How Democracies Die

  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.

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  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.

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  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, p
aradoxically, 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.

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  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-i
mposed 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.