When Fox News and The New York Times agree with one another, you know something’s wrong.
In November 2018, that unlikely scenario came to pass. After aggressive questioning from CNN reporter Jim Acosta during a press conference, then-White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders suspended Acosta’s White House press credential. CNN sued to have his access restored, and both Fox News and The New York Times filed amicus briefs in support of CNN.
Though unthinkable not all that long ago, this incident is merely one of many in which President Donald Trump and his administration have broken traditional U.S. political norms. From attacking journalists’ integrity to questioning the legitimacy of U.S. elections, Trump has repeatedly crashed against the guardrails that constrain power-hungry politicians and keep democracy on track. For years, those guardrails functioned in the shadows as unwritten rules most Americans simply assumed their leaders were following. However, with Trump’s ascendency, they took on a new importance.
Two years ago, Harvard Government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt brought those guardrails to the forefront with their political science bestseller How Democracies Die. Warning that today’s democracies seldom fall “at the hands of men with guns” but instead are broken down by “elected governments themselves,” Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the United States is not unique. It may be one of the world’s oldest and wealthiest democracies, but they believe the United States is not immune to the same factors that have caused democratic backsliding in countries ranging from Venezuela to Turkey.
With the 2020 election approaching, it is time to take stock of the threats to our democracy. In the two years since the release of How Democracies Die, Trump has continued to challenge political norms and exhibit traits that Levitsky and Ziblatt classify as authoritarian. Despite this pressure, however, our democratic norms have bent, but not broken. After all, fewer than two weeks after it was revoked, the White House backed down and permanently restored Acosta’s credential.
In the most crucial instances, America’s institutions have constrained Trump. In all likelihood, they will continue to do so through 2020 or 2024. But the day Trump leaves office is not the day our democracy is healed. His presidency is a symptom, not the underlying cause, of the deep divisions plaguing American politics today. The real question, then, is not whether our democracy is still alive, but this: Can we break out of the tribal politics of the present moment, or will we be paralyzed by polarization for the foreseeable future?
Trouble at the Top?
Like so many other things in the Trump presidency, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ resignation was announced with a tweet. In a move that many saw coming, Trump forced him out the day after the 2018 midterm elections, and Matthew Whitaker, then Sessions’ chief of staff and a relatively unknown figure to the public, took over the Justice Department.
At the time, the department was overseeing Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into the president’s possible coordination with Russia during the 2016 election. Citing conflicts of interest with his work on the campaign, Sessions had recused himself from oversight of the investigation, instead leaving it in the hands of career Justice Department official and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Whitaker declined to do the same, despite advice from ethics officials that recusal would be appropriate out of “an abundance of caution” due to his prior statements criticizing the probe.
Sessions’ firing is a textbook example of what Levitsky and Ziblatt call “capturing the referees,” or attempting to co-opt an independent investigative or regulatory institution to do an individual politician’s own bidding. It is one of three key ways outlined in their book by which would-be authoritarians try to consolidate their power. Another is “sidelining key players,” which is when a politician keeps individuals, such as opposition leaders, the media, and anyone else who is a potential threat to his or her political power, out of politics. Finally, autocratic-leaning politicians sometimes try to “tilt the playing field,” or change electoral rules to benefit themselves. How Democracies Die contains many examples from the first year of Trump’s presidency where he attempted all three.
Beyond working to capture the referees, Trump has continued working to sideline key players. His administration’s effort to remove Acosta’s press pass is only one example of action taken against one key player in a constitutional democracy, the free press. Sarah Repucci, senior director for research and analysis at the democracy-focused NGO Freedom House, told the HPR that she and her colleagues have been closely tracking anti-press rhetoric from the White House and are “very worried” about its potential consequences.
Finally, Trump has also tried to tilt the electoral playing field in his favor. He has called for tighter Voter ID laws, despite little evidence of widespread voter fraud. Furthermore, he said that Congress should take up no measures on election security that do not include Voter ID requirements, even though those election security measures could help prevent Russian interference in the 2020 election.
It is important to note that none of Trump’s aforementioned actions are illegal — the president is constitutionally empowered to appoint whomever he wants as attorney general, and he does not have to grant press credentials to any journalist — and not everyone agrees norm-breaking behavior is a sign of democratic breakdown. In an interview with the HPR, Claremont-McKenna government professor Charles Kesler argued that though Trump has violated “modern, liberal norms of government,” he has “not violated important constitutional norms.”
Furthermore, many of America’s institutions have stood their ground. In an interview with the HPR, Levitsky noted that that the United States has a “much more independent set of referees, particularly in the judiciary,” than many other democracies, and Repucci remarked that Freedom House has been “really impressed with the performance of the media under the Trump administration, continuing to investigate cases and continuing to report accurately.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s controversial Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was disbanded after encountering bipartisan opposition to its requests for cooperation from state election officials. And though, in Levitsky’s words, Trump has “gotten the Attorney General to basically behave as a political hack,” he did not prevent the release of the Mueller report, nor did he keep Mueller from testifying before Congress.
The 2018 midterm elections have also constrained Trump. “The United States has a much, much more robust, better financed, better organized, more electorally-viable opposition” than many other democracies, said Levitsky. Democratic oversight in the House of Representatives has opened the president up to scrutiny beyond that which he faced in his first two years in office. For example, the House Oversight committee has investigated stays by government officials at Trump hotels that could constitute violations of the Emoluments Clause.
The evidence, then, is clear: The president has sometimes pushed against the constitutional guardrails constraining his power, but he has not broken them down. Whether through Trump’s forbearance, outside pressure, or their own strength, America’s democratic institutions are still standing.
