How Democracy Die ; Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

CONTENTS 

■ 

Introduction 1 

1: Fateful Alliances 11 

2: Gotekeeping in America 33. 

3: The Great Republican Abdication 53 

4:.Subverting Democracy 72 

5: The Guardrails of Democracy 97 

6: The Unwritten Rules of American Politics 118 

7: The Unravelling 145 

8: Trump's First Year: An Authoritarian 

Report Card 176 

9: Saving Democracy 204 

Acknowledgments 233 

Endnotes 235 

Index 301

Introduction

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 Ameri-cans, 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 man-aged to defy gravity. Our Constitution, our national creed of freedom and equality, our historically robust middle class, our high levels of wealth and education, and our large, diversified private sector—all these should inoculate us from the kind of democratic breakdown that has occurred elsewhere. Yet, we worry. American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, the intelligence services, and ethics offices. America may not be alone. Scholars are increasingly concerned that democracy may be under threat worldwide—even in places where its existence has long been taken for granted. Populist governments have assaulted democratic institutions in Hungary, Turkey, and Poland. Extremist forces have made dra-matic electoral gains in Austria, France, Germany, the Nether-lands, and elsewhere in Europe. And in the United States, for the first time in history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president. What does all of this mean? Are we living through the decline and fall of one of the world's oldest and most successful democracies? At midday on September 11, 1973, after months of mounting tensions in the streets of Santiago, Chile, British-made Hawker Hunter jets swooped overhead, dropping bombs on La Moneda, the neoclassical presidential palace in the center of the city. As the bombs continued to fall, La Moneda burned. President Salvador Allende, elected three years earlier at the head of a leftist coali-tion, was barricaded inside. During his term, Chile had been wracked by social unrest, economic crisis, and political paralysis. Allende had said he would not leave his post until he had finished his job—but now the moment of truth had arrived. Under the under the command of GeneralAugustoPinochet,Chile's armed forces were seizing control of the country. Early in the morning on that fateful day, Allende offered defiant words on a national radio broadcast, hoping that his many supporters would take to the streets in defence of democracy. But the resistance never material-ized. The military police who guarded the palace had abandoned him; his broadcast was met with silence. Within hours, President Allende was dead. So, too, was Chilean democracy. This is how we tend to think of democracies dying: at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, coups d'état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic break-downs. Democracies in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Re-public, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay all died this way. More recently, military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra 

in 2014. In all these cases, democracy dissolved in spectacular fashion, through military power and coercion. But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dra-matic but equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime min-isters who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps. In Venezuela, for example, Hugo Chivez was a political outsider who railed against what he cast as a corrupt govern-ing elite, promising to build a more "authentic" democracy that used the country's vast oil wealth to improve the lives of the - poor. Skillfully tapping into the anger of ordinary Venezuelans, Many of whom felt ignored or mistreated by the established political parties, Chivez was elected president in 1998. As a woman in Chavez's home state of Barinas put it on election night, "Democracy is infected. And Chávez is the only antibi-otic we have." When Chávez launched his promised revolution, he did so democratically. In 1999, he held free elections for a new constituent assembly, in which his allies won an overwhelming majority. This allowed the chavistas to single-handedly write a new constitution. It was a democratic constitution, though, and to reinforce its legitimacy, new presidential and legislative elections were held in 2000. Chávez and his allies won those, too. Chávez's populism triggered intense opposition, and in April 2002, he was briefly toppled by the military. But the coup failed, allowing a triumphant Chávez to claim for himself even more democratic legitimacy. It wasn't until 2003 that Chávez took his first clear steps to-ward authoritarianism. With public support fading, he stalled an opposition-led referendum that would have recalled him from office—until a year later, when soaring oil prices had boosted his standing enough for him to win. In 2004, the government blacklisted 'those who had signed the recall petition and packed the supreme court, but Chávez's landslide reelection in 2006 allowed him to maintain a democratic veneer. The chavista regime grew more repressive after 2006, closing a major television station, arresting or exiling opposition politicians, judges, and media figures on dubious charges, and eliminating presidential term limits so that Chávez could remain in power indefinitely: When Chávez, now dying of cancer, was reelected in 2012, the contest was free but not fair: Chavismo controlled much of the media and deployed the vast machinery of the government in its favour. After Chávez's death a year later, his successor, Nico-lás Maduro, won another questionable reelection, and in 2014, His government imprisoned a major opposition leader. Still, the opposition's landslide victory in the 2015 legislative elections seemed to belie critics' claims that Venezuela was no longer democratic. It was only when a new single-party constituent assembly usurped the power of Congress in 2017, nearly two decades after Chávez first won the presidency, Venezuela was widely recognized as an autocracy. This is how democracies now die. Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means. Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected gov-ernments themselves. Like Chávez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box. The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. With a classic coup d'état, as in Pinochet's Chile, the death of a democracy is immediate and evident to ail. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed, imprisoned, or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped. On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally dem-ocratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are "legal," in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or ac-cepted by the courts. they may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy—making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process

Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship: Citizens continue to criticise the government but often find themselves facing tax or_ other legal troubles. This shows public confusion. People do not immediately realise what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy. In 2011, when a Latinobar6metro survey asked Venezuelans to rate their own country from 1 ("not at all dem-ocratic") to 10 ("completely democratic"), 51 percent of respon-dents gave their country a score of 8 or higher. Because there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously "crosses the line" into dictatorship, nothing may set off society's alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy's erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible. How vulnerable is American democracy to this form of back-sliding? The foundations of our democracy are certainly stron-ger than those in Venezuela, Turkey, or Hungary. But are they strong enough? Answering such a question requires stepping back from daily headlines and breaking news alerts to widen our view, drawing lessons from the experiences of other democracies around the world and throughout history. Studying other democracies in crisis allows us to better understand the challenges facing our own democracy. For example, based on the historical experi-ences of other nations, we have developed a litmus test to help identify would-be autocrats before they come to power. We can learn from the mistakes that past democratic leaders have made in opening the door to would-be authoritarians—and, conversely, from the ways that other democracies have kept

extremists out of power. A comparative approach also reveals how elected autocrats in different parts of the world employ remarkably similar strategies to subvert democratic institutions. As these patterns become visible, the steps toward breakdown grow less ambiguous—and easier to combat. Knowing how citizens in other democracies have successfully resisted elected autocrats, or why they tragically failed to do so, is essential to those seeking to defend American democracy today. We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extrem-ists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into 

the mainstream, democracy is imperilled. Once a would-be authoritarian makes it to power, democra-cies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them? Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organised citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, consti-Tutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become pol-itical weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and "weaponizing" the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electôral route to authoritarianism is that democracy's assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it. America failed the first test in November 2016, when we elected a president with a dubious allegiance to democratic norms. Donald Trump's surprise victory was made possible not only by public disaffection but also by the Republican Party's failure to keep an extremist demagogue within its own ranks from gain-ing the nomination. . How serious is the threat now? Many observers take comfort in our Constitution, which was designed precisely to thwart 

and contain demagogues like Donald Trump. Our Madison-ian system of checks and balances has endured for more than two centuries. It survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and Watergate. Surely, then, it will be able to survive Trump. We are less certain. Historically, our system of checks'ànd balances has worked pretty well—but not, or not entirely, be-caùse of the constitutional system designed by the founders. 

Democracies work best—and survive longer—where consti-tutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms. Two basic norms have preserved America's checks and balances in ways we have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one an-other as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives. These two norms undergirded American democracy for most of the twentieth century. Leaders of the two major parties accepted one another as legitimate and resisted the temptation to use their temporary control of in-stitutions to maximum partisan advantage. Norms of toleration and restraint served as the soft guardrails of American democracy, helping it avoid the kind of partisan fight to the death that has destroyed democracies elsewhere in the world, including Europe in the 1930s and South America in the 1960s and the 1970s. Today, however, the guardrails of American democracy are weakening. The erosion of our democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s. By the time Barack Obama became president, many Republicans, in par-ticular, questioned the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals and had abandoned forbearance for a strategy of winning by any means necessary. Donald Trump may have accelerated this process, but he didn't cause it. The challenges facing Ameri-Can democracy run deeper? The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarisation—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture. America's efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarisation. And if one thing is clear From studying breakdowns throughout history, it's that extreme polarisation can kill democracies. There are, therefore, reasons for alarm. Not only did Ameri-cans elect a demagogue in 2016, but we did so at a time when the norms that once protected our democracy were already coming unmoored. But if other countries' experiences teach us that that polarisation can kill democracies, they also teach us that breakdown is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Draw-ing lessons from other democracies in crisis, this book suggests strategies that citizens should, and should not, follow to defend our democracy. Many Americans are justifiably frightened by what is hap-pening to our country. But protecting our democracy requires more than just fright or outrage. We must be humble and bold. We must learn from other countries to see the warning signs— Fateful Alliances and recognize the false alarms. We must be aware of the fateful missteps that have wrecked other democracies. And we must 

see how citizens have risen to meet the great democratic crises of the past, overcoming their own deep-seated divisions to avert breakdown. History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes. The promise of history, and the hope of this book, is that we can find the rhymes before it is too late.

Fateful Alliances and recognize the false alarms. We must be aware of the fateful missteps that have wrecked other democracies. And we must see how citizens have risen to meet the great democratic crises of the past, overcoming their own deep-seated divisions to avert breakdown. History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes. the the promise of history, and the hope of this book, is that we can find the rhymes before it is too late. A quarrel had arisen between the Horse and the Stag, so the Horse came to a Hunter to ask his help to take revenge on the Stag. The Hunter agreed but said: "If you desire to conquer the Stag, you must permit me to place this piece of iron between your jaws, so that I may guide you with these reins, and allow this saddle to be placed upon your back so that I may keep steady upon you as we follow the enemy." The Horse agreed to the conditions, and the Hunter soon saddled and bridled him. Then, with the aid of the Hunter, the Horse soon overcame the Stag and said to the Hunter: "Now get off, and remove those things from my mouth and back" "Not so fast, friend," said the Hunter. "I have now got you under a bit and spur and prefer to keep you as you are at present." —"The Horse, the Stag, and the Hunter," Aesop 's Fables On October 30, 1922, Benito Mussolini arrived in Rome at 10:55 A.M. in an overnight sleeping car from Milan. He had mn

12 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

been invited to the capital city by the king to accept Italy's premiership and form a new cabinet. Accompanied by a small group of guards, Mussolini first stopped at the Hotel 

Savoia And then, wearing a black suit jacket, black shirt, and matching black bowler hat, walked triumphantly to the king's Quirinal Palace. Rome was filled with rumours of unrest. Bands of Fascists—many in mismatched uniforms—roamed the city's streets. Mussolini, aware of the power of the specta-cle, strode into the king's marble-floored residential palace and greeted him, "Sire, forgive my attire. I come from the battle-field." This was the beginning of Mussolini's legendary "March on Rome." The image of masses of Blackshirts crossing the Rubi-con to seize power from Italy's Liberal state became Fascist canon, repeated on national holidays and in children's school-books throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Mussolini did his part to enshrine the myth. At the last train stop before entering Rome that day, he had considered disembarking to ride into the city on horseback surrounded by his guards. Though the plan was ultimately abandoned, afterward he did a 11he could to bolster the legend of his rise to power as, in his own words, a "revolution" and "insurrection act" that launched a new Fascist epoch. The truth was more mundane. The bulk of Mussolini's Blackshirts, often poorly fed and unarmed, arrived only after 

he had been invited to become prime minister. The squads of Fascists around the country were a menace, but Mussolini's machinations to take the reins of state were no revolution. He used his party's 35 parliamentary votes (out of 535), divisions among establishment politicians, fear of socialism, and the threat of violence by 30,000 Blackshirts to capture the attention of the timid King Victor Emmanuel III, who saw in Mus-solini a rising political star and a means of neutralising unrest. With political order restored by Mussolini's appointment 

and socialism in retreat, the Italian stock market soared. Elder .statesmen of the Liberal establishment, such as Giovanni Gio-Litti and Antonio Salandra, found themselves applauding the turn of events. They regarded Mussolini as a useful ally. But not unlike the horse in Aesop's fable, Italy soon found itself under "bit and spur." Some version of this story has repeated itself throughout the world over the last century. A cast of political outsiders, includ-ing Adolf Hitler, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, came to power on the same path: from the inside, via elections or alliances with 

powerful political figures. In each instance, elites believed the invitation to power would contain the outsider, leading to a restoration of control by mainstream politicians. But their plans backfired. A lethal mix of ambition, fear, and miscalculation conspired to lead them to the same fateful mistake: willingly handing over the keys of power to an autocrat-in-the-making. Why dó seasoned elder statesmen make. this mistake? There are few more gripping illustrations than the rise of Adolf Hitler in January 1933. His capacity for violent insurrection was on display as early as Munich's Beer HallPutschof 1923—a surprise evening strike in which his group of pistol-bearing loyalists took control of several government buildings and a Munich beer ha 11 where Bavarian officials were meeting. The ill-conceived attack was halted by the authorities, and Hitler spent nine months in jail, where he wrote his infamous personal testament, Mein

14 NOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

Kampf. Thereafter, Hitler publicly committed to gaining power via elections. Initially, his National Socialist movement found few votes. The Weimar political system had been founded in 1919 by á prodemocratic coalition of Catholics, Liberals, and Social Democrats. But beginning in 1930, with the German economy reeling, the center-right fell prey to infighting, and the Communists and Nazis grew in popularity. The elected government collapsed in March 1930 amid the pain of the Great Depression. With political gridlock block-ing government action, the figurehead president, World War I hero Paul von Hindenburg, took advantage of a constitutional article giving the head of state the authority to name chan-cellors in the exceptional circumstance that parliament failed to deliver governing majorities. the aim of these unelected chancellors—and the president—was not only to govern but to sideline radicals on the left and right. First, Center Party economist Heinrich Briining (who would later flee Germany to become a professor at Harvard) attempted, but failed, to restore economic growth; his time as chancellor was short-lived. President von Hindenburg turned next to nobleman Franz von Papen,and then, in growing despondency, to von Papen's close friend and rival, former defence minister General Kùrt von Schleicher. But without parliamentary majorities in the Reich-stag, stalemate persisted. Leaders, for good reason, feared the next-election. Convinced that "something must finally give," a cabal of ri-valrous conservatives convened in late January 1933 and settled on a solution: A popular outsider should be placed at the head of the government. They despised him but knew that at least he had a mass following. And, most of all, they thought they could control him

FATEFUL ALLIANCES 15 

On January 30, 1933, vonPapen,one of the chief architects of the plan, dismissed worries over the gamble that would make Adolf Hitler chancellor of a crisis-ridden Germany with the reassuring words: "We've engaged him for ourselves.... Within two months, we will have pushed [him] so far into a corner that he'll squeal." A more profound miscalculation is hard to imagine. The Italian and German experiences highlight the type of "fateful alliance" that often elevates authoritarians to power. In any democracy, politicians will at times face severe challenges. Economic crisis, rising public discontent, and the electoral decline of mainstream political parties can test the judgement of even the most experienced insiders. If a charismatic outsider emerges on the scene, gaining popularity as he challenges the old order, it is tempting for establishment politicians who feel their control is unravelling to try to co-opt him. If an insider breaks ranks to embrace the insurgent before his rivals do, he can use the outsider's energy and base to outmanoeuvre his peers. And then, establishment politicians hope the insurgent can be redirected to support their own program. This sort of devil's bargain often mutates to the benefit of the insurgent, as a 11 iances provide outsiders with enough rerespectability to become legitimate contenders for power. In early 1920s Italy, the old Liberal order was crumbling amid grow-ing strikes and social unrest. The failure of traditional parties to forge solid parliamentary majorities left the elderly fifth-term prime minister. GiovanniGiolittidesperate, and against the wishes of advisors he called early elections in May 1921. With the aim of tapping into the Fascists' mass appeal,Giolitti decided to offer Mussolini's upstart movement a place on his electoral group's "bourgeois bloc" of Nationalists, Fascists,

lb HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

and Liberals. This strategy failed—the bourgeois bloc won less than 20 percent of the vote, leading to Giolitti's resignation. But Mussolini's place on the ticket gave his ragtag group the legitimacy it would need to enable its rise. Such fateful alliances are hardly confined to interwar Europe. They also help to explain the rise of Hugo Chávez. Venezuela had prided itself on being South America's oldest democracy, in place since 1958. Chávez, a junior military officer and the failed coup leader who had never held public office, was a political outsider. But his rise to power was given a critical boost from a consummate insider: ex-presidente RafaelCaldera,one of the founders of Venezuelan democracy. Venezuelan politics was long dominated by two parties, the centre-left Democratic Action and Caldera's centre-right So-cial Christian Party (known as COPEI). The two alternated in power peacefully for more than thirty years, a-Rd by the 1970s, Venezuela was viewed as a model democracy in a region plagued by coups and dictatorships. During the 1980s, 

however, the country's oil-dependent economy sank into a prolonged slump, a crisis that persisted for more than a decade, nearly doubling the poverty rate. Not surprisingly, Venezuelans grew disaffected. Massive riots in February 1989 suggested that the established parties were in trouble. Three years later, in February 1992, a group of junior military officers rose up against President Carlos AndrésPérez.Led by Hugo Chivez, the rebels called themselves `Bolivarians," after revered inde-pendence hero Simón Bolivar. The coup failed. But when the now-detained Chivez appeared on live television to tell his sup-porters to lay down their arms (declaring, in words that would become legendary, that their mission had failed "for now"), he became a hero in the eyes of many Venezuelans, particularly poorer ones. Following a second failed coup in November 1992,

FATEFUL ALLIANCES 17 

the imprisoned Chivez changed course, opting to pursue power via elections. He would need help. Although Ex-presidente Caldera Was a well-regarded elder statesman, his political career was waning in 1992. Four years earlier, he had failed to secure his party'spresidential nomi-nation, and he was now considered a political relic. But the seventy-six-year-old senator still dreamed of returning to the presidency, and Chivez's emergence provided him with a life-line. On the night of Chivez's initial coup, the former president stood up during an emergency joint session of congress and embraced the rebels' cause, declaring: 

It is difficult to ask the people to sacrifice themselves for freedom and democracy when they think that freedom and democracy are incapable of giving them food to eat, of preventing the astronomical rise in the cost of subsistence, or of placing a definitive end to the terrible scourge of corruption that, in the eyes of the entire world, is eating away at the institutions of Venezuela with each passing day. The stunning speech resurrected Caldera's political career. Having tapped into Chivez's anti system constituency, the ex-the president's public support swelled, which allowed him to make a successful presidential bid in 1993. Caldera's public flirtation with Chávez did more than boost his own standing in the polls; it also gave Chivez new credibility. Chivez and his comrades had sought to destroy their _country's thirty-four-year-old democracy. But rather than denouncing the coup leaders as an extremist threat, the former president offered them public sympathy—and, with it, an opening to mainstream politics.

