Abstract
This article reflects on whether the erosion of democracy in the contemporary United States can be halted. Using the cases and conclusions from McCoy and Somer’s eleven country collective project, it argues that democracy’s decline is not inevitable. A case for cautious optimism emerges from analyzing the coalitions around democracy’s disassemblers and democracy’s defenders. The actors disassembling democracy have activated cleavages and adopted a style of rule that exacerbates fault-lines on the Right. The actors defending democracy have thus far done what’s needed to eventually build the sort of winning coalition that has proven successful elsewhere. Creating broad, cross-class networks, mobilizing peaceful protest, and drawing on mass values that are still supportive of democracy bolster the likelihood of successful defense.
As every morning’s news sets our heads spinning, it is natural to steady ourselves with historical parallels and to speculate about the future with an eye to the past. McCoy and Somer’s collective project enables us to do precisely this. By analyzing the association between polarization and democracy in eleven countries across four continents, it provides a broad platform for viewing the turbulence of the Trump administration in comparative perspective.
What can the effects of pernicious polarization on democracies elsewhere teach us about democracy in the United States? More precisely, do the analyses presented here foreshadow democracy’s continued erosion, democracy’s collapse, or the potential for democracy’s defense? Though each case study contributes to an answer, the editors’ conclusion provides two general theoretical leads that are especially helpful.
The first is that the effects of polarization on democracy are shaped not simply by the coalition of “polarizing figures” in charge but by the “reaction of opponents” as well. By drawing our attention to two specific sets of actors, the collection highlights the sometimes forgotten fact that democracies never die of natural causes. Democracies become dictatorships when one set of actors attempts to disassemble democratic institutions and another set of actors fails to marshal an appropriate defense.
The collection’s second especially helpful lead concerns the factors that help to determine whether the defense of democracy will succeed. The editors conclude that “the possibility of handling” polarization “democratically” is decisively shaped by the nature of the cleavages activated by polarizing elites, and the relative capacity for electoral mobilization exhibited by each camp. A close look at cleavages and capacity among incumbent and opposition actors in Trump’s America suggests that an effective defense of U.S. democracy is sorely needed but still possible.
Incumbent Elites
The right-wing coalition associated with Donald Trump has fault-lines that may hamper its capacity to disassemble American democracy in the future. One of the most significant involves the divide between political elites in the White House and a subset of economic elites in globalized sectors of the economy. Despite changes in tax and regulatory policy, which have clearly worked to their benefit, a subset of prominent business elites is offering public resistance to both the content and the nature of Trump’s rule.
We must not forget that capitalists in the United States have been very well served by neo-liberal democracy. They have no need for an authoritarian executive, or for dramatic institutional change because their control of policymaking has heretofore been firm (Hacker and Pierson 2010; Gilens 2012; Page, Bartels, and Seawright 2013). Unlike their counterparts in Thailand before the 2006 coup (and unlike many other democracies that collapsed), U.S. capitalists are not being threatened by either an economic crisis or a redistributive Left.
Rather than playing the role of silent coalition partners, some of the most dynamic and powerful sectors of our capitalist elite have emerged to oppose Trump’s policymaking. They have come out vehemently against trade tariffs. 1 They have strongly opposed xenophobic immigration policies. 2 And when Trump expressed sympathy for the racist and anti-Semitic right-wing marchers in Charlottesville, so many members of his hand-picked Business Council resigned that he was forced to abolish it. 3 Most recently, the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity group not only pledged to campaign against Republicans who backed Trump’s agenda but openly criticized “Trump’s Washington” for “divisiveness” and for “the deterioration of the core institutions of society.” 4 In line with what happened in the Philippines under Estrada (Arugay and Slater, this volume), key capitalist elites are uneasy with any further concentration of executive power and are demanding more “horizontal accountability” instead.
Capitalist resistance to the concentration of executive power may be partially driven by libertarian values, but its main impetus is material. Governing an economy by tweets and executive orders may send signals of decisiveness to Trump’s base and may provide direct benefit to Trump’s personal cronies but it harms the interests of most capitalists who need predictability and who have long benefitted from the multiple access points and lobbying opportunities afforded by the separation of powers. In any case, the cronyism and patronage that buy loyalty in smaller and weaker economies is of less marginal value to our spectacularly large and globalized economic elite. Most U.S. capitalists do not depend on government contracts or protection. They have thrived in open markets and been advantaged by skilled and unskilled labor crossing relatively open borders.
The divide between the incumbent administration and economic globalists is closely linked to Trump’s nationalist activation of cultural cleavages. These cleavages may constitute a second coalitional fault-line. Xenophobia and racial resentment were decisive in Trump’s 2016 victory and are foundational to his support base (Abramowitz and McCoy, this volume). Yet there are reasons to question whether these cleavages can be the basis of a lasting majoritarian coalition. Xenophobia and racism run deep in American society, but demographic and generational changes are weakening their resonance. Only 3 percent of the American public sees racism as unproblematic and the share deeming it a “big problem” has doubled since 2011 to nearly 60 percent. A full 37 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners take this view (Neal 2017) and nearly a third believe that “we need to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites” (Pew Research Center 2018b). Anti-immigrant sentiment has been declining since 1995 (ANES), and despite the president’s fear-mongering, a full 68 percent of registered voters and 44 percent of Republicans still believe that “America’s openness is essential to who we are as a nation.” An impressive 80 percent of adults under 30 hold this view (Pew Research Center 2018b). Racist and xenophobic messages may have magnetic appeal for Trump’s base, but they may also be a liability for retaining Republican moderates and Independents. The party’s lethal loss of suburban House seats in the 2018 midterm elections illustrates precisely this (Scherer and Dawsey 2018).
