You may write the assignment as a Memo to someone who is in charge of a non-profit concerned with issues of democracy such as the United States Institute of Peace or the American Civil Liberties Union, but you don’t have to write it that way if doing so confuses you.
Part 1 of the assignment is to summarize two chapters from How Democracies Die (this section will be worth half of your assignment grade):
You must choose at least one of the following chapters: 4, 5 or 9 (these chapters cover international cases)
You may choose any other chapter as a second chapter (the other chapters mostly cover America)
You can bullet-point your summaries, but please make sure to separate the chapters
You must use some quotes and some paraphrases
Please cite the text appropriately
Part 2 of the assignment is to analyze the summaries that you included. Analysis involves breaking down an issue in order to evaluate it with the goal of discovering new connections. Analysis can involve comparison, evaluation and linking an issue to a broader context or significance. You may add information from the rest of the book in this section (meaning the parts of the book you didn’t summarize), but please make sure to focus on what you did summarize. Please note the following in your analysis section (which will be worth the other half of your grade). This section should be written in paragraph/essay form not as a series of short-answer responses:
What ramifications does the summary information/data have for the future of democracy in the world and in America?
What is the significance of this information?
What findings/discoveries/new knowledge arise from a comparison of the information from the two chapters? (And if you want, what findings arise from adding other information from the book?)
What findings arise when you add new information from outside sources (like the news) to the summary information?
Evaluate whether you think this is a critical issue for the future of the world and for people like you and explain why. (Here you can touch on the whole book in addition to your summaries if you would like).
Is it too easy to undo democracy? If so, what safeguards are needed?
To our families:
Liz Mineo and Alejandra Mineo-Levitsky & Suriya, Lilah, and Talia Ziblatt
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1: Fateful Alliances
Chapter 2: Gatekeeping in America
Chapter 3: The Great Republican Abdication
Chapter 4: Subverting Democracy
Chapter 5: The Guardrails of Democracy
Chapter 6: The Unwritten Rules of American Politics
Chapter 7: The Unraveling
Chapter 8: Trump Against the Guardrails
Chapter 9: Saving Democracy
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Introduction
Is our democracy in danger? It is a question we never thought we’d be
asking. We have been colleagues for fifteen years, thinking, writing, and
teaching students about failures of democracy in other places and times—
Europe’s dark 1930s, Latin America’s repressive 1970s. We have spent years
researching new forms of authoritarianism emerging around the globe. For
us, how and why democracies die has been an occupational obsession.
But now we find ourselves turning to our own country. Over the past two
years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented
in the United States—but that we recognize as having been the precursors
of democratic crisis in other places. We feel dread, as do so many other
Americans, even as we try to reassure ourselves that things can’t really be
that bad here. After all, even though we know democracies are always
fragile, the one in which we live has somehow managed to defy gravity. Our
Constitution, our national creed of freedom and equality, our historically
robust middle class, our high levels of wealth and education, and our large,
diversified private sector—all these should inoculate us from the kind of
democratic breakdown that has occurred elsewhere.
Yet, we worry. American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies,
intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They
try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the
courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices. American states, which were
once praised by the great jurist Louis Brandeis as “laboratories of
democracy,” are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as
those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even
rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose. And in 2016, for the
first time in U.S. history, a man with no experience in public office, little
observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian
tendencies was elected president.
What does all this mean? Are we living through the decline and fall of
one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies?
—
At midday on September 11, 1973, after months of mounting tensions in
the streets of Santiago, Chile, British-made Hawker Hunter jets swooped
overhead, dropping bombs on La Moneda, the neoclassical presidential
palace in the center of the city. As the bombs continued to fall, La Moneda
burned. President Salvador Allende, elected three years earlier at the head
of a leftist coalition, was barricaded inside. During his term, Chile had been
wracked by social unrest, economic crisis, and political paralysis. Allende
had said he would not leave his post until he had finished his job—but now
the moment of truth had arrived. Under the command of General Augusto
Pinochet, Chile’s armed forces were seizing control of the country. Early in
the morning on that fateful day, Allende offered defiant words on a national
radio broadcast, hoping that his many supporters would take to the streets in
defense of democracy. But the resistance never materialized. The military
police who guarded the palace had abandoned him; his broadcast was met
with silence. Within hours, President Allende was dead. So, too, was
Chilean democracy.
This is how we tend to think of democracies dying: at the hands of men
with guns. During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out
of every four democratic breakdowns. Democracies in Argentina, Brazil,
the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan,
Peru, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay all died this way. More recently,
military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and
Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. In all these cases,
democracy dissolved in spectacular fashion, through military power and
coercion.
But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but
equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of
elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process
that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy
quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany.
More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.
In Venezuela, for example, Hugo Chávez was a political outsider who
railed against what he cast as a corrupt governing elite, promising to build a
more “authentic” democracy that used the country’s vast oil wealth to
improve the lives of the poor. Skillfully tapping into the anger of ordinary
Venezuelans, many of whom felt ignored or mistreated by the established
political parties, Chávez was elected president in 1998. As a woman in
Chávez’s home state of Barinas put it on election night, “Democracy is
infected. And Chávez is the only antibiotic we have.”
When Chávez launched his promised revolution, he did so
democratically. In 1999, he held free elections for a new constituent
assembly, in which his allies won an overwhelming majority. This allowed
the chavistas to single-handedly write a new constitution. It was a
democratic constitution, though, and to reinforce its legitimacy, new
presidential and legislative elections were held in 2000. Chávez and his
allies won those, too. Chávez’s populism triggered intense opposition, and in
April 2002, he was briefly toppled by the military. But the coup failed,
allowing a triumphant Chávez to claim for himself even more democratic
legitimacy.
It wasn’t until 2003 that Chávez took his first clear steps toward
authoritarianism. With public support fading, he stalled an opposition-led
referendum that would have recalled him from office—until a year later,
when soaring oil prices had boosted his standing enough for him to win. In
2004, the government blacklisted those who had signed the recall petition
and packed the supreme court, but Chávez’s landslide reelection in 2006
allowed him to maintain a democratic veneer. The chavista regime grew
more repressive after 2006, closing a major television station, arresting or
exiling opposition politicians, judges, and media figures on dubious charges,
and eliminating presidential term limits so that Chávez could remain in
power indefinitely. When Chávez, now dying of cancer, was reelected in
2012, the contest was free but not fair: Chavismo controlled much of the
media and deployed the vast machinery of the government in its favor. After
Chávez’s death a year later, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, won another
questionable reelection, and in 2014, his government imprisoned a major
opposition leader. Still, the opposition’s landslide victory in the 2015
legislative elections seemed to belie critics’ claims that Venezuela was no
longer democratic. It was only when a new single-party constituent
assembly usurped the power of Congress in 2017, nearly two decades after
Chávez first won the presidency, that Venezuela was widely recognized as an
autocracy.
This is how democracies now die. Blatant dictatorship—in the form of
fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the
world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most
countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different
means. Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have
been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments
themselves. Like Chávez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted
democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the
Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic
backsliding today begins at the ballot box.
The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. With a classic
coup d’état, as in Pinochet’s Chile, the death of a democracy is immediate
and evident to all. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed,
imprisoned, or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or
scrapped. On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no
tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic
institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a
veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.
Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense
that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may
even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy—making the judiciary
more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.
Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship.
Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves
facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not
immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are
living under a democracy. In 2011, when a Latinobarómetro survey asked
Venezuelans to rate their own country from 1 (“not at all democratic”) to 10
(“completely democratic”), 51 percent of respondents gave their country a
score of 8 or higher.
Because there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law,
or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously “crosses
the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those
who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or
crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.
—
How vulnerable is American democracy to this form of backsliding? The
foundations of our democracy are certainly stronger than those in
Venezuela, Turkey, or Hungary. But are they strong enough?
Answering such a question requires stepping back from daily headlines
and breaking news alerts to widen our view, drawing lessons from the
experiences of other democracies around the world and throughout history.
Studying other democracies in crisis allows us to better understand the
challenges facing our own democracy. For example, based on the historical
experiences of other nations, we have developed a litmus test to help
identify would-be autocrats before they come to power. We can learn from
the mistakes that past democratic leaders have made in opening the door to
would-be authoritarians—and, conversely, from the ways that other
democracies have kept extremists out of power. A comparative approach
also reveals how elected autocrats in different parts of the world employ
remarkably similar strategies to subvert democratic institutions. As these
patterns become visible, the steps toward breakdown grow less ambiguous—
and easier to combat. Knowing how citizens in other democracies have
successfully resisted elected autocrats, or why they tragically failed to do so,
is essential to those seeking to defend American democracy today.
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.
Once a would-be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a
second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic
institutions or be constrained by them? Institutions alone are not enough to
rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political
parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without
robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the
bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become
political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against
those who do not. 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.
—
America failed the first test in November 2016, when we elected a president
with a dubious allegiance to democratic norms. Donald Trump’s surprise
victory was made possible not only by public disaffection but also by the
Republican Party’s failure to keep an extremist demagogue within its own
ranks from gaining the nomination.
How serious is the threat now? Many observers take comfort in our
Constitution, which was designed precisely to thwart and contain
demagogues like Donald Trump. Our Madisonian system of checks and
balances has endured for more than two centuries. It survived the Civil War,
the Great Depression, the Cold War, and Watergate. Surely, then, it will be
able to survive Trump.
We are less certain. Historically, our system of checks and balances has
worked pretty well—but not, or not entirely, because of the constitutional
system designed by the founders. Democracies work best—and survive
longer—where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms.
Two basic norms have preserved America’s checks and balances in ways we
have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that
competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance,
or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their
institutional prerogatives. These two norms undergirded American
democracy for most of the twentieth century. Leaders of the two major
parties accepted one another as legitimate and resisted the temptation to
use their temporary control of institutions to maximum partisan advantage.
Norms of toleration and restraint served as the soft guardrails of American
democracy, helping it avoid the kind of partisan fight to the death that has
destroyed democracies elsewhere in the world, including Europe in the
1930s and South America in the 1960s and 1970s.
Today, however, the guardrails of American democracy are weakening.
The erosion of our democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and
accelerated in the 2000s. By the time Barack Obama became president,
many Republicans, in particular, questioned the legitimacy of their
Democratic rivals and had abandoned forbearance for a strategy of winning
by any means necessary. Donald Trump may have accelerated this process,
but he didn’t cause it. The challenges facing American democracy run
deeper. 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.
There are, therefore, reasons for alarm. Not only did Americans elect a
demagogue in 2016, but we did so at a time when the norms that once
protected our democracy were already coming unmoored. But if other
countries’ experiences teach us that that polarization can kill democracies,
they also teach us that breakdown is neither inevitable nor irreversible.
Drawing lessons from other democracies in crisis, this book suggests
strategies that citizens should, and should not, follow to defend our
democracy.
Many Americans are justifiably frightened by what is happening to our
country. But protecting our democracy requires more than just fright or
outrage. We must be humble and bold. We must learn from other countries
to see the warning signs—and recognize the false alarms. We must be aware
of the fateful missteps that have wrecked other democracies. And we must
see how citizens have risen to meet the great democratic crises of the past,
overcoming their own deep-seated divisions to avert breakdown. History
doesn’t repeat itself. But it rhymes. The promise of history, and the hope of
this book, is that we can find the rhymes before it is too late.
1
Fateful Alliances
A quarrel had arisen between the Horse and the Stag, so the Horse came to a Hunter
to ask his help to take revenge on the Stag. The Hunter agreed but said: “If you desire
to conquer the Stag, you must permit me to place this piece of iron between your
jaws, so that I may guide you with these reins, and allow this saddle to be placed
upon your back so that I may keep steady upon you as we follow the enemy.” The
Horse agreed to the conditions, and the Hunter soon saddled and bridled him. Then,
with the aid of the Hunter, the Horse soon overcame the Stag and said to the Hunter:
“Now get off, and remove those things from my mouth and back.” “Not so fast,
friend,” said the Hunter. “I have now got you under bit and spur and prefer to keep
you as you are at present.”
—“The Horse, the Stag, and the Hunter,” Aesop’s Fables
On October 30, 1922, Benito Mussolini arrived in Rome at 10:55 A.M. in an
overnight sleeping car from Milan. He had been invited to the capital city by
the king to accept Italy’s premiership and form a new cabinet.
Accompanied by a small group of guards, Mussolini first stopped at the
Hotel Savoia and then, wearing a black suit jacket, black shirt, and
matching black bowler hat, walked triumphantly to the king’s Quirinal
Palace. Rome was filled with rumors of unrest. Bands of Fascists—many in
mismatched uniforms—roamed the city’s streets. Mussolini, aware of the
power of the spectacle, strode into the king’s marble-floored residential
palace and greeted him, “Sire, forgive my attire. I come from the
battlefield.”
This was the beginning of Mussolini’s legendary “March on Rome.” The
image of masses of Blackshirts crossing the Rubicon to seize power from
Italy’s Liberal state became fascist canon, repeated on national holidays and
in children’s schoolbooks throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Mussolini did his
part to enshrine the myth. At the last train stop before entering Rome that
day, he had considered disembarking to ride into the city on horseback
surrounded by his guards. Though the plan was ultimately abandoned,
afterward he did all he could to bolster the legend of his rise to power as, in
his own words, a “revolution” and “insurrectional act” that launched a new
fascist epoch.
The truth was more mundane. The bulk of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, often
poorly fed and unarmed, arrived only after he had been invited to become
prime minister. The squads of Fascists around the country were a menace,
but Mussolini’s machinations to take the reins of state were no revolution.
He used his party’s 35 parliamentary votes (out of 535), divisions among
establishment politicians, fear of socialism, and the threat of violence by
30,000 Blackshirts to capture the attention of the timid King Victor
Emmanuel III, who saw in Mussolini a rising political star and a means of
neutralizing unrest.
With political order restored by Mussolini’s appointment and socialism in
retreat, the Italian stock market soared. Elder statesmen of the Liberal
establishment, such as Giovanni Giolitti and Antonio Salandra, found
themselves applauding the turn of events. They regarded Mussolini as a
useful ally. But not unlike the horse in Aesop’s fable, Italy soon found itself
under “bit and spur.”
Some version of this story has repeated itself throughout the world over
the last century. A cast of political outsiders, including Adolf Hitler, Getúlio
Vargas in Brazil, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela,
came to power on the same path: from the inside, via elections or alliances
with powerful political figures. In each instance, elites believed the
invitation to power would contain the outsider, leading to a restoration of
control by mainstream politicians. But their plans backfired. A lethal mix of
ambition, fear, and miscalculation conspired to lead them to the same
fateful mistake: willingly handing over the keys of power to an autocrat-in-
the-making.
—
Why do seasoned elder statesmen make this mistake? There are few more
gripping illustrations than the rise of Adolf Hitler in January 1933. His
capacity for violent insurrection was on display as early as Munich’s Beer
Hall Putsch of 1923—a surprise evening strike in which his group of pistol-
bearing loyalists took control of several government buildings and a Munich
beer hall where Bavarian officials were meeting. The ill-conceived attack
was halted by the authorities, and Hitler spent nine months in jail, where he
wrote his infamous personal testament, Mein Kampf. Thereafter, Hitler
publicly committed to gaining power via elections. Initially, his National
Socialist movement found few votes. The Weimar political system had been
founded in 1919 by a prodemocratic coalition of Catholics, Liberals, and
Social Democrats. But beginning in 1930, with the German economy
reeling, the center-right fell prey to infighting, and the Communists and
Nazis grew in popularity.
The elected government collapsed in March 1930 amid the pain of the
Great Depression. With political gridlock blocking government action, the
figurehead president, World War I hero Paul von Hindenburg, took
advantage of a constitutional article giving the head of state the authority to
name chancellors in the exceptional circumstance that parliament failed to
deliver governing majorities. The aim of these unelected chancellors—and
the president—was not only to govern but to sideline radicals on the left and
right. First, Center Party economist Heinrich Brüning (who would later flee
Germany to become a professor at Harvard) attempted, but failed, to restore
economic growth; his time as chancellor was short-lived. President von
Hindenburg turned next to nobleman Franz von Papen, and then, in growing
despondency, to von Papen’s close friend and rival, former defense minister
General Kurt von Schleicher. But without parliamentary majorities in the
Reichstag, stalemate persisted. Leaders, for good reason, feared the next
election.
Convinced that “something must finally give,” a cabal of rivalrous
conservatives convened in late January 1933 and settled on a solution: A
popular outsider should be placed at the head of the government. They
despised him but knew that at least he had a mass following. And, most of
all, they thought they could control him.
On January 30, 1933, von Papen, one of the chief architects of the plan,
dismissed worries over the gamble that would make Adolf Hitler chancellor
of a crisis-ridden Germany with the reassuring words: “We’ve engaged him
for ourselves….Within two months, we will have pushed [him] so far into a
corner that he’ll squeal.” A more profound miscalculation is hard to
imagine.
The Italian and German experiences highlight the type of “fateful
alliance” that often elevates authoritarians to power. In any democracy,
politicians will at times face severe challenges. Economic crisis, rising
public discontent, and the electoral decline of mainstream political parties
can test the judgment of even the most experienced insiders. 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.
This sort of devil’s bargain often mutates to the benefit of the insurgent,
as alliances provide outsiders with enough respectability to become
legitimate contenders for power. In early 1920s Italy, the old Liberal order
was crumbling amid growing strikes and social unrest. The failure of
traditional parties to forge solid parliamentary majorities left the elderly
fifth-term prime minister Giovanni Giolitti desperate, and against the
wishes of advisors he called early elections in May 1921. With the aim of
tapping into the Fascists’ mass appeal, Giolitti decided to offer Mussolini’s
upstart movement a place on his electoral group’s “bourgeois bloc” of
Nationalists, Fascists, and Liberals. This strategy failed—the bourgeois bloc
won less than 20 percent of the vote, leading to Giolitti’s resignation. But
Mussolini’s place on the ticket gave his ragtag group the legitimacy it would
need to enable its rise.
Such fateful alliances are hardly confined to interwar Europe. They also
help to explain the rise of Hugo Chávez. Venezuela had prided itself on
being South America’s oldest democracy, in place since 1958. Chávez, a
junior military officer and failed coup leader who had never held public
office, was a political outsider. But his rise to power was given a critical
boost from a consummate insider: ex-president Rafael Caldera, one of the
founders of Venezuelan democracy.
Venezuelan politics was long dominated by two parties, the center-left
Democratic Action and Caldera’s center-right Social Christian Party
(known as COPEI). The two alternated in power peacefully for more than
thirty years, and by the 1970s, Venezuela was viewed as a model democracy
in a region plagued by coups and dictatorships. During the 1980s, however,
the country’s oil-dependent economy sank into a prolonged slump, a crisis
that persisted for more than a decade, nearly doubling the poverty rate. Not
surprisingly, Venezuelans grew disaffected. Massive riots in February 1989
suggested that the established parties were in trouble. 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. Following a
second failed coup in November 1992, the imprisoned Chávez changed
course, opting to pursue power via elections. He would need help.
Although ex-president Caldera was a well-regarded elder statesman, his
political career was waning in 1992. Four years earlier, he had failed to
secure his party’s presidential nomination, and he was now considered a
political relic. But the seventy-six-year-old senator still dreamed of
returning to the presidency, and Chávez’s emergence provided him with a
lifeline. On the night of Chávez’s initial coup, the former president stood up
during an emergency joint session of congress and embraced the rebels’
cause, declaring:
It is difficult to ask the people to sacrifice themselves for
freedom and democracy when they think that freedom and
democracy are incapable of giving them food to eat, of
preventing the astronomical rise in the cost of subsistence, or of
placing a definitive end to the terrible scourge of corruption
that, in the eyes of the entire world, is eating away at the
institutions of Venezuela with each passing day.
The stunning speech resurrected Caldera’s political career. Having tapped
into Chávez’s antisystem constituency, the ex-president’s public support
swelled, which allowed him to make a successful presidential bid in 1993.
Caldera’s public flirtation with Chávez did more than boost his own
standing in the polls; it also gave Chávez new credibility. Chávez and his
comrades had sought to destroy their country’s thirty-four-year-old
democracy. But rather than denouncing the coup leaders as an extremist
threat, the former president offered them public sympathy—and, with it, an
opening to mainstream politics.
Caldera also helped open the gates to the presidential palace for Chávez
by dealing a mortal blow to Venezuela’s established parties. In a stunning
about-face, he abandoned COPEI, the party he had founded nearly half a
century earlier, and launched an independent presidential bid. To be sure,
the parties were already in crisis. But Caldera’s departure and subsequent
antiestablishment campaign helped bury them. The party system collapsed
after Caldera’s 1993 election as an antiparty independent, paving the way
for future outsiders. Five years later, it would be Chávez’s turn.
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.
Freeing Chávez was popular, and Caldera had promised such a move during
the campaign. Like most Venezuelan elites, he viewed Chávez as a passing
fad—someone who would likely fall out of public favor by the time of the
next election. But in dropping all charges, rather than allowing Chávez to
stand trial and then pardoning him, Caldera elevated him, transforming the
former coup leader overnight into a viable presidential candidate. On
December 6, 1998, Chávez won the presidency, easily defeating an
establishment-backed candidate. On inauguration day, Caldera, the
outgoing president, could not bring himself to deliver the oath of office to
Chávez, as tradition dictated. Instead, he stood glumly off to one side.
Despite their vast differences, Hitler, Mussolini, and Chávez followed
routes to power that share striking similarities. Not only were they all
outsiders with a flair for capturing public attention, but each of them rose to
power because establishment politicians overlooked the warning signs and
either handed over power to them (Hitler and Mussolini) or opened the
door for them (Chávez).
The abdication of political responsibility by existing leaders often marks
a nation’s first step toward authoritarianism. 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.”
—
Not all democracies have fallen into this trap. Some—including Belgium,
Britain, Costa Rica, and Finland—have faced challenges from demagogues
but also have managed to keep them out of power. How have they done it?
It is tempting to think this survival is rooted in the collective wisdom of
voters. Maybe Belgians and Costa Ricans were simply more democratic
than their counterparts in Germany or Italy. 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.
Hugo Chávez was elected by a majority of voters, but there is little
evidence that Venezuelans were looking for a strongman. At the time,
public support for democracy was higher there than in Chile—a country
that was, and remains, stably democratic. According to the 1998
Latinobarómetro survey, 60 percent of Venezuelans agreed with the
statement “Democracy is always the best form of government,” while only
25 percent agreed that “under some circumstances, an authoritarian
government can be preferable to a democratic one.” By contrast, only
53 percent of respondents in Chile agreed that “democracy is always the
best form of government.”
Potential demagogues exist in all democracies, and occasionally, one or
more of them strike a public chord. But in some democracies, political
leaders heed the warning signs and take steps to ensure that authoritarians
remain on the fringes, far from the centers of power. When faced with the
rise of extremists or demagogues, they make a concerted effort to isolate
and defeat them. 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.
—
If authoritarians are to be kept out, they first have to be identified. There is,
alas, no foolproof advance warning system. 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.
But politicians do not always reveal the full scale of their
authoritarianism before reaching power. Some adhere to democratic norms
early in their careers, only to abandon them later. Consider Hungarian
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán and his Fidesz party began as liberal
democrats in the late 1980s, and in his first stint as prime minister between
1998 and 2002, Orbán governed democratically. His autocratic about-face
after returning to power in 2010 was a genuine surprise.
So how do we identify authoritarianism in politicians who don’t have an
obvious antidemocratic record? Here we turn to the eminent political
scientist Juan Linz. Born in Weimar Germany and raised amid Spain’s civil
war, Linz knew all too well the perils of losing a democracy. As a professor
at Yale, he devoted much of his career to trying to understand how and why
democracies die. Many of Linz’s conclusions can be found in a small but
seminal book called The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes. Published in
1978, the book highlights the role of politicians, showing how their behavior
can either reinforce democracy or put it at risk. He also proposed, but never
fully developed, a “litmus test” for identifying antidemocratic politicians.
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. Table 1 shows how to
assess politicians in terms of these four factors.
A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern.
What kinds of candidates tend to test positive on a litmus test for
authoritarianism? Very often, populist outsiders do. Populists are
antiestablishment politicians—figures who, claiming to represent the voice
of “the people,” wage war on what they depict as a corrupt and
conspiratorial elite. Populists tend to deny the legitimacy of established
parties, attacking them as undemocratic and even unpatriotic. They tell
voters that the existing system is not really a democracy but instead has
been hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite. And they promise to bury
that elite and return power to “the people.” This discourse should be taken
seriously. When populists win elections, they often assault democratic
institutions. In Latin America, for example, of all fifteen presidents elected
in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela between 1990 and 2012, five were
populist outsiders: Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Lucio
Gutiérrez, and Rafael Correa. All five ended up weakening democratic
institutions.
Table 1: Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior
1. Rejection of (or
weak commitment
to) democratic
rules of the game
Do they reject the Constitution or express a willingness to violate
it?
Do they suggest a need for antidemocratic measures, such as
canceling elections, violating or suspending the Constitution,
banning certain organizations, or restricting basic civil or
political rights?
Do they seek to use (or endorse the use of) extraconstitutional
means to change the government, such as military coups, violent
insurrections, or mass protests aimed at forcing a change in the
government?
Do they attempt to undermine the legitimacy of elections, for
example, by refusing to accept credible electoral results?
2. Denial of the
legitimacy of
political opponents
Do they describe their rivals as subversive, or opposed to the
existing constitutional order?
Do they claim that their rivals constitute an existential threat,
either to national security or to the prevailing way of life?
Do they baselessly describe their partisan rivals as criminals,
whose supposed violation of the law (or potential to do so)
disqualifies them from full participation in the political arena?
Do they baselessly suggest that their rivals are foreign agents, in
that they are secretly working in alliance with (or the employ of)
a foreign government—usually an enemy one?
3. Toleration or
encouragement of
violence
Do they have any ties to armed gangs, paramilitary forces,
militias, guerrillas, or other organizations that engage in illicit
violence?
Have they or their partisan allies sponsored or encouraged mob
attacks on opponents?
Have they tacitly endorsed violence by their supporters by
refusing to unambiguously condemn it and punish it?
Have they praised (or refused to condemn) other significant acts
of political violence, either in the past or elsewhere in the
world?
4. Readiness to
curtail civil
liberties of
Have they supported laws or policies that restrict civil liberties,
such as expanded libel or defamation laws, or laws restricting
protest, criticism of the government, or certain civic or political
organizations?
opponents,
including media
Have they threatened to take legal or other punitive action
against critics in rival parties, civil society, or the media?
Have they praised repressive measures taken by other
governments, either in the past or elsewhere in the world?
Keeping authoritarian politicians out of power is more easily said than
done. Democracies, after all, are not supposed to ban parties or prohibit
candidates from standing for election—and we do not advocate such
measures. The responsibility for filtering out authoritarians lies, rather, with
political parties and party leaders: democracy’s gatekeepers.
Successful gatekeeping requires that mainstream parties isolate and
defeat extremist forces, a behavior political scientist Nancy Bermeo calls
“distancing.” Prodemocratic parties may engage in distancing in several
ways. First, they can keep would-be authoritarians off party ballots at
election time. This requires that they resist the temptation to nominate
these extremists for higher office even when they can potentially deliver
votes.
Second, parties can root out extremists in the grass roots of their own
ranks. Take the Swedish Conservative Party (AVF) during the perilous
interwar period. The AVF’s youth group (an organization of voting-age
activists), called the Swedish Nationalist Youth Organization, grew
increasingly radical in the early 1930s, criticizing parliamentary democracy,
openly supporting Hitler, and even creating a group of uniformed storm
troopers. The AVF responded in 1933 by expelling the organization. The
loss of 25,000 members may have cost the AVF votes in the 1934 municipal
elections, but the party’s distancing strategy reduced the influence of
antidemocratic forces in Sweden’s largest center-right party.
Third, prodemocratic parties can avoid all alliances with antidemocratic
parties and candidates. As we saw in Italy and Germany, prodemocratic
parties are sometimes tempted to align with extremists on their ideological
flank to win votes or, in parliamentary systems, form governments. But such
alliances can have devastating long-term consequences. As Linz wrote, the
demise of many democracies can be traced to a party’s “greater affinity for
extremists on its side of the political spectrum than for [mainstream]
parties close to the opposite side.”
Fourth, prodemocratic parties can act to systematically isolate, rather
than legitimize, extremists. This requires that politicians avoid acts—such
as German Conservatives’ joint rallies with Hitler in the early 1930s or
Caldera’s speech sympathizing with Chávez—that help to “normalize” or
provide public respectability to authoritarian figures.
Finally, whenever extremists emerge as serious electoral contenders,
mainstream parties must forge a united front to defeat them. To quote Linz,
they must be willing to “join with opponents ideologically distant but
committed to the survival of the democratic political order.” In normal
circumstances, this is almost unimaginable. Picture Senator Edward
Kennedy and other liberal Democrats campaigning for Ronald Reagan, or
the British Labour Party and their trade union allies endorsing Margaret
Thatcher. Each party’s followers would be infuriated at this seeming
betrayal of principles. But in extraordinary times, courageous party
leadership means putting democracy and country before party and
articulating to voters what is at stake. When a party or politician that tests
positive on our litmus test emerges as a serious electoral threat, there is
little alternative. United democratic fronts can prevent extremists from
winning power, which can mean saving a democracy.
—
Although the failures are more memorable, some European democracies
practiced successful gatekeeping between the wars. Surprisingly big lessons
can be drawn from small countries. Consider Belgium and Finland. In
Europe’s years of political and economic crisis in the 1920s and 1930s, both
countries experienced an early warning sign of democratic decay—the rise
of antisystem extremists—but, unlike Italy and Germany, they were saved
by political elites who defended democratic institutions (at least until Nazi
invasion several years later).
During Belgium’s 1936 general election, as the contagion of fascism was
spreading from Italy and Germany across Europe, voters delivered a jarring
result. Two authoritarian far-right parties—the Rex Party and the Flemish
nationalist party, or Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV)—surged in the
polls, capturing almost 20 percent of the popular vote and challenging the
historical dominance of three establishment parties: the center-right
Catholic Party, the Socialists, and the Liberal Party. The challenge from the
leader of the Rex Party, Léon Degrelle, a Catholic journalist who would
become a Nazi collaborator, was especially strong. Degrelle, a virulent critic
of parliamentary democracy, had departed from the right edges of the
Catholic Party and now attacked its leaders as corrupt. He received
encouragement and financial support from both Hitler and Mussolini.
The 1936 election shook the centrist parties, which suffered losses across
the board. Aware of the antidemocratic movements in nearby Italy and
Germany and fearful for their own survival, they confronted the daunting
task of deciding how to respond. The Catholic Party, in particular, faced a
difficult dilemma: collaborate with their longtime rivals, the Socialists and
Liberals, or forge a right-wing alliance that included the Rexists, a party
with whom they shared some ideological affinity but that rejected the value
of democratic politics.
Unlike the retreating mainstream politicians of Italy and Germany, the
Belgian Catholic leadership declared that any cooperation with the Rexists
was incompatible with party membership and then pursued a two-pronged
strategy to combat the movement. Internally, Catholic Party leaders
heightened discipline by screening candidates for pro-Rexist sympathies and
expelling those who expressed extremist views. In addition, the party
leadership took a strong stance against cooperation with the far right.
Externally, the Catholic Party fought Rex on its own turf. The Catholic
Party adopted new propaganda and campaign tactics that targeted younger
Catholics, who had formerly been part of the Rexist base. They created the
Catholic Youth Front in December 1935 and began to run former allies
against Degrelle.
The final clash between Rex and the Catholic Party, in which Rex was
effectively sidelined (until the Nazi occupation), centered around the
formation of a new government after the 1936 election. The Catholic Party
supported the incumbent Catholic prime minister Paul van Zeeland. After
van Zeeland regained the premiership, there were two chief options for
forming a government: The first was an alliance with the rival Socialists,
along the lines of France’s “Popular Front,” which van Zeeland and other
Catholic leaders had initially hoped to avoid. The second was a right-wing
alliance of antisocialist forces that would include Rex and VNV. The choice
was not easy; the second option was supported by a traditionalist faction
that sought to upset the fragile van Zeeland cabinet by rallying the Catholic
rank and file, organizing a “March on Brussels,” and forcing a by-election in
which Rex leader Degrelle would run against van Zeeland. These plans were
thwarted in 1937 when Degrelle lost the by-election, largely because the
Catholic Party MPs had taken a stand: They refused to go with the
traditionalists’ plan and instead united with the Liberals and Socialists
behind van Zeeland. This was the Catholic Party’s most important
gatekeeping act.
The Catholic Party’s stand on the right was also made possible by King
Leopold III and the Socialist Party. The election of 1936 had left the
Socialist Party as the largest party in the legislature, which gave it the
prerogative to form a government. However, when it became evident that
the Socialists could not gain enough parliamentary support, rather than call
a new election—which may have handed even more seats to extremist
parties—the king met with leaders of the largest parties to talk them into a
power-sharing cabinet, led by incumbent prime minister van Zeeland,
which would include both the conservative Catholics and the Socialists but
exclude antisystem parties on both sides. Although the Socialists distrusted
van Zeeland, a Catholic Party man, they nevertheless put democracy ahead
of their own interests and endorsed the grand coalition.
A similar dynamic unfolded in Finland, where the extreme-right Lapua
Movement burst onto the political stage in 1929, threatening the country’s
fragile democracy. The movement sought the destruction of communism by
any means necessary. It threatened violence if its demands were not met
and attacked mainstream politicians whom it deemed collaborators with
Socialists. At first, politicians from the governing center-right Agrarian
Union flirted with the Lapua Movement, finding its anticommunism
politically useful; they met the movement’s demands to deny communist
political rights while tolerating extreme-right violence. In 1930, P. E.
Svinhufvud, a conservative whom the Lapua leaders considered “one of
their own,” became prime minister, and he offered them two cabinet posts.
A year later, Svinhufvud became president. Yet the Lapua Movement
continued its extremist behavior; with the communists banned, it targeted
the more moderate Social Democratic Party. Lapua thugs abducted more
than a thousand Social Democrats, including union leaders and members of
parliament. The Lapua Movement also organized a 12,000-person march on
Helsinki (modeled on the mythical March on Rome), and in 1932, it backed
a failed putsch aimed at replacing the government with one that was
“apolitical” and “patriotic.”
As the Lapua Movement grew more radical, however, Finland’s
traditional conservative parties broke decisively with it. In late 1930, the
bulk of the Agrarian Union, the liberal Progress Party, and much of the
Swedish Peoples Party joined their main ideological rival, the Social
Democrats, in the so-called Lawfulness Front to defend democracy against
violent extremists. Even the conservative president, Svinhufvud, forcefully
rejected—and eventually banned—his former allies. The Lapua Movement
was left isolated, and Finland’s brief burst of fascism was aborted.
It is not only in distant historical cases that one finds successful
gatekeeping. In Austria in 2016, the main center-right party (the Austrian
People’s Party, ÖVP) effectively kept the radical-right Freedom Party
(FPÖ) out of the presidency. Austria has a long history of extreme right
politics, and the FPÖ is one of Europe’s strongest far-right parties. Austria’s
political system was growing vulnerable because the two main parties, the
Social Democratic SPÖ and the Christian Democratic ÖVP, which had
alternated in the presidency throughout the postwar period, were
weakening. In 2016, their dominance was challenged by two upstarts—the
Green Party’s former chairman, Alexander Van der Bellen, and the
extremist FPÖ leader Norbert Hofer.
To the surprise of most analysts, the first round left Van der Bellen and
the right-wing outsider Hofer as the two candidates in a second-round
runoff. After a procedural error in October 2016, the runoff was held in
December. At this point, several leading politicians, including some from
the conservative ÖVP, argued that Hofer and his Freedom Party had to be
defeated. Hofer had appeared to encourage violence against immigrants,
and many questioned whether an elected Hofer would privilege his party in
ways that violated long-standing norms of the president remaining above
politics. In the face of this threat, some important ÖVP leaders worked to
defeat Hofer by supporting their ideological rival, the left-leaning Green
candidate, Van der Bellen. The ÖVP’s presidential candidate, Andreas
Khol, endorsed Van der Bellen, as did Chairman Reinhold Mitterlehner,
Cabinet Minister Sophie Karmasin, and dozens of ÖVP mayors in the
Austrian countryside. In one letter, former chairman Erhard Busek wrote
that he endorsed Van der Bellen “not with passion but after careful
deliberation,” and that, furthermore, the decision was motivated by the
sentiment that “we don’t want congratulations from Le Pen, Jobbik, Wilders
and the AfD [and other extremists] after our presidential elections.” Van
der Bellen won by a mere 300,000 votes.
This stance took considerable political courage. According to one
Catholic Party mayor of a small city outside Vienna, Stefan
Schmuckenschlager, who endorsed the Green Party candidate, it was a
decision that split families. His twin brother, another party leader, had
supported Hofer. As Schmuckenschlager explained it, power politics
sometimes has to be put aside to do the right thing.
Did the endorsements from the ÖVP help? There is evidence that they
did. According to exit polls, 55 percent of respondents who identified as
ÖVP supporters said they voted for Van der Bellen, and 48 percent of Van
der Bellen voters said they had voted for him to prevent Hofer from
winning. In addition, the strong urban/rural division that has always marked
Austrian politics (between left-wing urban areas and right-wing rural areas)
was dramatically diminished in the second round in December 2016, with a
surprising number of traditional rural conservative states switching to vote
for Van der Bellen.
In short, in 2016, responsible leaders in the ÖVP resisted the temptation
to ally with an extremist party on their own ideological flank, and the result
was that party’s defeat. The FPÖ’s strong performance in the 2017
parliamentary elections, which positioned it to become a junior partner in a
new right-wing government, made it clear that the dilemma facing Austrian
conservatives persists. Still, their effort to keep an extremist out of the
presidency provides a useful model of contemporary gatekeeping.
For its part, the United States has an impressive record of gatekeeping.
Both Democrats and Republicans have confronted extremist figures on their
fringes, some of whom enjoyed considerable public support. For decades,
both parties succeeded in keeping these figures out of the mainstream. Until,
of course, 2016.
2
Gatekeeping in America
In The Plot Against America, American novelist Philip Roth builds on real
historical events to imagine what fascism might have looked like in prewar
America.
An early American mass-media hero, Charles Lindbergh, is the novel’s
central figure: He skyrockets to fame with his 1927 solo flight across the
Atlantic and later becomes a vocal isolationist and Nazi sympathizer. But
here is where history takes a fantastic turn in Roth’s hands: Rather than
fading into obscurity, Lindbergh arrives by plane at the 1940 Republican
Party convention in Philadelphia at 3:14 A.M., as a packed hall finds itself
deadlocked on the twentieth ballot. Cries of “Lindy! Lindy! Lindy!” erupt
for thirty uncontained minutes on the convention floor, and in a moment of
intense collective fervor, his name is proposed, seconded, and approved by
acclamation as the party’s nominee for president. Lindbergh, a man with no
political experience but unparalleled media savvy, ignores the advice of his
advisors and campaigns by piloting his iconic solo aircraft, Spirit of St. Louis,
from state to state, wearing his flight goggles, high boots, and jumpsuit.
In this world turned upside down, Lindbergh beats Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, the incumbent, to become president. And Lindbergh, whose
campaign is later revealed to be linked to Hitler, goes on to sign peace
treaties with America’s enemies. A wave of anti-Semitism and violence is
unleashed across America.
Many Americans have found parallels between the 2016 presidential
election and Roth’s work of fiction. The premise—an outsider with dubious
democratic credentials comes to power with the aid of a foreign nation—
cannot help but resonate. But the comparison raises another striking
question: Given the severity of the economic crisis in 1930s America, why
didn’t this happen here?
—
The reason no extremist demagogue won the presidency before 2016 is not
the absence of contenders for such a role. Nor is it the lack of public
support for them. To the contrary, extremist figures have long dotted the
landscape of American politics. In the 1930s alone, as many as eight
hundred right-wing extremist groups existed in the United States. Among
the most important figures to emerge during this period was Father Charles
Coughlin, an anti-Semitic Catholic priest whose fiery nationalist radio
program reached up to forty million listeners a week. Father Coughlin was
openly antidemocratic, calling for the abolition of political parties and
questioning the value of elections. His newspaper, Social Justice, adopted
pro-fascist positions in the 1930s, naming Mussolini its “Man of the Week”
and often defending the Nazi regime. Despite his extremism, Father
Coughlin was immensely popular. Fortune magazine called him “just about
the biggest thing ever to happen to radio.” He delivered speeches to packed
stadiums and auditoriums across the country; as he traveled from city to
city, fans lined his route to see him passing by. Some contemporary
observers called him the most influential figure in the United States after
Roosevelt.
The Depression also gave rise to Louisiana governor and senator Huey
Long, who called himself “the Kingfish.” Long was described by the
historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. as “the great demagogue of the day, a
man who resembled…a Latin American dictator, a Vargas or a Perón.” The
Kingfish was a gifted stump speaker, and he routinely flouted the rule of
law. As governor, Long built what Schlesinger described as “the nearest
approach to a totalitarian state the American republic has ever seen,” using
a mix of bribes and threats to bring the state’s legislature, judges, and press
to heel. Asked by an opposition legislator if he had heard of the state
constitution, Long replied, “I’m the constitution just now.” Newspaper
editor Hodding Carter called Long “the first true dictator out of the soil of
America.” When Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign manager, James A. Farley,
met Mussolini in Rome in 1933, he wrote that the Italian dictator
“reminded me of Huey Long.”
Long built a massive following with his call to redistribute wealth. In
1934, he was said to have “received more mail than all other senators
combined, more even than the president.” By then his Share Our Wealth
movement had more than 27,000 cells across the country and a mailing list
of nearly eight million names. Long planned a presidential run, telling a
New York Times reporter, “I can take this Roosevelt….I can out-promise
him. And he knows it.” Roosevelt viewed Long as a serious threat but was
spared when Long was assassinated in September 1935.
America’s authoritarian tendency persisted through the post–World
War II golden age. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who used the Cold War fear
of communist subversion to promote blacklisting, censorship, and book
banning, enjoyed wide backing among the American public. At the height
of McCarthy’s political power, polls showed that nearly half of all
Americans approved of him. Even after the Senate’s 1954 censure of him,
McCarthy enjoyed 40 percent support in Gallup polls.
A decade later, Alabama governor George Wallace’s defiant segregationist
stance vaulted him to national prominence, leading to surprisingly vigorous
bids for the presidency in 1968 and 1972. Wallace engaged in what
journalist Arthur Hadley called the “old and honorable American tradition
of hate the powerful.” He was, Hadley wrote, a master at exploiting “plain
old American rage.” Wallace often encouraged violence and displayed a
casual disregard for constitutional norms, declaring:
There is one thing more powerful than the
Constitution….That’s the will of the people. What is a
Constitution anyway? They’re the products of the people, the
people are the first source of power, and the people can abolish
a Constitution if they want to.
Wallace’s message, which mixed racism with populist appeals to working-
class whites’ sense of victimhood and economic anger, helped him make
inroads into the Democrats’ traditional blue-collar base. Polls showed that
roughly 40 percent of Americans approved of Wallace in his third-party run
in 1968, and in 1972 he shocked the establishment by emerging as a serious
contender in the Democratic primaries. When Wallace’s campaign was
derailed by an assassination attempt in May 1972, he was leading George
McGovern by more than a million votes in the primaries.
In short, Americans have long had an authoritarian streak. It was not
unusual for figures such as Coughlin, Long, McCarthy, and Wallace to gain
the support of a sizable minority—30 or even 40 percent—of the country.
We often tell ourselves that America’s national political culture in some way
immunizes us from such appeals, but this requires reading history with rose-
colored glasses. The real protection against would-be authoritarians has not
been Americans’ firm commitment to democracy but, rather, the
gatekeepers—our political parties.
—
On June 8, 1920, as Woodrow Wilson’s presidency was winding down,
Republican delegates gathered to choose their nominee in the flag-draped
but poorly ventilated Chicago Coliseum, where the withering heat reached
over one hundred degrees. After nine ballots over four days, the convention
remained undecided. On Friday evening, in Suite 404 on the thirteenth floor
of the nearby Blackstone Hotel, Republican National Committee Chairman
Will Hays and George Harvey, the powerful publisher of Harvey’s Weekly,
hosted a rotating group of U.S. senators and party leaders in the original
“smoke-filled back room.” The Old Guard, as journalists called them,
poured themselves drinks, smoked cigars, and talked late into the night
about how to break the deadlock to get a candidate the 493 delegates
needed for the nomination.
The leading contender on the convention floor was Major General
Leonard Wood, an old ally of Theodore Roosevelt who had generated
popular enthusiasm in the primaries and dominated the ballot earlier in the
week, with 287 delegates. He was followed by Illinois governor Frank
Lowden, California senator Hiram Johnson, and Ohio senator Warren G.
Harding, trailing in a distant fourth place with only 65½ delegates. From the
convention floor, reporters wrote, “Nobody is talking Harding…[He is] not
even considered as among the most promising dark horses.” But as reporters
heard rumors about the discussions taking place at the Blackstone, the most
motivated of them found their way to the thirteenth floor of the hotel and
quietly gathered in the hallways outside Suite 404 to catch a glimpse as
leading senators—including Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts,
McCormick of Illinois, Phipps of Colorado, Calder of New York, former
senator Crane of Massachusetts, and others—came and went.
Inside Suite 404, the upsides and downsides of each candidate were
carefully reviewed and debated (Knox was too old; Lodge didn’t like
Coolidge). At one in the morning, seven members of the Old Guard
remained in the room and took a “standing vote.” Called in at 2:11 A.M. by
George Harvey, a stunned Harding was informed that he had been selected.
Word spread. By the next evening, on the tenth ballot and to the great relief
of the sweltering delegates, Warren G. Harding received an overwhelming
692½ convention delegates amid rousing cheers. Though he garnered just
over 4 percent of the primary vote, he was now the Republican Party’s 1920
presidential nominee.