18 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

Caldera also helped open the gates to the presidential palace for Chávez by dealing a mortal blow to Venezuela's established parties. In a stunning about-face, he abandoned COPEI, the party he had founded nearly half a century earlier, and launched an independent presidential bid. To be sure, the parties were already in crisis. But Caldera's departure and subsequent anti-the establishment campaign helped bury them. The party system collapsed after Caldera's 1993 election as anantipartyindepen-dent, paving the way for future outsiders. Five years later, it would be Chivez's turn. But back in 1993, Chivez still had a major problem. He was in jail, awaiting trial for treason. However, in 1994, now-President Caldera dropped all charges against him. Caldera's final act in enabling Chávez was literally opening the gates—of prison—for him Immediately after Chávez's release, a reporter asked him where he was going. "To power," he replied. Freeing Chávez was popular, andCalderahad promised such a move during the campaign. Like most Venezuelan elites, he viewed Chavez as a passing fad—someone who would likely fall out of public favour by the time of the next election. But in dropping all charges, rather than allowing Chivez to stand trial and then pardoning him,Caldera Elevated him, transforming the former coup leader overnight into a viable presidential candidate. On December 6, 1998, Chivez won the presidency, easily defeating an establishment-backed candidate. On inauguration day, Cal-dera, the outgoing president, could not bring himself to deliver the oath of office to Chivez, as tradition dictated. Instead, he stood glumly off to one side. Despite their vast differences, Hitler, Mussolini, and Chivez followed routes to power that share striking similarities. Not 

only were they all outsiders with a flair for capturing public at

FATEFUL ALLIANCES 19 

tention, but each of them rose to power because establishment-politicians overlooked the warning signs and either handed over power to them (Hitler and Mussolini) or, opened the door for them (Chivez). The abdication of political responsibility by existing leaders often marks a nation's first step toward authoritarianism. Years after Chivez's presidential victory, Rafael Caldera explained his mistakes simply: "Nobody thought that Mr. Chivez had even the remotest chance of becoming president" And merely a day after Hitler became chancellor, a prominent conservative who aided him admitted, "I have just committed the greatest stupidity of my life; I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in world history." Not all democracies have fallen into this trap. Some—including Belgium, Britain, Costa Rica, and Finland—have faced chal-lenges from demagogues but also have managed to keep them out of power. How have they done it? It is tempting to think This survival is rooted in the collective wisdom of voters. Maybe Belgians and Costa Ricans were simply more democratic than their counterparts in Germany or Italy. After all, we like to believe that the fate of a government lies in the hands of its citi-zens. If the people hold democratic values, democracy will be safe. If citizens are open to authoritarian appeals, then, sooner or later, democracy will be in trouble. This view is wrong. It assumes too much of democracy — that "the people" can shape at will the kind of government they possess. It's hard to find any evidence of majority support for authoritarianism in 1920s Germany and Italy. Before the Nazis and Fascists seized power, less than 2 percent of the population

20 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

were party members, and neither party achieved anything close to a majority of the vote in free and fair elections. Rather, solid electoral majorities opposed Hitler and Mussolini—before both men achieved power with the support of political insiders blind to the danger of their own ambitions. Hugo Chavez was elected by a majority of voters, but there is little evidence that Venezuelans were looking for a strong-man. At the time, public support for democracy was higher there than in Chile—a country that was, and remains, stably democratic. According to the 1998 Latinobarómetro survey, 60 percent of Venezuelans agreed with the statement "Democ-racy is always the best form of government," while only 25 per-cent agreed that "under some circumstances, an authoritarian government can be preferable to a democratic one." By contrast, only 53 percent of respondents in Chile agreed that "democracy is always the best form of government." Potential demagogues exist in all democracies, and occa-sionally, one or more of them strike a public chord. But in some democracies, political leaders heed the warning signs and take steps to ensure that authoritarians remain on the fringes, far from the centres of power. When faced with the rise of extrem-ists or demagogues, they make a concerted effort to isolate and defeat them. Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and espe-cially parties, serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy's gatekeepers. If authoritarians are to be kept out, they first have to be identi-fied. There is, alas, no foolproof advance warning system. Many 

authoritarians can be easily recognized before they come to

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power. lhey have a clear track record: Hitler led a failed putsch; -Chivez led a failed military uprising; Mussolini's Blackshirts engaged in paramilitary violence; and in Argentina in the mid—twentieth century, JuanPerónhelped lead a successful coup two and a half years before running for president. But politicians do not always reveal the full scale of their authoritarianism before reaching power. Some adhere to demo-cratic norms early in their careers, only to abandon them later. Consider Hungarian Prime lMinisterViktorOrbin. Orbin and his Fidesz party began as liberal democrats in the late 1980s, and in his first stint as prime minister between 1998 and 2002, Orbin governed democratically. His autocratic about-face after Returning to power in 2010 was a genuine surprise. So how do we identify authoritarianism in politicians who don't have an obvious antidemocratic record? Here we turn to the eminent political scientist Juan Linz. Born in Weimar Germany and raised amid Spain's civil war, Linz knew all too well the perils of losing a democracy. As a professor at Yale, he devoted much of his career to trying to understand how andwhy do democracies die? Many of Linz's conclusions can be found in a small but seminal book called The Breakdown of Demo-cratic Regimes. Published in 1978, the book highlights the role of politicians, showing how their behaviour can either reinforce democracy or put it at risk. He also proposed, but never fully developed, a "litmus test" for identifying antidemocratic politi-cians. . Building on Linz's work, we have developed a set of four behavioural warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence,

22 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE FATEFUL ALLIANCES 23 

or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media. Table 1 shows how to assess politicians. in terms of these four factors. A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern. What kinds of candidates tend to test positive on a litmus test for authoritarianism? Very often, populist out-siders do. Populists are anti establishment politicians—figures who, claiming to represent the voice of "the people," wage war on what they depict as a corrupt and conspiratorial elite. Populists tend to deny the legitimacy of established parties, at-tacking them as undemocratic and even unpatriotic. They tell voters that the existing system is not really a democracy but instead has been hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite. And they promise to bury that elite and return power to "the people." This discourse should be taken seriously. When popu-lists win elections, they often assault democratic institutions. In Latin America, for example, of all fifteen presidents elected in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela between 1990 and 2012, five were populist outsiders: Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, LucioGutiérrez, and Rafael Correa. All five ended up weakening democratic institutions.

FATEFUL ALLIANCES 23 

or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media. Table 1 shows how to assess politicians. in terms of these four factors. A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern. What kinds of candidates tend to test positive on a litmus test for authoritarianism? Very often, populist out-siders do. Populists are anti establishment politicians—figures who, claiming to represent the voice of "the people," wage war on what they depict as a corrupt and conspiratorial elite. Populists tend to deny the legitimacy of established parties, attacking them as undemocratic and even unpatriotic. They tell voters that the existing system is not really a democracy but instead has been hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite. And they promise to bury that elite and return power to "the people." This discourse should be taken seriously. When popu-lists win elections, they often assault democratic institutions. In Latin America, for example, of all fifteen presidents elected in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela between 1990 and 2012, five were populist outsiders: Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez,EvoMorales,LucioGutiérrez,and Rafael Correa. All five ended up weakening democratic institutions. 

Table 1: Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behaviour 

1. Rejection of (or Do they reject the Constitution or express a willingness to violate it? Do they suggest a need for antidemocratic measures, such as cancelling elections, 

violating or suspending the Constitution, banning certain organisations, or restricting 

basic civil or political rights? weak commitment to) democratic Do they seek to use (or endorse the use of) extra constitutional means to change the rules of the game government, such as military coups, violent insurrections, or mass protests aimed at forcing a change in the government? Do they attempt to undermine the legitimacy of elections, for example, by 

refusing to accept credible electoral results? Do they describe their rivals as subversive, or opposed to the existing constitutional order? Do they claim that their rivals constitute an 

existential threat, either to national security or to the prevailing way of life? 

2. Denial of Do they baselessly describe their partisan the legitimacy rivals as criminals, whose supposed violation of political of the law (or potential to do so) disqualifies 

opponents them from full participation in the political arena? Do they baselessly suggest that their rivals are foreign agents, in that they are secretly working in alliance with (or the employ of) a foreign government—usually an enemy one?

24 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

3. Toleration or Do they have any ties to armed gangs, paramilitary forces, militias, guerrillas, or other organisations that engage in illicit violence? Have they or their partisan allies sponsored or encouraged mob attacks on opponents? encouragement of violence Have they tacitly endorsed violence by their supporters by refusing to unambiguously condemn it and punish it? Have they praised (or refused to condemn) other significant acts of political violence, either in the past or elsewhere in the world? Have they supported laws or policies that restrict civil liberties, such as expanded libel or defamation laws, or laws restricting 

4. Readiness, protest, criticism of the government, or to curtail certain civic or political organisations? liberties of Have they threatened to take legal or other opponents, punitive action against critics in rival parties, including media civil society, or the media? . Have they praised repressive measures taken by other governments, either in the past or elsewhere in the world? Keeping authoritarian politicians out of power-is more eas-ily said than done. Democracies, after all, are not supposed to ban parties or prohibit candidates from standing for election—and we do not advocate such measures. The responsibility for filtering out authoritarians lies, rather, with political parties and party leaders: democracy's gatekeepers. Successful gatekeeping requires that mainstream parties isolate and defeat extremist forces, a behaviour political scien-tist Nancy Bermeo calls "distancing." Prodemocratic parties 

may engage in distancing in several ways. First, they can keep

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would-be authoritarians off party ballots at election time. This requires that they resist the temptation to nominate these extremists for higher office even when they can potentially deliver votes. Second, parties can root out extremists in the grass roots of their own ranks. Take the Swedish Conservative Party (AVF) during the perilous interwar period. The AVF's youth group (an organisation of voting-age activists), called the Swedish Nationalist Youth Organisation, grew increasingly radical in the early 1930s; criticising parliamentary democracy, openly supporting Hitler, and even creating a group of uniformed storm troopers. The AVF responded in 1933 by expelling the organisation. The loss of 25,000 members may have cost the AVF votes in the 1934 municipal elections, but the party's distancing strategy reduced the influence of antidemocratic forces in Sweden's larg-est centre-right party. Third, prodemocratic parties can avoid all alliances with antidemocratic parties and candidates. As we saw in Italy and In Germany, pro-democratic parties are sometimes tempted to align with extremists on their ideological flank to win votes or, in parliamentary systems, form governments. But such al-liances can have devastating long-term consequences. As Linz wrote, the demise of many democracies can be traced to a party's "greater affinity for extremists on its side of the political spectrum than for [mainstream] parties close to the opposite side." Fourth, pro-democratic parties can act to systematically iso-late, rather than legitimise, extremists. This requires that politi-

cians avoid acts—such as German Conservatives' joint rallies with Hitler in the early 1930s or Caldera's speech sympathising with Chivez—that helps to "normalise" or provide public respectability to authoritarian figures.

26 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

Finally, whenever extremists emerge as serious electoral con-tenders, mainstream parties must forge a united front to defeat them. To quote Linz; they must be willing to "join with op-ponents ideologically distant but committed to the survival of the democratic political order." In normal circumstances, this is almost unimaginable. Picture Senator Edward Kennedy and other liberal Democrats campaigning for Ronald Reagan, or the British Labour Party and their trade union allies endors-ing Margaret Thatcher. Each party's followers would be infuri-ated at this seeming betrayal of principles. But in extraordinary times, courageous party leadership means putting democracy and country before parry and articulating to voters what is at stake. When a party or politician that tests positive on our lit-mus test emerges as a serious electoral threat, there is little alter-native. United democratic fronts can prevent extremists from winning power, which can mean saving a democracy— Although the failures are more memorable, some European democracies practised successful gatekeeping between the wars. Surprisingly big lessons can be drawn from small coun-

tries. Consider Belgium and Finland. In Europe's 'years of political and economic crisis in the 1920s and 1930s, both countries experienced an early warning sign of democratic decay-:—the rise of antisystem extremists—but, unlike Italy and Germany, they were saved by political elites who defended democratic institutions (at least until Nazi invasion several years later). 

During Belgium's 1936 general election, as the contagion of fascism was spreading from Italy and Germany across Eu-rope, voters delivered a jarring result. Two authoritarian far-right parties—the Rex Party and the Flemish nationalist party,

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or Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV)—surged in the polls, capturing almost 20 percent of the popular vote and challeng-ing the historical dominance of three establishment parties: 

the centre-right Catholic Party, the Socialists, and the Liberal Party. The challenge from the leader of the Rex Party, L6on Degrelle, a Catholic journalist who would become a Nazi col-laborator, was especially strong. Degrelle, a virulent critic of parliamentary democracy, had departed from the right edges of the Catholic Party and now attacked its leaders as corrupt. He received encouragement and financial support from both Hitler and Mussolini. 

The 1936 election shook the centrist parties, which suffered losses across the board. Aware of the antidemocratic movements in nearby Italy and Germany and fearful for their own survival, they confronted the daunting task of deciding how to respond. 

The Catholic Party, in particular, faced a difficult dilemma: collaborate with their longtime rivals, the Socialists and Liber-als, or forge a right-wing alliance that included the Rexists, a party with whom they shared some ideological affinity but that rejected the value of democratic politics. Unlike the retreating mainstream politicians of Italy and Germany, the Belgian Catholic leadership declared that any cooperation with the Rexists was incompatible with party mem-bership and then pursued a two-pronged strategy to combat the movement. Internally, Catholic Party. leaders heightened discipline by screening candidates for pro-Rexist Sympathies and expelling those who expressed extremist views. In addition, 

The party leadership took a strong stance against cooperation with the fax right. Externally, the Catholic Party fought Rex on its own turf. The Catholic Party adopted new propaganda and campaign tactics that targeted younger Catholics, who had formerly been part of theRexist base. They created the Catholic

28 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

Youth Front in December 1935 and began to run former allies againstDegrelle. 

The final clash between Rex and the Catholic Party, in which R& was effectively sidelined (until the Nazi occupation), centered around the formation of a new government after the 

1936 election. The Catholic Party supported the incumbent Catholic prime minister Paul van Zeeland. After van Zeeland regained the premiership, there were two chief options for 

forming a government: The first was an alliance with the rival LSocialists, along the lines of France's "Popular Front," which van Zeeland and other Catholic leaders had initially hoped to avoid. The second was a right-wing alliance of antisocialist forces that would include Rex and VNV.The choice was not easy; the second option was supported by a traditionalist faction that sought to upset the fragile van Zeeland cabinet by rallying the Catholic rank and file, organising a "March on brussels," and forcing a by-election-in which Rex leader Degrelle Would run against van Zeeland. These plans were thwarted in 1937 when Degrelle lost the by-election, largely because the Catho-lic Party MPs had taken a stand: They refused to go with the traditionalists' plan and instead united with the Liberals and Socialists behind van Zeeland. This was the Catholic'Party's most important gatekeeping act. The Catholic Party's stand on the right was also made pos-sible by King Leopold III and the Socialist Party. The election of 1936 had left the Socialist Party as the largest party in the legislature, which gave it the prerogative to form a government. 

However, when it became evident that the Socialists could not gain enough -parliamentary support, rather than call a new election—which may have handed even more seats to extremist parties—the king met with leaders of the largest parties to talk

FATEFUL ALLIANCES 29 

them into a power-sharing cabinet, led by incumbent prime minister van Zeeland, which would include both the conserva-tive Catholics and the Socialists but exclude anti system parties on both sides. Although the Socialists distrusted van Zeeland, a Catholic Party man, they nevertheless put democracy ahead of their own interests and endorsed the grand coalition. A similar dynamic unfolded in Finland, where the extreme-right Lapua Movement burst onto the political stage in 1929, threatening the country's fragile democracy. the movement sought the destruction of communism by any means necessary. It threatened violence if its demands were not met and attacked mainstream politicians whom it deemed collaborators with Socialists..At first, politicians from the governing centre-right 

Agrarian Union flirted with the Lapua Movement, finding its anticommunism politically useful; they met the movement's demands to deny communist political rights while tolerating extreme-right violence. In 1930,P. E.Svinhufvud, a conserva-tive whom the Lapua leaders considered "one of their own," became prime minister, and he offered diem two cabinet posts. A year later, Svinhufvud became president. Yet the Lapua Move-ment continued its extremist behaviour; with the communists . banned, it targeted the more moderate Social Democratic Party. Lapua thugs abducted more than a thousand Social Democrats, including union leaders and members of parliament. The Lapua Movement also organised a 12,000-person march on Helsinki (modelled on the mythical March on Rome), and in 1932, it 

backed a failed putsch aimed at replacing the government with one that was "a political" and "patriotic." As the Lapua Movement grew more radical, however, Fin-land's traditional conservative parties broke decisively with it. In late 1930, the bulk of the Agrarian. Union, the liberal

30 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

Progress Party, and much of the Swedish People's Party joined their main ideological rival, the Social Democrats, in the so-called Lawfulness Front to defend democracy against violent extremists. Even the conservative president, Svinhufvud, force-fully rejected—and eventually banned—his former allies. The Lapua Movement was left isolated, and Finland's brief burst of fascism was aborted. It is not only in distant historical cases that one finds suc-

cessful gatekeeping. In Austria in 2016, the main centre-right party (the Austrian People's Party, OVP) effectively kept the radical-right Freedom Party (FPO) out of the presidency. Aus-tria has a long history of extreme right politics, and the FPO is one of Europe's strongest far-right parties. Austria's politi-cal system was growing vulnerable because the two main par-ties, the Social Democratic SPO and the Christian Democratic OVP, which had alternated in the presidency throughout the the postwar period was weakening. In 2016, their dominance was challenged by two upstarts—the. Green Party's former chair-

man, Alexander Van der Bellen, and the extremist FPO leader Norbert Hofer. 

To the surprise of most analysts, the first round left Van der Bellen and the right-wing outsider Hofer as the two can-didates in a second-round runoff. After a procedural error in October 2016, the runoff was held in December. At this point, several leading politicians, including some from the conserva-tive OVP, argued that Hofer and his Freedom Party had to be defeated. Hofer had appeared to encourage violence against immigrants, and many questioned whether an elected Hofer would privilege his party in ways that violated long-standing norms of the president remaining above politics. In the face of this threat, some important OVP leaders worked to defeat Hofer by supporting their ideological rival, the left-leaning Green

FATEFUL ALLIANCES 31 

candidate, Van der Bellen. The OVP's presidential candidate, Andreas Khol, endorsed Van der Bellen, as did Chairman Rein-hold Mitterlehner, Cabinet Minister Sophie Karmasin, and dozens of OVP mayors in the Austrian countryside. In one letter, former chairman Erhard Busek wrote that he endorsed Van der Bellen "not with passion but after careful deliberation," and that, furthermore, the decision was motivated by the sentiment that "we don't want congratulations from Le Pen, Jobbik, Wilders and the AfD [and other extremists] after our presidential elec-tions." Van der Bellen won by a mere 300,000 votes. 

This stance took considerable political courage. According to one Catholic Party mayor of a small city outside Vienna, Stefan Schmuckenschlager, who endorsed the Green Party can-didate, said it was a decision that split families. His twin brother, another party leader, had supported Hofer. As Schmucken-schlager explained it, power politics sometimes has to be put aside to do the right thing. Did the endorsements from the OVP help? There is evidence that they did. According to exit polls, 55 percent of respondents who identified as OVP supporters said they voted for Van der Bellen, and 48 percent of Van der Bellenvoters said they had voted for him to prevent Hofer from winning. In addition, the the strong urban/rural division that has always marked Austrian politics (between left-wing urban areas and right-wing rural areas) was dramatically diminished in the second round in December 2016, with a surprising number of traditional rural conservative states switching to vote for Van der Bellen. In short, in 2016, responsible leaders in the OVP resisted the temptation to ally with an extremist party on their own ide-ological flank, and the result was that party's defeat. The FPO's strong performance in the 2017 parliamentary elections, which positioned it to become a junior partner in a new right-wing

32 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

the government, made it clear that the dilemma facing Austrian conservatives persists. Still, their effort to keep an extremist out of the presidency provides a useful model of contemporary gatekeeping. For its part, the United States has an impressive record of 

gatekeeping. Both Democrats and Republicans have confronted extremist figures on their fringes, some of whom enjoyed con-siderable public support. For decades, both parties succeeded in keeping these figures out of the mainstream. Until, of course, 

2016. 

Gatekeeping in America 

In The Plot Against America, American novelist Philip Roth builds on real historical events to imagine what fascism might have looked like in pre war America. An early Americanmass-media hero, Charles Lindbergh, is the novel's central figure: He skyrockets to fame with his 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic and later becomes a vocal isolationist and Nazi sympathizer. But here is where history takes a fantastic turn inRoth'shands: Rather than fading into

Gatekeeping in America 

In The Plot Against America, American novelist Philip Roth builds on real historical events to imagine what fascism might have looked like in pre war America. 

An early Americanmass-media hero, Charles Lindbergh, is the novel's central figure: He skyrockets to fame with his 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic and later becomes a vocal 

isolationist and Nazi sympathizer. But here is where history takes a fantastic turn inRoth'shands: Rather than fading into obscurity, Lindbergh arrives by plane at the 1940 Republican Party convention in Philadelphia at 3:14 A.M., as a packed hall 

finds itself deadlocked on the twentieth ballot. Cries of "Lindy! Lindy! Lindy!" erupt for thirty uncontained minutes on the convention floor, and in a moment of intense collective fervour, 

His name is proposed, seconded, and approved by acclamation as the party's nominee for president. Lindbergh, a man with no political experience but unparalleled media savvy, ignores the advice of his advisors and campaigns by piloting his iconic solo aircraft, Spirit of St. Louis, from state to state, wearing his flight goggles, high boots, and jumpsuit.

Trump's First Year: An Authoritarian Report Card Donald Trump's first year in office followed a familiar script. Like Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chivez, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, America's new president began his tenure by launching blister-ing rhetorical attacks-on his opponents. He called the media the "enemy of the American people," questioned judges' legitimacy, and threatened to cut federal funding to major cities. Predictably, ÿ These attacks triggered dismay, shock, and anger across the po-litical spectrum. Journalists found themselves at the front lines, exposing—but also provoking—the president's norm-breaking behaviour. A study by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy found that the major news outlets were "unspar-ing" in their coverage of the Trump administration's first hundred 

days. Of news reports with a clear tone, the study found, 80 per-cent were negative—much higher than under Clinton (60 per-cent), GeorgeW. Bush (57 percent), and Obama (41 percent). Soon, Trump administration officials were feeling besieged. Not a single week went by in which press coverage wasn't at least 70 percent negative. And amid swirling rumours about the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, a high-profile special counsel,

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 177 

s-

Trump's First Year: An Authoritarian Report Card Donald Trump's first year in office followed a familiar script. Like Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chivez, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, America's new president began his tenure by launching blister-ing rhetorical attacks-on his opponents. He called the media the "enemy of the American people," questioned judges' legitimacy, and threatened to cut federal funding to major cities. Predictably, 

ÿ 

These attacks triggered dismay, shock, and anger across the po-litical spectrum. Journalists found themselves at the front lines, exposing—but also provoking—the president's norm-breaking behaviour. A study by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, 

and Public Policy found that the major news outlets were "unspar-ing" in their coverage of the Trump administration's first hundred days. Of news reports with a clear tone, the study found, 80 per-cent were negative—much higher than under Clinton (60 per-cent), GeorgeW. Bush (57 percent), and Obama (41 percent). Soon, Trump administration officials were feeling besieged. Not a single week went by in which press coverage wasn't at least 70 percent negative. And amid swirling rumours about the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, a high-profile special counsel, Robert Mueller, was appointed to oversee investigations into 

the case. Just a few months into his presidency, President Trump faced talk of impeachment. But he retained the sup-

port of his base, and like other elected demagogues, he doubled down. He claimed his administration was beset by powerful establishment forces, telling graduates of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that "no politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly." The question, then, was how Trump would respond. Would an outsider presi-dent who considered himself to be under unwarranted assault lash out, as happened in Peru and Turkey? President Trump exhibited clear authoritarian instincts dur-ing his -first year in office. In Chapter 4, we presented three strategies by which elected authoritarians seek to. consolidate power: capturing the referees,_ sidelining the key players, and rewriting the rules to tilt the playing field against opponents. Trump attempted all three of these strategies. President Trump demonstrated striking hostility toward the Referees — law enforcement, intelligence, ethics agencies, and the courts. Soon after his inauguration, he sought to ensure that the heads-of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency, would be person-ally loyal to him, apparently in the hope of using these agencies as a shield against investigations into his campaign's Russia ties. During his first week in office, President Trump summoned FBI Director James Comey to a one-on-one dinner in the White House in which, according to Comey, the president asked for a pledge of loyalty. He later reportedly pressured Comey to drop investigations into his recently departed national security

178 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

director, Michael Flynn, pressed Director of National Intel-ligence Daniel Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeoto intervene inComey's investigation, and personally appealed to 

Coats and NSA head Michael Rogers to release statements denying the existence of any collusion with Russia (both refused). President Trump also tried to punish or purge agencies that acted with independence. Most prominently, he dismissed Comey after it became clear that Comey could not be pres-sured into protecting the administration and was expanding its Russia investigation. Only once in the FBI's eighty-two-year history had a president fired the bureau's director before his ten-year term was up—and in that case, the move was in response to clear ethical violations and enjoyed bipartisan support. The Comey firing was not President Trump's only assault on referees who refused to come to his personal defence. Trump had attempted to establish a personal relationship with Manhattan-based U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose investigations into money laundering reportedly threatened to reach Trump's inner circle; when Bharara, a respected anti corruption figure, contin-used the investigation, the president removed him. After Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investiga-tion and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, appointed the respected former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee 

in the investigation, Trump publicly shamed Sessions, reportedly seeking his resignation. White House lawyers even launched an effort to dig up dirt on Mueller, seeking conflicts of interest that could be used to discredit or dismiss him. By late 2017, many of Trump's allies were openly calling on him to fire Mueller, and there was widespread concern that he would soon do so. President Trump's efforts to derail independent investigations evoked the kind of assaults on the referees routinely seen in less

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 179 

democratic countries—for example, the dismissal of Venezuelan Prosecutor GeneralLuisaOrtega, a chavi= appointee who as-serted her independence and began to investigate corruption and abuse in the Maduro government. Although Ortegasterm did not expire until 2021 and she could be legally removed only by the legislature (which was in opposition hands), the government's du-biously elected Constituent Assembly sacked her in August 2017 President Trump also attacked judges who ruled against 

him. After Judge James Robart of the Ninth Circuit of the U. S. Court of Appeals blocked the administration's initial travel ban, Trump spoke of "the opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country." Two months later, when the same court temporarily blocked the withholding of federal funds from sanctuary cities, the White House denounced the judgement as an attack on the rule of law 

by an "unelected judge." Trump himself responded by threat-ening to break up the Ninth Circuit. The president took an indirect swipe at the judiciary in Au-gust 2017 when he pardoned the controversial former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of violating a federal court order to stop racial profiling. Arpaio was a political ally and a hero to many of Trump's anti-immigrant supporters. As we noted earlier, the chief executive's constitutional power to pardon is without limit, but presidents have historically exercised it with great restraint, seeking advice from the Justice Department and never issuing pardons for self-protection or political gain. Presi-dent Trump boldly violated these norms. Not only did he not consult the Justice Department, but the pardon was clearly po-litical—it was popular with his base. The move reinforced fears that the president would eventually pardon himself and his inner circle—something that was reportedly explored by his lawyers.

