How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

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. The turning point came in the live-televised 1954 Army–McCarthy hearings in which McCarthy was humbled by Army chief counsel Joseph Welch, who responded to McCarthy’s baseless accusations by saying, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy’s popularity declined, and six months later the Senate voted to censure him, effectively ending his career.

The third notable test of America’s democratic institutions was the authoritarian behavior of the Nixon administration. Despite his public gestures toward it in the 1950s, Nixon never fully embraced norms of mutual toleration. He viewed public opponents and the press as enemies, and he and his staff justified illicit activities with the claim that their domestic opponents—often depicted as anarchists and communists—posed a threat to the nation or the constitutional order. In ordering H. R. Haldeman to organize a break-in at the Brookings Institution in 1971 (an act that was never carried out), Nixon told his aide, “We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy. We’re using any means….Is that clear?” Likewise, Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy justified the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters by claiming that the White House was “at war, internally as well as externally.”

The Nixon administration’s path away from democratic norms began with widespread wiretapping and other surveillance of journalists, opposition activists, the Democratic National Committee, and prominent Democrats such as Senator Edward Kennedy. In November 1970, Nixon sent a memo to Haldeman ordering him to compile a list of the administration’s opponents to develop an “intelligence program…to take them on.”

The administration also deployed the Internal Revenue Service as a political weapon,

Nixon’s criminal assault on democratic institutions was contained. In February 1973, the Senate established a bipartisan Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Democratic senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina. The Ervin committee was bipartisan: Its vice chair, Tennessee Republican Howard Baker, described its mission as a “bipartisan search for the unvarnished truth.”

America’s democratic institutions were challenged on several occasions during the twentieth century, but each of these challenges was effectively contained. The guardrails held, as politicians from both parties—and often, society as a whole—pushed back against violations that might have threatened democracy. 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.

the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the United States. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction.

On March 16, 2016, President Barack Obama nominated appellate judge Merrick Garland to fill Scalia’s seat. No one doubted that Garland was a qualified candidate, and by all accounts he was an ideological moderate. But for the first time in American history, the U.S. Senate refused to even consider an elected president’s nominee for the Supreme Court. As we have seen, the Senate had always used forbearance in exercising its advice and consent in the selection of Supreme Court justices: Since 1866, every time a president had moved to fill a Supreme Court vacancy prior to the election of his successor, he had been allowed to do so. But the world had changed by 2016. Now, in a radical departure from historical precedent Senate Republicans denied the president’s authority to nominate a new justice. It was an extraordinary instance of norm breaking. Within a year, a Republican was in the White House and Senate Republicans got their wish: a conservative justice nominee, Neil Gorsuch, whom they quickly approved. The GOP had trampled on a basic democratic norm—in effect, stealing a Supreme Court seat—and gotten away with it.

In June of his 1978 campaign, Gingrich had met with a group of College Republicans at an Atlanta Airport Holiday Inn, wooing them with a blunter, more cutthroat vision of politics than they were accustomed to. He found a hungry audience. Gingrich warned the young Republicans to stop using “Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire, but are lousy in politics.” He continued: You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power….This party does not need another generation of cautious, prudent, careful, bland, irrelevant quasi-leaders….What we really need are people who are willing to stand up in a slug-fest….What’s the primary purpose of a political leader?…To build a majority.

Backed by a small but growing group of loyalists, Gingrich launched an insurgency aimed at instilling a more combative approach in the party. Taking advantage of a new media technology, C-SPAN, Gingrich “used adjectives like rocks,” deliberately employing over-the-top rhetoric. He described Congress as “corrupt” and “sick.” He questioned his Democratic rivals’ patriotism. He even compared them to Mussolini and accused them of trying to “destroy our country.” According to former Georgia state Democratic Party leader Steve Anthony, “the things that came out of Gingrich’s mouth…we had never [heard] that before from either side. Gingrich went so far over the top that the shock factor rendered the opposition frozen for a few years.”

Through a new political action committee, GOPAC, Gingrich and his allies worked to spread these tactics across the party. GOPAC produced more than two thousand training audiotapes, distributed each month to get the recruits of Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” on the same rhetorical page. Gingrich’s former press secretary Tony Blankley compared this tactic of audiotape distribution to one used by the Ayatollah Khomeini on his route to power in Iran.

