By STEVEN LEVITSKY and DANIEL ZIBLATTDEC. 16, 2016<\/p>\n
Donald J. Trump\u2019s election has raised a question that few Americans ever imagined asking: Is our democracy in danger? With the possible exception of the Civil War, American democracy has never collapsed; indeed, no democracy as rich or as established as America\u2019s ever has. Yet past stability is no guarantee of democracy\u2019s future survival.<\/p>\n
We have spent two decades studying the emergence and breakdown of democracy in Europe and Latin America. Our research points to several warning signs.
\nThe clearest warning sign is the ascent of anti-democratic politicians into mainstream politics. Drawing on a close study of democracy\u2019s demise in 1930s Europe, the eminent political scientist Juan J. Linz designed a \u201clitmus test\u201d to identify anti-democratic politicians. His indicators include a failure to reject violence unambiguously, a readiness to curtail rivals\u2019 civil liberties, and the denial of the legitimacy of elected governments.
\nMr. Trump tests positive. In the campaign, he encouraged violence among supporters; pledged to prosecute Hillary Clinton; threatened legal action against unfriendly media; and suggested that he might not accept the election results.
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\nThis anti-democratic behavior has continued since the election. With the false claim that he lost the popular vote because of \u201cmillions of people who voted illegally,\u201d Mr. Trump openly challenged the legitimacy of the electoral process. At the same time, he has been remarkably dismissive of United States intelligence agencies\u2019 reports of Russian hacking to tilt the election in his favor.
\nMr. Trump is not the first American politician with authoritarian tendencies. (Other notable authoritarians include Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.) But he is the first in modern American history to be elected president. This is not necessarily because Americans have grown more authoritarian (the United States electorate has always had an authoritarian streak). Rather it\u2019s because the institutional filters that we assumed would protect us from extremists, like the party nomination system and the news media, failed.
\nMany Americans are not overly concerned about Mr. Trump\u2019s authoritarian inclinations because they trust our system of constitutional checks and balances to constrain him.
\nYet the institutional safeguards protecting our democracy may be less effective than we think. A well-designed constitution is not enough to ensure a stable democracy \u2014 a lesson many Latin American independence leaders learned when they borrowed the American constitutional model in the early 19th century, only to see their countries plunge into chaos.
\nDemocratic institutions must be reinforced by strong informal norms. Like a pickup basketball game without a referee, democracies work best when unwritten rules of the game, known and respected by all players, ensure a minimum of civility and cooperation. Norms serve as the soft guardrails of democracy, preventing political competition from spiraling into a chaotic, no-holds-barred conflict.
\nAmong the unwritten rules that have sustained American democracy are partisan self-restraint and fair play. For much of our history, leaders of both parties resisted the temptation to use their temporary control of institutions to maximum partisan advantage, effectively underutilizing the power conferred by those institutions. There existed a shared understanding, for example, that anti-majoritarian practices like the Senate filibuster would be used sparingly, that the Senate would defer (within reason) to the president in nominating Supreme Court justices, and that votes of extraordinary importance \u2014 like impeachment \u2014 required a bipartisan consensus. Such practices helped to avoid a descent into the kind of partisan fight to the death that destroyed many European democracies in the 1930s.
\nYet norms of partisan restraint have eroded in recent decades. House Republicans\u2019 impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 abandoned the idea of bipartisan consensus on impeachment. The filibuster, once a rarity, has become a routine tool of legislative obstruction. As the political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have shown, the decline of partisan restraint has rendered our democratic institutions increasingly dysfunctional. Republicans\u2019 2011 refusal to raise the debt ceiling, which put America\u2019s credit rating at risk for partisan gain, and the Senate\u2019s refusal this year to consider President Obama\u2019s Supreme Court nominee \u2014 in essence, allowing the Republicans to steal a Supreme Court seat \u2014 offer an alarming glimpse at political life in the absence of partisan restraint.
\nNorms of presidential restraint are also at risk. The Constitution\u2019s ambiguity regarding the limits of executive authority can tempt presidents to try and push those limits. Although executive power has expanded in recent decades, it has ultimately been reined in by the prudence and self-restraint of our presidents.
\nUnlike his predecessors, Mr. Trump is a serial norm-breaker. There are signs that Mr. Trump seeks to diminish the news media\u2019s traditional role by using Twitter, video messages and public rallies to circumvent the White House press corps and communicate directly with voters \u2014 taking a page out of the playbook of populist leaders like Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Hugo Ch\u00e1vez in Venezuela and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.
\nAn even more basic norm under threat today is the idea of legitimate opposition. In a democracy, partisan rivals must fully accept one another\u2019s right to exist, to compete and to govern. Democrats and Republicans may disagree intensely, but they must view one another as loyal Americans and accept that the other side will occasionally win elections and lead the country. Without such mutual acceptance, democracy is imperiled. Governments throughout history have used the claim that their opponents are disloyal or criminal or a threat to the nation\u2019s way of life to justify acts of authoritarianism.
\nThe idea of legitimate opposition has been entrenched in the United States since the early 19th century, disrupted only by the Civil War. That may now be changing, however, as right-wing extremists increasingly question the legitimacy of their liberal rivals. During the last decade, Ann Coulter wrote best-selling books describing liberals as traitors, and the \u201cbirther\u201d movement questioned President Obama\u2019s status as an American.
\nSuch extremism, once confined to the political fringes, has now moved into the mainstream. In 2008, the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin linked Barack Obama to terrorism. This year, the Republican Party nominated a birther as its presidential candidate. Mr. Trump\u2019s campaign centered on the claim that Hillary Clinton was a criminal who should be in jail; and \u201cLock her up!\u201d was chanted at the Republican National Convention. In other words, leading Republicans \u2014 including the president-elect \u2014 endorsed the view that the Democratic candidate was not a legitimate rival.
\nThe risk we face, then, is not merely a president with illiberal proclivities \u2014 it is the election of such a president when the guardrails protecting American democracy are no longer as secure.
\nAmerican democracy is not in imminent danger of collapse. If ordinary circumstances prevail, our institutions will most likely muddle through a Trump presidency. It is less clear, however, how democracy would fare in a crisis. In the event of a war, a major terrorist attack or large-scale riots or protests \u2014 all of which are entirely possible \u2014 a president with authoritarian tendencies and institutions that have come unmoored could pose a serious threat to American democracy. We must be vigilant. The warning signs are real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By STEVEN LEVITSKY and DANIEL ZIBLATTDEC. 16, 2016 Donald J. Trump\u2019s election has raised a question that few Americans ever imagined asking: Is our democracy in danger? With the possible exception of the Civil War, American democracy has never collapsed; indeed, no democracy as rich or as established as America\u2019s ever has. Yet past stability …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5285],"tags":[6245],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6617"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6617\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}