[ The U.S. still has a chance to fix itself before 2024. But when
democracies start dying—as ours already has—they usually don’t
recover.]
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AMERICA’S SELF-OBSESSION IS KILLING ITS DEMOCRACY  
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Brian Klaas
July 21, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ The U.S. still has a chance to fix itself before 2024. But when
democracies start dying—as ours already has—they usually don’t
recover. _

, Stephen Voss / Redux

 

In 2009, a violent mob stormed the presidential palace in Madagascar,
a deeply impoverished red-earthed island off the coast of East Africa.
They had been incited to violence by opportunistic politicians and
media personalities, successfully triggering a coup. A few years
later, I traveled to the island, to meet the new government's
ringleaders, the same men who had unleashed the mob.

As we sipped our coffees and I asked them questions, one of the
generals I was interviewing interrupted me.

“How can you Americans lecture us on democracy?” he asked.
“Sometimes, the president who ends up in your White House isn’t
even the person who got the most votes.”

“Our election system isn’t perfect,” I replied then. “But,
with all due respect, our politicians don’t incite violent mobs to
take over the government when they haven’t won an election.”

For decades, the United States has proclaimed itself a “shining city
upon a hill,” a beacon of democracy that can lead broken nations out
of their despotic darkness. That overconfidence has been instilled
into its citizens, leading me a decade ago to the mistaken, naive
belief that countries such as Madagascar have something to learn from
the U.S. rather than also having wisdom to teach us.

During the Donald Trump presidency, the news covered a relentless
barrage of “unprecedented” attacks on the norms and institutions
of American democracy. But they weren’t unprecedented. Similar
authoritarian attacks had happened plenty of times before. They were
only unprecedented to us.

I’ve spent the past 12 years studying the breakdown of democracy and
the rise of authoritarianism around the world, in places such as
Thailand, Tunisia, Belarus, and Zambia. I’ve shaken hands with many
of the world’s democracy killers.

My studies and experiences have taught me that democracies can die in
many ways. In the past, most ended in a quick death. Assassinations
can snuff out democracy in a split second, coups in an hour or two,
and revolutions in a day. But in the 21st century, most democracies
die like a chronic but terminal patient. The system weakens as the
disease spreads. The agony persists over years. Early intervention
increases the rate of survival, but the longer the disease festers,
the more that miracles become the only hope.

American democracy is dying. There are plenty of medicines that would
cure it. Unfortunately, our political dysfunction means we’re
choosing not to use them, and as time passes, fewer treatments become
available to us, even though the disease is becoming terminal. No
major prodemocracy reforms have passed Congress. No key political
figures who tried to overturn an American election have faced real
accountability. The president who orchestrated the greatest threat to
our democracy in modern times is free to run for reelection, and may
well return to office.

Our current situation started with a botched diagnosis. When Trump
first rose to political prominence, much of the American political
class reacted with amusement, seeing him as a sideshow. Even if he
won, they thought, he’d tweet like a populist firebrand while
governing like a Romney Republican, constrained by the system. But for
those who had watched Trump-like authoritarian strongmen rise in
Turkey, India, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand,
and Venezuela, Trump was never entertaining. He was ominously
familiar.

At issue was a classic frame-of-reference problem. America’s
political culture is astonishingly insular. Turn on cable news and
it’s all America, all the time. Other countries occasionally make
cameos, but the story is still about us. (Poland is discussed if Air
Force One goes to Warsaw; Iran flits into view only in relation to
Washington’s nuclear diplomacy; Madagascar appears only in cartoon
form, mostly featuring talking animals that don’t actually live
there.) Our self-obsession means that whenever authoritarianism rises
abroad, it’s mentioned briefly, if at all. Have you ever spotted a
breathless octobox of talking heads on CNN or Fox News debating the
death of democracy in Turkey, Sri Lanka, or the Philippines?

That’s why most American pundits and journalists used an “outsider
comes to Washington” framework to process Trump’s campaign and his
presidency, when they should have been fitting every fresh fact into
an “authoritarian populist” framework or a “democratic death
spiral” framework. While debates raged over tax cuts and offensive
tweets, the biggest story was often obscured: The system itself was at
risk.

Even today, too many think of Trump more as Sarah Palin in 2012 rather
than Viktor Orbán in 2022. They wrongly believe that the
authoritarian threat is over and that January 6 was an isolated event
from our past, rather than a mild preview of our future. That
misreading is provoking an underreaction from the political
establishment. And the worst may be yet to come.

The basic problem is that one of the two major parties in the
U.S.—the Trumpified Republican Party—has become authoritarian to
its core. Consequently, there are two main ways to protect American
democracy. The first is to reform the GOP, so that it’s again a
conservative, but not authoritarian, party (à la John McCain’s or
Mitt Romney’s Republican Party). The second is to perpetually block
authoritarian Republicans from wielding power. But to do that,
Democrats need to win _every_ election. When you’re facing off
against an authoritarian political movement, each election is an
existential threat to democracy. Eventually, the authoritarian party
will win.