Nobody likes smoke-filled rooms today—and for good reason. They were
not very democratic. Candidates were chosen by a small group of power
brokers who were not accountable to the party rank and file, much less to
average citizens. And smoke-filled rooms did not always produce good
presidents—Harding’s term, after all, was marked by scandal. But backroom
candidate selection had a virtue that is often forgotten today: It served a
gatekeeping function, keeping demonstrably unfit figures off the ballot and
out of office. To be sure, the reason for this was not the high-mindedness of
party leaders. Rather, party “bosses,” as their opponents called them, were
most interested in picking safe candidates who could win. It was, above all,
their risk aversion that led them to avoid extremists.
Gatekeeping institutions go back to the founding of the American
republic. The 1787 Constitution created the world’s first presidential
system. Presidentialism poses distinctive challenges for gatekeeping. In
parliamentary democracies, the prime minister is a member of parliament
and is selected by the leading parties in parliament, which virtually ensures
that he or she will be acceptable to political insiders. The very process of
government formation serves as a filter. Presidents, by contrast, are not
sitting members of Congress, nor are they elected by Congress. At least in
theory, they are elected by the people, and anyone can run for president and
—if he or she earns enough support—win.
Our founders were deeply concerned with gatekeeping. In designing the
Constitution and electoral system, they grappled with a dilemma that, in
many respects, remains with us today. On the one hand, they sought not a
monarch but an elected president—one who conformed to their idea of a
republican popular government, reflecting the will of the people. On the
other, the founders did not fully trust the people’s ability to judge
candidates’ fitness for office. Alexander Hamilton worried that a popularly
elected presidency could be too easily captured by those who would play on
fear and ignorance to win elections and then rule as tyrants. “History will
teach us,” Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, that “of those men who
have overturned the liberties of republics, the great number have begun
their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing
demagogues, and ending tyrants.” For Hamilton and his colleagues,
elections required some kind of built-in screening device.
The device the founders came up with was the Electoral College.
Article II of the Constitution created an indirect election system that
reflected Hamilton’s thinking in Federalist 68:
The immediate election should be made by men most capable
of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting
under the circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a
judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements
which were proper to govern them.
The Electoral College, made up of locally prominent men in each state,
would thus be responsible for choosing the president. Under this
arrangement, Hamilton reasoned, “the office of president will seldom fall to
the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the
requisite qualifications.” Men with “talents for low intrigue, and the little
arts of popularity” would be filtered out. The Electoral College thus became
our original gatekeeper.
This system proved short-lived, however, due to two shortcomings in the
founders’ original design. First, the Constitution is silent on the question of
how presidential candidates are to be selected. The Electoral College goes
into operation after the people vote, playing no role in determining who
seeks the presidency in the first place. Second, the Constitution never
mentions political parties. Though Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
would go on to pioneer our two-party system, the founders did not seriously
contemplate those parties’ existence.
The rise of parties in the early 1800s changed the way our electoral
system worked. Instead of electing local notables as delegates to the
Electoral College, as the founders had envisioned, each state began to elect
party loyalists. Electors became party agents, which meant that the Electoral
College surrendered its gatekeeping authority to the parties. The parties
have retained it ever since.
Parties, then, became the stewards of American democracy. Because they
select our presidential candidates, parties have the ability—and, we would
add, the responsibility—to keep dangerous figures out of the White House.
They must, therefore, strike a balance between two roles: a democratic role,
in which they choose the candidates that best represent the party’s voters;
and what political scientist James Ceaser calls a “filtration” role, in which
they screen out those who pose a threat to democracy or are otherwise unfit
to hold office.
These dual imperatives—choosing a popular candidate and keeping out
demagogues—may, at times, conflict with each other. What if the people
choose a demagogue? This is the recurring tension at the heart of the
presidential nomination process, from the founders’ era through today. An
overreliance on gatekeeping is, in itself, undemocratic—it can create a
world of party bosses who ignore the rank and file and fail to represent the
people. But an overreliance on the “will of the people” can also be
dangerous, for it can lead to the election of a demagogue who threatens
democracy itself. There is no escape from this tension. There are always
trade-offs.
—
For most of American history, political parties prioritized gatekeeping over
openness. There was always some form of a smoke-filled room. In the early
nineteenth century, presidential candidates were chosen by groups of
congressmen in Washington, in a system known as Congressional Caucuses.
The system was soon criticized as too closed, so beginning in the 1830s,
candidates were nominated in national party conventions made up of
delegates from each state. Delegates were not popularly elected; they were
chosen by state and local political party committees, and they were not
bound to support particular candidates. They generally followed the
instructions of the state party leaders who sent them to the convention. The
system thus favored insiders, or candidates backed by the party leaders who
controlled the delegates. Candidates who lacked support among their party’s
network of state and local politicians had no chance of success.
The convention system was also criticized for being closed and
undemocratic, and there was no shortage of efforts to reform it. Primary
elections were introduced during the Progressive era; the first was held in
Wisconsin in 1901, and in 1916, primaries were held in two dozen states.
Yet these brought little change—in part because many states didn’t use
them, but mostly because elected delegates were not required to support the
candidate who won the primary. They remained “unpledged,” free to
negotiate their vote on the convention floor. Party leaders—with their
control over government jobs, perks, and other benefits—were well-
positioned to broker these deals, so they remained the presidency’s
gatekeepers. Because primaries had no binding impact on presidential
nominations, they were little more than beauty contests. Real power
remained in the hands of party insiders, or what contemporaries called
“organization men.” For prospective candidates, securing the backing of the
organization men was the only viable road to the nomination.
The old convention system highlights the trade-offs inherent to
gatekeeping. On the one hand, the system wasn’t very democratic. The
organization men were hardly representative of American society. Indeed,
they were the very definition of an “old boys” network. Most rank-and-file
party members, especially the poor and politically unconnected, women,
and minorities, were not represented in the smoke-filled rooms and were
thus excluded from the presidential nomination process.
On the other hand, the convention system was an effective gatekeeper, in
that it systematically filtered out dangerous candidates. Party insiders
provided what political scientists called “peer review.” Mayors, senators,
and congressional representatives knew the candidates personally. They had
worked with them, under diverse conditions, over the years and were thus
well-positioned to evaluate their character, judgment, and ability to operate
under stress. Smoke-filled back rooms therefore served as a screening
mechanism, helping to keep out the kind of demagogues and extremists
who derailed democracy elsewhere in the world. American party
gatekeeping was so effective that outsiders simply couldn’t win. As a result,
most didn’t even try.
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.
Yet Ford was also a widely admired, even beloved, figure in the United
States, especially in the Midwest. A “poor farm boy who made good,” the
plainspoken businessman was revered by many rural Americans as a folk
hero, alongside such presidents as Washington and Lincoln.
Ford’s restless imperiousness eventually lured him into politics. He began
with opposition to World War I, launching an amateurish but high-profile
“peace mission” to Europe. He dipped in and out of politics after the Great
War, nearly winning a Senate seat in 1918 and then flirting with the idea of
running for president (as a Democrat) in 1924. The idea quickly generated
enthusiasm, especially in rural parts of the country. Ford for President clubs
sprang up in 1923, and the press began to write of a “Ford Craze.”
That summer, the popular magazine Collier’s began a weekly national poll
of its readers, which suggested that Ford’s celebrity, reputation for business
acumen, and unremitting media attention could translate into a popular
presidential candidacy. As the results rolled in each week, they were
accompanied by increasingly reverential headlines: “Politics in Chaos as
Ford Vote Grows” and “Ford Leads in Presidential Free-for-All.” By the end
of the two-month straw poll of upward of 250,000 readers, Henry Ford ran
away from the competition, outpacing all twelve contenders, including
President Warren Harding and future president Herbert Hoover. With these
results, Collier’s editors concluded, “Henry Ford has become the issue in
American politics.”
But if Ford harbored serious presidential ambitions, he was born a
century too soon. What mattered far more than public opinion was the
opinion of party leaders, and party leaders soundly rejected him. A week
after publishing the results of its readers’ poll, in a series of articles,
including one titled “The Politicians Pick a President,” Collier’s reported the
results of its poll of the ultimate insiders—a group of 116 party leaders in
both parties, including all members of the Republican and Democratic
Party National Committees, 14 leading governors, and senators and
congressmen in each party. Among these kingmakers, Ford lagged in a
distant fifth position. The Collier’s editors observed that fall:
When Democratic [Party] chieftains are asked: “What about
Ford?” they all shrug their shoulders. Almost without a single
exception the men who constitute what is usually known as the
“organization” in every State are opposed to Ford. In all the
States except where there are presidential primaries these men
practically hand-pick the delegates to the national
conventions….Nobody denies the amount of Ford sentiment
among the masses of the people—Democratic and Republican.
Every Democratic leader knows his State is full of it—and he is
afraid of it. He thinks, however, that because of the machinery
of selection of delegates there is little likelihood that Ford will
make much of a showing.
Despite popular enthusiasm for his candidacy, Ford was effectively locked
out of contention. Senator James Couzens called the idea of his candidacy
ridiculous. “How can a man over sixty years old, who…has no training, no
experience, aspire to such an office?” he asked. “It is most ridiculous.”
It is, therefore, not surprising that when Ford was interviewed for Collier’s
at the end of that long summer, his presidential ambitions were tempered:
I can’t imagine myself today accepting any nomination. Of
course, I can’t say…what I will do tomorrow. There might be a
war or some crisis of the sort, in which legalism and
constitutionalism and all that wouldn’t figure, and the nation
wanted some person who could do things and do them quick.
What Ford was saying, in effect, was that he would only consider running if
the gatekeeping system blocking his path were somehow removed. So, in
reality, he never stood a chance.
Huey Long didn’t live long enough to test the presidential waters, but
despite his extraordinary political skills, popularity, and ambition, there is
good reason to think that he, too, would have been stopped by the partisan
gatekeepers. When he was elected to the Senate in 1932, Long’s norm-
breaking behavior quickly isolated him from his peers. Lacking support
among Democratic Party leaders, Long would have stood no chance of
defeating Roosevelt at the 1936 convention. He would have had to mount an
independent presidential bid, which would have been extraordinarily
difficult. Polls suggested that a Long candidacy could divide the Democratic
vote and throw the 1936 race to the Republicans but that Long himself had
little chance of winning.
Party gatekeeping also helped confine George Wallace to the margins of
politics. The segregationist governor participated in a few Democratic
primaries in 1964, performing surprisingly well. Running against civil rights
and under the slogan “Stand Up for America,” Wallace shocked the pundits
by winning nearly a third of the vote in Wisconsin and Indiana and a
stunning 43 percent in Maryland. But primaries mattered little in 1964, and
Wallace soon bowed out in the face of an inevitable Lyndon Johnson
candidacy. Over the next four years, however, Wallace campaigned across
the country in anticipation of the 1968 presidential race. His mix of
populism and white nationalism earned him strong support among some
white working-class voters. By 1968, roughly 40 percent of Americans
approved of him. In other words, Wallace made a Trump-like appeal in
1968, and he enjoyed Trump-like levels of public support.
But Wallace operated in a different political world. Knowing that the
Democratic Party establishment would never back his candidacy, he ran as
the candidate of the American Independence Party, which doomed him.
Wallace’s performance—13.5 percent of the vote—was strong for a third-
party candidate, but it left him far from the White House.
We can now grasp the full scale of Philip Roth’s imaginative leap in his
novel The Plot Against America. The Lindbergh phenomenon was not
entirely a figment of Roth’s imagination. 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. And he was extraordinarily popular. His
speeches drew large crowds, and in 1939, according to Reader’s Digest
editor Paul Palmer, his radio addresses generated more mail than those of
any other person in America. As one historian put it, “Conventional
wisdom had had it that Lindbergh would eventually run for public office,”
and in 1939, Idaho senator William Borah suggested that Lindbergh would
make a good presidential candidate. But here is where we return to reality.
The Republican Party’s 1940 convention was not even remotely like the
fictionalized one described in The Plot Against America. Not only did
Lindbergh not appear at the convention, but his name never even came up.
Gatekeeping worked.
In the conclusion of their history of radical-right politics in the United
States, The Politics of Unreason, Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab
described American parties as the “chief practical bulwark” against
extremists. They were correct. But Lipset and Raab published their book in
1970, just as the parties were embarking on the most dramatic reform of
their nomination systems in well over a century. Everything was about to
change, with consequences far beyond what anyone might have imagined.
—
The turning point came in 1968. It was a heart-wrenching year for
Americans. President Lyndon Johnson had escalated the war in Vietnam,
which was now spiraling out of control—16,592 Americans died in
Vietnam in 1968 alone, more than in any previous year. American families
sat in their living rooms each evening watching the TV nightly news,
assaulted with ever more graphic scenes of combat. In April 1968, an
assassin gunned down Martin Luther King Jr. Then, in June, within hours of
his winning the California Democratic presidential primary, Robert F.
Kennedy’s presidential campaign—centered on opposition to Johnson’s
escalating war—was abruptly halted by a second assassin’s gun. The cries of
despair in Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel ballroom that night were given
expression by novelist John Updike, who wrote that it felt as if “God might
have withdrawn His blessing from America.”
Meanwhile, the Democrats grew divided between supporters of Johnson’s
foreign policy and those who had embraced Robert Kennedy’s antiwar
position. This split played out in a particularly disruptive manner at the
Democratic convention in Chicago. With Kennedy tragically gone, the
traditional party organization stepped into the breach. The party insiders
who dominated on the convention floor favored Vice President Hubert
Humphrey, but Humphrey was deeply unpopular among antiwar delegates
because of his association with President Johnson’s Vietnam policies.
Moreover, Humphrey had not run in a single primary. His campaign, as one
set of analysts put it, was limited to “party leaders, union bosses, and other
insiders.” Yet, with the backing of the party regulars, including the machine
of powerful Chicago mayor Richard Daley, he won the nomination on the
first ballot.
Humphrey was hardly the first presidential candidate to win the
nomination without competing in primaries. He would, however, be the
last. The events that unfolded in Chicago—displayed on television screens
across America—mortally wounded the party-insider presidential selection
system. Even before the convention began, the crushing blow of Robert
Kennedy’s assassination, the escalating conflict over Vietnam, and the
energy of the antiwar protesters in Chicago’s Grant Park sapped any
remaining public faith in the old system. On August 28, the protesters
turned to march on the convention: Blue-helmeted police attacked
protesters and bystanders, and bloodied men, women, and children sought
refuge in nearby hotels. The so-called Battle of Michigan Avenue then
spilled over into the convention hall itself. Senator Abraham Ribicoff of
Connecticut, in his nomination speech for antiwar candidate George
McGovern, decried “the gestapo tactics” of the Chicago police, looking—on
live television—directly at Mayor Daley. As confrontations exploded on the
convention floor, uniformed police officers dragged several delegates from
the auditorium. Watching in shock, NBC anchor Chet Huntley observed,
“This surely is the first time policemen have ever entered the floor of a
convention.” His coanchor, David Brinkley, wryly added, “In the United
States.”
The Chicago calamity triggered far-reaching reform. Following
Humphrey’s defeat in the 1968 election, the Democratic Party created the
McGovern–Fraser Commission and gave it the job of rethinking the
nomination system. The commission’s final report, published in 1971, cited
an old adage: “The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” With
the legitimacy of the political system at stake, party leaders felt intense
pressure to open up the presidential nomination process. As George
McGovern put it, “Unless changes are made, the next convention will make
the last look like a Sunday-school picnic.” If the people were not given a
real say, the McGovern–Fraser report darkly warned, they would turn to
“the anti-politics of the street.”
The McGovern–Fraser Commission issued a set of recommendations that
the two parties adopted before the 1972 election. What emerged was a
system of binding presidential primaries. Beginning in 1972, the vast
majority of the delegates to both the Democratic and Republican
conventions would be elected in state-level primaries and caucuses.
Delegates would be preselected by the candidates themselves to ensure their
loyalty. This meant that for the first time, the people who chose the parties’
presidential candidates would be neither beholden to party leaders nor free
to make backroom deals at the convention; rather, they would faithfully
reflect the will of their state’s primary voters. There were differences
between the parties, such as the Democrats’ adoption of proportional rules
in many states and mechanisms to enhance the representation of women
and minorities. But in adopting binding primaries, both parties substantially
loosened their leaders’ grip over the candidate selection process—opening it
up to voters instead. Democratic National Committee chair Larry O’Brien
called the reforms “the greatest goddamn changes since the party system.”
George McGovern, who unexpectedly won the 1972 Democratic
nomination, called the new primary system “the most open political process
in our national history.”
McGovern was right. The path to the nomination no longer had to pass
through the party establishment. For the first time, the party gatekeepers
could be circumvented—and beaten.
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.
Some political scientists worried about the new system. Binding
primaries were certainly more democratic. But might they be too
democratic? By placing presidential nominations in the hands of voters,
binding primaries weakened parties’ gatekeeping function, potentially
eliminating the peer review process and opening the door to outsiders. Just
before the McGovern–Fraser Commission began its work, two prominent
political scientists warned that primaries could “lead to the appearance of
extremist candidates and demagogues” who, unrestrained by party
allegiances, “have little to lose by stirring up mass hatreds or making absurd
promises.”
Initially, these fears seemed overblown. Outsiders did emerge: Civil rights
leader Jesse Jackson ran for the Democratic Party nomination in 1984 and
1988, while Southern Baptist leader Pat Robertson (1988), television
commentator Pat Buchanan (1992, 1996, 2000), and Forbes magazine
publisher Steve Forbes (1996) ran for the Republican nomination. But they
all lost.
Circumventing the party establishment was, it turned out, easier in theory
than in practice. Capturing a majority of delegates required winning
primaries all over the country, which, in turn, required money, favorable
media coverage, and, crucially, people working on the ground in all states.
Any candidate seeking to complete the grueling obstacle course of U.S.
primaries needed allies among donors, newspaper editors, interest groups,
activist groups, and state-level politicians such as governors, mayors,
senators, and congressmen. In 1976, Arthur Hadley described this arduous
process as the “invisible primary.” He claimed that this phase, which
occurred before the primary season even began, was “where the winning
candidate is actually selected.” Members of the party establishment—
elected officials, activists, allied interest groups—were, thereby, not
necessarily locked out of the game. Without them, Hadley argued, it was
nearly impossible to win either party’s nomination.
For a quarter of a century, Hadley was right.
3
The Great Republican Abdication
On June 15, 2015, real estate developer and reality-TV star Donald Trump
descended an escalator to the lobby of his own building, Trump Tower, to
make an announcement: He was running for president. At the time, he was
just another long-shot candidate who thought his wealth and celebrity might
give him a chance or, at the very least, allow him to bask in the spotlight for
a few months. Like fellow businessman Henry Ford a century earlier, Trump
held some extremist views—his most recent experience with politics had
been as a “birther,” questioning whether President Barack Obama was born
in the United States. To the extent that leading media and political figures
took him seriously, it was to denounce him.
But the primary system had opened up the presidential nomination
process more than ever before in American history. And openness is always
double-edged. In this new environment, a wider range of politicians, from
George McGovern to Barack Obama, could now compete seriously for the
presidency. But the window was now also open to true outsiders—
individuals who had never held elective office. In the twenty-three years
between 1945 and 1968, under the old convention system, only a single
outsider (Dwight Eisenhower) publicly sought the nomination of either
party. By contrast, during the first two decades of the primary system, 1972
to 1992, eight outsiders ran (five Democrats and three Republicans), an
average of 1.25 per election; and between 1996 and 2016, eighteen
outsiders competed in one of the two parties’ primaries—an average of
three per election. Thirteen of these were Republicans.
The post-1972 primary system was especially vulnerable to a particular
kind of outsider: individuals with enough fame or money to skip the
“invisible primary.” In other words, celebrities. Although conservative
outsiders Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and Steve Forbes did not manage to
overcome the effects of the invisible primary during the 1980s and 1990s,
their relative success provided clues into how it might be done. Forbes, an
extraordinarily wealthy businessman, was able to buy name recognition,
while Robertson, a televangelist who founded the Christian Broadcasting
Network, and Buchanan, a television commentator (and early Republican
proponent of white nationalism), were both colorful figures with special
media access. Although none of them won the nomination, they used
massive wealth and celebrity status to become contenders.
But in the end, celebrity outsiders had always fallen short. And so on that
early-summer afternoon in the gilded lobby of Trump Tower, there seemed
no reason to think things would be different. To win the nomination, Trump
would have to compete in an intricate web of caucuses and primaries
against sixteen other candidates. Many of his rivals boasted the kind of
résumé that had been the hallmark of successful candidates in the past. At
the head of the pack was Florida governor Jeb Bush, son and brother of
former presidents. There were other governors, as well, including
Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, New Jersey’s Chris
Christie, and Ohio’s John Kasich, and several rising Republican stars—
younger, media-savvy politicians such as Senators Marco Rubio and Rand
Paul, who hoped to replicate Barack Obama’s fast track to the presidency.
Texas, home to three of the last eight elected presidents, offered two more
candidates: Senator Ted Cruz and former governor Rick Perry. Besides
Trump, two other outsiders threw their hats into the ring: businesswoman
Carly Fiorina and neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
Trump could not hope to win the support of the establishment. Not only
did he lack any political experience, but he wasn’t even a lifelong
Republican. Whereas Bush, Rubio, Cruz, Christie, Walker, and Kasich all
had deep Republican roots, Trump had switched his party registration
several times and had even contributed to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the
U.S. Senate.
Even after Trump began to surge in the polls, few people took his
candidacy seriously. In August 2015, two months after Trump declared his
candidacy, Las Vegas bookmakers gave him one-hundred-to-one odds of
winning the White House. And in November 2015, as Trump sat high atop
the Republican polls, Nate Silver, founder of the FiveThirtyEight blog,
whose uncannily accurate predictions in the 2008 and 2012 elections had
earned him fame and prestige, wrote an article titled “Dear Media: Stop
Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Poll Numbers.” The article predicted
that Trump’s weakness among party insiders would spell his demise. Despite
Trump’s seemingly large lead, Silver assured us, his chances of winning the
nomination were “considerably less than 20 percent.”
But the world had changed. Party gatekeepers were shells of what they
once were, for two main reasons. One was a dramatic increase in the
availability of outside money, accelerated (though hardly caused) by the
Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. Now even marginal
presidential candidates—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Howard Dean,
Bernie Sanders—could raise large sums of money, either by finding their
own billionaire financier or through small donations via the Internet. The
proliferation of well-funded primary candidates indicated a more open and
fluid political environment.
The other major factor diminishing the power of traditional gatekeepers
was the explosion of alternative media, particularly cable news and social
media. Whereas the path to national name recognition once ran through
relatively few mainstream channels, which favored establishment politicians
over extremists, the new media environment made it easier for celebrities
to achieve wide name recognition—and public support—practically
overnight. This was particularly true on the Republican side, where the
emergence of Fox News and influential radio talk-show personalities—what
political commentator David Frum calls the “conservative entertainment
complex”—radicalized conservative voters, to the benefit of ideologically
extreme candidates. This gave rise to such phenomena as Herman Cain, the
former Godfather Pizza CEO and radio talk-show host who rocketed to the
top of the Republican polls in late 2011 before flaming out because of
scandal.
The nomination process was now wide open. While the rules of the game
hardly guaranteed the rise of a Trump-like figure, they could no longer
prevent it, either. It was like a game of Russian roulette: The chances of an
extremist outsider capturing the presidential nomination were higher than
ever before in history.
—
Although many factors contributed to Donald Trump’s stunning political
success, his rise to the presidency is, in good measure, a story of ineffective
gatekeeping. Party gatekeepers failed at three key junctures: the “invisible
primary,” the primaries themselves, and the general election.
Trump finished dead last in the invisible primary. When the actual
primary season began on February 1, 2016, the day of the Iowa Caucus, he
had no endorsements among Republican power brokers. Measured by the
backing of governors, U.S. senators, and congressional representatives at the
time of the Iowa Caucus, Jeb Bush won the invisible primary with 31
endorsements. Marco Rubio finished second with 27. Ted Cruz finished
third with 18, followed by Rand Paul with 11. Chris Christie, John Kasich,
Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, and Carly Fiorina all won more
endorsements than Trump. By all standard wisdom, then, Trump’s
candidacy was a nonstarter. If history were any guide, his lead in the polls
would inevitably fade.
Trump’s performance in the first state contest, Iowa—24 percent, good
for second place—did little to alter these expectations. After all, outsiders
Pat Robertson (25 percent of the vote in 1988), Pat Buchanan (23 percent
in 1996), and Steve Forbes (31 percent in 2000) had all finished second in
Iowa but faded away soon thereafter.
Then Trump did something no previous outsider had done: He easily won
subsequent primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Still, he was
shunned by the party establishment. On the day of the South Carolina
primary, Trump did not yet have a single endorsement from a sitting
Republican governor, senator, or congressperson. It was only after winning
South Carolina that Trump gained his first supporters: congressional
backbenchers Duncan Hunter (California) and Chris Collins (New York).
Even as he proceeded to rout his Republican rivals at the polling stations,
Trump never gained a substantial number of endorsements. When the
primary season ended, he had forty-six—less than a third of Marco Rubio’s
total and barely as many as the long-ended Bush campaign.
By the time Trump rolled to victory in the March 1 Super Tuesday
primaries, it was clear that he had laid waste to the invisible primary,
rendering it irrelevant. Undoubtedly, Trump’s celebrity status played a role.
But equally important was the changed media landscape. From early on in
the campaign, Trump had the sympathy or support of right-wing media
personalities such as Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, and Michael
Savage, as well as the increasingly influential Breitbart News. Although
Trump initially had a contentious relationship with Fox News, he reaped
the benefits of its polarized media landscape.
Trump also found new ways to use old media as a substitute for party
endorsements and traditional campaign spending. A “candidate with
qualities uniquely tailored to the digital age,” Trump attracted free
mainstream coverage by creating controversy. By one estimate, the Twitter
accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC—four outlets that no one could
accuse of pro-Trump leanings—mentioned Trump twice as often as his
general election rival, Hillary Clinton. According to another study, Trump
enjoyed up to $2 billion in free media coverage during the primary season.
As the undisputed frontrunner in free mainstream coverage and the favorite
son of much of the alternative right-wing media network, Trump did not
need traditional Republican power brokers. The gatekeepers of the invisible
primary were not merely invisible; by 2016, they had left the building
entirely.
After Trump’s Super Tuesday victories, panic set in among the
Republican establishment. Prominent insiders and conservative opinion
leaders began to make the case against Trump. In March 2016, former
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a high-profile speech
at the Hinckley Institute of Politics in which he described Trump as a
danger to both the Republican Party and the country. Echoing Ronald
Reagan’s 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech, Romney declared that Trump
was a “fraud” who had “neither the temperament nor the judgment to be
president.” Other party elders, including 2008 presidential candidate John
McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham, warned against Trump. And leading
conservative publications, including the National Review and the Weekly
Standard, rejected Trump in blistering terms. But the #NeverTrump
movement was always more talk than action. In reality, the primary system
had left Republican leaders virtually weaponless to halt Trump’s rise. The
barrage of attacks had little impact and possibly even backfired where it
counted: the voting booth.
Republican leaders’ toothlessness was on display at the July 2016
Republican National Convention in Cleveland. In the lead-up to the
convention, there was much talk of a deadlocked vote, of convincing
committed delegates to cast their support to another candidate. In late June,
a group called Delegates Unbound began to air national television
advertisements telling Republican delegates that they were not, strictly
speaking, legally bound to Trump and urging them to abandon him. Groups
such as Free the Delegates, Courageous Conservatives, and Save Our Party
led a campaign for the Republican National Committee’s 112-member
Rules Panel to modify the rules binding delegates to candidates, freeing
delegates to vote as they had before the 1972 reforms. All these efforts came
to naught; they, indeed, never had a chance.
The idea that the nomination could be wrested from Trump at the
convention was pure wishful thinking. In the primary-based system we now
have, votes confer a legitimacy that cannot easily be circumvented or
ignored, and Donald Trump had the votes—nearly fourteen million of them.
As Cindy Costa, a Republican National Committee member from South
Carolina, put it, Trump “won it fair and square.” To hand the nomination to
anyone else would have created “magnificent chaos.” Republican leaders
were forced to face reality: They no longer held the keys to their party’s
presidential nomination.
—
As the battleground shifted to the general election, it became clear that this
was no ordinary race. Quite simply, Donald Trump was no ordinary
candidate. Not only was he uniquely inexperienced—no U.S. president who
was not a successful general had ever been elected without having held an
elective office or a cabinet post—but his demagoguery, extremist views on
immigrants and Muslims, willingness to violate basic norms of civility, and
praise for Vladimir Putin and other dictators generated unease in much of
the media and the political establishment. Had Republicans nominated a
would-be dictator? It was impossible to know for certain. 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.
His campaign rhetoric, in this view, was “mere words.”
There is always uncertainty over how a politician with no track record
will behave in office, but as we noted earlier, antidemocratic leaders are
often identifiable before they come to power. Trump, even before his
inauguration, tested positive on all four measures on our litmus test for
autocrats.
The first sign is a weak commitment to the democratic rules of the game.
Trump met this measure when he questioned the legitimacy of the electoral
process and made the unprecedented suggestion that he might not accept
the results of the 2016 election. Levels of voter fraud in the United States
are very low, and because elections are administered by state and local
governments, it is effectively impossible to coordinate national-level voting
fraud. Yet throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump insisted that millions of
illegal immigrants and dead people on the voting rolls would be mobilized
to vote for Clinton. For months, his campaign website declared “Help Me
Stop Crooked Hillary from Rigging This Election!” In August, Trump told
Sean Hannity, “We’d better be careful, because that election is going to be
rigged….I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be
taken away from us.” In October, he tweeted, “Of course there is large scale
voter fraud happening on and before election day.” During the final
presidential debate, Trump refused to say he would accept the results of the
election if he were defeated.
According to historian Douglas Brinkley, no major presidential candidate
had cast such doubt on the democratic system since 1860. Only in the run-
up to the Civil War did we see major politicians “delegitimizing the federal
government” in this way. As Brinkley put it, “That’s a secessionist,
revolutionary motif. That’s someone trying to topple the apple cart
entirely.” And Trump’s words mattered—a lot. A Politico/Morning Consult
poll carried out in mid-October found that 41 percent of Americans, and
73 percent of Republicans, believed that the election could be stolen from
Trump. In other words, three out of four Republicans were no longer
certain that they were living under a democratic system with free elections.
The second category in our litmus test is the denial of the legitimacy of
one’s opponents. Authoritarian politicians cast their rivals as criminal,
subversive, unpatriotic, or a threat to national security or the existing way
of life. Trump met this criterion, as well. For one, he had been a “birther,”
challenging the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency by suggesting that
he was born in Kenya and that he was a Muslim, which many of his
supporters equated with being “un-American.” During the 2016 campaign,
Trump denied Hillary Clinton’s legitimacy as a rival by branding her a
“criminal” and declaring repeatedly that she “has to go to jail.” At campaign
rallies he applauded supporters who chanted “Lock her up!”
The third criterion is toleration or encouragement of violence. Partisan
violence is very often a precursor of democratic breakdown. Prominent
examples include the Blackshirts in Italy, the Brownshirts in Germany, the
emergence of leftist guerrillas in Uruguay, and the rise of right- and left-
wing paramilitary groups in early-1960s Brazil. In the last century, no
major-party presidential candidate has ever endorsed violence (George
Wallace did in 1968, but he was a third-party candidate). Trump broke this
pattern. During the campaign, Trump not only tolerated violence among his
supporters but at times appeared to revel in it. In a radical break with
established norms of civility, Trump embraced—and even encouraged—
supporters who physically assaulted protesters. He offered to pay the legal
fees of a supporter who sucker-punched and threatened to kill a protester at
a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. On other occasions, he responded to
protesters at his rallies by inciting violence among his supporters. Here are a
few examples, compiled by Vox.
“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock
the crap out of them, would ya? Seriously. Just knock the hell
out of them. I promise you I will pay the legal fees. I promise.”
(February 1, 2016, Iowa)
“I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like
that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out
on a stretcher, folks. It’s true….I’d like to punch him in the
face, I’ll tell you.” (February 22, 2016, Nevada)
“In the good old days, they’d rip him out of that seat so fast. But
today, everybody’s politically correct. Our country’s going to
hell with being politically correct.” (February 26, 2016,
Oklahoma)
“Get out of here. Get out. Out! This is amazing. So much fun. I
love it. I love it. We having a good time? USA, USA, USA! All
right, get him out. Try not to hurt him. If you do, I’ll defend you
in court. Don’t worry about it….We had four guys, they jumped
on him, they were swinging and swinging. The next day, we got
killed in the press—that we were too rough. Give me a break.
You know? Right? We don’t want to be too politically correct
anymore. Right, folks?” (March 4, 2016, Michigan)
“We had some people, some rough guys like we have right in
here. And they started punching back. It was a beautiful thing. I
mean, they started punching back. In the good old days, this
doesn’t happen, because they used to treat them very, very
rough. And when they protested once, you know, they would not
do it so easily again. But today, they walk in and they put their
hand up and put the wrong finger in the air at everybody, and
they get away with murder, because we’ve become weak.”
(March 9, 2016, North Carolina)
In August 2016, Trump issued a veiled endorsement of violence against
Hillary Clinton, telling supporters at a Wilmington, North Carolina, rally
that a Clinton appointee to the Supreme Court could result in the abolition
of the right to bear arms. He went on to say, “If she gets to pick her judges,
nothing you can do, folks….Although the Second Amendment people—
maybe there is, I don’t know.”
The final warning sign is a readiness to curtail the civil liberties of rivals
and critics. One thing that separates contemporary autocrats from
democratic leaders is their intolerance of criticism, and their readiness to
use their power to punish those—in the opposition, media, or civil society
—who criticize them. Donald Trump displayed such a readiness in 2016.
He said he planned to arrange for a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary
Clinton after the election and declared that Clinton should be imprisoned.
Trump also repeatedly threatened to punish unfriendly media. At a rally in
Fort Worth, Texas, for example, he attacked Washington Post owner Jeff
Bezos, declaring, “If I become president, oh, do they have problems. They
are going to have such problems.” Describing the media as “among the most
dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met,” Trump declared:
I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write
purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue
them and win lots of money….So that when the New York
Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace—or when the
Washington Post…writes a hit piece, we can sue them….
With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential
candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century. As
Table 2 shows, Donald Trump met them all. No other major presidential
candidate in modern U.S. history, including Nixon, has demonstrated such
a weak public commitment to constitutional rights and democratic norms.
Trump was precisely the kind of figure that had haunted Hamilton and other
founders when they created the American presidency.
Table 2: Donald Trump and the Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian
Behavior
1. Rejection of (or
weak
commitment to)
democratic rules
of the game
Do they reject the Constitution or express a willingness to violate
it?
Do they suggest a need for antidemocratic measures, such as
canceling elections, violating or suspending the Constitution,
banning certain organizations, or restricting basic civil or political
rights?
Do they seek to use (or endorse the use of) extraconstitutional
means to change the government, such as military coups, violent
insurrections, or mass protests aimed at forcing a change in the
government?
Do they attempt to undermine the legitimacy of elections, for
example, by refusing to accept credible electoral results?
2. Denial of the
legitimacy of
political
opponents
Do they describe their rivals as subversive, or opposed to the
existing constitutional order?
Do they claim that their rivals constitute an existential threat,
either to national security or to the prevailing way of life?
Do they baselessly describe their partisan rivals as criminals,
whose supposed violation of the law (or potential to do so)
disqualifies them from full participation in the political
arena?
Do they baselessly suggest that their rivals are foreign agents, in
that they are secretly working in alliance with (or the employ of) a
foreign government—usually an enemy one?
3. Toleration or
encouragement of
violence
Do they have any ties to armed gangs, paramilitary forces,
militias, guerrillas, or other organizations that engage in illicit
violence?
Have they or their partisan allies sponsored or encouraged mob
attacks on opponents?
Have they tacitly endorsed violence by their supporters by
refusing to unambiguously condemn it and punish it?
Have they praised (or refused to condemn) other significant
acts of political violence, either in the past or elsewhere in the
world?
4. Readiness to
curtail civil
liberties of
opponents,
including media
Have they supported laws or policies that restrict civil
liberties, such as expanded libel or defamation laws or laws
restricting protest, criticism of the government, or certain
civic or political organizations?
Have they threatened to take legal or other punitive action
against critics in rival parties, civil society, or the media?
Have they praised repressive measures taken by other
governments, either in the past or elsewhere in the world?
This all should have set off alarm bells. The primary process had failed in
its gatekeeping role and allowed a man unfit for office to run as a
mainstream party candidate. But how could Republicans respond at this
stage? Recall the lessons of democratic breakdowns in Europe in the 1930s
and South America in the 1960s and 1970s: When gatekeeping institutions
fail, mainstream politicians must do everything possible to keep dangerous
figures away from the centers of power.
—
Collective abdication—the transfer of authority to a leader who threatens
democracy—usually flows from one of two sources. The first is the
misguided belief that an authoritarian can be controlled or tamed. The
second is what sociologist Ivan Ermakoff calls “ideological collusion,” in
which the authoritarian’s agenda overlaps sufficiently with that of
mainstream politicians that abdication is desirable, or at least preferable to
the alternatives. But when faced with a would-be authoritarian,
establishment politicians must unambiguously reject him or her and do
everything possible to defend democratic institutions—even if that means
temporarily joining forces with bitter rivals.
For Republicans entering the general election of 2016, the implications
were clear. If Trump threatened basic democratic principles, they had to
stop him. To do anything else would put democracy at risk, and losing
democracy is far worse than losing an election. This meant doing what was,
to many, the unthinkable: backing Hillary Clinton for president. The United
States has a two-party system; only two candidates stood a chance to win
the 2016 election, and one of them was a demagogue. For Republicans, it
tested their political courage. Would they accept short-term political
sacrifice for the good of the country?
As we showed earlier, there is a precedent for such behavior. In 2016,
Austrian conservatives backed Green Party candidate Alexander Van der
Bellen to prevent the election of far-right radical Norbert Hofer. And in
2017, defeated French conservative candidate François Fillon called on his
partisans to vote for center-left candidate Emmanuel Macron to keep far-
right candidate Marine Le Pen out of power. In both these cases, right-wing
politicians endorsed ideological rivals—angering much of the party base but
redirecting substantial numbers of their voters to keep extremists out of
power.
Some Republicans did endorse Hillary Clinton on the grounds that
Donald Trump was dangerously unfit for office. Like their Austrian and
French conservative counterparts, they deemed it vitally important to put
their partisan interests aside out of a shared commitment to democracy.
Here is what three of them said:
Republican 1: “Our choice this election could not be more clear—
Hillary Clinton is a strong and clear supporter of American
democracy interests….Donald Trump is a danger for our
democracy.”
Republican 2: “It’s time…to put country before party and vote for
Secretary Clinton. Trump is too dangerous and too unfit to hold
our nation’s highest office.”
Republican 3: “This is serious stuff, and I won’t waste my vote on
a protest candidate. Since the future of the country may depend on
preventing Donald Trump from becoming president, I’m with her
[Clinton] this November, and I urge Republicans to join me.”
Had these statements been made by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and former President George W. Bush,
or perhaps a trio of such prominent senators as John McCain, Marco Rubio,
and Ted Cruz, the course of the 2016 election would have changed
dramatically. Alas, they were made by William Pierce, the former press
secretary of retired Maine senator Olympia Snowe (Republican 1); Jack
McGregor, a former state senator from Pennsylvania (Republican 2); and
Rick Stoddard, a Republican banker in Denver (Republican 3).
Leading national Republican politicians such as Paul Ryan, Mitch
McConnell, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz endorsed Donald Trump. The only
Republican figures of any prominence who endorsed Hillary Clinton were
retired politicians or former government officials—people who were not
planning to compete in future elections, who, politically, had nothing to
lose. On the eve of the election, the Washington Post published a list of
seventy-eight Republicans who publicly endorsed Clinton. Only one of
them, Congressman Richard Hanna of New York, was an elected official.
And he was retiring. No Republican governors were listed. No senators.
And only one (retiring) member of Congress.
A handful of active Republican leaders, including Senators McCain,
Mark Kirk, Susan Collins, Kelly Ayotte, Mike Lee, Lisa Murkowski, and
Ben Sasse, Governors John Kasich and Charlie Baker, and former governors
Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, refused to endorse Trump. Former president
George W. Bush remained silent. None of them, however, was willing to
endorse Clinton.
In short, most Republican leaders ended up holding the party line. If they
had broken decisively with Trump, telling Americans loudly and clearly that
he posed a threat to our country’s cherished institutions, and if, on those
grounds, they had endorsed Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump might never
have ascended to the presidency. In France, it is estimated that half of
François Fillon’s conservative Republican Party voters followed his
surprising endorsement of Macron; about another third abstained, leaving
around a sixth of Fillon’s supporters who went for Le Pen, arguably making
a key difference in that country’s election. In the United States, we have no
way of knowing how Republican voters would have split. Some, perhaps
even most, of the base might still have voted for Trump. But enough would
have been swayed by the image of both parties uniting to ensure Trump’s
defeat.
What happened, tragically, was very different. Despite their hemming
and hawing, most Republican leaders closed ranks behind Trump, creating
the image of a unified party. That, in turn, normalized the election. Rather
than a moment of crisis, the election became a standard two-party race,
with Republicans backing the Republican candidate and Democrats backing
the Democratic candidate.
That shift proved highly consequential. 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.
Second, given the uneven state of the economy and President Obama’s
middling approval ratings, nearly all political science models predicted a
tight election. Most of them forecast a narrow Clinton victory in the popular
vote, but some predicted a narrow Trump win. In any case, the models
converged in predicting a close race. Toss-up elections can go either way.
They hinge on contingent events—on the accidents of history. In this
context, “October surprises” can weigh heavily. So when a newly surfaced
video paints one candidate in a negative light, or a letter from the FBI
director casts doubt on the other candidate’s trustworthiness, it can make all
the difference.
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.
4
Subverting Democracy
Peru’s Alberto Fujimori didn’t plan to be dictator. He didn’t even plan to be
president. A little-known university rector of Japanese descent, Fujimori
had hoped to run for a senate seat in 1990. When no party would nominate
him, he created his own and nominated himself. Short of funds, he threw
his hat into the presidential race to attract publicity for his senate campaign.
But 1990 was a year of acute crisis. Peru’s economy had collapsed into
hyperinflation, and a Maoist guerrilla group called the Shining Path, whose
brutal insurgency had killed tens of thousands of people since its launching
in 1980, was closing in on Lima, the capital city. Peruvians were disgusted
with the established parties. In protest, many of them turned to the political
nobody whose campaign slogan was “A President Like You.” Fujimori
surged unexpectedly in the polls. He shocked Peru’s political world by
finishing second and qualifying for a runoff against Mario Vargas Llosa, the
country’s most prominent novelist. Peruvians admired Vargas Llosa, who
would go on to win a Nobel Prize in literature. 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.
In his inaugural address, Fujimori warned that Peru faced “the most
profound crisis in its republican history.” The economy, he said, was “on
the brink of collapse,” and Peruvian society had been “broken apart by
violence, corruption, terrorism, and drug trafficking.” Fujimori pledged to
“dig [Peru] out of the state that it’s in and guide it to a better destiny.” He
was convinced that the country needed drastic economic reforms and that it
would have to step up the fight against terrorism. But he had only a vague
idea of how to accomplish these things.
He also faced daunting obstacles. As a political outsider, Fujimori had
few friends among Peru’s traditional power brokers. Opposition parties
controlled congress, and their appointees sat on the supreme court. The
traditional media, most of which had backed Vargas Llosa, distrusted him.
Fujimori had been unsparing in his attacks on the political elite, describing
it as a corrupt oligarchy that was ruining the country. Now he found that
those he had attacked and defeated during the campaign still controlled
many of the levers of power.
Fujimori got off to a rocky start. Congress failed to pass any legislation
during his first months in office, and the courts did not seem up to the task
of responding to the mounting terrorist threat. Fujimori not only lacked
experience with the intricacies of legislative politics, he also lacked the
patience for it. As one of his aides put it, Fujimori “couldn’t stand the idea
of inviting the President of the Senate to the presidential palace every time
he wanted Congress to approve a law.” He preferred, as he sometimes
bragged, to govern Peru alone—from his laptop.
So instead of negotiating with the leaders of congress, Fujimori lashed
out at them, calling them “unproductive charlatans.” He attacked
uncooperative judges as “jackals” and “scoundrels.” More troubling still, he
began to bypass congress, turning instead to executive decrees. Government
officials began to complain that Peru’s constitution was “rigid” and
“confining,” reinforcing fears that Fujimori’s commitment to democratic
institutions was weak. In a speech to business leaders, Fujimori asked, “Are
we really a democracy?…I find it difficult to say yes. We are a country that
in truth has always been governed by powerful minorities, oligopolies,
cliques, lobbies….”
Alarmed, Peru’s establishment pushed back. When Fujimori sidestepped
the courts to free thousands of prisoners convicted of petty crimes to make
room for terrorists, the National Association of Judges accused him of
“unacceptable antidemocratic authoritarianism.” Indeed, the courts
declared several of Fujimori’s decrees unconstitutional. Soon, his critics
were routinely denouncing him as “authoritarian,” and the media began to
depict him as a Japanese emperor. By early 1991, there was talk of
impeachment. In March, the news magazine Caretas ran a cover with a
picture of Fujimori in the crosshairs of a rifle, asking “Could Fujimori be
deposed? Some are already studying the Constitution.”
