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Chapter 6
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How Democracies Die, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
American Tyranny
Authoritarianism vs. Democratic Norms
Extremism and Gatekeeping
Polarization and Inclusive Democracy
Global and Historical Patterns
Summary
Analysis
After Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016, Republican senators refused to consider Obama’s replacement candidate, Merrick Garland. This was an unprecedented break with the Senate’s tradition of forbearance. As soon as Donald Trump came into office, the Republican-led Senate pushed through his conservative nominee Neil Gorsuch instead. But this is only part of a much longer process of unraveling democratic norms in the U.S.—which started long before Donald Trump.
While it’s technically legal for the Senate majority to leave a Supreme Court seat open indefinitely, it clearly violates the spirit of the law—which is that the Senate is supposed to actively confirm qualified justices and reject unqualified ones, regardless of partisan affiliation. Levitsky and Ziblatt start with this extraordinary moment of anti-democratic behavior in Congress, then pivot to looking at the historical context that brought U.S. democracy to such a fragile place. This is similar to their plan in the book as a whole: they start with Trump’s election, but then spend the book explaining the context that made his assault on democratic norms possible.
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Newt Gingrich won election to the House on his third try, in 1978. He viewed politics as “a war for power.” While establishment Republicans still held to norms of bipartisanship and civility, Gingrich attacked the Democrats with exaggerated rhetoric, claiming they were “trying to ‘destroy our country.’” He founded a political action committee to encourage other Republicans to use the same tactics. As he rose up in the ranks to become Speaker of the House, the rest of his party started to closely resemble him.
Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that by putting Gingrich on the ballot, the Republican Party clearly failed in its gatekeeping responsibilities. Gingrich’s view of politics is at odds with the norms of toleration and forbearance, which sustained American democracy through most of the 20th century. Toleration relies on viewing one’s opponents as legitimate rivals for power who also have the country’s best interests in heart—and not enemies who will “destroy our country.” Forbearance depends on treating politics as a fair, democratic game, and not “a war for power.” By spreading these extreme tactics, Gingrich clearly contributed to the decline in democratic norms in the U.S.
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Gingrich was taking advantage of a new extreme in public polarization. During his rise, politicians started viewing the other side as immoral and illegitimate. During Bill Clinton’s administration, Republican senators dramatically expanded use of the filibuster and started investigating presidential scandals that didn’t exist.
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When Republicans won a landslide election and Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1994, the party completely abandoned forbearance in the hopes of stopping Democrats any way they could. They politicized the impeachment process by impeaching President Clinton without meeting the traditional standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” After Gingrich left office, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay continued Gingrich’s tactics. For instance, he created “a pay-to-play system” for lobbyists to buy legislation.
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Even though President George W. Bush promised unity and bipartisanship, polarization only increased during his term. He moved further to the right, and the Democrats filibustered Republican legislation and rejected Bush’s judicial appointments. The Republican-led House refused to exercise oversight of Bush’s actions. While states ordinarily redraw congressional districts every ten years (after each Census), Republicans decided to gerrymander Texas’s House districts in 2003. Democrats organized two unsuccessful walkouts, and Republicans won six new seats in Texas during the 2004 midterms.
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Mutual toleration also broke down during the Bush administration. After 9/11, conservative media commentators like Ann Coulter accused Democrats of treason and anti-Americanism. In 2008, conservative media painted Barack Obama as a treasonous, communist, Muslim terrorist. Troublingly, Republican politicians started echoing the same intolerant ideas.
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After the 2008 election, both Obama and his Republican opponent John McCain encouraged Americans to embrace civility and unity. But they didn’t heed the call: the Tea Party formed, largely to oppose Obama’s right to the presidency. It argued that Obama threatened American democracy and wasn’t a “real American” (meaning a white Christian). Republican politicians like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Rudy Giuliani openly questioned whether Obama loved his country.
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Meanwhile, the “birther movement” started questioning Obama’s citizenship. Its most famous proponent was Donald Trump, who learned how intolerance could win him political support. Extremists like Henry Ford and Father Coughlin have challenged presidents’ legitimacy throughout U.S. history, but the attacks on Obama were the first to win wide acceptance among American voters and major party leaders.
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During Obama’s second term, the Republican Party increasingly embraced the Tea Party. It rejected mutual toleration by arguing that Democrats threatened the existence of the U.S., and it used this threat to justify rejecting forbearance, too. During the Great Recession, Republicans banded together to obstruct Obama’s entire legislative agenda. They filibustered as many bills between 2007 and 2012 as the Senate did between 1919 and 1979, and they rejected as many Obama court nominees as possible.
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The Democrats and President Obama responded by breaking more norms. The Democrats banned filibusters for most presidential nominees, and when Congress wouldn’t pass legislation, Obama started ruling through executive actions, which violated forbearance. Republican-led state governments started simply ignoring these orders, undermining the federal government’s authority.
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Levitsky and Ziblatt cite three key events that show how severely forbearance collapsed during the Obama administration. First, in 2011, Republicans decided to freeze debt ceiling negotiations and threaten defaulting on the nation’s debt as leverage to pass wide spending cuts. Second, in 2015, forty-seven Republican senators wrote to the Iranian government to try to sabotage the nuclear deal Obama negotiated. Finally, the Senate refused to consider Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland for the open Supreme Court seat. This hasn’t happened once since Reconstruction. In short, the Republicans were taking the guardrails off American democracy.
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Extreme polarization is the underlying condition that has enabled this extreme breakdown of democratic norms. Democrats and Republicans aren’t just two parties: they’re now two different “way[s] of life.” Many partisan Americans wouldn’t want their children to marry someone from the other party, and most are afraid of the other party.
This “intense partisan animosity” is a result of how the parties have realigned since the 1960s. In the past, both parties used to be “big tents” that included diverse groups and ideologies. They disagreed on some policy issues, but when it came to race—the most volatile issue in U.S. politics—both parties had pro-civil rights and pro-segregation factions. Then, President Johnson embraced the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Presidents Nixon and Reagan campaigned on thinly veiled racial rhetoric. Many Southern white voters switched to the Republicans, and many newly enfranchised Black voters and Northern white liberals started going for the Democrats.
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This realignment has created regional, ideological, racial, and religious divisions between the parties, where there used to be overlap. The South became reliably Republican and the Northeast reliably Democratic. Conservatives became reliably Republican and liberals reliably Democratic, and each side became more ideologically extreme and less willing to compromise. But mutual toleration has particularly eroded because the parties now represent different “social, ethnic, and cultural bases.” Enfranchised Black voters and new immigrants since the 1960s almost all support the Democratic Party, while white evangelical Christians have become a key Republican constituency. Race and religion are often more polarizing than policy issues like taxes.
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Levitsky and Ziblatt ask why the Republicans have broken political norms far more often than the Democrats. Partisan media like Fox News and talk radio are more powerful on the right, and conservative commentators help support the Republican party line by attacking politicians who reject it. Conservative interest groups like Americans for Tax Reform force Republican congresspeople to pledge extreme positions (like never to raise taxes). Money from billionaires like the Koch family has flooded into such groups, many of which reject compromise.
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The GOP’s key constituency—white Protestants—used to be the dominant group in American politics and society, but is now a shrinking minority. Feeling that their status is under threat, white conservatives increasingly embrace a hostile, apocalyptic political style. They define themselves as “real Americans,” unlike Democrats, which explains why they want to “Take Our Country Back” and “Make America Great Again.” Republicans have learned that it’s advantageous for them to abandon norms of toleration and forbearance and instead treat politics as a war against their Democratic enemies.