180 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

Such a move would constitute an unprecedented attack on judi-cial independence.. As constitutional scholar Martin Redish put it, "If the president can immunise his agents in this manner, the courts will effectively lose any meaningful authority to protect constitutional rights against invasion by the executive branch." The Trump administration also trampled, inevitably, on the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), an independent watchdog agency that, though lacking legal teeth, had been respected by previous administrations. Faced with the numerous conflicts of interest created by Trump's business dealings, OGE director 

Walter Shaub repeatedly criticised the president-elect during the transition. The administration responded by launching attacks on the OGE. House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz, a Trump ally, even hinted at an investigation of Shaub. In May, adminis-

tratioh officials tried to force the OGE to halt investigations into the White House's appointment of ex-lobbyists. Alternately ha-Rassed and ignored by the White House, Shaub resigned, leaving behind what journalist RyanLizzacalled a "broken" OGE. 

President Trump's behaviour toward the courts, law enforce-ment and intelligence bodies, and other independent agencies was drawn from an authoritarian playbook. He openly spoke of using the Justice Department and the FBI to go after Democrats, in-cluding Hillary Clinton. And in late 2017, the Justice Department considered nominating a special counsel to investigate Clinton. Despite its purges and threats, however, the administration could not capture the referees. Trump did not replace Comey with a loyalist, largely because such a move was vetoed by key Senate Republicans. Likewise, Senate Republicans resisted Trump's ef-forts to replace Attorney General Sessions. But the president had other battles to wage.

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 181 

The Trump administration also mounted efforts to sideline key players in the political system. President Trump's rhetorical attacks on critics in the media are an example. His repeated accusations that outlets such as the New York Times and CNN 

were dispensing "fake news" and conspiring against- he looked familiar to any student of authoritarianism. In a February 2017 tweet, he called the media the "enemy of the American people," a term that, critics noted, mimicked one used by Stalin and Mao. Trump's rhetoric was often threatening. A few days after his "enemy of the people" tweet, Trump told the Conservative . Political Action Committee: I love the First Amendment; nobody loves it better than me. Nobody,... But as you saw throughout the entire campaign, and even now, the fake news doesn't tell the truth.... I say it doesn't represent the people. It never will represent the people, and we're going to do something about it. Do what, exactly? The following month, President Trump returned to his campaign pledge to "open up the libel laws," tweeting that the New York Times had "disgraced the media world. Gotten me wrong for two solid years. Change libel laws?" When asked by a reporter whether the administration was really considering such changes, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said, "I think that's something we've looked at." Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa used this ap-proach. His multimillion-dollar defamation suits and jailing of journalists on charges of defamation had a powerfully chill-ing effect on the media. -Although Trump dropped the libel issue, he continued his threats. In July, he retweeted an altered video clip made from old WWE footage of him tackling and

182 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

then punching someone with a CNN logo superimposed on his face. President Trump also considered using government regu-latory agencies against unfriendly media companies. During the 2016 campaign, he had threatened Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and Amazon, with antitrust action, tweet-ing: "If I become president, oh do they have problems." He also threatened to block the pending merger of Time War-ner (CNN's parent company) and AT&T, and during the in the first months of his presidency, there were reports that White House advisors considered using the administration's antitrust authority as a source of leverage against CNN. And finally, in October 2017, Trump attacked NBC and other networks by threatening to "challenge their licence." There was one area in which the Trump administration went beyond threat's to try to use the machinery of government to punish critics. During his first week in office, President Trump signed an executive order authorizing federal agencies to with-hold funding from "sanctuary cities" that refused to cooperate with the administration's crackdown on undocumented immi-grants. "If we have to," he declared in February 2017, "we'll defund." The plan was reminiscent of the Chivez government's repeated moves to strip opposition-run city governments of their control over local hospitals, police forces, ports, and other infrastructure. Unlike the Venezuelan president, however, Pres-ident Trump was blocked by the courts. Although President Trump has waged a war of words against the media and other critics, those words have not (yet) led to action. No journalists have been arrested, and no media outlets

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 183 

have altered their coverage due to pressure from the govern-ment. Trump's efforts to tilt the playing field to his advantage have been more worrying. In May 2017, he called for changes in what he called "archaic" Senate rules, including the elimination of the filibuster; which would have strengthened the Republic-can majority at the expense of the Democratic minority. Senate Republicans did eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, clearing the way for Neil Gorsuch's ascent to the Court, but they rejected the idea of doing away with it entirely. Perhaps the most antidemocratic initiative yet undertaken by the Trump administration is the creation of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence•but run by Vice Chair Kris Kobach. To 

understand its potential impact, recall that the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts prompted a massive shift in party identifica-tion: The Democratic Party became the primary representative of minority and first and second-generation immigrant voters, while GOP voters remained overwhelmingly white. Because the minority share of the electorate is growing, these changes favour the Democrats, a perception that was reinforced by Barack Obama's 2008 victory, in which minority turnout rates were unusually high. Perceiving a threat, some Republican leaders came up with a response that evoked memories of the Jim Crow South: make it is harder for low-income minority citizens to vote. Because poor minority voters were overwhelmingly Democratic, measures that dampened turnout among such voters would likely tilt the play-ing field in favour of Republicans. This would be done via strict voter identification laws—requiring, for example, that voters present a valid driver's licence or other government-issued photo ID upon arrival at the polling station.

184 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

The push for voter ID laws was based on a false claim: that voter fraud is widespread in the United States. All reputable studies have concluded that levels of such fraud in this country are low. Yet Republicans began to push for measures to combat this nonexistent problem. The first two states to adopt voter ID laws were Georgia and Indiana, both in 2005. Georgia con-gressman John Lewis, a longtime civil rights leader, described his state's law as a "modern day poll tax." An-estimated 300,000 Georgia voters lacked the required forms of ID, and African Americans were five times more likely than whites to lack them. Indiana's voter ID law, which Judge Terence Evans of the Sev-enth Circuit Court of Appeals called "a not-too-thinly veiled attempt to discourage election day turnout by certain folks be-

levied to skew Democratic," was taken to the Supreme Court, where it was upheld in 2008. After that, voter ID laws prolifer-ated. Bills were introduced in thirty-seven states between 2010 and 2012, and by 2016 fifteen states had adopted such laws, although only ten had them in effect for the election. The laws were passed exclusively in states where Republicans controlled both legislative chambers, and in all but Arkansas, The governor was also a Republican. There is little doubt that minority voters were a primary target. Voter ID laws are almost certain to have a disproportionate impact on low-income minority voters: According to one study, 37 percent of African Americans and 27 percent of Latinos reported not possessing a valid driver's licence, compared to 16 percent of whites. A study by the Brennan Centre for Justice estimated that 11 percent of American citizens (twenty-one million eligible voters) did not possess government-issued photo IDs, and that among African American citizens, the figure rose to 25 percent. Of the eleven states with the highest black turnout in 2008,

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 185 

seven adopted stricter voter ID laws, and of the twelve states that experienced- the highest rates of Hispanic population growth between 2000 and 2010, nine passed laws making it harder to vote. Scholars have just begun to evaluate the impact of voter ID laws, and most studies have found only a modest effect on turnout. But a modest effect can be decisive in close elections, especially if the laws are widely adopted. That is precisely what the Presidential Advisory Commis-sion on Election Integrity hopes to make happen. The Com-mission's de facto head, Kris Kobach, has been described as 

America's "premier advocate of vote suppression" As Kansas's secretary of state, Kobach helped push through one of the na-nation's strictest voter ID laws. For Kobach, Donald Trump was a useful ally. During the 2016 campaign, Trump had complained 

that the election was "rigged," and afterward, he made the extraordinary claim that he had "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." He repeated this point in a meeting with congressional leaders, saying that there had been between three and five million illegal votes. The claim was baseless: A national vote-monitoring project led by The media organisation ProPublica found no evidence of fraud. Washington Post reporter Philip Bump scoured Nexis for documented cases of fraud in 2016 and found a total of four. But President Trump's apparent obsession with having "won" the popular vote converged with Kobach's goals. Kobach endorsed Trump's claims, declaring that he was "absolutely correct" in asserting that the number of illegal votes exceeded Clinton's margin of victory. (Kobach later said that "we will probably never know" who won the popular vote.) Kobach gained Trump's ear, helped convince him to create the Commission, and was appointed to run it.

186 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

The Commission's early activities suggested that its objective was voter suppression. First, it is collecting stories of fraud from across the country, which could provide political ammunition for state-lével voter-restriction initiatives or, perhaps, for efforts to repeal the 1993 "Motor Voter" law, which eased the process of voter registration across the United States. In effect, the Com-mission is poised to serve as a high-profile national mouthpiece 

for Republican efforts to pass tougher voter ID laws. Second, the Commission aims to encourage or facilitate state-level voter roll purges, which, existing research suggests, would invariably remove many legitimate voters. The Commission has already 

sought to cross-check local voter records to uncover cases of double registration, in which people are registered in more than one state. There are also reports that the Commission plans to use a Homeland Security database of green card and visa hold-ers to scour the voter rolls for noncitizens. The risk, as one study shows, is that the number of mistakes— because of the existence of many people with the same name and birthdate—will vastly exceed the number of illegal registrations that are uncovered. Efforts to discourage voting are fundamentally anti demo-cratic, and they have a particularly deplorable history in the 

United States. Although contemporary voter-restriction 'efforts are nowhere near as far-reaching as those undertaken by south-ern Democrats in the late nineteenth century, they are neverthe-less significant. Because strict voter ID laws disproportionately 

affect low-income minority voters, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, they skew elections in favour of the GOP. Trump's Commission on Election Integrity did not carry out any concrete reforms in 2017, and its clumsy request for voter information was widely rebuffed by the states. But if the Commission proceeds with its project unchecked, it has the po-tential to inflict real damage on our country's electoral process

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 187 

In many ways, President Trump followed the electoral authori-tarian script during his first year. He made efforts to capture the referees, sideline the key players who might halt him, and tilt the playing field. But the president has talked more than he has acted, and his most notorious threats have not been realised. Troubling antidemocratic initiatives, including packing the FBI with loyalists and blocking the Mueller investigation, were derailed by Republican opposition and his own bumbling. One important initiative, the Advisory Commission on Election In-tegrity, is just getting off the ground, so its impact is harder 

to evaluate. Overall, then, President Trump repeatedly scraped up against the guardrails, like a reckless driver, but he did not break through them. Despite clear causes for concern, little actual backsliding occurred in 2017. We did not cross the line into authoritarianism. It is still early, however. The backsliding of democracy is often gradual, its effects unfolding slowly over time. Comparing Trump's first year in office to those of other would-be authori-tarians, the picture is mixed. Table 3 offers an illustrative list of nine countries in which potentially authoritarian leaders came to power via elections. In some countries, including Ecuador and Russia, backsliding was evident during the first year. By contrast, in Peru under Fujimori and Turkey under Erdogan, there was no initial backsliding. Fujimori engaged in heated rhetorical battles during his first year as president but did not assault democratic institutions until nearly two years in. Break-down took even longer in Turkey.

188 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

Table 3: The Authoritarian Report Card After One Year Country _Leader Start 

Date 

Capturing 

Referees 

Sidelining 

Players 

Changing 

Rules 

Eventual 

Fate of 

Regime 

Argentina 

Juan 

Perlin 

June 1946 YES NO NO Authoritarian 

Ecuador Rafael 

.Correa 

January 

2007 

YES YES YES Mildly 

authoritarian 

Hungary 

Viktor 

Orb6n 

May 2010 LIMITED NO NO 

Mildly 

authoritarian 

Italy 

Silvio 

Berluscom 

June 2001 NO NO NO Democratic 

Peru 

Alberto 

Fujimori 

July 1990 NO NO NO Authoritarian 

Peru 

011anto 

Humala 

Jul Y 2011 NO NO NO Democratic 

Poland 

Jaroslow 

I(aczynski 

November 

2015 

YES NO NO -,Mildly 

authoritarian 

Russia 

Vladimir 

Pbtin 

May2000 NO YES NO 

Highly 

authoritarian 

Turkey 

Recep 

Edogon 2arc 

NO NO NO Authoritarian 

Venezuela 

Chávez 

Fe 999ry 

YES YES YES Authoritarian 

Democracy's fate during the remainder of Trump's presi- dency will depend on several factors. The first is the behavior of Republican leaders. Democratic institutions depend crucially on the willingness of governing parties to defend them—even against their own leaders. The failure of Roosevelt's court-packing scheme and the fall of Nixon were made possible, in part, when key members of the president's own party—Democrats in Roo-

sevelt's case and Republicans in the case of Nixon—decided to stand up and oppose him. More recently, in Poland, the Law

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 189 and Justice Party government's efforts to dismantle checks and balances suffered a setback when President Andrzej Duda, a Law and Justice Party member, vetoed two bills that would have enabled the government to thoroughly purge and pack the supreme court. In Hungary, by contrast, Prime MinisterViktor Orbán faced little resistance from the governing Fidesz party as he made his authoritarian push. The relationship between Donald Trump and his party is equally important, especially given the Republicans' con-trol over both houses of Congress. Republican leaders could choose to remain loyal. Active loyalists do not merely support the president but publicly defend even his most controversial moves. Passive loyalists retreat from public view when scandals erupt but still vote with the president. Critical loyalists try, in a sense, to have it both ways: they may publicly distance them-selves from the president's worst behavior, but they do not take any action (for example, voting in Congress) that will weaken, 

much less bring down, the president. In the face of presidential abuse, any of these responses will enable authoritarianism. A second approach is containment. Republicans who adopt this strategy may back the president on many issues, from judicial appointments to tax and health care reform, but draw a line at behavior they consider dangerous. This can be a dif-ficult stance to maintain. As members of the same party, they stand to benefit if the president succeeds yet they realize that the president could inflict real damage on our institutions in I he long term. They work with the president wherever possible while at the same time taking steps to ensure that he does not abuse power, allowing the president to remain in office but, they would hope, constraining him. Finally, in principle, congressional leaders could seek the-president's removal. this would be politically costly for them.

190 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

Not only does bringing down one's own president risk accusa-tions of treason from fellow partisans (imagine, for example, the responses of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh), but it also risks derailing the party's legislative agenda. It would hurt the party's short-term electoral prospects, as it did after Nixon's res-ignation. But if the threat coming from the presidency is severe enough (or if the president's behavior starts to hurt their own 

poll numbers), party leaders may deem it necessary to bring down one of their own. 

During President Trump's first year in office, Republicans responded to presidential abuse with a mix of loyalty and con- tainment. At first, loyalty predominated. But after the president 

fired James Comey in May 2017, some GOP senators moved toward containment, making it clear that they would not ap-prove a Trump loyalist to succeed him. Republican senators 

also worked to ensure that an independent investigation into Russia's involvement in the 2016 election would go forward. A few of them pushed quietly for the Justice Department to 

name á special counsel, and many of them embraced Robert Mueller's appointment. When reports emerged that the White House was exploring ways of removing Mueller, and when some Trump loyalists called for Mueller's removal, important Repub-lican senators, including Susan Collins, Bob Corker, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain, came out in opposition. And when President Trump leaned toward sacking Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, having recused himself, could not fire Mueller, GOP senators jumped to Sessions's defense. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley said he would not schedule hearings for a replacement if Sessions was fired. Although Senators Graham, McCain, and Corker hardly joined the opposition (each voted with Trump at least 85 per-cent of the time), they took important steps to contain the pres

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 191 

ident. No Republican leaders sought the president's removal in 2017, but as journalist Abigail Tracy put it, some of them appeared to have "found their own red line." Another factor affecting the fate of our democracy is public opinion. If would-be authoritarians can't turn to the military or organize large-scale violence, they must find other means of persuading allies to go along and critics to back off or give up. Public support is a useful tool in this regard. When an elected leader enjoys, say, a 70 percent approval rating, critics jump on the bandwagon, media coverage softens, judges grow more reluctant to rule against the government, and even rival politi-cians, worried that strident opposition will leave them isolated, tend to keep their heads down. By contrast, when the govern-ment's approval rating is low, media and opposition grow more brazen, judges become emboldened to stand up to the president, and allies begin to dissent. Fujimori, Chávez, and Erdogan all enjoyed massive popularity when they launched their assault on democratic institutions. 

To understand how public support could affect the Trump presidency, ask yourself: What if America were like West Virginia? West Virginia is the most pro Trump state in the union. 

According to a Gallup poll, President Trump's approval rating there averaged 60 percent in the first half of 2017, compared to 40 percent in favor of him nationwide. In the face of the president's popularity, opposition to him withered in West Virginia—even among Democrats. Democratic senator Joe Manchin voted with President Trump 54 percent of the time through August 2017, more than any other Democrat in the Senate. The Hill listed Manchin among Trump's "10 Biggest Allies in Congress." The state's Democratic governor, Jim Justice, went further: He switched parties. Embracing President Trump at a rally, Justice not only praised him as a "good man"

192 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

with "real ideas" but dismissed the Russia investigation, declaring: "Have we not heard enough about the Russians?" If Democrats across the country behaved as they did in West 

Virginia, President Trump would face little resistance—even on the issue of foreign interference in our election. 

The higher President Trump's approval rating, the more dangerous he is. His popularity will depend on the state of the economy, as well as on contingent events. Events that put the government's incompetence on display, such as the Bush administration's inept response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, can erode public support. But other developments, such as security threats, can boost it. That brings us to a final factor shaping President Trump's ability to damage our democracy: crisis. Major security crises—wars or large-scale terrorist attacks—are political game changers. Almost invariably, they increase support for.- the government. The last time the United States experienced a major security crisis, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, President Bush's approval rating skyrocketed to 90 percent. Popularity tends to loosen the constraints on presidential power. Citizens become more likely to tolerate, and even endorse, authoritarian measures when they fear for their security. And it's not only average citizens who respond this way. Judges are notoriously reluctant to block presidential power grabs in the midst of crises, when national security is perceived to be at risk. According to political scientist William Howell, institutional constraints on President Bush disappeared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, allowing Bush to "do whatever he liked to define and respond to the crisis." Security crises are, therefore, moments of danger for democracy. Leaders who can "do whatever they like" can inflict great harm upon democratic institutions. As we have seen, that

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 193 

is precisely what leaders such as Fujimori, Putin, and Erdogan did. For a would-be authoritarian who feels unfairly besieged by opponents and shackled by democratic institutions, crisis opens up a window of opportunity. In the United States, too, security crises have permitted executive power grabs, from Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus to Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans to Bush's 

USA PATRIOT Act. But there was an important difference. Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Bush were committed democrats, and at the end of the day, each of them exercised considerable forbearance in wielding the vast authority generated by crisis. 

Donald Trump, by contrast, has rarely exhibited forbearance in any context. The chances of a conflict occurring on his watch are also considerable. They would be for any president—the United States fought land wars or suffered major terrorist attacks under six of its last twelve elected presidents. But given President Trump's foreign policy ineptitude, the risks are especially high. We fear that if Trump were to confront a war or terrorist attack, he would exploit this crisis fully—using it to attack political opponents and restrict freedoms Americans take for granted. In our view, this scenario represents the greatest danger facing American democracy today. 

