This is why democracy is under such stress now.
For now, Ewig wrote, the United States is not a competitive authoritarian regime. The results of the 2020 national elections and the institutional opposition to the insurrection in 2021 “helped to avoid that. But some U.S. states do look suspiciously competitive authoritarian.”
Why is democracy under such stress now? There are many answers to that question, including, crucially, the divisiveness inherent in the elevated levels of contemporary polarization that makes democratic consensus so difficult to achieve.
In an April 2021 paper, four scholars, Samuel Wang of Princeton, Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie Mellon, Bernard Grofman of the University of California, Irvine, and Keena Lipsitz of Queens College, address the basic question of what led to the erosion among a substantial number of voters of support for democratic principles in a nation with a two-century-plus commitment to this tradition:
In the United States, rules and institutions from 1790, when voters comprised white male landowners and slave owners in a nation of four million, were not designed to address today’s governance needs. Moreover, existing rules and institutions may amplify background conditions that drive polarization. The decline of civic life in America and the pluralism it once nurtured has hastened a collapse of dimensionality in the system.
Americans once enjoyed a rich associational life, Wang and his colleagues write, the demise of which contributes to the erosion of democracy: “Nonpolitical associations, such as labor unions, churches, and bowling leagues, were often crosscutting, bringing people from different backgrounds into contact with one another, building trust and teaching tolerance.” In recent years, however, “the groups that once structured a multidimensional issue space in the United States have collapsed.”
The erosion of democracy is also the central topic of a Feb. 13 podcast with Martin Wolf, a Financial Times columnist and the author of “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” Wolf makes the case that “economic changes and the performance of the economy interacting produced quite a large number of people who feared that they were becoming losers. They feared that they risked falling into the condition of people who really were at the bottom.”
At the same time, Wolf continued, “the immense growth of the financial sector and the dominance of the financial sector in management generated some simply staggering fortunes at the top.” Instead of helping to drive democratization, the market system “recreated an oligarchy. I think there’s no doubt about that.”
Those who suffered, Wolf noted, “felt the parties of the center-left had largely abandoned them and were no longer really interested in their fate.”
Two senior fellows at Brookings, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, explore threats to American democracy in a January 2022 analysis, “Is Democracy Failing and Putting Our Economy at Risk?” Citing data from six surveys, including those by Pew, P.R.R.I., Voter Study Group and CNN, the authors write:
Support in the United States for political violence is significant. In February 2021, 39 percent of Republicans, 31 percent of independents and 17 percent of Democrats agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” In November, 30 percent of Republicans, 17 percent of independents and 11 percent of Democrats agreed that they might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.
In the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Galston and Kamarck observe:
Even though constitutional processes prevailed, and Mr. Trump is no longer president, he and his followers continue to weaken American democracy by convincing many Americans to distrust the results of the election. About three-quarters of rank-and-file Republicans believe that there was massive fraud in 2020 and Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president.
In fact, Galston and Kamarck continue, “the 2020 election revealed structural weaknesses in the institutions designed to safeguard the integrity of the electoral process,” noting that “if Mr. Pence had yielded to then-President Trump’s pressure to act, the election would have been thrown into chaos and the Constitution placed in jeopardy.”
Since then, Galston and Kamarck note, the attack on democracy
has taken a new and dangerous turn. Rather than focusing on the federal government, Trump’s supporters have focused on the obscure world of election machinery. Republican majorities in state legislatures are passing laws making it harder to vote and weakening the ability of election officials to do their jobs.
American democracy, the two authors conclude,
is thus under assault from the ground up. The most recent systematic attack on state and local election machinery is much more dangerous than the chaotic statements of a disorganized former president. A movement that relied on Mr. Trump’s organizational skills would pose no threat to constitutional institutions. A movement inspired by him with a clear objective and a detailed plan to achieve it would be another matter altogether.
“The chances that this threat will materialize over the next few years,” Galston and Kamarck add, “are high and rising.”
If democracy fails in America, they contend,
It will not be because a majority of Americans is demanding a nondemocratic form of government. It will be because an organized, purposeful minority seizes strategic positions within the system and subverts the substance of democracy while retaining its shell — while the majority isn’t well organized, or doesn’t care enough, to resist. The possibility that this will occur is far from remote.
The anxiety about democratic erosion — even collapse — is widespread among those who think about politics for a living:
In his January 2022 article, “Democracy’s Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled,” Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, joins those who tackle what has become an overriding topic of concern in American universities:
For a decade, the democratic recession was sufficiently subtle, incremental and mixed so that it was reasonable to debate whether it was happening at all. But as the years have passed, the authoritarian trend has become harder to miss. For each of the last fifteen years, many more countries have declined in freedom than have gained. By my count, the percentage of states with populations over one million that are democracies peaked in 2006 at 57 percent and has steadily declined since, dropping below a majority (48 percent) in 2019 for the first time since 1993.
In this country, Diamond continued, “Rising proportions of Americans in both camps express attitudes and perceptions that are blinking red for democratic peril. Common political ground has largely vanished.”
He adds: “Even in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, most Americans have still not come to grips with how far the country has strayed from the minimum elements of normative and behavioral consensus that sustain democracy.”
At the close of his essay, Diamond goes on to say:
It is human nature to seek personal autonomy, dignity and self-determination, and with economic development those values have become ascendant. But there is nothing inevitable about the triumph of democracy.
The next test will be in November 2024.