Gingrich was a role model to a new generation of Republican legislators, many of them elected in the 1994 landslide that gave the GOP its first House majority in forty years. The Senate was likewise transformed by the arrival of “Gingrich Senators,” whose ideology, aversion to compromise, and willingness to obstruct legislation helped speed the end of the body’s traditional “folkways.”

According to Democratic congressman Barney Frank, Gingrich transformed American politics from one in which people presume the good will of their opponents, even as they disagreed, into one in which people treated the people with whom they disagreed as bad and immoral. He was a kind of McCarthyite who succeeded.

Senate Republicans also pushed aggressively for investigations into a series of dubious scandals, most notably a Clinton 1980s land deal in Arkansas (the so-called Whitewater investigation). These efforts culminated in the 1994 appointment of Kenneth Starr as independent counsel. A shadow would linger over the entire Clinton presidency.

In an act without precedent in U.S. history, House Republicans had politicized the impeachment process, downgrading it, in the words of congressional experts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, to “just another weapon in the partisan wars.”

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. Republican congressman Chris Shays described DeLay’s philosophy in blunt terms: “If it wasn’t illegal, do it.” The result was further norm erosion. “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. —

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. And with the exception of the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and subsequent military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, congressional Democrats eschewed bipartisan cooperation in favor of obstruction. Harry Reid and other Senate leaders used Senate rules to slow down or block Republican legislation and broke with precedent by routinely filibustering Bush proposals they

Senate Democrats also began to stray from the norm of forbearance in the area of advice and consent, obstructing an unprecedented number of President Bush’s judicial nominees, either by rejecting them outright or by allowing them to languish by not holding hearings. The norm of deference to the president on appointments was dissolving. Indeed, the New York Times quoted one Democratic strategist as saying that the Senate needed to “change the ground rules…there [is] no obligation to confirm someone just because they are scholarly or erudite.”

Charles Krauthammer wrote that “one of the great traditions, customs, and unwritten rules of the Senate is that you do not filibuster judicial nominees.”

In the House, the informal practice of “regular order,” which assured the minority party opportunities to speak and to amend legislation, was largely abandoned.

2003, Texas Republicans, led by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, carried out a radical out-of-cycle redistricting plan that, as they themselves admitted, aimed only at partisan advantage. Although the Texas electorate was increasingly Republican, seventeen of the state’s thirty-two representatives were Democrats, and many of them were entrenched incumbents.

When the bill finally passed, DeLay flew in from Washington to oversee the reconciliation process, which produced an even more radical redistricting plan. An aide to Republican congressman Joe Barton admitted in an e-mail that it was “the most aggressive map I have ever seen. This…should assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood.” Indeed, the redistricting plan worked nearly to perfection. Six Texas congressional seats changed hands from Democrats to Republicans in 2004, helping to preserve Republican control of the House.

In addition to the decline in forbearance, the Bush presidency also saw some early challenges to the norm of mutual toleration. To his great credit, President Bush did not question the patriotism of his Democratic rivals, even when anti-Muslim hysteria in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks created an opportunity to do so. But Fox News commentators and influential radio talk-show hosts used the moment to imply that Democrats lacked patriotism. Commentators began at times to link Democrats to Al Qaeda—as Rush Limbaugh did in 2006, when he accused Senator Patrick Leahy of “taking up arms for Al Qaeda” after Leahy probed Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito on the Bush administration’s use of torture.

Among the most brazen agents of partisan intolerance in the early 2000s was Ann Coulter. Coulter wrote a series of bestselling books attacking liberals and Democrats in a McCarthyite voice. The books’ titles speak for themselves: Slander (2002); Treason (2003); Godless (2006); Guilty (2009); Demonic (2011); Adios, America! (2015). Treason, published around the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, defends Joseph McCarthy and embraces his tactics. The book claims that anti-Americanism is “intrinsic to [liberals’] entire worldview” and accuses liberals of having committed “fifty years of treason” during the Cold War. While doing publicity for Treason, Coulter declared, “There are millions of suspects here….I am indicting the entire Democratic Party.” The book spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

But what was especially troubling about the 2008 campaign is that the right-wing media’s rhetoric of intolerance was picked up by leading Republican politicians. Tom DeLay, for example, declared that “unless Obama proves me wrong, he’s a Marxist,” while Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, called Obama “anti-American” and warned that he would lead America into “totalitarian dictatorship.” Although Republican presidential candidate John McCain did not employ such rhetoric, he nevertheless selected a running mate, Sarah Palin, who did. Palin embraced the Bill Ayers story, declaring that Obama had been “palling around with terrorists.” On the campaign trail, Palin told supporters that Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist!,” continuing: “This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America….I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.” Her racially coded speeches elicited cries of “Treason!,” “Terrorist!,” and even “Kill him!” from crowds.