Even if President Trump does not directly dismantle democratic institutions, his norm breaking is almost certain to corrode them. President Trump has, as David Brooks has written, "smashed through the behavior standards that once *governed public life." His party rewarded him for it by nominating him for president. In office, his continued norm violation has -expanded the zone of acceptable presidential behavior, giving tactics that were once considered aberrant and inadmissible, such_

194 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

as lying, and b»llying, a prominent place in politicians' tool kits. 

Presidential norm breaking is not inherently bad. Many violations are innocuous. In January 1977, Jimmy Carter surprised the police, the press, and the 250,000 Americans gathered to watch his inauguration when he and his wife walked the mile and a half from the Capitol to the White House. The New York Daily News described the Carter's decision to abandon the 

"closed and armored limousine" as an "unprecedented departure from custom." Ever since, it has become what the New York Times called "an informal custom" for the president-elect to at least step out of his protected limousine during the inaugural parade to show that he is "the people's president." Norm breaking can also be democratizing: In the 1840 presidential. election, William Henry Harrison broke tradition by going out and campaigning among voters. The previous norm had been for candidates to avoid campaigning, preserving a Cincinnatus-like fiction that they harbored no personal ambition for power—but limiting voters' ability to get to know them. 

Or take another example: In 1901, a routine White House 

press release was issued on behalf of new president Theodore 

Roosevelt headlined, "BookerTWashington of Tuskegee, Ala-

bama, dined with the President last evening." While prominent 

black political leaders had visited the White House before, a 

dinner with a leading African American political figure .was, 

as one historian has described it, a violation of "the prevailing 

social etiquette of white domination." The response was im-

mediate and vicious. One newspaper described it as "the most 

damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any 

citizen of the United States." Senator William Jennings Bryan 

commented, "It is hoped that both of them [Roosevelt and

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR. ANAUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 195 

Washington] will upon reflection, realize the wisdom of aban-

doning their purpose to wipe out race lines." In the face of the 

uproar, the White House's press operation first denied the event 

happened, later said it had "merely" been a lunch, and then 

defended it by saying that at least no women had been present. 

Because societal values change over time, a degree of presi-

dential norm breaking is inevitable—even desirable. But Don-

ald Trump's norm violations in his first year of office differed 

fundamentally from those of his predecessors. For one, he was 

a serial norm breaker. Never has a president flouted so many 

unwritten rules so quickly. Many of the transgressions were 

trivial—President Trump broke a 150 year White House tradi-

tion by not having a pet. Others were more ominous. Trump's 

first inaugural address, for example, was darker than such ad-

dresses typically are (he spoke, for example, of "American car-

nage"), leading former President GeorgeW.Bush to observe: 

"That was some weird shit." 

But where President Trump really stands out from his pre-

decessors is in his willingness to challenge unwritten rules -of 

greater consequence, including norms that are essential to the 

health of democracy. Among these are long-standing norms of 

separating private and public affairs, such as those governing 

nepotism. Existing legislation, which prohibits presidents from 

appointing family members to the cabinet or agency positions, 

does not include White House staff positions. So Trump's ap-

pointment of his daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared Kush-

ner, to high-level advisory posts was technically legal—but it 

flouted the spirit of the law. 

There were also norms regulating presidential conflicts of in-

terest. Because presidents must not use public office for private 

enrichment, those who own businesses must separate them-

selves from these enterprises before they take office. Yet the laws

196 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

governing such separation are surprisingly lax. Government of-

ficials are not technically required to divest themselves of their 

holdings, but only to recuse themselves from decisions that af-

fect their interests. It has become standard practice for govern-

ment officials to simply divest themselves, however, to avoid 

even the appearance of a wrongdoing. President Trump exer-

cised no such forbearance, despite his unprecedented conflicts 

of interest. He granted his sons control over his business hold-

ings, in a move deemed vastly insufficient by government ethics 

officials. The Office of Government Ethics reported receiving 

39,105 public complaints involving Trump administration con-

flicts of interest between October 1, 2016, and March 31, 2017, 

a massive increase over the same period in 2008-2009 (when 

President Obama took office), when just 733 complaints were 

recorded. 

President Trump also violated core democratic norms when 

he openly challenged the legitimacy of elections. Although his 

claim of "millions" of illegal voters was rejected by fact check-

ers, repudiated by politicians from both parties, and dismissed 

as baseless by social scientists, the new president repeated it in 

public and in private. No major politician in more than a cen-

tury had questioned the integrity of the American ëlectoral 

process—not even Al Gore, who lost one of the closest elections 

in history at the hands of the Supreme Court. - 

False charges of fraud can undermine public confidence in 

elections and when citizens do not trust the electoral process, 

they often lose faith in democracy itself. In Mexico, after the 

losing presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, 

insisted that the 2006 election was stolen from him, confidence 

in Mexico's electoral system declined. A poll taken prior to the 

2012 presidential election found that 71 percent of Mexicans

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 197 

believed that fraud could be in play. In the United States, the 

figures were even more dramatic. In a survey carried out prior 

to the 2016 election, 84 percent of Republican voters said they 

believed a "meaningful amount" of fraud occurred in Ameri-

can elections, and nearly 60 percent of Republican voters said 

they believed illegal immigrants would "vote in meaning-

ful amounts" in November. These doubts persisted after the 

election. According to a July 2017 Morning Consult/Politico 

poll, 47 percent of Republicans believed that Trump won the 

popular vote, compared to 40 percent who believed Hillary 

Clinton won. In other words, about half of self-identified Re-

publicans said they believe that American elections are mas-

sively rigged. Such beliefs may be consequential. A survey 

conducted in June 2017 asked, "If Donald Trump were to say 

that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until 

the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens 

can vote, would you support or oppose postponing the elec-

tion?" Fifty-two percent of Republicans said they would sup-

port postponement. 

President Trump also abandoned basic rules of political 

civility. He broke with norms of postelection reconciliation 

by continuing to attack Hillary Clinton. He also violated the 

unwritten rule that sitting presidents should not attack their 

predecessor. At 6:35 A.M. on March 4, 2017, President Trump 

tweeted, "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my `wires 

tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. 

This is McCarthyism!" He followed up half an hour later with: 

"How low has President Obama gone to Lapp [sic] my phones 

during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/ Water-

gate. Bad (or sick) guy!" 

Perhaps President Trump's most notorious norm-breaking

198 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

behavior has been lying. The idea that presidents should tell the 

truth in public is uncontroversial in American politics. As Re-

publican consultant Whit Ayers likes to tell his clients, candi-

dates seeking credibility must "never deny the undeniable" and 

"never lie." Given this norm, politicians typically avoid lying 

by changing the topic of debate, refraining difficult questions, 

or only partly answering them. President Trump's routine, bra-

zen fabrications are unprecedented. His tendencies were mani-

fest during the 2016 campaign. PolitiFact classified 69 percent 

of his public statements as "mostly false" (21 percent), "false" 

(33 percent), or "pants on fire" (15 percent). Only 17 percent 

were coded as "true" or "mostly true." 

Trump continued to lie as president. Tracing all the presi-

dent's public statements since taking office, the New York Times 

showed that even using a conservative metric—demonstrably 

false statements, as opposed to merely dubious one's—President 

Trump "achieved something remarkable": He made at least 

one false or misleading public statement every single day of his 

first forty days in office. No lie is too obvious. President Trump 

claimed the largest Electoral College victory since Ronald Rea-

gan (in fact, GeorgeH. W.Bush, Clinton, and Obama all won 

by larger margins than he did); he claimed to have signed more 

bills in his first six months than any other president (he was 

well behind several presidents, including George H.WBush 

and Clinton). In July 2017, he bragged that the head of the Boy 

Scouts told him he had "made the greatest speech ever made to 

them," only to have the claim disputed immediately by the Boy 

Scouts organization itself. 

President Trump himself did not pay much of a price for 

his lies. In a political and media environment in which engaged 

citizens increasingly filter events through their own partisan 

lenses, his supporters did not come to view him as dishonest

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 199 

during the first year of his presidency. For our political sys-

tem, however, the consequences of his dishonesty are devastat-

ing. Citizens have a basic right to information in a democracy. 

Without credible information about what our elected leaders 

do, we cannot effectively exercise our right to vote. When the 

president of the United States lies to the public, our access to 

credible information is jeopardized, and trust in government 

is eroded (how could it not be?). When citizens do not believe 

their elected leaders, the foundations of representative democ-

racy weaken. The value of elections is diminished when citizens 

have no faith in the leaders they elect. 

Exacerbating this loss of faith is President Trump's abandon-

ment of basic norms of respect for the media. An independent 

press is a bulwark of democratic institutions; no democracy can 

live without it. Every American president since Washington has 

done battle with the media. Many of them privately despised it. 

But with few exceptions, U.S. presidents have recognized the 

media's centrality as a democratic institution and respected its 

place in the political system. Even presidents who scorned the 

media in private treated it with a certain minimum of respect 

and civility in public. This basic norm gave rise to a host of 

unwritten rules governing the president's relationship with the 

press. Some of these norms—such as waving to the press corps 

before boarding Air Force One—were superficial, but others, 

such as holding press conferences accessible to allmembers of 

the White House press corps, were more significant. 

President Trump's public insults of media outlets and even 

individual journalists were without precedent in modern U.S. 

history. He described the media as "among the most dishonest 

human beings on Earth," and repeatedly accused such critical 

news outlets as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and 

CNN of lying or delivering "fake news." Trump was not above

200 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

personal attacks. In June 2017, he went after television host 

Mika Brzezinski and her cohost Joe Scarborough in a uniquely 

vitriolic tweetstorm: 

s 

I heard poorly rated OaMorning_Joe speaks badly of 

me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q 

Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came ... 

... to Mar-a-Lago3 nights in a row around New 

Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleed-

ing badly from a face-lift. I said no! 

Even Richard Nixon, who privately viewed the media as "the 

enemy," never made such public attacks. To find comparable 

behavior in this hemisphere one must look at Hugo Chávez 

and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or Rafael Correa in-Ecuador. 

The Trump administration also broke established norms 

by selectively excluding reporters from press events. On Febru-

ary 24, 2017, Press Secretary Sean Spicer barred reporters from 

the New York Times, CNN, Politico, BuzzFeed, and the Los An-

geles Times from attending an untelevised press "gaggle," while 

handpicking journalists from smaller but sympathetic' outlets 

such as the Washington Times and One America News Network 

to round-out the pool. The only modern precedent for such a 

move was Nixon's decision to bar the Washington Post from the 

White House after it broke the Watergate scandal. 

In 1993, New York's Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moyn-

ihan, a former social scientist, made an incisive observation: 

Humans have a limited ability to cope with people behaving in

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 201 

ways that depart from shared standards. When unwritten rules 

are violated over and over, Moynihan observed, societies have 

a tendency to "define deviancy down"—to shift the standard. 

What was once seen as abnormal becomes normal. 

Moynihan applied this insight, controversially, to Amer-

ica's growing social tolerance for single-parent families, high 

murder rates, and mental illness. Today it can be applied to 

American democracy. Although political deviance—the viola-

tion of unwritten rules of civility, of respect for the press, of not 

lying=did not originate with Donald Trump, his presidency 

is accelerating it. Under President Trump, America has been 

defining political deviancy down. The president's routine use of 

personal insult, bullying, -and lying, has, inevitably, helped to 

norma 1 ize such practices. Trump's tweets may trigger outrage 

from the media, Democrats, and some Republicans, but the 

effectiveness of their responses is limited by the sheer quantity 

of violations. As Moynihan observed, in the face of widespread 

deviance, we become overwhelmed—and then desensitized. 

We grow accustomed to what we previously thought to be 

scandalous. 

Furthermore, Trump's deviance has been tolerated by the 

Republican Party, which has helped make it acceptable to much 

of the Republican electorate. To be sure, many Republicans 

have condemned Trump's most egregious behavior. But these 

one-off statements are not very punitive. All but one Republi-

can senator voted with President Trump at least 85 percent of 

the time during his first seven months in office. Even Senators 

BenSasseof Nebraska and Jeff Flake of Arizona, who often 

strongly condemned the president's norm violations, voted with 

him 94 percent of the time. There is no "containment" strategy 

for an endless stream of offensive tweets. Unwilling to pay the

202 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

political price of breaking with their own president, Repub-

licans find themselves with little alternative but to constantly 

redefine what is and isn't tolerable. 

This will have terrible consequences for our democracy. 

President Trump's assault on basic norms has expanded the 

bounds of acceptable political behavior. We may already be see-

ing some of the consequences. In May 2017, Greg Gianforte, 

the Republican candidate in a special election for Congress, 

body-slammed a reporter from The Guardian who was asking 

him about health care reform. Gianforte was charged with mis-

demeanor assault—but he won the election. More generally, a 

YouGov poll carried out for 7he Economist in mid-2017 revealed 

a striking level of intolerance toward the media, especially 

among Republicans. When asked whether or not they favored 

permitting the courts to shut down media outlets for present-

ing information that is "biased or inaccurate,"-w,45 percent of 

Republicans who were polled said they favored it, whereas only 

20 percent were opposed. More than 50 percent of Republicans 

supported the idea of imposing fines for biased or inaccurate 

reporting. In other words, a majority of Republican voters said 

they support the kind of media repression seen in recent years 

in Ecuador, Turkey, and Venezuela. 

Two National Rifle Association recruiting videos were released 

in the summer of 2017. In the first video, NRA spokeswoman 

Dana Loesch speaks about Democrats and the use of force: 

They use their schools to teach children that their 

president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars 

and singers and comedy shows and award shows to 

repeat their narrative over and over again. And then

TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: AN AUTHORITARIAN REPORT CARD 203 

they use theirex-presidentto endorse the "resistance." 

All to make them march, to make them protest, to 

make them scream racism and sexism and xenopho-

bia and homophobia. To smash windows, to burn 

cars, to shut down interstates and airports, bully and 

terrorize the law-abiding, until the only option left is 

for the police to do their jobs and-stop the madness. 

And when that happens,. they use it as an excuse for 

their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way 

we save our country and our freedom, is to fight the 

violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. 

In the second video, Loesch issues a not-so-subtle warning of 

violence against the New York Times: 

We've had it with your pretentious ... assertion that 

you are in any way truth- or fact based journalism. 

Consider this the shot across your proverbial bow... . 

In short, we're coming for you. 

The NRA is not a small, fringe organization. It claims five 

million members and is closely tied to the Republican Party—

Donald Trump and Sarah Palin are lifetime members. Yet it 

now uses words that in the past we would have regarded as 

dangerously politically deviant. 

Norms are the soft guardrails of democracy; as they break 

down, the zone of acceptable political behavior expands, giv-

ing rise to discourse and action that could imperil democracy. 

Behavior that was once considered unthinkable in American 

politics is becoming thinkable. Even if Donald Trump does not 

break the hard guardrails of our constitutional democracy, he 

has increased the likelihood that a future president will.

Saving Democracy 

Writing this book has reminded us that American democracy is 

not as exceptional as we sometimes believe. There's nothing in 

our Constitution or our culture to immunize us against dem-

ocratic breakdown. We have experienced political -catastrophe 

before, when regional and partisan enmities so divided the na-

tion that,it collapsed into civil war. Our constitutional system 

recovered, and Republican and Democratic leaders developed 

new norms and practices that would undergird more than 

a century of political stability. But that stability came at the 

price of racial exclusion and authoritarian single-party rule in 

the South. It was only after 1965 that the United States fully 

democratized. And, paradoxically, that very process began a 

fundamental realignment of the American electorate that has 

once again left our parties deeply polarized. This polarization, 

deeper than at any time since the end of Reconstruction, has 

triggered the epidemic of norm breaking that now challenges 

our democracy. 

There is a mounting perception that democracy is in retreat all 

over the world. Venezuela. Thailand. Turkey. Hungary. Poland. 

Larry Diamond, perhaps the foremost authority on democracy

SAVING DEMOCRACY 205 

Saving Democracy 

Writing this book has reminded us that American democracy is 

not as exceptional as we sometimes believe. There's nothing in 

our Constitution or our culture to immunize us against dem-

ocratic breakdown. We have experienced political -catastrophe 

before, when regional and partisan enmities so divided the na-

tion that,it collapsed into civil war. Our constitutional system 

recovered, and Republican and Democratic leaders developed 

new norms and practices that would undergird more than 

a century of political stability. But that stability came at the 

price of racial exclusion and authoritarian single-party rule in 

the South. It was only after 1965 that the United States fully 

democratized. And, paradoxically, that very process began a 

fundamental realignment of the American electorate that has 

once again left our parties deeply polarized. This polarization, 

deeper than at any time since the end of Reconstruction, has 

triggered the epidemic of norm breaking that now challenges 

our democracy. 

There is a mounting perception that democracy is in retreat all 

over the world. Venezuela. Thailand. Turkey. Hungary. Poland. 

Larry Diamond, perhaps the foremost authority on democracy 

worldwide, believes we have entered a period of democratic 

recession. International conditions are clearly less favorable for 

democracy today than they were in the years following the end 

of the Cold War. During the 1990s, Western liberal democracies 

were unrivaled in their military, economic, and ideological power, 

and Western-style democracy was widely viewed as the "only 

game in town." Two decades later, however, the global balance 

of power has shifted. TheEUand the US have seen their global 

influence erode, while China and Russia appear increasingly as-

cendant. And with the emergence of new authoritarian models in 

Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and elsewhere, democracy now seems 

less unassailable. Might Americas current crises be part of a global 

wave of democratic backsliding? 

We are skeptical. Prior to Donald Trump's election, claims 

about a global democratic recession were exaggerated. Although 

international conditions grew more unfavorable to democracy 

in the early twenty-first century, existing democracies have 

proven remarkably robust in the face of these challenges. The 

number of democracies in the world has not declined. Rather, 

it has remained steady. since peaking in around the year 2005. 

Backsliders make headlines and capture our attention, but for 

every Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela there is a Colombia, Sri 

Lanka, or Tunisia—countries that have grown more democratic 

over the last decade. And importantly, the vast majority of the 

world's democracies—from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru 

to Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Romania to Ghana, 

India, South Korea, South Africa, and Taiwan—remained in-

tact through 2017. 

Western democracies have been wracked by domestic crises 

of confidence in recent years. With weak economies, growing 

skepticism of theEU,and the rise ofanti-immigrantpolitical 

parties, there is much to worry about in western Europe. The

206 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

radical right's recent electoral success in Prance, Netherlands, 

Germany, and Austria, for example, has raised concerns about 

the stability of European democracies. In Britain, the Brexit de-

bate deeply polarized politics. In November 2016, in the wake 

of a court decision requiring parliamentary approval to pro-

ceed with Brexit, The Daily Mail aggressively echoed Donald 

Trump's language, dubbing the judges "Enemies of the People." 

And the Conservative government's invocation of the so-called 

Henry VIII clause, potentially allowing Brexit to proceed with-

out parliamentary approval, has worried critics, including some 

Tory backbenchers. Thus far, however, basic democratic norms 

remain largely intact in western Europe. 

But Trump's rise may itself increasingly pose a challenge 

to global democracy. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 

the Obama presidency, U.S. governments maintained a broadly 

prodemocratic foreign policy. There were numerous,exceptions: 

Wherever America's strategic interests were at stake, as in 

China, Russia, and the Middle East, democracy disappeared 

from the agenda. But in much of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, 

and Latin America, U.S. governments used diplomatic pres-

sure, economic assistance, and other foreign-policy tools to 

oppose authoritarianism and press for democratization during 

the post-Cold War era. The 1990-2015 period was easily the 

most democratic quarter century in world history—partly be-

cause Western powers broadly supported democracy. That may 

now be changing. Under Donald Trump, the United States 

appears to be abandoning its role as democracy promoter for 

the first time since the Cold War. President Trump's is the 

least prodemocratic of any U.S. administration since Nixon's. 

Moreover, America is no longer a democratic model. A country 

whose president attacks the press, threatens to lock up his rival, 

and declares that he might not accept election results cannot

SAVING DEMOCRACY 207 

credibly defend democracy. Both existing and potential auto-

crats are likely to be emboldened with Trump in the White 

House. So even if the idea of a global democratic recession was 

largely a myth before 2016, the Trump presidency—together 

with the crisis of theEU,the rise of China, and the growing 

aggressiveness of Russia—could help make it a reality. 

Turning back to our own country, we see three possible futures 

for a post-Trump America. The first, and most optimistic, is a 

swift democratic recovery. In this scenario, President Trump 

fails politically: He either loses public support and is not re-

elected or, more dramatically, is impeached or forced to resign. 

The implosion of Trump's presidency and the triumph of the 

anti-Trump resistance energizes the Democrats, who then sweep 

back into power and reverse Trump's most egregious policies. 

If President Trump were to fail badly enough, public disgust 

could even motivate reforms that improve the quality of our 

democracy, . as occurred in the aftermath of Richard Nixon's 

resignation in 1974. Republican leaders, having paid a heavy 

price for their association with Trump, might end their flirta-

tion with extremist politics. In this future, America's reputation 

in the world would be quickly restored. The Trump interlude 

would be taught in schools, recounted in films, and recited in 

historical works as an era of tragic mistakes where catastrophe 

was avoided and American democracy saved. 

This is certainly the future many of us hope for. But it is 

unlikely. Recall that the assault on long-standing democratic 

norms—and the underlying polarization driving it—began well 

before Donald Trump ascended to the White House. The soft 

guardrails of American democracy have been weakening for de-

cades; simply removing President Trump will not miraculously_

208 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE - 

restore them. Although Trump's presidency may ultimately be 

seen as a momentary aberration with only modest footprints 

on our institutions, ending it may not be enough to restore a 

healthy democracy. 

A second, much darker future is one in which President 

Trump and the Republicans continue to win with a white na-

tionalist-appeal. Under this scenario, a pro Trump GOP would 

retain the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the vast ma-

jority of statehouses, and it would eventually gain a solid majority 

in the Supreme Court. It would then use the techniques of con-

stitutional hardball to manufacture durable white electoral ma-

jorities. 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 majori-

ties. These measures may appear extreme, but every one of them 

has been at least contemplated by the Trump administration. 