Feeling besieged, Fujimori doubled down. In a speech to business leaders,
he declared, “I am not going to stop until I have broken all of the taboos
that are left, one by one they are going to fall; we will be triply audacious in
knocking down all the old walls that separate the country from progress.” In
November 1991 he sent a massive package of 126 decrees for congressional
approval. The decrees were far-reaching, including some antiterrorism
measures that threatened civil liberties. Congress demurred. Not only did it
repeal or water down several of the most important decrees, it passed
legislation curbing Fujimori’s power. The conflict escalated. Fujimori
accused congress of being controlled by drug traffickers, and in response, the
senate passed a motion to “vacate” the presidency because of Fujimori’s
“moral incapacity.” Although the motion fell a few votes short in the
Chamber of Deputies, the conflict had reached a point where one
government official worried that “either the Congress would kill the
President, or the President would kill the Congress.”
The president killed congress. On April 5, 1992, Fujimori appeared on
television and announced that he was dissolving congress and the
constitution. Less than two years after his surprising election, the long-shot
outsider had become a tyrant.
—
Although some elected demagogues take office with a blueprint for
autocracy, many, such as Fujimori, do not. Democratic breakdown doesn’t
need a blueprint. Rather, as Peru’s experience suggests, it can be the result
of a sequence of unanticipated events—an escalating tit-for-tat between a
demagogic, norm-breaking leader and a threatened political establishment.
The process often begins with words. Demagogues attack their critics in
harsh and provocative terms—as enemies, as subversives, and even as
terrorists. When he first ran for president, Hugo Chávez described his
opponents as “rancid pigs” and “squalid oligarchs.” As president, he called
his critics “enemies” and “traitors”; Fujimori linked his opponents to
terrorism and drug trafficking; and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
attacked judges who ruled against him as “communist.” Journalists also
become targets. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa called the media a
“grave political enemy” that “has to be defeated.” Turkey’s Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan accused journalists of propagating “terrorism.” These attacks can
be consequential: If the public comes to share the view that opponents are
linked to terrorism and the media are spreading lies, it becomes easier to
justify taking actions against them.
The assault rarely ends there. Though observers often assure us that
demagogues are “all talk” and that their words should not be taken too
seriously, a look at demagogic leaders around the world suggests that many
of them do eventually cross the line from words to action. This is because a
demagogue’s initial rise to power tends to polarize society, creating a
climate of panic, hostility, and mutual distrust. The new leader’s threatening
words often have a boomerang effect. If the media feels threatened, it may
abandon restraint and professional standards in a desperate effort to weaken
the government. And the opposition may conclude that, for the good of the
country, the government must be removed via extreme measures—
impeachment, mass protest, even a coup.
When Juan Perón was first elected in Argentina in 1946, many of his
opponents viewed him as a fascist. Members of the opposition Radical
Civic Union, believing themselves to be in a “struggle against Nazism,”
boycotted Perón’s inauguration. From day one of Perón’s presidency, his
rivals in congress adopted a strategy of “opposition, obstruction, and
provocation,” even calling on the supreme court to seize control of the
government. Likewise, the Venezuelan opposition requested that the
supreme court appoint a team of psychiatrists to determine whether Chávez
could be removed from office on the grounds of “mental incapacity.”
Prominent newspapers and television networks endorsed extraconstitutional
efforts to overthrow him. Would-be authoritarians, of course, interpret these
attacks as a serious threat and, in turn, become more hostile.
They take this step for another reason, as well: Democracy is grinding
work. Whereas family businesses and army squadrons may be ruled by fiat,
democracies require negotiation, compromise, and concessions. Setbacks
are inevitable, victories always partial. Presidential initiatives may die in
congress or be blocked by the courts. All politicians are frustrated by these
constraints, but democratic ones know they must accept them. They are able
to weather the constant barrage of criticism. But for outsiders, particularly
those of a demagogic bent, democratic politics is often intolerably
frustrating. For them, checks and balances feel like a straitjacket. Like
President Fujimori, who couldn’t stomach the idea of having lunch with
senate leaders every time he wanted to pass legislation, would-be
authoritarians have little patience with the day-to-day politics of
democracy. And like Fujimori, they want to break free.
—
How do elected authoritarians shatter the democratic institutions that are
supposed to constrain them? Some do it in one fell swoop. But more often
the assault on democracy begins slowly. For many citizens, it may, at first,
be imperceptible. After all, elections continue to be held. Opposition
politicians still sit in congress. Independent newspapers still circulate. The
erosion of democracy takes place piecemeal, often in baby steps. Each
individual step seems minor—none appears to truly threaten democracy.
Indeed, government moves to subvert democracy frequently enjoy a veneer
of legality: They are approved by parliament or ruled constitutional by the
supreme court. Many of them are adopted under the guise of pursuing some
legitimate—even laudable—public objective, such as combating corruption,
“cleaning up” elections, improving the quality of democracy, or enhancing
national security.
To better understand how elected autocrats subtly undermine institutions,
it’s helpful to imagine a soccer game. To consolidate power, would-be
authoritarians must capture the referees, sideline at least some of the other
side’s star players, and rewrite the rules of the game to lock in their
advantage, in effect tilting the playing field against their opponents.
—
It always helps to have the referees on your side. Modern states possess
various agencies with the authority to investigate and punish wrongdoing by
both public officials and private citizens. These include the judicial system,
law enforcement bodies, and intelligence, tax, and regulatory agencies. In
democracies, such institutions are designed to serve as neutral arbiters. For
would-be authoritarians, therefore, judicial and law enforcement agencies
pose both a challenge and an opportunity. If they remain independent, they
might expose and punish government abuse. It is a referee’s job, after all, to
prevent cheating. But if these agencies are controlled by loyalists, they could
serve a would-be dictator’s aims, shielding the government from
investigation and criminal prosecutions that could lead to its removal from
power. The president may break the law, threaten citizens’ rights, and even
violate the constitution without having to worry that such abuse will be
investigated or censured. With the courts packed and law enforcement
authorities brought to heel, governments can act with impunity.
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.
Institutions that cannot be easily purged may be hijacked, subtly, by other
means. Few did this better than Alberto Fujimori’s “intelligence advisor,”
Vladimiro Montesinos. Under Montesinos’s direction, Peru’s National
Intelligence Service videotaped hundreds of opposition politicians, judges,
congressmen, businessmen, journalists, and editors paying or receiving
bribes, entering brothels, or engaging in other illicit activity—and then used
the videotapes to blackmail them. He also maintained three supreme court
justices, two members of the Constitutional Tribunal, and a “staggering”
number of judges and public prosecutors on his payroll, delivering monthly
cash payments to their homes. All this was done in secret; on the surface,
Peru’s justice system functioned like any other. But in the shadows,
Montesinos was helping Fujimori consolidate power.
Judges who cannot be bought off may be targeted for impeachment.
When Perón assumed the presidency in 1946, four of Argentina’s five-
member supreme court were conservative opponents, one of whom had
called him a fascist. Concerned about the court’s history of striking down
pro-labor legislation, Perón’s allies in congress impeached three of the
justices on the grounds of malfeasance (a fourth resigned before he could be
impeached). Perón then appointed four loyalists, and the court never
opposed him again. Likewise, when Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal
threatened to block President Fujimori’s bid for a third term in 1997,
Fujimori’s allies in congress impeached three of the body’s seven justices—
on the grounds that, in declaring Fujimori’s effort to evade constitutional
term limits “unconstitutional,” they themselves had breached the
constitution.
Governments that cannot remove independent judges may bypass them
through court packing. In Hungary, for instance, the Orbán government
expanded the size of the Constitutional Court from eight to fifteen, changed
the nomination rules so that the ruling Fidesz party could single-handedly
appoint the new justices, and then filled the new positions with Fidesz
loyalists. In Poland, the governing Law and Justice Party had several of its
initiatives blocked by the Constitutional Tribunal—the country’s highest
authority on constitutional matters—between 2005 and 2007. When the
party returned to power in 2015, it took steps to avoid similar losses in the
future. At the time, there were two openings in the fifteen-member
Constitutional Tribunal and three justices who were approved by the
outgoing parliament but had yet to be sworn in. In a dubiously
constitutional move, the new Law and Justice government refused to swear
in the three justices and instead imposed five new justices of its own. For
good measure, it then passed a law requiring that all binding Constitutional
Tribunal decisions have a two-thirds majority. This effectively gave
government allies a veto power within the tribunal, limiting the body’s
ability to serve as an independent check on governmental power.
The most extreme way to capture the referees is to raze the courts
altogether and create new ones. In 1999, the Chávez government called
elections for a constituent assembly that, in violation of an earlier supreme
court ruling, awarded itself the power to dissolve all other state institutions,
including the court. Fearing for its survival, the supreme court acquiesced
and ruled the move constitutional. Supreme court president Cecilia Sosa
resigned, declaring that the court had “committed suicide to avoid being
assassinated. But the result is the same. It is dead.” Two months later, the
supreme court was dissolved and replaced by a new Supreme Tribunal of
Justice. Even that wasn’t enough to ensure a pliant judiciary, however, so in
2004, the Chávez government expanded the size of the Supreme Tribunal
from twenty to thirty-two and filled the new posts with “revolutionary”
loyalists. That did the trick. Over the next nine years, not a single Supreme
Tribunal ruling went against the government.
In each of these cases, the referees of the democratic game were brought
over to the government’s side, providing the incumbent with both a shield
against constitutional challenges and a powerful—and “legal”—weapon
with which to assault its opponents.
—
Once the referees are in tow, elected autocrats can turn to their opponents.
Most contemporary autocracies do not wipe out all traces of dissent, as
Mussolini did in fascist Italy or Fidel Castro did in communist Cuba. But
many make an effort to ensure that key players—anyone capable of really
hurting the government—are sidelined, hobbled, or bribed into throwing the
game. Key players might include opposition politicians, business leaders
who finance the opposition, major media outlets, and in some cases,
religious or other cultural figures who enjoy a certain public moral standing.
The easiest way to deal with potential opponents is to buy them off. Most
elected autocrats begin by offering leading political, business, or media
figures public positions, favors, perks, or outright bribes in exchange for
their support or, at least, their quiet neutrality. Cooperative media outlets
may gain privileged access to the president, while friendly business
executives may receive profitable concessions or government contracts. The
Fujimori government was masterful at buying off its critics, particularly
those in the media. By the late 1990s, every major television network,
several daily newspapers, and popular tabloid papers were on the
government’s payroll. Vladimiro Montesinos paid the owners of Channel 4
about $12 million in exchange for signing a “contract” that gave Montesinos
control over the channel’s news programming. The principal stockholder of
Channel 5 received $9 million from Montesinos, and Channel 9’s principal
stockholder was given $50,000 in exchange for firing two prominent
investigative reporters. In a videotaped conversation in late 1999,
Montesinos declared that the heads of the television networks were “all
lined up now….We made them sign papers and everything….All of them,
all lined up. Every day, I have a meeting at 12:30…and we plan the evening
news.”
Media figures received Montesinos’s largest bribes, but he also bought off
politicians. In 1998, when opposition groups collected enough signatures to
force a referendum on whether Fujimori could stand for reelection in 2000,
the issue was thrown to congress, where, by law, it required the support of
40 percent of the legislature. In theory, the opposition had the forty-eight
votes necessary to approve the referendum. But Montesinos bribed three
legislators to skip the vote. One of them, Luis Chu, received a $130,000
payment on an apartment from an intelligence agency slush fund; another,
Miguel Ciccia, received help in a legal case involving one of his businesses.
The third, Susy Díaz, agreed to stay home for “personal reasons.” The vote
fell just short, allowing Fujimori to run for, and win, an illegal third term in
2000. And when the electorate failed to deliver Fujimori a congressional
majority, Montesinos bribed eighteen opposition legislators to switch sides.
Players who cannot be bought must be weakened by other means.
Whereas old-school dictators often jailed, exiled, or even killed their rivals,
contemporary autocrats tend to hide their repression behind a veneer of
legality. This is why capturing the referees is so important. Under Perón,
opposition leader Ricardo Balbín was imprisoned for “disrespecting” the
president during an election campaign. Balbín appealed to the supreme
court, but since Perón had packed the court, he stood no chance. In
Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad used a politically loyal police
force and a packed judiciary to investigate, arrest, and imprison his leading
rival, Anwar Ibrahim, on sodomy charges in the late 1990s. In Venezuela,
opposition leader Leopoldo López was arrested and charged with “inciting
violence” during a wave of antigovernment protest in 2014. Government
officials provided no evidence of incitement, alleging at one point that it
had been “subliminal.”
Governments may also use their control of referees to “legally” sideline
the opposition media, often through libel or defamation suits. Ecuadorian
President Rafael Correa was masterful at this. In 2011, he won a massive
$40 million libel suit against the owners and editor of a major newspaper, El
Universo, for publishing an editorial that labeled him a “dictator.” Correa
called the case a “great step forward for the liberation of our Americas from
one of the largest and most unpunished powers: the corrupt media.” He later
pardoned the owners, but the lawsuit had a powerful chilling effect on the
press.
The Erdoğan and Putin governments also wielded the law with
devastating effectiveness. In Turkey, a major victim was the powerful Doğan
Yayin media conglomerate, which controlled about 50 percent of the
Turkish media market, including the country’s most widely read newspaper,
Hurriyat, and several television stations. Many Doğan group media outlets
were secular and liberal, which put them at odds with the AKP government.
In 2009, the government struck back, fining Doğan nearly $2.5 billion—an
amount that nearly exceeded the company’s total net worth—for tax
evasion. Crippled, Doğan was forced to sell off much of its empire,
including two large newspapers and a TV station. They were purchased by
progovernment businessmen. In Russia, after Vladimir Gusinsky’s
independent NTV television network earned a reputation as a “pain in the
neck,” the Putin government unleashed the tax authorities on Gusinsky,
arresting him for “financial misappropriation.” Gusinsky was offered “a deal
straight out of a bad Mafia movie: give up NTV in exchange for freedom.”
He took the deal, turned NTV over to the giant government-controlled
energy company, Gazprom, and fled the country. In Venezuela, the Chávez
government launched an investigation into financial irregularities
committed by Globovisión television owner Guillermo Zuloaga, forcing him
to flee the country to avoid arrest. Under intense financial pressure, Zuloaga
eventually sold Globovisión to a government-friendly businessman.
As key media outlets are assaulted, others grow wary and begin to
practice self-censorship. When the Chávez government stepped up its
attacks in the mid-2000s, one of the country’s largest television networks,
Venevisión, decided to stop covering politics. Morning talk shows were
replaced with astrology programs, and soap operas took precedence over
evening news programs. Once considered a pro-opposition network,
Venevisión barely covered the opposition during the 2006 election, giving
President Chávez more than five times as much coverage as it did his rivals.
Elected autocrats also seek to weaken business leaders with the means to
finance opposition. This was one of the keys to Putin’s consolidation of
power in Russia. In July 2000, less than three months into his presidency,
Putin summoned twenty-one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen to the
Kremlin, where he told them that they would be free to make money under
his watch—but only if they stayed out of politics. Most of the so-called
oligarchs heeded his warning. Billionaire Boris Berezovsky, the controlling
shareholder of ORT television station, did not. When ORT coverage turned
critical, the government revived a long-dormant fraud case and ordered
Berezovsky’s arrest. Berezovsky fled into exile, leaving his media assets in
the hands of his junior partner, who “graciously put them at Putin’s
disposal.” Another oligarch who ignored Putin’s warning was Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, head of the giant Yukos oil company. Russia’s wealthiest
man (worth $15 billion, according to Forbes), Khodorkovsky was believed
to be untouchable. But he overplayed his hand. A liberal who disliked Putin,
Khodorkovsky began to generously finance opposition parties, including the
pro-Western Yabloko. At one point, as many as one hundred Duma
(parliament) members were doing his bidding. There were rumors that he
planned to seek the presidency. Threatened, Putin had Khodorkovsky
arrested in 2003 for tax evasion, embezzlement, and fraud. He was
imprisoned for nearly a decade. The message to the oligarchs was clear:
Stay out of politics. Nearly all of them did. Starved of resources, opposition
parties weakened, many to the point of extinction.
The Erdoğan government also pushed businessmen to the political
margins. When the Young Party (GP), created and funded by wealthy
tycoon Cem Uzan, emerged as a serious rival in 2004, financial authorities
seized Uzan’s business empire and charged Uzan with racketeering. Uzan
fled to France, and the GP soon collapsed. A few years later, the Koc group,
Turkey’s largest industrial conglomerate, was accused of assisting the
massive 2013 Gezi Park protests (a Koc-owned hotel near the park was used
as a shelter and makeshift hospital amid police repression). That year, tax
officials audited several Koc companies and canceled a massive defense
ministry contract with a subsidiary. The Koc family learned its lesson. After
2013, it kept its distance from the opposition.
Finally, elected autocrats often try to silence cultural figures—artists,
intellectuals, pop stars, athletes—whose popularity or moral standing makes
them potential threats. When Argentine literary icon Jorge Luis Borges
emerged as a high-profile critic of Perón (one fellow writer described
Borges as a “sort of Anti-Perón”), government officials had him transferred
from his municipal library post to what Borges described as an
“inspectorship of poultry and rabbits.” Borges resigned and was unable to
find employment for months.
Usually, however, governments prefer to co-opt popular cultural figures or
reach a mutual accommodation with them, allowing them to continue their
work as long as they stay out of politics. Venezuela’s Gustavo Dudamel, the
internationally renowned conductor of the Bolivarian Symphony Orchestra
and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is an example. Dudamel was a
prominent champion of El Sistema, Venezuela’s world-famous music
education program, which benefits hundreds of thousands of low-income
Venezuelan youth. Due to El Sistema’s dependence on government funding,
its founders maintained strict political neutrality. Dudamel continued this
practice, refusing to criticize the Chávez government even as it grew
increasingly authoritarian. Dudamel conducted the Bolivarian Symphony
Orchestra at Chávez’s funeral in 2012, and as late as 2015, when major
opposition figures were in prison, he penned a Los Angeles Times op-ed
defending his neutrality and declaring his “respect” for the Maduro
government. In return, El Sistema received increased government funding,
which allowed it to reach 700,000 children by 2015, up from 500,000 three
years earlier. Things changed, however, in May 2017, with the killing by
security forces of a young violinist—and El Sistema alumnus—during an
antigovernment protest. Dudamel then broke his political silence, publishing
a New York Times op-ed condemning government repression and
Venezuela’s slide into dictatorship. He paid a price: The following month,
the government canceled his planned National Youth Orchestra tour to the
United States.
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. And when opposition politicians are
arrested or exiled, as in Venezuela, other politicians decide to give up and
retire. Many dissenters decide to stay home rather than enter politics, and
those who remain active grow demoralized. This is what the government
aims for. Once key opposition, media, and business players are bought off or
sidelined, the opposition deflates. The government “wins” without
necessarily breaking the rules.
—
To entrench themselves in power, however, governments must do more—
they must also change the rules of the game. Authoritarians seeking to
consolidate their power often reform the constitution, the electoral system,
and other institutions in ways that disadvantage or weaken the opposition,
in effect tilting the playing field against their rivals. These reforms are often
carried out under the guise of some public good, while in reality they are
stacking the deck in favor of incumbents. And because they involve legal
and even constitutional changes, they may allow autocrats to lock in these
advantages for years and even decades.
Consider Malaysia, where the electoral system was historically tailored to
suit the ruling UMNO, a predominantly Malay-based party. Although
Malays constituted just over half the overall population, parliamentary
districts were gerrymandered so that 70 percent of districts were Malay-
majority, which allowed UMNO and its allies to win overwhelming
parliamentary majorities. The situation changed, however, when the
Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) emerged as the country’s leading opposition
party in the late 1990s. The PAS was also an overwhelmingly Malay party.
So in 2002, the UMNO-dominated electoral authorities reversed course and
carried out a redistricting process that—in defiance of demographic trends
—reduced the number of parliamentary seats in the rural areas that were
considered PAS strongholds. The gerrymandering helped the UMNO-led
coalition win a stunning 91 percent of parliamentary seats in the 2004
election.
The Orbán government in Hungary did something similar. After winning
a two-thirds parliamentary majority in 2010, the ruling Fidesz party used its
supermajority to rewrite the constitution and electoral laws to lock in its
advantage. It adopted new majoritarian electoral rules that favored the
largest party (Fidesz) and gerrymandered the country’s electoral districts to
maximize the number of seats it would win. Finally, it banned campaign
advertising in private media, limiting television campaigning to the public
broadcast station, which was run by Fidesz loyalists. The effect of these new
institutional advantages was evident in the 2014 parliamentary election:
Despite the fact that Fidesz’s share of the vote fell markedly, from
53 percent in 2010 to 44.5 percent in 2014, the ruling party managed to
preserve its two-thirds majority.
Perhaps the most striking example of rewriting the rules to lock in an
authoritarian advantage comes from the United States. The end of post–
Civil War Reconstruction in the 1870s led to the emergence of
authoritarian single-party regimes in every post-Confederate state. Single-
party rule was not some benign historical accident; rather, it was a product
of brazenly antidemocratic constitutional engineering.
During the era of Reconstruction, the mass enfranchisement of African
Americans posed a major threat to southern white political control and to
the political dominance of the Democratic Party. Under the 1867
Reconstruction Act and the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited
suffrage limitations on account of race, African Americans suddenly
constituted a majority of the voting population in Mississippi, South
Carolina, and Louisiana and a near-majority in Alabama, Florida, Georgia,
and North Carolina. Federal troops oversaw the mass registration of black
voters throughout the South. Nationwide, the percentage of black men who
were eligible to vote increased from 0.5 percent in 1866 to 80.5 percent two
years later. In many southern states, black registration rates exceeded
90 percent. And black citizens voted. In the 1880 presidential election,
estimated black turnout was 65 percent or higher in North and South
Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Enfranchisement empowered
African Americans: More than two thousand southern freedmen won
elective office in the 1870s, including fourteen congressmen and two U.S.
senators. At one point, more than 40 percent of legislators in Louisiana’s
and South Carolina’s lower houses were black. And because African
Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, black enfranchisement
invigorated Republican and other challengers to the once-dominant
Democrats. The Democrats lost power in North Carolina, Tennessee, and
Virginia in the 1880s and 1890s, and they nearly lost it in Alabama,
Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas. If democratic elections
continued, political scientist V. O. Key observed, it “would have been fatal
to the status of black belt whites.”
So they changed the rules—and did away with democracy. “Give us a
[constitutional] convention, and I will fix it so that…the Negro shall never
be heard from,” former Georgia senator Robert Toombs declared as
Reconstruction was coming to an end. Between 1885 and 1908, all eleven
post-Confederate states reformed their constitutions and electoral laws to
disenfranchise African Americans. To comply with the letter of the law as
stipulated in the Fifteenth Amendment, no mention of race could be made
in efforts to restrict voting rights, so states introduced purportedly “neutral”
poll taxes, property requirements, literacy tests, and complex written
ballots. “The overarching aim of all of these restrictions,” historian Alex
Keyssar observed, “was to keep poor and illiterate blacks…from the polls.”
And because African Americans were overwhelmingly Republican, their
disenfranchisement could be expected to restore the Democrats’ electoral
dominance. The goal, as a state senator from North Carolina put it, was to
write a “good square, honest law that will always give a good Democratic
majority.”
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.
In Tennessee, black suffrage made Republicans so competitive in 1888
that the pro-Democratic Avalanche predicted “a sweeping Republican
victory” in the next election unless something were done. The following
year, Democratic legislators introduced a poll tax, strict registration
requirements, and the Dortch Law, which created a complex ballot that
required literacy. As the legislature debated, the Avalanche proclaimed,
“Give us the Dortch bill or we perish.” Afterward, the headline of the
Memphis Daily Appeal read: “Safe at Last—Goodbye Republicans,
Goodbye.” The Democrats swept to victory in 1890, while the Republicans
“collapsed.” The Daily Appeal editorialized that the Dortch Law’s effects
were “most admirable. The vote has been cut down woefully and
wonderfully to be sure, but the ratio of Democratic majorities has been
raised at least four-fold.” By 1896, black turnout was close to zero.
In Alabama, where the Democrats nearly lost the governorship to a
populist in 1892, they “turned to suffrage restrictions to escape their
difficulties.” After the state legislature approved a bill to suppress the black
vote, Governor Thomas Jones reportedly said, “Let me sign that bill quickly,
lest my hand or arm become paralyzed, because it forever wipes out the
[populists]…and all the niggers.” The story repeated itself in Arkansas,
Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas, and
Virginia.
These “reform” measures effectively killed democracy in the American
South. Even though African Americans constituted a majority or near-
majority of the population in many states, and even though black suffrage
was now enshrined in the Constitution, “legal” or neutral-sounding
measures were used to “insure that the Southern electorate…would be
almost all white.” Black turnout in the South fell from 61 percent in 1880 to
just 2 percent in 1912. The disenfranchisement of African Americans
wiped out the Republican Party, locking in white supremacy and single-
party rule for nearly a century. As one black southerner observed, “The
whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very
men that had held us as slaves.”
—
By capturing the referees, buying off or enfeebling opponents, and rewriting
the rules of the game, elected leaders can establish a decisive—and
permanent—advantage over their opponents. Because these measures are
carried out piecemeal and with the appearance of legality, the drift into
authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarm bells. Citizens are often slow
to realize that their democracy is being dismantled—even as it happens
before their eyes.
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. Would-be
autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially
security threats—wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify
antidemocratic measures. In 1969, after winning reelection to his second
and final term in office, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines
began to consider how he might use an emergency to extend his rule.
Marcos did not want to step aside when his second term expired in 1973, as
the constitution dictated, so he drew up plans to declare martial law and
rewrite the constitution. But he needed a reason. An opportunity arrived in
July 1972, when a series of mysterious bombings rocked Manila. Following
an apparent assassination attempt on Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile,
Marcos, blaming communist terrorists, enacted his plan. He announced
martial law on national television, insisting somberly, “My countrymen…
[this] is not a military takeover.” He argued that “a democratic form of
government is not a helpless government” and that the constitution—the
one he was suspending—“wisely provided the means to protect it” when
confronting a danger like insurrection. With this move, Marcos ensconced
himself in power for the next fourteen years.
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; in the aftermath
of September 11, President Bush saw his approval rating soar from
53 percent to 90 percent—the highest figure ever recorded by Gallup. (The
previous record high—89 percent—had been set by Bush’s father, George
H. W. Bush, in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.) Because few
politicians are willing to stand up to a president with 90 percent support in
the middle of a national security crisis, presidents are left virtually
unchecked. 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.
Citizens are also more likely to tolerate—and even support—
authoritarian measures during security crises, especially when they fear for
their own safety. In the aftermath of 9/11, 55 percent of surveyed
Americans said they believed it was necessary to give up some civil liberties
to curb terrorism, up from 29 percent in 1997. Likewise, Roosevelt’s
internment of Japanese Americans would have been unthinkable without
the public fear generated by the Pearl Harbor attack. After Pearl Harbor,
more than 60 percent of surveyed Americans supported expelling Japanese
Americans from the country, and a year later, Japanese American
internment still enjoyed considerable public support.
Most constitutions permit the expansion of executive power during crisis.
As a result, even democratically elected presidents can easily concentrate
power and threaten civil liberties during war. In the hands of a would-be
authoritarian, this concentrated power is far more dangerous. For a
demagogue who feels besieged by critics and shackled by democratic
institutions, crises open a window of opportunity to silence critics and
weaken rivals. Indeed, elected autocrats often need crises—external threats
offer them a chance to break free, both swiftly and, very often, “legally.”
The combination of a would-be authoritarian and a major crisis can,
therefore, be deadly for democracy. Some leaders come into office facing
crisis. For example, Fujimori took office amid hyperinflation and a
mounting guerrilla insurgency, so when he justified his 1992 presidential
coup as a necessary evil, most Peruvians agreed with him. Fujimori’s
approval rating shot up to 81 percent after the coup.
Other leaders invent crises. There was a backstory to Ferdinand Marcos’s
declaration of martial law in 1972: His “crisis” was largely fabricated.
Acutely aware that he needed to justify his plan to skirt the constitution’s
two-term limit in the presidency, Marcos decided to manufacture a
“communist menace.” Facing only a few dozen actual insurgents, President
Marcos fomented public hysteria to justify an emergency action. Marcos
wanted to declare martial law as early as 1971, but selling his plan required
an act of violence—a terrorist attack—that generated widespread fear. That
would come the following year with the Manila bombings, which U.S.
intelligence officials believed to be the work of government forces, and the
assassination attempt on Defense Secretary Enrile—which Enrile later
admitted was “a sham.” In fact, he said he was “nowhere near the scene” of
the reported attack.
Whether real or not, would-be authoritarians are primed to exploit crises
to justify power grabs. Perhaps the best-known case is Adolf Hitler’s
response to the February 27, 1933, Reichstag fire, just a month after he was
sworn in as chancellor. The question of whether a young Dutchman with
communist sympathies started the fire in the Berlin parliament building or
whether the Nazi leadership itself did remains a matter of debate among
historians. Whatever the case, Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph
Goebbels arrived at the burning Reichstag and immediately used the event
to justify emergency decrees that dismantled civil liberties. This, along with
the Enabling Act one month later, destroyed all opposition, consolidating
Nazi power until the end of the Second World War.
A security crisis also facilitated Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian turn. In
September 1999, shortly after Putin was named prime minister, a series of
bombings in Moscow and other cities—presumably by Chechen terrorists—
killed nearly three hundred people. Putin responded by launching a war in
Chechnya and a large-scale crackdown. As in the case of Nazi Germany,
there is some debate over whether the bombings were committed by
Chechen terrorists or by the Russian government’s own intelligence service.
What is clear, however, is that Putin’s political popularity received a major
boost with the bombings. The Russian public rallied behind Putin,
tolerating, if not supporting, attacks on the opposition over the months and
years that followed.
Most recently, the Erdoğan government in Turkey used security crises to
justify his tightening grip on power. After the AKP lost its parliamentary
majority in June 2015, a series of ISIS terrorist attacks enabled Erdoğan to
use the rally-’round-the-flag effect to call snap elections and regain control
of parliament just five months later. Even more consequential was the
July 2016 coup attempt, which provided justification for a wide-ranging
crackdown. Erdoğan responded to the coup by declaring a state of
emergency and launching a massive wave of repression that included a
purge of some 100,000 public officials, the closure of several newspapers,
and more than 50,000 arrests—including hundreds of judges and
prosecutors, 144 journalists, and even two members of the Constitutional
Court. Erdoğan also used the coup attempt as a window of opportunity to
make the case for sweeping new executive powers. The power grab
culminated in the April 2017 passage of a constitutional amendment that
demolished checks on presidential authority.
For demogagues 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. Crises allow autocrats to expand their room to maneuver and
protect themselves from perceived enemies. But the question remains: Are
democratic institutions so easily swept away?
5
The Guardrails of Democracy
For generations, Americans have retained great faith in their Constitution,
as the centerpiece of a belief that the United States was a chosen nation,
providentially guided, a beacon of hope and possibility to the world.
Although this larger vision may be fading, trust in the Constitution remains
high. A 1999 survey found that 85 percent of Americans believed the
Constitution was the major reason “America had been successful during this
past century.” Indeed, our constitutional system of checks and balances was
designed to prevent leaders from concentrating and abusing power, and for
most of American history, it has succeeded. President Abraham Lincoln’s
concentration of power during the Civil War was reversed by the Supreme
Court after the war ended. President Richard Nixon’s illegal wiretapping,
exposed after the 1972 Watergate break-in, triggered a high-profile
congressional investigation and bipartisan pressure for a special prosecutor
that eventually forced his resignation in the face of certain impeachment. In
these and other instances, our political institutions served as crucial
bulwarks against authoritarian tendencies.
But are constitutional safeguards, by themselves, enough to secure a
democracy? We believe the answer is no. Even well-designed constitutions
sometimes fail. Germany’s 1919 Weimar constitution was designed by some
of the country’s greatest legal minds. Its long-standing and highly regarded
Rechtsstaat (“rule of law”) was considered by many as sufficient to prevent
government abuse. But both the constitution and the Rechtsstaat collapsed
rapidly in the face of Adolf Hitler’s usurpation of power in 1933.
Or consider the experience of postcolonial Latin America. Many of the
region’s newly independent republics modeled themselves directly on the
United States, adopting U.S.-style presidentialism, bicameral legislatures,
supreme courts, and in some cases, electoral colleges and federal systems.
Some wrote constitutions that were near-replicas of the U.S. Constitution.
Yet almost all the region’s embryonic republics plunged into civil war and
dictatorship. 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.
Likewise, the Philippines’ 1935 constitution has been described as a
“faithful copy of the U.S. Constitution.” Drafted under U.S. colonial
tutelage and approved by the U.S. Congress, the charter “provided a
textbook example of liberal democracy,” with a separation of powers, a bill
of rights, and a two-term limit in the presidency. But President Ferdinand
Marcos, who was loath to step down when his second term ended, dispensed
with it rather easily after declaring martial law in 1972.
If constitutional rules were enough, then figures such as Perón, Marcos,
or Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas—all of whom took office under U.S.-style
constitutions that, on paper, contained an impressive array of checks and
balances—would have been one- or two-term presidents rather than
notorious autocrats.
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.
Constitutional rules are also always subject to competing interpretations.
What, exactly, does “advice and consent” entail when it comes to the U.S.
Senate’s role in appointing Supreme Court justices? What sort of threshold
for impeachment does the phrase “crimes and misdemeanors” establish?
Americans have debated these and other constitutional questions for
centuries. If constitutional powers are open to multiple readings, they can
be used in ways that their creators didn’t anticipate.
Finally, the written words of a constitution may be followed to the letter
in ways that undermine the spirit of the law. One of the most disruptive
forms of labor protests is a “work to rule” campaign, in which workers do
exactly what is asked of them in their contracts or job descriptions but
nothing more. In other words, they follow the written rules to the letter.
Almost invariably, the workplace ceases to function.
Because of the gaps and ambiguities inherent in all legal systems, we
cannot rely on constitutions alone to safeguard democracy against would-be
authoritarians. “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.”
That includes our own political system. The U.S. Constitution is, by most
accounts, a brilliant document. But the original Constitution—only four
pages long—can be interpreted in many different, and even contradictory,
ways. We have, for example, few constitutional safeguards against filling
nominally independent agencies (such as the FBI) with loyalists. According
to constitutional scholars Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, only the “thin tissue
of convention” prevents American presidents from capturing the referees
and deploying them against opponents. Likewise, the Constitution is
virtually silent on the president’s authority to act unilaterally, via decrees or
executive orders, and it does not define the limits of executive power during
crises. Thus, Huq and Ginsburg recently warned that “the constitutional and
legal safeguards of [American] democracy…would prove to be fairly easy to
manipulate in the face of a truly antidemocratic leader.”
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. All successful democracies rely
on informal rules that, though not found in the constitution or any laws, are
widely known and respected. In the case of American democracy, this has
been vital.
As in all facets of society, ranging from family life to the operation of
businesses and universities, unwritten rules loom large in politics. To
understand how they work, think of the example of a pickup basketball
game. Street basketball is not governed by rules set up by the NBA, NCAA,
or any other league. And there are no referees to enforce such rules. Only
shared understandings about what is, and what is not, acceptable prevent
such games from descending into chaos. The unwritten rules of a half-court
game of pickup basketball are familiar to anyone who has played it. Here
are some of the basics:
• Scoring is by ones, not by twos as in regular basketball, and the
winning team must win by two points.
• The team that makes a basket keeps the ball (“make it, take it”). The
scoring team takes the ball to the top of the key and, to ensure that the
defending team is ready, “checks” it by passing it to the nearest
opposing player.
• The player who starts with the ball cannot shoot; he or she must pass it
in.
• Players call their own fouls but with restraint; only egregious fouls are
legitimate (“no blood, no foul”). But when fouls are called, the calls
must be respected.
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. These rules or norms serve as the
soft guardrails of democracy, preventing day-to-day political competition
from devolving into a no-holds-barred conflict.
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. When norms are strong, violations trigger
expressions of disapproval, ranging from head-shaking and ridicule to
public criticism and outright ostracism. And politicians who violate them
can expect to pay a price.
Unwritten rules are everywhere in American politics, ranging from the
operations of the Senate and the Electoral College to the format of
presidential press conferences. But two norms stand out as fundamental to a
functioning democracy: mutual toleration and institutional forbearance.
—
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. We may disagree with, and even strongly
dislike, our rivals, but we nevertheless accept them as legitimate. This
means recognizing that our political rivals are decent, patriotic, law-abiding
citizens—that they love our country and respect the Constitution just as we
do. 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. Nor do we
treat them as treasonous, subversive, or otherwise beyond the pale. We may
shed tears on election night when the other side wins, but we do not
consider such an event apocalyptic. Put another way, mutual toleration is
politicians’ collective willingness to agree to disagree.
As commonsensical as this idea may sound, the belief that political
opponents are not enemies is a remarkable and sophisticated invention.
Throughout history, opposition to those in power had been considered
treason, and indeed, the notion of legitimate opposition parties was still
practically heretical at the time of America’s founding. 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.
But mutual toleration is not inherent to all democracies. When Spain
underwent its first genuine democratic transition in 1931, for example,
hopes were high. The new left-leaning Republican government, led by Prime
Minister Manuel Azaña, was committed to parliamentary democracy. But
the government confronted a highly polarized society, ranging from
anarchists and Marxists on the left to monarchists and fascists on the right.
Opposing sides viewed each other not as partisan rivals but as mortal
enemies. On the one hand, right-wing Catholics and monarchists, who
watched in horror as the privileges of the social institutions they valued
most—the Church, the army, and the monarchy—were dismantled, did not
accept the new republic as legitimate. They viewed themselves, in the words
of one historian, as engaged in a battle against “bolshevizing foreign agents.”
Unrest in the countryside and hundreds of acts of arson against churches,
convents, and other Catholic institutions left conservatives feeling besieged,
in the grips of a conspiratorial fury. Religious authorities darkly warned,
“We have now entered the vortex…we have to be ready for everything.”
On the other hand, many Socialists and other leftist Republicans viewed
rightists such as José María Gil-Robles, the leader of the Catholic
conservative Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), as
monarchist or fascist counterrevolutionaries. At best, many on the left
regarded the well-organized CEDA as a mere front for the ultraconservative
monarchists who were plotting the republic’s violent overthrow. Although
CEDA was apparently willing to play the democratic game by competing in
elections, its leaders refused to unconditionally commit to the new regime.
So they remained targets of extreme suspicion. In short, neither the
Republicans on the left nor the Catholics and monarchists on the right fully
accepted one another as legitimate opponents.
When norms of mutual toleration are weak, democracy is hard to sustain.
If we view our rivals as a dangerous threat, we have much to fear if they are
elected. We may decide to employ any means necessary to defeat them—
and therein lies a justification for authoritarian measures. Politicians who
are tagged as criminal or subversive may be jailed; governments deemed to
pose a threat to the nation may be overthrown.
In the absence of strong norms of mutual toleration, the Spanish
Republic quickly fell apart. The new republic descended into crisis after the
right-wing CEDA won the 1933 elections and became the largest bloc in
parliament. The governing center-left Republican coalition collapsed and
was replaced by a minority centrist government that excluded the Socialists.
Because many Socialists and left Republicans viewed the original (1931–33)
center-left government as the embodiment of the republic, they regarded
efforts to revoke or change its policies as fundamentally “disloyal” to the
republic. And when CEDA—which had a fascist-leaning youth group
among its rank and file—joined the government the following year, many
Republicans viewed it as a profound threat. The Republican left party
declared that
the monstrous fact of turning over the government of the
Republic to its enemy is a treason. [We] break all solidarity
with the present institutions of the regime and affirm [our]
decision to turn to all means in defense of the Republic.
Facing what they saw as a descent into fascism, leftists and anarchists
rebelled in Catalonia and Asturias, calling a general strike and forming a
parallel government. The rightist government brutally repressed the uprising.
It then tried to associate the entire Republican opposition with it, even
jailing former Prime Minister Azaña (who did not participate in the
uprising). The country sank into increasingly violent conflict in which street
battles, bombings, church burnings, political assassinations, and coup
conspiracies replaced political competition. By 1936, Spain’s nascent
democracy had degenerated into a civil war.
In just about every case of democratic breakdown we have studied,
would-be authoritarians—from Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini in interwar
Europe to Marcos, Castro, and Pinochet during the Cold War to Putin,
Chávez, and Erdoğan most recently—have justified their consolidation of
power by labeling their opponents as an existential threat.
—
A 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.
Institutional forbearance has its origins in a tradition older than
democracy itself. 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. But many of Europe’s
predemocratic monarchs nevertheless acted with forbearance. To be
“godly,” after all, required wisdom and self-restraint. When a figure such as
King Richard II, portrayed as a tyrant in one of Shakespeare’s most famous
historical plays, abuses his royal prerogatives in order to expropriate and
plunder, his violations are not illegal; they merely violate custom. But the
violations are highly consequential, for they unleash a bloody civil war. As
Shakespeare’s character Carlisle warns his compatriots in the play,
abandoning forbearance meant “the Blood of English shall manure the
ground….And future ages groan for this foul act.”
Just as divine-right monarchies required forbearance, so do democracies.
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 a pickup basketball game, we play
aggressively, but we know not to foul excessively—and to call a foul only
when it is egregious. After all, you show up at the park to play a basketball
game, not to fight. In politics, this often means eschewing dirty tricks or
hardball tactics in the name of civility and fair play.
What does institutional forbearance look like in democracies? Consider
the formation of governments in Britain. As constitutional scholar and
author Keith Whittington reminds us, the selection of the British prime
minister is “a matter of royal prerogative. Formally, the Crown could select
anyone to occupy the role and form the government.” In practice, the prime
minister is a member of Parliament able to command a majority in the
House of Commons—usually, the head of the largest parliamentary party.
Today we take this system for granted, but for centuries the Crown adhered
to it voluntarily. There is still no written constitutional rule.
Or take presidential term limits. For most of American history, the two-
term limit was not a law but a norm of forbearance. Before ratification of
the Twenty-Second Amendment in 1951, nothing in the Constitution
dictated that presidents step down after two terms. But George
Washington’s retirement after two terms in 1797 set a powerful precedent.
As Thomas Jefferson, the first sitting president to follow the norm, observed,
If some termination of the services of the [President] be not
fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office,
nominally for four years, will in fact become for life….I should
unwillingly be the person who, disregarding sound precedent set
by an illustrious predecessor, should furnish the first example of
prolongation beyond the second term in office.
Thus established, the informal two-term limit proved remarkably robust.
Even ambitious and popular presidents such as Jefferson, Andrew Jackson,
and Ulysses S. Grant refrained from challenging it. When friends of Grant
encouraged him to seek a third term, it caused an uproar, and the House of
Representatives passed a resolution declaring:
The precedent established by Washington and other
presidents…in retiring from…office after their second term has
become…a part of our republican system….[A]ny departure
from this time-honored custom would be unwise, unpatriotic,
and fraught with peril to our free institutions.
Likewise, the Democratic Party refused to nominate Grover Cleveland for a
nonconsecutive third term in 1892, warning that such a candidacy would
violate an “unwritten law.” Only FDR’s reelection in 1940 clearly violated
the norm—a violation that triggered the passage of the Twenty-Second
Amendment.
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.
The opposite of forbearance is to exploit one’s institutional prerogatives
in an unrestrained way. Legal scholar Mark Tushnet calls this
“constitutional hardball”: playing by the rules but pushing against their
bounds and “playing for keeps.” It is a form of institutional combat aimed at
permanently defeating one’s partisan rivals—and not caring whether the
democratic game continues.
Argentine presidents have long been masters of constitutional hardball. In
the 1940s, President Juan Perón used his majority in congress to impeach
three out of five supreme court justices, taking “maximum advantage” of a
vaguely defined constitutional clause listing “malfeasance” as grounds for
impeachment. Nearly half a century later, President Carlos Menem showed
a similar flair for pushing the boundaries. Argentina’s 1853 constitution was
ambiguous in defining the president’s authority to issue decrees.
Historically, elected presidents had used this authority sparingly, issuing just
twenty-five decrees between 1853 and 1989. Menem showed no such
restraint, issuing 336 decrees in less than a single presidential term.
The judiciary may also be deployed for constitutional hardball. After
opposition parties won control of the Venezuelan congress in a landslide
election in December 2015, they hoped to use the legislature to check the
power of autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. Thus, the new congress
passed an amnesty law that would free 120 political prisoners, and it voted
to block Maduro’s declaration of a state of economic emergency (which
granted him vast power to govern by decree). To fend off this challenge,
Maduro turned to the supreme court, which was packed with loyalists. The
chavista court effectively incapacitated the legislature by ruling nearly all of
its bills—including the amnesty law, efforts to revise the national budget,
and the rejection of the state of emergency—unconstitutional. According to
the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, the court ruled against congress
twenty-four times in six months, striking down “all the laws it has
approved.”
Legislatures may also overindulge their constitutional prerogatives. Take
the 2012 impeachment of President Fernando Lugo in Paraguay. Lugo, a
leftist ex-priest, was elected in 2008, ending the Colorado Party’s sixty-one-
year run in power. An outsider with few friends in congress, Lugo faced
impeachment attempts throughout his presidency. These efforts succeeded
in 2012, after the president’s popularity had eroded and his former Liberal
allies had abandoned him. The trigger was a violent conflict between police
and peasant squatters that killed seventeen people. Although similar
violence had occurred under previous governments, the opposition used the
incident to bring Lugo down. On June 21, just six days after the killings, the
chamber of deputies voted to impeach Lugo on grounds of “poor
performance of duties.” A day later, following a rushed trial in which the
president had only two hours to present his defense, Lugo was removed
from office by the senate. According to one observer, the trial was an
“obvious farce….Lugo’s impeachment barely even rose to the level of show
trial.” Strictly speaking, however, it was legal.
