How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

  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 contra
st, 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.

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  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.