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory revived hopes for a return to a more civilized brand of politics. On election night, as he gathered his family onstage in Chicago, the president-elect spoke generously, congratulating McCain on a heroic career of contributions to America. Earlier, in Phoenix, Arizona, McCain had delivered a gracious concession speech in which he described Obama as a good man who loved his country, and wished him “Godspeed.” It was a textbook case of postelection reconciliation. But something was not right in Phoenix. When McCain mentioned Obama, the crowd booed loudly, forcing the Arizona senator to calm them down. Many looked over at Sarah Palin, who stood off to the side in grim silence. Although the stage belonged to McCain that evening, his tradition-bound plea for Republicans to “bridge our differences” with the new president seemed to sit uneasily with those who had gathered to hear him.

The second thread was that Barack Obama was not a “real American.” During the 2008 campaign, Sarah Palin had used the expression “real Americans” to describe her (overwhelmingly white Christian) supporters. This was central to the Tea Party’s campaign against President Obama, as followers stressed repeatedly that he did not love America or share American values.

The rhetoric wasn’t limited to Tea Party activists. Republican politicians also questioned President Obama’s “Americanness.” Former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo declared, “I do not believe Barack Obama loves the same America that I do, the one the founders put together.” Newt Gingrich, who attempted a political comeback and sought the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, called Obama “the first anti-American president.” And at a private fund-raising dinner for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker in February 2015, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani openly questioned the sitting president’s patriotism, declaring: “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America.”

Such attacks have a long and dishonorable pedigree in American history. Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and the John Birch Society all adopted similar language. But the challenges to Obama’s legitimacy were different in two important ways. First, they were not confined to the fringes, but rather accepted widely by Republican voters. According to a 2011 Fox News poll, 37 percent of Republicans believed that President Obama was not born in the United States, and 63 percent said they had some doubts about his origins. Forty-three percent of Republicans reported believing he was a Muslim in a CNN/ORC poll, and a Newsweek poll found that a majority of Republicans believed President Obama favored the interests of Muslims over those of other religions.

Second, unlike past episodes of extremism, this wave reached into the upper ranks of the Republican Party. With the exception of the McCarthy period, the two major parties had typically kept such intolerance of each other at the margins for more than a century. Neither Father Coughlin nor the John Birch Society had the ear of top party leaders. Now, open attacks on President Obama’s legitimacy (and later, Hillary Clinton’s) were carried out by leading national politicians. In 2010, Sarah Palin advised the Republicans to “absorb as much of the Tea Party movement as possible.” They did. Republican senators, governors, and even presidential candidates mirrored the language of the fringe, and they were joined by Republican donors who viewed the Tea Party movement as an opportunity to push the GOP into a harder line against the Obama administration. Well-funded organizations such as Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity and political action committees such as the Tea Party Express and Tea Party Patriots sponsored dozens of Republican candidates.

In 2010, more than one hundred Tea Party–backed candidates ran for Congress, and more than forty were elected. By 2011, the House Tea Party Caucus had sixty members, and in 2012, Tea Party–friendly candidates emerged as contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2016, the Republican presidential nomination went to a birther, at a national party convention in which Republican leaders called their Democratic rival a criminal and led chants of “Lock her up.” For the first time in many decades, top Republican figures—including one who would soon be president—had overtly abandoned norms of mutual toleration, goaded by a fringe that was no longer fringe.

By the end of the Obama presidency, many Republicans embraced the view that their Democratic rivals were anti-American or posed a threat to the American way of life. This was dangerous territory. Such extremism encourages politicians to abandon forbearance. If Barack Obama is a “threat to the rule of law,” as Senator Ted Cruz ...

Kevin McCarthy, Eric Cantor, and Paul Ryan, held a series of meetings to develop a strategy to confront the new administration. The self-styled “Young Guns” decided to make the GOP the “Party of No.”

