The Fate of Democracy In America
Two weeks before the 2020 elections, I wrote an article entitled “American Democracy at Risk.” That piece focused on the analysis of two Harvard political science professors (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt) contained in their 2018 book entitled “How Democracies Die.” In that book they described the evolution of democracies into authoritarian states. They also recognized in Donald Trump all of the earmarks of an authoritarian leader. At that time, however, they did not perceive any danger of our nation’s descending into an authoritarian state. Their views, however, decidedly turned more pessimistic when they witnessed the response of Republican politicians to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. In an interview with Michele Goldberg, Professor Ziblatt admitted, “We didn’t consider or call the Republican Party an authoritarian party” and “we did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.” The two professors have now written a new book entitled “The Tyranny of the Minority” in which they acknowledge that the vast majority of Republican politicians on both the state and federal levels have become “Trumpized.”
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt credit the January 6th Capitol siege by MAGA adherents as the turning point for the Republican party, it was undoubtedly less telling than the actions that took place over the next 30 days when the members of Congress were called upon to consider an Article of Impeachment of President Trump. Their conclusions were confirmed again this week in an article written by McKay Coppins in The Atlantic excerpting portions of his new biography of Mitt Romney whose term in the Senate expires at the end of next year. In Coppins’ article Senator Romney is quoted as saying that “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” Jamelle Bouie in his column in The New York Times suggests that Romney simply used “the Constitution” as a euphemism for “democracy.”
According to Coppins, Romney concedes that Republicans, like himself, began siding with Trump initially to place themselves in a position to try to influence his actions for the betterment of the nation. When that rationale proved unworkable, many continued their support of Trump simply to maintain their position of power. For having done so, Romney accuses them of “putting their political ambitions ahead of the best interests of the nation.” Romney further points out that some continue to support Trump simply out of sheer fear for their own physical safety and that of their family members. In this connection he confesses that after making remarks unfavorable to Trump at a rally held in his home state, he was besieged with cries of outrage and threats of physical harm. As a result he was prompted to hire a security detail costing him $5,000 a day.
As pointed out by Levitsky and Ziblatt in The Tyranny of the Minority, the “Trumpization” of Republicans has not been confined to the U.S. Congress. Many Republican politicians at the state level have been forced out of office as a result of their opposition to Trump. More importantly, virtually all of those states controlled by Republicans have gerrymandered their state and federal election districts to minimize the effective voting power of Democrats and have enacted changes to their voting laws to discourage and even prevent voting by minorities. Recent examples of their anti-democratic actions include:
Florida’s passing legislation that convicted felons who have served their jail sentences can’t vote until they pay all court fees assessed against them even though an amendment to the state’s constitution unconditionally restored their right to vote;
The Alabama legislature has refused to redraw its highly discriminatory Congressional districting map even after being ordered to do so by the U.S. Supreme Court;
Texas has limited its largest county (Harris) with 4,731,143 residents to a single mail ballot drop box; and
The Wisconsin legislature is considering impeaching the newly-elected Democratic member of its Supreme Court even though she hasn’t even considered a single case. Her sin was criticizing the state’s highly-gerrymandered election districts while running for election.
As detailed above, Republican politicians appear determined to move toward an authoritarian model, much in the same way that Italy did in the 1920s and Hungary and Turkey have done in recent years. The seeds of this problem have always existed in the United States owing to the fact that only some of our nation’s founding fathers adhered to the belief that the government should be guided by the wishes of all of its citizens. At the same time, others asserted that the direction of the nation should be determined by its elites, contending that most of the nation’s citizens are incapable (either through intellectual incapacity or indifference) of making responsible decisions.
It has always been recognized that the U.S. Constitution is a porous document and provides little protection against a slide into authoritarianism. Benjamin Franklin, when asked if our federal government was a republic or a monarchy, is reported to have responded that “it is a republic, if you can keep it.” While the Civil War was fought to bring this issue to a close, it only partially (and temporarily) achieved a resolution. Even with the addition of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, that danger has persisted.That’s because the conflict was always both an economic as well as a political struggle. Simply stated, when democratic governments become dysfunctional and are unable to provide for the economic needs of the governed, there is a natural tendency for the people to turn to an autocrat to address their needs.
