American Democracy At Risk
When Benjamin Franklin was asked whether the government described in our Constitution was a republic or a monarchy, he reportedly replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin’s concern that the United States could one day evolve into a more authoritarian state was not, and is not, irrational. In fact, this very theme is now being evoked by both political parties, with the Trump Campaign proclaiming that the forthcoming election is between “Trump and socialism” and the Biden Campaign countering that the election is between “Trump and democracy.”
My article entitled “Fear of Socialism,” addressed the over-blown fear that the adoption of government-run social welfare programs would be the first step along an inevitable path leading to authoritarianism. This leaves the concern over whether a president, like Trump, with authoritarian tendencies could transform our nation’s government into an autocracy. There have been literally dozens of democratic governments that have been succeeded by autocratic regimes. This has mostly occurred in underdeveloped countries whose governments were overthrown by an armed revolution. In the last 100 years, however, it has also occurred in industrialized countries with well-established democratic governments. Specifically, the democratic governments in Germany and Italy became dictatorships following World War I; and more recently in Venezuela, Hungary, Turkey and The Philippines where elected officials transformed themselves into dictators. What caused this to happen and is it likely to happen in America?
In 2018, two Harvard political science professors (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt), alarmed by the election of Donald Trump, wrote a book entitled “How Democracies Die” in which they describe how the governments of each of those nations slowly evolved from democracies into autocracies. Relying on those experiences, they analyze the events that led up to Trump’s election and the dangers posed to our nation’s democratic system by a Trump presidency. Like Ben Franklin, Levitsky and Ziblatt recognize that democracies, in trying to accommodate and reconcile the beliefs and agendas of a diverse population, are particularly fragile institutions that require a tradition of compromise and adherence to political norms. In addition, political parties must play an important “gate-keeping” function in preventing the ascension of would-be autocrats.
Levitsky and Ziblatt recognized in Donald Trump four characteristics of a potentially autocratic leader: (1) his disregard for democratic principles; (2) his denial of the legitimacy of his political opponents; (3) his toleration and encouragement of violence; and (4) his readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents and the press. During his 2016, he declined to commit to the outcome of the election, asserting that the system was rigged against him. He also asserted that Mrs. Clinton was a criminal and branded her as “Crocked Hillary.” In addition, he encouraged his followers to physically attack his critics and even offered to pay their legal bills. Lastly, he led the cheers of “lock her up” in reference to Secretary Clinton, and he advocated a relaxation of the standards for bringing civil litigation against news organizations that criticized him. Their concerns about Trump were undoubtedly heightened when, as President, he dismissed James Comey as the head of the FBI after Comey declined to provide him with assurance of his personal loyalty.
America had previously successfully prevented other would-be autocrats (like Henry Ford, Huey Long, Charles Lindbergh and George Wallace) from reaching the White House. Levitsky and Ziblatt attribute Trump’s success to both the prevailing conditions as well as a failure on the part of the Republican Party to perform the critical gatekeeping function that had been played by political parties for more than 200 years. The seeds for Trump’s election were planted several decades before when the Republican Party, as described in my article entitled “Partisan Politics,” embarked upon a plan to establish permanent Republican control of the U.S. government. That plan called for the establishment of a symbiotic relationship between the Party and corporate America and wealthy individuals. For its part, the Party would pursue policies that would channel the nation’s growing wealth to these political allies in return for their economic support for the election of Republican candidates. The Supreme Court’s weakening of the nation’s campaign financing laws in its Citizens United decision was a critical element in this plan. Other facets of this strategy entailed (a) tax cuts weighed heavily in favor of their supporters, (b) reductions in business regulations that reduced corporate profits and (c) cuts in social welfare programs.
The success of the Party’s effort are undeniable. By 2016, the top 1% of Americans earned 22% of all U.S. income, a figure which is identical to the division of income in plutocratic Russia. In addition, 90% of American wage earners were experiencing little or no improvement in their earnings. This had largely been the product of a devastating recession followed by eight years of Republican efforts to block the Obama administration attempts to rebuild the nation’s economy. As a result, when Trump ran for President in 2016 there was not only a high level of social dissatisfaction, but also a frustration with a dysfunctional federal government. These events set the stage for a Washington outsider with a wholly unfounded reputation for business success to step in and claim that he alone could remedy the nation’s ills.
