At an Ohio manufacturing plant on Monday, Donald Trump called Democrats who failed to stand for the applause lines during his State of the Union speech “Un-American.” Then, unsatisfied with that term, Trump tried out the word “treasonous,” decided he liked the taste, and applied it again. This followed a morning in which Trump called a prominent Democrat in the House a “liar” without evidence, and declared that he “must be stopped.” And it followed a week in which Trump continued an attack on the FBI and Department of Justice with the assistance of Republicans in the House who discarded their party’s decades of close relationship to the FBI in an effort to aid Trump.
Concerns about the stability of our government rose sharply with the election of Donald Trump, those worries have ramped up constantly as Trump has attacked opponents, tradition, procedures, agencies and the press. While many of those raising red flags are alarmed by some particular moment in the news, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt—professors at Harvard University’s school of government—who looked not just at the situation in the United States, but at recent history around the world at nations that used to be democracies and now … aren’t.
By reviewing how democracy fell in other countries, the two professors were able to merge American politics with events around the world, building a broad picture of where we are, what others have experienced and what we should expect from Trump in the future. But there’s a particular force at the heart of America’s decline—a driving force behind the kind of radical populism that’s been at the heart of not just Trump, but previous steps at radicalizing the Republican Party ... racism. Attempts to reverse the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and destroy immigration reforms dating from the same year may seem like a distant event in 2018—but the reaction to those events, the effort to preserve white power, is the core of Donald Trump’s threat to the nation.
Come below the line for an discussion with the authors.
Question: Monday seemed like one of those days in which it seemed that the principles and practices of our institutions were strained, if not cracked. There was the Devin Nunes-authored memo, the apparently forced early retirement of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and the failure to recommend new sanctions against Russia. Do you think these events mark a significant acceleration? Do they take us past any sort of “red line” in the erosion of Democracy?
Levitsky: I don’t think we ever know if it’s a “red line” or not. There were a couple of important things that reinforced that this was a bad day. We, too, are genuinely concerned.
Trump is continuing with something that autocratic leaders do—go after the referees. Go after the institutions that serve as neutral arbiters. Trump has been concerned about the FBI from the beginning and demonstrated repeatedly that he would like to bring it under control. He’s made clumsy efforts to put the agency directly under his personal control both when Comey was the director and after. When those failed, he moved to making attacks on the integrity of the FBI.
Ziblatt: The memo is very worrying, especially as part of a broader pattern. Electoral authoritarians always want to capture the referees in the judiciary, but they’re even more interested in getting law enforcement agencies on their side. The best way to avoid being prosecuted is to control the prosecutors.
Q: That’s of the things that comes up frequently in the book, that effort that many autocrats have made to capture law enforcement. Has Trump succeeded in politicizing the FBI?
Levitsky: He’s had mixed success. He fired Comey, but he wasn’t able to replace Comey with a complete hack who was totally under his control. There are still people in the FBI more interested in preserving the institution than in helping Trump.
Q: It’s been a few months now since you turned in the manuscript for the book, and since then it seems like things have moved very quickly. Are there things you misjudged?
Levitsky: We were overly optimistic in the book on one point. The members of the Republican Party in the House and Senate have become lapdogs. They’ve increasingly not just looked away, but acted in complicity with Trump’s abuses. Some institutions have held up well—the courts, the media, public—but not Congress.
We expected more Republicans to behave like Corker or Flake—voting with Trump on the big Republican issues, but standing up to abuses of power. That hasn’t happened.
Q: Why not? It seemed like a lot of Republicans were strongly against Trump at the outset. Why have they all folded?
Levistsky: That’s simple enough. Republicans who think they still have a future in the Congress or any elected office have looked at what happened to Flake, they’ve looked at what happened to Corker. They’ve looked at those who went head to head with Trump. What happened is that those politicians lost their careers. Trump remains very popular among Republicans, and no other Republican is close to him.
No other Republican has emerged as an alternative leader—an alternative center for the party. Mitt Romney may be making a bid for that, but so far, any time there’s been a conflict, Trump has come out the winner. Electoral calculus has led all the other Republicans to get in line behind Trump.
Ziblatt: When you look at Paul Ryan, you can see that political calculation. There are enough members of his caucus who are closely aligned with Trump, that in order to sustain his position, he throws what he views as small things to this group. That’s sheer electoral calculation in maintaining his leadership position.
There’s a real fear of his own base. He thinks he's holding the line to keep Republicans on the same page by not getting in the way of things Trump supporters want. But to do so, he’s surrendering most of the power of his position, and accelerating the move to Trump. It may look like good electoral politics now, but what happens in the fall? What happens in 2020?
