both Bernie Sanders and some moderates argued passionately that Democrats must win back the elusive blue-collar voters who abandoned them in the Rust Belt, Appalachia, and elsewhere. To do this, many opinion-makers argued, the Democrats needed to back away from their embrace of immigrants and so-called identity politics—a vaguely defined term that often encompasses the promotion of ethnic diversity and, more recently, anti-police-violence initiatives, such as Black Lives Matter. In a New York Times op-ed, Mark Penn and Andrew Stein urged Democrats to abandon “identity politics” and moderate their stance on immigration to win back white working-class votes. Though rarely voiced, the core message is this: Democrats must reduce the influence of ethnic minorities to win back the white working class.

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. This is America’s great challenge. We cannot retreat from it.

By contrast, a social policy agenda that sets aside stiff means testing in favor of the more universalistic models found in northern Europe could have a moderating effect on our politics. Social policies that benefit everyone—Social Security and Medicare are prime examples—could help diminish resentment, build bridges across large swaths of the American electorate, and lock into place social support for more durable policies to reduce income inequality—without providing the raw materials for racially motivated backlash. Comprehensive health insurance is a prominent example. Other examples include a much more aggressive raising of the minimum wage, or a universal basic income—a policy that was once seriously considered, and even introduced into Congress, by the Nixon administration. Still another example is “family policy,” or programs that provide paid leave for parents, subsidized day care for children with working parents, and prekindergarten education for nearly everyone. America’s expenditures on families is currently a third of the advanced-country average, putting us on par with Mexico and Turkey. Finally, Democrats could consider more comprehensive labor market policies, such as more extensive job training, wage subsidies for employers to train and retain workers, work-study programs for high school and community-college students, and mobility allowances for displaced employees. Not only do these sorts of policies have the potential to reduce the economic inequality...

Difficult as it may be, however, it is imperative that Democrats address the issue of inequality. It is, after all, more than a question of social justice. The very health of our democracy hinges on it.