“How Democracies Die”
by Steven Levtsky and Daniel Ziblatt
This book came highly recommended by the likes of Farid Zakaria. Although it is interesting in parts by providing historical and world-wide context as to how other democracies have failed, in term of “analysis” on the causes of democratic failure, I found this book to be very disappointing, narrowly focused and somewhat simplistic in its emphasis on the role of “political parties” as “democracy’s gatekeepers”. The book ultimately devolves into a critique of Donald Trump and the current Republican Party, which for many people (like myself) is emotionally satisfying, but falls far short in terms of serious analysis of what makes democracies fail.
Democracies are indeed very fragile. “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others”, attributed to Winston Churchill, highlights this fragility. But this also highlights the need to constantly remain aware of what we have to loose if we allow democracy to fail. This in turn highlights the importance of “education” in the broadest sense both to allow democracy to develop and to allow it to persist. This fragility also highlights the need for a “free press”, which ensures that the public is “informed” and thus armed against the speed of demagoguery.
Demagogues have fertile fields on which to sow their seeds of distrust and hatred primarily if there are external or internal events which cause society in general to feel under pressure (e.g. large scale economic downturns) or subgroups within society to feel disadvantaged. The world-wide Great Depression led to the rise of Fascism and the collapse of fragile democracies in Germany and Italy, and serious attacks on democracy in many other countries. The huge migrations from poor, war-torn countries into Europe are causing huge strains on European democratic institutions and a re-emergence of demagogues, primarily on the right.
To me, relying on political parties as “democracy’s gatekeepers” is like letting the fox be the protector of the chicken coop. Political Parties, like almost all large organizations (including economic corporations and even religious organizations, like the Catholic Church) are primarily interested in maintaining and enhancing their power - they will, in general, make pacts with the devil to that end. Political parties in Germany and Italy made pacts with Hitler and Mussolini, respectively, to maintain their influence and power. The current GOP tried to co-opt the Tea Party to enhance their own power, only to find that it fractured the Republican Party to make it incapable of governing, literally. I’m sure there are examples of Democrats making disastrous pacts with fringe organizations to enhance their own power.
Taking a look at the current Trump phenomenon, one-plus year in, and its corrosive effects on US democracy, I’m struck by the fact that, so far, there are two pillars of democratic governance which are holding up reasonably well - the judicial, both at the federal and state levels and including portions of the Justice Department, and the “fourth estate”, the press broadly.
The legislative branch (Congress) is for all practical purposes completely broken - note that this is also the place where political parties, those gatekeepers of democracy, or most prominent. The executive branch is now completely dominated by ignorance and incompetence.
The importance of the judiciary and the “fourth estate” is also highlighted by the fact, that these are the institutions which immediately come under attack by demagogues and wannabe dictators. What the “Lügenpresse” was to Hitler is “fake news” and “mainstream media” to Trump. Erdogan in Turkey has imprisoned more journalists than any other advanced society. The current Polish government has passed new laws and a modified Constitution which emasculates the judiciary.
It seems to me, that what really initiates decline in democracies are developments which cause polarization in societies, and more often than not, these polarizing developments are large scale, world-wide phenomena to which different societies respond in different ways.
In Europe this polarization is currently caused by the migration and refugee crisis, which is putting huge economic and cultural strains on societies and countries. Such strains are then hyped and demagogued by groups seeking to use these external events to scapegoat for perceived (often not real, or at least not as imminent as portrayed) disadvantages experienced by one group compared to another. In Germany, for example, the hysteria over “Überfremdung” (large numbers of foreigners) is most pronounced in former Eastern Germany, where the actual numbers are small.
Different countries and societies deal with these external pressures in different ways. In France, for example, after the Font National under Marine LaPen came very close to capturing the Presidency, Macron almost single-handedly turned the situation around and soundly defeated the Front National to the point where it is now cannibalizing itself. This victory for democratic values was not achieved through gate-keeping by political parties, but, so it seems, by the charismatic (though non-demagogic) personality of a single man.
In Germany the approach is more in line with the authors’ view of gate-keeping by mainstream political parties. All traditional parties, in spite of their significant electoral losses, categorically rejected any coalition with the AfD and are intent on isolating that neo-Nazi party. It is interesting to note, that the AfD originally formed as primarily an anti-Euro, libertarian movement, which was then taken over (literally) by nationalistic, xenophobic tendencies, which very much matches the experience of the US Republican Party.
In Austria the new young Prime Minister, Sebastian Kurz, is following very closely the path of Hitler’s rise to power - he has formed a coalition with the FPÖ, a long established Austrian political party, but one with ever increasing nationalist tendencies. He obviously feels that he can “control” the neo-Nazi aspirations of his coalition partner, and it will be interesting to see how that works out.
Other countries, such as Poland and Hungary, have opted to respond to the common external pressures of mass migration and refugees by full out attacks on democratic institutions. The different approaches by different European societies are partially driven by long historic trends (Poland and Hungary both have strong xenophobic, nationalistic, anti-semitic tendencies, which, unlike Germany, they have not been forced to acknowledge and deal with), but by the same token, the differing responses are often driven by individuals (Macron in France, Merkel in Germany, Kurz in Austria).
Now let’s look more closely at the “Death of Democracy in America” - a little pitch for my own past writing on that topic - admittedly poor writing and quite possibly poorly argued opinions, as evidenced by the fact that this “book” has been collecting dust in the back-reaches of Amazon’s e-book offerings for more than five years. This book is the culmination of my “American experience” since immigrating to this country in 1963 and observing the changing social and political landscape here and comparing it to social and political developments in Germany, the country I left.