Henry Ford, an equally well-known personality with an unparalleled career of business success, had tried to run for President in 1924, but failed to win the Republican nomination. His problem was one of timing. At the time, presidential candidates were selected by party leaders in “smoked-filled rooms.” This represented an insurmountable barrier for an outsider without governmental experience. Over the course of the next 70 years the Republican and Democratic parties would go on to utilize national conventions to choose their presidential nominees. Later, they would institute non-binding state primaries to select the delegates to their conventions and even later, they made the results of those primaries binding. As a result, by 2016 the winner of most of the party’s state primary elections was virtually assured of becoming the party’s nominee. That, however, was less true within the Republican party whose leaders still retained significant control over the final selection of the party’s presidential nominee. But even this safeguard against the selection of Trump proved unavailing.
There were also two other factors that worked in Trump’s favor. First, there were sixteen other Republicans seeking their party’s presidential nomination in 2016. This meant that a candidate who could win 20% to 30% of the votes could generally place first in each state’s primary. Since some states awarded all of their convention delegates to the winner and the remaining states would award most of their convention delegates to the winner, this greatly worked in favor of a candidate, like Trump, with national name recognition. This advantage enabled Trump to bring to the 2016 Republican national convention a virtually insurmountable lead in the number of delegates committed to him.
Equally important was the composition of the Republican Party’s electoral base, the vast majority of which consisted of rural and suburban voters who were attracted by Trump’s anti-immigration and anti-free trade positions. Thus, by the time the convention was convened in August 2016, a sizable portion of the Party’s political base was fully enamored with Trump, posing a serious question as to whether they would even support another candidate, like John Kasich or Ted Cruz, had the Party’s leaders chosen one of them over Trump. These factors made it difficult for the Party’s leaders to reject Trump’s nomination.
To be sure, politicians are generally loath to relinquish the leadership of their party to an outsider, like Trump. Levitsky and Ziblatt explain that this only occurs in two specific situations. The first is when they believe that they can control the outsider. Going into the 2016 election the Republican Party enjoyed a majority in both Houses of Congress. That, along with the Constitution, existing laws from the post-Nixon period constraining the actions of a president and a plethora of existing political norms, provided them with reasonable assurance that Trump’s autocratic tendencies could be held in check. The second is that they shared a number of important political goals with Trump which meant that they could count on him to go along with cutting taxes and regulations on businesses and appointing conservative judges. Thus, in KGB parlance, he could serve as a “useful idiot,” ignoring the fact that he might already be playing that role for someone else.
With the Republican nomination sealed, Trump set out to win the general election. His ultimate victory, an extremely narrow one in which he received almost 3,000 less votes than his opponent, was the product of a near perfect storm. Working in his favor were the Electoral College which favors Republican candidates, the third-party candidacy of Jill Stein which siphoned away just enough Democratic votes to cause Clinton to lose some key battleground states, the Russian disinformation campaign which caused many Democratic voters to sit out the election, three years of sustained Republican efforts to destroy Secretary Clinton’s reputation, James Comey’s eleventh hour disclosure of a re-opening of an investigation of Secretary Clinton email practices and Secretary Clinton’s own miscalculations regarding the likely outcome in certain key swing states.
Following his inauguration, Trump immediately set out to consolidate his tenuous hold on the presidency. Using an “autocrat’s handbook” (undoubtedly, a gift from Vladimir Putin), Trump immediately began vilifying the mainstream media, damning such news organizations as “enemies of the people” and purveyors of “fake news.” He made a number of key personnel changes within the Department of Justice and the FBI, as well as the U.S. Intelligence agencies. With personal loyalty to himself a critical job requisite, he appointed four generals to key positions within his administration, perhaps operating under the misapprehension that their military training would compel them to follow the orders of their Commander-in-Chief. When some of his initial appointees, like Reince Priebus, Rex Tillerson, Seam Spicer, Gary Cohn, and Generals Mattis, Kelly and McMaster, did not display a sufficient degree loyalty, Trump unceremoniously replaced them with more compliant individuals.
A significant early threat to his presidency came from the investigation by Robert Mueller, a Special Counsel appointed by Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein, to look into efforts by the Russians to assist the Trump Campaign. This investigation had been allowed to proceed as a result of the recusal of Jeff Sessions, Trump’s initial Attorney General. After many failed efforts to badger Sessions to resign, Trump simply dismissed him and appointed William Barr as his replacement. Barr had auditioned for the job on Fox News, expounding his view of the “Unitary Executive,” a dubious Constitutional interpretation affording the president virtually unfettered powers. With Barr safely on board, Trump paid little attention to governmental formalities like complying with Congressional subpoenas and employing appropriations only for the purposes specified by the Congress.
