Democracy’s fate may hang in the balance even if Donald Trump loses

2017-03-24T13:35:19-04:00

Tuesday’s election could pose an unprecedented challenge to American democracy. Donald J. Trump and many of his supporters may not accept the results. But this year’s presidential campaign has already entered uncharted territory. Unlike any other major party candidate in modern US history, Trump has openly and repeatedly attacked basic norms of our democracy — threatening to jail his opponent, calling on a hostile foreign power to hack her campaign, and questioning the legitimacy of the election on the demonstrably false grounds that it is “rigged.“

Republican Party leaders have seemed at a loss for how to respond to their candidate’s anti-democratic behavior. Focused on winning the election or avoiding the wrath of right-wing allies and the base, most GOP politicians have either grudgingly endorsed Trump or adopted a strategy of silence or ambiguity. Few prominent Republicans with a political future have fully broken with him.

If it continues through November 8, the Republicans’ strategy of equivocation could prove to be a tragic mistake. Should Trump question the legitimacy of the election’s outcome or condone extremism or violence in its aftermath, Republican leaders must set aside normal politics and join Democrats in finally drawing the line against such behavior — even at the risk of angering the party base.

Why is the Republican response so critical? The great political scientist Juan Linz devoted much of his career to understanding why and how established democracies die. Having spent years researching the reasons for the tragic collapse of democracy in 1930s Europe, Linz proposed a “litmus test,” a list of actions by politicians that can put democracy at risk. These warning signs include a refusal to unambiguously disavow violence, a readiness to curtail rivals’ civil liberties, and the denial of the legitimacy of an elected government.

Donald Trump has clearly passed Linz’s anti-democratic litmus test. He has encouraged violence among supporters (offering to pay their legal fees), pledged to jail Hillary Clinton and take legal action against unfriendly media, and suggested that he might not accept the election results. Such acts are unprecedented among major American candidates, but they are precisely the kind of behavior that Linz and other scholars have identified as preceding democratic breakdown in interwar Europe.

But the problem is not just Trump. Linz’s research shows that what undermines democracies in crisis is not only the behavior of extremists but also that of mainstream politicians who — out of fear, ignorance, or political calculation — tolerate and even facilitate their ascent.

In Italy, when Mussolini and his National Fascist Party first arrived on the political scene, Liberal Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti helped to “normalize” them and bring them into mainstream politics by forming an electoral alliance — not because he was pro-fascist but because they could help him win the coming election. And in Germany, conservative politicians formed a “fateful alliance” with Hitler, catapulting him into national prominence out of not conviction but expediency; they hoped to tap into the support of his voters while steering him toward “responsible” positions. In 1933, the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor, though he loathed him, because Hindenburg believed it was the only way to preserve a right-wing government.

Our point is not that Trump is a Hitler-like figure or that the United States is on the brink of fascism. Rather, the experiences of interwar Europe remind us that Western democracies are not immune to collapse. We would be foolish, therefore, to ignore the lessons they provide.

What we can learn from 1930s Europe is that democracy is imperiled when mainstream politicians do not act decisively against anti-democratic figures, when they continue to let day-to-day political calculations guide them, when they align with extremists because it is politically useful, or when they simply tolerate them via silence or ambiguity because they are popular with “the base” and it is politically costly to confront them. As Linz wrote, the tragic demise of many democracies can be traced to a mainstream party’s “greater affinity for extremists on its side of the political spectrum than for [mainstream] parties close to the opposite side.”

To ensure democracy’s survival, mainstream politicians must vigorously oppose anyone who threatens democratic norms, even if it means temporarily joining forces with their partisan rivals. And even if it means likely political defeat.

The lessons for Republicans today are painful but clear. It is not enough for Republican leaders to dissociate themselves from Trump’s most outlandish comments or simply distance themselves from his candidacy. They must actively oppose him, because he is an anti-democratic figure who threatens our country’s institutions. Republicans must build a wall — not of brick and mortar, but of democratic ideals — to defend our democratic norms, isolating those who violate them.

