Under Trump, the United States has joined the sad roster of backsliding democracies

Shortly after the Trump inauguration, I made the case that US politics displayed troubling echoes of the democratic backsliding other nations have suffered in the past decade. Where do we stand, one year into the Trump presidency? With robust economic growth, a very predictable blend of tax cuts and deregulation crowding the Washington agenda, and the #MeToo movement putting sexual harassment in the (long-overdue) spotlight, were the concerns I and others expressed overblown?

Did the plot against America unravel before it happened?

Not so fast. Democratic decline, as recent experience in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Kenya, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Russia shows, is an incremental process. Leaders such as Hugo Chávez and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have been elected on the back of populist platforms and then have set about dismantling institutional checks on their authority from courts, legislatures, and the civil services. The quality — and in cases such as Venezuela, the very possibility — of democratic competition has waned.

Venezuela aside, such democratic erosion is wholly consistent with strong economic growth. Indeed, robust growth may paradoxically have provided a buffer for anti-democratic populists to grasp political power without sparking widespread dissent.

In three ways, the US experience of the past year continues to track developments in polities where democracy has eroded. There is clear evidence that the quality of democratic government is set on a sharply downhill gradient; whether the changes can be reversed is a different matter.

A first bellwether of democratic backsliding is a resurgence of unabashed racial animosity as an accepted form of political argument. In several declining democracies, self-proclaimed populists have accumulated public support by turning majority sentiment against a racial or ethnic minority.

Leaders as disparate as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Sri Lanka’s Mahinda Rajapaksa have invoked racial unity to deflect legitimate criticism and limit democratic competition. Such tactics reap electoral gains regardless of how substantial the minority in question is. Rajapaksa’s invective and policies targeted Sri Lanks’s Tamils, who make up roughly 11 percent of its people and who had been participants in a long-running civil war in the country’s north. In contrast, Orbán railed against Muslims and migrants, even though they make up a vanishingly small share of Hungary’s population.

The common logic of such populists is to use a shared animosity against outsiders as a substitute for more familiar criteria of democratic success, such as effective public policies and broadly shared economic gains. In short, racism is not a sideshow in democratic decline; it’s tightly woven into the main event.

Even before Trump’s inauguration, white Americans were increasingly receptive to explicit racial appeals, an unraveling of progress we’d seen after the “Southern strategy” of Nixon and Atwater had seemingly run its course.

But things got worse. Consider Trump’s embrace of anti-Muslim animus in the form of the travel ban and his retweets of the hateful anti-Muslim libels posted by a leader of the nativist group Britain First, Jayda Fransen. Or consider his racialized denigration of immigrants, echoed by his attorney general’s conjuring of “crime, violence and even terrorism” as justifications for ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Given that there is no evidence that DACA beneficiaries commit a disproportionate number of crimes, let alone any terrorist acts, that justification can only be understood as another subtle deployment of a pernicious stereotype. Or recall the president’s equivocation about white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia — a concerted effort at moral blurring that has already shaped Republican public opinion on the moral acceptability of white supremacists.

All of these actions appeal to racist and nativist sentiments. All reflect a belief that there is a hierarchy of races, cultures, and faiths. Such views are intrinsically shameful, but more to the point here, they are directly harmful to democracy.

That’s in part because hateful rhetoric leads to hateful deeds against American citizens. In 2017, there was a new surge in hate crimes against racial and ethnic minorities. Although the causes of this trend cannot be conclusively proven, it is not unreasonable to think that presidential endorsement of white supremacy legitimatizes and popularizes such violence.

The second reason for concern about democracy’s health is subtler. Democracy remains a going concern not because the law commands it to be so. People who wield state-sanctioned power also have to be willing to follow the laws. Some do so because they have internalized the values of democratic tolerance and pluralism. Others, however, lacking those commitments, will decide to keep faith with democracy only if there are political costs to acting against democracy and the rule of law. A pronounced collapse of those political costs bodes ill for democracy’s perseverance.

The past year has revealed that key political actors, including members of Congress, will tolerate flagrant malfeasance by the president and members of his administration, both in politics and on personal matters. And it’s not just that there is no cost to such actions: The perception that Trump stands above the rules, that he pokes hallowed institutions such as the FBI in the eye, might even improve his standing among his core of true believers.

Perhaps the most vivid example of putting personal interests above national interests is the White House’s repeated interference in federal investigations into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. News of the president’s firing of James Comey, an action done avowedly to curtail investigation into his inner circle, followed by reports of his contemplated firing of Robert Mueller, have not resulted in either sharp rebukes from Trump’s fellow Republican elites or a dramatic slump in his support among Republican voters.

What’s more, a president’s actions set a standard for other actors in the government. And top officials have followed Trump down the low road. After the president criticized Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reportedly tried to have McCabe fired; Sessions also reportedly tried to gather dirt on Comey before his firing. McCabe ultimately resigned, two months before he became eligible for retirement.

It is extraordinary that an attorney general would engage in a war of attrition against his own investigative apparatus at the behest of a president publicly implicated by that investigation. That his efforts would elicit almost zero public reaction offers further evidence that American political elites aligned with a political leader are no more likely to stand up for democracy than leaders in Poland or Hungary.

One crucial development over the past year has been the gradual elimination of formal platforms from which the opposition party can register objections to corruption and other systemic threats to democratic values. Consider the gutting of the filibuster and the more general move toward an increasingly pure form of majoritarian process — such efforts by Senate Republicans eliminated opportunities to raise objections to self-dealing in the White House.

These institutional changes lower the cost of executive wrongdoing, whether for partisan personal gain, hastening the process of democratic unraveling.

Contempt for the rule of law among the political elite matters beyond the Beltway. A growing belief that political and financial wrongs yield no political penalty sets in motion a vicious circle. Voters who look to elected leaders for guidance see that self-dealing is tolerated. When that’s the case, they are themselves less likely to object, making it all the easier for elites to continue to turn a blind eye to malfeasance. Apathy breeds apathy.

The third and final warning sign regarding democratic backsliding relates to the civil service. A central element of democratic backsliding worldwide has been attacks on a professional and independent civil service capable of correcting or embarrassing would-be autocrats. In the United States, where the Constitution fails to protect the autonomy of the civil service from partisan politicization (through tenure rules, for example, or institutional separation from elected actors), American bureaucrats are sheltered only by a fragile skein of statutory and customary protections.

They are thus vulnerable. Hence, the Office of Government Ethics, initially active under Walter Shaub, has been largely quiescent since his resignation in July. The administration’s early attempt to fire en masse all federal inspectors general was shelved in February last year. But as their investigations start to heat up, expect renewed efforts on this front.

In other areas, the bureaucracy is proving adept at tacking with the political winds. After the president suggested that the FBI should reopen its investigation into the Clinton Foundation, the agency, remarkably, did so. That decision raises questions about the criminalization of political difference in a way that the Russia investigation, which rests on clear evidence of serious criminality, simply does not, Republicans’ protestations aside.

It is these material changes to federal policy and practices, and not the more abstract erosion of political “norms,” that supply the justification for continued concern for the health of our democracy. All, critically, set the stage for even quicker degradation of democracy and more endemic self-dealing.

Collectively, these developments suggest that the first year of the Trump administration has set the United States, perhaps irreversibly, on a new and perilously uncharted course that may, one day, lead us beyond democracy.

Aziz Huq is the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg professor of law at the University of Chicago. He is the author, with Tom Ginsburg, of a forthcoming book called How to Save a Constitutional Democracy.

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