Losing Democracy - Part I

When we think of a democratic country losing its democracy, we tend to think of a sudden military coup or overnight political overthrow.

As Levitsky and Ziblatt argue in How Democracies Die, however, more and more democratic governments that have slid toward autocracy have done so legally and gradually, for instance, Hungary and Turkey.

In these countries, the free press did not have to be taken over to become a complete propaganda arm but only so threatened by government pressure that the media printed only articles favoring the government.  The judiciary was not co-opted by force but legally packed with government loyalists.  The military was not toppled, but the autocratic president appointed a new leader friendly to his policies. 

In writing this blog over the last two years and chronicling some of these changes in the United States, I have come to the conclusion that our country has stepped over a red line on the path toward autocracy.  I have hesitated in writing this and the next several posts, however, for they represent a departure from my usual, narrower, single-issue critique.  They will consider a broader view comprising the impact of the whole.  I understand these posts may sound overly dramatic to some.  To be candid, I have much less confidence in them, too, so I would ask you to forbear judging this series but explore with me the individual arguments that lead to my conclusion.

Like Hungary or Turkey, the United States has moved slowly toward the red line. We don’t yet have an autocrat but do have a wanna-be autocrat as president. We do have free elections but also such institutions as gerrymandering and voter suppression that eat away at democracy.  There is no definitive, clear line, but for me we stepped over the boundary with the Supreme Court’s refusal to declare gerrymandering unconstitutional.  I can no longer call my country a representative democracy.  You will undoubtedly have different red lines; for some, especially people of color, we will have passed some time ago; for  others the lines are yet to come.  We may still have the capacity to repair our democracy, but we can no longer take that repair for granted.

Multiple factors have been instrumental in our country’s slide toward autocracy.  Some of these were not originally intended to subvert democracy but have easily been misused to do so. They include:

• Certain provisions in our founding documents,
• Slavery and ongoing racism,
• Inevitably increasing presidential powers,
• Broad political changes,
• Packing of the Supreme Court and others.

In this series, I want to examine each of these factors one at a time, beginning today with those embedded in our founding documents and institutions.

Let’s start with those well-established but problematic institutions.

• Hanging over if all, of course, is the pox of slavery, which is simply too great to be compared to the others or to deal with here.  I will try to deal with the resultant racism in future posts.

• Although it was written directly into the Constitution, the criteria for selecting senators is decidedly undemocratic.  When the Constitution was written, most southern states had a much smaller non-enslaved population than the North and would have, therefore, lost power from a thoroughly representative government (of free, landowning men).  A compromise was, therefore, written into the Constitution whereby the number of delegates to the House of Representatives would be determined by the white population plus 3/5 of the slaves.  For the Senate, however, there would be two representatives from each state, giving each equal power regardless of the population.  That has never changed, so each state continues to have the same number of senators, which gives every voter in small states (represented, it turns out, primarily by Republicans and white voters) greater power than those in large states (with much larger numbers of voters who are people of color).  Wyoming with a population of about 300,000, for instance, has the same number of senators as California with a population of approximately 40 million, giving each Wyoming voter almost 65 times the power in the Senate as the voter in California (to confirm Supreme Court justices, for instance).

• Although to a much smaller degree, the same phenomenon gives small states more power in the Electoral College that chooses the president.  Each state receives one electoral vote for each delegate to the House of Representatives (equal representation) but also one for each senator, (unequal representation).  For instance, California has 53 Representatives and two Senators for 55 electoral votes, one for every 727,000 residents; Wyoming has 3 electoral votes, one for each 100,000 residents, giving each resident over seven times the power to elect the president.  Republicans, who control many more small states than do Democrats, are, therefore, disproportionately represented in the Electoral College.  Additionally, the selection of electors in most states is winner-take-all further skewing the results.

• Although the Framers were concerned about the implications of political parties, they made no provision in the Constitution to limit their power.  This is one of the factors in today’s extreme partisanship.

• After their experience with the English monarchy, the Framers were explicitly concerned to limit the president’s power.  They, therefore, specified only a few direct powers to the president.  Unfortunately, except for the powers specifically granted to the judicial and legislative branches of government, the Framers did not specifically limit the powers of the president.  Because of the expansion of government since the Founding, the president has gained extraordinary power within the government, despite the explicit concerns of the Founders.  For example, the president can now essentially declare war without congressional approval.

• The Constitution calls for the legislative branch to oversee the president.  Unfortunately, again, the Framers did not foresee that this oversight could become seriously compromised by the parties’ extraordinary partisanship we see today. Politics has recently become so highly partisan that congressional Republicans were unwilling to provide oversight for the GW Bush administration during the Iraq war, and are now even more reluctant to rein in Donald Trump.  President Trump’s moves toward autocracy have gone largely unchallenged by the very institution to which the Constitution gave the power.

While there have been historical exceptions—for example, the extreme partisanship before the Civil War—most of these weaknesses in the Constitution didn’t reveal themselves or lead to significant problems until the last 30 years.  They have, nevertheless, created a framework that has made possible the current attacks on American democracy.

In the next post, I’ll examine some of the historical political changes that have occurred in the last forty years that have provided a pathway toward autocracy even before Donald Trump’s presidency.