Q: One of the themes of the book is that you need two solid parties that view each other as political opponents, not unpatriotic enemies.
Ziblatt: What will Republicans look like two or three years from now? The Republican Party needs to re-found itself. America needs a good Republican Party. Needs a party that gives the Democrats an opponent to test ideas against. But that party needs to be refounded on a new basis—that's willing to play by democratic rules, rather than trying to subvert them.
Q: The Republican Party right now is radical. And one thing you talk about in the book is the problem of what happens when the opposing party becomes radical in response.
Ziblatt: Because one side is breaking the rules, the biggest risk is breaking the rules in return. We realize it’s hard to make the argument that Democrats should act with restraint when the Republicans are behaving as they are now, because it's very compelling to respond in kind.
But look at the record. When the opposition party radicalizes, this is the final chapter for countries on their way from democracy to autocracy. It provides the excuse the people in power need to take definitive action.
Q: One of the things that seems to surprise many people is how easy it’s been for Trump to simply ignore “the way things are done.” To override traditions.
Levitsky: Any set of rules in any nation relies on the idea that people will “Do the right thing.” That they’ll display forbearance—restraint. It's impossible to write the rules so that they cover every situation. We rely on politicians not to use the letter of the law to violate the spirit of the law. But that’s exactly what Republicans are doing.
It’s an extension of the sort of constitutional hardball that Newt Gingnrich used in the 1990s—turning the rules against themselves. It’s very dangerous for our institutions.
Q: And weakening those institutions is another step in “capturing the referees.”
Levitsky: Right. The courts, FBI. Capturing these supposedly neutral referees is one of the first moves of would-be autocrats. They want to replace the referees with hacks, allies, and loyalists. It serves to protect the autocrat from investigation and prosecution, but it also provides them with a weapon to use against their enemies. Trump has continued to hammer away at these institutions. Looking for ways to either weaken or politicize them.
Q: And particularly the FBI.
Levitsky: FBI independence isn’t an unalloyed good. The FBI has actually done damage by being independent, by having so much power that it really could engage in overreach and abuse. That’s why the FBI needed to be reeled in post-Nixon.
But Trump is weaponizing an agency that has, until now, been a somewhat of a hands-off area, even if it has always leaned toward Republicans. And while Trump may not be winning every fight, empirical evidence suggests that they can get away with selling this idea thanks to the radicalization of the Republican Party.
Q: That radicalization makes it easier …
Levitsky: For Trump. Because there’s no opposition within the party. Trump’s radical populism has made the party unrecognizable to long term members of the Republican establishment, including some very conservative ones. Bolstered by AM radio personalities and Fox News, Trump has achieved an astounding transformation in record time.
It’s left traditional Republicans stunned. They’re also surprised by the recklessness and irresponsibility of Republican politicians in lining up behind Trump, but those politicians don’t see a choice.
In private, many of those same Republican politicians are scandalized. They despise Trump. They’re afraid of Trump. But they line up behind him because it's the electorally right thing to do.
Q: On elections—it looks like we’re seeing some advances when it comes to gerrymandering, but efforts to stop laws that essentially reverse Civil Rights legislation have enjoyed less success, and we’re seeing no effort to halt Russian interference, dark money, etc.
Levitsky: People seem to think that for democracy to fail, it takes something clearly illegal. It takes a Kristallnacht, or something like Charlottesville on a large scale, with fascists marching in the streets. People think that if something is legal, it must also be democratic.
They don’t understand the misuse of radical populism and the threat of individual popularity. They don’t know what to do with a popular extremist in a nation that values freedom of speech.
Q: Is there a hopeful note here? Are there example of democracies that have gone down this path toward autocracy, but recovered?
Ziblatt: Unfortunately, there are not a lot of great examples of pulling back from autocracy. The first and most important step is to prevent people from coming to power who are interested in dismantling democracy. And we failed that step.
What we can do now is to continue to pressure our politicians to stand up to abuses of office in a way that reinforces democratic norms. We need to continue things like the Women’s March, which is very encouraging—a muscular defense of democracy.
It’s equally vital to work on commitments that cross class, cross race, cross religious boundaries—to work on goals where diverse groups share a common commitment to democracy. That’s how you push back effectively.
And the most important thing, is also the most obvious thing: Fall elections. If we want to turn this back, we need to turn out to vote.
American history is filled with flaws in American democracy. Before 1965, before the Voting Rights Act, we were't really democracy. There never was a Golden Age. It's always been politicized, it's always been imperfect, but that doesn't mean that what we’re facing now isn’t a different caliber of threat.