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 Hugo 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.
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.
A comparative approach 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 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.
politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.
These two norms undergirded American democracy for most of the 20th
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.
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.
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 is that we can find the rhymes before it is too late.
- This is an extract from How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors of government at Harvard University, published in the US by Penguin
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