Donald Trump’s presidency represented an acute crisis for American democracy, but Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that this crisis didn’t come out of the blue: instead, it was actually a continuation of longer-term political trends. Since the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century, polarization has steadily worsened and democratic norms have steadily weakened in the U.S. Even absent a Trump presidency, this trend poses a fundamental threat to American democracy because it encourages both sides to seek power by any means necessary. Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude that, as American democracy has become more inclusive, it has also become more polarized, which has accelerated its decline. This means that, in the 21st century, Americans’ great political challenge is overcoming polarization without sacrificing inclusivity.
The U.S. electorate and political parties have become more and more polarized since the 1960s due to a variety of social, political, and economic factors. First, the two major parties realigned in response to the civil rights movement. Both parties used to be “big tents” that included voters with diverse political views. But after the Democrats supported civil rights legislation in the 1960s, segregationists and white supremacists in the South started switching to the Republican Party. This created new ideological and geographical allegiances in the parties: liberals and the North went primarily for the Democrats, while conservatives and the South went for the Republicans. Rather than having to compromise and disagree productively, as in the past, the parties started to clash and grow intolerant. This tendency has become more and more extreme over time. Next, after the 1960s, the demographics of the American electorate also started to change. Black citizens finally got to exercise their voting rights, and they joined unprecedented numbers of new immigrants from Latin America and Asia in voting for the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the Republican Party remained mostly white and Protestant. Because they belong to different “social, cultural, and ethnic bases,” Democratic and Republican voters decreasingly empathize with one another and increasingly see one another as enemies. Two other developments have also accelerated these changes: independent media and the influence of money in politics. Independent partisan media has profited by pushing increasingly extreme views, and new rules that allow unlimited political donations have forced many politicians to appease ultra-wealthy donors in order to finance their campaigns. Both of these factors have loosened the traditional party establishments’ control over candidates and their policy positions—particularly among the Republicans, who, in the authors’ view, have become much more extreme than the Democrats.
In response to the U.S.’s increasing diversity and growing polarization, its two major political parties have increasingly turned against democratic norms. From the early 1900s to the 1960s, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, Democrats and Republicans largely held to democratic norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. For instance, they refrained from using impeachment or the filibuster for partisan gain. Of course, this was only possible because both parties agreed to build a racially exclusionary political system based on white supremacy—neither wanted Black people to vote or participate as equals in the political process. Since neither party wanted a truly inclusive democracy, both worked together fruitfully, without feeling that the other side threatened their existence. But this started to change in the 1970s. Newt Gingrich played a key role in overturning democratic norms: he argued that the Republicans should treat politics as “a war for power,” not a democratic process to produce effective policy. He started rejecting mutual toleration and describing Democrats as treasonous enemies. As these tactics won Gingrich attention and support, other Republican politicians followed suit. Since Gingrich’s tenure as Speaker of the House, both parties have largely abandoned norms of toleration and forbearance. Instead, they have started taking extreme, anti-democratic measures to win power. For instance, both sides started overusing the filibuster to block the opposing party’s legislation, and the Republicans impeached President Clinton without accusing him of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the traditional standard for impeachment. By 2008, some Republicans were accusing Barack Obama of being foreign-born, Muslim, and ineligible for the presidency. They claimed to want a “real American”—meaning a white Protestant—in the Oval Office. This shows how polarization around race and religion has led Americans to stop viewing their political opposition as legitimate, equal citizens. This polarization set the stage for democratic norms to collapse and Donald Trump to win the presidency on an extreme, authoritarian platform. In the future, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, similar behavior will become more and more frequent unless Americans manage to overcome polarization.
To reduce polarization, restore trust in politics, and slowly rebuild democratic norms, the authors argue, the United States needs another great realignment so that people can find common ground across racial, ethnic, religious, and regional lines. In the past, this common ground was racial exclusion, but that model is no longer viable. The Democrats’ challenge is to win white working-class conservative voters, not by deemphasizing minority constituents and replicating the racial exclusion of the past, but instead by implementing effective universal social policies that will win them a new, broader coalition. If they succeed, Levitsky and Ziblatt insist, the United States can achieve its great promise of building the first truly inclusive, equitable, multiethnic democracy in the modern world.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Polarization and Inclusive Democracy ThemeTracker
Polarization and Inclusive Democracy Quotes in How Democracies Die
Is our democracy in danger? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking. We have been colleagues for fifteen years, thinking, writing, and teaching students about failures of democracy in other places and times—Europe’s dark 1930s, Latin America’s repressive 1970s. We have spent years researching new forms of authoritarianism emerging around the globe. For us, how and why democracies die has been an occupational obsession.
But now we find ourselves turning to our own country. Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States—but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places. We feel dread, as do so many other Americans, even as we try to reassure ourselves that things can’t really be that bad here. After all, even though we know democracies are always fragile, the one in which we live has somehow managed to defy gravity.
In short, Americans have long had an authoritarian streak. It was not unusual for figures such as Coughlin, Long, McCarthy, and Wallace to gain the support of a sizable minority—30 or even 40 percent—of the country. We often tell ourselves that America’s national political culture in some way immunizes us from such appeals, but this requires reading history with rose-colored glasses. The real protection against would-be authoritarians has not been Americans’ firm commitment to democracy but, rather, the gatekeepers—our political parties.
In short, most Republican leaders ended up holding the party line. If they had broken decisively with Trump, telling Americans loudly and clearly that he posed a threat to our country’s cherished institutions, and if, on those grounds, they had endorsed Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump might never have ascended to the presidency. […] We have no way of knowing how Republican voters would have split. Some, perhaps even most, of the base might still have voted for Trump. But enough would have been swayed by the image of both parties uniting to ensure Trump’s defeat.