Erica Frantz, a political scientist and expert on authoritarianism at
Michigan State University, told me she shares that concern: With
Republicans out of the White House and in the congressional minority,
“democratic deterioration in the U.S. has simply been put on
pause.”

Frantz was more sanguine during much of the Trump era. “When Trump
won office, I pushed back against forecasts that democracy in the U.S.
was doomed,” she explained. After all, America has much more robust
democratic institutions than Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, or
Turkey. “Though the risk of democratic collapse was higher than it
had been in recent memory,” Frantz said, “it still remained low,
comparatively speaking.”

When democracies start to die, they usually don’t recover. Instead,
they end up as authoritarian states with zombified democratic
institutions: rigged elections in place of legitimate ones, corrupt
courts rather than independent judges, and propagandists replacing the
press.

There are exceptions. Frantz pointed to Ecuador, Slovenia, and South
Korea as recent examples. In all three cases, a political shock acted
as a wake-up call, in which the would-be autocrat was removed and
their political movement either destroyed or reformed. In South Korea,
President Park Geun-hye was ousted from office and sent to prison. But
more important, Frantz explained, “there was a cleaning of the house
after Park’s impeachment, with the new administration aggressively
getting rid of those who had been complicit in the country’s slide
to authoritarianism.”

Those examples once signaled a hopeful possibility for the United
States. At some point, Trump’s spell over the country and his party
could break. He would go too far, or there would be a national
calamity, and we’d all come to our democratic senses.

By early 2021, Trump had gone too far and there had been a national
calamity. That’s why, on January 6, 2021, as zealots and extremists
attacked the Capitol, I felt an unusual emotion mixed in with the
horror and sadness: a dark sense that there was a silver lining.

Finally, the symptoms were undeniable. After Trump stoked a bona fide
insurrection, the threat to democracy would be impossible to ignore.
As Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell denounced Trump on the Senate
floor, it looked like Republicans might follow the South Korean path
and America could finally take its medicine.

In reality, the denunciations were few and temporary. According to
a new poll
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the University of Monmouth, six in 10 Republican voters now believe
that the attack on the Capitol was a form of “legitimate protest.”
Only one in 10 would use the word _insurrection_ to describe January
6. And rather than cleaning house, the Republicans who dared to
condemn Trump are now the party’s biggest pariahs, while the January
6 apologists are rising stars.

The past 18 months portend a post-Trump GOP future that remains
authoritarian: Trumpism without Trump.

“Democracies can’t depend on one of two major parties never
holding power,” argues Brendan Nyhan, a government professor at
Dartmouth College and a co-founder of Bright Line Watch, a group that
monitors the erosion of American democracy. But that may be the
necessary treatment for now, because Republican leaders “are
defining a vision of a Trumpist GOP that could prove more durable than
the man himself.”

Frantz concurred: “What did surprise me and change my assessment was
the Republican Party’s decision to continue to embrace Trump and
stand by him. The period following the Capitol riots was a critical
one, and the party’s response was a turning point.”

That leaves American democracy with a bleak prognosis. Barring an
electoral wipeout of Republicans in 2022 (which looks extremely
unlikely), the idea that the party will suddenly abandon its
anti-democracy positioning is a delusion.

Prodemocracy voters now have only one way forward: Block the
authoritarian party from power, elect prodemocracy politicians in
sufficient numbers, and then insist that they produce lasting
democratic reforms.

The wish list from several democracy experts I spoke with is long, and
includes passing the Electoral Count Act, creating a constitutional
right to vote, reforming districting so more elections are
competitive, establishing a nonpartisan national election-management
body, electing the president via popular vote, reducing the gap in
representation between states like California and Wyoming, introducing
some level of proportional representation or multimember districts,
aggressively regulating campaign spending and the role of money in
politics, and enforcing an upper age limit for Supreme Court justices.
But virtually all of those ideas are currently political fantasies.

The American system isn’t just dysfunctional. It’s dying. Nyhan
believes there is now a “significant risk” that the 2024 election
outcome will be illegitimate. Even Frantz, who has been more
optimistic about America’s democratic resilience in the past,
doesn’t have a particularly reassuring retort to the doom-mongers:
“I don’t think U.S. democracy will collapse, but just hover in a
flawed manner for a while, as in Poland.”

We may not be doomed. But we should be honest:
The _optimistic_ assessment from experts who study authoritarianism
globally is that the United States will most likely settle into a
dysfunctional equilibrium that mirrors a deep democratic breakdown.
It’s not yet too late to avoid that. But the longer we wait, the
more the cancer of authoritarianism will spread. We don’t have long
before it’s inoperable.

_Brian Klaas [[link removed]] is a
contributing writer at The Atlantic, and a global-politics professor
at University College London. He is the author of Corruptible: Who
Gets Power and How It Changes Us
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* democracy
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* Authoritarianism
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* United States
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* Nationalism
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