Something similar happened in Ecuador in the 1990s. President Abdalá
Bucaram was a populist who rose to the presidency by attacking Ecuador’s
political establishment. Nicknamed El Loco, or “The Crazy One,” Bucaram
thrived on controversy, which tested the forbearance of his opponents. In
his first months in office, he engaged in blatant nepotism, called former
President Rodrigo Borja a “donkey,” and distributed subsidized milk named
after himself. Though scandalous, these were almost certainly not
impeachable offenses. Nevertheless, efforts to impeach Bucaram began
within weeks of his inauguration. When it became clear that the opposition
lacked the two-thirds vote required for impeachment, it found a dubious but
constitutional alternative: Ecuador’s 1979 constitution allowed a simple
legislative majority to remove the president on the grounds of “mental
incapacity.” On February 6, 1997, congress did just that. In a clear violation
of the spirit of the constitution, it voted to remove Bucaram without even
debating whether he was, in fact, mentally impaired.
The United States has also had its share of constitutional hardball. As we
have noted, after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments formally
established universal male suffrage, Democratic-controlled legislatures in
the South came up with new means of denying African Americans the right
to vote. Most of the new poll taxes and literacy tests were deemed to pass
constitutional muster, but they were clearly designed to counter its spirit. As
Alabama state legislator Anthony D. Sayre declared upon introducing such
legislation, his bill would “eliminate the Negro from politics, and in a
perfectly legal way.”
—
Mutual toleration and institutional forbearance are closely related.
Sometimes they reinforce each other. Politicians are more likely to be
forbearing when they accept one another as legitimate rivals, and politicians
who do not view their rivals as subversive will be less tempted to resort to
norm breaking to keep them out of power. Acts of forbearance—for
example, a Republican-controlled Senate approving a Democratic
president’s Supreme Court pick—will reinforce each party’s belief that the
other side is tolerable, promoting a virtuous circle.
But the opposite can also occur. The erosion of mutual toleration may
motivate politicians to deploy their institutional powers as broadly as they
can get away with. When parties view one another as mortal enemies, the
stakes of political competition heighten dramatically. Losing ceases to be a
routine and accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a
full-blown catastrophe. 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.
The result is politics without guardrails—what political theorist Eric
Nelson describes as a “cycle of escalating constitutional brinksmanship.”
What does such politics look like? Nelson offers an example: the collapse of
Charles I’s monarchy in England during the 1640s. A religious conflict
between the Crown, the Church of England, and the Puritans in Parliament
led to mutual accusations of heresy and treason and a breakdown of the
norms that had sustained the English monarchy. England’s constitutional
tradition endowed Parliament with the exclusive right to collect the taxes
necessary to fund the government. But Parliament, which viewed Charles as
dangerously close to the papacy, refused to fund the monarchy unless it met
a set of far-reaching demands, including a virtual dismantling of the Church
of England. Parliament maintained this position even after England was
invaded by the Scots and desperately needed revenue for national defense.
Charles responded to this norm violation with some of his own: He
dissolved Parliament and ruled without it for eleven years. As Nelson
observes, “At no point…did Charles claim the right to make law without
parliament.” Rather, he “simply tried to make do without the passage of any
new laws.” Eventually, the need for revenue drove Charles to circumvent
Parliament’s monopoly on taxation, which left his outraged opposition even
more unyielding when Parliament reopened in 1640. As Nelson concludes,
“The spiral of legislative obstruction and royal overreaching continued until
it could be resolved only by war.” The civil war that ensued dismantled the
English monarchy and cost Charles his life.
Some of history’s most tragic democratic breakdowns were preceded by
the degrading of basic norms. One example can be found in Chile. Prior to
the 1973 coup, Chile had been Latin America’s oldest and most successful
democracy, sustained by vibrant democratic norms. Even though Chilean
political parties ranged from a Marxist left to a reactionary right, a “culture
of compromise” predominated throughout much of the twentieth century.
As reporter Pamela Constable and Chilean political scientist Arturo
Valenzuela put it:
Chile’s strong, law-abiding traditions kept competition confined
within certain rules and rituals, softening class hostility and
ideological conflict. There was no argument, it was said, that
could not be settled over a bottle of Chilean cabernet.
Beginning in the 1960s, however, Chile’s culture of compromise was
strained by Cold War polarization. Some on the left, inspired by the Cuban
Revolution, began to dismiss the country’s tradition of political give and
take as a bourgeois anachronism. Many on the right began to fear that if the
leftist Popular Unity coalition gained power, it would turn Chile into
another Cuba. By the 1970 presidential election, these tensions had reached
extreme levels. Popular Unity candidate Salvador Allende faced what
Radomiro Tomic, his Christian Democratic rival, described as a “gigantic
campaign of hatred” in the media that “systematically foster[ed] fears” on
the right.
Allende won, and although he was committed to democracy, the prospect
of his presidency generated panic among conservatives. The extreme rightist
Fatherland and Freedom Party demanded that Allende be kept out of office
by any means necessary, and the right-wing National Party, funded by the
CIA, engaged in hardball tactics before he was even sworn in. Chile’s
constitution stipulated that if no presidential candidate won at least
50 percent of the vote, the election would be decided by congress; Allende
had won with only 36 percent. Although established norms dictated that
congress elect the first-place candidate, no rule required such action.
Abandoning forbearance, the National Party tried to persuade the centrist
Christian Democrats to vote for its candidate, Jorge Alessandri, who had
finished a close second. The Christian Democrats refused, but in exchange
for their vote, they forced Allende to sign a constitutional Statute of
Guarantees requiring the president to respect free elections and civil
liberties such as press freedom. The demand was reasonable enough, but as
Arturo Valenzuela observed, it “marked a breakdown in mutual
understanding” between leaders “for whom a respect of the rules of the
game had been implicit.”
Allende’s presidency witnessed the continued erosion of democratic
norms. Lacking a legislative majority, his government was unable to fully
implement its socialist program. So Allende exploited his presidential
powers, threatening to pass laws via national referendum if congress
blocked them and using “legal loopholes” to advance his program at the
margins of the legislature. The opposition responded in kind. In a speech
delivered at a social gathering during the second month of Allende’s
presidency, right-wing senator Raúl Morales mapped out what he called a
strategy of “institutional checkmate.” Although the opposition lacked the
two-thirds vote in the senate necessary to impeach Allende, a senate
majority could remove ministers via a vote of censure. On the books since
1833, the censure vote was designed for use only in exceptional
circumstances and had been seldom used before 1970. Now, however, it
would be a weapon. In January 1972, the senate impeached Interior
Minister José Tohá, a close Allende ally. Allende responded by reappointing
Tohá to the cabinet as defense minister.
Partisan hostility intensified over the course of Allende’s presidency. His
leftist allies took to describing opponents as fascists and “enemies of the
people,” while rightists described the government as totalitarian. The
growing mutual intolerance undermined efforts by Allende and the
Christian Democrats to negotiate any sort of modus vivendi: Whereas
Allende’s radical allies viewed such negotiations as “opening the door to
fascism,” right-wing groups criticized Christian Democrats for not resisting
the communist threat. To pass legislation, the government needed Christian
Democratic support, but by early 1973 the Christian Democrats had
decided, in the words of party leader Patricio Aylwin, to “not let Allende
score a single goal.”
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. Some
polarization is healthy—even necessary—for democracy. And indeed, the
historical experience of democracies in Western Europe shows us that
norms can be sustained even where parties are separated by considerable
ideological differences. 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.
Politics without guardrails killed Chilean democracy. Both the
government and the opposition viewed the March 1973 midterm legislative
elections as an opportunity to win the fight for good. Whereas Allende
sought the congressional majority he needed to legally impose his socialist
program, the opposition sought the two-thirds majority necessary for
Allende’s “constitutional overthrow” via impeachment. But neither side
achieved the majority it sought. Unable to permanently defeat each other
and unwilling to compromise, Chilean parties threw their democracy into a
death spiral. Hard-liners took over the Christian Democratic Party, vowing
to employ any means necessary to block what ex-president Eduardo Frei
described as Allende’s “attempt to implement totalitarianism in Chile.” And
Allende’s desperate efforts to reestablish a dialogue with the opposition
were undercut by his own allies, who called on him to reject “all dialogues
with reactionary…parties” and instead dissolve congress. Allende refused,
but he sought to placate his allies by pushing harder against his opponents.
When judicial authorities blocked the expropriation of forty firms seized by
striking workers, Allende responded with a constitutionally dubious “decree
of insistence,” which in turn triggered opposition calls for his impeachment.
One right-wing senator proclaimed on national television that Allende was
now “an illegitimate head of state,” and in August 1973, the Chamber of
Deputies passed a resolution declaring that the government was
unconstitutional.
Less than a month later, the military seized power. Chileans, who had
long prided themselves on being South America’s most stable democracy,
succumbed to dictatorship. The generals would rule Chile for the next
seventeen years.
6
The Unwritten Rules of American Politics
On March 4, 1933, as American families gathered around their radios
during the darkest days of the Great Depression to listen to Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, they heard his deliberate, thunderous
voice declare, “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to
meet the crisis: broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency,
as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded
by a foreign foe.” Roosevelt was invoking the most open-ended enumerated
power the Constitution offered him as president—war powers—to confront
a domestic crisis.
Roosevelt concluded that even this wasn’t enough. In November 1936, he
was reelected with 61 percent of the vote—the largest popular presidential
mandate in American history. But he found his ambitious policy agenda
straitjacketed by an unexpected source: the conservative (and, in his view,
backward-looking) Supreme Court—a body composed entirely of men who
had completed their legal educations in the nineteenth century. Never had
the Supreme Court been as active in blocking legislation as it was in 1935
and 1936. The Court found large portions of the New Deal program
unconstitutional, often on questionable grounds. Roosevelt’s agenda was
hanging in the balance.
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. Roosevelt’s proposal would have allowed him to add a new justice
to the Court for every member over seventy years of age, with a maximum
court size of fifteen. Since six justices were seventy or older, Roosevelt
would be able to name six judges immediately. The president’s motivation
was, perhaps, understandable—he sought a more secure legal basis to
achieve the goals of the New Deal. Had it passed, however, it would have set
a dangerous precedent. The Court would have become hyperpoliticized, its
membership, size, and selection rules open to constant manipulation, not
unlike Argentina under Perón or Venezuela under Chávez. Had Roosevelt
passed his judicial act, a key norm—that presidents should not undermine
another coequal branch—would have been demolished.
But the norm held. Roosevelt’s court-packing plan faced greater
opposition than any other initiative undertaken during his presidency. It was
opposed not only by Republicans but by the press, prominent lawyers and
judges, and a surprisingly large number of fellow Democrats. Within
months, the proposal was dead—killed by a Congress dominated by
Roosevelt’s own party. Even amid a crisis as profound as the Great
Depression, the system of checks and balances had worked.
—
The American republic was not born with strong democratic norms. In fact,
its early years were a textbook case of politics without guardrails. As we
have seen, norms of mutual toleration were at best embryonic in the 1780s
and 1790s: Far from accepting one another as legitimate rivals, Federalists
and Republicans initially suspected each other of treason.
This climate of partisan hostility and distrust encouraged what we would
today call constitutional hardball. In 1798, the Federalists passed the
Sedition Act, which, though purportedly criminalizing false statements
against the government, was so vague that it virtually criminalized criticism
of the government. The act was used to target Republican Party newspapers
and activists. In the 1800 election, which pitted President Adams, a
Federalist, against Jefferson, the leader of the Republican opposition, each
side aimed for a permanent victory—to put the other party out of business
forever. Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton talked of finding a “legal and
constitutional step” to block Jefferson’s ascent to the presidency, while
Jefferson described the election as a last opportunity to save America from
monarchy. Jefferson’s victory did not put an end to the intense partisan
acrimony. 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.
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—and that rivals need not be enemies.
Typical of this new view was Martin Van Buren, a founder of the modern
Democratic Party and later U.S. president. According to Richard
Hofstadter, Van Buren
typified the spirit of the amiable county courthouse lawyer
translated to politics, the lawyer who may enjoy over a period
of many years a series of animated courtroom duels with an
antagonist, but who sustains outside the courtroom the mutual
respect, often the genial friendship, of the co-professional.
Although Van Buren had “many opponents” during his career, a biographer
writes, he had “few enemies.” Whereas the founders had only grudgingly
accepted partisan opposition, Van Buren’s generation took it for granted.
The politics of total opposition had become the politics of mutual
toleration.
America’s nascent norms soon unraveled, however, over an issue the
founders had tried to suppress: slavery. During the 1850s, an increasingly
open conflict over slavery’s future polarized the country, investing politics
with what one historian has called a new “emotional intensity.” To white
southern planters and their Democratic allies, abolitionism—a cause
associated with the new Republican Party—posed an existential threat.
South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, one of slavery’s most influential
defenders, described a postemancipation South in near-apocalyptic terms,
in which former slaves would be
raised above the whites…in the political and social scale. We
would, in a word, change conditions with them—a degradation
greater than has ever yet fallen to the lot of a free and
enlightened people, and one from which we could not escape…
but by fleeing the homes of ourselves and ancestors, and by
abandoning our country to our former slaves, to become the
permanent abode of disorder, anarchy, poverty, misery and
wretchedness.
Polarization over slavery shattered America’s still-fragile norm of mutual
toleration. Democratic representative Henry Shaw assailed Republicans as
“traitors to the Constitution and the Union,” while Georgia senator Robert
Toombs vowed to “never permit this federal government to pass into the
traitorous hands of the Black Republican Party.” Antislavery politicians, for
their part, accused proslavery politicians of “treason” and “sedition.”
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.
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, though, of course, one notable executive order freed the
slaves. And following the Union victory, much of the former Confederacy
was placed under military rule.
The trauma of the Civil War left Americans with searing questions about
what went wrong. The sheer destruction—including more than 600,000
dead—shattered many northern intellectuals’ belief in the superiority of
their form of democracy. Was the U.S. Constitution not the providentially
inspired document it had been thought to be? This wave of self-
examination gave rise to a new interest in unwritten rules. In 1885, the
then–political science professor Woodrow Wilson, the son of a southern
Confederate family, published a book about Congress that explored the
disparity between the promise of constitutional arrangements and the way
institutions really worked. In addition to good laws, America needed
effective norms.
Rebuilding democratic norms after a civil war is never easy, and America
was no exception. The wounds of war healed slowly; Democrats and
Republicans only grudgingly accepted one another as legitimate rivals. At an
1876 campaign event for Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes,
politician Robert Ingersoll spoke out against Democrats in ghastly terms:
Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat.
Every enemy this great Republic has had for twenty years has
been a Democrat….Every man that denied to the Union
prisoners even the worm-eaten crust of famine, and when some
poor, emaciated Union patriot, driven to insanity by famine,
saw in an insane dream the face of his mother, and she
beckoned him and he followed, hoping to press her lips once
again against his fevered face, and when he stepped one step
beyond the dead line, the wretch that put the bullet through his
loving, throbbing heart was—and is—a Democrat.
This kind of rhetoric, known as “waving the bloody shirt,” persisted for
years.
With enduring partisan animosity came constitutional hardball. 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, and a
year later, it passed the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited Johnson
from removing Lincoln’s cabinet members without Senate approval.
Viewing the law as a violation of his constitutional authority, Johnson
ignored it—a “high misdemeanor” for which he was impeached in 1868.
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.
It was not just time, however, that healed partisan wounds. 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.
It is difficult to overstate the tragic significance of these events. Because
civil and voting rights were regarded by many southern Democrats as a
fundamental threat, the parties’ agreement to abandon those issues provided
a basis for restoring mutual toleration. The disenfranchisement of African
Americans preserved white supremacy and Democratic Party dominance in
the South, which helped maintain the Democrats’ national viability. With
racial equality off the agenda, southern Democrats’ fears subsided. Only
then did partisan hostility begin to soften. 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.
After Democrats and Republicans accepted each other as legitimate
rivals, polarization gradually declined, giving rise to the kind of politics that
would characterize American democracy for the decades that followed.
Bipartisan cooperation enabled a series of important reforms, including the
Sixteenth Amendment (1913), which permitted the federal income tax, the
Seventeenth Amendment (1913), which established the direct election of
U.S. senators, and the Nineteenth Amendment (1919), which granted
women the right to vote.
Mutual toleration, in turn, encouraged forbearance. By the late
nineteenth century, informal conventions or work-arounds had already
begun to permeate all branches of government, enabling our system of
checks and balances to function reasonably well. 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.
—
By the turn of the twentieth century, then, norms of mutual toleration and
institutional forbearance were well-established. Indeed, they became the
foundation of our much-admired system of checks and balances. For our
constitutional system to function as we expect it to, the executive branch,
Congress, and the judiciary must strike a delicate balance. On the one hand,
Congress and the courts must oversee and, when necessary, check the power
of the president. They must be democracy’s watchdogs. On the other,
Congress and the courts must allow the government to operate. This is
where forbearance comes in. For a presidential democracy to succeed,
institutions that are muscular enough to check the president must routinely
underuse that power.
In the absence of these norms, this balance becomes harder to sustain.
When partisan hatred trumps politicians’ commitment to the spirit of the
Constitution, a system of checks and balances risks being subverted in two
ways. 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. In this
scenario, legislative and judicial watchdogs become partisan attack dogs.
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. 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. For most of the twentieth century, however,
American politicians used them all with remarkable forbearance.
—
We begin with presidential power. The American presidency is a potent—
and potentially dominant—institution, due, in part, to gaps in the
Constitution. Article II of the Constitution, which lays out the formal
powers of the presidency, does not clearly define its limits. It is virtually
silent on the president’s authority to act unilaterally, via executive orders or
decrees. Presidential power has, moreover, swelled over the last century.
Driven by the imperatives of war and depression, the executive branch has
built up vast legal, administrative, budgetary, intelligence, and war-making
capacities, transforming itself into what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
famously called the “Imperial Presidency.” Postwar American presidents
controlled the largest military force in the world. And the challenges of
governing a global superpower and complex industrial economy and society
generated ever-growing demands for more concentrated executive action.
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 immense powers of the executive branch create a temptation for
presidents to rule unilaterally—at the margins of Congress and the
judiciary. Presidents who find their agenda stalled can circumvent the
legislature by issuing executive orders, proclamations, directives, executive
agreements, or presidential memoranda, which can assume the weight of
law without the endorsement of Congress. The Constitution does not
prohibit such action.
Likewise, presidents can circumvent the judiciary, either by refusing to
abide by court rulings, as Lincoln did when the Supreme Court rejected his
suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, or by using the prerogative of the
presidential pardon. Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist 74 that
because the power of pardon was so far-reaching, it would “naturally inspire
scrupulousness and caution.” But in the hands of a president without
scruples or caution, the pardon can be used to thoroughly shield the
government from judicial checks. The president can even pardon himself.
Such action, though constitutional, would undermine the independence of
the judiciary.
Given the vast potential for unilateral action, nearly all of which is either
prescribed or permitted by the Constitution, the importance of executive
forbearance is hard to overstate. George Washington was an important
precedent-setting figure in this regard. Washington knew his presidency
would help establish the future scope of executive authority; as he put it, “I
walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which
may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.” As the occupant of an office
many feared would become a new form of monarchy, Washington worked
hard to establish norms and practices that would complement—and
strengthen—constitutional rules. He energetically defended his designated
areas of authority but was careful not to encroach on areas within the
domain of Congress. He limited his use of the veto to bills he regarded as
constitutionally dubious, issuing only two vetoes in eight years and writing
that he “signed many bills with which my Judgement is at variance,” out of
“motives of respect to the legislature.” Washington was also reluctant to
issue decrees that could be seen as encroaching on congressional
jurisdiction. In eight years, he issued only eight executive orders.
Throughout his life, Washington had learned that he “gained power from
his readiness to give it up.” Thanks to his enormous prestige, this
forbearance infused many of the American republic’s other nascent political
institutions. As historian Gordon Wood put it, “If any single person was
responsible for establishing the young Republic on a firm footing, it was
Washington.”
Norms of presidential restraint took hold. Although occasionally tested,
especially during wartime, they were robust enough to constrain even our
most ambitious presidents. Consider Theodore Roosevelt, who ascended to
the office in 1901 after President William McKinley’s assassination.
Roosevelt subscribed to what he called the stewardship theory of the
presidency, which asserted that all executive actions were allowed unless
expressly prohibited by law. This expansive view of presidential power,
Roosevelt’s fondness for populist-style appeals to “the people,” and his
“boundless energy and ambition” alarmed contemporary observers,
including leaders of his own Republican Party. President McKinley’s
powerful advisor, Mark Hanna, had warned against selecting Roosevelt as
his vice president, reportedly saying, “Don’t you realize that there’s only one
life between that madman and the White House?” As president, however,
Roosevelt acted with surprising restraint. He took great care, for example,
to avoid appearing to bully Congress by speaking directly to the people or
attacking individual members of Congress as they debated crucial votes. In
the end, Roosevelt operated well within the bounds of our constitutional
checks and balances.
Even as the executive’s legal, administrative, military, and intelligence
capabilities soared during the twentieth century, presidents abided by
established norms of self-limitation in their interactions with Congress and
the courts. Outside of wartime, they were judicious in their use of executive
orders. They never used pardons for self-protection or narrow political gain,
and most sought the advice of the Justice Department before issuing them.
And, crucially, twentieth-century presidents rarely defied other branches of
government, as Lincoln and Andrew Johnson had done during the
nineteenth century. President Harry Truman complied with the Supreme
Court’s blocking of his 1952 executive order to nationalize the steel industry
in the face of a strike that he viewed as a national emergency. Eisenhower
enforced the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision despite
his own displeasure with it. Even Nixon acceded to congressional demands
that he turn over his secret tapes after the Supreme Court ruled in
Congress’s favor.
So although the office of the American presidency strengthened during
the twentieth century, American presidents demonstrated considerable
restraint in their exercise of that power. Even in the absence of
constitutional barriers, unilateral executive action remained largely a
wartime exception, rather than the rule.
A similar story can be told about presidential court packing. Court
packing may take one of two forms: impeaching unfriendly Supreme Court
justices and replacing them with partisan allies, or altering the size of the
Court and filling the new seats with loyalists. Both of these maneuvers are,
strictly speaking, legal; the Constitution permits impeachment and does not
specify the size of the Supreme Court. Presidents may purge and pack the
Court without violating the letter of the law. They have not done so,
however, for well over a century.
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 time for political reasons. By the late nineteenth century, however,
court packing was widely viewed as unacceptable. In an 1893 book on the
American political system, future president Woodrow Wilson wrote that
“such outrages” were “a violation of the spirit of the Constitution.” Former
President Benjamin Harrison wrote around the same time that although
expanding the Court “is very tempting to partisans,” it would be
“destructive, fatally so to our constitutional union.” By the 1920s, British
journalist H. W. Horwill concluded that there existed an informal norm
“strong enough to prohibit the most powerful President and Congress,
whatever the provocation, from taking a course which would make the
Supreme Court the plaything of party politics.”
President Franklin Roosevelt, of course, violated this particular norm
with his 1937 court-packing effort. As constitutional scholars Lee Epstein
and Jeffrey Segal wrote, Roosevelt’s norm-violating proposal was
“extraordinary in its hubris.” Equally extraordinary, however, was the
resistance it generated. At the time, Roosevelt was extremely popular—he
had just been reelected in a historic landslide, and his Democratic allies
enjoyed solid majorities in both houses of Congress. Few American
presidents have ever enjoyed such political strength. Yet court packing
triggered across-the-board opposition. Media criticism was fierce—the San
Francisco Chronicle described the plan as an “open declaration of war on the
Supreme Court.” And congressional opposition was immediate, not only
from Republicans but also from many Democrats. Missouri senator James
A. Reed called Roosevelt’s proposal “a step toward making himself dictator
in fact.” Edward Cox, a Democratic congressman from Georgia, warned
that it would “change the meaning of our basic laws and our whole system
of government” and thus represented “the most terrible threat to
constitutional government that has ever arisen in the entire history of the
country.” Even loyal New Dealers turned against Roosevelt. Wyoming
senator Joseph O’Mahoney was such a close ally that he had been seated
next to Eleanor Roosevelt at a pre-inaugural dinner at the White House only
two weeks earlier. Yet O’Mahoney opposed the Court plan, writing to a
friend, “The whole mess smells of Machiavelli and Machiavelli stinks!”
It is worth noting that the Supreme Court itself played a major role in
defeating Roosevelt’s plan. In a move that has been described as a “masterly
retreat” to preserve the Supreme Court’s integrity, the previously anti–New
Deal Court quickly reversed itself on a series of decisions. In spring 1937,
the Court ruled in quick succession in favor of several pieces of New Deal
legislation, including the National Labor Relations Act and Roosevelt’s
Social Security legislation. With the New Deal program on more secure
constitutional ground, liberal Democrats in Congress could more easily
oppose the president’s Court plan. In July 1937, it died in the Senate. The
president, at the peak of his popularity and power, strained against the
limits of his constitutional authority and was blocked. Never again would an
American president try to pack the Supreme Court.
—
Norms of forbearance also operate in Congress. Take the U.S. Senate. As a
body whose original purpose was to protect minorities from the power of
majorities (which, the founders believed, would be represented by the
House), the Senate was designed, from its inception, to allow deliberation.
It developed a range of tools—many of them unwritten—that enabled
legislative minorities, and even individual senators, to slow down or block
projects put forth by the majority. Prior to 1917, the Senate lacked any rules
limiting discussion, which meant that any senator could prevent a vote on
(or “filibuster”) any legislation indefinitely by simply prolonging debate.
These informal prerogatives are essential checks and balances, serving as
both a source of protection for minority parties and a constraint on
potentially overreaching presidents. Without forbearance, however, they
could easily lead to gridlock and conflict. As political scientist Donald
Matthews wrote:
[Each senator] has vast power over the chamber’s rules. A single
senator, for example, can slow the Senate almost to a halt by
systematically objecting to all unanimous consent requests. A
few, by exercising their right to filibuster, can block the passage
of all bills.
For most of American history, such dysfunction did not occur, in part
because prevailing norms discouraged senators from overusing their
political authority. As Matthews observed, although tools such as the
filibuster “exist as a potential threat, the amazing thing is that they are rarely
used. The spirit of reciprocity results in much, if not most, of the senators’
actual power not being exercised.”
Matthews’s seminal study of the U.S. Senate during the late 1950s
highlights how informal norms, or what he called “folkways,” helped the
institution function. Two of these folkways are closely associated with
forbearance: courtesy and reciprocity. Courtesy meant, first and foremost,
avoiding personal or embarrassing attacks on fellow senators. The cardinal
rule, Matthews observed, was for senators to not let “political disagreements
influence personal feelings.” This was difficult, for, as one senator put it, “it
is hard not to call a man a liar when you know he is one.” But senators
viewed courtesy as critical to their success, since, as one senator put it,
“your enemies on one issue may be your friends on the next.” In the words
of another senator, political self-preservation “dictates at least a semblance
of friendship. And then before you know it, you really are friends.”
Norms of reciprocity entailed restraint in the use of one’s power so as not
to overly antagonize other senators and endanger future cooperation. In his
study, Matthews concludes, “If a senator does push his formal power to the
limit, he has broken the implicit bargain and can expect, not cooperation
from his colleagues, but only retaliation in kind,” making legislative work
much more difficult. As one senator described the norm, “It’s not a matter
of friendship; it’s just a matter of, ‘I won’t be an S.O.B. if you won’t be
one.’ ”
No institutional tool illustrates the importance of these norms more
clearly than the filibuster. Prior to 1917, again, any senator could obstruct
legislation by using a filibuster to delay a vote indefinitely. Yet this rarely
happened. Though available to any senator, at any time, most senators
treated the filibuster as a “procedural weapon of last resort.” According to
one count, only twenty-three manifest filibusters occurred during the entire
nineteenth century. A modest increase in filibuster use in the early
twentieth century gave rise to the 1917 cloture rule, by which two-thirds
(now three-fifths) of the Senate could vote to end debate. But even then,
only thirty filibusters occurred between 1880 and 1917, according to
political scientists Sarah Binder and Steven Smith. Filibuster use remained
low through the late 1960s—in fact, between 1917 and 1959, the Senate
saw an average of only one per congressional term.
Another congressional prerogative central to the system of checks and
balances is the Senate’s power of “advice and consent” over presidential
appointments to the Supreme Court and other key positions. Though
stipulated in the Constitution, the actual scope of the Senate’s advice and
consent role is open to interpretation and debate. In theory, the Senate
could block presidents from appointing any of their preferred cabinet
members or justices—an act that, though nominally constitutional, would
hobble the government. This has not happened, in part, because of an
established Senate norm of deferring to presidents to fill their cabinets and
open Supreme Court seats. Only nine presidential cabinet nominations were
blocked between 1800 and 2005; when the Senate blocked Calvin
Coolidge’s attorney general pick in 1925, Coolidge angrily accused the
Senate of violating an “unbroken practice of three generations permitting
the president to choose his own cabinet.”
The Senate has always reserved the right to reject individual Supreme
Court nominees. Even President Washington had a nomination blocked in
1795. But the Senate has historically been judicious in the use of this right.
Between 1880 and 1980, more than 90 percent of Supreme Court nominees
were approved, and only three presidents—Grover Cleveland, Herbert
Hoover, and Richard Nixon—had nominees rejected. Highly qualified
nominees were invariably approved even when senators disagreed with
them ideologically. The ultraconservative Antonin Scalia, a Reagan
appointee, was approved in 1986 by a vote of 98 to 0, despite the fact that
the Democrats had more than enough votes (47) to filibuster.
Whether or not individual nominees are approved, the Senate has long
accepted the president’s ultimate authority to appoint justices. In the 150-
year span between 1866 and 2016, the Senate never once prevented the
president from filling a Supreme Court seat. On seventy-four occasions
during this period, presidents attempted to fill Court vacancies prior to the
election of their successor. And on all seventy-four occasions—though not
always on the first try—they were allowed to do so.
Finally, one of the most potentially explosive prerogatives granted to
Congress by the Constitution is the power to remove a sitting president via
impeachment. This, British scholar James Bryce noted more than a century
ago, is “the heaviest piece of artillery in the congressional arsenal.” But,
Bryce continued, “because it is so heavy, it is unfit for ordinary use.” If
deployed casually, constitutional scholar Keith Whittington warns,
impeachment can become a “partisan tool for undermining electoral
officials and overturning electoral results.”
This is precisely what happened, as we have already noted, in Paraguay in
2012 with the two-day “quickie” impeachment of Fernando Lugo, and in
Ecuador in 1997 with the removal of Abdalá Bucaram on bogus grounds of
“mental incapacity.” In these cases, impeachment was weaponized—the
leaders of congress used it to remove a president they didn’t like.
In theory, American presidents could suffer Lugo’s or Bucaram’s fate.
The legal barriers to impeachment in the United States are actually quite
low. Constitutionally, it only takes a simple majority in the House of
Representatives. Although the conviction and removal of a president
requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate, impeachment without conviction
is still a traumatic event that can weaken presidents to the point of political
impotence—as occurred with Andrew Johnson after 1868.
Unlike in Paraguay or Ecuador, however, impeachment in the United
States has long been governed by norms of forbearance. Constitutional
scholar Mark Tushnet describes the norm: “The House of Representatives
should not aggressively carry out an impeachment unless…there is a
reasonable probability that the impeachment will result in the target’s
removal from office.” Since removal requires a two-thirds vote in the
Senate, this means that impeachment should have at least some bipartisan
support. After Johnson’s impeachment in 1868, there were no serious
congressional efforts to impeach the president until the Nixon scandal more
than a century later.
—
America’s system of checks and balances worked in the twentieth century
because it was embedded in robust norms of mutual toleration and
forbearance. This is not to say that America ever experienced an
unadulterated golden age, where some variant of the gentlemanly
Queensberry boxing rules of good sportsmanship governed the country’s
politics. At various points, democratic norms have been challenged and
even violated. Three such incidents are worth noting.
One we have already explored: Roosevelt’s unprecedented concentration
of executive power during the Great Depression and World War II. Beyond
the court-packing attempt, Roosevelt’s reliance on unilateral action posed a
serious challenge to traditional checks and balances. His use of executive
orders—more than 3,000 during his presidency, averaging more than 300 a
year—was unmatched at the time or since. His decision to seek a third (and
later a fourth) term in office shattered a nearly 150-year-old norm
restricting the president to two terms.
Roosevelt’s presidency never slid into autocracy, however. There are many
reasons for this, but one of them is that many of Roosevelt’s executive
excesses triggered bipartisan resistance. The court-packing scheme was
rejected by both parties, and although Roosevelt destroyed the unwritten
rule limiting presidents to two terms in office, support for the old norm was
so strong that in 1947, less than two years after his death, a bipartisan
coalition in Congress passed the Twenty-Second Amendment, which
enshrined it in the Constitution. The guardrails were tested during the
Roosevelt era, but they held.
McCarthyism posed the second significant challenge to America’s
institutions, threatening norms of mutual toleration in the early 1950s. The
rise of communism scared many Americans, particularly after the Soviet
Union emerged as a nuclear superpower in the late 1940s. Anticommunist
hysteria could be harnessed for partisan ends: Politicians could red-bait, or
seek votes by casting their opponents as communists or communist
sympathizers.
Between 1946 and 1954, anticommunism found its way into partisan
politics. The advent of the Cold War had created a frenzy over national
security, and the Republican Party, which had been out of national power
for nearly twenty years, was searching desperately for a new electoral
appeal.
Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy found such an appeal. First elected
to the Senate in 1947, McCarthy took the national stage on February 9,
1950, with an infamous speech in front of the Ohio County Republican
Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. McCarthy ranted against
communism and the presence of “traitors” within, and then stumbled onto a
line that instantly became iconic: “I have here in my hand a list of 205
names that were made known to the Secretary of State and who
nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State
Department.” The reaction was immediate. The press went wild. McCarthy,
a demagogue who loved the attention, began repeating the speech, realizing
he had hit upon a political gold mine. Democrats were outraged. Moderate
Republicans were alarmed, but conservative Republicans saw the potential
political benefits and supported McCarthy. Republican senator Robert Taft
passed on the message, “Keep talking.” Three days later, McCarthy sent a
wire to President Truman that said, “Pick up your phone and ask [Secretary
of State Dean] Acheson how many Communists he failed to
discharge….Failure on your part will label the Democratic Party of being
the bedfellow of international Communism.”
Red-baiting became a common tactic among Republican candidates in
the early 1950s. Richard Nixon deployed it in his 1950 Senate campaign,
vilifying his Democratic rival, Helen Gahagan Douglas, as the “Pink Lady,”
who “follows the Communist line.” In Florida, Republican George Smathers
unleashed a vicious campaign to defeat incumbent Claude Pepper, labeling
his Democratic rival “Red Pepper.”
By the time of the 1952 presidential race, it was clear that McCarthy’s
virulent anticommunism was a useful club with which to beat Democrats.
McCarthy was called in to speak in races across the country. Even moderate
Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower, though ambivalent
about McCarthy, relied on the political energy he generated. McCarthy
repeatedly impugned Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson as a traitor,
intentionally confusing his name with that of accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss.
Eisenhower initially resisted joint appearances with McCarthy, but at the
insistence of the Republican National Committee, the two men campaigned
together in Wisconsin a month before the election.
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.
McCarthy’s fall discredited the practice of red-baiting, giving rise to a
new pejorative label: “McCarthyism.” After 1954, few Republicans so
overtly employed the tactic, and those who did were criticized. Even Nixon,
always pragmatic, began to reconsider his use of McCarthyite rhetoric.
According to a biographer, even the vice president “was at pains to
acknowledge the loyalty of the Democratic Party” during his 1956
reelection campaign. Although groups such as the extremist John Birch
Society “kept the McCarthyist spirit alive,” they operated at the Republican
Party’s fringes. But norms of mutual toleration remained intact within the
dominant factions of both parties until late in the twentieth century.
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.” Hundreds of names, including “dozens of Democrats,” made the
list. The administration also deployed the Internal Revenue Service as a
political weapon, auditing such key opponents as National Democratic
Committee Chair Larry O’Brien. Most prominent, however, was Nixon’s
campaign to sabotage his Democratic rivals in the 1972 election, which
culminated in the botched Watergate break-in.
As is well known, 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.” As the committee began its
work, nearly a dozen Republican senators joined Democrats in calling for
an independent special prosecutor. Archibald Cox was named in May. By
mid-1973, investigations were closing in on Nixon. Senate hearings
revealed the existence of secret White House tapes that could implicate the
president. Cox requested that Nixon release the tapes—a demand that was
echoed by leaders of both parties. Nixon played hardball, refusing to turn
over the tapes and eventually firing Cox, but to no avail.
The move triggered widespread calls for Nixon’s resignation, and the
House Judiciary Committee, chaired by New Jersey representative Peter
Rodino, took initial steps toward impeachment proceedings. On July 24,
1974, the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon must turn over the tapes. By
then, Rodino had sufficient Republican support on the Judiciary Committee
to move ahead with impeachment. Although Nixon held out hope that he
could muster up the 34 Republican votes needed to avoid a Senate
conviction, Senate Republicans sent Barry Goldwater to inform him of the
inevitability of impeachment. When Nixon asked Goldwater how many
votes he had, Goldwater reportedly replied, “Ten at most, maybe less.” Two
days later, Nixon resigned. Due in part to bipartisan cooperation, Congress
and the courts had checked the abuse of presidential power.
—
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.
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.
As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites,
Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party was likely
to view the other as an existential threat. The process of racial inclusion
that began after World War II and culminated in 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.
7
The Unraveling
On the afternoon of Saturday, February 13, 2016, a San Antonio newspaper
reported that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died in his sleep
while on a hunting trip in Texas. Social media erupted. Within minutes, a
former Republican staffer and founder of the conservative legal publication
The Federalist tweeted, “If Scalia has actually passed away, the Senate must
refuse to confirm any justices in 2016 and leave the nomination to the next
president.” Shortly afterward, the communications director for Republican
senator Mike Lee tweeted, “What is less than zero? The chances of Obama
successfully appointing a Supreme Court Justice to replace Scalia.” By early
evening, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement
sending his condolences to the Scalia family but also declaring, “This
vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
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.
The traditions underpinning America’s democratic institutions are
unraveling, opening up a disconcerting gap between how our political
system works and long-standing expectations about how it ought to work.
As our soft guardrails have weakened, we have grown increasingly
vulnerable to antidemocratic leaders.
Donald Trump, a serial norm breaker, is widely (and correctly) criticized
for assaulting America’s democratic norms. But the problem did not begin
with Trump. The process of norm erosion started decades ago—long before
Trump descended an escalator to announce his presidential candidacy.
—
In a 1978 congressional race in northwestern Georgia, a young Newt
Gingrich made his third bid for office in a district outside Atlanta. After two
previous failed runs as a self-identified liberal Republican, he finally won—
this time as a conservative, capturing a district that hadn’t been in
Republican hands in 130 years. Gingrich’s bespectacled academic look (he
had been a history professor at a local university), his chirpy speech, and his
thick mop of hair and bushy sideburns belied a ruthlessness that would help
transform American politics.
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.
When Gingrich arrived in Washington in 1979, his vision of politics as
warfare was at odds with that of the Republican leadership. House Minority
Leader Bob Michel, an amiable figure who carpooled home to Illinois for
congressional recesses with his Democratic colleague Dan Rostenkowski,
was committed to abiding by established norms of civility and bipartisan
cooperation. Gingrich rejected this approach as too “soft.” Winning a
Republican majority, Gingrich believed, would require playing a harder
form of politics.
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. In the early 1990s, Gingrich and his team distributed
memos to Republican candidates instructing them to use certain negative
words to describe Democrats, including pathetic, sick, bizarre, betray,
antiflag, antifamily, and traitors. It was the beginning of a seismic shift in
American politics.
Even as Gingrich ascended the Republican leadership structure—
becoming minority whip in 1989 and Speaker of the House in 1995—he
refused to abandon his hard-line rhetoric. And rather than repelling the
party, he pulled it to him. By the time he became Speaker, 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.”
Though few realized it at the time, Gingrich and his allies were on the
cusp of a new wave of polarization rooted in growing public discontent,
particularly among the Republican base. Gingrich didn’t create this
polarization, but he was one of the first Republicans to exploit the shift in
popular sentiment. And his leadership helped to establish “politics as
warfare” as the GOP’s dominant strategy. 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.
The Republicans’ new hardball approach was manifest during the
presidency of Bill Clinton. In April 1993, four months into Clinton’s first
term, Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole claimed that Clinton’s modest
popular victory meant the traditional honeymoon period in which deference
was given to a new president was not warranted, and so orchestrated a
filibuster to block the president’s $16 billion job initiative. Filibuster use,
which had already risen markedly in the 1980s and early 1990s, reached
what one former senator described as “epidemic” levels during the first two
years of the Clinton presidency. Before the 1970s, the annual number of
cloture motions filed to end Senate debate—a good indicator of a filibuster
attempt—never exceeded seven; by 1993–94, the number had reached
eighty. 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.
But the era of politics as warfare moved into full gear after the
Republicans’ landslide 1994 election. With Gingrich now Speaker of the
House, the GOP adopted a “no compromise” approach—a signal of
ideological purity to the party base—that brazenly rejected forbearance in
pursuit of victory by “any means necessary.” House Republicans refused to
compromise, for example, in budget negotiations, leading to a five-day
government shutdown in 1995 and a twenty-one-day shutdown in 1996.
This was a dangerous turn. Without forebearance, checks and balances give
way to deadlock and dysfunction.
The apogee of 1990s constitutional hardball was the December 1998
House vote to impeach President Clinton. Only the second presidential
impeachment in U.S. history, the move ran afoul of long-established norms.
The investigation, beginning with the dead-end Whitewater inquiry and
ultimately centering on President Clinton’s testimony about an extramarital
affair, never revealed anything approaching conventional standards for what
constitute high crimes and misdemeanors. In the words of constitutional
scholar Keith Whittington, the Republicans impeached Clinton “on a
technicality.” The Republican House members also moved ahead with
impeachment without bipartisan support, which meant that President
Clinton would almost certainly not be convicted by the Senate (he was
acquitted there in February 1999). 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.”
While Newt Gingrich may have led the initial assault on mutual
toleration and forbearance, the descent into politics as warfare only
accelerated after he left Congress in 1999. 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.
—
On the evening of December 14, 2000, after Al Gore conceded the
presidency to George W. Bush following a bitter postelection fight, Bush
spoke to the country from the Texas House of Representatives. Having been
introduced by the state’s Democratic House Speaker, Bush declared that he
had chosen to speak from the Texas House
because it has been a home to bipartisan cooperation. Here in a
place where Democrats have the majority, Republicans and
Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the
people we represent. The spirit of cooperation I have seen in
this hall is what we need in Washington.
No such spirit materialized. Bush had promised to be a “uniter, not a
divider,” but partisan warfare only intensified during his eight years in
office. Just prior to Bush’s inauguration, DeLay gave the president-elect a
reality check, reportedly telling him: “We don’t work with Democrats.
There’ll be none of that uniter-divider stuff.”
President Bush governed hard to the right, abandoning all pretense of
bipartisanship on the counsel of his political advisor 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 opposed.
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.” After the Republicans won back the
Senate in 2002, the Democrats turned to filibusters to block the
confirmation of several appeals court nominations. Republicans reacted
with outrage. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that “one
of the great traditions, customs, and unwritten rules of the Senate is that
you do not filibuster judicial nominees.” During the 110th Congress, the last
of Bush’s presidency, the number of filibusters reached an all-time high of
139—nearly double that of even the Clinton years.
If Democrats eschewed forbearance to obstruct the president,
Republicans did so in order to protect him. In the House, the informal
practice of “regular order,” which assured the minority party opportunities
to speak and to amend legislation, was largely abandoned. The share of bills
introduced under “closed rules” prohibiting amendments skyrocketed. As
congressional observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it, “long-
standing norms of conduct in the House…were shredded for the larger goal
of implementing the president’s program.” The GOP effectively abandoned
oversight of a Republican president, weakening Congress’s ability to check
the executive. Whereas the House had conducted 140 hours of sworn
testimony investigating whether President Clinton had abused the White
House Christmas card list in an effort to drum up new donors, it never once
subpoenaed the White House during the first six years of George Bush’s
presidency. Congress resisted oversight of the Iraq War, launching only
superficial investigations into serious abuse cases, including the torture at
the Abu Ghraib prison. The congressional watchdog became a lapdog,
abdicating its institutional responsibilities.
Norm breaking was also evident at the state level. Among the most
notorious cases was the 2003 Texas redistricting plan. Under the
Constitution, state legislatures may modify congressional districts to
maintain districts of equal population. However, there exists a long-standing
and widely shared norm that redistricting should occur once a decade,
immediately after publication of the census. This is with good reason:
Because people move continuously, redistricting that occurs later in a
decade will be based on less accurate population figures. Though there is no
legal impediment to mid-decade redistricting, it has always been rare.
In 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. This mattered to national GOP leaders because Republicans
held a narrow (229–204) majority in the House of Representatives. The
Democrats only needed to win thirteen Republican seats in 2004 to
recapture the House, so a swing of even a handful of seats would be
decisive.
Under DeLay’s guidance, Texas Republicans drew up a redistricting plan
designed to gerrymander African American and Latino voters into a small
number of Democratic districts while adding Republican voters to the
districts of white incumbent Democrats, thereby ensuring their defeat. The
new map left six Democratic congressmen especially vulnerable. The plan
was pure hardball. As one analyst posited, it “was as partisan as the
Republicans thought the law would allow.”
It would take another audacious move to pass the Texas bill. The Texas
House requires a quorum—the presence of two-thirds of its members—to
vote on a bill. And Democrats had the votes to deny a quorum. So when the
redistricting was brought to the floor in May 2003, the Democrats
responded with an unusual maneuver of their own: Forty-seven state
legislators boarded buses and drove to Ardmore, Oklahoma. They remained
there for four days, until the House dropped the bill.
In response, Governor Rick Perry called a special session of the House in
June, and because the Democrats were too exhausted to organize another
walkout, the redistricting bill passed. The bill then moved to the state
Senate, where the Democrats, following the precedent of their House
colleagues, tried to thwart the bill in absentia by boarding a plane and flying
to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They remained there for more than a month,
until Senator John Whitmire (soon to be known as “Quitmire”) gave in and
returned to Austin. 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.
