How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

  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.

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  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 necess
ary 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 li
kely to view them as mortal enemies.

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  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.