“I don’t know if U.S. democracy is under threat. I don’t feel that I have the tools even to know what to worry about,” he recognized. Out of his question arose an academic course already taught at ten colleges around the country that is essentially a postmortem examination of democracies that have died, for instance, Venezuela, Poland, Hungary, and Russia. (Washington Post)The Washington Post continues that Blair
focused on reinforcing the theme of erosion: a subtle wearing away of something that by most appearances looks sturdy. “We tend to think about things like coups — that’s the way democracies die,” he says. “They die in a firefight, or they die in a president being abducted by the military and shuffled off into exile. A real impetus of this course was on the ways that democratic backsliding can be extremely subtle and difficult to detect.
As
an example, he cites a leader enacting libel laws that inhibit free speech, or
electoral laws that create barriers for opposition parties (both of which Trump
has threatened but about which he has done nothing concrete). “It tends to
happen at the hands of democratically elected leaders,” says Blair. “And often
with a veneer — doing things that undermine democracy while arguing that they
are taking those actions because they are necessary for democracy,” such as
supporting strict voter ID laws by claiming they guard against fraudulent votes.
(Such laws have already been enacted in
many states although Trump has not been a primary force).
Blair is asking his students to take a deeper look at the
President, but he is also trying to avoid “Trump-Bashing 101.” The course attempts to strike a balance
between Trump and anti-Trump, although some professors among the faculties acknowledge
it’s hard to find academic articles defending the President. The teachers do try to avoid the media’s
sensationalizing, in part because populists like Trump have been with us throughout
history: Consider, for instance Julius Caesar but also in the United States Huey Long, George Wallace and
other less-well-known names.
What are some of the other markers of democratic
decline? I’ve already
written about the studies
by Mounk and Foa, which identify three factors marking democracy’s decline. To reiterate their findings:
- The first marker of democratic decline is public support: How important do citizens think it is for their country to remain democratic? (Only 32% of millennials think it’s essential).
- The second is public openness to nondemocratic forms of government, such as military rule. (“The share of Americans who say that army rule would be a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995,” and this was before Trump. Mounk and Foa write that only 19% of millennials “believe it is illegitimate for the military to take over if the government [is] incompetent or failing to do its job.”)
- And the third factor is whether “antisystem parties and movements” — political parties and other major players whose core message is that the current system is illegitimate — are gaining support. (Eighty-five percent of Republicans and thirty-plus percent of all Americans continue to support the President despite his ongoing jeremiads against not only the government but such fundamentals as freedom of speech, freedom of the media, the independence of the judiciary, the rights of minorities, lawful treatment of everyone (not only permanent residents), and so on. Their core message is that the current system is illegitimate.
In the United States all three factors are heading away
from democracy.
A fourth factor, polarization also leads to a decline
in democracy. Blair
again from a study about Venezuela:
People were so polarized there, he says, that they were willing to tolerate candidates with authoritarian tendencies so long as they shared their policy positions.Authoritarianism might not be such a far leap in the United States, he says. Polarization sets the stage for voters to support candidates based solely on the letter R or D following their names. “In this sense, it’s not about Trump” or any president, says Blair. “It’s about us.” …
Perhaps the clearest example of this polarization is
the ongoing support for Trump among Evangelical Christians. Eighty percent of white evangelicals voted for and, by and
large, continue to support President Trump, who makes little visible effort to
appear to support Christian values. They
are apparently “willing
to tolerate candidates with authoritarian tendencies so long as they shared
their policy positions.”
I have been concentrating in the blog on Trump’s
impact on our democracy. It’s important,
however, to recognize that Trump and his attitudes and beliefs didn’t come out
of nowhere. We Americans have been
sliding in that direction for at least forty years.
- Stagnant wages
- Increasing inequality
- Tax cuts for the wealthy
- Declining social services
- The polarization of government and society
- The increasing inefficiency of government and so on
These have brought trust in government to all-time
lows. In future posts, I’ll examine the
drift that has made us ripe for demagoguery.