If the Republican Party were strong, these opinions (and voters) might be ignored without cost, but Trump is weakening his party. This is a third problem for the coalition. In 2017, the percentage of registered women voters identifying as Republican plummeted to only 25 percent (Pew Research Center 2018a). Nearly a quarter of young Republicans shifted Democratic between January 2016 and March 2017 alone (Pew Research Center 2017b). Overall, the rate of defection is now steeper than it has been since 2005 (Kamarck, Pokul, and Zeppos 2018). Successful democracy disassemblers such as Chávez, Thaksin, Erdoğan, and Orbán built and expanded political parties. Trump has done the opposite. Even on the eve of decisive midterm elections he was channeling the fruits of fundraising overwhelmingly toward his own 2020 campaign rather than toward vulnerable fellow-partisans (Vogel 2018).
The weaknesses outlined above may harm incumbent capacity to build a winning electoral coalition in the future. It pays to remember that even as Trump won the presidency in 2016, he lost the election by some 3 million votes and that only 25 percent of eligible voters actually cast a ballot backing him. (The comparable figures for Chávez, Orbán, Estrada, and Duterte average over 33 percent). Trump has a rock-solid base, but it lacks the width and dynamism to make victory a sure thing. He took office with approval ratings that were far lower than his two predecessors and they have been stagnant ever since, despite a buoyant economy (Dunn 2018). The midterm loss of forty House seats and more than seven governorships shows the coalition’s vulnerability.
Opposition
At the time of writing, in early December 2018, the defenders of democracy are behaving as if they had already internalized the tactical themes of this collection. Unlike their counterparts in failed democracies, opponents of the incumbent administration have built cross-class alliances, avoided unconstitutional actions, and eschewed violence. While depriving disassemblers of an excuse to silence critics in the name of security, they have had extraordinary success at mobilizing peaceful resistance. Peaceful protest—involving between 14 and 21 million Americans—is at an historic high and a sharp spike in voter registration and turnout is likely to give Democrats the advantage.
But the diversity of the opposition may matter most. As I have shown elsewhere, democracy endures when key actors distance themselves from would-be authoritarians, prosecuting and condemning all those who engage in lawlessness and antidemocratic behavior even when they present themselves as allies (Bermeo 2003). We have seen pathetically little distancing from the Republican Congress and this is deeply problematic, but we are seeing prosecution and condemnation from a broad range of other important actors.
The judiciary is still managing to prosecute elite lawlessness. It has convicted or indicted at least eight of the president’s closest associates so far and challenged a host of xenophobic and other executive orders. Even stalwart Republican judges such as South Carolina’s Dave Norton have joined in. 5 Of course, Trump is filling the bench with his own appointments, but we sometimes see distancing from them too: Dabney Friedrich is now the fourth judge to rule against legal challenges to the Mueller investigation.
Condemnation from the Left abounds but the defense of democracy is being advanced by figures associated with the Right as well. Condemnation from George Will and former Republican operatives such as Steve Schmidt are surely consequential, but condemnation from actors associated with the FBI, the intelligence community, the military, and leading donors is likely to resonate with a broader audience. Hope for an effective defense of American democracy lies in the fact that more than 200 former intelligence and security officials signed a cascade of open letters rebuking the president as a menace to free speech; that the admiral who headed the Bin Laden Raid stated publicly that Trump’s attacks on the media are “the worst threat to democracy” in his lifetime (Vogel 2018); and that Seth Kalman, formerly the biggest GOP donor in New England, recently pledged $20 million to help Democrats retake Congress and become “a check on Donald Trump and his runaway presidency” (Kranish and Lee 2018).
Support for basic democratic values remains strong among ordinary Americans and this means that wise and principled leaders can still shape a winning coalition for democracy’s defense. A recent LAPOP poll found that political tolerance for those who “hold diverging views” was nearly identical to Canada’s, that support for coups was even lower than Canada’s, and that only 14 percent of Americans had orientations that put “democracy at risk” (Cohen, Lupu, and Zechmeister 2017). Despite pernicious polarization, an impressive 84 percent of the public agrees that it is “very important that the rights and freedoms of all people are respected.” A full 83 percent believe that a democracy requires “a system of checks and balances” and a striking 89 percent agree that democracy depends on “elections that are open and fair” (Pew Research Center 2017a). The historically high turnout in the 2016 midterms illustrates that abstract opinions about elections can affect the behavior of ordinary voters.
Democratic victories in the House, in state legislatures, and in gubernatorial races in key states such as Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Kansas suggest that the incumbent coalition is already suffering from the frailties I detailed above. But no one can predict whether the potential for democracy’s defense will be realized. And no one can know whether and when the damage already done to norms and institutions can be corrected. Backsliding and defense are iterative games. Moreover, every unhappy democracy is unhappy in its own way and, thus, the routes to breakdown are myriad. Voter suppression, court-packing, gerrymandering, media manipulation, and infighting might stymie democracy’s defenders. But the differences between the U.S. case and the cases of democratic breakdown analyzed in this collection suggest that the worst case scenarios may still be avoided. Time will tell.
Footnotes
Notes
Nancy Bermeo is currently a PIIRS senior scholar at Princeton University and a Nuffield senior research fellow at Oxford University. Her books include Parties, Movements and Democracy (with Deborah Yashar; Cambridge University Press 2016), Mass Politics in Hard Times (with Larry Bartels; Oxford University Press 2014) and Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times (Princeton University Press 2003), an award winning study of the breakdown of democracy.