Efforts to shore up the Republican Party by engineering a 

new white majority would, of course, be profoundly antidemo-

cratic. Such measures would trigger resistance from a broad range 

of forces, including progressives, minority groups, and much of 

the private sector. This resistance could lead to escalating con-

frontation and even violent conflict, which, in turn, could bring 

heightened police repression and private vigilantism—in the 

name of "law and order." For a sense of how such a crackdown 

might be framed, watch recent NRA recruitment videos or lis-

ten to how Republican politicians talk about Black Lives Matter. 

Such a nightmare scenario isn't likely, but it also isn't in-

conceivable. It is difficult to find examples of societies in which 

shrinking ethnic majorities gave up their dominant status with

SAVING DEMOCRACY 209 

out a fight. In Lebanon, the demographic decline of dominant 

Christian groups contributed to a fifteen year civil war. In Israel, 

the demographic threat created by the de facto annexation of the 

West Bank is pushing the country toward a political system that 

two of its former prime ministers have compared to apartheid. 

And closer to home, in the aftermath of Reconstruction, south-

ern Democrats responded to the threat posed by black suffrage 

by disenfranchising African Americans for nearly a century. Al-

though white nationalists remain a minority within the GOP, 

the growing push for strict voter ID laws and the purging of 

voter rolls—championed by influential Republicans Attorney 

General Jeff Sessions and Commission on Election Integrity 

Co-chair Kris Kobach—suggest that electoral reengineering is 

on the GOP agenda. 

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. President 

Trump and Trumpism may well fail in this scenario, but that 

failure would do little to narrow the divide between parties or 

reverse the decline in mutual toleration and forbearance. 

To see what politics without guardrails might look likein the 

United States, consider North Carolina today. North Carolina 

is a classic "purple" state. With a diversified economy and an 

internationally recognized university system, it is wealthier, 

more urban, and better educated than most southern states. It 

is also demographically diverse, with African Americans, Asian 

Americans, and Latinos making up about a third of the popula-

tion. All this makes North Carolina more hospitable terrain for 

Democrats than are the states of the Deep South. North Caro-

linas electorate resembles the national one: It is evenly split be-

tween Democrats and Republicans, with Democrats dominant

210 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

in such urban centers as Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham and 

Republicans dominant in rural areas. 

The state has become, in the words of Duke law professor 

Jédediah Purdy, a "microcosm of the country's hyper-partisan 

politics and growing mutual mistrust." Over the last decade, 

partisans have battled over Republican-imposed abortion restric-

tions, the Republican governor's refusal of Medicaid as part of 

the Affordable Care Act, a proposed constitutional amendment 

to ban same-sex marriage, and, most famous, the 2016 Public 

Facilities Privacy & Security Act (the "Bathroom Bill"), which 

barred local governments from allowing transgender people to 

use public bathrooms for the sex they identify as. All these initia-

tives triggered intense opposition. As one veteran Republican put 

it, state politics has become "more polarized and more acrimoni-

ous than I've ever seen it.... And I worked for Jesse Helms." 

By most accounts, North Carolina's descent into all-out 

political warfare began after the Republicans won control of 

the state legislature in 2010. The following year, the legislature 

approved a redistricting plan that was widely viewed as "racially 

gerrymandered"—districts were carved out in ways that concen-

trated African American voters into a small number of districts, 

thereby diluting their electoral weight and maximizing Republi-

can seat gains. Progressive pastor William Barber, leader of the 

Moral Mondays movement, described the new districts as "apart-

heid voting districts." The changes enabled Republicans to cap-

ture nine of the state's thirteen congressional seats in 2012—even 

though Democrats cast more votes statewide. 

After Republican Pat McCrory's 2012 gubernatorial victory 

gave Republicans control of all three branches of government, the 

state GOP tried to lock in its dominance for the long haul. Armed 

with the governorship, both legislative chambers, and a majority 

on the state Supreme Court, Republican leaders launched an am

SAVING DEMOCRACY 211 

bitious string of reforms that appen red designed to skew the politi-

cal game. They began by demanding access to background data on 

voters across the state. With this information in hand, the legislature 

passed a series of electoral reforms making it harder for voters to cast 

their ballots. They passed a strict voter ID law, reduced opportuni-

ties for Pa rly voting, ended preregistration for sixteen and seventeen-

year-olds, eliminated same-day registration, and slashed the number 

of polling places in several key counties. New data allowed the Re-

p ublicans to design the reforms which appeared to have the effect 

of targeting African American voters, as a federal appeals court put 

it, with "almost surgical precision." And when an appeals court sus-

pended the execution of the new laws, Republicans used their control 

of the state's election boards to implement several of them anyway. 

Institutional warfare persisted after Democrat Roy Coo-

per narrowly defeated McCrory for the governorship in 2016. 

McCrory refused to concede the race for nearly a month, as 

Republicans made baseless accusations of voter fraud. But that 

was only the beginning. After McCrory finally conceded in 

December 2016, Republicans called a "surprise special session" 

of the state legislature. In a testament to how far politics had 

deteriorated, rumors spread of an impending "legislative coup," 

in which Republicans would hand the election to McCrory by 

exploiting a law allowing legislators to intervene when the re-

sults of a gubernatorial election are challenged. 

No such coup occurred, but in what the New York Times de-

scribed as a "brazen power grab," the special session passed sev-

eral measures to reduce the power of the incoming Democratic 

governor. The Senate granted itself the authority to confirm 

gubernatorial cabinet appointments, and it empowered the sitting 

Republican governor to transfer temporary political appointees 

into permanent positions. Outgoing governor McCrory quickly 

granted tenure to nearly one thousand of his handpicked guberna

212 NOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

torial stafFers—essentially "packing" the executive branch. Repub-

licans then changed the composition of the state's election boards, 

which were responsible for local rules involving gerrymandering, 

voter registration, voter ID requirements, voting hours, and the 

rl istribution of polling places.'Ihe boards had been under the con-

trol of the sitting governor, who could award his parry a majority 

of seats; now the GOP created a system of equal partisan repre-

sentation. In another twist, the chair of the election boards would 

rotate between the two parties each year, with the parry with the 

second-largest membership (the GOP) holding the chair in even 

years—which are election years. A few months later, the legislature 

voted to shrink the state court of appeals by three seats, effectively 

stealing three judicial appointments from Governor Cooper. 

Although the racially gerrymandered districts, the 2013 

voter law, and the reform of the election boards were later struck 

down by the courts, their passage revealed a Republican Party 

willing to leverage its full power to cripple its political adversar-

ies. Congressman David Price, a Democrat from Chapel Hill, 

said the legislative crisis taught him that "American democracy 

may be more fragile than we realized." 

North Carolina offers a window into what politics without 

guardrails looks like—and a possible glimpse into America's fii-

ture. When partisan rivals become enemies, political competition 

descends into warfare, and our institutions turn into weapons. 

The result is a system hovering constantly on the brink of crisis. 

This grim scenario highlights a central lesson of this book: When 

American democracy has worked, it has relied upon two norms 

that we often take for granted—mutual tolerance and institu-

tional forbearance. Treating rivals as legitimate contenders for 

power and underutili7ing one's institutional prerogatives in the

SAVING DEMOCRACY 213 

spirit of fair play are not written into the American Constitution. 

Yet without them, our constitutional checks and balances will not 

operate as we expect them to. When French thinker Baron de 

Montesquieupioneered the notion of separation of powers in his 

1748 work The Spirit of the Laws, he worried little about what we 

today call norms.Montesquieu believed the hard architecture of 

political institutions might be enough to constrain overreaching 

power—that constitutional design was not unlike an engineer-

ing problem, a challenge of crafting institutions so that ambition 

could be used to counteract ambition, even when political leaders 

were flawed. Many of our founders believed this, as well. 

History quickly revealed that the founders were mistaken. 

Without innovations such as political parties and their accom-

panying norms, the Constitution they so carefully constructed 

in Philadelphia would not have survived. Institutions were more 

than just formal rules; they encompassed the shared understand-

ings of appropriate behavior that overlay them. The genius of the 

first generation of Americas political leaders was not that they 

created foolproof institutions, but that, in addition to designing 

very good institutions, .they—gradually and with difficulty—

established a set of shared beliefs and practices that helped make 

those institutions work. 

The strength of the American political system, it has often 

been said, rests on what Swedish Nobel Prize-winning econo-

mist GunnarMyrdalcalled the American Creed: the principles 

of individual freedom and egalitarianism. Written into our 

founding documents and repeated in classrooms, speeches, and 

editorial pages, freedom and equality are self-justifying values. 

But they are not self-executing. Mutual toleration and institu-

tional forbearance are procedural principles—they tell politi-

cians how to behave, beyond the bounds of law, to make our 

institutions function. We should regard these procedural values

214 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

as also sitting at the center of the American Creed—for without 

them, our democracy would not work. 

This has important implications for how citizens oppose the 

Trump administration. In the wake of the 2016 election, many 

progressive opinion makers concluded that Democrats needed 

to "fight like Republicans." If Republicans were going to break 

the rules, the argument went, Democrats had no choice but to 

respond in kind. Acting with self-restraint and civility while the 

other side abandoned forbearance would be like a boxer enter-

ing the ring with a hand tied behind his back. When confronted 

with a bully who is willing to use any means necessary to win, 

those who play by the rules risk playing the sucker. The GOP's 

refusal to allow President Obama to fill a Supreme Court vacancy 

left Democrats feeling sucker-punched, particularly after Trump's 

victory ensured that they would get away with it. Political scientist 

and writer David Faris typified the calls to "fight dirty": 

The Democratic negotiating position on all issues ... 

should be very simple: You will give us Merrick Gar-

land or you may go die in a fire.... Not only that, 

but they should do what they should have done the 

day Antonin Scalia died: Make it clear that the next 

time the Democrats control the Senate while the 

Republican Party controls the presidency.... there 

will be an extraordinarily high price to pay for what 

just transpired. The next Republican president facing 

divided government will get nothing.... Zero confir-

mations. No judges, not even to the lowliest district 

court in the country. No Cabinet heads. No laws. 

Immediately after President Trump's election, some progres-

sives called for actions to prevent him from assuming office. In

SAVING DEMOCRACY 215 

an op-ed entitled "Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Repub-

licans," published a month before Trump's inauguration, Dahlia 

Lithwick and David S. Cohen lamented that Democrats were 

"doing little to stop him." Although there was "no shortage of 

legal theories that could challenge Mr. Trump's anointment," 

they wrote, Democrats were not pursuing them. Lithwick and 

Cohen argued that Democrats "should be fighting tooth and 

nail" to prevent Donald Trump from taking office—pushing 

recounts and fraud investigations in Michigan, Pennsylvania, 

and Wisconsin, seeking to sway the Electoral College, and even 

trying to overturn President Trump's victory in court. 

On Inauguration Day, some Democrats questioned Donald 

Trump's legitimacy as president. Representative Jerry McNer-

ney of California boycotted the inauguration, claiming that 

the election "lacks legitimacy" because of Russian interference, 

likewise, Representative John Lewis of Georgia declared that he 

did not view President Trump as a "legitimate president." Nearly 

seventy House Democrats boycotted Trump's inauguration. 

After Trump was installed in the White House, some pro-

gressives called on Democrats to "take a page from the GOP 

playbook and obstruct everything." Markos Moulitsas, founder 

of the website Daily Kos, declared, for example, that "there is 

nothing that should be going through that Senate without Re-

publicans having to fight. I don't care if it's the morning prayer. 

Everything should be a fight." 

Some Democrats even raised the specter of an early im-

peachment. Less than two weeks after Trump's inauguration, 

Representative Maxine Waters tweeted, "my greatest desire 

[is] to lead @realDonaldTrump right into impeachment." Im-

peachment talk picked up after FBI Director James Comey was 

fired, reinforced by Trump's sliding popularity, which raised 

Democrats' hopes of winning the House majority necessary to

216 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

lead an impeachment process. In a May 2017 interview, Waters 

declared, "Some people don't even want to mention the word. 

It's almost as if it's too grandiose an idea. It's too hard to do, just 

too much to think about. I don't see it that way." 

In our view, the idea that Democrats should "fight like 

Republicans" is misguided. First of :,I], evidence from other 

countries suggests that such a strategy often plays directly into 

the hands of authoritarians. Scorched-earth tactics often erode 

support for the opposition by scaring off moderates. And they 

unify progovernment forces, as even dissidents within the in-

cumbent party close ranks in the face of an uncompromising 

opposition. And when the opposition fights dirty, it provides 

the government with justification for cracking down. 

This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chivez. 

Although the first few years of Chavez's presidency were dem-

ocratic, opponents found his populist discourse terrifying. 

Fearful that Chivez would steer Venezuela toward Cuban-style 

socialism, they tried to remove him preemptively—and by any 

means necessary. In April 2002, opposition leaders backed a 

military coup, which not only failed but destroyed their image 

as democrats. Undeterred, the opposition launched an indefi-

nite general strike in December 2002,_ seeking to shut the coun-

try down until Chivez resigned. The strike lasted two months, 

costing Venezuela an estimated $4.5 billion and ultimately 

failing. Anti-Chivez forces then boycotted the 2005 legislative 

elections, but this did little more than allow the chavistas to 

gain total control over Congress. All three strategies had back-

fired. Not only did they fail to knock Chivez out, but they 

eroded the opposition's public support, allowed Chivez to tag 

his rivals as antidemocratic, and handed the government an ex-

cuse to purge the military, the police, and the courts, arrest or 

exile dissidents, and close independent media outlets. Weak

SAVING DEMOCRACY 217 

ened and discredited, the opposition could not stop the regime's 

subsequent descent into authoritarianism. 

Opposition strategies in Colombia under President Ádvaro 

Uribe were more successful. Uribe, who was elected in 2002, 

launched a power grab not unlike Chivez's: His administration 

attacked critics as subversive and terrorist, spied on opponents 

and journalists, tried to weaken the courts, and twice sought to 

modify the constitution to run for another term. In response, 

unlike their Venezuelan counterparts, the Colombian opposition 

never attempted to topple Uribe through extraconstitutional 

means. Instead, as political scientist Laura Gamboa shows, they 

focused their efforts on the congress and the courts. This made 

it more difficult for Uribe to question his opponents' democratic 

credentials or justify cracking down on them. Despite Uribe's 

abuses, Venezuelan-style institutional warfare did not occur, and 

Colombia's democratic institutions did not come under threat. 

In February 2010, the Constitutional Court struck down Uribe's 

bid for a third term as unconstitutional, forcing him to step down 

after two terms. The lesson is this: Where institutional channels 

exist, opposition groups should use them. 

Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or remov-

ing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would 

be Pyrrhic—for they would inherit a democracy stripped of its 

remaining protective guardrails. If the Trump administration 

were brought to its knees by obstructionism, or if President 

Trump were impeached without a strong bipartisan consen-

sus, the effect would be to reinforce—and perhaps hasten—the 

dynamics of partisan antipathy and norm erosion that helped 

bring Trump to power to begin with. As much as a third of the 

country would likely view Trump's impeachment as the machi-

nations of a vast left-wing conspiracy—maybe even as a coup. 

American politics would be left dangerously unmoored.._

218 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

This sort of escalation rarely ends well. If Democrats do not 

work to restore norms of mutual toleration and forbearance, their 

nex president will likely confront an opposition willing to use 

any means necessary to defeat them. And if partisan rifts deepen 

and our unwritten rules continue to fray, Americans could 

eventually elect a president who is even more dangerous than 

Trump. 

Opposition to the Trump administration's authoritarian be-

havior should be muscular, but it should seek to preserve, rather 

than violate, democratic rules and norms. Where possible, op-

position should center on Congress, the courts; and, of course, 

elections. If Trump is defeated via democratic institutions, it 

will strengthen those institutions. 

Protest should be viewed in a similar way. Public protest is a 

basic right and an important activity in any democracy, but its aim 

should be the defense of rights and institutions, rather than their 

disruption. In an important study of the effects of black protest 

in the 1960s, political scientist Omar Wasow found that black-

led nonviolent protest fortified the national civil rights agenda in 

Washington and broadened public support for that agenda. By 

contrast, violent protest led to a decline in white support and may 

have tipped the 1968 election from Humphrey to Nixon. 

We should learn from our own history. Anti-Trump forces 

should build a broad prodemocratic coalition. Contemporary 

coalition building is often a coming-together of like-minded 

groups: Progressive synagogues, mosques, Catholic parishes, 

and Presbyterian churches may form an interfaith coalition to 

combat poverty or racial intolerance, or Latino, faith-based, 

and civil liberties groups might form a coalition to defend im-

migrant rights. Coalitions of the like-minded are important, 

but they are not enough to defend democracy. The most ef-

fective coalitions are those that bring together groups with

SAVING DEMOCRACY 219 

dissimilar—even opposing—views on many issues. They are 

built not among friends but among adversaries. An effective 

coalition in defense ofAmerican democracy, then, would likely 

require that progressives forge alliances with business execu-

tives, religious (and particularly white evangelical) leaders, and 

red-state Republicans. Business leaders may not be natural al-

lies of Democratic activists, but they have good reasons to op-

pose an unstable and rule-breaking administration. And they 

can be powerful partners. Think of recent boycott movements 

aimed at state governments that refused to honor Martin Lu-

ther King Jr.'s birthday, continued to fly the Confederate flag, or 

violated gay or transgender rights. When major businesses join 

progressive boycotts, they often succeed. 

Building coalitions that extend beyond our natural allies is 

difficult. It requires a willingness to set aside, for the moment, 

issues we care deeply about. If progressives make positions on is-

sues such as abortion rights or single-payer health care a "litmus 

test" for coalition membership, the chances for building a coali-

tion that includes evangelicals and Republican business executives 

will be nil. We must lengthen our time horizons, swallow hard, 

and make tough concessions. This does not mean abandoning the 

causes that matter to us. It means temporarily overlooking dis-

agreements in order to find common moral ground. 

A broad opposition coalition would have important benefits. 

For one, it would strengthen the defenders of democracy by ap-

pealing to a much wider sector ofAmerican society. Rather than 

confining anti Trumpism to progressive blue-state circles, it would 

extend it to a wider range of America. Such broad involvement is 

critical to isolating and defeating authoritarian governments. 

In addition, whereas a narrow (urban, secular, progressive) 

anti-Trump coalition would reinforce the current axes of par-

tisan division, a broader coalition would crosscut these axes

220 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

and maybe even help dampen them. A political movement that 

brings together—even if temporarily—Bernie Sanders sup-

porters and businesspeople, evangelicals and secular feminists, 

and small-town Republicans and urban Black Lives Matter 

supporters, will. open channels of communication across the 

vast chasm that has emerged between our country's two main 

partisan camps. And it might help foster more crosscutting alle-

giances in a society that has too few of them. Where a society's 

political divisions are crosscutting, we line up on different sides 

of issues with different people at different times. We may dis-

agree with our neighbors on abortion but agree with them on 

health care; we may dislike another neighbor's views on immi-

gration 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. 

Thinking about how to resist the Trump administration's abuses 

is clearly important. However, the fundamental problem facing 

American democracy remains extreme partisan division—one 

fueled not just by policy differences but by deeper sources of re-

sentment, including racial and religious differences. America's 

great polarisation preceded the Trump presidency; and it is very 

likely to endure beyond it. 

Political leaders have two options in the face of extreme polar-

ization. First, they can take society's divisions as a given but try to 

counteract them through elite-level cooperation and compromise. 

This is what Chilean politicians did. As we saw in Chapter 5, in-

tense conflict between the Socialists and the Christian Democrats 

helped destroy Chilean democracy in 1973. A profound distrust 

between the two parties persisted for years afterward, trumping 

SAVING DEMOCRACY 221 

their shared revulsion toward Pinochet's dictatorship. Exiled 

Socialist leader Ricardo Lagos, who lectured at the University of 

North Carolina, recalled that when former Christian Democratic 

president Eduardo FreiMontalvavisited the university in 1975, he 

decided that he couldn't bear to talk to him—so he called in sick. 

But eventually, politicians started talking. In 1978, Lagos 

returned to Chile and was invited to dinner by former Christian 

Democratic senator Tomas Reyes. They began to meet regularly. 

At around the same time, Christian Democratic leader Patricio 

Aylwin attended meetings of lawyers and academics from di-

verse partisan backgrounds, many of whom had crossed-paths in 

courtrooms while defending political prisoners. these "Group of 

24" meetings were just casual dinners in members' homes, but 

according to Aylwin, they "built up trust among those of us who 

had been adversaries." Eventually, the conversations bore fruit. In 

August 1985, the Christian Democrats, Socialists, and nineteen 

other parties gathered in Santiago's elegant Spanish Circle Club 

and signed the National Accord for a Transition to a Full De-

mocracy. The pact formed the basis for the DemocraticConcerta-

tioncoalition. The coalition developed a practice of "consensus 

politics," in which key decisions were negotiated between Socialist 

and Christian Democratic leaders. It was successful. Not only did 

the DemocraticConcertationtopplePinochetin a 1988 plebiscite, 

but it won the presidency in 1989 and held it for two decades. 

TheConcertationdeveloped a governing style that broke 

sharplywith the politics of the 1970s. Fearful that renewed conflict 

would threaten Chile's new democracy, leaders developed a prac-

tice of informal cooperation—which Chileans called "democracy 

of agreements"—in which presidents consulted the leaders of all 

parties before submitting legislation to congress. Pinochet's 1980 

constitution had created a dominant executive with the authority

to impose budgets more or less unilaterally, but President Aylwin,

222 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

a Christian Democrat, consulted extensively with the Socialists 

and other parties before submitting his proposed budgets. And 

he diçln't just consult his allies. Aylwin also negotiated legislation 

with right-wing parties that had backed the dictatorship and de-

fendedPinochet. According to political scientist Peter Siavelis, the 

new norms "helped stave off potentially destabilizing conflicts 

both within the coalition and between the coalition and the op-

position." Chile has been one of Latin Americas most stable and 

successful democracies over the last three decades. 