What happened, tragically, was very different. Despite their hemming and hawing, most Republican leaders closed ranks behind Trump, creating the image of a unified party. That, in turn, normalized the election. Rather than a moment of crisis, the election became a standard two-party race, with Republicans backing the Republican candidate and Democrats backing the Democratic candidate.
Although some elected demagogues take office with a blueprint for autocracy, many, such as Fujimori, do not. Democratic breakdown doesn’t need a blueprint. Rather, as Peru’s experience suggests, it can be the result of a sequence of unanticipated events—an escalating tit-for-tat between a demagogic, norm-breaking leader and a threatened political establishment.
[…]
Many [demagogues] do eventually cross the line from words to action. This is because a demagogue’s initial rise to power tends to polarize society, creating a climate of panic, hostility, and mutual distrust. The new leader’s threatening words often have a boomerang effect. If the media feels threatened, it may abandon restraint and professional standards in a desperate effort to weaken the government. And the opposition may conclude that, for the good of the country, the government must be removed via extreme measures—impeachment, mass protest, even a coup.
Polarization can destroy democratic norms. When socioeconomic, racial, or religious differences give rise to extreme partisanship, in which societies sort themselves into political camps whose worldviews are not just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain. Some polarization is healthy—even necessary—for democracy. And indeed, the historical experience of democracies in Western Europe shows us that norms can be sustained even where parties are separated by considerable ideological differences. But when societies grow so deeply divided that parties become wedded to incompatible worldviews, and especially when their members are so socially segregated that they rarely interact, stable partisan rivalries eventually give way to perceptions of mutual threat. As mutual toleration disappears, politicians grow tempted to abandon forbearance and try to win at all costs. This may encourage the rise of antisystem groups that reject democracy’s rules altogether. When that happens, democracy is in trouble.
In the 150-year span between 1866 and 2016, the Senate never once prevented the president from filling a Supreme Court seat. On seventy-four occasions during this period, presidents attempted to fill Court vacancies prior to the election of their successor. And on all seventy-four occasions—though not always on the first try—they were allowed to do so.
The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion. The stability of the period between the end of Reconstruction and the 1980s was rooted in an original sin: the Compromise of 1877 and its aftermath, which permitted the de-democratization of the South and the consolidation of Jim Crow. Racial exclusion contributed directly to the partisan civility and cooperation that came to characterize twentieth-century American politics.
[…]
The process of racial inclusion that began after World War II and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the United States. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction.
The traditions underpinning America’s democratic institutions are unraveling, opening up a disconcerting gap between how our political system works and long-standing expectations about how it ought to work. As our soft guardrails have weakened, we have grown increasingly vulnerable to antidemocratic leaders.
Donald Trump, a serial norm breaker, is widely (and correctly) criticized for assaulting America’s democratic norms. But the problem did not begin with Trump. The process of norm erosion started decades ago—long before Trump descended an escalator to announce his presidential candidacy.
In the early 1990s, Gingrich and his team distributed memos to Republican candidates instructing them to use certain negative words to describe Democrats, including pathetic, sick, bizarre, betray, antiflag, antifamily, and traitors. It was the beginning of a seismic shift in American politics.
[…]
Though few realized it at the time, Gingrich and his allies were on the cusp of a new wave of polarization rooted in growing public discontent, particularly among the Republican base. Gingrich didn’t create this polarization, but he was one of the first Republicans to exploit the shift in popular sentiment. And his leadership helped to establish “politics as warfare” as the GOP’s dominant strategy.
If, twenty-five years ago, someone had described to you a country in which candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the government of stealing the election or establishing a dictatorship, and parties used their legislative majorities to impeach presidents and steal supreme court seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania. You probably would not have thought of the United States.
Behind the unraveling of basic norms of mutual tolerance and forbearance lies a syndrome of intense partisan polarization. […] Over the last quarter century, Democrats and Republicans have become much more than just two competing parties, sorted into liberal and conservative camps. Their voters are now deeply divided by race, religious belief, geography, and even “way of life.”
Unlike the Democratic Party, which has grown increasingly diverse in recent decades, the GOP has remained culturally homogeneous. This is significant because the party’s core white Protestant voters are not just any constituency—for nearly two centuries, they comprised the majority of the U.S. electorate and were politically, economically, and culturally dominant in American society. Now, again, white Protestants are a minority of the electorate—and declining. And they have hunkered down in the Republican Party.
[…]
The struggle against declining majority status is, in good part, what fuels the intense animosity that has come to define the American Right. Survey evidence suggests that many Tea Party Republicans share the perception that the country they grew up in is “slipping away, threatened by the rapidly changing face of what they believe is the ‘real’ America.”
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.
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.
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.
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 likely to view them as mortal enemies.
Reducing polarization requires that the Republican Party be reformed, if not refounded outright. First of all, the GOP must rebuild its own establishment. This means regaining leadership control in four key areas: finance, grassroots organization, messaging, and candidate selection. Only if the party leadership can free itself from the clutches of outside donors and right-wing media can it go about transforming itself. This entails major changes: Republicans must marginalize extremist elements; they must build a more diverse electoral constituency, such that the party no longer depends so heavily on its shrinking white Christian base; and they must find ways to win elections without appealing to white nationalism, or what Republican Arizona senator Jeff Flake calls the “sugar high of populism, nativism, and demagoguery.”
The reforms of the 1960s gave Americans a third chance to build a truly multiethnic democracy. It is imperative that we succeed, extraordinarily difficult though the task is. As our colleague Danielle Allen writes:
“The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economies that empower all have been achieved.”
This is America’s great challenge. We cannot retreat from it.