The 2008 presidential election was a watershed moment in partisan
intolerance. Through the right-wing media ecosystem—including Fox
News, America’s most-watched cable news channel—Democratic
presidential candidate Barack Obama was cast as Marxist, anti-American,
and secretly Muslim. The campaign even featured a sustained effort to link
Obama to “terrorists” like Bill Ayers, a Chicago-area professor who had
been active in the Weather Underground in the early 1970s (Ayers had
hosted a gathering for Obama in 1995 as he prepared his Illinois state
Senate bid). The Fox News program Hannity & Colmes discussed the Ayers
story in at least sixty-one different episodes during the 2008 campaign.
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.
Rather than ushering in a new era of tolerance and cooperation, the
Obama presidency was marked by rising extremism and partisan warfare.
Challenges to President Obama’s legitimacy, which had begun with fringe
conservative authors, talk-radio personalities, TV talking heads, and
bloggers, was soon embodied in a mass political movement: the Tea Party,
which started to organize just weeks after President Obama’s inauguration.
Although the Tea Party framed its mission in terms of such traditional
conservative ideas as limited government, low taxes, and resistance to health
care reform, its opposition to Obama was far more pernicious. The
difference? The Tea Party questioned President Obama’s very right to be
president.
Two threads that broke with established norms consistently ran through
Tea Party discourse. One was that President Obama posed a threat to our
democracy. Just days after Obama’s election, Georgia congressman Paul
Broun warned of a coming dictatorship comparable to Nazi Germany or the
Soviet Union. He later tweeted, “Mr. President, you don’t believe in the
Constitution. You believe in socialism.” Iowa Tea Partier Joni Ernst, who
would soon be elected to the U.S. Senate, claimed that President Obama
“has become a dictator.”
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. According to Tea Party activist and radio host Laurie
Roth:
This was not a shift to the Left like Jimmy Carter or Bill
Clinton. This is a worldview clash. We are seeing a worldview
clash in our White House. A man who is a closet secular-type
Muslim, but he’s still a Muslim. He’s no Christian. We’re seeing
a man who’s a Socialist Communist in the White House,
pretending to be an American.
Mass e-mails sent rumors and innuendo through Tea Party circles, including
one with a photograph showing President Obama carrying a book, The Post-
American World, by CNN host Fareed Zakaria. The e-mail read: “THIS
WILL CURDLE YOUR BLOOD!!! The name of the book Obama is reading is
called The Post-American World and it was written by a fellow Muslim.”
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.”
If the Tea Party hammered home the accusation that President Obama
did not love America, the “birther movement” went even further,
questioning whether he was born in the United States—and thus challenging
his constitutional right to hold the presidency. The idea that Obama was not
even from America first circulated in the blogosphere during his 2004
Senate campaign and resurfaced in 2008. Republican politicians discovered
that questioning President Obama’s citizenship was an easy way to elicit
crowd enthusiasm at public appearances. So they began to do it. Colorado
representative Mike Coffman told supporters, “I do not know if Barack
Obama was born in the United States of America….But I do know this, that
in his heart, he’s not an American. He’s just not an American.” At least
eighteen Republican senators and House members were called “birther
enablers” because of their refusal to reject the myth. U.S. Senators Roy
Blunt, James Inhofe, Richard Shelby, and David Vitter, former vice
presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and 2012 presidential candidate Mike
Huckabee all made statements endorsing or encouraging the birther
campaign.
The most notorious birther of all was Donald Trump. In the spring of
2011, as he pondered a 2012 presidential bid, Trump told the Today show
that he had “doubts” about whether President Obama was a natural-born
U.S. citizen. “I have people who actually have been studying it,” Trump
claimed, “and they cannot believe what they are finding.” Trump became
America’s most prominent birther, appearing repeatedly on television news
programs to call on the president to release his birth certificate. And when
Obama’s certificate was made public in 2011, Trump suggested it was a
forgery. Although Trump opted not to run against Obama in 2012, his high-
profile questioning of President Obama’s nationality gained him media
attention and endeared him to the Republicans’ Tea Party base. Intolerance
was politically useful.
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 claimed, then it made sense to block his
judicial appointments by any means necessary.
Rising partisan intolerance thus led to an erosion of institutional
forbearance during the Obama years. Immediately after President Obama’s
election, a group of young House members, led by 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.” The United States was mired in the
deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, yet Republican
legislators planned to not cooperate with the new administration. Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell echoed this sentiment when he declared
that the “single most important thing we want to achieve [in the Senate] is
for President Obama to be a one-term president.” So McConnell, too,
embraced obstructionism. The very first bill in front of the Senate in
January 2009 was the innocuous Public Land Management Act—a
bipartisan conservation measure to secure two million acres of wilderness
in nine states. As if to send a message, the Republicans filibustered it.
This behavior became standard practice. 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. And
Senate Republicans continued using the judicial confirmation process as a
partisan tool: The confirmation rate of presidential circuit court
appointments, which had been over 90 percent in the 1980s, fell to barely
50 percent under President Obama.
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 the norm of forbearance.
President Obama’s efforts to circumvent Congress triggered further
escalation. 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. As the New York Times editorialized,
“This sounds like John Calhoun’s Secessionist screed from 1828, the South
Carolina Exposition and Protest.”
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. Because a failure to raise the debt ceiling could cause the
U.S. government to default, destroying America’s credit rating and
potentially throwing the economy into a tailspin, Congress could, in theory,
use the debt limit as a “hostage,” refusing to raise it unless the president met
certain demands. 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.
This changed after the Republicans, pushed by a new class of 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. As
Congressman Jason Chaffetz put it afterward, “We weren’t kidding….We
would have taken it down.” Although a last-minute deal prevented a default,
considerable damage had already been done. 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. 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.
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. But the threat of
obstruction did not end there. In 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. Burr, a senator from North
Carolina, told a private meeting of Republican volunteers that “if Hillary
Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make
sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court.”
Although the Constitution does not specify the size of the Supreme Court,
the nine-member Court had long ago become an established tradition.
Republicans and Democrats had both defended the Court’s autonomy
against President Roosevelt’s overreach in 1937. This was now
unimaginable. Although Ted Cruz claimed there was a long “historical
precedent” for changing the size of the Supreme Court, that precedent died
shortly after the Civil War. Cruz’s initiative would have broken a 147-year-
old norm.
With tactics like these, the Republicans had begun to behave like an
antisystem political party. By the end of the Obama presidency,
democracy’s soft guardrails were becoming dangerously unmoored.
—
If, 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.
Behind the unraveling of basic norms of mutual tolerance and
forbearance lies a syndrome of intense partisan polarization. Although it
began with the radicalization of the Republican Party, the consequences of
this polarization have been felt through the entire American political
system. Government shutdowns, legislative hostage-taking, mid-decade
redistricting, and the refusal to even consider Supreme Court nominations
are not aberrant moments. Over the last quarter century, Democrats and
Republicans have become much more than just two competing parties,
sorted into liberal and conservative camps. Their voters are now deeply
divided by race, religious belief, geography, and even “way of life.”
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. 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.
These surveys point to the rise of a dangerous phenomenon in American
politics: intense partisan animosity. 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. The Democrats represented the New Deal coalition of
liberals, organized labor, second- and third-generation Catholic immigrants,
and African Americans, but they also represented conservative whites in the
South. For its part, the GOP ranged from liberals in the Northeast to
conservatives in the Midwest and West. Evangelical Christians belonged to
both parties, with slightly more of them supporting the Democrats—so
neither party could be charged with being “Godless.”
Because the two parties were so internally heterogeneous, polarization
between them was far lower than it is today. Congressional Republicans and
Democrats divided on such issues as taxes and spending, government
regulation, and unions, but the parties overlapped on the potentially
explosive issue of race. Although both parties contained factions supporting
civil rights, southern Democrats’ opposition and strategic control of
Congress’s committee system kept the issue off the agenda. This internal
heterogeneity defused conflict. Rather than viewing one another as enemies,
Republicans and Democrats frequently found common ground. Whereas
liberal Democrats and Republicans often voted in Congress together to push
the cause of civil rights, southern Democrats and right-wing northern
Republicans maintained a “conservative coalition” in Congress that
thwarted it.
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. In the decades that followed, southern white
migration to the Republican Party quickened. The racial appeals of Nixon’s
“Southern Strategy” and, later on, Ronald Reagan’s coded messages about
race communicated to voters that the GOP was the home for white racial
conservatives. By century’s end, what had long been a solidly Democratic
region had become solidly Republican. At the same time, southern blacks—
able to vote for the first time in nearly a century—flocked to the Democrats,
as did many northern liberal Republicans who supported civil rights. As the
South went Republican, the Northeast went reliably blue.
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. 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. As both voters and their elected
representatives clustered into increasingly homogeneous “camps,” the
ideological differences between the parties grew more marked.
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.
Ideologically sorted parties don’t necessarily generate the “fear and
loathing” that erodes norms of mutual toleration, leading politicians to
begin to question the legitimacy of their rivals. Voters are ideologically
sorted in Britain, Germany, and Sweden, but in none of these countries do
we see the kind of partisan hatred we now see in America.
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. We have already mentioned
one major driver of this: the civil rights movement. But America’s ethnic
diversification was not limited to black enfranchisement. Beginning in the
1960s, the United States experienced a massive wave of immigration, first
from Latin America and later from Asia, which has dramatically altered the
country’s demographic map. 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.
Together with black enfranchisement, immigration has transformed
American political parties. 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.
The Republican Party has also become the party of evangelical
Christians. Evangelicals entered politics en masse in the late 1970s,
motivated, in large part, by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision
legalizing abortion. Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980, the GOP
embraced the Christian Right and adopted increasingly pro-evangelical
positions, including opposition to abortion, support for school prayer, and,
later, opposition to gay marriage. White evangelicals—who had leaned
Democratic in the 1960s—began to vote Republican. In 2016, 76 percent of
white evangelicals identified as Republican. Democratic voters, in turn,
grew increasingly secular. The percentage of white Democrats who attended
church regularly fell from nearly 50 percent in the 1960s to below
30 percent in the 2000s.
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.
—
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. 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.
The rise of right-wing media also affected Republican officeholders.
During the Obama administration, Fox News commentators and right-wing
radio personalities almost uniformly adopted a “no compromise” position,
viciously attacking any Republican politician who broke with the party line.
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. In the late 1990s, organizations such as Grover Norquist’s
Americans for Tax Reform and the Club for Growth became leading voices
in the GOP, pulling Republican politicians toward more ideologically
inflexible positions. Norquist demanded that GOP congressmen sign “no
tax” pledges, essentially forcing them into an obstructionist stance. 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. 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.
But it is not only media and outside interests that have pushed the
Republican Party toward extremism. Social and cultural changes have also
played a major role. 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. Now, again,
white Protestants are a minority of the electorate—and declining. And they
have hunkered down in the Republican Party.
In his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian
Richard Hofstadter described the phenomenon of “status anxiety,” which,
he believed, is most likely to emerge when groups’ social status, identity,
and sense of belonging are perceived to be under existential threat. This
leads to a style of politics that is “overheated, oversuspicious,
overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic.” Half a century after its
publication, Hofstadter’s essay may be more relevant than ever. The struggle
against declining majority status is, in good part, what fuels the intense
animosity that has come to define the American Right. Survey evidence
suggests that many Tea Party Republicans share the perception that the
country they grew up in is “slipping away, threatened by the rapidly
changing face of what they believe is the ‘real’ America.” To quote the title
of sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s recent book, they perceive themselves to
be “strangers in their own land.”
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. As Ann Coulter
chillingly put it, “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.
Republican politicians from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump learned
that in a polarized society, treating rivals as enemies can be useful—and
that the pursuit of politics as warfare can be appealing to those who fear
they have much to lose. 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. When Donald Trump took office in
January 2017, the guardrails were still there, but they were weaker than they
had been in a century—and things were about to get worse.
8
Trump Against the Guardrails
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. Predictably, these attacks triggered dismay, shock, and anger
across the political spectrum. Journalists found themselves at the front lines,
exposing—but also provoking—the president’s norm-breaking behavior. A
study by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy found
that the major news outlets were “unsparing” in their coverage of the Trump
administration’s first hundred days. Of news reports with a clear tone, the
study found, 80 percent were negative—much higher than under Clinton
(60 percent), George W. Bush (57 percent), and Obama (41 percent).
Soon, Trump administration officials were feeling besieged. Not a single
week went by in which press coverage wasn’t at least 70 percent negative.
And amid swirling rumors about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, a
high-profile special counsel, Robert Mueller, was appointed to oversee
investigations into the case. Just a few months into his presidency, President
Trump faced talk of impeachment. But he retained the support of his base,
and like other elected demagogues, he doubled down. He claimed his
administration was beset by powerful establishment forces, telling graduates
of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that “no politician in history, and I say
this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” The
question, then, was how Trump would respond. Would an outsider president
who considered himself to be under unwarranted assault lash out, as
happened in Peru and Turkey?
President Trump exhibited clear authoritarian instincts during his first
year in office. 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.
—
President Trump demonstrated striking hostility toward the referees—law
enforcement, intelligence, ethics agencies, and the courts. Soon after his
inauguration, he sought to ensure that the heads of U.S. intelligence
agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency,
would be personally loyal to him, apparently in the hope of using these
agencies as a shield against investigations into his campaign’s Russia ties.
During his first week in office, 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.
The Comey firing was not President Trump’s only assault on referees who
refused to come to his personal defense. Trump had attempted to establish a
personal relationship with Manhattan-based U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara,
whose investigations into money laundering reportedly threatened to reach
Trump’s inner circle; when Bharara, a respected anticorruption figure,
continued the investigation, the president removed him. After Attorney
General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation and his
deputy, Rod Rosenstein, appointed the respected former FBI Director
Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the investigation, Trump
publicly shamed Sessions, reportedly seeking his resignation. White House
lawyers even launched an effort to dig up dirt on Mueller, seeking conflicts
of interest that could be used to discredit or dismiss him. By late 2017,
many of Trump’s allies were openly calling on him to fire Mueller, and there
was widespread concern that he would soon do so.
President Trump’s efforts to derail independent investigations evoked the
kind of assaults on the referees routinely seen in less democratic countries
—for example, the dismissal of Venezuelan Prosecutor General Luisa
Ortega, a chavista appointee who asserted her independence and began to
investigate corruption and abuse in the Maduro government. Although
Ortega’s term did not expire until 2021 and she could be legally removed
only by the legislature (which was in opposition hands), the government’s
dubiously elected Constituent Assembly sacked her in August 2017.
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.
The president took an indirect swipe at the judiciary in August 2017
when he pardoned the controversial former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who
was convicted of violating a federal court order to stop racial profiling.
Arpaio was a political ally and a hero to many of Trump’s anti-immigrant
supporters. 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. President Trump boldly
violated these norms. Not only did he not consult the Justice Department,
but the pardon was clearly political—it was popular with his base. 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 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. House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz, a Trump ally,
even hinted at an investigation of Shaub. In May, administration officials
tried to force the OGE to halt investigations into the White House’s
appointment of ex-lobbyists. Alternately harassed and ignored by the White
House, Shaub resigned, leaving behind what journalist Ryan Lizza called a
“broken” OGE.
President Trump’s behavior toward the courts, law enforcement and
intelligence bodies, and other independent agencies was drawn from an
authoritarian playbook. He openly spoke of using the Justice Department
and the FBI to go after Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. And in late
2017, the Justice Department considered nominating a special counsel to
investigate Clinton. 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.
—
The Trump administration also mounted efforts to sideline key players in
the political system. President Trump’s rhetorical attacks on critics in the
media are an example. His repeated accusations that outlets such as the
New York Times and CNN were dispensing “fake news” and conspiring
against him look familiar to any student of authoritarianism. 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.
Do what, exactly? The following month, President Trump returned to his
campaign pledge to “open up the libel laws,” tweeting that the New York
Times had “disgraced the media world. Gotten me wrong for two solid
years. 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.
President Trump also considered using government regulatory agencies
against unfriendly media companies. During the 2016 campaign, he had
threatened Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and Amazon, with
antitrust action, tweeting: “If I become president, oh do they have
problems.” He also threatened to block the pending merger of Time Warner
(CNN’s parent company) and AT&T, and during the first months of his
presidency, there were reports that 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.”
There was one area in which the Trump administration went beyond
threats to try to use the machinery of government to punish critics. 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.
—
Although President Trump has waged a war of words against the media and
other critics, those words have not (yet) led to action. No journalists have
been arrested, and no media outlets have altered their coverage due to
pressure from the government. Trump’s efforts to tilt the playing field to his
advantage have been more worrying. In May 2017, he called for changes in
what he called “archaic” Senate rules, including the elimination of the
filibuster, which would have strengthened the Republican majority at the
expense of the Democratic minority. 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.
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. To understand its potential impact, recall that the Civil
Rights and Voting Rights Acts prompted a massive shift in party
identification: The Democratic Party became the primary representative of
minority and first- and second-generation immigrant voters, while GOP
voters remained overwhelmingly white. Because the minority share of the
electorate is growing, these changes favor the Democrats, a perception that
was reinforced by Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, in which minority turnout
rates were unusually high.
Perceiving a threat, some Republican leaders came up with a response
that evoked memories of the Jim Crow South: make it harder for low-
income minority citizens to vote. Because poor minority voters were
overwhelmingly Democratic, measures that dampened turnout among such
voters would likely tilt the playing field in favor of Republicans. This would
be done via strict voter identification laws—requiring, for example, that
voters present a valid driver’s license or other government-issued photo ID
upon arrival at the polling station.
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. Yet Republicans began to push
for measures to combat this nonexistent problem. The first two states to
adopt voter ID laws were Georgia and Indiana, both in 2005. Georgia
congressman John Lewis, a longtime civil rights leader, described his state’s
law as a “modern day poll tax.” An estimated 300,000 Georgia voters lacked
the required forms of ID, and African Americans were five times more
likely than whites to lack them. Indiana’s voter ID law, which Judge
Terence Evans of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals called “a not-too-
thinly veiled attempt to discourage election day turnout by certain folks
believed to skew Democratic,” was taken to the Supreme Court, where it
was upheld in 2008. After that, voter ID laws proliferated. Bills were
introduced in thirty-seven states between 2010 and 2012, and by 2016
fifteen states had adopted such laws, although only ten had them in effect for
the election.
The laws were passed exclusively in states where Republicans controlled
both legislative chambers, and in all but Arkansas, the governor was also a
Republican. There is little doubt that minority voters were a primary target.
Voter ID laws are almost certain to have a disproportionate impact on low-
income minority voters: According to one study, 37 percent of African
Americans and 27 percent of Latinos reported not possessing a valid driver’s
license, compared to 16 percent of whites. A study by the Brennan Center
for Justice estimated that 11 percent of American citizens (twenty-one
million eligible voters) did not possess government-issued photo IDs, and
that among African American citizens, the figure rose to 25 percent.
Of the eleven states with the highest black turnout in 2008, seven adopted
stricter voter ID laws, and of the twelve states that experienced the highest
rates of Hispanic population growth between 2000 and 2010, nine passed
laws making it harder to vote. 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.
That is precisely what the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election
Integrity hopes to make happen. The Commission’s de facto head, Kris
Kobach, has been described as America’s “premier advocate of vote
suppression.” As Kansas’s secretary of state, Kobach helped push through
one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws. For Kobach, Donald Trump was a
useful ally. During the 2016 campaign, Trump had complained that the
election was “rigged,” and afterward, he made the extraordinary claim that
he had “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who
voted illegally.” He repeated this point in a meeting with congressional
leaders, saying that there had been between three and five million illegal
votes. The claim was baseless: A national vote-monitoring project led by the
media organization ProPublica found no evidence of fraud. Washington Post
reporter Philip Bump scoured Nexis for documented cases of fraud in 2016
and found a total of four.
But President Trump’s apparent obsession with having “won” the popular
vote converged with Kobach’s voter suppression goals. Kobach endorsed
Trump’s claims, declaring that he was “absolutely correct” in asserting that
the number of illegal votes exceeded Clinton’s margin of victory. (Kobach
later said that “we will probably never know” who won the popular vote.)
Kobach gained Trump’s ear, helped convince him to create the
Commission, and was appointed to run it.
The Commission’s early activities suggested that its objective was voter
suppression. First, it is collecting stories of fraud from across the country,
which could provide political ammunition for state-level voter-restriction
initiatives or, perhaps, for efforts to repeal the 1993 “Motor Voter” law. In
effect, the Commission is poised to serve as a high-profile national
mouthpiece for Republican efforts to pass tougher voter ID laws. Second,
the Commission aims to encourage or facilitate state-level voter roll purges,
which, existing research suggests, would invariably remove many legitimate
voters. The Commission has already sought to cross-check local voter
records to uncover cases of double registration, in which people are
registered in more than one state. There are also reports that the
Commission plans to use a Homeland Security database of green card and
visa holders to scour the voter rolls for noncitizens. The risk, as one study
shows, is that the number of mistakes—because of the existence of many
people with the same name and birthdate—will vastly exceed the number of
illegal registrations that are uncovered.
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. Because strict voter ID laws disproportionately
affect low-income minority voters, who are overwhelmingly Democratic,
they skew elections in favor of the GOP.
Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity did not carry out any concrete
reforms in 2017, and its clumsy request for voter information was widely
rebuffed by the states. But if the Commission proceeds with its project
unchecked, it has the potential to inflict real damage on our country’s
electoral process.
—
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. One important initiative, the
Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, is just getting off the ground,
so its impact is harder to evaluate. Overall, then, President Trump
repeatedly scraped up against the guardrails, like a reckless driver, but he
did not break through them. Despite clear causes for concern, little actual
backsliding occurred in 2017. We did not cross the line into
authoritarianism.
It is still early, however. The backsliding of democracy is often gradual,
its effects unfolding slowly over time. Comparing Trump’s first year in office
to those of other would-be authoritarians, the picture is mixed. Table 3
offers an illustrative list of nine countries in which potentially authoritarian
leaders came to power via elections. In some countries, including Ecuador
and Russia, backsliding was evident during the first year. By contrast, in
Peru under Fujimori and Turkey under Erdoğan, there was no initial
backsliding. Fujimori engaged in heated rhetorical battles during his first
year as president but did not assault democratic institutions until nearly two
years in. Breakdown took even longer in Turkey.
Table 3: The Authoritarian Report Card After One Year
Democracy’s fate during the remainder of Trump’s presidency will
depend on several factors. The first is the behavior of Republican leaders.
Democratic institutions depend crucially on the willingness of governing
parties to defend them—even against their own leaders. The failure of
Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme and the fall of Nixon were made possible,
in part, when key members of the president’s own party—Democrats in
Roosevelt’s case and Republicans in the case of Nixon—decided to stand up
and oppose him. More recently, in Poland, the Law and Justice Party
government’s efforts to dismantle checks and balances suffered a setback
when President Andrzej Duda, a Law and Justice Party member, vetoed
two bills that would have enabled the government to thoroughly purge and
pack the supreme court. In Hungary, by contrast, Prime Minister Viktor
Orbán faced little resistance from the governing Fidesz party as he made his
authoritarian push.
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.
A second approach is containment. Republicans who adopt this strategy
may back the president on many issues, from judicial appointments to tax
and health care reform, but draw a line at behavior they consider dangerous.
This can be a difficult stance to maintain. As members of the same party,
they stand to benefit if the president succeeds—yet they realize that the
president could inflict real damage on our institutions in the long term.
They work with the president wherever possible while at the same time
taking steps to ensure that he does not abuse power, allowing the president
to remain in office but, they would hope, constraining him.
Finally, in principle, congressional leaders could seek the president’s
removal. This would be politically costly for them. Not only does bringing
down one’s own president risk accusations of treason from fellow partisans
(imagine, for example, the responses of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh),
but it also risks derailing the party’s legislative agenda. It would hurt the
party’s short-term electoral prospects, as it did after Nixon’s resignation. But
if the threat coming from the presidency is severe enough (or if the
president’s behavior starts to hurt their own poll numbers), party leaders
may deem it necessary to bring down one of their own.
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. And when President Trump leaned toward
sacking Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, having recused himself, could
not fire Mueller, GOP senators jumped to Sessions’s defense. Senate
Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley said he would not schedule
hearings for a replacement if Sessions was fired.
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. No Republican leaders sought
the president’s removal in 2017, but as journalist Abigail Tracy put it, some
of them appeared to have “found their own red line.”
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 understand how public support could affect the Trump presidency, ask
yourself: What if America were like West Virginia? West Virginia is the
most pro-Trump state in the union. According to a Gallup poll, President
Trump’s approval rating there averaged 60 percent in the first half of 2017,
compared to 40 percent in favor of him nationwide. In the face of the
president’s popularity, opposition to him withered in West Virginia—even
among Democrats. Democratic senator Joe Manchin voted with President
Trump 54 percent of the time through August 2017, more than any other
Democrat in the Senate. The Hill listed Manchin among Trump’s “10
Biggest Allies in Congress.” The state’s Democratic governor, Jim Justice,
went further: He switched parties. Embracing President Trump at a rally,
Justice not only praised him as a “good man” with “real ideas” but
dismissed the Russia investigation, declaring: “Have we not heard enough
about the Russians?” If Democrats across the country behaved as they did in
West Virginia, President Trump would face little resistance—even on the
issue of foreign interference in our election.
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.
That brings us to a final factor shaping President Trump’s ability to
damage our democracy: crisis. Major security crises—wars or large-scale
terrorist attacks—are political game changers. Almost invariably, they
increase support for the government. Citizens become more likely to
tolerate, and even endorse, authoritarian measures when they fear for their
security. And it’s not only average citizens who respond this way. Judges are
notoriously reluctant to block presidential power grabs in the midst of
crises, when national security is perceived to be at risk. According to
political scientist William Howell, institutional constraints on President
Bush disappeared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, allowing Bush to “do
whatever he liked to define and respond to the crisis.”
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.
In the United States, too, security crises have permitted executive power
grabs, from Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus to Roosevelt’s internment
of Japanese Americans to Bush’s USA PATRIOT Act. But there was an
important difference. Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Bush were committed
democrats, and at the end of the day, each of them exercised considerable
forbearance in wielding the vast authority generated by crisis.
Donald Trump, by contrast, has rarely exhibited forbearance in any
context. The chances of a conflict occurring on his watch are also
considerable. They would be for any president—the United States fought
land wars or suffered major terrorist attacks under six of its last twelve
elected presidents. 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.
—
Even if President Trump does not directly dismantle democratic
institutions, his norm breaking is almost certain to corrode them. President
Trump has, as David Brooks has written, “smashed through the behavior
standards that once governed public life.” His party rewarded him for it by
nominating him for president. In office, his continued norm violation has
expanded the zone of acceptable presidential behavior, giving tactics that
were once considered aberrant and inadmissible, such as lying, cheating,
and bullying, a prominent place in politicians’ tool kits.
Presidential norm breaking is not inherently bad. Many violations are
innocuous. In January 1977, Jimmy Carter surprised the police, the press,
and the 250,000 Americans gathered to watch his inauguration when he and
his wife walked the mile and a half from the Capitol to the White House.
The New York Daily News described the Carters’ decision to abandon the
“closed and armored limousine” as an “unprecedented departure from
custom.” Ever since, it has become what the New York Times called “an
informal custom” for the president-elect to at least step out of his protected
limousine during the inaugural parade to show that he is “the people’s
president.”
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.
Or take another example: In 1901, a routine White House press release
was issued on behalf of new president Theodore Roosevelt headlined,
“Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee, Alabama, dined with the President last
evening.” While prominent black political leaders had visited the White
House before, a dinner with a leading African American political figure
was, as one historian has described it, a violation of “the prevailing social
etiquette of white domination.” The response was immediate and vicious.
One newspaper described it as “the most damnable outrage which has ever
been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.” Senator William
Jennings Bryan commented, “It is hoped that both of them [Roosevelt and
Washington] will upon reflection, realize the wisdom of abandoning their
purpose to wipe out race lines.” In the face of the uproar, the White House’s
press operation first denied the event happened, later said it had “merely”
been a lunch, and then defended it by saying that at least no women had
been present.
Because societal values change over time, a degree of presidential norm
breaking is inevitable—even desirable. But Donald Trump’s norm violations
in his first year of office differed fundamentally from those of his
predecessors. For one, he was a serial norm breaker. Never has a president
flouted so many unwritten rules so quickly. Many of the transgressions were
trivial—President Trump broke a 150-year White House tradition by not
having a pet. Others were more ominous. 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.”
But where President Trump really stands out from his predecessors is in
his willingness to challenge unwritten rules of greater consequence,
including norms that are essential to the health of democracy. Among these
are long-standing norms of separating private and public affairs, such as
those governing nepotism. Existing legislation, which prohibits presidents
from appointing family members to the cabinet or agency positions, does
not include White House staff positions. So Trump’s appointment of his
daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to high-level advisory
posts was technically legal—but it flouted the spirit of the law.
There were also norms regulating presidential conflicts of interest.
Because presidents must not use public office for private enrichment, those
who own businesses must separate themselves from these enterprises before
they take office. Yet the laws governing such separation are surprisingly lax.
Government officials are not technically required to divest themselves of
their holdings, but only to recuse themselves from decisions that affect their
interests. It has become standard practice for government officials to simply
divest themselves, however, to avoid even the appearance of a wrongdoing.
President Trump exercised no such forbearance, despite his unprecedented
conflicts of interest. He granted his sons control over his business holdings,
in a move deemed vastly insufficient by government ethics officials. The
Office of Government Ethics reported receiving 39,105 public complaints
involving Trump administration conflicts of interest between October 1,
2016, and March 31, 2017, a massive increase over the same period in
2008–2009 (when President Obama took office), when just 733 complaints
were recorded.
President Trump also violated core democratic norms when he openly
challenged the legitimacy of elections. 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. In Mexico, after the losing presidential candidate, Andrés
Manuel López Obrador, insisted that the 2006 election was stolen from
him, confidence in Mexico’s electoral system declined. A poll taken prior to
the 2012 presidential election found that 71 percent of Mexicans believed
that fraud could be in play. In the United States, the figures were even more
dramatic. In a survey carried out prior to the 2016 election, 84 percent of
Republican voters said they believed a “meaningful amount” of fraud
occurred in American elections, and nearly 60 percent of Republican voters
said they believed illegal immigrants would “vote in meaningful amounts” in
November. These doubts persisted after the election. According to a
July 2017 Morning Consult/Politico poll, 47 percent of Republicans
believed that Trump won the popular vote, compared to 40 percent who
believed Hillary Clinton won. In other words, about half of self-identified
Republicans said they believe that American elections are massively rigged.
Such beliefs may be consequential. 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.
President Trump also abandoned basic rules of political civility. He broke
with norms of postelection reconciliation by continuing to attack Hillary
Clinton. He also violated the unwritten rule that sitting presidents should
not attack their predecessor. At 6:35 A.M. on March 4, 2017, President
Trump tweeted, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’
in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is
McCarthyism!” He followed up half an hour later with: “How low has
President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred
election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Perhaps President Trump’s most notorious norm-breaking behavior has
been lying. The idea that presidents should tell the truth in public is
uncontroversial in American politics. As Republican consultant Whit Ayers
likes to tell his clients, candidates seeking credibility must “never deny the
undeniable” and “never lie.” Given this norm, politicians typically avoid
lying by changing the topic of debate, reframing difficult questions, or only
partly answering them. 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.”
Trump continued to lie as president. Tracing all the president’s public
statements since taking office, the New York Times showed that even using a
conservative metric—demonstrably false statements, as opposed to merely
dubious ones—President Trump “achieved something remarkable”: He
made at least one false or misleading public statement every single day of
his first forty days in office. No lie is too obvious. President Trump claimed
the largest Electoral College victory since Ronald Reagan (in fact, George
H. W. Bush, Clinton, and Obama all won by larger margins than he did); he
claimed to have signed more bills in his first six months than any other
president (he was well behind several presidents, including George H. W.
Bush and Clinton). In July 2017, he bragged that the head of the Boy Scouts
told him he had “made the greatest speech ever made to them,” only to have
the claim disputed immediately by the Boy Scouts organization itself.
President Trump himself did not pay much of a price for his lies. In a
political and media environment in which engaged citizens increasingly
filter events through their own partisan lenses, his supporters did not come
to view him as dishonest during the first year of his presidency. 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?). When citizens do
not believe their elected leaders, the foundations of representative
democracy weaken. The value of elections is diminished when citizens have
no faith in the leaders they elect.
Exacerbating this loss of faith is President Trump’s abandonment of basic
norms of respect for the media. An independent press is a bulwark of
democratic institutions; no democracy can live without it. Every American
president since Washington has done battle with the media. Many of them
privately despised it. But with few exceptions, U.S. presidents have
recognized the media’s centrality as a democratic institution and respected
its place in the political system. Even presidents who scorned the media in
private treated it with a certain minimum of respect and civility in public.
This basic norm gave rise to a host of unwritten rules governing the
president’s relationship with the press. Some of these norms—such as
waving to the press corps before boarding Air Force One—were superficial,
but others, such as holding press conferences accessible to all members of
the White House press corps, were more significant.
President Trump’s public insults of media outlets and even individual
journalists were without precedent in modern U.S. history. He described
the media as “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth,” and
repeatedly accused such critical news outlets as the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and CNN of lying or delivering “fake news.” Trump was
not above personal attacks. In June 2017, he went after television host Mika
Brzezinski and her cohost Joe Scarborough in a uniquely vitriolic
tweetstorm:
I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t
watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along
with Psycho Joe, came…
…to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and
insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift.
I said no!
Even Richard Nixon, who privately viewed the media as “the enemy,” never
made such public attacks. To find comparable behavior in this hemisphere
one must look at Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or Rafael
Correa in Ecuador.
The Trump administration also broke established norms by selectively
excluding reporters from press events. On February 24, 2017, Press
Secretary Sean Spicer barred reporters from the New York Times, CNN,
Politico, BuzzFeed, and the Los Angeles Times from attending an untelevised
press “gaggle,” while handpicking journalists from smaller but sympathetic
outlets such as the Washington Times and One America News Network to
round out the pool. The only modern precedent for such a move was
Nixon’s decision to bar the Washington Post from the White House after it
broke the Watergate scandal.
—
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.
Furthermore, Trump’s deviance has been tolerated by the Republican
Party, which has helped make it acceptable to much of the Republican
electorate. To be sure, many Republicans have condemned Trump’s most
egregious behavior. But these one-off statements are not very punitive. All
but one Republican senator voted with President Trump at least 85 percent
of the time during his first seven months in office. Even Senators Ben Sasse
of Nebraska and Jeff Flake of Arizona, who often strongly condemned the
president’s norm violations, voted with him 94 percent of the time. There is
no “containment” strategy for an endless stream of offensive tweets.
Unwilling to pay the political price of breaking with their own president,
Republicans find themselves with little alternative but to constantly redefine
what is and isn’t tolerable.
This will have terrible consequences for our democracy. President
Trump’s assault on basic norms has expanded the bounds of acceptable
political behavior. We may already be seeing some of the consequences. In
May 2017, Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate in a special election
for Congress, body-slammed a reporter from The Guardian who was asking
him about health care reform. Gianforte was charged with misdemeanor
assault—but he won the election. More generally, a YouGov poll carried out
for The Economist in mid-2017 revealed a striking level of intolerance
toward the media, especially among Republicans. When asked whether or
not they favored permitting the courts to shut down media outlets for
presenting information that is “biased or inaccurate,” 45 percent of
Republicans who were polled said they favored it, whereas only 20 percent
were opposed. More than 50 percent of Republicans supported the idea of
imposing fines for biased or inaccurate reporting. In other words, a majority
of Republican voters said they support the kind of media repression seen in
recent years in Ecuador, Turkey, and Venezuela.
—
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.
In the second video, Loesch issues a not-so-subtle warning of violence
against the New York Times:
We’ve had it with your pretentious…assertion that you are in
any way truth- or fact-based journalism. Consider this the shot
across your proverbial bow….In short, we’re coming for you.
The NRA is not a small, fringe organization. It claims five million members
and is closely tied to the Republican Party—Donald Trump and Sarah Palin
are lifetime members. Yet it now uses words that in the past we would have
regarded as dangerously politically deviant.
Norms are the soft guardrails of democracy; as they break down, the zone
of acceptable political behavior expands, giving rise to discourse and action
that could imperil democracy. Behavior that was once considered
unthinkable in American politics is becoming thinkable. Even if Donald
Trump does not break the hard guardrails of our constitutional democracy,
he has increased the likelihood that a future president will.
9
Saving Democracy
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.
There is a mounting perception that democracy is in retreat all over the
world. Venezuela. Thailand. Turkey. Hungary. Poland. Larry Diamond,
perhaps the foremost authority on democracy worldwide, believes we have
entered a period of democratic recession. Might America’s current crisis be
part of a global wave of backsliding? We are skeptical. Prior to Donald
Trump’s election, claims about a global democratic recession were
exaggerated. The number of democracies rose dramatically in the 1980s
and 1990s, peaked around the year 2005, and has remained steady ever
since. Backsliders make headlines and capture our attention, but for every
Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela there is a Colombia, Sri Lanka, or Tunisia
—countries that have grown more democratic over the last decade. The vast
majority of the world’s democracies—from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and
Peru to Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Romania to Ghana, India,
South Korea, and South Africa—remain intact. 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.
But Trump’s rise may itself pose a challenge to global democracy.
Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Obama presidency, U.S.
governments maintained a broadly prodemocratic foreign policy. There
were numerous exceptions: Wherever America’s strategic interests were at
stake, as in China, Russia, and the Middle East, democracy disappeared
from the agenda. But in much of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin
America, U.S. governments used diplomatic pressure, economic assistance,
and other foreign policy tools to oppose authoritarianism and press for
democratization during the post–Cold War era. The 1990–2015 period was
easily the most democratic quarter century in world history—partly because
Western powers broadly supported democracy. That may now be changing.
Under Donald Trump, the United States appears to be abandoning its role as
democracy promoter for the first time since the Cold War. 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.
Both existing and potential autocrats are likely to be emboldened with
Trump in the White House. So even if the idea of a global democratic
recession was largely a myth before 2016, the Trump presidency—together
with the crisis of the EU, the rise of China, and the growing aggressiveness
of Russia—could help make it a reality.
—
Turning back to our own country, we see three possible futures for a post-
Trump America. The first, and most optimistic, is a swift democratic
recovery. In this scenario, President Trump fails politically: He either loses
public support and is not reelected or, more dramatically, is impeached or
forced to resign. The implosion of Trump’s presidency and the triumph of
the anti-Trump resistance energize the Democrats, who then sweep back
into power and reverse Trump’s most egregious policies. If President Trump
were to fail badly enough, public disgust could even motivate reforms that
improve the quality of our democracy, as occurred in the aftermath of
Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Republican leaders, having paid a
heavy price for their association with Trump, might end their flirtation with
extremist politics. 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.
This is certainly the future many of us hope for. But it is unlikely. Recall
that the assault on long-standing democratic norms—and the underlying
polarization driving it—began well before Donald Trump ascended to the
White House. The soft guardrails of American democracy have been
weakening for decades; simply removing President Trump will not
miraculously restore them. Although Trump’s presidency may ultimately be
seen as a momentary aberration with only modest footprints on our
institutions, ending it may not be enough to restore a healthy democracy.
A second, much darker future is one in which President Trump and the
Republicans continue to win with a white nationalist appeal. Under this
scenario, a pro-Trump GOP would retain the presidency, both houses of
Congress, and the vast majority of statehouses, and it would eventually gain
a solid majority in the Supreme Court. It would then use the techniques of
constitutional hardball to manufacture durable white electoral majorities.
This could be done through a combination of large-scale deportation,
immigration restrictions, the purging of voter rolls, and the adoption of
strict voter ID laws. Measures to reengineer the electorate would likely be
accompanied by elimination of the filibuster and other rules that protect
Senate minorities, so that Republicans could impose their agenda even with
narrow majorities. These measures may appear extreme, but every one of
them has been at least contemplated by the Trump administration.
Efforts to shore up the Republican Party by engineering a new white
majority would, of course, be profoundly antidemocratic. Such measures
would trigger resistance from a broad range of forces, including
progressives, minority groups, and much of the private sector. This
resistance could lead to escalating confrontation and even violent conflict,
which, in turn, could bring heightened police repression and private
vigilantism—in the name of “law and order.” For a sense of how such a
crackdown might be framed, watch recent NRA recruitment videos or listen
to how Republican politicians talk about Black Lives Matter.
Such a nightmare scenario isn’t likely, but it also isn’t inconceivable. It is
difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities
gave up their dominant status without a fight. In Lebanon, the demographic
decline of dominant Christian groups contributed to a fifteen-year civil war.
In Israel, the demographic threat created by the de facto annexation of the
West Bank is pushing the country toward a political system that two of its
former prime ministers have compared to apartheid. And closer to home, in
the aftermath of Reconstruction, southern Democrats responded to the
threat posed by black suffrage by disenfranchising African Americans for
nearly a century. Although white nationalists remain a minority within the
GOP, the growing push for strict voter ID laws and the purging of voter rolls
—championed by influential Republicans Attorney General Jeff Sessions
and Commission on Election Integrity Co-chair Kris Kobach—suggest that
electoral reengineering is on the GOP agenda.
The third, and in our view, most likely, post-Trump future is one marked
by polarization, more departures from unwritten political conventions, and
increasing institutional warfare—in other words, democracy without solid
guardrails. President Trump and Trumpism may well fail in this scenario,
but that failure would do little to narrow the divide between parties or
reverse the decline in mutual toleration and forbearance.
To see what politics without guardrails might look like in the United
States, consider North Carolina today. North Carolina is a classic “purple”
state. With a diversified economy and an internationally recognized
university system, it is wealthier, more urban, and better educated than
most southern states. It is also demographically diverse, with African
Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos making up about a third of the
population. All this makes North Carolina more hospitable terrain for
Democrats than are the states of the Deep South. North Carolina’s
electorate resembles the national one: It is evenly split between Democrats
and Republicans, with Democrats dominant in such urban centers as
Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham and Republicans dominant in rural areas.
The state has become, in the words of Duke law professor Jedediah
Purdy, a “microcosm of the country’s hyper-partisan politics and growing
mutual mistrust.” Over the last decade, partisans have battled over
Republican-imposed abortion restrictions, the Republican governor’s refusal
of Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act, a proposed constitutional
amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and, most famous, the 2016 Public
Facilities Privacy & Security Act (the “Bathroom Bill”), which barred local
governments from allowing transgender people to use public bathrooms for
the sex they identify as. All these initiatives triggered intense opposition. As
one veteran Republican put it, state politics has become “more polarized
and more acrimonious than I’ve ever seen it….And I worked for Jesse
Helms.”
By most accounts, North Carolina’s descent into all-out political warfare
began after the Republicans won control of the state legislature in 2010.
The following year, the legislature approved a redistricting plan that was
widely viewed as “racially gerrymandered”—districts were carved out in
ways that concentrated African American voters into a small number of
districts, thereby diluting their electoral weight and maximizing Republican
seat gains. Progressive pastor William Barber, leader of the Moral Mondays
movement, described the new districts as “apartheid voting districts.” The
changes enabled Republicans to capture nine of the state’s thirteen
congressional seats in 2012—even though Democrats cast more votes
statewide.
After Republican Pat McCrory’s 2012 gubernatorial victory gave
Republicans control of all three branches of government, the state GOP
tried to lock in its dominance for the long haul. Armed with the
governorship, both legislative chambers, and a majority on the state
Supreme Court, Republican leaders launched an ambitious string of reforms
designed to skew the political game. They began by demanding access to
background data on voters across the state. With this information in hand,
the legislature passed a series of electoral reforms making it harder for
voters to cast their ballots. They passed a strict voter ID law, reduced
opportunities for early voting, ended preregistration for sixteen- and
seventeen-year-olds, eliminated same-day registration, and slashed the
number of polling places in several key counties. New data allowed the
Republicans to design the reforms to target African American voters, as a
federal appeals court put it, with “almost surgical precision.” And when an
appeals court suspended the execution of the new laws, Republicans used
their control of the state’s election boards to implement several of them
anyway.
Institutional warfare persisted after Democrat Roy Cooper narrowly
defeated McCrory for the governorship in 2016. McCrory refused to
concede the race for nearly a month, as Republicans made baseless
accusations of voter fraud. But that was only the beginning. After McCrory
finally conceded in December 2016, Republicans called a “surprise special
session” of the state legislature. In a testament to how far politics had
deteriorated, rumors spread of an impending “legislative coup,” in which
Republicans would hand the election to McCrory by exploiting a law
allowing legislators to intervene when the results of a gubernatorial election
are challenged.
No such coup occurred, but in what the New York Times described as a
“brazen power grab,” the special session passed several measures to reduce
the power of the incoming Democratic governor. The Senate granted itself
the authority to confirm gubernatorial cabinet appointments, and it
empowered the sitting Republican governor to transfer temporary political
appointees into permanent positions. Outgoing governor McCrory quickly
granted tenure to nearly one thousand of his handpicked gubernatorial
staffers—essentially “packing” the executive branch. Republicans then
changed the composition of the state’s election boards, which were
responsible for local rules involving gerrymandering, voter registration,
voter ID requirements, voting hours, and the distribution of polling places.
The boards had been under the control of the sitting governor, who could
award his party a majority of seats; now the GOP created a system of equal
partisan representation. In another twist, the chair of the election boards
would rotate between the two parties each year, with the party with the
second-largest membership (the GOP) holding the chair in even years—
which are election years. A few months later, the legislature voted to shrink
the state court of appeals by three seats, effectively stealing three judicial
appointments from Governor Cooper.
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. When French thinker Baron de
Montesquieu pioneered the notion of separation of powers in his 1748 work
The Spirit of the Laws, he worried little about what we today call norms.
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.
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.
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. 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.