My first impressions of American life were almost like having escaped hell and gone to heaven at age seven - we came from bombed out Berlin in 1950 to San Francisco, where my father took up his first post-war posting for the German Foreign Service. Even after leaving again five years later, my plan to someday return and become an American citizen was firmly in place. In 1963 that plan came to fruition, when I came as an immigrant to start university, and I have been grateful ever since for the welcome I received and the opportunities I was given.
However, even back in 1963, with all the youthful enthusiasm and optimism about the future, there were shocking events which gave me pause. The rash of political assassinations (JFK, MLK and RFK) made me wonder if the US was really the model democracy I had come to assume. These spasms of violence, more reminiscent of Banana Republics, continued through the 70’s and 80’s. The long Vietnam War, the violent suppression of protest and the subsequent proof that the war was politically engineered, abetted and aided by cowardly military leaders, raised uncomfortable comparisons to recent German history.
On the positive side of the ledger in my early years in the US was the Civil Rights movement, demonstrating democratic civil society at its best, forcing society and government to rectify centuries of injustice through essentially peaceful, grassroots democratic means.
The 70’s brought Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, aimed at fostering racial animosity in an effort to win over southern white voters. Here is an explicit example of political parties, rather that acting as “democracy’s gatekeepers, shamelessly exploited fears and resentments resulting from the civil rights movement to enhance their electoral, policies power. Today’s republican’s like to cast Democrats as practicing “identity politics” (due to their efforts to include minorities in politics), but the Southern Strategy was only the first of a continuous set of electoral policies by conservatives to deepen divides among Americans to enhance their political power.
Then came Watergate, a flagrant effort by the Executive branch to use criminal activities to enhance and maintain its political power, and then to use its executive powers to cover up its unlawful activities. American democratic institutions survived that attack by a ruthless and lawless Executive, mainly because the media, that vital “fourth estate”, did its Constitutional duties by exposing the corrupt disintegration of a President. However, very much different from today’s corrupt Trump presidency, Watergate was recited by courageous individuals (The Saturday Night Massacre) and a Republican Party, which still retained some decency and dignity. By contrast, today we have a gutless Republican Party which consciously and knowingly support a President intent on corruption every corner of American society.
However, there are other, more basic aspects of American Democracy which are destroying democracy.
The US Constitution was, in its day, a brilliant effort codify liberal, democratic principals to transform a ragtag group o colonies into a cohesive and stable democratic society. That success, and its longevity compared to all other democratic experiments around the world, has led Americans to endow their Constitution and the people who wrote it, with a religious aura of infallibility (“The Founding Fathers”). In spite of obvious flaws in today’s world, resulting in no small part from the need for imperfect compromises to get all States to ratify it. This religious veneration leads to the disastrous efforts of interpreting the Constitution by trying to divine the intent of the original framers - this is both impossible as a practical matter, but also counterproductive in a world which has changed dramatically in the past 250 years.
This effort to divine the original intent has led to hair raising rulings by the Supreme Court. The two most devastating “interpretations” of original intent deserve special mention. The first involves the extension of “free speech” of the First Amendment to corporations, thus loosing torrents of corrupting money on the political process and making a mockery of the democratic concept of “one person, one vote”. This is a death knell to everything “democratic”, as it essentially ushers in a new age of political rule by privilege and wealth. Although money has a strong influence on politics and policy in all democracies, this interpretation of “personhood” in the First Amendment canonized that influence as supremely legitimate. Who can honestly say that todays electoral process in the US is truly “democratic” - it is much more akin to the “electors” of the medieval “Holy Roman Empire” getting together to designate a new Emperor.
The second example I would cite is the unbelievably convoluted justification of the latest decision on the Second Amendment, where the decision at the same time argues, that the Second Amendment applies to “all citizens”, arguing the the preamble about “ a well regulated Militia” does not apply (i.e. an expansive interpretation), but then turns around and argues restrictively that “arms” does not apply to all modern weaponry. Although this mis-interpretation of the Second Amendment, does not directly impinge on the institutions of democracy (although one could make a strong argument, that the continuous stream of political assassinations in the US, far beyond what other democracies experience, does have significant impacts on democratic processes), it leads to a weakening of “the rule of law” in favor of a “Wild West” mentality. It is argued in political science and sociology, that the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force lies with “the state”, that indeed that is what defines a cohesive society, “a state”. The absence of such a monopoly of the user of force by the state can easily lead to s spiraling of society into chaos and anarchy.
There is, however, a strong undercurrent in the current popular interpretation of the Second Amendment, not explicitly sanctioned by Supreme Court interpretation, but strongly influenced by the Revolutionary origins of the US, of a distrust in government in general. This distrust in government is encouraged by mainstream conservative libertarian, lesser-faire economic philosophy, popularized by the (in-)famous Reagan speech that “government is the problem”. This combination of distrust in government, although not unique to the US (Note: In Germany there is a movement of “Reichsbürger”, who do not accept the authority of the central government and have gone so far as to issue their own passports), is much more typical of US attitudes, as evidenced by private militias and armed conflicts over issues such as grazing rights on Federal lands, and are potentially a great danger to democratic governance.
Although “How Democracies Die” mentions some of these additional threats to democracy, it’s emphasis on the role of political parties as “democracy’s gatekeepers” and its devolution into a tirade on Trump (as justified as such a tirade may be) was very disappointing.