The Republican response to Tuesday’s election will be a critical test — with potentially momentous consequences. If Trump or any of his supporters refuse to accept the results or threaten or condone violence, Republican leaders must rise to the occasion, joining forces with Democrats in unambiguously denouncing such behavior. They must sever all ties with anyone who engages in extremist or anti-democratic rhetoric. Such a response may infuriate some hardcore supporters, but it is essential to preserving our democratic system.

Winston Churchill once declared that political leaders “must be judged in the testing moments of their lives. Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because … it is the quality which guarantees all others.”

This is a Churchillian moment for the Republican Party. If Republican leaders find the political courage to stand up to a popular demagogue and his movement, they will help avert a dangerous spiral that could imperil our democracy — and they might even find a new basis for a re-founded Republican Party. If they do not, history will not be kind to them.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are professors of government at Harvard University.

Donald Trump isn’t a fascist; he’s a demagogue. That’s why he’s so dangerous.

2019-03-05T23:12:23-05:00

US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets supporters during his rally at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia, on February 29, 2016. | Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images

The media’s favorite guessing game is to figure out what Donald Trump really believes. Over the past several days, he has repeated his vitriolic remarks about immigrants, promised once again to kill the families of terrorists, declined to dissociate himself from the Ku Klux Klan, and retweeted a quote by Benito Mussolini. Taken together, many commentators have argued, this suggests that Trump is nothing less than a fascist.

But there is also evidence to the contrary. After all, Trump has also praised the state-run health care system in Canada and come to the defense of Planned Parenthood. At the last Republican debate, he repeatedly attacked his main rivals from the left — suggesting that the state has an obligation not to let the sick die on the side of the road, and that the immigrants he would deport should have a chance to come back to the United States. Deep down, other commentators have therefore responded, Trump is actually a moderate.

This whole debate, as Max Weber realized nearly a century ago, misses the point. That’s because, unlike both run-of-the-mill moderates and dyed-in-the-wool fascists, Trump is not motivated by deep political values — and even less so by specific policy preferences.

But this ideological flexibility, Weber explained in “Politics as Vocation,” his magisterial 1919 lecture on the nature of politics, does not make politicians like Donald Trump less dangerous; on the contrary, it turns them into a profound threat to the survival of democratic politics:

Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician…. This is more truly the case as the demagogue is compelled to count upon “effect.” He therefore is constantly in danger of becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcome of his actions and of being concerned merely with the “impression” he makes. His lack of objectivity tempts him to strive for the glamorous semblance of power rather than for actual power. His irresponsibility, however, suggests that he enjoy power merely for power’s sake without a substantive purpose. Although, or rather just because, power is the unavoidable means, and striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu-like braggart with power, and vain self-reflection in the feeling of power

Weber knew that the problem of demagogues is as old as democracy itself, and that in their recklessness they can provoke great upheaval or even civil war. True believers may be willing to sacrifice anything for their cause. But they have goals that can be obtained and values that guide how (not) to act.

Demagogues, by contrast, are willing to do or say anything to gain office or to consolidate their power. Unconstrained by ideology, they have no concern for the consequences of their actions. Anything that serves to make them more powerful is good enough for them — even if the political system that facilitated their rise should be destroyed in the process.

This, rather than some deep similarity to fascism, also explains the affinity between demagogues and political violence. True fascists venerate violence but also want to make it serve a purpose larger than themselves, like territorial conquest. Demagogues, on the other hand, tap into the most violent currents in a population simply to bolster their own popularity.

In the process, they often unleash lethal damage: They wreck the informal rules of civility that democracies require to survive. Once voters are activated along violent lines and fervently believe the myths propagated by the demagogue, the dam is broken; the ordinary rules of democratic politics no longer apply, and there is no telling what might come next.

Daniel Ziblatt is a professor of government at Harvard University and the author of Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism.

Daniel Ziblatt | Vox

Democracy’s fate may hang in the balance even if Donald Trump loses

Donald Trump isn’t a fascist; he’s a demagogue. That’s why he’s so dangerous.