This has important implications for how citizens oppose the Trump
administration. In the wake of the 2016 election, many progressive opinion
makers concluded that Democrats needed to “fight like Republicans.” If
Republicans were going to break the rules, the argument went, Democrats
had no choice but to respond in kind. Acting with self-restraint and civility
while the other side abandoned forbearance would be like a boxer entering
the ring with a hand tied behind his back. When confronted with a bully
who is willing to use any means necessary to win, those who play by the
rules risk playing the sucker. The GOP’s refusal to allow President Obama to
fill a Supreme Court vacancy left Democrats feeling sucker-punched,
particularly after Trump’s victory ensured that they would get away with it.
Political scientist and writer David Faris typified the calls to “fight dirty”:
The Democratic negotiating position on all issues…should be
very simple: You will give us Merrick Garland or you may go
die in a fire….Not only that, but they should do what they
should have done the day Antonin Scalia died: Make it clear
that the next time the Democrats control the Senate while the
Republican Party controls the presidency….there will be an
extraordinarily high price to pay for what just transpired. The
next Republican president facing divided government will get
nothing….Zero confirmations. No judges, not even to the
lowliest district court in the country. No Cabinet heads. No
laws.
Immediately after President Trump’s election, some progressives called for
actions to prevent him from assuming office. In an op-ed entitled “Buck Up,
Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans,” published a month before Trump’s
inauguration, Dahlia Lithwick and David S. Cohen lamented that
Democrats were “doing little to stop him.” Although there was “no shortage
of legal theories that could challenge Mr. Trump’s anointment,” they wrote,
Democrats were not pursuing them. Lithwick and Cohen argued that
Democrats “should be fighting tooth and nail” to prevent Donald Trump
from taking office—pushing recounts and fraud investigations in Michigan,
Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, seeking to sway the Electoral College, and
even trying to overturn President Trump’s victory in court.
On Inauguration Day, some Democrats questioned Donald Trump’s
legitimacy as president. Representative Jerry McNerney of California
boycotted the inauguration, claiming the election “lacks legitimacy”
because of Russian interference; likewise, Representative John Lewis of
Georgia declared that he did not view President Trump as a “legitimate
president.” Nearly seventy House Democrats boycotted Trump’s
inauguration.
After Trump was installed in the White House, some progressives called
on Democrats to “take a page from the GOP playbook and obstruct
everything.” Markos Moulitsas, founder of the website Daily Kos, declared,
for example, that “there is nothing that should be going through that Senate
without Republicans having to fight. I don’t care if it’s the morning prayer.
Everything should be a fight.”
Some Democrats even raised the specter of an early impeachment. Less
than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters
tweeted, “my greatest desire [is] to lead @realDonaldTrump right into
impeachment.” Impeachment talk picked up after FBI Director James
Comey was fired, reinforced by Trump’s sliding popularity, which raised
Democrats’ hopes of winning the House majority necessary to lead an
impeachment process. In a May 2017 interview, Waters declared, “Some
people don’t even want to mention the word. It’s almost as if it’s too
grandiose an idea. It’s too hard to do, just too much to think about. I don’t
see it that way.”
In our view, the idea that Democrats should “fight like Republicans” is
misguided. First of all, evidence from other countries suggests that such a
strategy often plays directly into the hands of authoritarians. Scorched-earth
tactics often erode support for the opposition by scaring off moderates. And
they unify progovernment forces, as even dissidents within the incumbent
party close ranks in the face of an uncompromising opposition. And when
the opposition fights dirty, it provides the government with justification for
cracking down.
This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. Although the
first few years of Chávez’s presidency were democratic, opponents found his
populist discourse terrifying. Fearful that Chávez would steer Venezuela
toward Cuban-style socialism, they tried to remove him preemptively—and
by any means necessary. In April 2002, opposition leaders backed a military
coup, which not only failed but destroyed their image as democrats.
Undeterred, the opposition launched an indefinite general strike in
December 2002, seeking to shut the country down until Chávez resigned.
The strike lasted two months, costing Venezuela an estimated $4.5 billion
and ultimately failing. Anti-Chávez forces then boycotted the 2005
legislative elections, but this did little more than allow the chavistas to gain
total control over Congress. All three strategies had backfired. Not only did
they fail to knock Chávez out, but they eroded the opposition’s public
support, allowed Chávez to tag his rivals as antidemocratic, and handed the
government an excuse to purge the military, the police, and the courts,
arrest or exile dissidents, and close independent media outlets. Weakened
and discredited, the opposition could not stop the regime’s subsequent
descent into authoritarianism.
Opposition strategies in Colombia under President Álvaro Uribe were
more successful. Uribe, who was elected in 2002, launched a power grab not
unlike Chávez’s: His administration attacked critics as subversive and
terrorist, spied on opponents and journalists, tried to weaken the courts, and
twice sought to modify the constitution to run for another term. In
response, unlike their Venezuelan counterparts, the Colombian opposition
never attempted to topple Uribe through extraconstitutional means. Instead,
as political scientist Laura Gamboa shows, they focused their efforts on the
congress and the courts. This made it more difficult for Uribe to question
his opponents’ democratic credentials or justify cracking down on them.
Despite Uribe’s abuses, Venezuelan-style institutional warfare did not occur,
and Colombia’s democratic institutions did not come under threat. In
February 2010, the Constitutional Court struck down Uribe’s bid for a third
term as unconstitutional, forcing him to step down after two terms. The
lesson is this: Where institutional channels exist, opposition groups should
use them.
Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President
Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic—for they would
inherit a democracy stripped of its remaining protective guardrails. If the
Trump administration were brought to its knees by obstructionism, or if
President Trump were impeached without a strong bipartisan consensus,
the effect would be to reinforce—and perhaps hasten—the dynamics of
partisan antipathy and norm erosion that helped bring Trump to power to
begin with. As much as a third of the country would likely view Trump’s
impeachment as the machinations of a vast left-wing conspiracy—maybe
even as a coup. American politics would be left dangerously unmoored.
This sort of escalation rarely ends well. If Democrats do not work to
restore norms of mutual toleration and forbearance, their next president
will likely confront an opposition willing to use any means necessary to
defeat them. And if partisan rifts deepen and our unwritten rules continue
to fray, Americans could eventually elect a president who is even more
dangerous than Trump.
Opposition to the Trump administration’s authoritarian behavior should
be muscular, but it should seek to preserve, rather than violate, democratic
rules and norms. Where possible, opposition should center on Congress, the
courts, and, of course, elections. If Trump is defeated via democratic
institutions, it will strengthen those institutions.
Protest should be viewed in a similar way. Public protest is a basic right
and an important activity in any democracy, but its aim should be the
defense of rights and institutions, rather than their disruption. In an
important study of the effects of black protest in the l960s, political
scientist Omar Wasow found that black-led nonviolent protest fortified the
national civil rights agenda in Washington and broadened public support for
that agenda. By contrast, violent protest led to a decline in white support
and may have tipped the 1968 election from Humphrey to Nixon.
We should learn from our own history. Anti-Trump forces should build a
broad prodemocratic coalition. Contemporary coalition building is often a
coming-together of like-minded groups: Progressive synagogues, mosques,
Catholic parishes, and Presbyterian churches may form an interfaith
coalition to combat poverty or racial intolerance, or Latino, faith-based,
and civil liberties groups might form a coalition to defend immigrant rights.
Coalitions of the like-minded are important, but they are not enough to
defend democracy. The most effective coalitions are those that bring
together groups with dissimilar—even opposing—views on many issues.
They are built not among friends but among adversaries. An effective
coalition in defense of American democracy, then, would likely require that
progressives forge alliances with business executives, religious (and
particularly white evangelical) leaders, and red-state Republicans. Business
leaders may not be natural allies of Democratic activists, but they have good
reasons to oppose an unstable and rule-breaking administration. And they
can be powerful partners. Think of recent boycott movements aimed at state
governments that refused to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday,
continued to fly the Confederate flag, or violated gay or transgender rights.
When major businesses join progressive boycotts, they often succeed.
Building coalitions that extend beyond our natural allies is difficult. It
requires a willingness to set aside, for the moment, issues we care deeply
about. If progressives make positions on issues such as abortion rights or
single-payer health care a “litmus test” for coalition membership, the
chances for building a coalition that includes evangelicals and Republican
business executives will be nil. We must lengthen our time horizons,
swallow hard, and make tough concessions. This does not mean abandoning
the causes that matter to us. It means temporarily overlooking
disagreements in order to find common moral ground.
A broad opposition coalition would have important benefits. For one, it
would strengthen the defenders of democracy by appealing to a much wider
sector of American society. Rather than confining anti-Trumpism to
progressive blue-state circles, it would extend it to a wider range of
America. Such broad involvement is critical to isolating and defeating
authoritarian governments.
In addition, whereas a narrow (urban, secular, progressive) anti-Trump
coalition would reinforce the current axes of partisan division, a broader
coalition would crosscut these axes and maybe even help dampen them. A
political movement that brings together—even if temporarily—Bernie
Sanders supporters and businesspeople, evangelicals and secular feminists,
and small-town Republicans and urban Black Lives Matter supporters, will
open channels of communication across the vast chasm that has emerged
between our country’s two main partisan camps. And it might help foster
more crosscutting allegiances in a society that has too few of them. Where a
society’s political divisions are crosscutting, we line up on different sides of
issues with different people at different times. We may disagree with our
neighbors on abortion but agree with them on health care; we may dislike
another neighbor’s views on immigration but agree with them on the need
to raise the minimum wage. Such alliances help us build and sustain norms
of mutual toleration. When we agree with our political rivals at least some
of the time, we are less likely to view them as mortal enemies.
—
Thinking about how to resist the Trump administration’s abuses is clearly
important. However, the fundamental problem facing American democracy
remains extreme partisan division—one fueled not just by policy differences
but by deeper sources of resentment, including racial and religious
differences. America’s great polarization preceded the Trump presidency,
and it is very likely to endure beyond it.
Political leaders have two options in the face of extreme polarization.
First, they can take society’s divisions as a given but try to counteract them
through elite-level cooperation and compromise. This is what Chilean
politicians did. As we saw in Chapter 5, intense conflict between the
Socialists and the Christian Democrats helped destroy Chilean democracy
in 1973. A profound distrust between the two parties persisted for years
afterward, trumping their shared revulsion toward Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Exiled Socialist leader Ricardo Lagos, who lectured at the University of
North Carolina, recalled that when former Christian Democratic president
Eduardo Frei Montalva visited the university in 1975, he decided that he
couldn’t bear to talk to him—so he called in sick.
But eventually, politicians started talking. In 1978, Lagos returned to
Chile and was invited to dinner by former Christian Democratic senator
Tomás Reyes. They began to meet regularly. At around the same time,
Christian Democratic leader Patricio Aylwin attended meetings of lawyers
and academics from diverse partisan backgrounds, many of whom had
crossed paths in courtrooms while defending political prisoners. These
“Group of 24” meetings were just casual dinners in members’ homes, but
according to Aylwin, they “built up trust among those of us who had been
adversaries.” Eventually, the conversations bore fruit. In August 1985, the
Christian Democrats, Socialists, and nineteen other parties gathered in
Santiago’s elegant Spanish Circle Club and signed the National Accord for a
Transition to a Full Democracy. The pact formed the basis for the
Democratic Concertation coalition. The coalition developed a practice of
“consensus politics,” in which key decisions were negotiated between
Socialist and Christian Democratic leaders. It was successful. Not only did
the Democratic Concertation topple Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite, but it
won the presidency in 1989 and held it for two decades.
The Concertation developed a governing style that broke sharply with the
politics of the 1970s. Fearful that renewed conflict would threaten Chile’s
new democracy, leaders developed a practice of informal cooperation—
which Chileans called “democracy of agreements”—in which presidents
consulted the leaders of all parties before submitting legislation to congress.
Pinochet’s 1980 constitution had created a dominant executive with the
authority to impose budgets more or less unilaterally, but President Aylwin,
a Christian Democrat, consulted extensively with the Socialists and other
parties before submitting his proposed budgets. And he didn’t just consult
his allies. Aylwin also negotiated legislation with right-wing parties that had
backed the dictatorship and defended Pinochet. According to political
scientist Peter Siavelis, the new norms “helped stave off potentially
destabilizing conflicts both within the coalition and between the coalition
and the opposition.” Chile has been one of Latin America’s most stable and
successful democracies over the last three decades.
It is doubtful that Democrats and Republicans can follow the Chilean
path. It’s easy for politicians to bemoan the absence of civility and
cooperation, or to wax nostalgic about the bipartisanship of a bygone era.
But norm creation is a collective venture—it is only possible when a critical
mass of leaders accepts and plays by new unwritten rules. This usually
happens when political leaders from across the spectrum have stared into
the abyss and realized that if they do not find a way of addressing
polarization, democracy will die. Often, it is only when politicians suffer the
trauma of violent dictatorship, as they did in Chile, or even civil war, as in
Spain, that the stakes truly become clear.
The alternative to learning to cooperate despite underlying polarization is
to overcome that polarization. In the United States, political scientists have
proposed an array of electoral reforms—an end to gerrymandering, open
primaries, obligatory voting, alternative rules for electing members of
Congress, to name just a few—that might mitigate partisan enmity in
America. The evidence of their effectiveness, however, is far from clear. We
think it would be more valuable to focus on two underlying forces driving
American polarization: racial and religious realignment and growing
economic inequality. Addressing these social foundations, we believe,
requires a reshuffling of what America’s political parties stand for.
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. Over the last quarter century, the party’s
leadership structure has been eviscerated—first by the rise of well-funded
outside groups (such as Americans for Tax Freedom, Americans for
Prosperity, and many others) whose fund-raising prowess allowed them to
more or less dictate the policy agenda of many GOP elected officials, but
also by the mounting influence of Fox News and other right-wing media.
Wealthy outside donors such as the Koch brothers and influential media
personalities exert greater influence over elected Republican officials than
does the GOP’s own leadership. Republicans still win elections across the
country, but what used to be called the Republican “establishment” has
today become a phantom. This hollowing out has left the party vulnerable to
takeover by extremists.
Reducing polarization requires that the Republican Party be reformed, if
not refounded outright. First of all, the GOP must rebuild its own
establishment. This means regaining leadership control in four key areas:
finance, grassroots organization, messaging, and candidate selection. Only if
the party leadership can free itself from the clutches of outside donors and
right-wing media can it go about transforming itself. This entails major
changes: Republicans must marginalize extremist elements; they must build
a more diverse electoral constituency, such that the party no longer depends
so heavily on its shrinking white Christian base; and they must find ways to
win elections without appealing to white nationalism, or what Republican
Arizona senator Jeff Flake calls the “sugar high of populism, nativism, and
demagoguery.”
A refounding of America’s major center-right party is a tall order, but
there are historical precedents for such transformations—and under even
more challenging circumstances. And where it has been successful,
conservative party reform has catalyzed democracy’s rebirth. A particularly
dramatic case is the democratization of West Germany after the Second
World War. At the center of this achievement was an underappreciated
development: the formation of Germany’s center-right Christian
Democratic Union (CDU) out of the wreckage of a discredited conservative
and right-wing tradition.
Before the 1940s, Germany never had a conservative party that was both
well-organized and electorally successful, on the one hand, and moderate
and democratic on the other. German conservatism was perennially
wracked by internal division and organizational weakness. In particular, the
highly charged divide between conservative Protestants and Catholics
created a political vacuum on the center-right that extremist and
authoritarian forces could exploit. This dynamic reached its nadir in Hitler’s
march to power.
After 1945, Germany’s center-right was refounded on a different basis.
The CDU separated itself from extremists and authoritarians—it was
founded primarily by conservative figures (such as Konrad Adenauer) with
“unassailable” anti-Nazi credentials. The party’s founding statements made
clear that it was directly opposed to the prior regime and all it had stood
for. CDU leader Andreas Hermes gave a sense of the scale of the rupture,
commenting in 1945: “An old world has sunk and we want to build a new
one….” The CDU offered a clear vision of a democratic future for
Germany: a “Christian” society that rejected dictatorship and embraced
freedom and tolerance.
The CDU also broadened and diversified its base, by recruiting both
Catholics and Protestants into the fold. This was a challenge. But the
trauma of Nazism and World War II convinced conservative Catholic and
Protestant leaders to overcome the long-standing differences that had once
splintered German society. As one regional CDU leader put it, “The close
collaboration of Catholics and Protestants, which occurred in the prisons,
dungeons, and concentration camps, brought to an end the old conflict and
began to build bridges.” As new Catholic and Protestant CDU leaders went
door-to-door to Catholic and Protestant homes during the founding years of
1945–46, they conjured into existence a new party of the center-right that
would reshape German society. The CDU became a pillar of Germany’s
postwar democracy.
The United States played a major role in encouraging the formation of
the CDU. It is a great historical irony, then, that Americans can today learn
from these successful efforts to help rescue our own democracy. To be clear:
We are not equating Donald Trump or any other Republicans with German
Nazis. Yet the successful rebuilding of the German center-right offers some
useful lessons for the GOP. 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.
The rebuilding of German conservatism, of course, followed a major
catastrophe. The CDU had no choice but to reinvent itself. The question
before Republicans today is whether such a reinvention can occur before we
plunge into a deeper crisis. Can leaders muster the foresight and political
courage to reorient what has become an increasingly dysfunctional political
party before further damage is done, or will we need a catastrophe to
inspire the change?
Although the Democratic Party has not been the principal driver of
America’s deepening polarization, it could nevertheless play a role in
reducing it. 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.
Such a strategy might well reduce partisan polarization. If the
Democratic Party were to abandon the demands of ethnic minorities or
relegate them to the bottom of the agenda, it would almost certainly win
back some white lower- and middle-income white voters. In effect, the
party would return to what it was in the 1980s and 1990s—a party whose
public face was predominantly white and in which minority constituencies
were, at most, junior partners. The Democrats would—literally—begin to
look more like their Republican rivals. And as they moved closer to
Trumpist positions on immigration and racial equality (that is, accepting
less of both), they would appear less threatening to the Republican base.
We think this is a terrible idea. Seeking to diminish minority groups’
influence in the party—and we cannot emphasize this strongly enough—is
the wrong way to reduce polarization. It would repeat some of our country’s
most shameful mistakes. The founding of the American republic left racial
domination intact, which eventually led to the Civil War. When Democrats
and Republicans finally reconciled in the wake of a failed Reconstruction,
their conciliation was again based on racial exclusion. The reforms of the
1960s gave Americans a third chance to build a truly multiethnic
democracy. It is imperative that we succeed, extraordinarily difficult though
the task is. As our colleague Danielle Allen writes:
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.
But there are other ways for Democrats to help restructure the political
landscape. The intensity of partisan animosities in America today reflects
the combined effect not only of growing ethnic diversity but also of slowed
economic growth, stagnant wages in the bottom half of the income
distribution, and rising economic inequality. Today’s racially tinged partisan
polarization reflects the fact that ethnic diversity surged during a period
(1975 to the present) in which economic growth slowed, especially for those
at the bottom end of the income distribution. For many Americans, the
economic changes of the last few decades have brought decreased job
security, longer working hours, fewer prospects for upward mobility, and,
consequently, a growth in social resentment. Resentment fuels polarization.
One way of tackling our deepening partisan divide, then, would be to
genuinely address the bread-and-butter concerns of long-neglected segments
of the population—no matter their ethnicity.
Policies aimed at addressing economic inequality can be polarizing or
depolarizing, depending on how they are organized. Unlike in many other
advanced democracies, social policy in America has relied heavily on
means tests—distributing benefits only to those who fall below an income
threshold or otherwise qualify. Means-tested programs create the
perception among many middle-class citizens that only poor people benefit
from social policy. And because race and poverty have historically
overlapped in the United States, these policies can be racially stigmatizing.
Opponents of social policy have commonly used racially charged rhetoric
against means-tested programs—Ronald Reagan’s references to “welfare
queens” or “young bucks” buying steaks with food stamps is a prime
example. Welfare became a pejorative term in America because of a
perception of recipients as undeserving.
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 that fuels resentment and polarization, but they could contribute
to the formation of a broad, durable coalition that realigns American
politics.
Adopting policies to address social and economic inequality is, of course,
politically difficult—in part because of the polarization (and resulting
institutional gridlock) such policies seek to address. And we are under no
illusions about the obstacles to building multiracial coalitions—those
including both racial minorities and working-class whites. We cannot be
certain that universalistic policies would provide the basis for such a
coalition—only that they stand a better chance than our current means-
tested programs. 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.
—
Comparing our current predicament to democratic crises in other parts of
the world and at other moments of history, it becomes clear that America is
not so different from other nations. Our constitutional system, while older
and more robust than any in history, is vulnerable to the same pathologies
that have killed democracy elsewhere. Ultimately, then, American
democracy depends on us—the citizens of the United States. No single
political leader can end a democracy; no single leader can rescue one,
either. Democracy is a shared enterprise. Its fate depends on all of us.
In the darkest days of the Second World War, when America’s very future
was at risk, writer E. B. White was asked by the U.S. Federal Government’s
Writers’ War Board to write a short response to the question “What is
democracy?” His answer was unassuming but inspiring. He wrote:
Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that
forms on the right. It is the “don’t” in don’t shove. It is the hole
in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it
is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion
that more than half of the people are right more than half of the
time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling
of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality
everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is
the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which
hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not
gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the
rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in
the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to
know what democracy is.
The egalitarianism, civility, sense of freedom, and shared purpose
portrayed by E. B. White were the essence of mid-twentieth-century
American democracy. Today that vision is under assault. To save our
democracy, Americans need to restore the basic norms that once protected
it. But we must do more than that. We must extend those norms through the
whole of a diverse society. We must make them truly inclusive. America’s
democratic norms, at their core, have always been sound. But for much of
our history, they were accompanied—indeed, sustained—by racial
exclusion. Now those norms must be made to work in an age of racial
equality and unprecedented ethnic diversity. Few societies in history have
managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic. That is our
challenge. It is also our opportunity. If we meet it, America will truly be
exceptional.
Acknowledgments
We could not possibly have written this book without the collaboration of a
group of extraordinary student research assistants. We are deeply grateful to
Fernando Bizzarro, Kaitlyn Chriswell, Jasmine Hakimian, David Ifkovits,
Shiro Kuriwaki, Martin Liby Troein, Manuel Meléndez, Brian Palmiter,
Justin Pottle, Matt Reichert, Briita van Staalduinen, Aaron Watanabe, and
Selena Zhao. Special thanks to David Ifkovits and Justin Pottle for their
impeccable work on the blind notes. The fruits of these students’ research
pervade this entire book. We hope they see themselves in it.
The ideas in this book emerged from numerous conversations with
friends and colleagues. We especially thank Daniel Carpenter, Ryan Enos,
Gretchen Helmke, Alisha Holland, Daniel Hopkins, Jeff Kopstein, Evan
Lieberman, Robert Mickey, Eric Nelson, Paul Pierson, Pia Raffler, Kenneth
Roberts, Theda Skocpol, Dan Slater, Todd Washburn, and Lucan Ahmad
Way for their willingness to listen to, debate, and teach us. Special thanks to
Larry Diamond, Scott Mainwaring, Tarek Masoud, John Sides, and Lucan
Ahmad Way for reading earlier drafts of the manuscript.
We are indebted to our agent, Jill Kneerim, for many things. Jill invented
this book project and guided us through it from start to finish. She has been
a source of much-needed encouragement and wise advice—and great
editing to boot.
We thank our editor at Crown Publishers, Amanda Cook, for her faith in
us, as well as for her patience and perseverance in coaxing a readable book
out of a couple of political scientists. We are also thankful to Crown’s
Meghan Houser, Zach Phillips, Kathleen Quinlan, and Penny Simon for
their hard work and patient support, as well as Molly Stern for the great
energy she brought to the project.
Steve thanks the members of the Soccer Dads Club (Chris, Jonathan, and
Todd) for their constant good humor and support (and, of course, their
insights into politics).
Finally, we are deeply grateful to our families. Steve thanks Liz Mineo
and Alejandra Mineo-Levitsky, the two people who matter most. Daniel
thanks Suriya, Talia, and Lilah Ziblatt for their unending enthusiasm and
patience. And Daniel also thanks his father, David Ziblatt, for conversation,
insight, intellectual companionship, and enduring inspiration.
Endnotes
INTRODUCTION
in barely visible steps: Constitutional scholars Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg call this form of
democratic breakdown “constitutional regression.” See Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, “How to
Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” UCLA Law Review 65 (2018); also Ellen Lust and David
Waldner, Unwelcome Change: Understanding, Evaluating, and Extending Theories of Democratic
Backsliding (Washington, DC: U.S. Agency for International Development, 2015).
“the only antibiotic we have”: Bart Jones, Hugo!: The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual
Revolution (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2007), p. 225.
Blatant dictatorship: Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid
Regimes After the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); also Scott
Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America:
Emergence, Survival, and Fall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
by elected governments themselves: Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional
Democracy,” p. 36.
Many continue to believe: Latinobarómetro, accessed March 16, 2017,
http://www.latinobarometro.org/ latOnline.jsp (Question: Democracy -> Scale [country] is
democratic).
have fueled an insidious reaction: Robert Mickey, Steven Levitsky, and Lucan Ahmad Way, “Is
America Still Safe for Democracy?,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2017, pp. 20–29.
http://www.latinobarometro.org/latOnline.jsp
CHAPTER 1: FATEFUL ALLIANCES
Benito Mussolini arrived in Rome: Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of
Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 1.
“I come from the battlefield”: Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004),
p. 90.
At the last train stop: Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 2.
a new fascist epoch: Ibid.
“We’ve engaged him for ourselves”: Quoted in Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich
(New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 308.
“fateful alliance”: Hermann Beck, The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933:
The Machtergreifung in a New Light (New York: Berghahn Press, 2011). Also see Daniel
Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017).
“bourgeois bloc”: Alexander De Grand, The Hunchback’s Tailor: Giovanni Giolitti and Liberal Italy
from the Challenge of Mass Politics to the Rise of Fascism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), pp.
241–42.
“It is difficult to ask”: Taken from Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Hugo Chávez
(New York: Random House, 2004), p. 304.
Caldera’s departure and subsequent antiestablishment campaign: See José E. Molina, “The
Unraveling of Venezuela’s Party System,” in The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in
Venezuela, eds. Jennifer L. McCoy and David J. Myers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2004), p. 162.
“To power”: Quoted in Jones, Hugo!, p. 186.
he viewed Chávez as a passing fad: Ibid., p. 189.
in dropping all charges: Marcano and Barrera Tyszka, Hugo Chávez, p. 107.
he stood glumly: Jones, Hugo!, p. 226.
“Nobody thought that Mr. Chávez”: Quoted in Marcano and Barrera Tyszka, Hugo Chávez, p.
107.
“I have just committed”: Quoted in Larry Eugene Jones, “ ‘The Greatest Stupidity of My Life’:
Alfred Hugenberg and the Formation of the Hitler Cabinet, January 1933,” Journal of
Contemporary History 27, no. 1 (1992), pp. 63–87.
1998 Latinobarómetro survey: Source: Latinobarómetro, accessed March 16, 2017,
http://www.latinobarometro.org/ latOnline.jsp.
“litmus test”: Juan J. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and
Reequilibration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 29–30.
Building on Linz’s work: See ibid., pp. 27–38.
All five ended up: Steven Levitsky and James Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism
in the Andes,” Democratization 20, no. 1 (2013).
http://www.latinobarometro.org/latOnline.jsp
“distancing”: Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the
Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 238.
The AVF’s youth group: Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, p. 344.
The loss of 25,000 members: Ibid.
“greater affinity for extremists”: Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 32–33.
“join with opponents”: Ibid., p. 37.
The party leadership took: Giovanni Capoccia, Defending Democracy: Reactions to Extremism in
Interwar Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 121.
created the Catholic Youth Front: Ibid., p. 120.
The Catholic Party supported: Ibid., p. 121.
The choice was not easy: Ibid., pp. 122–23.
when it became evident: Capoccia, Defending Democracy, p. 121.
the extreme-right Lapua Movement: Risto Alapuro and Erik Allardt, “The Lapua Movement: The
Threat of Rightist Takeover in Finland, 1930–32,” in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes:
Europe, eds. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978),
p. 130.
The movement sought: Ibid., p. 130.
At first, politicians from the governing: Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, p. 240;
Alapuro and Allardt, “The Lapua Movement,” pp. 130–31.
P. E. Svinhufvud, a conservative: Alapuro and Allardt, “The Lapua Movement,” pp. 130–31.
the Lapua Movement continued: Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, p. 240.
Lapua thugs abducted: Alapuro and Allardt, “The Lapua Movement,” p. 130.
The Lapua Movement also organized: Ibid., p. 133.
the bulk of the Agrarian Union: Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, p. 240.
Even the conservative president: Ibid., p. 241.
The Lapua Movement was left isolated: Ibid., pp. 239–41.
“not with passion”: “Bürgerlicher Aufruf für Van der Bellen (Citizens Appeal to Van der Bellen),”
Die Presse, May 14, 2016, http://diepresse.com/ home/ innenpolitik/ bpwahl/ 4988743/
Buergerlicher-Aufruf-fuer-Van-der-Bellen.
a decision that split families: Interview with author, March 16, 2017.
CHAPTER 2: GATEKEEPING IN AMERICA
extremist groups existed in the United States: Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics
of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970 (New York: Harper & Row,
1970), p. 152.
naming Mussolini its “Man of the Week”: Lipset and Raab, The Politics of Unreason, pp. 170–71.
“ever to happen to radio”: Quoted in Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin
& the Great Depression (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), p. 119.
He delivered speeches to packed stadiums: Ibid., pp. 83, 175–77.
lined his route to see him: Ibid., p. 119. As late as 1938, a Gallup poll found that 27 percent of
Americans approved of Father Coughlin, while 32 percent disapproved (Lipset and Raab, The
Politics of Unreason, pp. 171–73).
“the great demagogue of the day”: Arthur Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt: The Politics of
Upheaval, 1935–1936 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, [1960] 2003), pp. viii, 68.
a gifted stump speaker: Richard D. White Jr., Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long (New York:
Random House, 2006), pp. 45, 99, 171; Brinkley, Voices of Protest, p. 69.
a mix of bribes and threats: Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt, p. 62; White, Kingfish, pp. 248–53;
William Ivy Hair, The Kingfish and His Realm: The Life and Times of Huey P. Long (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), pp. 276–80.
“I’m the constitution just now”: White, Kingfish, p. 45.
“the first true dictator”: Quoted in ibid., p. 253.
Roosevelt’s campaign manager: Ibid., p. 352.
“more mail than all other senators”: Ibid., p. 198.
nearly eight million names: Robert E. Snyder, “Huey Long and the Presidential Election of 1936,”
Louisiana History 16, no. 2 (Spring 1975), p. 123; White, Kingfish, p. 198.
a presidential run: Brinkley, Voices of Protest, p. 81; Hair, The Kingfish and His Realm, pp. 306–7.
“I can take this Roosevelt”: Snyder, “Huey Long and the Presidential Election of 1936,” p. 128.
Roosevelt viewed Long as a serious threat: Lipset and Raab, The Politics of Unreason, pp. 209,
224.
Senator Joseph McCarthy: Ibid., p. 21.
enjoyed 40 percent: Ibid., p. 237.
“hate the powerful”: Arthur T. Hadley, The Invisible Primary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1976), p. 238; Jody Carlson, George C. Wallace and the Politics of Powerlessness: The Wallace
Campaigns for the Presidency, 1964–1976 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1981), p.
6.
“What is a Constitution anyway?”: Lipset and Raab, The Politics of Unreason, pp. 355–56.
blue-collar base: Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New
Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics, Second Edition (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2000), pp. 344–52; Stephan Lesher, George Wallace:
American Populist (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994), pp. 276–78; Lipset and Raab, The
Politics of Unreason, pp. 345–57.
his third-party run: Lipset and Raab, The Politics of Unreason, p. 21.
assassination attempt: Carlson, George C. Wallace and the Politics of Powerlessness, p. 149.
“smoke-filled back room”: This account of the 1920 convention relies on two sources: Francis
Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1968), pp. 379–81; and John Morello, Selling the President, 1920: Albert D. Lasker,
Advertising, and the Election of Warren G. Harding (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), pp. 41–43.
“Nobody is talking Harding”: Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, p. 376.
In parliamentary democracies: See David Samuels and Matthew Shugart, Presidents, Parties, and
Prime Ministers: How the Separation of Powers Affects Party Organization and Behavior (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
“and ending tyrants”: Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 1.
built-in screening device: James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 64.
“The immediate election”: Quoted in Robert Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution?,
Second Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 76.
“filtration”: James W. Ceaser, Reforming the Reforms: A Critical Analysis of the Presidential Selection
Process (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1982), pp. 84–87.
They generally followed the instructions: Ibid., pp. 19–21.
Yet these brought little change: Ibid., p. 23.
the presidency’s gatekeepers: Ibid., p. 27.
“peer review”: See, for example, Nelson W. Polsby, Consequences of Party Reform (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 169–70.
They had worked with them: Austin Ranney, Testimony Before the Senate Committee on Rules and
Administration, September 10, 1980. Quoted in Ceaser, Reforming the Reforms, p. 96.
praise from racists worldwide: Lipset and Raab, The Politics of Unreason, p. 111.
mentioned with admiration by Adolf Hitler: For more on the relationship of Henry Ford and the
Nazi regime, see Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hatred (New
York: Public Affairs, 2002).
Ford was also a widely admired: See Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-roots America (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972).
“poor farm boy who made good”: Ibid., pp. 8–10, 42, 167.
“Ford Craze”: Ibid., pp. 162, 172–73.
As the results rolled in: “Ford Leads in Presidential Free-for-All,” Collier’s, May 26, 1923, p. 7;
“Politics in Chaos as Ford Vote Grows,” Collier’s, June 23, 1923, p. 8.
“the issue in American politics”: “Ford First in Final Returns,” Collier’s, July 14, 1923, p. 5.
“machinery of selection”: Edward Lowry, “Dark Horses and Dim Hopes,” Collier’s, November 10,
1923, p. 12.
“It is most ridiculous”: Quoted in Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-roots America, p. 162.
“There might be a war or some crisis”: “If I Were President,” Collier’s, August 4, 1923, p. 29.
isolated him from his peers: Brinkley, Voices of Protest, pp. 75–77; Hair, The Kingfish and His
Realm, pp. 268–69; White, Kingfish, p. 191.
had little chance of winning: Robert E. Snyder, “Huey Long and the Presidential Election of 1936,”
Louisiana History 16, no. 2 (Spring 1975), pp. 131–33.
Wallace shocked the pundits: Carlson, George C. Wallace and the Politics of Powerlessness, pp. 33–
36.
roughly 40 percent of Americans: Lipset and Raab, The Politics of Unreason, p. 21.
establishment would never back: Stephen Lesher, George Wallace: American Populist (Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994), pp. 387–88; Carlson, George C. Wallace and the Politics of
Powerlessness, p. 71.
“racial purity”: Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight over
World War II, 1931–1941 (New York: Random House, 2014), pp. 18–20, 72.
His speeches drew large crowds: A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1998), p. 410.
“Conventional wisdom”: Olson, Those Angry Days, p. 442.
Idaho senator William Borah: Berg, Lindbergh, p. 398.
“God might have withdrawn His blessing”: Quoted in Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of
Chicago (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 7.
“party leaders, union bosses, and other insiders”: Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and
John Zaller, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 1.
“In the United States”: “A Look Back at the 1968 Democratic Convention,”
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=aUKzSsVmnpY, accessed May 11, 2017.
“The cure for the ills of democracy”: Democratic National Committee, Mandate for Reform
(Washington, DC, Democratic National Committee, April 1970), p. 14.
open up the presidential nomination process: Quoted in James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection:
Theory and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 273.
“the anti-politics of the street”: Democratic National Committee, Mandate for Reform, p. 49.
representation of women and minorities: Ceaser, Presidential Selection, p. 237.
“the most open political process”: Both quotes taken from David E. Price, Bringing Back the Parties
(Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1984), pp. 149–50.
volatile and divisive: In 1972, the Democratic nomination was nearly captured by George Wallace,
and the eventual nominee, George McGovern, suffered a landslide defeat at the hands of
Richard Nixon. In 1976, the nomination went to Jimmy Carter, a relative outsider, and in 1980,
President Carter faced a tough primary challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy.
“stirring up mass hatreds”: Nelson W. Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky, Presidential Elections (New
York: The Free Press, 1968), p. 230.
Any candidate seeking: Cohen, Karol, Noel, and Zaller, The Party Decides, pp. 175–79.
“invisible primary”: Arthur Hadley, The Invisible Primary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1976).
“actually selected”: Ibid., p. xiii.
CHAPTER 3: THE GREAT REPUBLICAN ABDICATION
now also open to true outsiders: By outsiders, we mean candidates who have never previously held
elective office or a cabinet post. We count all candidates who either participate in a primary or
whose name is placed in contention at the convention. We thank Fernando Bizzarro for his
assistance in compiling these data.
skip the “invisible primary”: For a detailed explanation of why this was the case, see Cohen, Karol,
Noel, and Zaller, The Party Decides.
Las Vegas bookmakers: James Ceaser, Andrew Busch, and John Pitney Jr., Defying the Odds: The
2016 Elections and American Politics (Washington, DC: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), p. 69.
“considerably less than 20 percent”: Nate Silver, “Dear Media: Stop Freaking Out About Donald
Trump’s Polls,” FiveThirtyEight, November 23, 2015, http://fivethirtyeight.com/ features/ dear-
media-stop-freaking-out-about-donald-trumps-polls/.
Citizens United ruling: Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, “Party Versus
Faction in the Reformed Presidential Nominating System, PS (October 2016), pp. 704–5;
Theda Skocpol and Alex Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch Network and Republican Party
Extremism,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 3 (2016), pp. 681–99.
explosion of alternative media: Ibid., p. 705.
Whereas the path to national name recognition: Ibid., pp. 703–4.
“conservative entertainment complex”: David Frum, “The Great Republican Revolt,” The Atlantic,
September 9, 2015.
radicalized conservative voters: See Matthew Levendusky, How Partisan Media Polarize America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Cass R. Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy
in the Age of Social Media (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Although many factors contributed: See John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity
Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
more endorsements than Trump: “The Endorsement Primary,” FiveThirtyEight, June 7, 2016,
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/ 2016-endorsement-primary/.
did not yet have a single endorsement: Ibid.
When the primary season ended: Ibid.
Trump had the sympathy: Among Republicans, more than twice as many Trump supporters as
supporters of rival Republican candidates listed Breitbart News as their main news source. See
Pew Research Center, “Trump, Clinton Voters Divided in Their Main Source for Election
News,” January 18, 2017, pp. 3, 5.
new ways to use old media: See Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck, Identity Crisis, Chapter 4.
“uniquely tailored to the digital age”: Nathaniel Persily, “The 2016 U.S. Election: Can
Democracy Survive the Internet?,” Journal of Democracy, April 2017, p. 67.
$2 billion in free media coverage: Ibid., p. 67.
“magnificent chaos”: “Why the Never Trump Movement Failed at the Republican National
Convention,” ABCNews.com, July 20, 2016.
Levels of voter fraud: On electoral fraud in the United States in general, see Richard L. Hasen, The
Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2012), and Lorraine C. Minnite, The Myth of Voter Fraud (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2010). On the absence of fraud in the 2016 election, see Jessica
Huseman and Scott Klein, “There’s No Evidence Our Election Was Rigged,” ProPublica,
November 28, 2016.
immigrants and dead people: Darren Samuelsohn, “A Guide to Donald Trump’s ‘Rigged’ Election,”
Politico, October 25, 2016.
“Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary”: Ibid.
“We’d better be careful”: Jeremy Diamond, “Trump: ‘I’m Afraid the Election’s Going to Be
Rigged,’ ” CNN.com, August 2, 2016.
“Of course there is large scale voter fraud”: “U.S. Election 2016: Trump Says Election ‘Rigged at
Polling Places,’ ” BBC.com, October 17, 2016.
“topple the apple cart”: “Donald Trump, Slipping in Polls, Warns of ‘Stolen Election,” New York
Times, October 14, 2016.
the election could be stolen: “Poll: 41 Percent of Voters Say Election Could Be Stolen from
Trump,” Politico, October 17, 2016.
“birther”: “14 of Trump’s Most Outrageous Birther Claims—Half from After 2011,” CNN.com,
September 16, 2016.
“has to go to jail”: Lisa Hagen, “Trump: Clinton ‘Has to Go to Jail,’ ” The Hill, October 12, 2016.
offered to pay the legal fees: “Donald Trump Says He May Pay Legal Fees of Accused Attacker
from Rally,” New York Times, March 13, 2016.
Here are a few examples: “Don’t Believe Donald Trump Has Incited Violence at Rallies? Watch
This Video,” Vox, March 12, 2016, https://www.vox.com/ 2016/ 3/12/ 11211846/ donald-trump-
violence-rallies.
“the Second Amendment people”: “Donald Trump Suggests ‘Second Amendment People’ Could
Act Against Hillary Clinton,” New York Times, August 9, 2016.
special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton: “Trump: Clinton ‘Has to Go to Jail,’ ” CNN.com,
October 13, 2016.
“If I become president”: “Donald Trump Threatens to Rewrite Libel Laws to Make It Easier to Sue
the Media,” Business Insider, February 26, 2016.
“open up our libel laws”: Ibid.
“ideological collusion”: This definition of “collective abdication” and the discussion that follows
builds on sociologist Ivan Ermakoff’s important study of interwar Germany and France, titled
Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2008).
when faced with a would-be authoritarian: Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, p. 37.
right-wing politicians endorsed ideological rivals: For electoral data that supports this point on the
French 2017 presidential election, see “French Election Results: Macron’s Victory in Charts,”
Financial Times, May 9, 2017. See https://www.ft.com/ content/ 62d782d6-31a7-11e7-9555-
23ef563ecf9a.
Republican 1: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/ briefing/ updates/ 2016/ 09/ 29/ number-of-prominent-
republicans-and-independents-backing-hillary-clinton-grows/ , accessed May 20, 2017.
Republican 2: Ibid.
Republican 3: Ibid.
William Pierce: Ibid.
Republicans who publicly endorsed Clinton: “78 Republican Politicians, Donors, and Officials
Who Are Supporting Hillary Clinton,” Washington Post, November 7, 2016.
In France, it is estimated that half: “French Election Results: Macron’s Victory in Charts,”
Financial Times, May 9, 2017 [see figure: “How Allegiances Shifted from the First to the
Second Round of Voting in the French Presidential Election”].
increasingly sorted into Republicans and Democrats: Alan Abramowitz, The Polarized Public?
Why American Government Is So Dysfunctional (New York: Pearson, 2012); “Partisanship and
Political Animosity in 2016,” Pew Research Center, June 22, 2016, http://www.people-
press.org/ 2016/ 06/ 22/ partisanship-and-political-animosity-in-2016/.
predicting a close race: John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, “The 2016 U.S. Election:
How Trump Lost and Won,” Journal of Democracy 28, no. 2 (April 2017), pp. 36–37; Sides,
Tessler, and Vavreck, Identity Crisis, Chapter 2.
CHAPTER 4: SUBVERTING DEMOCRACY
nominated himself: Gregory Schmidt, “Fujimori’s 1990 Upset Victory in Peru: Rules,
Contingencies, and Adaptive Strategies,” Comparative Politics 28, no. 3 (1990), pp. 321–55.
Short of funds: Luis Jochamowitz, Ciudadano Fujimori: La Construcción de un Político (Lima: Peisa,
1993), pp. 259–63.
But he had only a vague idea: Charles Kenney, Fujimori’s Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in
Latin America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), pp. 126–27; also
Susan C. Stokes, Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 69–71.
Fujimori had been unsparing: See Kenneth Roberts, “Neoliberalism and the Transformation of
Populism in Latin America,” World Politics 48, no. 1 (January 1995), pp. 82–116.
Congress failed to pass any legislation: Gregory Schmidt, “Presidential Usurpation or
Congressional Preference? The Evolution of Executive Decree Authority in Peru,” in Executive
Decree Authority, eds. John M. Carey and Matthew S. Shugart (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), p. 124; Kenney, Fujimori’s Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in
Latin America, pp. 131–32.
he also lacked the patience: Yusuke Murakami, Peru en la era del Chino: La política no
institucionalizada y el pueblo en busca de un salvador (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos,
2012), p. 282; Maxwell A. Cameron, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Alberto Fujimori,” in The
Peruvian Labyrinth: Polity, Society, Economy, eds. Maxwell Cameron and Philip Mauceri
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 54–58; Cynthia McClintock,
“La Voluntad Política Presidencial y la Ruptura Constitucional,” in Los Enigmas Del Podre:
Fujimori 1990–1996, ed. Fernando Tuesta (Lima: Fundación Friedrich Ebert, 1996).
“inviting the President of the Senate”: McClintock, “La Voluntad Política Presidencial y la
Ruptura Constitucional,” p. 65.
“unproductive charlatans”: Catherine Conaghan, Fujimori’s Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), p. 30.
“jackals” and “scoundrels”: Kenney, Fujimori’s Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin
America, p. 132.
he began to bypass congress: Schmidt, “Presidential Usurpation or Congressional Preference?,” pp.
118–19.
“rigid” and “confining”: Cameron, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Alberto Fujimori,” p. 55.
“We are a country”: Conaghan, Fujimori’s Peru, p. 30.
a Japanese emperor: McClintock, “La Voluntad Política Presidencial y la Ruptura Constitucional,”
p. 65.
“Could Fujimori be deposed?”: Kenney, Fujimori’s Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin
America, p. 146.
“the President would kill the Congress”: Cameron, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Alberto
Fujimori,” p. 55; Kenney, Fujimori’s Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin America,
pp. 56–57, 172–76, 186.
“rancid pigs” and “squalid oligarchs”: Jones, Hugo!, p. 1.