“North-Carolina-ization”
Though Trump’s actions may be particularly alarming, he is not an aberration. His governing style — using the complete constitutional power of his office in an all-out war against his political opponents — is the continuation of a trend that has been building in American politics over many years.
Denying your opponent’s legitimacy, congressional obstructionism, changing the senate rules, ignoring a Supreme Court nomination — these are all examples of what legal scholar Mark Tushnet calls “constitutional hardball,” defined by Levitsky and Ziblatt as “playing by the rules but pushing against their bounds and ‘playing for keeps.’” And they have all happened with increasing frequency in American politics since the turn of the century.
The opposites of constitutional hardball are Levitsky and Ziblatt’s norms of “mutual toleration,” or respect between the two major political parties that allows them to work together and accept electoral losses, and “forbearance,” or the exercise of political power with restraint. Though those values once undergirded the U.S. political system — think of the unwritten two-term limit for presidents or the norm that unified executive and legislative branches should not work together to pack the court — respect for their importance has been in decline for some time.
That decline has recently accelerated, and many remaining vestiges of forbearance have disappeared. The impeachment investigation and trial, for example, were conducted in a thoroughly partisan manner by both sides and increased the likelihood of future weaponization of the impeachment process. State governments have actively resisted the Trump administration’s policies. Major Democratic presidential candidates advocate for dramatic Supreme Court overhauls. And this past year saw the longest government shutdown in history.
Levitsky called this shift toward constitutional hardball “the North Carolina-ization of American democracy.” A purple state with a heavily gerrymandered GOP-led legislature, the North Carolina governor’s mansion switched from red to blue in 2016. In the aftermath of the election, the outgoing governor refused to concede for almost a month, and the state legislature took numerous actions to weaken the incoming governor, including granting itself the power to review gubernatorial appointments and shrinking the size of the state’s court of appeals. Neither of those actions were illegal, but they pointed to a deepening partisan animosity and a willingness to use whatever means necessary to subvert, rather than work with, the other party. That same attitude has come to Washington.
A Political Prognosis
In today’s America, 88 percent of voters are frustrated by the levels of “uncivil and rude behavior” among politicians. 84 percent agree that “behavior that used to be seen as unacceptable is now accepted as normal behavior.” And 87 percent agree that “compromise and finding common ground should be the goal for leaders.” Yet despite these high levels of support for bipartisan ideals, voters are not willing to stand up and hold politicians accountable to them. Instead, 83 percent of voters want politicians willing to “stand up to the other side.”
Intense societal polarization gives politicians license to play constitutional hardball with the opposition, leading to dysfunction in Washington. Kesler believes it would be harmful for “the current level of partisanship and disagreement [to] fester and deepen indefinitely” because it is “not good for the country or for the Constitution” — he says polarization has left the United States in a “cold civil war.”
Unfortunately, the answer is not likely to come from the nation’s leaders. “It’s only in certain moments that politicians are forced to choose between their short-term political interests and the good of the country. … Most of the time, we expect politicians to simply pursue their interests,” said Levitsky. With functioning institutions and no immediate threat of backsliding towards authoritarianism, and with constituents unwilling to punish norm-breaking politicians, it is no surprise that politics has taken a nasty turn.
Many hope that the 2020 election will ultimately reduce political polarization. Levitsky and Ziblatt write that the best-case outcome is for President Trump to fail politically and in a way that unites public opinion against hardball politics. Kesler simply hopes that by the 2020 election, the public tires of partisan bickering and “finally says … that’s enough, it’s going to be this way. And then you have a kind of realignment of political forces and you have a kind of new normal that the public brings in.”
Unfortunately, neither Levitsky nor Kesler seem to believe that this change is on the horizon. Levitsky stands by his book’s 2018 prediction of the North Carolina model as the most likely outcome in the post-Trump era, saying that “[constitutional hardball] has come even more into view” over the past two years. Kesler voices similar opinions, saying that 2020 “probably will be another narrow victory which will prolong the agony between the parties for another four years.”
To be clear, hardball politics is not authoritarianism. Elections are not rigged, and the voters still decide the direction of the country. But if no change is made, governance will further deteriorate. Fewer bills will pass, no compromises will be reached, and the United States’ global standing will continue to nosedive. It will also be more difficult to implement reforms to combat other threats to our democracy, such as partisan gerrymandering, special interest groups, or foreign aggression.
Much of the responsibility for preventing such a scenario falls on voters. According to Repucci, voters must “get involved.” She says that “people need to see their own role in the democratic process,” whether that is through “communicating with their representatives or volunteering at the local level or getting involved with politics itself.” Most importantly, voters must demand that politicians reject tactics like capturing the referees, sidelining key players, and tilting the playing field.
The United States’ democratic tradition has remained strong for more than 230 years, but that does not make it indestructible. Yes, our institutions have held firm, and the dire warnings of authoritarianism are overblown. Today’s United States is not tomorrow’s North Korea. But norms of forbearance and mutual toleration have all but disappeared from Washington, and neither politicians nor voters seem likely to bring them back any time soon.
Our democracy is not dying, but it has a disease. Without effective treatment — a decrease in partisan polarization and a return to a more civil, norm-based politics — inter-party trust and effective government will continue to disappear. Constitutional hardball is an attractive vice, to be sure. We all love to see our own side win. Now, we have to ask ourselves: Is the thrill of victory worth the pain of dysfunction? Only when our answer is “no” can our democracy become healthy again.
Image Credit: Daryan Shamkali