It is doubtful that Democrats and Republicans can follow the 

Chilean path. It's easy for politicians to bemoan the absence of 

civility and cooperation, or to wax nostalgic about the bipartisan-

ship of a bygone era. But norm creation is a collective venture—it 

is only possible when a critical mass of leaders accepts and plays 

by new unwritten rules. This usually happens when political 

leaders from across the spectrum have stared into the abyss and 

realized that if they do not find a way of addressing polarization, 

demoçracy will die. Often, it is only when politicians suffer the 

trauma of violent dictatorship, as they did in Chile, or even civil 

war, as in Spain, that the stakes truly become clear. 

The alternative to learning to cooperate despite underlying 

polarization is to overcome that polarization. In the United 

States, political scientists have proposed an array of electoral 

reforms—an end to gerrymandering, open primaries, obliga-

tory voting, alternative rules for electing members of Congress, 

to name just a few—that might mitigate partisan enmity in 

America. The evidence of their effectiveness, however, is far 

from deq r. We think it would be more valuable to focus on two 

underlying forces driving American polarization: racial and 

religious realignment and growing economic inequality. Ad-

dressing these social foundations, we believe, requires a reshuf-

fling of what Americas political parties stand for. 

SAVING DEMOCRACY 223 

The Republican Party has been the main driver of the chasm 

between the parties. Since 2008, the GOP has at times behaved 

like an antisystem party in its obstructionism, partisan hostility, 

and extremist policy positions. Its twenty-five-year march to the 

right was made possible by the hollowing out of its organiza-

tional core. Over the last quarter century, the party's leadership 

structure has been eviscerated—first by the rise of well-funded 

outside groups (such as Americans for Tax Freedom, Americans 

for Prosperity, and many others) whose fund-raising prowess al-

lowed them to more or less dictate the policy agenda of many 

GOP elected officials, but also by the mounting influence of Fox 

News and other right-wing media. Wealthy outside donors such 

as the Koch brothers and influential mediapersonalities exert 

greater influence over elected Republican officials than does the 

GOP's own leadership. Republicans still win elections across the 

country, but what used to be called the Republican "establish- _ 

ment" has today become a phantom. This hollowing out has left 

the party vulnerable to takeover by extremists. 

Reducing polarization requires that the Republican Party be 

reformed, if not refounded outright. First of all, the GOP must re-

build its own establishment. This means regaining leadership con-

trol in four key areas: finance, grassroots organization, messaging, 

and candidate selection. Only if the party leadership can free it-

self from the clutches of outside donors and right-wing media can 

it go about transforming itself this entails major changes: Re-

publicans must marginalize extremist elements; they must build 

a more diverse electoral constituency, such that the party no lon-

ger 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.'-' . 

A refounding of America's major center-right party is _

224 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

a tall order, but there are historical precedents for such 

transformations—and under even more challenging circum-

stances. And where it has been successful, conservative party 

reform has catalyzed democracy's rebirth. A particularly dra-

matic case is the democratization of West Germany after the 

Second World War. At the center of this achievement was an 

underappreciated development: the formation of Germany's 

center-right Christian Democratic Union(CDU)out of the 

wreckage of a discredited conservative and right-wing tradition. 

Before the 1940s, Germany never had a conservative party 

that was both well-organized and electorally successful, on the one 

hand, and moderate and democratic on the other. German con-

servatism was perennially wracked by internal division and or-

ganizational weakness. In particular, the highly charged divide 

between conservative Protestants and Catholics created a politi-

cal vacuum on the center-right that extremist and authoritarian 

forces could exploit. This dynamic reached its nadir in Hitler's 

march 40 power. 

After 1945, Germany's center-right was refounded on a dif-

ferent basis. TheCDUseparated itself from extremists and au-

thoritarians—it was founded primarily by conservative figures 

(such as KonradAdenauer) with "unassailable" anti-Nazi creden-

tials. the party's founding statements made clear that it was 

directly opposed to the prior regime and all it had stood for. 

CDU leader Andreas Hermes gave a sense of the scale of the 

rupture, commenting in 1945: "An old world has sunk and we 

want to build a new one...." theCDUoffered a clear vision 

of a democratic future for Germany: a "Christian" society that 

rejected dictatorship and embraced freedom and tolerance. 

TheCDU also broadened and diversified its base, by re-

cruiting both Catholics and Protestants into the fold. This 

SAVING DEMOCRACY 225 

was a challenge. But the trauma of Nazism and World War II 

convinced conservative Catholic and Protestant leaders to over-

come the long-standing differences that had once splintered 

German society. As one regionalCDUleader put it, "`Ihe close 

collaboration of Catholics and Protestants; which occurred in 

the prisons, dungeons, and concentration camps, brought to an 

end the old conflict and began to build bridges." As new Catho-

lic and ProtestantCDUleaders went door-to-door to Catholic 

and Protestant homes during the founding years of 1945-46, 

they conjured into existence a new party of the center-right that 

would reshape German society. TheCDUbecame a pillar of 

Germany's postwar democracy. 

The United States played a major role in encouraging the 

formation of theCDU.It is a great historical irony, then, that 

Americans can today learn from these successful efforts to help 

rescue our own democracy. To be clear: We are not equating 

Donald Trump or any other Republicans with German Nazis. 

Yet the successful rebuilding of the German center-right offers 

some useful lessons for the GOP. Not unlike their German 

counterparts, Republicans today must expel extremists from 

their ranks, break sharply with the Trump administration's au-

thoritarian and white nationalist orientation, and find a way to 

broaden the party's base beyond white Christians. TheCDU 

may offer a model: If the GOP were to abandon white nation-

alism and soften its extreme free-market ideology, a broad reli-

gious conservative appeal could allow it to build a sustainable 

base, for example, among Protestants and Catholics, while also 

potentially attracting a substantial number of minority voters. 

The rebuilding of German conservatism, of course, followed 

a major catastrophe. TheCDUhad no choice but to reinvent 

itself. The question before Republicans today is whether such

226 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

a reinvention can occur before we plunge into a deeper, crisis. 

Can leaders muster the foresight and political courage to re-

.,orient what has become an increasingly dysfunctional political 

party before further damage is done, or will we need a catastro-

phe to inspire the change? 

Although the Democratic Party has not been the principal 

driver of America's deepening polarization, it could neverthe-

less play a role in reducing it. Some Democrats have suggested 

the party focus on recapturing the so-called white working 

class, or non-college-educated white voters. This was a promi-

nent theme in the wake of Hillary Clinton's traumatic 2016 

defeat. Both Bernie Sanders and some moderates argued pas-

sionately that Democrats must win back the elusive blue-collar 

voters who abandoned them in the Rust Belt, Appalachia, 

and elsewhere. To do this, many opinion-makers argued, the 

Democrats needed to back away from their-embrace of immi-

grants and so-galled identity politics—a vaguely defined term 

ghat often encompasses the promotion of ethnic diversity and, 

more recently, anti-police-violence .initiatives, such as Black 

Lives Matter. In a New York Times op-ed, Mark Penn and An-

drew Stein urged Democrats to abandon "identity politics" 

and moderate their stance on immigration to win back white 

working-class votes. Though rarely voiced, the core message is 

this: Democrats must reduce the influence of ethnic minorities 

to win back the white working class. 

Such a strategy might well reduce partisan polarization. If 

the Democratic Party were to abandon the demands of eth-

nic minorities or relegate them to the bottom of the agenda, 

it would almost certainly win back some white lower- and 

middle-income white voters. In effect, the party would return 

to what it was in the 1980s and 1990s—a party whose public 

face was predominantly white and in which minority constitu-

SAVING DEMOCRACY 227 

encies were, at most, junior partners. The Democrats would—

literally—begin to look more like their Republican rivals. And 

as they moved closer to Trumpist positions on immigration and 

racial equality (that is, accepting less of both), they would ap-

pear less threatening to the Republican base. 

We think this is a terrible idea. Seeking to diminish minor-

ity groups' influence in the party—and we cannot emphasize 

this strongly enough—is the wrong way to reduce polarization. 

It would repeat some of our country's most shameful mistakes. 

the founding of the American republic left racial domination 

intact, which eventually led to the Civil War. When Democrats 

and Republicans finally reconciled in the wake of a failed Re-

construction, their conciliation was again based on racial exclu-

sion. 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 col-

league 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. 

But there are other ways for Democrats to help restructure 

the political landscape. The intensity of partisan animosities in 

America today reflects the combined effect not only of growing 

ethnic diversity but also of slowed economic growth, stagnant 

wages in the bottom half of the income distribution, and rising 

economic inequality. Today's racially tinged partisan polariza-

tion reflects the fact that ethnic diversity surged during 4 period

228 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

(1975 to the present) in which economic growth slowed, espe-

cially for those at the bottom end of the income distribution. 

For many Americans, the economic changes of the last few 

decades have brought decreased job security, longer working 

hours, fewer prospects for upward mobility, and, consequently, 

a growth in social resentment. Resentment fuels polarization. 

One way of tackling our deepening partisan divide, then, 

would be to genuinely address the bread-and-butter concerns 

of long-neglected segments of the population-no matter their 

ethnicity. 

Policies aimed at addressing economic inequality can 

be polarizing or depolarizing, depending on how they are 

organized. Unlike in many other advanced democracies, 

in America social policy has relied heavily on means tests—

distributing benefits only to those who fall below an income 

threshold or otherwise qualify. Means-tested programs create 

the perception among many middle-class citizens that only 

poor people benefit from social policy. And because race and 

poverty have historically overlapped in the United States, 

these policies can be racially stigmatizing. Opponents of 

social policy have commonly used racially charged rhetoric 

against means-tested programs—Ronald Reagan's references 

_to "welfare queens" or "young bucks" buying steaks with 

food stamps is a prime example. Welfare became a pejorative 

term in America because of a perception of recipients as unde-

serving. 

By contrast, a social policy agenda that sets aside stiff means 

testing in favor of the more universalistic models found in 

northern Europe could have a moderating effect on our poli-

tics. Social policies that benefit everyone—Social Security 

and Medicare are prime examples—could help diminish re-

sentment, build bridges across large swaths of the American 

SAVING DEMOCRACY 229 

electorate, and lock into .place social support for more durable 

income inequality policies to reduce without providing the 

raw materials for racially motivated backlash. Comprehensive 

health insurance is a prominent example. Other examples in-

clude a much more aggressive raising of the minimum wage, 

or a universal basic income—a policy that was once seriously 

considered, and even introduced into Congress, by the Nixon 

administration. Still another example is "family policy," or pro-

grams that provide paid leave for parents, subsidized day care 

for children with working parents, and prekindergarten edu-

cation for nearly everyone. America's expenditures on families 

is currently a third of the advanced-country average, putting 

us on par with Mexico and Turkey. Finally, Democrats could 

consider more comprehensive labor market policies, such as 

more extensive job training, wage subsidies for employers to 

train and retain workers, work-study programs for high school 

and community-college students, and mobility allowances for 

displaced employees. Not only do these sorts of policies have 

the potential to reduce the economic inequality that fuels re-

sentment and polarization, but they could contribute to the 

formation of a broad, durable coalition that realigns American 

politics. 

Adopting policies to address social and economic inequality 

is, of course, politically difficult—in part because of the polar-

ization (and resulting institutional gridlock) such policies seek 

to address. And we are under no illusions about the obstacles 

to building multiracial coalitions—those including both ra-

cial minorities and working-class whites. We cannot be certain 

that universalistic policies would provide the basis for such a 

coalition—only that they stand a better chance than our cur-

rent means-tested programs. Difficult as it may be, however, it 

is imperative that Democrats address the issue of inequality.

230 HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE 

It is, after all, more than a question of social justice. The very 

health of our democracy hinges on it. 

~ 

Comparing our current predicament to democratic crises in 

other parts of the world and at other moments of history, it 

becomes clear that America is not so different from other na-

tions. Our constitutional system, while older and more robust 

than any in history, is vulnerable to the same pathologies that 

have killed democracy elsewhere. Ultimately, then, American 

democracy depends on us—the citizens of the United States. 

No single political leader can end a democracy; no single leader 

can rescue one, either. Democracy is a shared enterprise. Its fate 

depends onnI Iof us. 

In the darkest days of the Second World War, when Amer-

ica's very future was at risk, writerE. B. White was asked by 

the U.S. Federal Government's Writers' War Board to write a 

short response to the question "What is democracy?" His an-

swer was unassuming but inspiring. He wrote: 

Surely the Board knows what democracy is; It is the 

line that forms on the right. It is the "don't" in don't 

shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which 

the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high 

hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more 

than half of the people are right more than half of the 

time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, 

the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling 

of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the 

editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of 

the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved 

yet, a song the words-of which have not gone bad. 

SAVING DEMOCRACY 231 

It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the 

rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War 

Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a 

war, wanting to know what democracy is. 

The egalitarianism, civility, sense of freedom, and shared pur-

pose portrayed byE.B. White were the essence of mid-twentieth-

century American democracy. Today that vision is under assault 

not only in the United States but across the industrialized West. 

Simply restoring the liberal democratic ideals of a bygone era will 

not be enough to revitalize Western democracies today. We must 

not only restore democratic norms but extend them through 

the whole of increasingly diverse societies. This is a daunting 

challenge: Few societies in history have managed to be both 

multiracial and truly democratic. But there is precedent—and 

hope. In Britain and Scandinavia a century ago, working 

classes were successfully incorporated into liberal democratic 

systems—a development that many had deemed impossible 

only a few decades earlier. And in the United States, earlier 

waves of immigrants—Italian and Irish Catholics, Eastern 

European Jews—were successfully absorbed into democratic 

life, notwithstanding many dire predictions to the contrary. 

History shows us that it is possible to reconcile democracy with 

diversity. This is the challenge we face. Previous generations 

of Europeans and Americans made extraordinary sacrifices to 

defend our democratic institutions .against powerful external 

threats. Our generation, which grew up taking democracy for 

granted, now faces a different task: We must prevent it from 

dying from within.

234 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

We are indebted to our agent, Jill Kneerim, for many things. 

Jill invented this book project and guided us through it from 

start to finish. She has been a source of much-needed encour-

agement and wise advice—and great editing to boot. 

We thank our editor at Crown Publishers, Amanda Cook, 

for her faith in us, as well as for her patience and perseverance 

in coaxing a readable book out of a couple of political scientists. 

We are also thankful to Crown's Meghan Houser,ZachPhil-

lips, Kathleen Quinlan, and Penny Simon for their hard work 

and patient support, as well as Molly Stern for the great energy 

she brought to the project. 

Steve thanks the members of the Soccer Dads Club (Chris, 

Jonathan, and Todd) for their constant good humor and sup-

port (and, of course, their insights into politics). 

Finally, we are deeply grateful to our families. Steve thanks 

Liz Mineo and Alejandra Mineo-Levitsky, the two,-people who 

matter-most. Daniel thanks Suriya, Talia, and Lilah Ziblatt 

for their unending enthusiasm and patience. And Daniel also 

thanks his father, David Ziblatt, for conversation, insight, 

intellectual companionship, and enduring inspiration. 

Endnotes 

INTRODUCTION 

3 in barely visible steps: Constitutional scholars Aziz Huq and 

Tom Ginsburg call this form of democratic breakdown "consti-

tutional regression." See Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, "How 

to Lose a Constitutional Democracy," UCLA Law Review 65 

(2018); also Ellen Lust and David Waldner, Unwelcome Change: 

Understanding, Evaluating, and Extending Theories ofDemocratic 

Backsliding (Washington, DC: U.S. Agency for International 

Development, 2015). 

4 "the only antibiotic we have": Bart Jones, Hugo!• The Hugo 

Chdvez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution (Hanover, 

NH: Steerforth Press, 2007),p. 225. 

5 Blatant dictatorship: Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Com-

petitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War 

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); also Scott 

Mainwaring and Anibal Nrez-Lifián, Democracies and Dictator-

ships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall (New York: 

Cambridge University Press, 2014). 

5 by elected governments themselves: Huq and Ginsburg, "How 

to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,"P. 36- 

6 Many continue to believe: Latinobar6metro, accessed March 16, 

2017, http://www.latinobarometro.org/latOnlinejsp(Question: 

Democracy -> Scale [country] is democratic).

236 ENDKOTES 

9 have fueled an insidious reaction: Robert Mickey, Steven Lev 

itsky, and LucanAhmadWay, "Is America Still Safe for Democ-

racy?," Foreign Affairs, May/June 2017, pp. 20-29. 

CHAPTER 1: FATEFUL ALLIANCES 

11 Benito Mussolini arrived in Rome: SimonettaFalasca-

Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's 

Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),p.1. 

12 "I come from the battlefield": Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of 

Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004),p.90. 

12 At the last train stop: Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle,p. 2. 

12 a new Fascist epoch: Ibid. 

15 "We've engaged him for ourselves": Quoted in Richard Evans, 

The Corning ofthe Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2003),p.308. 

15 "fateful alliance": Hermann Beck, The Fateful Alliance. Ger-

man Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: TheMachtergreifungin a 

New Light (New York: BerghahnPress, 2011). Also see Daniel 

Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 

15 "bourgeois bloc": Alexander De Grand, The Hunchback's Tailor.• 

GiovanniGiolittiand Liberal Italy from the Challenge of Mass Poli-

tics to the Rise of Fascism (Westport, CT. Praeger, 2001), pp. 241-

42. 

17 "It is difficult to ask": Taken fromCristina Marcanoand Al-

bertoBarreraTyszka, Hugo Chdvez (New York: Random House, 

2004),p.304. 

18 Calderas departure and subsequent antiestablishment 

campaign: See JoshE. Molina, "The Unraveling of Venezuela's 

Parry System," in The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in 

Venezuela, eds. JenniferL.McCoy and David J. Myers (Bald-

more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004),p.162. 

18 "To power'. Quoted in Jones, Hugo!p. 186. 

18 he viewed Chivez as a passing fad: Ibid.,p. 189. 

18 in dropping all charges: MarcanoandBarreraTyszka, Hugo 

Chdvez,P. 107. 

18 he stood glumly: Jones, Hugo;p. 226. 

19 "Nobody thought that Mr. Chivez": Quoted inMarcanoand 

BarreraTyszka, Hugo Chdvez,p. 107. 

-ENDNOTES 237 

19 "I have just committed": Quoted in Larry Eugene Jones, "`The 

Greatest Stupidity of My Life': Alfred Hugenberg and the For-

mation of the Hitler Cabinet, January 1933," journal of Contem-

porary History 27, no. 1 (1992), pp. 63-87. 

20 1998 Latinobar6metro survey: Source: Latinobar6metro, ac-

cessed March 16, 2017, http://wwwlatinobarometro.org/lat 

Online.jsp. 

21 "litmus test": Juan J. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Re-

gimes. Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration (Baltimore: Johns 

Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 29-30. 

21 Building on Linz's work: See ibid., pp. 27-38. 

22 All five ended up: Steven Levitsky and James Loxton, "Populism 

and Competitive Authoritarianism in the Andes," Democratiza-

tion 20, no. 1 (2013). 

24 "distancing": Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary 

Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Prince-

ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003),p.238. 

25 The AVF's youth group: Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the 

Birth of Democracy,p. 344. 

25 The loss of 25,000 members: Ibid. 

25 "greater affinity for extremists": Linz, The Breakdown of Demo-

cratic Regimes, pp. 32-33. 

26 "join with opponents": Ibid.,p. 37. 

27 The party leadership took: GiovanniCapoccia, Defending 

Democracy: Reactions to Extremism in Interwar Europe (Bald-

more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005),p. 121. 

27 created the Catholic Youth Front: Ibid.,p.120. 

28 The Catholic Party supported: Ibid,p. 121. 

28 The choice was not easy: Ibid, pp. 122-23. 

28 when it became evident: Ibid.,p. 121. 

29 the extreme-right Lapua Movement: Risto Alapuro 

and Erik Allardt, "The Lapua Movement: The Threat of 

Rightist Takeover in Finland, 1930-32," in The Breakdown 

of Democratic Regimes. Europe, eds. Juan J. Linz and Alfred 

Stepan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 

p.130. 

29 The movement sought: Ibid.

238 ENDNOTES 

29 At first, politicians from the governing: Bermeo, Ordinary 

People in Extraordinary Times,p. 240; Alapuro and Allardt, "The 

Lapua Movement," pp. 130-31. 

29 YE.E. Svinhufvud, a conservative: Alapuro and Allardt, "The 

Lapua Movement," pp. 130-31. 

29 the Lapua Movement continued: Bermeo, Ordinary People in 

Extraordinary Times,p. 240. 

29 Lapua thugs abducted: Alapuro and Allardt, "The Lapua Move 

ment," P.130. 

29 The Lapua Movement also organized: Ibid.,p.133. 

29 the bulk of the Agrarian Union: Bermeo, Ordinary People in 

Extraordinary Times,p. 240. 

30 Even the conservative president: Ibid.,p. 241. 

30 The Lapua Movement was left isolated: Ibid., pp. 239-41. 

31 "not with passion": "Bürgerlicher Aufruf fürVan derBellen 

(Citizens Appeal to Van derBellen)," DiePresse, May 14, 2016, 

http://diepresse.com/home/innenpolitik/bpwahl/4988743 

/B uergerlicher-Aufruf-fuer-Van-der-B ellen. 

31 a decision that split families: Interview with author, March 16, 

2017. 

CHAPTER 2: GATEKEEPING IN AMERICA 

34 extremist groups existed in the United States: Seymour Mar-

tin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing 

Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (New York: Hàrper & Row, 

1970),p. 152. 

34 naming Mussolini its "Man of the Week": Lipset and Raab, The 

Politics of Unreason, pp. 170-71. 