“enemies” and “traitors”: Kirk Hawkins, Venezuela’s Chavismo and Populism in Comparative
Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 61.
judges who ruled against him as “communist”: “Silvio Berlusconi Says Communist Judges Out to
Destroy Him,” Reuters, October 20, 2009.
called the media a “grave political enemy”: “Assaults on Media Make Ecuador an Odd Refuge,”
The Age, June 21, 2012, http://www.theage.com.au/ federal-politics/ political-news/ assaults-on-
media-make-ecuador-an-odd-refuge-20120620-20okw.html?deviceType=text.
accused journalists of propagating “terrorism”: Ahmet Sik, “Journalism Under Siege,”
EnglishPen, 2016, https://www.englishpen.org/ wp-content/ uploads/ 2016/ 03/
JournalismUnderSiege_FINAL .
“opposition, obstruction, and provocation”: Joseph Page, Perón (New York: Random House,
1983), pp. 162–65.
“mental incapacity”: Jones, Hugo!, p. 309.
Orbán packed the nominally independent: János Kornai, “Hungary’s U-Turn: Retreating from
Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 43 (July 2015), p. 35.
videotaped hundreds of opposition politicians: Maxwell A. Cameron, “Endogenous Regime
Breakdown: The Vladivideo and the Fall of Peru’s Fujimori,” in The Fujimori Legacy: The Rise
of Electoral Authoritarianism in Peru, ed. Julio F. Carrión (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2006).
delivering monthly cash payments: Conaghan, Fujimori’s Peru, p. 167; and Cameron, “Endogenous
Regime Breakdown,” p. 180.
had called him a fascist: Page, Perón, p. 165.
on the grounds of malfeasance: Gretchen Helmke, Courts Under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and
Presidents in Argentina (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 64.
Péron then appointed four loyalists: Page, Perón, p. 165; Helmke, Courts Under Constraints, p. 64.
evade constitutional term limits “unconstitutional”: Conaghan, Fujimori’s Peru, pp. 126–31.
Fidesz loyalists: Bojan Bugaric and Tom Ginsburg, “The Assault on Postcommunist Courts,” Journal
of Democracy 27, no. 3 (July 2016), p. 73.
In a dubiously constitutional move: Ibid., pp. 73–74.
veto power within the tribunal: Joanna Fomina and Jacek Kucharczyk, “Populism and Protest in
Poland,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 4 (October 2016), pp. 62–63. The Tribunal declared the
repair bill unconstitutional in early 2016, but the government ignored the ruling, with Law and
Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczy´nski declaring that his party would “not permit anarchy in Poland,
even if it is promoted by the courts.” (Bugaric and Ginsburg, “The Assault on Postcommunist
Courts,” p. 74.)
Fearing for its survival: Allan R. Brewer-Carías, Dismantling Democracy in Venezuela: The Chávez
Authoritarian Experiment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 58–59; Jones,
Hugo!, pp. 241–42.
“It is dead”: Jones, Hugo!, p. 242.
Two months later: Brewer-Carías, Dismantling Democracy in Venezuela, p. 59.
“revolutionary” loyalists: Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold, Dragon in the Tropics: Hugo Chávez
and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela (Washington, DC: The Brookings
Institution, 2011), p. 27; and Brewer-Carías, Dismantling Democracy in Venezuela, pp. 236–38.
not a single Supreme Tribunal ruling: “El chavismo nunca pierde en el Supremo Venezolano,” El
País, December 12, 2014, http://internacional.elpais.com/ internacional/ 2014/ 12/ 12/ actualidad/
1418373177_159073.html; also Javier Corrales, “Autocratic Legalism in Venezuela,” Journal
of Democracy 26, no. 2 (April 2015), p. 44.
control over the channel’s news programming: Conaghan, Fujimori’s Peru, pp. 154–62.
“we plan the evening news”: Ibid.
stay home for “personal reasons”: Ibid., p. 137.
he stood no chance: Helmke, Courts Under Constraints, p. 64.
on sodomy charges: Dan Slater, “Iron Cage in an Iron Fist: Authoritarian Institutions and the
Personalization of Power in Malaysia,” Comparative Politics 36, no. 1 (October 2003), pp. 94–
95. Anwar’s conviction was overturned in 2004, a year after Mahathir Mohamad had left office.
it had been “subliminal”: Corrales, “Autocratic Legalism in Venezuela,” pp. 44–45; “Venezuelan
Opposition Leader Leopoldo López Sentenced to Prison Over Protest,” New York Times,
September 10, 2015.
chilling effect on the press: “El Universo Verdict Bad Precedent for Free Press in America,”
Committee to Protect Journalists Alert, February 16, 2012, https://cpj.org/ 2012/ 02/ el-universo-
sentence-a-dark-precedent-for-free-pre.php.
purchased by progovernment businessmen: Soner Cagaptay, The New Sultan: Erdogan and the
Crisis of Modern Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), p. 124; also Svante E. Cornell, “As
Dogan Yields, Turkish Media Freedom Plummets,” Turkey Analyst, January 18, 2010,
https://www.turkeyanalyst.org/ publications/ turkey-analyst-articles/ item/ 196-as-dogan-yields-
turkish-media-freedom-plummets.html.
“pain in the neck”: Marshall Goldman, PetroState: Putin, Power, and the New Russia (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), p. 102.
“straight out of a bad Mafia movie”: Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir
Putin’s Russia and the End of the Revolution, Revised Edition (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books,
2007), p. 83.
He took the deal: Ibid., p. 482.
Under intense financial pressure: “Venden TV Venezolana Globovisón y Anuncian Nueva Linea
Editorial de ‘Centro,’ ” El Nuevo Herald, May 13, 2013, http://www.elnuevoherald.com/ noticias/
mundo/ america-latina/ venezuela-es/ article2023054.html.
Once considered a pro-opposition network: “Media Mogul Learns to Live with Chávez,” New York
Times, July 5, 2007.
only if they stayed out of politics: Baker and Glasser, Kremlin Rising, pp. 86–87; Goldman,
PetroState, p. 102.
Putin had Khodorkovsky arrested: Goldman, PetroState, pp. 103, 106, 113–16. Also Baker and
Glasser, Kremlin Rising, pp. 286–92.
Starved of resources: Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, p. 198.
emerged as a serious rival: “Rakibimiz Uzan,” Sabah, June 4, 2003, http://arsiv.sabah.com.tr/ 2003/
06/ 04/ p01.html.
tax officials audited several Koc companies: Svante E. Cornell, “Erdogan Versus Koc Holding:
Turkey’s New Witch Hunt,” Turkey Analyst, October 9, 2013, http://www.turkeyanalyst.org/
publications/ turkey-analyst-articles/ item/ 64-erdogan-vs-ko.
“inspectorship of poultry and rabbits”: Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life (New York: Penguin,
2004), pp. 292–95.
El Sistema received increased government funding: Gustavo Dudamel, “Why I Don’t Talk
Venezuelan Politics,” Los Angeles Times, September 29, 2015.
slide into dictatorship: Gustavo Dudamel, “A Better Way for Venezuela,” New York Times, July 19,
2017.
He paid a price: “Venezuela Cancels Gustavo Dudamel Tour After His Criticisms,” New York
Times, August 21, 2017.
parliamentary districts were gerrymandered: Harold Crouch, Government and Society in Malaysia
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 58–59, 74.
reduced the number of parliamentary seats: William Case, “New Uncertainties for an Old
Pseudo-Democracy: The Case of Malaysia,” Comparative Politics 37, no. 1 (October 2004), p.
101.
it banned campaign advertising: Kim Lane Scheppele, “Understanding Hungary’s Constitutional
Revolution,” in Constitutional Crisis in the European Constitutional Area, eds. Armin von
Bogdandy and Pal Sonnevend (London: Hart/Beck, 2015), pp. 120–21; and Gabor Toka,
“Constitutional Principles and Electoral Democracy in Hungary,” in Constitution Building in
Consolidated Democracies: A New Beginning or Decay of a Political System?, eds. Ellen Bos and
Kálmán Pocza (Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlag, 2014).
preserve its two-thirds majority: Cas Mudde, “The 2014 Hungarian Parliamentary Elections, or
How to Craft a Constitutional Majority,” Washington Post, April 14, 2014.
emergence of authoritarian single-party regimes: See V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and
Nation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984); and Robert Mickey, Paths out of
Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
African Americans suddenly constituted a majority: Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation,
p. 537; Richard Vallely, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 122.
Federal troops oversaw: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie, p. 38.
In many southern states: Vallely, The Two Reconstructions, pp. 24, 33; Mickey, Paths out of Dixie,
p. 38.
estimated black turnout was 65 percent: J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics:
Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 15, 28–29.
more than 40 percent: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie, pp. 38, 73; Vallely, The Two Reconstructions, pp.
3, 78–79.
to the once-dominant Democrats: Vallely, The Two Reconstructions, p. 77; and Kousser, The
Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 31.
The Democrats lost power: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, pp. 26–27, 41.
“status of black belt whites”: Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, p. 8.
“the Negro shall never be heard from”: Quoted in Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p.
209. Toombs once said he was willing to “face thirty years of war to get rid of negro suffrage in
the South.” Quoted in Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York:
HarperCollins, 1988), pp. 590–91.
to disenfranchise African Americans: Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, pp. 535–39;
Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics; Vallely, The Two Reconstructions, pp. 121–48. Two
non-Confederate states, Delaware and Oklahoma, also disenfranchised African Americans
(Vallely, The Two Reconstructions, pp. 122–23).
To comply with the letter of the law: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie, pp. 42–43; Kousser, The Shaping
of Southern Politics.
“The overarching aim”: Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy
in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 89.
“good square, honest law”: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 190.
“Eight Box Law”: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie, pp. 72–73.
In 1888, Governor John Richardson declared: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 145.
fell to just 11 percent: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 92.
“wrecked the Republican Party”: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie, p. 73. Republicans did not win the
South Carolina governorship until 1974.
“a sweeping Republican victory”: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, pp. 103, 113. This
paragraph draws on Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, pp. 104–121.
“to escape their difficulties”: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, pp. 131–32.
“Let me sign that bill quickly”: Eight years later, a constitutional convention added a poll tax,
literacy test, and property requirements. See Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 137.
“would be almost all white”: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 224.
Black turnout in the South: Stephen Tuck, “The Reversal of Black Voting Rights After
Reconstruction,” in Democratization in America: A Comparative-Historical Analysis, eds.
Desmond King, Robert C. Lieberman, Gretchen Ritter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), p. 140.
“The whole South”: Foner, Reconstruction, p. 582.
an emergency to extend his rule: William C. Rempel, Delusions of a Dictator: The Mind of Marcos
as Revealed in His Secret Diaries (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), pp. 32, 101–3.
a danger like insurrection: A full video of Marcos’s speech, September 23, 1972, ABS-CVN
News, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bDCHIIXEXes.
“rally ’round the flag”: See John Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley,
1973). More recent empirical studies of the rally-’round-the-flag effect in the United States
include John R. Oneal and Anna Lillian Bryan, “The Rally ’Round the Flag Effect in U.S.
Foreign Policy Crises, 1950–1985,” Political Behavior 17, no. 4 (1995), pp. 379–401;
Matthew A. Baum, “The Constituent Foundations of the Rally-’Round-the-Flag Phenomenon,”
International Studies Quarterly 46 (2002), pp. 263–98; and J. Tyson Chatagnier, “The Effect of
Trust in Government on Rallies ’Round the Flag,” Journal of Peace Research 49, no. 5 (2012),
pp. 631–45.
the highest figure ever recorded by Gallup: David W. Moore, “Bush Approval Rating Highest in
Gallup History,” Gallup News Service, September 21, 2001. See http://www.gallup.com/ poll/
4924/ bush-job-approval-highest-gallup-history.aspx.
fear for their own safety: Leonie Huddy, Nadia Khatib, and Theresa Capelos, “The Polls—Trends,
Reactions to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” Public Opinion Quarterly 66
(2002), pp. 418–50; Darren W. Davis and Brian D. Silver, “Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public
Opinion in the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America,” American Journal of Political
Science 48, no. 1 (2004), pp. 28–46; Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman, and Christopher Weber,
“The Political Consequences of Perceived Threat and Felt Insecurity,” The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 614 (2007), pp. 131–53; and Adam J.
Berinsky, In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Chapter 7.
In the aftermath of 9/11: Moore, “Bush Approval Rating Highest in Gallup History.”
necessary to give up some civil liberties: Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Online. Accessed at
http://www.albany.edu/ sourcebook/ ind/ TERRORISM.Public_opinion.Civil_liberties.2.html.
After Pearl Harbor: “Gallup Vault: World War II–Era Support for Japanese Internment,” August
31, 2016, http://www.gallup.com/ vault/ 195257/ gallup-vault-wwii-era-support-japanese-
internment.aspx.
Most constitutions permit: On “states of exception” in Latin American constitutions, see Brian
Loveman, The Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). On the U.S. Constitution, see Huq and Ginsburg, “How
to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” pp. 29–31.
after the coup: Julio F. Carrion, “Public Opinion, Market Reforms, and Democracy in Fujimori’s
Peru,” in The Fujimori Legacy: The Rise of Electoral Authoritarianism in Peru, ed. Julio F.
Carrion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. 129.
“communist menace”: Sterling Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty (New York: Harper and Row, 1988),
pp. 243–44; Rempel, Delusions of a Dictator, pp. 52–55. In February 1970, Marcos wrote in
his diary, “It has saddened me to be driven to the refuge of anti-communism” (Rempel,
Delusions of a Dictator, p. 53).
a few dozen actual insurgents: Rempel, Delusions of a Dictator, pp. 61, 122, 172–73.
fomented public hysteria: Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty, p. 244.
Marcos wanted to declare martial law: Rempel, Delusions of a Dictator, pp. 105–7.
the work of government forces: “Philippines: Marcos Gambles on Martial Law,” United States
Department of State Declassified Intelligence Note, Bureau of Intelligence Research, Dated
October 6, 1972. Also Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty, p. 242.
“nowhere near the scene”: Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New
York: Ballantine Books, 1989), p. 359. Also Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty, p. 262.
The question of whether a young Dutchman: See account of the historiography by Richard Evans,
“The Conspiracists,” London Review of Books 36, no. 9 (2014), pp. 3–9.
government’s own intelligence service: See John B. Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings: Examinations
of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule (London: Ibidem, 2014). Also
Baker and Glasser, Kremlin Rising, p. 55.
a major boost with the bombings: Baker and Glasser, Kremlin Rising, p. 55.
The Russian public rallied: Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice, Second Edition (New York:
Routledge, 2007), pp. 20–22; Masha Gessen, Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of
Vladimir Putin (London: Penguin, 2012), pp. 23–42; Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings.
a series of ISIS terrorist attacks: Cagaptay, The New Sultan, pp. 181–82.
even two members of the Constitutional Court: “Turkey: Events of 2016,” Human Rights Watch
World Report 2017, https://www.hrw.org/ world-report/ 2017/ country-chapters/ turkey. Also
“Turkey Coup Attempt: Crackdown Toll Passes 50,000,” BBC.com, July 20, 2016.
The power grab culminated: The reform gave the president the authority to dissolve parliament and
unilaterally appoint four-fifths of the Constitutional Court. See the evaluation of the
constitutional amendment by the Turkish Bar Association, available at
http://anayasadegisikligi.barobirlik.org.tr/ Anayasa_Degisikligi.aspx.
CHAPTER 5: THE GUARDRAILS OF DEMOCRACY
a beacon of hope and possibility: Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American
Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 36.
the Constitution was the major reason: For sources, see Guillermo O’Donnell and Laurence
Whitehead, “Two Comparative Democratization Perspectives: ‘Brown Areas’ and
‘Immanence,’ ” in Democratization in America: A Comparative-Historical Perspective, eds.
Desmond King, Robert C. Lieberman, Gretchen Ritter, and Laurence Whitehead, p. 48.
Adolf Hitler’s usurpation of power: Kenneth F. Ledford, “German Lawyers and the State in the
Weimar Republic,” Law and History Review 13, no. 2 (1995), pp. 317–49.
near-replicas of the U.S. Constitution: George Athan Billias, American Constitutionalism Heard
Round the World, 1776–1989 (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 124–25;
Zackary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton, The Endurance of National Constitutions
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 26.
Argentina’s 1853 constitution: Jonathan M. Miller, “The Authority of a Foreign Talisman: A Study
of U.S. Constitutional Practice as Authority in Nineteenth Century Argentina and the Argentine
Elite’s Leap of Faith,” The American University Law Review 46, no. 5 (1997), pp. 1464–572.
Also Billias, American Constitutionalism Heard Round the World, pp. 132–35.
Two-thirds of its text: Miller, “The Authority of a Foreign Talisman,” pp. 1510–11.
“provided a textbook example”: Raul C. Pangalangan, “Anointing Power with Piety: People
Power, Democracy, and the Rule of Law,” in Law and Newly Restored Democracies: The
Philippines Experience in Restoring Political Participation and Accountability, ed. Raul C.
Pangalangan (Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies, 2002), p. 3.
“God has never endowed”: Benjamin Harrison, This Country of Ours (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1897), p. ix.
and even contradictory, ways: Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” p.
72; also William G. Howell, Power Without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 13–16.
few constitutional safeguards against filling: Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional
Democracy,” pp. 61–63; also Bruce Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 183.
“thin tissue of convention”: Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” p. 70.
does not define the limits of executive power: Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional
Democracy,” pp. 29, 31. Also Howell, Power Without Persuasion, pp. 13–14, 183–87; and
Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, pp. 67–85.
“a truly antidemocratic leader”: Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,”
pp. 60, 75. Yale constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman reaches a similar conclusion. See
Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic.
All successful democracies rely on informal rules: See Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky,
eds., Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2006).
unwritten rules: Princeton constitutional scholar Keith Whittington calls these “conventions.” See
Keith E. Whittington, “The Status of Unwritten Constitutional Conventions in the United States,”
University of Illinois Law Review 5 (2013), pp. 1847–70.
reinforced by their own unwritten rules: See Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñan,
Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Unwritten rules are everywhere: For a classic account of the norms or “folkways” of the U.S.
Senate, see Donald R. Matthews, U.S. Senators and Their World (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1960).
As commonsensical as this idea may sound: Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The
Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1969), p. 8.
the Federalists regarded them as traitors: Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of
Thomas Jefferson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 122; Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of
America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 114;
Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, pp. 105, 111.
plotting a British-backed monarchic restoration: Wood, The Idea of America, pp. 244–45;
Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, p. 94.
Each side hoped to vanquish: Wood, The Idea of America, p. 245.
rather than destroying each other: Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System.
The new left-leaning Republican government: Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil
War, 1931–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 52.
“bolshevizing foreign agents”: Shlomo Ben-Ami, “The Republican ‘Take-Over’: Prelude to
Inevitable Catastrophe,” in Revolution and War in Spain, 1931–1939, ed. Paul Preston (London:
Routledge, 2001), pp. 58–60.
“We have now entered the vortex”: Gerard Alexander, The Sources of Democratic Consolidation
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 111.
as monarchist or fascist counterrevolutionaries: Raymond Carr, Spain 1808–1939 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 621.
willing to play the democratic game: Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 330.
fundamentally “disloyal”: Juan J. Linz, “From Great Hopes to Civil War: The Breakdown of
Democracy in Spain,” in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe, eds. Juan J. Linz and
Alfred Stepan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 162.
a profound threat: Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, pp. 147–48.
“break all solidarity with the present institutions”: Quoted in Linz, “From Great Hopes to Civil
War,” p. 161.
brutally repressed the uprising: As many as 2,000 workers were killed in the repression, and an
estimated 20,000 leftists were imprisoned. See Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London:
Penguin Books, 2001), p. 136; Stanley Payne, The Franco Regime 1936–1974 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 43.
associate the entire Republican opposition: Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, pp.
165–68.
institutional forbearance: We borrow the term forbearance from Alisha Holland. See Alisha
Holland, “Forbearance,” American Political Science Review 110, no. 2 (May 2016), pp. 232–
46; and Holland, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Also see Eric Nelson, “Are We on the Verge
of the Death Spiral That Produced the English Revolution of 1642–1649?,” History News
Network, December 14, 2014, http://historynewsnetwork.org/ article/ 157822.
“patient self-control”: Oxford Dictionary, See https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/ definition/
forbearance.
to the hilt: Whittington, “The Status of Unwritten Constitutional Conventions in the United States,” p.
106.
divine-right rule: Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978), p. 7.
To be “godly”: Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England
and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 21; Bendix, Kings or People, p. 234.
“future ages groan for this foul act”: Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, eds., Richard II, The
Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 241.
“a matter of royal prerogative”: Whittington, “The Status of Unwritten Constitutional Conventions
in the United States,” p. 107.
not a law but a norm: Julia R. Azari and Jennifer K. Smith, “Unwritten Rules: Informal Institutions
in Established Democracies,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 1 (March 2012); also Whittington,
“The Status of Unwritten Constitutional Conventions in the United States,” pp. 109–12.
“I should unwillingly be”: Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Vermont State Legislature, December
10, 1807, quoted in Thomas H. Neale, Presidential Terms and Tenure: Perspectives and Proposals
for Change (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2004), p. 5.
“departure from this time-honored custom”: Bruce Peabody, “George Washington, Presidential
Term Limits, and the Problem of Reluctant Political Leadership,” Presidential Studies Quarterly
31, no. 3, p. 402.
violate an “unwritten law”: Whittington, “The Status of Unwritten Constitutional Conventions in the
United States,” p. 110. When Theodore Roosevelt sought a nonconsecutive third term in 1912,
he failed to win the Republican nomination, and when he ran as an independent, he was shot on
the campaign trail by a man who claimed to be defending the two-term limit. See Elkins,
Ginsburg, and Melton, The Endurance of National Constitutions, p. 47.
FDR’s reelection in 1940: Azari and Smith, “Unwritten Rules: Informal Institutions in Established
Democracies,” p. 44.
especially important in presidential democracies: See Nelson, “Are We on the Verge of the Death
Spiral That Produced the English Revolution of 1642–1649?”
can easily bring deadlock: Juan J. Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy 1,
no. 1 (January 1990), pp. 51–69; also see Gretchen Helmke, Institutions on the Edge: The
Origins and Consequences of Inter-Branch Crises in Latin America (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2017).
“playing for keeps”: Mark Tushnet, “Constitutional Hardball,” The John Marshall Law Review 37
(2004), pp. 550, 523–53.
“malfeasance” as grounds for impeachment: Page, Perón, p. 165.
authority to issue decrees: Delia Ferreria Rubio and Matteo Gorreti, “When the President Governs
Alone: The Decretazo in Argentina, 1989–1993,” in Executive Decree Authority, eds. John M.
Carey and Matthew Soberg Shugart (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Menem showed no such restraint: Ferreria Rubio and Gorreti, “When the President Governs
Alone,” pp. 33, 50.
congress passed an amnesty law: “Venezuela’s Supreme Court Consolidates President Nicolás
Maduro’s Power,” New York Times, October 12, 2016; “Supremo de Venezuela declara
constitucional el Decreto de Emergencia Económica,” El País, January 21, 2016. See
http://internacional.elpais.com/ internacional/ 2016/ 01/ 21/ america/ 1453346802_377899.html.
The chavista court: “Venezuela Leaps Towards Dictatorship,” The Economist, March 31, 2017;
“Maduro podrá aprobar el presupuesto a espaldas del Parlamento,” El País, October 13,
2016. See http://internacional.elpais.com/ internacional/ 2016/ 10/ 13/ america/
1476370249_347078.html; “Venezuela’s Supreme Court Consolidates President Nicolás
Maduro’s Power,” New York Times, October 12, 2016; “Supremo de Venezuela declara
constitucional el Decreto de Emergencia Económica,” El País, January 21, 2016. See
http://internacional.elpais.com/ internacional/ 2016/ 01/ 21/ america/ 1453346802_377899.html.
“all the laws it has approved”: “Radiografía de los chavistas que controlan el TSJ en Venezuela,”
El Tiempo, August 29, 2016. See http://www.eltiempo.com/ mundo/ latinoamerica/ perfil-de-los-
jueces-del-tribunal-supremo-de-justicia-de-venezuela-44143.
few friends in congress: Lev Marsteintredet, Mariana Llanos, and Detlef Nolte, “Paraguay and the
Politics of Impeachment,” Journal of Democracy 42, no. 4 (2013), p. 113.
removed from office by the senate: Marsteintredet, Llanos, and Nolte, “Paraguay and the Politics of
Impeachment,” pp. 112–14.
“obvious farce”: Francisco Toro, “What’s in a Coup?,” New York Times, June 29, 2012.
it was legal: Article 225 of Paraguay’s 1992 Constitution allows Congress to impeach the president
for “poor performance of his duties,” a “willfully vague formulation that could mean almost
anything that two-thirds of sitting senators want it to mean.” See Toro, “What’s in a Coup?”
“The Crazy One”: Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in
Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 26.
milk named after himself: Carlos De la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America, Second Edition
(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), p. 106; Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and
the New Political Instability in Latin America, p. 155.
In a clear violation: See De la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America, p. 102; Ximena Sosa,
“Populism in Ecuador: From José M. Velasco to Rafael Correa,” in Populism in Latin America,
Second Edition, ed. Michael L. Conniff (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012),
pp. 172–73; and Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin
America, p. 26.
“in a perfectly legal way”: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, pp. 134–36.
“cycle of escalating constitutional brinksmanship”: Nelson, “Are We on the Verge of the Death
Spiral That Produced the English Revolution of 1642–1649?” Also Linz, “The Perils of
Presidentialism,” and Helmke, Institutions on the Edge.
“spiral of legislative obstruction”: Nelson, “Are We on the Verge of the Death Spiral That
Produced the English Revolution of 1642–1649?”
vibrant democratic norms: See Arturo Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 13–20.
“culture of compromise”: Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile
Under Pinochet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 21–22. Also Luis Maira, “The Strategy
and Tactics of the Chilean Counterrevolution in the Area of Political Institutions,” in Chile at the
Turning Point: Lessons of the Socialist Years, 1970–1973, eds. Federico Gil, Ricardo Lagos, and
Henry Landsberger (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979), p. 247.
“There was no argument”: Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, p. 21.
strained by Cold War polarization: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 22–39.
bourgeois anachronism: Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, p. 25.
into another Cuba: Youssef Cohen, Radicals, Reformers, and Reactionaries: The Prisoner’s Dilemma
and the Collapse of Democracy in Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
p. 100.
“gigantic campaign of hatred”: Rodrigo Tomic, “Christian Democracy and the Government of the
Unidad Popular,” in Chile at the Turning Point: Lessons of the Socialist Years, 1970–1973, eds.
Federico Gil, Ricardo Lagos, and Henry Landsberger, p. 232.
committed to democracy: Paul Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964–
1976 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p. 18; Valenzuela, The Breakdown of
Democratic Regimes, p. 45.
by any means necessary: Julio Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy in Chile: From 1932 to the Fall of
Allende (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 181.
Abandoning forbearance: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, p. 48; Sigmund, The
Overthrow of Allende, p. 111.
Statute of Guarantees: Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende, pp. 118–20; Faúndez, Marxism and
Democracy in Chile, pp. 188–90.
“breakdown in mutual understanding”: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, p. 49.
Lacking a legislative majority: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 50–60, 81;
Ricardo Israel, Politics and Ideology in Allende’s Chile (Tempe: Arizona State University Center
for Latin American Studies, 1989), pp. 210–16.
“legal loopholes”: Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende, p. 133; Cohen, Radicals, Reformers, and
Reactionaries, pp. 104–5.
“institutional checkmate”: Maira, “The Strategy and Tactics of the Chilean Counterrevolution,” pp.
249–56.
it would be a weapon: Maira, “The Strategy and Tactics of the Chilean Counterrevolution,” pp.
249–56; Israel, Politics and Ideology in Allende’s Chile, p. 216.
Allende responded by reappointing: Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende, p. 164.
His leftist allies: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, p. 67; Constable and
Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, p. 28.
“opening the door to fascism”: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 67–77.
“not let Allende score a single goal”: Israel, Politics and Ideology in Allende’s Chile, p. 80.
“constitutional overthrow”: Jorge Tapia Videla, “The Difficult Road to Socialism: The Chilean
Case from a Historical Perspective,” in Chile at the Turning Point: Lessons of the Socialist Years,
1970–1973, eds. Federico Gil, Ricardo Lagos, and Henry Landsberger, p. 56; Sigmund, The
Overthrow of Allende, p. 282; Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 83–85.
“an illegitimate head of state”: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 89–94.
the government was unconstitutional: Cohen, Radicals, Reformers, and Reactionaries, p. 117.
CHAPTER 6: THE UNWRITTEN RULES OF AMERICAN POLITICS
“I shall ask the Congress”: Franklin Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933, The
Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, Yale Law School,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ 20th_century/ froos1.asp.
The Court found large portions: Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth
of the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 615–16.
Roosevelt’s proposal: Sidney Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and
Development, 1776–2014, Seventh Edition (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press,
2016), pp. 378–79.
Roosevelt’s court-packing plan: Noah Feldman, Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great
Supreme Court Justices (New York: Twelve, 2010), p. 108.
the Federalists passed: Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, p. 107.
The act was used: Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Presidential Power: Unchecked and
Unbalanced (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), pp. 49–50; Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party
System, pp. 107–11.
“legal and constitutional step”: Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, pp. 136, 140; Wood, The
Idea of America, p. 246.
“typified the spirit”: Ibid., p. 216.
“many opponents”: Donald B. Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American Political System (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 39, 430.
Van Buren’s generation: See Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, pp. 216–31.
“emotional intensity”: Donald Fehrenbacher, The South and the Three Sectional Crises (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 27.
“raised above the whites”: Quoted in John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union: A
Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), p. 325.
“traitors to the Constitution”: Representative Henry M. Shaw, U.S. House of Representatives,
April 20, 1858. See https://archive.org/ details/ kansasquestionsp00shaw; Ulrich Bonnell
Phillips, The Life of Robert Toombs (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1913), p. 183.
Antislavery politicians: Representative Thaddeus Stevens, U.S. House of Representatives, February
20, 1850. See https://catalog.hathitrust.org/ Record/ 009570624.
Yale historian Joanne Freeman: Joanne B. Freeman, “Violence Against Members of Congress Has
a Long, and Ominous, History,” Washington Post, June 15, 2017. Also see Joanne B. Freeman,
The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence and the Road to Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2018).
President Lincoln famously suspended: Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency, pp. 212–13.
The sheer destruction: Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 61.
then–political science professor Woodrow Wilson: Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A
Study in American Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1885).
“Every man that tried”: Robert Green Ingersoll, Fifty Great Selections, Lectures, Tributes, After
Dinner Speeches (New York: C. P. Farrell, 1920), pp. 157–58.
the Republican Congress reduced: Horwill, The Usages of the American Constitution, p. 188.
“high misdemeanor”: Keith Whittington, “Bill Clinton Was No Andrew Johnson: Comparing Two
Impeachments,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 2 no. 2 (May 2000),
pp. 438–39.
“fold up the bloody shirt”: Charles Calhoun, From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The
Transformation of Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010),
p. 88.
The pact effectively ended: C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and
the End of Reconstruction (Boston: Little, Brown and Company), 1966.
polarization gradually declined: Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized
America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p.
10.
Bipartisan cooperation enabled: Kimberly Morgan and Monica Prasad, “The Origins of Tax
Systems: A French American Comparison,” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 5 (2009),
p. 1366.
In his two-volume masterpiece: James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 1 (New York:
Macmillan and Company, 1896), pp. 393–94.
It is virtually silent: Howell, Power Without Persuasion, pp. 13–14.
the executive branch has built up: Arthur Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, [1973] 2004); Crenson and Ginsberg, Presidential Power; Ackerman, The Decline and
Fall of the American Republic; Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency; Chris Edelson,
Power Without Constraint: The Post-9/11 Presidency and National Security (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 2016).
“constitutional battering ram”: Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, pp. 87–
119; Crenson and Ginsberg, Presidential Power, pp. 180–351; Edelson, Power Without
Constraint.
Presidents who find their agenda stalled: William Howell, “Unitary Powers: A Brief Overview,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005), p. 417.
presidents can circumvent the judiciary: See James F. Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney:
Slavery, Secession, and the President’s War Powers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).
“naturally inspire scrupulousness and caution”: Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 74.
“I walk on untrodden ground”: Quoted in Fred Greenstein, Inventing the Job of President:
Leadership Style from George Washington to Andrew Jackson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2009), p. 9.
He energetically defended: Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency, p. 91.
He limited his use: Ibid., p. 82.
“signed many bills”: Quoted in ibid., p. 82.
Washington was also reluctant: Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, “Executive Orders,” The
American Presidency Project, eds. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, Santa Barbara, CA,
1999–2017. Available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ data/ orders.php.
“gained power from his readiness”: Gary Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the
Enlightenment (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), p. 23.
“If any single person”: Gordon Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different
(New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 30–31. Also see Seymour Martin Lipset, “George Washington
and the Founding of Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 9, no. 4 (October 1998), pp. 24–36.
stewardship theory: Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams
to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 243–44.
“boundless energy and ambition”: Quoted in Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency, pp.
125–27.
“Don’t you realize”: Quoted in ibid., p. 125.
Roosevelt acted with surprising restraint: Ibid., p. 128.
He took great care: Sidney Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and
Development, 1776–2007, Fifth Edition (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press,
2008), p. 217.
Roosevelt operated well within: Ibid., pp. 289–90.
presidents abided by established norms: Crenson and Ginsberg, Presidential Power, p. 211;
Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, p. 87.
They never used pardons: Lauren Schorr, “Breaking the Pardon Power: Congress and the Office of
the Pardon Attorney,” American Criminal Law Review 46 (2009), pp. 1535–62.
“ardent Federalist”: Alexander Pope Humphrey, “The Impeachment of Samuel Chase,” The
Virginia Law Register 5, no. 5 (September 1889), pp. 283–89.
Jefferson pushed for his impeachment: Ellis, American Sphinx, p. 225.
“political persecution from beginning to end”: Humphrey, “The Impeachment of Samuel Chase,”
p. 289. Historian Richard Hofstadter describes Chase’s impeachment as an “act of partisan
warfare, pure and simple” (Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, p. 163).
The Senate acquitted Chase: Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal, Advice and Consent: The Politics of
Judicial Appointment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 31.
Beginning with the Federalists’ move: The seven instances are these: 1) In 1800, when the lame-
duck Federalist Congress reduced the Court from 6 to 5 to limit Jefferson’s ability to shape the
judiciary; 2) In 1801, when the newly installed Jeffersonian Congress restored the Court’s size
from 5 to 6; 3) In 1807, when Congress expanded the Court to 7 to give Jefferson an additional
appointment; 4) In 1837, when Congress expanded the Court to 9 to give Andrew Jackson two
additional appointments; 5) In 1863, when Congress expanded the Court to 10 to grant Lincoln
an additional antislavery justice; 6) In 1866, when the Republican-dominated Congress reduced
the Court to 7 to limit Democratic President Andrew Johnson’s ability to shape the Court; 7) In
1869, when the Congress expanded the Court to 9 to give newly elected Republican President
Ulysses S. Grant two additional appointments. See Jean Edward Smith, “Stacking the Court,”
New York Times, July 26, 2007.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/orders.php
“such outrages”: Woodrow Wilson, An Old Master and Other Political Essays (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1893), p. 151.
“is very tempting to partisans”: Benjamin Harrison, This Country of Ours (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1897), p. 317.
“strong enough to prohibit”: Horwill, The Usages of the American Constitution, p. 190.
“extraordinary in its hubris”: Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal, Advice and Consent: The Politics of
Judicial Appointment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 46.
“open declaration of war”: Quoted in H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and
Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 470–71.
“a step toward making himself dictator”: Quoted in Feldman, Scorpions, p. 108.
“change the meaning”: Brands, Traitor to His Class, p. 472.
“The whole mess smells of Machiavelli”: Gene Gressley, “Joseph C. O’Mahoney, FDR, and the
Supreme Court,” Pacific Historical Review 40, no. 2 (1971), p. 191.
“masterly retreat”: Morison and Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, p. 618.
It developed a range of tools: Gregory Koger, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the
House and Senate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Gregory J. Wawro and Eric
Schickler, Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
the Senate lacked any rules: Wawro and Schickler, Filibuster, p. 6.
“[Each senator] has vast power”: Matthews, U.S. Senators and Their World, p. 100.
such dysfunction did not occur: Ibid., p. 101; Wawro and Schickler, Filibuster, p. 41.
“exist as a potential threat”: Matthews, U.S. Senators and Their World, p. 101.
Matthews’s seminal study: Ibid.; also Donald Matthews, “The Folkways of the United States
Senate: Conformity to Group Norms and Legislative Effectiveness,” American Political Science
Review 53, no. 4 (December 1959), pp. 1064–89.
Courtesy meant: Matthews, U.S. Senators and Their World, pp. 98–99.
“it is hard”: Quoted in Matthews, “Folkways,” 1959, p. 1069.
“your enemies on one issue”: Matthews, U.S. Senators and Their World, p. 98.
“dictates at least a semblance”: Ibid., p. 99.
“If a senator does push”: Matthews, “Folkways,” p. 1072.
“It’s not a matter of friendship”: Quoted in Matthews, U.S. Senators and Their World, p. 100.
No institutional tool: On the origins and evolution of the Senate filibuster, see Sarah Binder and
Steven Smith, Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the United States Senate (Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution Press, 1997); Wawro and Schickler, Filibuster; and Koger, Filibustering.
Yet this rarely happened: Wawro and Schickler, Filibuster, pp. 25–28.
“procedural weapon of last resort”: Binder and Smith, Politics or Principle?, p. 114.
only twenty-three manifest filibusters: Ibid., p. 11.
A modest increase in filibuster use: Wawro and Schickler, Filibuster, p. 41.
Sarah Binder and Steven Smith: Binder and Smith, Politics or Principle?, p. 60.
Filibuster use remained low: Ibid., p. 9.
“advice and consent”: Horwill, The Usages of the American Constitution, pp. 126–28; Lee Epstein
and Jeffrey A. Segal, Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointments (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007); Robin Bradley Kar and Jason Mazzone, “The Garland Affair:
What History and the Constitution Really Say About President Obama’s Powers to Appoint a
Replacement for Justice Scalia,” New York University Law Review 91 (May 2016), pp. 58–61.
This has not happened: Horwill, The Usages of the American Constitution, pp. 137–38; Kar and
Mazzone, “The Garland Affair,” pp. 59–60.
Only nine presidential cabinet nominations: Epstein and Segal, Advice and Consent, p. 21.
“unbroken practice of three generations”: Horwill, The Usages of the American Constitution, pp.
137–38.
more than 90 percent: Based on Kar and Mazzone, “The Garland Affair,” pp. 107–14.
Highly qualified nominees: Epstein and Segal, Advice and Consent, p. 106.
The ultraconservative Antonin Scalia: Ibid., p. 107.
And on all seventy-four occasions: Based on Kar and Mazzone, “The Garland Affair,” pp. 107–14.
“the heaviest piece of artillery”: James Bryce, American Commonwealth (New York: Macmillan
and Company, [1888] 1896), p. 211.
“partisan tool for undermining electoral officials”: Keith Whittington, “An Impeachment Should
Not Be a Partisan Affair,” Lawfare, May 16, 2017.
The legal barriers to impeachment: Ibid.
“The House of Representatives should not”: Tushnet, “Constitutional Hardball,” p. 528.
His use of executive orders: Data from Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, “The American
Presidency Project” (2017), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ executive_orders.php?year=2017.
His decision to seek: Constitutional scholar Noah Feldman describes the court-packing scheme as
“one of the most remarkable pieces of constitutional one-upsmanship ever tried.” See Feldman,
Scorpions, p. 108.
The advent of the Cold War: Edward Shils, The Torment of Secrecy (Glencoe: Free Press, 1956), p.
140.
McCarthy took the national stage: Richard Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in
Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 122.
“I have here in my hand”: Quoted in ibid., p. 123.
Moderate Republicans were alarmed: Ibid., p. 125.
“Keep talking”: Quoted in ibid., p. 125.
“Pick up your phone”: Quoted in Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph McCarthy and the
Senate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), pp. 53–54.
“Pink Lady”: Iwan Morgan, Nixon (London: Arnold Publishers, 2002), p. 19.
“Red Pepper”: Matthews, U.S. Senators and Their World, p. 70.
McCarthy repeatedly impugned: Fried, Nightmare in Red, p. 22.
Eisenhower initially resisted: David Nichols, Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower’s Secret
Campaign Against Joseph McCarthy (New York: Basic Books, 2017), pp. 12–15.
Even Nixon: Morgan, Nixon, p. 53.
“was at pains”: Ibid., p. 57.
“kept the McCarthyist spirit alive”: Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of
Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 126.
press as enemies: Morgan, Nixon, pp. 158–59; Keith W. Olson, Watergate: The Presidential Scandal
That Shook America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). p. 2.
anarchists and communists: Jonathan Schell, “The Time of Illusion,” The New Yorker, June 2,
1975; Olson, Watergate, p. 30.
“We’re up against an enemy”: Morgan, Nixon, p. 24.
“at war, internally”: Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of
America (New York: Scribner, 2008), p. 667.
The Nixon administration’s path: Morgan, Nixon, pp. 160, 179; Olson, Watergate, p. 12; Perlstein,
Nixonland, pp. 517, 676.
“dozens of Democrats”: Morgan, Nixon, p. 24.
The administration also deployed: Perlstein, Nixonland, p. 413.
Nixon’s criminal assault on democratic institutions: Olson, Watergate, pp. 35–42.
“bipartisan search for the unvarnished truth”: Quoted in ibid., p. 90.
nearly a dozen Republican senators: Ibid., pp. 76–82.
Cox requested that Nixon: Ibid., p. 102.
Rodino had sufficient Republican support: Ibid., p. 155.
Nixon held out hope: Morgan, Nixon, pp. 186–87.
“Ten at most, maybe less”: Olson, Watergate, p. 164.
America’s full democratization: Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of
American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
the greatest challenge to established forms: Also see Mickey, Levitsky, and Way, “Is America
Still Safe for Democracy?,” pp. 20–29.
CHAPTER 7: THE UNRAVELING
“If Scalia has actually passed away”: This reconstruction below of the social media response to
Scalia’s death is based on two sources: Jonathan Chait, “Will the Supreme Court Just
Disappear?,” New York Magazine, February 21, 2016, and “Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia Dies: Legal and Political Worlds React,” The Guardian, February 14, 2016.
“What is less than zero?”: Ibid.
the first time in American history: Kar and Mazzone, “The Garland Affair,” pp. 53–111.
According to Kar and Mazzone, there are six occasions in American history—all prior to the
twentieth century—in which the Senate has refused to vote on a president’s Supreme Court
nominee. In all six cases, the legitimacy of the appointment was open to question because the
nomination was made after the election of the president’s successor or because the president
himself had not been elected but had succeeded to office via the vice presidency (during the
nineteenth century, there was a constitutional debate over whether vice presidents who
succeeded to office were truly presidents or merely acting presidents).
every time a president: Based on Kar and Mazzone, “The Garland Affair,” pp. 107–14.
“Boy Scout words”: Text of speech reprinted in “To College Republicans: Text of Gingrich
Speech,” West Georgia News. Reprinted: http://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/ pages/ frontline/ newt/
newt78speech.html.
House Minority Leader Bob Michel: Ike Brannon, “Bob Michel, House GOP Statesman Across
Five Decades, Dies at Age 93,” Weekly Standard, February 17, 2017.
Winning a Republican majority: Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme
Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (New York: Penguin, 2007), pp.
137, 144; Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, The Broken Branch: How Congress Is
Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p.
65.
Gingrich launched an insurgency: Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics:
Ideological Republicans and Interest Group Democrats (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016), p. 285.
“used adjectives like rocks”: Brownstein, The Second Civil War, p. 142.
He questioned his Democratic rivals’ patriotism: Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s
Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New
Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2016), p. 35.
“destroy our country”: Quoted in James Salzer, “Gingrich’s Language Set New Course,” Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, January 29, 2012.
“the things that came out of Gingrich’s mouth”: Quoted in Salzer, “Gingrich’s Language Set New
Course.”
Gingrich’s former press secretary Tony Blankley: Gail Sheehy, “The Inner Quest of Newt
Gingrich,” Vanity Fair, January 12, 2012.
Gingrich and his team distributed memos: Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, p.
39; James Salzer, “Gingrich’s Language Set New Course.”
“Gingrich Senators”: Sean Theriault, The Gingrich Senators: The Roots of Partisan Warfare in
Congress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
“transformed American politics”: Quoted in Salzer, “Gingrich’s Language Set New Course.”
Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole: Michael Wines, “G.O.P. Filibuster Stalls Passage of Clinton
$16 Billion Jobs Bill,” New York Times, April 2, 1993.
Filibuster use: Binder and Smith, Politics or Principle?, pp. 10–11; Mann and Ornstein, The Broken
Branch, pp. 107–8.
“epidemic” levels: Former senator Charles Mathias, quoted in Binder and Smith, Politics or
Principle?, p. 6.
the annual number of cloture motions: Data from United States Senate. See
https://www.senate.gov/ pagelayout/ reference/ cloture_motions/ clotureCounts.htm.
House Republicans refused to compromise: Mann and Ornstein, The Broken Branch, pp. 109–10;
Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics, p. 293.
“on a technicality”: Whittington, “Bill Clinton Was No Andrew Johnson,” p. 459.
In an act without precedent: The 1868 impeachment of Andrew Johnson was a far more serious
affair, involving a high-stakes dispute over the constitutional authority of the president. See
Whittington, “Bill Clinton Was No Andrew Johnson.”
“just another weapon in the partisan wars”: Mann and Ornstein, The Broken Branch, p. 122.
He demonstrated this: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner Take All Politics (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2010), p. 207.
“If it wasn’t illegal, do it”: Quoted in John Ydstie, “The K Street Project and Tom DeLay,” NPR,
January 14, 2006.
“Time and time again”: Sam Tanenhaus, “Tom DeLay’s Hard Drive,” Vanity Fair, July 2004.
“because it has been a home”: Brownstein, The Second Civil War, p. 227.
“We don’t work with Democrats”: Tanenhaus, “Tom DeLay’s Hard Drive.”
President Bush governed hard to the right: Brownstein, The Second Civil War, pp. 263–323.
Harry Reid and other Senate leaders: Ibid., pp. 339–40.
