How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

Realignment has gone well beyond liberal versus conservative. The social, ethnic, and cultural bases of partisanship have also changed dramatically, giving rise to parties that represent not just different policy approaches but different communities, cultures, and values.

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. And popular radio talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham, all of whom have helped to legitimate the use of uncivil discourse, have few counterparts among liberals.

When California Republican representative Darrell Issa declared that the GOP could accomplish more of its agenda if it were willing to work, on occasion, with President Obama, Rush Limbaugh forced him to publicly repudiate his claim and pledge loyalty to the obstructionist agenda. As former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott put it, “If you stray the slightest from the far right, you get hit by the conservative media.”

Hard-line positions were reinforced by well-funded conservative interest groups.

Thanks, in part, to the loosening of campaign finance laws in 2010, outside groups such as Americans for Prosperity and the American Energy Alliance—many of them part of the Koch billionaire family network—gained outsize influence in the Republican Party during the Obama years.

“The American electorate isn’t moving to the left—it’s shrinking.” The perception among many Tea Party Republicans that their America is disappearing helps us understand the appeal of such slogans as “Take Our Country Back” or “Make America Great Again.” The danger of such appeals is that casting Democrats as not real Americans is a frontal assault on mutual toleration.

Donald Trump’s first year in office followed a familiar script. Like Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, America’s new president began his tenure by launching blistering rhetorical attacks on his opponents. He called the media the “enemy of the American people,” questioned judges’ legitimacy, and threatened to cut federal funding to major cities.

President Trump summoned FBI Director James Comey to a one-on-one dinner in the White House in which, according to Comey, the president asked for a pledge of loyalty. He later reportedly pressured Comey to drop investigations into his recently departed national security director, Michael Flynn, pressed Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo to intervene in Comey’s investigation, and personally appealed to Coats and NSA head Michael Rogers to release statements denying the existence of any collusion with Russia (both refused).

President Trump also tried to punish or purge agencies that acted with independence. Most prominently, 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.

President Trump also attacked judges who ruled against him. After Judge James Robart of the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals blocked the administration’s initial travel ban, Trump spoke of “the opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country.” Two months later, when the same court temporarily blocked the withholding of federal funds from sanctuary cities, the White House denounced the judgment as an attack on the rule of law by an “unelected judge.” Trump himself responded by threatening to break up the Ninth Circuit.

As we noted earlier, the chief executive’s constitutional power to pardon is without limit, but presidents have historically exercised it with great restraint, seeking advice from the Justice Department and never issuing pardons for self-protection or political gain.

The Trump administration also trampled, inevitably, on the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), an independent watchdog agency that, though lacking legal teeth, had been respected by previous administrations. Faced with the numerous conflicts of interest created by Trump’s business dealings, OGE director Walter Shaub repeatedly criticized the president-elect during the transition. The administration responded by launching attacks on the OGE.

Despite its purges and threats, however, the administration could not capture the referees. Trump did not replace Comey with a loyalist, largely because such a move was vetoed by key Senate Republicans. Likewise, Senate Republicans resisted Trump’s efforts to replace Attorney General Sessions. But the president had other battles to wage.

In a February 2017 tweet, he called the media the “enemy of the American people,” a term that, critics noted, mimicked one used by Stalin and Mao. Trump’s rhetoric was often threatening. A few days after his “enemy of the people” tweet, Trump told the Conservative Political Action Committee: I love the First Amendment; nobody loves it better than me. Nobody….But as you saw throughout the entire campaign, and even now, the fake news doesn’t tell the truth….I say it doesn’t represent the people. It never will represent the people, and we’re going to do something about it.

Change libel laws?” When asked by a reporter whether the administration was really considering such changes, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said, “I think that’s something we’ve looked at.” Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa used this approach. His multimillion-dollar defamation suits and jailing of journalists on charges of defamation had a powerfully chilling effect on the media. Although Trump dropped the libel issue, he continued his threats. In July, he retweeted an altered video clip made from old WWE footage of him tackling and then punching someone with a CNN logo superimposed on his face.

White House advisors considered using the administration’s antitrust authority as a source of leverage against CNN. And finally, in October 2017, Trump attacked NBC and other networks by threatening to “challenge their license.”

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.

Perhaps the most antidemocratic initiative yet undertaken by the Trump administration is the creation of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence but run by Vice Chair Kris Kobach.

In many ways, President Trump followed the electoral authoritarian script during his first year. He made efforts to capture the referees, sideline the key players who might halt him, and tilt the playing field. But the president has talked more than he has acted, and his most notorious threats have not been realized. Troubling antidemocratic initiatives, including packing the FBI with loyalists and blocking the Mueller investigation, were derailed by Republican opposition and his own bumbling.

During President Trump’s first year in office, Republicans responded to presidential abuse with a mix of loyalty and containment. At first, loyalty predominated. 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. Republican senators also worked to ensure that an independent investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election would go forward. A few of them pushed quietly for the Justice Department to name a special counsel, and many of them embraced Robert Mueller’s appointment. When reports emerged that the White House was exploring ways of removing Mueller, and when some Trump loyalists called for Mueller’s removal, important Republican senators, including Susan Collins, Bob Corker, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain, came out in opposition.

Another factor affecting the fate of our democracy is public opinion. If would-be authoritarians can’t turn to the military or organize large-scale violence, they must find other means of persuading allies to go along and critics to back off or give up. Public support is a useful tool in this regard. When an elected leader enjoys, say, a 70 percent approval rating, critics jump on the bandwagon, media coverage softens, judges grow more reluctant to rule against the government, and even rival politicians, worried that strident opposition will leave them isolated, tend to keep their heads down. By contrast, when the government’s approval rating is low, media and opposition grow more brazen, judges become emboldened to stand up to the president, and allies begin to dissent. Fujimori, Chávez, and Erdoğan all enjoyed massive popularity when they launched their assault on democratic institutions. To