34 "ever to happen to radio": Quoted in Alan Brinkley, Voices of 

Protest., Huey Long, Father Coughlin & the Great Depression (New 

York: Vintage Books, 1983),p. 119. 

34 He delivered speeches to packed stadiums: Ibid., pp. 83, 

175-77. 

35 lined his route to see him: Ibid.,p. 119. As late ás 1938, a Gal-

lup poll found that 27 percent of Americans approved of Father 

Coughlin, while 32 percent disapproved (Lipset and Raab, The 

Politics of Unreason, pp. 171-73). 

ENDNOTES 239 

35 "the great demagogue of the day". ArthurM. Schlesinger_ Jr., 

The Age of Roosevelt• The Politics of Upheaval, 1935-1936 (Bos-

ton: Houghton Mifflin, [1960] 2003), pp. viii, 68. 

35 a gifted stump speaker: RichardD. White Jr., Kingfish. The 

Reign of HueyP. Long (New York: Random House, 20.06), 

pp. 45, 99, 171; Brinkley, Voices of Protest,p. 69. 

35 a mix of bribes and threats: Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt, 

p.62; White, Kingfish, pp. 248-53; William Ivy Hair, The King-

fish and His Realm: The Life and Times of HueyP.Long (Baton 

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), pp. 276-80. 

35 "I'm the constitution just now": White, Kingfish,p. 45• 

35 "the first true dictator": Quoted in ibid.,p. 253. 

35 Roosevelt's campaign manager: Ibid.,p.352. 

35 "more mail than all other senators": Ibid.,p. 198. 

35 nearly eight million names: RobertE. Snyder, "Huey Long and 

the Presidential Election of 1936," Louisiana History 16, no. 2 

(Spring 1975),p.123; White, Kingfish,p. 198. 

35 a presidential run: Brinkley, Voices of Protest,p. 81; Hair, The 

Kingfish and His Realm, pp. 306-7. 

35 "I can take this Roosevelt": Snyder, "Huey Long and the Presi-

dential Election of 1936,"p.128. 

35 Roosevelt viewed Long as a serious threat: Lipset and Raab, The 

Politics of Unreason, pp. 209, 224. 

.35 Senator Joseph McCarthy: Ibid.,p. 21. 

36 enjoyed 40 percent: Ibid.,p. 237. 

36 "hate the powerful": ArthurT. Hadley, The Invisible Primary 

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976),p. 238; Jody Carl-

son, GeorgeC. Wallace and the Politics of Powerlessness., The Wal-

lace Campaigns for the Presidency, 196/-1976 (New Brunswick, 

NJ: Transaction Books, 1981),p.6. 

36 "What is a Constitution anyway?": Lipset and Raab, The Poli-

tics of Unreason, pp. 355-56. 

36 blue-collar base: DanT.Carter, The Politics ofRage. George Wal-

lace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation 

of American Politics, Second Edition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana 

State University Press, 2000), pp. 344 52; StephanLesher, 

George Wallace. American Populist (Reading, MA: Addison-

Wesley, 1994), pp. 276-78; Lipset and Raab, The Politics of Un-

reason, pp. 345-57.

282 ENDNOTES 

Party Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); 

Abramowitz, The Polarized Public?, pp. 69-77. 

171 76 percent of white evangelicals: "The Parties on the Eve of the 

2016 Election: Two Coalitions, Moving Further Apart," Pew 

Research Center, September 13, 2016, http://www.people-press. 

org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-among-voters-1992-2016/. 

171 The percentage ofwhite Democrats: Abramowitz, The Polarized 

Public?p. 67. 

171 married white Christians: Abramowitz, The Disappearing Cen-

ter,p. 129. 

171 By the 2000s: Ibid.,p. 129. 

171 the two parties are now divided: Hetherington and Weiler, Au-

thoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, pp. 27-28, 

63-83. 

172 most of the norm breaking: Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmet-

ric Politics; Mann and Ornstein, Its Even Worse Than It Looks. 

172 Republican voters rely more heavily: Levendusky, How Parti-

san Media PolarizeAmerica, pp. 14-16; Grossman and Hopkins, 

Asymmetric Politics, pp. 149-64. 

172 69 percent of Republican voters: Levendusky, How Partisan 

Media Polarize America,p. 14. 

172 popular radio talk-show hosts: Grossman and Hopkins, Asym-

metric Politics, pp. 170-74. 

172 The rise of right-wing media: Theda Skocpol and Alexander 

- Hertel-Fernandez, "The Koch Network and Republican Party 

Extremism," Perspectives on Politics 16, no. 3 (2016), pp. 681-99. 

172 "no compromise" position: Levendusky, How Partisan Media 

Polarizes America,p. 152. 

172 California Republican representative DarrellIssa: Leven-

dusky, How Partisan Media Polarize America,p. 152. 

172 "If you stray the slightest": Quoted in Grossman and Hopkins, 

Asymmetric Politics,p. 177. 

172 Hard-line positions were reinforced: Skocpol and Hertel-

Fernandez, "The Koch Network," pp. 681-99. 

172 Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform: Elizabeth Drew, 

Whatever It Taker The Real Struggle for Power in America (New 

York: Viking Press, 1997),p. 65. 

ENDNOTES 283 

173 outside groups such as Americans for Prosperity: Skocpol and 

Hertel-Fernandez, "the Koch Network,"p. 683. 

173 the Koch family was responsible: Ibid.,p.684. 

173 the GOP has remained culturally homogeneous: Grossman 

and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics, pp. 43-46, 118-23. 

173 white Protestants are a minority: Abramowitz, The Disappear-

ing Center,p. 129. 

174 "overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive": RichardHof-

stadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays 

(New York: Vintage, 1967),p.4. 

174 "slipping away": Parker and Barreto, Change They Can't Believe 

In, pp. 3, 157. 

174 "strangers in their own land": Arlie RussellHochschild, Strang-

ers in Their Own Land.,Anger and Mourning on the American 

Right (New York: The New Press, 2016). 

174 "real Americans": Based on an analysis of national survey re-

sults, ElizabethTheiss-Morse found that those who most 

strongly identify as Americans tend to view "real Americans" as 

1) native born, 2) English-speaking, 3) white, and .4) Christian. 

See Elizabeth lheiss-Morse, Who Counts as an American: The 

Boundaries of National Identity (New York: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2009), pp. 63-94. 

174 "The American electorate isn't moving": Ann Coulter, Adios 

America! The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third world 

Hellhole (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2015),p. 19. 

174 "Take Our Country Back": Parker and Barreto, Change They 

Can't Believe In. 

CHAPTER 8: TRUMP'S FIRST YEAR: 

AN AUTHORITARIAN. REPORT CARD 

176 A study by the Shorenstein Center: ThomasE.Patterson, "News 

Coverage of Donald Trump's First 100 Days," Shorenstein Cen-

ter on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, May 18, 2017, hops:// 

shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-first-loo 

-days. The news outlets covered in the study were the New York 

Times, Wall Street journal, and Washington Post, as well as CNN, 

CBS, Fox News, NBC, andrh reeEuropean media outlets.

284 ENDNOTES 

176 Trump administration officials were feeling besieged: See 

Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, At a Besieged White 

House, Tempers Flare and Confusion Swirls," New York Times, 

May 16~ 2017. 

176 press coverage: Patterson, "News Coverage of Donald Trump's 

First 100 Days." 

177 "no politician in history": "Trump Says No President Has Been 

Treated More Unfairly," Washington Post, May 17, 2017. 

177 He later reportedly pressured: "Comet' Memo Says Trump 

Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation," New York Times, 

May 16, 2017; "Top Intelligence Official Told Associates Trump 

Asked Him If He Could Intervene with Comey on FBI Russia 

Probe," Washington Post, June 6, 2017. 

178 he dismissed Comey: Josh Gerstein, "Trump Shocks with 

Ouster of FBI's Comey," Politico, May 9, 2017; and "Trump Said 

He Was Thinking of Russia Controversy When He Decided to 

Fire Comey," Washington Post, May 11, 2017. 

178 Only once in the FBI's eighty-two-year history- -Philip Bump, 

"Here's How Unusual It Is for an FBI Director to Be Fired," 

Washington Post, May 9, 2017; "FBI Director Firing in E`árly'90s 

Had Some Similarities to Comey Ouster," U.S. News & World 

Report, May 10, 2017. 

178 Trump had attempted to establish: Tina Nguyen, "Did Trump's 

Personal Lawyer Get Preet Bharara Fired?," Vanity Fair, June 13, 

2017; "Mueller Expands Probe into Trump Business Transac-

tions," Bloomberg, July 20, 2017. 

178 the president removed him: "Mueller Expands Probe into 

Trump Business Transactions." 

178 Trump publicly shamed Sessions: Nolan McCaskill and Louis 

Nelson, "Trump Coy on Session's Future: `Time Will Tell,"' 

Politico, July 25, 2017; Chris Cillizza, "Donald Trump Doesn't 

Want to Fire Jeff Sessions. He Wants Sessions to Quit," CNN 

.com, July 24, 2017. 

178 launched an effort to dig up dirt: Michael S. Schmidt, Mag-

gie Haberman, and Matt Apuzzo, "Trump's Lawyers, Seeking 

Leverage, Investigate Mueller's Investigators," New York Times, 

July 20, 2017. 

ENDNOTES 285 

179 the government's dubiously elected Constituent Assembly: 

"Venezuela's Chief ProsecutorLuisaOrtega Rejects Dismissal," 

BBC.com, August 6, 2017. 

179 "the opinion of this so-called judge": "Trump Criticizes `So-

Called Judge' Who Lifted Travel Ban," Lull Street journal, Feb-

ruary 5, 2017. 

179 "unelected judge": White House Office of the Press Secretary, 

"Statement on Sanctuary Cities Ruling," April 25, 2017. See https:// 

www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/04/25/statement 

-sanctuary-cities-ruling. 

179 Trump himself responded: "President Trump Is Absolutely' 

Considering Breaking Up the Ninth Circuit Court," Time, 

April 26, 2017 

179 the pardon was clearly political: A few nights earlier, Trump 

had said to loud applause at a political rally, "Do the people in 

this room like Sheriff Joe?" He rhetorically asked, "So was Sher-

iff Joe convicted for doing his job?" See "Trump Hints at Pardon 

for Ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio," CNN. com, August 23, 2017. 

179 The move reinforced fears: "Trump's Lawyers Are Exploring 

His Pardoning Powers to Hedge Against the Russia Investiga-

tion," Business Insider, July 20, 2017 

180 "If the president can immcmi7e his agents": Martin Redish, A 

Pardon for Arpaio Would Put Trump in Uncharted Territory" 

New York Times, August 27, 2017. 

180 The Trump administration also trampled: RyanLizza,"How 

Trump Broke the Office of Government Ethics," The New 

Yorker, July 14, 2017. 

180 House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz: Richard Painter, an 

ethics lawyer in the GeorgeWBush administration, described 

Chaffetz's action as "strong-arming" and "political retaliation." 

"GOP Lawmaker Hints at Investigating Ethics Chief Critical of 

Trump," New York Times, January 13, 2017. 

180 administration officials tried to force the OGE: "White House 

Moves to Block Ethics Inquiry into Ex-Lobbyists on Payroll," 

New York Times, May 22, 2017 

180 "broken' OGE: Lizza,"How Trump Broke the Office of Gov 

ernment Ethics."

286 ENDNOTES 

180 Trump did not replace Comey: "Trump Faces Tough Choices 

in FBI Pick," The Hill, May 15, 2017. Trump's eventual appoin-

tee, Christopher Wray, was widely expected to maintain the 

FBI's independence. 

180 Senate Republicans resisted Trump's efforts: "Trump Is Re-

portedly Considering Bringing Rudy Giuliani on as Attorney 

General amid Troubles with Jeff Sessions," Business Insider, 

July 24, 2017. 

181 "enemy of the American people": "Trump Calls the News 

Media the `Enemy of the American People,'" New York Times, 

February 17, 2017. 

181 "I love the First Amendment": "Remarks by President Trump 

at the Conservative Political Action Committee," White House 

Office of the Press Secretary, February 24, 2017. See https:// 

www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/24/remarks 

-president-trump-conservative-political-action-conference. 

181 "disgraced the media world": See https://twitter.com/real 

donaldtrump/status/84745518 0912181249. 

181 "I think that's something we've looked at": JonathatxTurley, 

"Trump's Quest to Stop Bad Media Coverage Threatens Our 

Constitution," The Hill, May 2, 2017. 

181 multimillion-dollar defamation suits: "Confrontation, Re-

pression in Correa's Ecuador," Committee to Protect Jour-

nalists, September 1, 2011, https:/fcpj.org/reports/2011/09 

/confrontation-repression-correa-ecuador.php. 

182 "If I become president": Conor Gaffey, "Donald Trump Versus 

Amazon: All the Times the President and Jeff Bezos Have Called 

Each Other Out," Newsweek, July 25, 2017. 

182 He also threatened to block: Philip Bump, "Would the Trump 

Administration Block a Merger Just to Punish CNN?," Washing-

ton Post, July 6, 2017. 

182 President Trump signed an executive order: "President Trump 

Vows to Take Aggressive Steps on Immigration," Boston Globe, 

January 25, 2017. 

182 "Ifwe have to": ".Judge Blocks Trump Effort to Withhold Money 

from Sanctuary Cities," New York Times, April 25, 2017. 

182 The plan was reminiscent: "Venezuela Lawmakers Strip Power 

from Caracas Mayor," Reuters, April 7, 2009. 

ENDNOTES 281 

182 President Trump was blocked by the courts: "Judge Blocks 

Trump Effort to Withhold Money from Sanctuary Cities," New 

York Times, April 25, 2017. 

183 he called for changes: Aaron Blake, "Trump Wants More Power 

and Fewer Checks and Balances—Again," Washington Post, 

May 2, 2017. Also https://rwitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status 

/869553853750013953. 

183 Senate Republicans did eliminate the filibuster: Aaron Blake, 

"Trump Asks for More Power. Here's Why the Senate GOP Will 

Resist," Washington Post, May 30, 2017. 

183 some Republican leaders: SeeHasen, The Voting Wars, AriBer-

man, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in 

America (New York: Picador, 2015). 

183 strict voter identification laws: Berman, Give Us the Ballot; 

Benjamin Highton, "Voter Identification Laws and Turnout in 

the United States," Annual Review of Political Science 20, no. 1 

(2017), pp. 49-67. 

184 The push for voter ID laws: Justin Levitt, "The Truth About 

Voter Fraud," New York University School of Law Brenner 

Center for Justice (2007). See https://www.brennancenter.org 

/publication/truth-about-voter-fraud; also Minnite, The Myth of 

Voter Fraud; Hasen, The Voting Wars, pp. 41-73; Sharad Goel, 

Marc Meredith, Michael Morse, David Rothschild, and Housh-

mand Shiraíii-Mehr, "One Person, One Vote? Estimating the 

Prevalence of Double-Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections," un-

published manuscript, January 2017. 

184 All reputable studies: See, for example, Levitt, "The Truth 

About Voter Fraud";Minnte, The Myth of Voter Fraud. 

184. 

 "modern day poll tax": Quoted in Berman, Give Us the Ballot, 

p.223. 

184 An estimated 300,000 Georgia voters: Ibid.,p.223. 

184 "a not-too-thinly veiled attempt": Quoted in ibid.,p.254. 

184 Bills were introduced: Ibid., pp. 260-61. 

184 fifteen states had adopted such laws: Highton, "Voter Identifi-

cation Laws and Turnout in the United States," pp. 152-53. 

184 a disproportionate impact: Charles Stewart III, "Voter ID: 

Who Has Them? Who Shows Them?" Oklahoma Law Review 66 

(2013).

288 ENDNOTES - 

184 reported not possessing avalid driver's license: Ibid., pp. 41-42. 

184 A study by the Brennan Center for justice: Berman, Give Us the 

Ballot,p. 254. 

185 sgyen adopted stricter voter ID laws: Ibid.,p.264. 

185 Scholars have just begun: Highton, "Voter Identification Laws 

and Turnout in the United States," P.153. 

185 "premier advocate of vote suppression": Peter Waldman, "Why 

We Should Be Very Afraid of Trump's Vote Suppression Com-

mission," Washington Post, June 30, 2017. 

185 Kobach helped push through: SeeAriBerman, "The Man Be-

hind Trump's Voter-Fraud Obsession," New York Times Maga-

zine, June 13, 2017. 

185 "won the popular vote": See https://twitter.com/realclonald 

trump/status/802972944532209664?lang=en. 

185 He repeated this point: "Without Evidence, Trump Tells 

Lawmakers 3 Million to 5 Million Illegal Ballots Cost 

Him the Popular Vote," Washington Post, January 23, 2017. 

Trump's statement appears to have been based on claims 

made by noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his website 

Infowars. See Jessica Huseman and Scott Klein, _"There's No 

Evidence Our Election Was Rigged," ProPublica, November 28, 

2016. 

185 national vote-monitoring project: Huseman and Klein, "There's 

No Evidence Our Election Was Rigged." 

185 Washington Post reporter Philip Bump: "There Have Been Just 

Four Documented Cases of Voter Fraud in the 2016 Election," 

Washington Post, December 1, 2016. 

185 "absolutely correct": Berman, "The Man Behind Trump's Voter-

Fraud Obsession." 

185 "we will probably never know": Max Greenwood and Ben Ka-

misar, "Kobach: `We May Never Know' If Clinton Won Popular 

Vote," The Hill, July 19, 2017. 

186 The Commission has already sought: Waldman, "Why We 

Should Be Very Afraid of Trump's Vote Suppression Commis-

sion." » 

186 the number of mistakes: Goel, Meredith, Morse, Rothschild, 

and Shirani-Mehr, "One Person, One Vote?" 

186 Trump's Commission on Election Integrity: In July 2017, it 

was reported that forty-four states had refused to share voter 

ENDNDTES 289 

information with the Commission. See "Forty-Four States and 

DC Have Refused to Give Certain Voter Information to Trump 

Commission," CNN.com, July 5, 2017. 

188 the Law and Justice Party: "Poland's President Vetoes 2 

Laws That Limited Courts' Independence," New York Times, 

July 24, 2017. 

189 Active loyalists: Representative Duncan Hunter of Califor-

nia, for example, publicly defended Trump even after the re-

lease of the Access Hollywood tape during the 2016 campaign. 

See "Trump's 10 Biggest Allies in Congress," The Hill, Decem-

ber 25, 2016. 

190 A few of them pushed quietly: "Special Counsel Appointment 

Gets Bipartisan Praise," The Hill, May 17, 2017. 

190 important Republican senators: "Republicans to Trump: Hands 

off Mueller," Politico, June 12, 2017. 

190 Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley: Ibid. 

190 Graham, McCain, and Corker: See https://projects.fivethirty 

eight. com/congress-trump-score/?ex—cid=rrpromo. 

191 "found their own red line": "Senators Unveil Two Proposals 

to Protect Mueller's Russia Probe" Washington Post, August 3, 

2017; Tracy, "As Mueller Closes In, Republicans Turn away from 

Trump." 

191 President Trump's approval rating: JeffreyM.Jones, "Trump 

Has Averaged 50% or Higher Job Approval in 17 States," 

Gallup News Service, July 24, 2017. See http://wwwgallup.com 

/pofl/214349/trump-averaged-higher-job-approval-states.aspx. 

191 Democratic senator Joe Manchin: See https://projects.fivethirty 

eight.com/congress-trump-score/?ex—cid=rrpromo. 

191 The Hill listed Manchin: "Trump's 10 Biggest Allies in Con-

gress." 

192 "Have we not heard enough": "In West Virginia, Trump Hails 

Conservatism and a New GOP Governor," New York Times, 

August 3, 2017. 

192 they increase support for the government: See again Mueller, 

War, Presidents, and Public Opinion and more recent empirical 

studies of the rally-'round-the-flag effect in the United States, 

including Oneal and Bryan, "The Rally 'Round the Flag Effect 

in U.S. Foreign Policy Crises, 1950-1985", Baum, "The Constit-

uent Foundations of the Rally-Round-the-Flag Phenomenon,"

290 ENDNOTES 

and Chatagnier, "The Effect of Trust in Government on Rallies 

'Round the Flag." 

192 President Bush's approval rating: Moore, "Bush Approval Rat-

ing Highest in Gallup History." 

192 Cidiens become more likely to tolerate: Huddy, Khatib, and 

Capelos, "The Polls—Trends," pp. 418-50; DarrenW.Davis 

and BrianD. Silver, "Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public Opinion 

in the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America," American 

Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1 (2004), pp. 28-46; Huddy, 

Feldman, and Weber, "The Political Consequences of Perceived 

Threat and Felt Insecurity," pp. 131-53; and Adam J. Berinsky, 

In Time of Wan • Understanding American Public Opinion from 

World War II to Iraq (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

2009), Chapter 7• 

192 Judges are notoriously reluctant: Howell, Power Without Per-

suasion; Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Repub-

lic, pp. 67-85. 

192 institutional constraints: Howell, Power Without Persuasion, 

p.184. 

193 President Trump's foreign policy ineptitude: During the 2016 

campaign, fifty Republican foreign policy experts, maffy of them 

former Bush administration officials, wrote a letter warning that 

Trump's ignorance and recklessness would "put at risk our na-

tion's ïiational security." See "50 G.O.P. Officials Warn Donald 

Trump Would Put Nation's Security At Risk,"' New York Times, 

August 8, 2016. 

193 "smashed through the behavior standards": David Brooks, "Get-

ting Trump out of My Brain," New York Times, August 8, 2017. 

194 "closed and armored limousine": James Wieghart and Paul 

Healy, "Jimmy Carter Breaks Protocol at Inauguration," New 

York Daily News, January 21, 1977• 

194 "an informal custom": Christine Hauser, "The Inaugural Pa-

rade, and the Presidents Who Walked It," New York Times, Jan-

uary 19, 2017. 