Senate Democrats also began to stray: Todd F. Gaziano, “A Diminished Judiciary: Causes and
Effects of the Sustained High Vacancy Rates in the Federal Courts,” The Heritage Foundation,
October 10, 2002; Mann and Ornstein, The Broken Branch, pp. 164–65.
the New York Times quoted: Neil Lewis, “Washington Talk: Democrats Readying for a Judicial
Fight,” New York Times, May 1, 2001.
the Democrats turned to filibusters: Tushnet, “Constitutional Hardball,” pp. 524–25; Epstein and
Segal, Advice and Consent, p. 99.
“one of the great traditions”: Quoted in Mann and Ornstein, The Broken Branch, p. 167.
the number of filibusters reached: Data from United States Senate. See https://www.senate.gov/
pagelayout/ reference/ cloture_motions/ clotureCounts.htm.
the informal practice of “regular order”: Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, pp. 7,
50.
The share of bills introduced: Mann and Ornstein, The Broken Branch, p. 172.
“long-standing norms of conduct in the House”: Mann and Ornstein, The Broken Branch, p. xi.
140 hours of sworn testimony: Brownstein, The Second Civil War, pp. 274–75.
The congressional watchdog: Ibid., pp. 274–75.
widely shared norm: Tushnet, “Constitutional Hardball,” p. 526.
In 2003, Texas Republicans: Steve Bickerstaff, Lines in the Sand: Congressional Redistricting in
Texas and the Downfall of Tom DeLay (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), pp. 132, 171.
Texas Republicans drew up: Ibid., pp. 84–108.
The new map left: Ibid., pp. 102–4.
“was as partisan”: Quoted in ibid., p. 108.
They remained there: Ibid., pp. 220, 228.
DeLay flew in from Washington: Ibid., pp. 251–53.
“the most aggressive map”: Quoted in ibid., pp. 251–53.
“taking up arms for Al Qaeda”: “First Democrat Issue: Terrorist Rights,” The Rush Limbaugh
Show, January 10, 2006. See https://origin-www.rushlimbaugh.com/ daily/ 2006/ 01/ 10/
first_democrat_issue_terrorist_rights/.
defends Joseph McCarthy: Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War
on Terrorism (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003).
“intrinsic to [liberals’] entire worldview”: Coulter, Treason, pp. 292, 16.
“There are millions of suspects here”: “Coulter Right on Rape, Wrong on Treason,” CoulterWatch,
December 11, 2014. See https://coulterwatch.wordpress.com/ 2014/ 12/ 11/ coulter-right-on-
rape-wrong-on-treason/ #_edn3.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama: For a summary of these attacks, see Martin
A. Parlett, Demonizing a President: The “Foreignization” of Barack Obama (Santa Barbara, CA:
Praeger, 2014).
The Fox News program Hannity & Colmes: Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics, pp. 129–
30.
“unless Obama proves me wrong”: Parlett, Demonizing a President, p. 164.
“totalitarian dictatorship”: “Rep. Steve King: Obama Will Make America a ‘Totalitarian
Dictatorship,’ ” ThinkProgress, October 28, 2008.
“palling around with terrorists”: Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics, p. 130.
“launched his political career”: Dana Milibank, “Unleashed, Palin Makes a Pit Bull Look Tame,”
Washington Post, October 7, 2008.
Her racially coded speeches: Frank Rich, “The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama,” New York Times,
October 11, 2008.
its opposition to Obama: See Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe
In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2013); also see Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the
Remaking of American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Georgia congressman Paul Broun: “Georgia Congressman Calls Obama Marxist, Warns of
Dictatorship,” Politico, November 11, 2008.
“you don’t believe in the Constitution”: “Broun Is Asked, Who’ll ‘Shoot Obama,’ ” Politico,
February 25, 2011.
“has become a dictator”: Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, p. 214.
followers stressed repeatedly: See Parker and Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In.
“This was not a shift”: Quoted in Parker and Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In, p. 2.
“THIS WILL CURDLE YOUR BLOOD!!!”: Quoted in Jonathan Alter, The Center Holds: Obama and
His Enemies (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p. 36.
“I do not believe Barack Obama”: Quoted in Parker and Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In, p.
200.
“the first anti-American president”: “Newt Gingrich: Obama ‘First Anti-American President,’ ”
Newsmax, March 23, 2016; and “Gingrich: Obama’s Worldview Shaped by Kenya,” Newsmax,
September 12, 2010.
“I do not believe, and I know”: Darren Samuelson, “Giuliani: Obama Doesn’t Love America,”
Politico, February 18, 2015.
“I do not know”: “Mike Coffman Says Obama ‘Not an American’ at Heart, Then Apologizes,”
Denver Post, May 16, 2012.
“birther enablers”: Gabriel Winant, “The Birthers in Congress,” Salon, July 28, 2009.
U.S. Senators Roy Blunt: Ibid.
“I have people”: “What Donald Trump Has Said Through the Years About Where President Obama
Was Born,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2016.
his high-profile questioning: Parker and Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In, p. 210.
37 percent of Republicans: “Fox News Poll: 24 Percent Believe Obama Not Born in the U.S.,”
FoxNews.com, April 7, 2011.
Forty-three percent of Republicans: “Poll: 43 Percent of Republicans Believe Obama is a
Muslim,” The Hill, September 13, 2015.
a Newsweek poll found: Daniel Stone, “Newsweek Poll: Democrats May Not Be Headed for a
Bloodbath,” Newsweek, August 27, 2010.
“absorb as much of the Tea Party”: Quoted in Abramowitz, The Polarized Public?, p. 101.
Well-funded organizations: Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of American
Conservatism, pp. 83–120.
Tea Party–backed candidates: “How the Tea Party Fared,” New York Times, November 4, 2010.
Also Michael Tesler, Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 122–23.
http://foxnews.com/
the House Tea Party Caucus: “Who Is in the Tea Party Caucus in the House?,” CNN.com
(Political Ticker), July 29, 2011.
“threat to the rule of law”: “Ted Cruz Calls Obama ‘The Most Lawless President in the History of
This Country,’ ” Tu94.9FM. See http://tu949fm.iheart.com/ articles/ national-news-104668/
listen-ted-cruz-calls-barack-obama-14518575/.
a group of young House members: See reporting by Michael Grunwald, The New New Deal: The
Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), pp. 140–42.
“Young Guns”: Ibid., pp. 140–42.
“single most important thing”: Quoted in Abramowitz, The Polarized Public?, p. 122.
the Republicans filibustered it: The bill eventually passed. See Joshua Green, “Strict
Obstructionist,” The Atlantic, January/February 2011.
Senate obstructionism spiked after 2008: Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, pp.
87–89.
“indefinite or permanent vetoes”: Ibid., p. 85.
A stunning 385 filibusters: Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency, p. 490.
The confirmation rate: Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, pp. 92–94.
“nuclear option”: “Reid, Democrats Trigger ‘Nuclear’ Option; Eliminate Most Filibusters on
Nominees,” Washington Post, November 21, 2013.
“raw exercise of political power”: Quoted in ibid.
“We can’t wait”: Quoted in Jonathan Turley, “How Obama’s Power Plays Set the Stage for Trump,”
Washington Post, December 10, 2015.
Obama began to use executive authority: See Nelson, “Are We on the Verge of the Death Spiral
That Produced the English Revolution of 1642–1649?”
“executive memorandum”: “Obama Mandates Rules to Raise Fuel Standards,” New York Times,
May 21, 2010.
he announced an executive action: “Obama to Permit Young Migrants to Remain in U.S.,” New
York Times, June 15, 2012.
President Obama responded to Congress’s refusal: “Obama Orders Cuts in Federal Greenhouse
Gas Emissions,” New York Times, March 19, 2015.
Mitch McConnell urged states: “McConnell Urges U.S. States to Defy U.S. Plan to Cut
Greenhouse Gases,” New York Times, March 4, 2015.
“John Calhoun’s Secessionist screed”: “A New Phase in Anti-Obama Attacks,” New York Times,
April 11, 2015.
Raising the debt limit: Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, p. 5.
leaders of both parties knew: Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, pp. 6–7.
willing to use the debt limit: Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics, pp. 295–96; Mann and
Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, pp. 7–10.
“bring the whole system crashing down”: Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, pp.
25–26.
Tea Party–backed Senators: Ibid., pp. 7–8, 26–27.
“We weren’t kidding”: Ibid., p. 26.
Senate Republicans intervened: As former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson put it,
“The Senate simply has no business conducting foreign policy with a foreign government,
especially an adversarial one….The Cotton letter creates the impression that Senate
Republicans are rooting for negotiations to fail.” Michael Gerson, “The True Scandal of the
GOP Senators’ Letter to Iran,” Washington Post, March 12, 2015.
“I couldn’t help but reflect”: Quoted in Susan Milligan, “Disrespecting the Oval Office,” U.S. News
& World Report, March 16, 2015.
Cotton and his allies: The New York Daily News blazed the word Traitors on its front cover the
following day.
not once since Reconstruction: Kar and Mazzone, “The Garland Affair.”
several Republican senators: “Republican Senators Vow to Block Any Clinton Supreme Court
Nominee Forever,” The Guardian, November 2, 2006.
“if Hillary Clinton becomes president”: Ibid.
“historical precedent”: Quoted in ibid.
Their voters are now deeply divided: Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler,
Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2009); Abramowitz, The Polarized Public?
“way of life”: Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded
America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 23.
“somewhat or very unhappy”: Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes, “Affect, Not
Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76, no. 3
(2012), pp. 417–18.
Being a Democrat or a Republican: Ibid.
the numbers are even higher: Pew Research Center, “Partisanship and Political Animosity in
2016,” June 22, 2016, http://www.people-press.org/ 2016/ 06/ 22/ partisanship-and-political-
animosity-in-2016/.
The Democrats represented: See James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and
Re-Alignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, DC: The Brookings
Institution, 1983), pp. 214–27; Alan I. Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens,
Polarization, and American Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 54–
56.
Evangelical Christians: Geoffrey Layman, The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in
American Party Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 171.
the parties overlapped: Schickler, Racial Realignment, p. 179; Edward G. Carmines and James A.
Stimson, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989), Chapter 3.
southern Democrats’ opposition and strategic control: Ibid., p. 119.
“conservative coalition”: Binder and Smith, Politics or Principle?, p. 88.
democratize the South: See Mickey, Paths out of Dixie.
Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”: Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center, pp. 66–73; Tesler, Post-
Racial or Most-Racial?, pp. 11–13.
what had long been: Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center, pp. 66–73.
southern blacks: Carmines and Stimson, Issue Evolution.
The post-1965 realignment: Matthew Levendusky, The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became
Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
partisanship and ideology converged: Ibid.; Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center, pp. 63–73.
the ideological differences between the parties: See Pew Research Center, Political Polarization in
the American Public (Washington, DC: Pew Foundation), June 12, 2014.
The social, ethnic, and cultural bases: This section draws on Hetherington and Weiler,
Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics; Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center;
Abramowitz, The Polarized Public?; and Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven Webster, “The Rise of
Negative Partisanship and the Nationalization of U.S. Elections in the 21st Century,” Electoral
Studies 41 (2016), pp. 12–22.
they constituted 38 percent: “It’s Official: The U.S. Is Becoming a Majority-Minority Nation,” U.S.
News & World Report, July 6, 2015.
the U.S. Census Bureau projects: Sandra L. Colby and Jennifer M. Ortman, “Projections of the
Size and Composition of the U.S. Population: 2014–2060,” United States Census Bureau Current
Population Reports, March 2015. See https://www.census.gov/ content/ dam/ Census/ library/
publications/ 2015/ demo/ p25-1143 .
The nonwhite share of the Democratic vote: Tesler, Post-Racial or Most-Racial?, p. 166;
Abramowitz, The Polarized Public?, p. 29.
Republican voters: Tesler, Post-Racial or Most-Racial?, pp. 166–68.
the GOP embraced the Christian Right: Geoffrey C. Layman, The Great Divide: Religious and
Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001);
Abramowitz, The Polarized Public?, pp. 69–77.
76 percent of white evangelicals: “The Parties on the Eve of the 2016 Election: Two Coalitions,
Moving Further Apart,” Pew Research Center, September 13, 2016, http://www.people-
press.org/ 2016/ 09/ 13/ 2-party-affiliation-among-voters-1992-2016/.
The percentage of white Democrats: Abramowitz, The Polarized Public?, p.67.
married white Christians: Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center, p. 129.
By the 2000s: Ibid., p. 129.
the two parties are now divided: Hetherington and Weiler, Authoritarianism and Polarization in
American Politics, pp. 27–28, 63–83.
most of the norm breaking: Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics; Mann and Ornstein, It’s
Even Worse Than It Looks.
Republican voters rely more heavily: Levendusky, How Partisan Media Polarize America, pp. 14–
16; Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics, pp. 149–64.
69 percent of Republican voters: Levendusky, How Partisan Media Polarize America, p. 14.
popular radio talk-show hosts: Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics, pp. 170–74.
The rise of right-wing media: Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch Network
and Republican Party Extremism,” Perspectives on Politics 16, no. 3 (2016), pp. 681–99.
“no compromise” position: Levendusky, How Partisan Media Polarize America, p. 152.
California Republican representative Darrell Issa: Levendusky, How Partisan Media Polarize
America, p. 152.
“If you stray the slightest”: Quoted in Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics, p. 177.
Hard-line positions were reinforced: Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch Network,” pp.
681–99.
Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform: Elizabeth Drew, Whatever It Takes: The Real
Struggle for Power in America (New York: Viking Press, 1997), p. 65.
outside groups such as Americans for Prosperity: Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch
Network,” p. 683.
the Koch family was responsible: Ibid., p. 684.
the GOP has remained culturally homogeneous: Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics, pp.
43–46, 118–23.
white Protestants are a minority: Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center, p. 129.
“overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive”: Richard Hoftstadter, The Paranoid Style in
American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 4.
“slipping away”: Parker and Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In, pp. 3, 157.
“strangers in their own land”: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and
Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016).
“real Americans”: Based on an analysis of national survey results, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse found
that those who most strongly identify as Americans tend to view “real Americans” as 1) native-
born, 2) English-speaking, 3) white, and 4) Christian. See Elizabeth Theiss Morse, Who Counts
as an American: The Boundaries of National Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2009), pp. 63–94.
“The American electorate isn’t moving”: Ann Coulter, Adios America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our
Country into a Third World Hellhole (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2015), p. 19.
“Take Our Country Back”: Parker and Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In.
CHAPTER 8: TRUMP AGAINST THE GUARDRAILS
A study by the Shorenstein Center: Thomas E. Patterson, “News Coverage of Donald Trump’s
First 100 Days,” Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, May 18, 2017,
https://shorensteincenter.org/ news-coverage-donald-trumps-first-100-days. The news outlets
covered in the study were the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, as well
as CNN, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC, and two European media outlets.
Trump administration officials were feeling besieged: See Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman,
“At a Besieged White House, Tempers Flare and Confusion Swirls,” New York Times, May 16,
2017.
press coverage: Patterson, “News Coverage of Donald Trump’s First 100 Days.”
“no politician in history”: “Trump Says No President Has Been Treated More Unfairly,”
Washington Post, May 17, 2017.
He later reportedly pressured: “Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation,”
New York Times, May 16, 2017; “Top Intelligence Official Told Associates Trump Asked Him
If He Could Intervene with Comey on FBI Russia Probe,” Washington Post, June 6, 2017.
he dismissed Comey: Josh Gerstein, “Trump Shocks with Ouster of FBI’s Comey,” Politico, May 9,
2017; and “Trump Said He Was Thinking of Russia Controversy When He Decided to Fire
Comey,” Washington Post, May 11, 2017.
Only once in the FBI’s eighty-two-year history: Philip Bump, “Here’s How Unusual It Is for an
FBI Director to Be Fired,” Washington Post, May 9, 2017; “FBI Director Firing in Early ’90s
Had Some Similarities to Comey Ouster,” U.S. News & World Report, May 10, 2017.
Trump had attempted to establish: Tina Nguyen, “Did Trump’s Personal Lawyer Get Preet
Bharara Fired?,” Vanity Fair, June 13, 2017; “Mueller Expands Probe into Trump Business
Transactions,” Bloomberg, July 20, 2017.
the president removed him: “Mueller Expands Probe into Trump Business Transactions.”
Trump publicly shamed Sessions: Nolan McCaskill and Louis Nelson, “Trump Coy on Sessions’s
Future: ‘Time Will Tell,’ ” Politico, July 25, 2017; Chris Cilizza, “Donald Trump Doesn’t Want
to Fire Jeff Sessions. He Wants Sessions to Quit,” CNN.com, July 24, 2017.
launched an effort to dig up dirt: Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman, and Matt Apuzzo,
“Trump’s Lawyers, Seeking Leverage, Investigate Mueller’s Investigators,” New York Times,
July 20, 2017.
the government’s dubiously elected Constituent Assembly: “Venezuela’s Chief Prosecutor Luisa
Ortega Rejects Dismissal,” BBC.com, August 6, 2017.
“the opinion of this so-called judge”: “Trump Criticizes ‘So-Called Judge’ Who Lifted Travel
Ban,” Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2017.
“unelected judge”: White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement on Sanctuary Cities
Ruling,” April 25, 2017. See https://www.whitehouse.gov/ the-press-office/ 2017/ 04/ 25/
statement-sanctuary-cities-ruling.
Trump himself responded: “President Trump Is ‘Absolutely’ Considering Breaking Up the Ninth
Circuit Court,” Time, April 26, 2017.
the pardon was clearly political: A few nights earlier, Trump had said to loud applause at a
political rally, “Do the people in this room like Sheriff Joe?” He rhetorically asked, “So was
Sheriff Joe convicted for doing his job?” See “Trump Hints at Pardon for Ex-Sheriff Joe
Arpaio,” CNN.com, August 23, 2017.
The move reinforced fears: “Trump’s Lawyers Are Exploring His Pardoning Powers to Hedge
Against the Russia Investigation,” Business Insider, July 20, 2017.
“If the president can immunize his agents”: Martin Redish, “A Pardon for Arpaio Would Put
Trump in Uncharted Territory,” New York Times, August 27, 2017.
The Trump administration also trampled: Ryan Lizza, “How Trump Broke the Office of
Government Ethics,” The New Yorker, July 14, 2017.
House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz: Richard Painter, an ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush
administration, described Chaffetz’s action as “strong-arming” and “political retaliation.” “GOP
Lawmaker Hints at Investigating Ethics Chief Critical of Trump,” New York Times, January 13,
2017.
administration officials tried to force the OGE: “White House Moves to Block Ethics Inquiry into
Ex-Lobbyists on Payroll,” New York Times, May 22, 2017.
“broken” OGE: Lizza, “How Trump Broke the Office of Government Ethics.”
Trump did not replace Comey: “Trump Faces Tough Choices in FBI Pick,” The Hill, May 15,
2017. Trump’s eventual appointee, Christopher Wray, was widely expected to maintain the
FBI’s independence.
Senate Republicans resisted Trump’s efforts: “Trump Is Reportedly Considering Bringing Rudy
Giuliani on as Attorney General amid Troubles with Jeff Sessions,” Business Insider, July 24,
2017.
“enemy of the American people”: “Trump Calls the News Media the ‘Enemy of the American
People,’ ” New York Times, February 17, 2017.
“I love the First Amendment”: “Remarks by President Trump at the Conservative Political Action
Committee,” White House Office of the Press Secretary, February 24, 2017. See
https://www.whitehouse.gov/ the-press-office/ 2017/ 02/ 24/ remarks-president-trump-
conservative-political-action-conference.
“disgraced the media world”: See https://twitter.com/ realdonaldtrump/ status/
847455180912181249.
“I think that’s something we’ve looked at”: Jonathan Turley, “Trump’s Quest to Stop Bad Media
Coverage Threatens Our Constitution,” The Hill, May 2, 2017.
multimillion-dollar defamation suits: “Confrontation, Repression in Correa’s Ecuador,” Committee
to Protect Journalists, September 1, 2011, https://cpj.org/ reports/ 2011/ 09/ confrontation-
repression-correa-ecuador.php.
“If I become president”: Conor Gaffey, “Donald Trump Versus Amazon: All the Times the
President and Jeff Bezos Have Called Each Other Out,” Newsweek, July 25, 2017.
He also threatened to block: Philip Bump, “Would the Trump Administration Block a Merger Just
to Punish CNN?,” Washington Post, July 6, 2017.
President Trump signed an executive order: “President Trump Vows to Take Aggressive Steps on
Immigration,” Boston Globe, January 25, 2017.
“If we have to”: “Judge Blocks Trump Effort to Withhold Money from Sanctuary Cities,” New York
Times, April 25, 2017.
The plan was reminiscent: “Venezuela Lawmakers Strip Power from Caracas Mayor,” Reuters,
April 7, 2009.
President Trump was blocked by the courts: “Judge Blocks Trump Effort to Withhold Money from
Sanctuary Cities,” New York Times, April 25, 2017.
he called for changes: Aaron Blake, “Trump Wants More Power and Fewer Checks and Balances—
Again,” Washington Post, May 2, 2017. Also https://twitter.com/ realdonaldtrump/ status/
869553853750013953.
Senate Republicans did eliminate the filibuster: Aaron Blake, “Trump Asks for More Power.
Here’s Why the Senate GOP Will Resist,” Washington Post, May 30, 2017.
some Republican leaders: See Hasen, The Voting Wars; Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The
Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Picador, 2015).
strict voter identification laws: Berman, Give Us the Ballot; Benjamin Highton, “Voter Identification
Laws and Turnout in the United States,” Annual Review of Political Science 20, no. 1 (2017), pp.
49–67.
The push for voter ID laws: Justin Levitt, “The Truth About Voter Fraud,” New York University
School of Law Brenner Center for Justice (2007). See https://www.brennancenter.org/
publication/ truth-about-voter-fraud; also Minnite, The Myth of Voter Fraud; Hasen, The Voting
Wars, pp. 41–73; Sharad Goel, Marc Meredith, Michael Morse, David Rothschild, and
Houshmand Shirani-Mehr, “One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double-
Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections,” unpublished manuscript, January 2017.
All reputable studies: See, for example, Levitt, “The Truth About Voter Fraud”; Minnite, The Myth
of Voter Fraud.
“modern day poll tax”: Quoted in Berman, Give Us the Ballot, p. 223.
An estimated 300,000 Georgia voters: Ibid., p. 223.
“a not-too-thinly veiled attempt”: Quoted in ibid., p. 254.
Bills were introduced: Ibid., pp. 260–61.
fifteen states had adopted such laws: Highton, “Voter Identification Laws and Turnout in the United
States,” pp. 152–53.
a disproportionate impact: Charles Stewart III, “Voter ID: Who Has Them? Who Shows Them?”
Oklahoma Law Review 66 (2013).
reported not possessing a valid driver’s license: Ibid., pp. 41–42.
A study by the Brennan Center for Justice: Berman, Give Us the Ballot, p. 254.
seven adopted stricter voter ID laws: Ibid., p. 264.
Scholars have just begun: Highton, “Voter Identification Laws and Turnout in the United States,” p.
153.
The U.S. Senate should switch to 51 votes, immediately, and get Healthcare and TAX CUTS approved, fast and easy. Dems would do it, no doubt!
“premier advocate of vote suppression”: Peter Waldman, “Why We Should Be Very Afraid of
Trump’s Vote Suppression Commission,” Washington Post, June 30, 2017.
Kobach helped push through: See Ari Berman, “The Man Behind Trump’s Voter-Fraud
Obsession,” New York Times Magazine, June 13, 2017.
“won the popular vote”: See https://twitter.com/ realdonaldtrump/ status/ 802972944532209664?
lang=en.
He repeated this point: “Without Evidence, Trump Tells Lawmakers 3 Million to 5 Million Illegal
Ballots Cost Him the Popular Vote,” Washington Post, January 23, 2017. Trump’s statement
appears to have been based on claims made by noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his
website Infowars. See Jessica Huseman and Scott Klein, “There’s No Evidence Our Election
Was Rigged,” ProPublica, November 28, 2016.
national vote-monitoring project: Huseman and Klein, “There’s No Evidence Our Election Was
Rigged.”
Washington Post reporter Philip Bump: “There Have Been Just Four Documented Cases of Voter
Fraud in the 2016 Election,” Washington Post, December 1, 2016.
“absolutely correct”: Berman, “The Man Behind Trump’s Voter-Fraud Obsession.”
“we will probably never know”: Max Greenwood and Ben Kamisar, “Kobach: ‘We May Never
Know’ If Clinton Won Popular Vote,” The Hill, July 17, 2019.
The Commission has already sought: Waldman, “Why We Should Be Very Afraid of Trump’s Vote
Suppression Commission.”
the number of mistakes: Goel, Meredith, Morse, Rothschild, and Houshmand, “One Person, One
Vote.”
Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity: In July 2017, it was reported that forty-four states had
refused to share voter information with the Commission. See “Forty-Four States and DC Have
Refused to Give Certain Voter Information to Trump Commission,” CNN.com, July 5, 2017.
the Law and Justice Party: “Poland’s President Vetoes 2 Laws That Limited Courts’
Independence,” New York Times, July 24, 2017.
Active loyalists: Representative Duncan Hunter of California, for example, publicly defended
Trump even after the release of the Access Hollywood tape during the 2016 campaign. See
“Trump’s 10 Biggest Allies in Congress,” The Hill, December 25, 2016.
A few of them pushed quietly: “Special Counsel Appointment Gets Bipartisan Praise,” The Hill,
May 17, 2017.
important Republican senators: “Republicans to Trump: Hands off Mueller,” Politico, June 12,
2017.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley: Ibid.
Graham, McCain, and Corker: See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/ congress-trump-score/ ?
ex_cid=rrpromo.
“found their own red line”: “Senators Unveil Two Proposals to Protect Mueller’s Russia Probe,”
Washington Post, August 3, 2017; Tracy, “As Mueller Closes In, Republicans Turn away from
Trump.”
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
President Trump’s approval rating: Jeffrey M. Jones, “Trump Has Averaged 50% or Higher Job
Approval in 17 States,” Gallup News Service, July 24, 2017. See http://www.gallup.com/ poll/
214349/ trump-averaged-higher-job-approval-states.aspx.
Democratic senator Joe Manchin: See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/ congress-trump-score/ ?
ex_cid=rrpromo.
The Hill listed Manchin: “Trump’s 10 Biggest Allies in Congress.”
“Have we not heard enough”: “In West Virginia, Trump Hails Conservatism and a New GOP
Governor,” New York Times, August 3, 2017.
they increase support for the government: See again Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion
and more recent empirical studies of the rally-’round-the-flag effect in the United States,
including Oneal and Bryan, “The Rally ’Round the Flag Effect in U.S. Foreign Policy Crises,
1950–1985,” Baum, “The Constituent Foundations of the Rally-Round-the-Flag Phenomenon,”
and Chatagnier, “The Effect of Trust in Government on Rallies ’Round the Flag.”
Citizens become more likely to tolerate: Huddy, Khatib, and Capelos, “The Polls—Trends,” pp.
418–50; Darren W. Davis and Brian D. Silver, “Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public Opinion in
the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America,” American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1
(2004), pp. 28–46; Huddy, Feldman, and Weber, “The Political Consequences of Perceived
Threat and Felt Insecurity,” pp. 131–53; and Adam J. Berinsky, In Time of War: Understanding
American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009), Chapter 7.
Judges are notoriously reluctant: Howell, Power Without Persuasion; Ackerman, The Decline and
Fall of the American Republic, pp. 67–85.
institutional constraints: Howell, Power Without Persuasion, p. 184.
President Trump’s foreign policy ineptitude: During the 2016 campaign, fifty Republican foreign
policy experts, many of them former Bush administration officials, wrote a letter warning that
Trump’s ignorance and recklessness would “put at risk our nation’s national security.” See “50
G.O.P. Officials Warn Donald Trump Would Put Nation’s Security ‘At Risk,’ ” New York Times,
August 8, 2016.
“smashed through the behavior standards”: David Brooks, “Getting Trump out of My Brain,” New
York Times, August 8, 2017.
“closed and armored limousine”: James Wieghart and Paul Healy, “Jimmy Carter Breaks Protocol
at Inauguration,” New York Daily News, January 21, 1977.
“an informal custom”: Christine Hauser, “The Inaugural Parade, and the Presidents Who Walked
It,” New York Times, January 19, 2017.
William Henry Harrison broke tradition: Paul F. Boller, Presidential Campaigns: From George
Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 70
“Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee, Alabama”: The following account draws on Clarence
Lusane, The Black History of the White House (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2011), pp.
219–78.
“the prevailing social etiquette”: Ibid.
President Trump broke: “President Trump Breaks a 150-Year Tradition of Pets in the White
House,” AOL.com, July 28, 2017.
“American carnage”: Yashar Ali, “What George W. Bush Really Thought of Donald Trump’s
Inauguration,” New York Magazine, March 29, 2017.
not technically required: As Walter Shaub, the former head of the Office of Government Ethics, put
it, “You could seriously be the Secretary of the Department of Energy and hold Chevron, Exxon,
and B.P. [shares] and not be violating the law, as long as you were willing to go to work every
day, put your feet up on your desk, and read the newspaper and do nothing else.” See Lizza,
“How Trump Broke the Office of Government Ethics.”
President Trump exercised no such forbearance: Trump maintained a number of potential
conflicts of interest stemming from his international business dealings and his extensive links to
the Trump Organization. Within weeks of the election, the Sunlight Foundation had created a list
of “red flag” conflicts, posting thirty-two of them in November 2016. By July 2017, the list had
grown to more than six hundred potential conflicts of interest. Many of Trump’s cabinet and
advisory appointees—drawn from the worlds of energy, finance, and lobbying—also faced
potential conflicts of interest. See data: http://www.sunlightfoundation.com.
The Office of Government Ethics: “As Trump Inquiries Flood Ethics Office, Director Looks to
House for Action,” NPR.com, April 17, 2017. Trump’s legal team pointed to former Vice
President Nelson Rockefeller as an example of an executive official who didn’t fully divest from
his family fortune. However, Vice President Rockefeller was subjected to four months of
hearings over potential conflicts. See “ Conflicts of Interest: Donald Trump 2017 vs. Nelson
Rockefeller 1974,” CBSNews.com, January 13, 2017.
President Trump also violated: See https://twitter.com/ realdonaldtrump/ status/
802972944532209664?lang=en.
“millions” of illegal voters: “California Official Says Trump’s Claim of Voter Fraud Is ‘Absurd,’ ”
New York Times, November 28, 2016; “Voter Fraud in New Hampshire? Trump Has No Proof
and Many Skeptics,” New York Times, February 13, 2017; “Trump’s Baseless Assertions of
Voter Fraud Called ‘Stunning,’ ” Politico, November 27, 2016.
A poll taken prior: “Un Tercio de los Mexicans Cree Que Hubo Fraude en las Elecciones de 2006,”
El Pais, July 3, 2008. See https://elpais.com/ internacional/ 2008/ 07/ 03/ actualidad/
1215036002_850215.html; Emir Olivares Alonso, “Considera 71% de los Mexicanos que
Puede Haber Fraude Electoral,” La Jornada, June 29, 2012. See http://www.jornada.unam.mx/
2012/ 06/ 29/ politica/ 003n1pol.
“meaningful amount” of fraud: Sam Corbett-Davies, Tobias Konitzer, and David Rothschild,
“Poll: 60% of Republicans Believe Illegal Immigrants Vote; 43% Believe People Vote Using
Dead People’s Names,” Washington Post, October 24, 2016.
47 percent of Republicans: “Many Republicans Doubt Clinton Won Popular Vote,” Morning
Consult, July 27, 2017.
Fifty-two percent of Republicans: Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, “In a New Poll, Half of
Republicans Say They Would Support Postponing the 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It,”
Washington Post, August 10, 2017.
“Terrible! Just found out”: https://twitter.com/ realdonaldtrump/ status/ 837996746236182529; also
see www.politifact.com/ truth-o-meter/ article/ 2017/ mar/ 21/ timeline-donald-trumps-false-
wiretapping-charge%2F.
“never deny the undeniable”: “Many Politicians Lie, but Trump Has Elevated the Art of
Fabrication,” New York Times, August 8, 2017.
PolitiFact classified: PolitiFact. See http://www.politifact.com/ personalities/ donald-trump/.
“achieved something remarkable”: David Leonhardt and Stuart Thompson, “Trump’s Lies,” New
York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/ 2017/ 06/ 23/ opinion/ trumps-lies.html?
mcubz=1.
President Trump claimed: Rebecca Savransky, “Trump Falsely Claims He Got Biggest Electoral
College Win Since Reagan,” The Hill, February 16, 2017; Tom Kertscher, “Donald Trump Not
Close in Claiming He Has Signed More Bills in First Six Months Than Any President,”
PolitiFact Wisconsin, July 20, 2017, http://www.politifact.com/ wisconsin/ statements/ 2017/ jul/
20/ donald-trump/ donald-trump-not-close-claiming-he-has-signed-more/.
“the greatest speech ever”: Ella Nilsen, “Trump: Boy Scouts Thought My Speech Was ‘Greatest
Ever Made to Them.’ Boy Scouts: No,” Vox, August 2, 2017.
view him as dishonest: Surveys from mid-2017 showed that 57 percent of Americans believed the
president was not honest. See Quinnipiac University Poll, “Trump Gets Small Bump from
American Voters,” January 10, 2017 (https://poll.qu.edu/ national/ release-detail?
ReleaseID=2415); “U.S. Voters Send Trump Approval to Near Record Low,” May 10, 2017
(https://poll.qu.edu/ national/ release-detail?ReleaseID=2456); “Trump Gets Small Bump from
American Voters,” June 29, 2017 (https://poll.qu.edu/ national/ release-detail?ReleaseID=2471).
Citizens have a basic right: See Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1971).
“among the most dishonest human beings”: “With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on
Turnout and Intelligence Rift,” New York Times, January 21, 2017. See also
http://video.foxnews.com/ v/5335781902001/ ?#sp=show-clips.
“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe”: https://twitter.com/ realdonaldtrump/ status/
880408582310776832, https://twitter.com/ realdonaldtrump/ status/ 880410114456465411.
Press Secretary Sean Spicer: “CNN, New York Times, Other Media Barred from White House
Briefing,” Washington Post, February 24, 2017.
The only modern precedent: “Trump Not the Only President to Ban Media Outlets from the White
House,” ABC10.com, February 24, 2017.
Humans have a limited ability to cope: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Defining Deviancy Down: How
We’ve Become Accustomed to Alarming Levels of Crime and Destructive Behavior,” The
American Scholar 62, no. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 17–30.
All but one Republican senator: Susan Collins of Maine voted with Trump 79 percent of the time.
See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/ congress-trump-score/ ?ex_cid=rrpromo.
Even Senators Ben Sasse: See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/ congress-trump-score/ ?
ex_cid=rrpromo.
Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate: “GOP Candidate in Montana Race Charged with
Misdemeanor Assault After Allegedly Body-Slamming Reporter,” Washington Post, May 24,
2017.
“biased or inaccurate”: “Attitudes Toward the Mainstream Media Take an Unconstitutional Turn,”
The Economist, August 2, 2017; https://www.economist.com/ blogs/ graphicdetail/ 2017/ 08/ daily-
chart-0.
“They use their schools”: “Why Join the National Rifle Association? To Defeat Liberal Enemies,
Apparently,” The Guardian, July 1, 2017.
“We’ve had it”: “ ‘We’re Coming for You’: NRA Attacks New York Times in Provocative Video,” The
Guardian, August 5, 2017.
CHAPTER 9: SAVING DEMOCRACY
It was only after 1965: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie.
fundamental realignment: Mickey, Levitsky, and Way, “Is America Still Safe for Democracy?,”
pp. 20–29.
There is a mounting perception: See Larry Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,”
Journal of Democracy 26, no. 1 (January 2015), pp. 141–55; and Roberto Stefan Foa and
Yascha Mounk, “The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 3 (July 2016), pp.
5–17.
Larry Diamond: Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession.”
claims about a global democratic recession: Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “The Myth of
Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 1 (January 2015), pp. 45–58.
U.S. governments used diplomatic pressure: Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism;
Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñan, Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America.
a pro-Trump GOP: Republican control over the various branches of government would be made
possible by the concentration of the Democratic vote in urban centers. This has allowed the
Republicans—who dominate the small-town and rural vote—to become nearly unbeatable in
much of the national territory, giving them an edge in the Electoral College and particularly in
the Senate.
It is also demographically diverse: See https://www.census.gov/ quickfacts/ NC.
“microcosm of the country’s hyper-partisan politics”: Jedediah Purdy, “North Carolina’s Partisan
Crisis,” The New Yorker, December 20, 2016.
partisans have battled: “North Carolina Governor Signs Controversial Transgender Bill,” CNN.com,
March 24, 2016.
“more polarized and more acrimonious”: Quoted in Mark Joseph Stern, “North Carolina
Republicans’ Legislative Coup Is an Attack on Democracy,” Slate, December 15, 2016.
The changes enabled Republicans: Max Blau, “Drawing the Line on the Most Gerrymandered
District in America,” The Guardian, October 19, 2016.
They began by demanding access: See: http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/ nlj/ 7-29-
16%204th%20Circuit%20NAACP%20v%20NC , pp. 10, 13.
They passed a strict voter ID law: “North Carolina Governor Signs Extensive Voter ID Law,”
Washington Post, August 12, 2013; and “Critics Say North Carolina Is Curbing the Black Vote.
Again,” New York Times, August 30, 2016.
“almost surgical precision”: “Justices Reject Two Gerrymandered North Carolina Districts, Citing
Racial Bias,” New York Times, May 27, 2017.
Republicans used their control: “Critics Say North Carolina Is Curbing the Black Vote. Again.”
McCrory refused to concede: “North Carolina Governor Alleges Voter Fraud in Bid to Hang On,”
Politico, November 21, 2016; and “North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory Files for Recount as
Challenger’s Lead Grows,” NBCNews.com, November 22, 2016.
“surprise special session”: “Democrats Protest as GOP Calls Surprise Special Session,”
WRAL.com, December 14, 1016.
“legislative coup”: “NC Is in the Hot National Spotlight Yet Again as Media Focus on General
Assembly, Cooper,” Charlotte Observer, December 16, 2016; Stern, “North Carolina
Republicans’ Legislative Coup Is an Attack on Democracy.”
“brazen power grab”: “A Brazen Power Grab in North Carolina,” New York Times, December 15,
2016.
The Senate granted itself the authority: “Proposed Cuts to Gov.-Elect Roy Cooper’s Appointment
Powers Passes NC House in 70–36 Vote,” News & Observer, December 15, 2016; and see
“Bill Would Curb Cooper’s Appointment Powers,” WRAL.com, December 14, 2016.
Outgoing governor McCrory: “Before Leaving Office, McCrory Protected 908 State Jobs from
Political Firings,” News & Observer, February 23, 2017.
Republicans then changed the composition: “Senate Passes Controversial Merger of Ethics,
Elections Boards,” WRAL.com, December 15, 2016.
responsible for local rules: See https://www.ncsbe.gov/ about-us.
The boards had been under: Purdy, “North Carolina’s Partisan Crisis.”
the chair of the election boards: “Proposed Cuts to Gov.-Elect Roy Cooper’s Appointment Powers
Passes NC House in 70–36 Vote.”
the legislature voted to shrink: “Rebuked Twice by Supreme Court, North Carolina Republicans
Are Unabashed,” New York Times, May 27, 2017.
“American democracy”: Quoted in Purdy, “North Carolina’s Partisan Crisis.”
Baron de Montesquieu pioneered: Baron von Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
American Creed: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American
Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), pp. 3–4.
“The Democratic negotiating position”: David Faris, “It’s Time for Democrats to Fight Dirty,” The
Week, December 1, 2016.
“doing little to stop him”: Dahlia Lithwick and David S. Cohen, “Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight
Like Republicans,” New York Times, December 14, 2016.
“lacks legitimacy”: Quoted in Daniella Diaz and Eugene Scott, “These Democrats Aren’t Attending
Trump’s Inauguration,” CNN.com, January 17, 2017.
“legitimate president”: Quoted in Theodore Schleifer, “John Lewis: Trump Is Not a ‘Legitimate’
President,” CNN.com, January 14, 2017.
Nearly seventy House Democrats: Michelle Goldberg, “Democrats Are Finally Learning How to
Fight Like Republicans,” Slate, January 19, 2017.
“take a page”: Faris, “It’s Time for Democrats to Fight Dirty.” Also Graham Vyse, “Democrats
Should Stop Talking About Bipartisanship and Start Fighting,” The New Republic, December
15, 2016.
“Everything should be a fight”: Michelle Goldberg, “The End Is Nigh,” Slate, May 16, 2017.
http://wral.com/
http://wral.com/
http://wral.com/
https://www.ncsbe.gov/about-us
http://cnn.com/
http://cnn.com/
“my greatest desire”: Daniella Diaz, “Rep. Maxine Waters: Trump’s Actions ‘Leading Himself’ to
Impeachment,” CNN.com, February 6, 2017.
Impeachment talk picked up: Goldberg, “The End Is Nigh.”
“I don’t see it that way”: Ibid.
when the opposition fights dirty: See Laura Gamboa, “Opposition at the Margins: Strategies
Against the Erosion of Democracy in Colombia and Venezuela,” Comparative Politics 49, no. 4
(July 2017), pp. 457–77.
The strike lasted two months: Ibid., p. 466.
All three strategies had backfired: Laura Gamboa, “Opposition at the Margins: The Erosion of
Democracy in Latin America,” PhD Dissertation, Department of Political Science, University
of Notre Dame (2016), pp. 129–51.
they eroded the opposition’s public support: Ibid., pp. 102–7.
Opposition strategies in Colombia: Ibid.
a power grab not unlike Chávez’s: Gamboa, “Opposition at the Margins: Strategies Against the
Erosion of Democracy in Colombia and Venezuela,” pp. 464–68.
This made it more difficult: Ibid., pp. 468–72.
black-led nonviolent protest: Omar Wasow, “Do Protests Matter? Evidence from the 1960s Black
Insurgency,” unpublished manuscript, Princeton University, February 2, 2017.
A profound distrust: “Interview with President Ricardo Lagos,” in Democratic Transitions:
Conversations with World Leaders, eds. Sergio Bitar and Abraham F. Lowenthal (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), p. 85.
Exiled Socialist leader Ricardo Lagos: Ibid., p. 74.
They began to meet regularly: Ibid.
Christian Democratic leader Patricio Aylwin: “Interview with President Patricio Aylwin,” in Bitar
and Lowenthal, Democratic Transitions, pp. 61–62.
“Group of 24”: Ibid.
National Accord: Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, pp. 271–72.
The pact formed the basis: “Interview with President Ricardo Lagos,” p. 83.
“consensus politics”: Ibid.
leaders developed a practice: Peter Siavelis, “Accommodating Informal Institutions and Chilean
Democracy,” in Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America, eds. Gretchen
Helmke and Steven Levitsky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) pp. 40–48.
Pinochet’s 1980 constitution: Ibid., p. 49.
Aylwin also negotiated: Ibid., pp. 48–49.
“helped stave off”: Ibid., p. 50.
political scientists have proposed: See, for example, Nathaniel Persily, ed., Solutions to Political
Polarization in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
http://cnn.com/
The Republican Party: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and
the Erosion of American Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Mann and
Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks; Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics; Michael
Barber and Nolan McCarty, “Causes and Consequences of Polarization,” in Persily, Solutions to
Political Polarization in America.
This hollowing out: Nathaniel Persily, “Stronger Parties as a Solution to Polarization,” in Persily,
Solutions to Political Polarization in America, p. 123.
“sugar high of populism”: Jeff Flake, Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive
Politics and a Return to Principle (New York: Random House, 2017), p. 8.
conservative party reform: Daniel Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Christian Democratic Union: Charles Maier, “The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for
Stability in Twentieth-Century Western Europe,” American Historical Review 86, no. 2, pp.
327–52.
German conservatism: Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, pp. 172–333.
“unassailable” anti-Nazi credentials: Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two
Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 270. Some figures in the
party’s early years had links to the Nazi regime, leaving the party always the subject of
criticism on this front.
“An old world has sunk”: Noel Cary, The Path to Christian Democracy: German Catholics and the
Party System from Windthorst to Adenauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996),
p. 147.
The CDU offered a clear vision: Geoffrey Pridham, Christian Democracy in Western Germany
(London: Croom Helm, 1977), pp. 21–66.
a “Christian” society: Ibid., p. 32.
“The close collaboration”: Quoted in ibid., pp. 26–28.
Both Bernie Sanders and some moderates: Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, “Back to the Center,
Democrats,” New York Times, July 6, 2017; Bernie Sanders, “How Democrats Can Stop Losing
Elections,” New York Times, June 13, 2017; also see Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity
Liberalism,” New York Times, November 18, 2016.
Mark Penn and Andrew Stein: Penn and Stein, “Back to the Center, Democrats.” Also Mark Lilla,
“The End of Identity Liberalism.”
“The simple fact of the matter”: Danielle Allen, “Charlottesville Is Not the Continuation of an Old
Fight. It Is Something New,” Washington Post, August 13, 2017.
The intensity of partisan animosities: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Today’s racially tinged partisan polarization: Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American
Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2016), p. 613.
economic changes of the last few decades: Katherine Kramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural
Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2016), p. 3.
“welfare queens”: Ian Haney Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
a social policy agenda: Gosta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
“family policy”: Paul Krugman, “What’s Next for Progressives?,” New York Times, August 8, 2017.
America’s expenditures on families: Ibid.
Democrats could consider: Harold Wilensky, American Political Economy in Global Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 225.
we are under no illusions: For an example of when this has worked, see the revisionist account of
the New Deal coalition by Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment.
Surely the Board knows what democracy is: E. B. White, “The Meaning of Democracy,” The New
Yorker, July 3, 1943.
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Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Fateful Alliances
Chapter 2: Gatekeeping in America
Chapter 3: The Great Republican Abdication
Chapter 4: Subverting Democracy
Chapter 5: The Guardrails of Democracy
Chapter 6: The Unwritten Rules of American Politics
Chapter 7: The Unraveling
Chapter 8: Trump Against the Guardrails
Chapter 9: Saving Democracy
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
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