The Irksome Method Of Demise

The techniques employed in the destruction of democracy in modern times have evolved.
No longer are the coups obvious overthrows or violent.
Rather, the preferred tactic today is for  elected leaders to subvert the very process that brought them to power.

 In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez was freely elected president, but he used his soaring popularity (and the country’s vast oil wealth) to tilt the playing field against opponents, packing the courts, blacklisting critics, bullying independent media, and eventually eliminating presidential term limits so that he could remain in power indefinitely.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used his party’s parliamentary majority to pack the judiciary with loyalists and rewrite the constitutional and electoral rules to weaken his opponents.

Elected leaders have similarly subverted democratic institutions in Ecuador, Georgia, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
In these cases, there are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain an illusion of democracy while eviscerating its substance entirely.
This is how most democracies die today: slowly, in barely visible steps.

How vulnerable is American democracy to such a fate?
Extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies.
An essential test of this kind of vulnerability isn’t whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power.
When established political parties opportunistically invite extremists into their ranks, they subvert democracy.

Once a would-be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them?
Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats.
Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens,
but also by democratic norms, social contracts of rules of toleration and restraint.
Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we'd like to imagine them to be.

Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to permanently disadvantage their rivals. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s enemies use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.



The United States failed the first test in November 2016, when it elected a president with no real allegiance to democracy whatsoever. Donald Trump’s surprise victory was made possible not only by public disaffection but also by the Republican Party’s failure to keep an extremist demagogue from gaining the nomination.

How serious a threat does that represent?
Many observers take comfort in the U.S. Constitution,
which was designed precisely to thwart and contain demagogues like Trump.
The Madison system of checks and balances has endured for more than two centuries.
It survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and Watergate.
Surely, then, it must be able to survive the current president?

I am far less certain.

Democracies work best—and survive longer—when constitutions are reinforced by codes of mutual toleration and restraint in the exercise of power. For most of the twentieth century, these codes of conduct have functioned as the guardrails of American democracy, helping to avoid the kind of partisan fights-to-the-death that have destroyed democracies elsewhere in the world, including in Europe in the 1930s and South America in the 1960s and 1970s.
But those codes of conduct are now weakening...well they are obliterated actually.
When Barack Obama became president, many Republicans, abandoned their restraint for a strategy of winning by any means necessary. This included claiming that Hawaii was Kenya and making up absolute bullshit rules that prevented the president from nominating his pick for the SCOTUS.
That was a complete abuse of power.
 Donald Trump has accelerated this process, but he didn’t cause it.
The challenges we face run deeper than this one man, however troubling this one man might be.

There is a reason no extremist demagogue has won the presidency before 2016.
 (Extremist figures have long degraded the landscape of American politics, from Henry Ford,  Charles Coughlin, & Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy, Pat Robertson, and George Wallace).
But political parties have, in the past acted as filters against would-be authoritarians. They screen out those who pose a threat to democracy or are otherwise unfit to hold office.
This role has been obliterated.

America’s constitutional system of checks and balances was designed to prevent leaders from concentrating and abusing power, and for most of our history, it has succeeded. Abraham Lincoln’s concentration of power during the Civil War was reversed by the Supreme Court after the war ended. Richard Nixon’s illegal wiretapping, exposed after the 1972 Watergate break-in, triggered a high-profile congressional investigation and bipartisan pressure for a special prosecutor, which eventually forced his resignation in the face of certain impeachment. In these and other instances, our political institutions served as crucial bulwarks against authoritarian tendencies.

But constitutional safeguards, by themselves, aren’t enough to secure a democracy once an authoritarian is elected to power.
Even well-designed constitutions can fail. Germany’s 1919 Weimar constitution was designed by some of the country’s greatest legal minds. Its long-standing and highly regarded Rechtsstaat (“rule of law”) was considered by many as sufficient to prevent government abuse. But both the constitution and the Rechtsstaat dissolved rapidly in the face of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

Or consider the experience of postcolonial Latin America.
Many of the region’s newly independent republics modeled themselves directly on the United States, adopting  a U.S.style president, dual  legislatures, supreme courts, and in some cases, electoral colleges and federal systems.
Some wrote constitutions that were near-replicas of the U.S. Constitution. Yet nearly all the region’s embryonic republics plunged into civil war and dictatorship.
For example, Argentina’s 1853 constitution closely resembled ours: Two-thirds of its text was taken directly from the U.S. Constitution. Yet these constitutional arrangements did little to prevent fraudulent elections in the late nineteenth century, military coups in 1930 and 1943, and Perón’s populist autocracy.

Likewise, the Philippines’ 1935 constitution has been described by legal scholar Raul Pangalangan as a “faithful copy of the U.S. Constitution.” Drafted under U.S. colonial tutelage and approved by the U.S. Congress, the charter “provided a textbook example of liberal democracy,” with a separation of powers, a bill of rights, and a two-term limit in the presidency.
But what happened?
President Ferdinand Marcos, who was loath to step down when his second term ended, dispensed with it rather easily after declaring martial law in 1972.

If constitutional rules alone do not secure democracy, then what does?
Donald Trump is widely and correctly criticized for assaulting democratic norms.
 But Trump didn’t cause the problem. The erosion began decades ago.

Think about it, 25 years ago,  if someone had described to you a country where candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the government of election fraud, and parties used their legislative majorities to steal Supreme Court seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania.
 It wouldn’t have been the United States of America.

This is a slow irksome method of demise.