194 William Henry Harrison broke tradition: Paul F. Boller, Presi-

dential Campaigns: From George Washington to GeorgeWBush 

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),p.70 

194 "BookerT.Washington of Tuskegee, Alabama': The following 

account draws on Clarence Lusane, The Black History ofthe White 

House (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2011), pp. 219-78. 

ENDNOTES 291 

194 "the prevailing social etiquette": Ibid. 

195 President Trump broke: "President Trump Breaks a 150 Yéar 

Tradition of Pets in the White House," AOL.com, July 28, 2017. 

195 "American carnage": Yashar Ali, "What GeorgeW.Bush Really 

Thought of Donald Trump's Inauguration," New York Maga-

zine, March 29, 2017• 

196 not technically required: As Walter Shaub, the former head of 

the Office of Government Ethics, put it, "You could seriously 

be the Secretary of the Department of Energy and hold Chev-

ron, Exxon, and B.P. [shares] and not be violating the law, as 

long as you were willing to go to work every day, put your feet 

up on your desk, and read the newspaper and do nothing else." 

SeeLizza,"How Trump Broke the Office of Government Ethics." 

196 President Trump exercised no such forbearance: Trump main-

tained a number of potential conflicts of interest stemming from 

his international business dealings and his extensive links to the 

Trump Organization. Within weeks of the election, the Sun-

light Foundation had created a list of "red flag" conflicts, post-

ing thirty-two of them in November 2016. By July 2017, the 

list had grown to more than six hundred potential conflicts of 

interest. Many of Trump's cabinet and advisory appointees—

drawn from the worlds of energy, finance, and lobbying—also 

faced potential conflicts of interest. See data: http://www.sun 

lightfoundation.com. 

196 The Office of Government. Ethics: "As Trump Inquiries Flood 

Ethics Office, Director Looks to House for Action," NPR.com, 

April 17, 2017• Trump's legal team pointed to former Vice Presi-

dent Nelson Rockefeller as an example of an executive official who 

didn't fully divest from his family fortune. However, Vice Pres-

ident Rockefeller was subjected to four months of hearings over 

potential conflicts. See "Conflicts of Interest: Donald Trump 2017 

vs. Nelson Rockefeller 1974," CBSNews.com, January 13, 2017. 

196 President Trump also violated: See https://twitter.com/real 

donaldtrump/status/802972944532209664?lang=en. 

196 "millions" of illegal voters: "California Official Says 

Trump's Claim of Voter Fraud Is Absurd,"' New York Times, 

November 28, 2016; "Voter Fraud in New Hampshire? Trump 

Has No Proof and Many Skeptics," New York Times, February 

13, 2017; "Trump's Baseless Assertions of Voter Fraud Called 

`Stunning,"' Politico, November 27, 2016.

292 ENDNOTES 

196 A poll taken prior: "Un TerciodelosMexicansCreeQueHubo 

FraudeenlasElecciones de 2006," El Pais, July 3, 2008. See 

https:/felpais.com/internacional/2008/07/03/actualidad 

/1215036002_850215_html;EmirOlivaresAlonso,"Considera 

71% dß'losMexicanosquePuede HaberFraudeElectoral," 

La jornada, June 29, 2012. See http://wwwjornada unam mx 

/2012/06/29/politica/003n 1pol. 

197 "meaningful amount" of fraud: Sam Corbett-Davies, To-

bias Konitzer, and David Rothschild, "Poll: 60% of Republi-

cans Believe Illegal Immigrants Vote; 43% Believe People Vote 

Using Dead People's Names," Washington Post, October 24, 

2016. 

197 47 percent of Republicans: "Many Republicans Doubt Clinton 

Won Popular Vote," Morning Consult, July 27, 2017. 

197 Fifty-two percent of Republicans: ArielMalka and Yphtach 

Lelkes, "In a New Poll, Half of Republicans Say They Would 

Support Postponing the 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It," 

Washington Post, August 10, 2017. 

197 "Terrible! Just found out": https:Htwitter.com/realdonaldtrump 

/status/837996746236182529; also see www.politifact.com/ 

truth-o-meter/article/2017/mar/21 /timeline-donald-trumps 

-false-wiretapping-charge%2F. 

198 "never degy the undeniable": "Many Politicians Lie, but Trump 

Has Elevated the Art of Fabrication," New York Times, August 8, 

2017 

198 PolitiFact classified: PolitiFact. See http://www.politifact.com/ 

personalities/donald-trump/. _ 

198 "achieved something remarkable": DavidLeonhardtand Stu-

art Thompson, "Trump's Lies," New York Times, https://www 

.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies 

.html?mcubz=l. 

198 President Trump claimed: Rebecca Savransky, "Trump Falsely 

Claims He Got Biggest Electoral College Win Since Reagan," 

The Hill, February 16, 2017; Tom Kertscher, "Donald Trump Not 

Close in Claiming He Has Signed More Bills in First Six Months 

Than Any President," PolitiFact Wisconsin, July 20, 2017, http:// 

wwwpolitifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2017/jul/20/donald-

trump/donald-trump-notclose-claiming-he-has-signed-more% 

ENDNOTES 293 

198 "the greatest speech ever": Ella Nilsen, "Trump: Boy Scouts 

Thought My Speech Was `Greatest Ever Made to Them.' Boy 

Scouts: No," Vox, August 2, 2017 

198 view him as dishonest: Surveys from mid-2017 showed that 

57 percent of Americans believed the president was not honest. 

See Quinnipiac University Poll, "Trump Gets Small Bump 

from American Voters," January 10, 2017 (https://poH.qu.edu/ 

national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2415) "U.S. Voters Send 

Trump Approval to Near Record Low," May 10, 2017 (https:// 

poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2456);"Trump 

Gets Small Bump from American Voters," June 29, 2017 (https:// 

poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleáselD=2471). 

199 Citizens have a basic right: See Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Partici-

pation and Opposition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 

1971). 

199 "among the most dishonest human beings": "With False 

Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence 

Rift," New York Times, January 21, 2017• See also http://video 

.foxnews.com/v/5335781902001/?#sp=show-dips. 

200 "I heard poorly rated @Morningjoe": https://twitter.com 

/realdonaldtrump/status/880408582310776832, https://twitter 

.com/realdonaldtr-ump/status/880410114456465411. 

200 Press Secretary Sean Spicer: "CNN, New York Times, Other 

Media Barred from White House Briefing," Washington Post, 

February 24, 2017. 

200 The only modern precedent: "Trump Not the Only President to 

Ban Media Outlets from the White House," ABC10.com, Feb-

ruary 24, 2017• 

200 Humans have a limited ability to cope: Daniel Patrick 

Moynihan, "Defining Deviancy Down: How We've Be-

come Accustomed to Alarming Levels of Crime and Destruc-

tive Behavior," The American Scholar 62, no. 1 (Winter 1993), 

pp. 17-30. 

200 All but one Republican senator: Susan Collins of Maine voted 

with Trump 79 percent ofthe time. See https://projccts.fivethirry 

eight.com/congress-trump-score/?ex—Cid=rrpromo. 

201 Even Senators BenSasse: See https:/fprojects.fivethirtyeight 

.com/congress-trump-score/?ex—dd=rrpromo.

294 ENDNOTES 

202 Greg Gianforte, - the Republican candidate:."GOP Candidate 

in Montana Race Charged with Misdemeanor Assault After Al-

legedly Body-Slamming Reporter," Washington Post, May 24, 

2017. 

202 "bias&a or inaccurate": "Attitudes Toward the Mainstream 

Media Take an Unconstitutional Turn," The Economist, Au-

gust 2, 2017; https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail 

12017108/daily-chart-0. 

202 "They use their schools": "Why Join the National Rifle Asso-

ciation? To Defeat Liberal Enemies, Apparently," The Guardian, 

July 1, 2017. 

203 "We've had it": "'We're Coming for You': NRA Attacks New 

York Times in Provocative Video," The Guardian, August 5, 

2017. 

CHAPTER 9: SAVING DEMOCRACY 

204 It was only after 1965: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie. 

204 fundamental realignment: Mickey, Levitsky, and Way, "Is 

America Still Safe for Democracy?," pp. 20-29. 

204 There is a mounting perception: See Larry Diamond "Fac-

ing Up to the Democratic Recession," journal of Democracy 26, 

no. 1 (January 2015), pp. 141-55; and Roberto Stefan Foa and 

Yascha Mounk, "The Democratic Disconnect," Journal of De-

mocracy27, no. 3 (July 2016), pp. 5-17 

204 Larry Diamond: Diamond, "Facing Up to the Democratic Re-

cession" 

205 claims about a global democratic recession: Steven Levitsky 

and Luc-an A. Way, "the Myth of Democratic Recession," Jour-

nal of Democracy 26, no. 1 (January 2015), pp. 45-58. 

206 U.S. governments used diplomatic pressure: Levitsky and Way, 

Competitive Authoritarianism; Mainwaring and Pérez-Linan, 

Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America. 

208 a pro-Trump GOP: Republican control over the various branches 

of government would be made possible by the concentration 

of the Democratic vote in urban centers. this has allowed the 

Republicans—who dominate the small-town and rural vote—to 

become nearly unbeatable in much of the national territory, giv-

ing them an edge in the Electoral College and particularly in the 

Senate. 

ENDNOTES 295 

209 It is also demographically diverse: See https://www.census.gov/ 

quickfacts/NC. 

210 "microcosm of the country's hyper-partisan politics". Jedediah 

Purdy, "North Carolina's Partisan Crisis," The New Yorker, De-

cember 20, 2016. 

210 partisans have battled: "North Carolina Governor Signs Con-

troversial Transgender Bill," CNN.com, March 24, 2016. 

210 "more polarized and more acrimonious": Quoted in Mark 

Joseph Stern, "North Carolina Republicans' Legislative Coup Is 

an Attack on Democracy," Slate, December 15, 2016. 

210 The changes enabled Republicans: Max -Blau, "Drawing the 

Line on the Most Gerrymandered District in America," The 

Guardian, October 19, 2016. 

211 They began by demanding access: See: http://pdfserver. 

amlaw.com/nlj/7-29-16%204th%2OCircuit%20NAACP%20 

v%20NC.pdf, pp. 10, 13. 

211 They passed a strict voter ID law: "North Carolina Governor 

Signs Extensive Voter ID Law," Washington Post, August 12, 

2013; and "Critics Say North Carolina Is Curbing the Black 

Vote. Again," New York Times, August 30, 2016. - 

211 "almost surgical precision": "Justices Reject-Two Gerryman-

dered North Carolina Districts, Citing Racial Bias," New York 

Times, May 27, 2017. 

211 Republicans used their control: "Critics Say North Carolina Is 

Curbing the Black Vote. Again." 

211 McCrory refused to concede: "North Carolina Governor Al-

leges Voter Fraud in Bid to Hang On," Politico, November 21, 

2016; and "North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory Files for Recount 

as Challenger's Lead Grows," NBCNews.com, November 22, 

2016. 

211 "surprise special session": "Democrats Protest as GOP Calls 

Surprise Special Session," WRAL.com, December 14, 2016. 

211 "legislative coup": "NC Is in the Hot National Spotlight Yet 

Again as Media Focus on General Assembly, Cooper," Char-

lotte Observer, December 16, 2016; Stern, "North Carolina Re-

publicans' Legislative Coup Is an Attack on Democracy." 

211 "brazen power grab": "A Brazen Power Grab in North Caro-

lina," New York Times, December 15, 2016.

296 ENDNOTES ENDNOTES 297 

211 The Senate granted itself the authority: "Proposed Cuts to 215 

Gov-Elect Roy Cooper's Appointment Powers Passes NC House 

in 70-36 Vote," News & Observer, December 15, 2016; and see 

Nearly seventy House Democrats: Michelle Goldberg, "Dem-

ocrats Are Finally Learning How to Fight Like Republicans," 

Slate, January 19, 2017. 

"Bill Would Curb Cooper's Appointment Powers," WRAL.com, 215 

Decedber14, 2016. 

"take a page": Faris, "It's Time for Democrats to Fight Dirty." 

Also Graham Vyse, "Democrats Should Stop Talking About 

211 Outgoing governor McCrory: "Before Leaving Office, Mc-

Crory Protected 908 State Jobs from Political Firings," Newser 

Bipartisanship and Start Fighting," The New Republic, Decem-

ber 15, 2016. 

Observer, February 23, 2017. 215 "Everything should be a fight": Michelle Goldberg, "The End Is 

211 Republicans then changed the composition: "Senate Passes Nigh," Slate, May 16, 2017. 

Controversial Merger of Ethics, Elections Boards," WRAL.com, 215 "my greatest desire": Daniella Diaz, "Rep. Maxine Waters: 

December 15, 2016. Trump's Actions `Leading Himself to Impeachment," CNN 

212 responsible for local rules: See https://www.ncsbe.gov/about-us. .com, February 6, 2017. 

211 The boards had been under: Purdy, "North Carolina's Partisan 215 Impeachment talk picked up: Goldberg, "The End Is Nigh." 

Crisis." 216 "I don't see it that way": Ibid. 

212 the chair of the election boards: "Proposed Cuts to Gov-Elect Roy 

Cooper's Appointment Powers Passes NC House in 70-36 Vote." 

216 when the opposition fights dirty: See Laura Gamboa, "Oppo-

sition at the Margins: Strategies Against the Erosion of Democ-

212 the legislature voted to shrink- "Rebuked Twice by Supreme racy in Colombia and Venezuela," Comparative Politics 49, no. 4 

Court, North Carolina Republicans Are Unabashed," New. 

 York (July 2017), pp. 457-77. 

Times, May 27, 2017. 216 The strike lasted two months: Ibid.,p.466. 

212 "American democracy": Quoted in Purdy, "North Cárolina's 216 

Partisan Crisis." 

All three strategies had backfired: Laura Gamboa, "Opposition 

at the Margins: The Erosion of Democracy in Latin America," 

213 Baron deMontesquieupioneered: Baron vonMontesquieu, 

TheSpiIt of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 

PhD Dissertation, Department of Political Science, University 

of Notre Dame, (2016), pp. 129-51. 

1989). 216 they eroded the opposition's public support: Ibid., pp. 102-7 

213 American Creed: GunnarMyrdal, An American Dilemma: The 217 Opposition strategies in Colombia: Ibid. 

Negro Problem andAmerican Democracy (New York: Harper and 217 a power grab not unlike Chávez's: Gamboa, "Opposition at the 

Brothers, 1944), pp. 3-4. Margins: Strategies Against the Erosion of Democracy in Co-

214 "The Democratic negotiating position": David Faris, "It's Time lombia and Venezuela," pp. 464-68. 

for Democrats to Fight Dirty," The Week, December 1, 2016. 217 This made it more difficult: Ibid., pp. 468-72. 

215 "doing little to stop him": Dahlia Lithwick and David S. Cohen, 218 

"Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans," New York 

Times, December 14, 2016. 

black-led nonviolent protest: Omar Wasow, "Do Protests Mat-

ter? Evidence from the 1960s Black Insurgency," unpublished 

manuscript, Princeton University, February 2, 2017• 

215 "lacks legitimacy": Quoted in Daniella Diaz and Eugene Scott, 220 

"These Democrats Aren't Attending Trump's Inauguration," 

A profound distrust: "Interview with President Ricardo Lagos," 

in Democratic Transitions: Conversations with World Leaders, eds. 

CNN.com, January 17, 2017. SergioBitarand Abraham F. Lowenthal (Baltimore: Johns Hop-

215 "legitimate president": Quoted in Theodore Schleifer, "John kins University Press, 2015),p. 85• 

Lewis: Trump Is Not a `Legitimate' President," CNN.com, Jan- 221 Exiled Socialist leader Ricardo Lagos: Ibid.,p.74. 

uary 14, 2017. 221 They began to meet regularly: Ibid.

298 ENDNOTES 

221 Christian Democratic leader Patricio Aylwin: "Interview with 

President Patricio Aylwin," inBitarand Lowenthal, Democratic 

Transitions, pp. 61-62. 

221 "Group of 24": Ibid. 

221 National Accord: Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of En-

emies, pp. 271-72. 

221 The pact formed the basis: "Interview with President Ricardo 

Lagos,"p. 83. 

221 "consensus politics": Ibid. 

221 leaders developed a practice: Peter Siavelis, `Accommodating 

Informal Institutions and Chilean Democracy," in Informal 

Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America, eds. 

Gretchen- Helmke and Steven Levitsky (Baltimore: Johns 

Hopkins University Press, 2006) pp. 40-48. 

221 Pinochet's 1980 constitution: Ibid,p.49. 

221 Aylwin also negotiated: Ibid., pp. 48-49. 

222 "helped stave off': Ibid,p.50. 

222 political scientists have proposed: See, for example, Nathaniel 

Persily,ed., Solutions to Political Polarization in America (New 

York. Cambridge University Press, 2015). 

223 The Republican Party: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Cen-

ter:'+The Republican Revolution and the Erosion ofAmerican De-

mocracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,,2006); Mann 

and Ornstein, Its Even Worse Than It Looks; Grossman and Hop-

kins, Asymmetric Politics; Michael Barber and Nolan McCarty, 

"Causes and Consequences of Polarization," in Persily, Solutions 

to Political Polarization in America. - 

223 This hollowing out: Nathaniel Persily, "Stronger Parties as a So-

lution to Polarization," in Persily, Solutions to Political Polariza-

tion in America,p. 123. 

223 "sugar high of populism": Jeff Flake, Conscience of a Conserva-

tive: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle 

(New York: Random House, 2017),P.8. 

224 conservative party reform: Daniel Ziblatt, Conservative Parties 

and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 2017). 

224 Christian Democratic Union: Charles Maier, "The Two 

Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth-

ENDNOTES 299 

Century Western Europe," American Historical Review 86, no. 2, 

PP• 327-52. 

224 German conservatism: Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the 

Birth ofDemocracy, pp. 172-333. 

224 "unassailable anti-Nazi credentials": Jeffrey Herf, Divided 

Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: 

Harvard University Press, 1997),p. 270. Some figures in the 

parry's early years had links to the Nazi regime, leaving the party 

always the subject of criticism on this front. 

224 `An old world has slink": Noel Cary, The Path to Christian 

Democracy: German Catholics and the Party System fromWind-

thorsttoAdenauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 

1996),p.147 

224 The .CDUoffered a clear vision: Geoffrey Pridham, Christian 

Democracy in Western Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 

pp. 21-66. 

224 a "Christian" society: Ibid.,p.32. 

225 "The close collaboration": Quoted in ibid., pp. 26-28. 

226 Both Bernie Sanders and some moderates: Mark Penn and An-

drew Stein, "Back to the Center, Democrats," New York Times, 

July 6, 2017; Bernie Sanders, "How Democrats Can Stop Los-

ing Elections," New York Times, June 13, 2017; also see Mark 

Lilla,"The End of Identity Liberalism," New York Times, No-

vember 18, 2016. 

226 Mark Penn and Andrew Stein: Penn and Stein, "Back to the Cen-

ter, Democrats."Also MarkLilla,"The End of IdentityLiberalism." 

227 "Thesinople fact of the matter": Danielle Allen, "Charlottesville 

Is Not the Continuation of an Old Fight. It Is. Something New," 

Washington Post, August 13, 2017. 

227 The intensity of partisan animosities: Thomas Piketty, Capital 

in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 2013). 

227 Today's racially tinged partisan polarization: Robert Gordon, 

The Rise and Fall ofAmerican Growth. The U.S. Standard ofLiv-

ing Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 

Press, 2016),p. 613. 

228 economic changes of the last few decades: Katherine Kramer, 

The Politics of Resentment• Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and 

the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

2016),p.3.

300 ENDNOTES 

228 "welfare queens": Ian Haney Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics (Ox-

ford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 

228 asocial policy agenda: GostaEsping-Andersen, The Three Worlds 

of We fare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 

190). 

229 "family policy": Paul Krugman, "What's Next for Progres-

sives?," New York Times, August 8, 2017. 

229 America's expenditures on families: Ibid. 

229 Democrats could consider: Harold Wilensky, American Political 

Economy in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2012),p.225. 

229 we are under no illusions: For an example of when this has 

worked, see the revisionist account of the New Deal coalition by 

Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment. 

230 Surely the Board knows what democracy is: E. B. White, 

"The Meaning of Democracy," The New Yorker, July 3, 1943. 

Index 

Note: Page numbers in bold refer to tables. 

Abramowitz, Alan, 171 

Ackerman, Bruce, 128 

Adams, John, 103, 120 

African Americans 

redistricting plans, 153-5,210 

Roosevelt dinner, 194-5 

slavery, 121-2 

voter ID laws, 183-6, 208, 

209,211 

voting rights, 89-92, 111, 124-5, 

184-5 

Al Qaeda, 155-6 

Alabama, 91-2 

Alessandri, Jorge, 114 

Alito,Samuel, 156 

Allen, Danielle, 227 

Allende, Salvador, 2-3,114-17 

American Creed, 213-14 

Anthony, Steve, 148 

Argentina 

authoritarianism, 188 

constitution, 98 

constitutional hardball, 109 

impeachment of supreme court 

justices, 79-80, 109 

Peróncoup, 21 

Arizona, 164 

Arpaio, Joe, 179 

Austria, presidential elections 

(2016), 30-32, 68 

authoritarian behavior 

bribery and blackmail, 79 

first year of office, 187 188 

intolerance of criticism, 64 

marginalization of business 

leaders, 85-6, 87 

opposition coalition in response, 

218-20 

possible responses from president's 

own party, 188-90 

public opinion, 191-2 

rhetorical attacks on opponents, 

75-6, 111, 148 

Trump's warning signs, 60-67, 

65-7 

violence tolerated and 

encouraged, 24, 62-4, 66 

warning signs, 20-22, 23--4 

see also gatekeeping measures 

Ayers, Bill, 156,157 

Ayers, Whit, 198 

Aylwin, Ricardo, 221-3 

Ayotte, Kelly, 70 

Azafia, Manuel, 103, 105