Our democratic system of government was placed under great pressure during the Great Depression. Fortunately, FDR was a strong leader who led the nation out of the Depression and World War II and back to prosperity. He was followed by a series of other strong leaders who helped restore the nation’s economy, culminating with Lyndon Johnson who addressed many of the political issues left unresolved by the Civil War. Thus, at the conclusion of the Johnson administration the nation was at least temporarily put back onto a path toward “a more perfect union.”
Despite the tumult of the Nixon, Ford and Carter years the nation remained economically and politically healthy. Its problems, however, began to reappear in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. Reagan embraced “supply-side economics” (cutting the corporate income tax rate from 70% to 50%) which his economic advisors claimed would spur economic growth to the benefit of all Americans. Unfortunately, not every American benefited from the nation’s economic growth during the Reagan years. Supply-side economics is based upon the dubious assertion that by cutting business taxes and regulations, business enterprises would reap higher profits which would enable them to expand and thereby provide more and better-paying jobs. Thus, in theory, the benefits of supply-side economic policy would inure to all Americans.
This was and is an economic fantasy. Each time it has been tried, it resulted in increased federal deficits and a transfer of wealth from the nation’s poorest citizens to its wealthiest. Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, refers to supply-side economics as a “Zombie” concept because every time it has been tried (and it was tried again in the administrations of George W. Bush [cutting the corporate tax rate from 50% to 35%] and Donald Trump [cutting it from 35% to 21%]), it has had the same disastrous effects. As a result, even though the nation’s economy grew by over 400% from 1983 to 2016, the percentage of the nation’s wealth held by middle-income families declined from 32% to 17% and that of lower-income families declined from 7% to 4%. In short, although the nation’s economy thrived, the level of economic dissatisfaction among middle and lower-income Americans was also rapidly increasing.
To be sure, businesses enterprises require capital in order to expand; but in a “free market economy” business enterprises only expand to fill a perceived economic need. If there are NO customers ready, willing and able to buy their goods or services, businesses will NOT invest even unexpectedly-acquired resources. They will either pocket those resources or (as history has shown) invest a portion of them in the campaigns of politicians who will further assist them with pro-business economic policies. This symbiotic relationship between the Republican Party and the American business community is what has propelled Republican politics for the past 40+ years.
The shift of wealth from working class families to the families of business owners caused by Republican economic policies over the preceding four decades understandably resulted in growing dissatisfaction by all working class Americans. Their desperation was a major factor enabling the election of Donald Trump who focused his presidential campaign upon their dissatisfaction. I won’t recite here how the Republican Party became the Party of Trump. You can find a description of that saga set forth in my article entitled “The Painful Birth of the Party of Trump.”
Although Donald Trump appealed to disaffected Americans with his pledge to “Make America Great Again,” he only made their economic plight far worse in so many ways, including:
He passed a huge corporate tax cut placing a $2 trillion strain on the federal government, thereby essentially frustrating efforts during his own administration to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure (Remember his many invocations of “Infrastructure Week”);
He badly mishandled the Covid-19 Pandemic causing the U.S.’s efforts to curb the effects of the virus to be among the worst among the world’s developed nations while increasing the national debt by another $6 trillion;
He attacked the credibility of the press causing the American public to lose faith in a media system that had served it well for over 200 years;
He praised autocratic governments around the world adding to the doubts that working class Americans harbor about the benefits of our democratic system;
Over the past three years he has maintained a constant campaign against the security of our electoral system generating further doubts about our democratic form of government;
He threatened and cajoled a majority of Republican politicians to join in his slanderous efforts to disparage democracy as practiced in our nation; and
Since leaving office he has waged a campaign against the integrity of governmental agencies claiming that they have been “weaponized” against him and that those agencies will soon direct their punitive efforts at all Americans.
Two recent articles have posited diametrically opposing views regarding the likely fate of democracy in America. Like Levitsky and Ziblatt, they both proceed from the conclusion that the Republican Party has largely abandoned democracy as a viable system of government. The first was written by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” Ben-Ghiat is a student of authoritarian regimes and believes that the Republican Party has become “an autocratic party operating in a democracy”, hollowed out and in its “bunker stage.”
Specifically, she asserts that it has no political agenda other than to desperately attempt to hold onto power with any means at its disposal. In support of this view, she points to the fact that Republicans have only won the popular vote in one presidential election during this century and that they even lost the popular vote in the 2022 mid-term election. She also finds their party “so out of step with popular desires” that “things can only go one way for Republicans”; namely, to ignominy. She thus happily concludes that “we will get through this and our democracy will be strengthened as a result.”