Two important elements in every autocrat’s rise to power is to secure control of the “referees” and to bribe or intimidate those within the government into compliance with the autocrat’s agenda. The term “referees” refers to the courts and legal authorities who judge the propriety of the actions of government and its citizens. They can be used both to shield the autocrat and his/her lieutenants from legal challenges and as a weapon against the autocrat’s adversaries. As Rachel Maddow wrote in her book “Blowout”, Putin governs Russia adhering to the dictator’s creed, “To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law.” Trump applied these same techniques, having his Attorney General intervene in the impeachment efforts against him as well as the criminal actions against his associates Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. He also pressed the Department of Justice to commence investigations of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton as well as those former FBI and Justice Department employees involved in the initiation of the Mueller Investigation.
For some time, threats, bribery and intimidation have have been major facets of Trump’s modus operandi. He has had a long history of threatening and initiating legal proceedings against those who oppose him. You need look no further than the twenty plus women who, during the 2016 campaign, had claimed to have been sexually assaulted by him. He is also perhaps best known for the phrase, “You’re fired.”. In this connection, he also forced out a number of employees within the Departments of Defense, State and Homeland Security. All of this took place before Senate Republicans, without taking any evidence, chose not to remove him from office in his impeachment proceeding.
Contrary to Senator Collins’ prediction, the impeachment proceeding did not chasten the President. He then went on to fire eleven Executive Branch Departmental Inspector Generals, replacing them with party loyalists who knew better than to pass information on to the Congress that had not been cleared by the White House. He also removed his well-regarded Director of National Intelligence, replacing him with John Ratcliffe who understood that he was not provide candid national security assessments to the Congress and the American people. He also summarily dismissed those governmental employees who had provided evidence in the House impeachment proceeding and demanded that the Department of Justice initiate investigations into his political opponents. Were that not enough, he muzzled the CDC so it could not provide candid advice to the states that might reflect adversely on his administration’s handling of the pandemic. He did all of this while faced with a forthcoming election, which only leaves one to wonder how he might act if re-elected.
Levitsky and Ziblatt point out that the U.S. Constitution, in reality, is a very “porous and ambiguous” document and that constitutions virtually identical to ours have failed to prevent autocratic takeovers in other countries. The very essence of a democratic government is that people with differing views will come together and discuss their positions in good faith and with open minds and proceed in a manner that will be in the best interest of all of the governed. That simply cannot take place when politicians treat their adversaries as enemies to be vanquished and when they choose to break accepted norms and traditions to achieve their objectives. What is required of political leaders in a democracy, according to Levitsky and Ziblatt, is mutual “tolerance and restraint,” traits which are alien to Trump whom they characterize as a “serial norm breaker.” As such, he poses a serious threat to our nation’s democratic form of government.
In one respect the coronavirus pandemic has been a God-send because it has exposed Trump as an inept, unfeeling, egotistical con man with no ability to lead the nation in a crisis. Before the pandemic took root in our country, the President was well on his way to a second term, bolstered by an expanding economy and a booming stock market. While the nation is now projected to suffer over 400,000 deaths from the virus (the IHME is now projecting 394,693 deaths by February 1, 2021), the President’s colossal failure in arresting the spread of the virus and protecting the nation’s economy appear to have derailed his re-election efforts. It’s not just that his poll numbers are down, but an impressive list of former Republican governors, U.S. Senators and cabinet members have spoken out in opposition to his re-election. This is not the sort of thing Republican officials are programmed to do. In addition, there are at least two groups of former Republican strategists and one group of veterans that are attacking the President in television advertisements and on TV talk shows. Unlike Democrats who concentrate their attacks on the President’s record and policy positions, these groups are viciously attacking the President’s persona.
While it may be premature to predict the President’s own political demise, the Five Thirty-Eight website is now projecting the President’s chances of being re-elected are down to a scant 13%. This, however, does not mean that American democracy is no longer at risk. At this point in the 2016 election, Trump’s chances of winning were deemed even lower. Perhaps more importantly, as explained in “Partisan Politics,” the Republican Party has spent the last forty years reshaping America’s governmental structure and those efforts remain in place. In addition, Donald Trump’s presidency has advanced the Republican strategic plan through significant reductions in business regulations and the 2017 tax legislation, both of which further channel the nation’s wealth into the hands of the wealthy. Trump has also appointed over 200 federal judges who were nominated with the intention that they would support the party’s political agenda. Together with Trump, It has also shattered many of the traditional norms which have enabled democracy to survive in this country.
Thus, even though the Democrats may win back both the Senate and the White House in the forthcoming election, the Republican Party remains well-positioned to move this country further toward a plutocratic government (not unlike the one that currently exists in Russia). Even after a Trump defeat in the 2020 election, remaining in place will be a relatively small cadre of wealthy individuals with the economic wherewithal to assure the elections of complicit state and federal executives and legislators. With the further assistance of a judiciary that has been infused with a large number of Republican appointees, they will be able to cause the nation’s governments to be run for their own benefit. Thus, Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people and for the people” may yet perish from the earth.