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.

The Democrats responded with norm breaking of their own. In November 2013, Senate Democrats voted to eliminate the filibuster for most presidential nominations, including federal judicial (but not Supreme Court) nominees, a move so extreme it was widely referred to as the “nuclear option.” Republican senators criticized the Democrats’ “raw exercise of political power,” but President Obama defended it, claiming that the filibuster had been transformed into a “reckless and relentless tool” of obstruction and adding that “today’s pattern of obstruction…just isn’t normal; it’s not what our founders envisioned.”

President Obama also responded with norm breaking—in the form of unilateral executive actions. In October 2011, the president presented what would become his mantra for achieving policy goals: “We can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job,” he told an audience in Nevada. “Whenever they won’t act, I will.” Obama began to use executive authority in a way he might not have expected to before coming into office. In 2010, in the face of Congress’s failure to pass a new energy bill, he issued an “executive memorandum” instructing government agencies to raise fuel efficiency standards for all cars. In 2012, in response to Congress’s inability to pass immigration reform, he announced an executive action to cease deportation of illegal immigrants who came to the United States before the age of sixteen and were either in school or were high school graduates or military veterans. In 2015, President Obama responded to Congress’s refusal to pass legislation to combat climate change by issuing an executive order to all federal agencies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and use more renewable energy. Unable to get Senate consent for a nuclear treaty with Iran, the Obama administration negotiated an “executive agreement,” which, because it was not formally a treaty, did not require Senate approval. 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...

In March 2015, the Republican Senate leadership publicly encouraged U.S. states to defy the president’s authority. In an op-ed in the Lexington Herald Leader, Mitch McConnell urged states to ignore Obama’s regulatory order limiting greenhouse gas emissions. It was a stunning undermining of federal authority. The following year, Arizona state legislators debated and nearly passed a bill prohibiting the state government from using any of its personnel or resources to enforce executive orders that had not been voted on by Congress.

Three dramatic events during Obama’s presidency revealed how severely norms of forbearance had eroded. The first was the 2011 crisis over the federal debt limit.

This extraordinary brinksmanship was never seriously contemplated—before 2011. Raising the debt limit was a long-standing bipartisan practice; between 1960 and 2011 it had been done 78 times, 49 under Republican presidents and 29 under Democrats. Although the process was often contentious, leaders of both parties knew it was just political posturing.

Tea Party–backed representatives, gained control of Congress in 2011. Not only were they willing to use the debt limit as a hostage, many of them were willing to kill it—to “bring the whole system crashing down”—if their demands for dramatic spending cuts were not met. Likewise, Tea Party–backed Senators Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Mike Lee of Utah openly called for a default if President Obama did not accede to their demands.

Markets responded badly, and Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s credit rating for the first time in history.

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.

A third norm-breaking moment was the Senate’s refusal to take up President Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. It bears repeating that not once since Reconstruction had a president been denied the opportunity to fill a Supreme Court vacancy when he nominated someone before the election of his successor.

the run-up to the 2016 election, when it was widely believed that Hillary Clinton would win, several Republican senators, including Ted Cruz, John McCain, and Richard Burr, vowed to block all of Clinton’s Supreme Court nominations for the next four years, effectively reducing the Court’s size to eight.

twenty-five years ago, someone had described to you a country in which candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the government of stealing the election or establishing a dictatorship, and parties used their legislative majorities to impeach presidents and steal supreme court seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania. You probably would not have thought of the United States.

Being a Democrat or a Republican has become not just a partisan affiliation but an identity. A 2016 survey conducted by the Pew Foundation found that 49 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of Democrats say the other party makes them “afraid.” Among politically engaged Americans, the numbers are even higher—70 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Republicans say they live in fear of the other party.

The roots of this phenomenon lie in a long-term partisan realignment that began to take form in the 1960s. For most of the twentieth century, American parties were ideological “big tents,” each encompassing diverse constituencies and a wide range of political views.

Because the two parties were so internally heterogeneous, polarization between them was far lower than it is today.

The civil rights movement, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, put an end to this partisan arrangement.

The post-1965 realignment also began a process of sorting out voters ideologically. For the first time in nearly a century, partisanship and ideology converged, with the GOP becoming primarily conservative and 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.