A more pessimistic view of the fate of democracy in America was recently voiced by David French in an op-ed article published in The New York Times. French proceeds from the premise that America, which has always been a “melting pot” of humanity, suffers from the fact that the vast majority of its population remains ill-informed about the workings of their own government. French also asserts that “civic ignorance isn’t confined to U.S. history or the Constitution. American voters are also wildly ignorant about one another. A 2015 survey found that Democrats believe Republicans are far older, far wealthier and more Southern than they truly are. Republicans, in turn, believe Democrats are far more atheist, Black and gay than the numbers indicate.”
In French’s view the past success of our democratic system lies in the fact that until now our politicians have generally acted in a responsible manner. When our democratic system was being attacked by Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, our politicians denounced their actions. Even as Trump sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Congress was able reject Trump’s Big Lie and confirm the election of Joe Biden. French, therefore, concludes that while “democracy requires both an informed public and a basically honest political class, it can only muddle through without one or the other.” At the same time, he warns that “when it loses both, the democratic experiment is in peril.”
That is where he now finds the U.S. as Republican politicians have seemingly given up on honesty and embraced concerted attacks on the truth. Yes, Mike Pence refused to capitulate to the urging of Donald Trump to block confirmation of President Biden’s election, but the political landscape has changed for the worse since January 6, 2021. The vast majority (147 out of 215) Republican members of the House objected to Biden’s election and ten of those that didn’t have now been replaced by MAGA Republicans. Similarly, five moderate Republicans in the Senate either didn’t seek re-election in 2022 or lost their seats in that election. The result is that even though Trump failed to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election he is likely to receive greater support for a similar effort should he try to do so in 2024. This is particularly sobering thought considering the fact that Republicans now control the House of Representatives.
Can these two seemingly contrasting views be reconciled? Professor Ben-Ghiat seems to focus (perhaps myopically) on the fact that neither Donald Trump (the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party) nor his Party seems to have an agenda for improving the lives of working class Americans who constitute an overwhelming majority of individuals who vote in presidential elections. Thus, in her view, it seems unlikely that Trump or any other Republican candidate can win a presidential election.
That assessment appears fallacious for at least three reasons: First, there is no basis for assuming that Americans cast their ballots in a rational manner. Indeed, as David French pointed out, the vast majority of American voters don’t even know the political agendas of the candidates running for president. Instead, they simply premise their voting decisions on their perceptions of the candidates’ personal qualities, such as their honesty and integrity, their willingness to champion their constituents’ needs and their combative nature. This largely explains the popularity of Donald Trump. Second, the absence of a political agenda seems to gives no credence to the apparent willingness of right wing media and Republican politicians to ignore (or at least distort) the truth. This point was dramatically made clear in the case brought by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation suit against Fox News in which it was revealed that Fox knowingly distorted its political coverage so as to appeal to its TV audience.
Lastly, it disregards the fact that the Electoral College tends to tilt elections in favor of Republican candidates. That’s because presidential elections are based on electoral votes, not popular votes; and the number of electoral votes of each state is equal to its number of House and Senate members. Since states with small populations (which are predominantly controlled by Republicans) have the same number of senators as states with large populations, a Republican presidential candidates can win with as little as six million fewer popular votes than Democratic candidates. Although Trump lost the 2020 election by roughly seven million votes, a swing of less than 70,000 votes in five battleground states would have provided him with a victory, much in the same way that he achieved a significant Electoral College victory in the 2016 election even while losing the popular vote by roughly three million votes.
There is yet another problem that must be considered. Even if President Biden wins another decisive victory against former President Trump in the 2024 election, that does not necessarily put an end to the authoritarian leanings of the Republican Party. In Trump’s own words, the Republican Party has already done much to “rig the system” for federal elections. This includes co-opting a large segment of the public media as well as a majority of the justices of the Supreme Court. In addition, it has made a concerted effort to elect state election officials. As noted above, they have also changed the voting laws in the sates they control so as to suppress voting by minorities who tend to support Democratic candidates. While these efforts may not be sufficient to assure the re-election of Donald Trump, they may very well prove sufficient to enable other Republicans with less political baggage than Trump to succeed. Accordingly, it is far too premature to be writing obituaries for the Republican Party or for celebrating the defeat of autocracy in America.