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Democracy Can Plant the Seeds of Its Own Destruction

Credit...Eric Thayer for The New York Times

Will President Trump’s assault on the norms underpinning constitutional democracy permanently alter American political life?

On a daily basis, Trump tests the willingness of the public to accept a president who lies as a matter of routine. So far, Trump has persuaded a large swath of America to swallow what he feeds them.

Asked whether the media makes up stories about Trump, nearly half the population of the United States, 46 percent, now says yes, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted Oct. 12-16. This compares to 37 percent who say that the media does not fabricate material about the president. While Republicans and Democrats diverge in the directions you would expect, a plurality of independents, 44 percent, says that the media produces false stories; 31 percent say the media is accurate.

Trump has flourished at a time when trust in basic institutions — organized religion, banks, medical services, Congress, the media, government, you name it — has eroded. His presidency is a product of this erosion, but it is also proving to be an accelerant of the process.

Eight days after Trump was elected, Clare Malone, a senior political writer for the website FiveThirtyEight, put it this way:

Trump did not so much conjure a dark view of America’s direction as tap into reserves that have lain deep and been sporadically voiced.

Or, as Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk write in the July 2016 issue of the Journal of Democracy:

Even as democracy has come to be the only form of government widely viewed as legitimate, it has lost the trust of many citizens who no longer believe that democracy can deliver on their most pressing needs and preferences.

The danger, they argue, cannot be underestimated:

As democracies deconsolidate, the prospect of democratic breakdown becomes increasingly likely — even in parts of the world that have long been spared such instability.

Trump is the most prominent of the right-wing populist politicians continuing to gain strength both here and in Europe (despite some electoral setbacks), but because the viewpoint he represents is now so widespread, he is in one sense personally irrelevant — a symptom rather than a cause.

As Sasha Polakow-Suransky, the author of “Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy,” warns in The New York Review of Books:

Liberal democracies are better equipped than authoritarian states to grapple with the inevitable conflicts that arise in diverse societies, including the threat of terrorist violence. But they also contain the seeds of their own destruction: if they fail to deal with these challenges and allow xenophobic populists to hijack the public debate, then the votes of frustrated and disaffected citizens will increasingly go to the anti-immigrant right, societies will become less open, nativist parties will grow more powerful, and racist rhetoric that promotes a narrow and exclusionary sense of national identity will be legitimized.

The threat to democracy posed by the current outbreak of populist nationalism has become a matter of concern for both scholars and ordinary citizens. The central topic at a conference at Yale earlier this month was “How Do Democracies Fall Apart,” and the subject will be taken up again in November at a Stanford conference called “Global Populisms: A Threat to Democracy?

I contacted several of the participants at the Yale gathering and was struck by their anxiety over the future prospects of democratic governance.

One of the most insightful was Adam Przeworski, a political scientist at N.Y.U., who has written, but not yet published, his own analysis of current events under the title “What’s Happening.”

First and foremost, Przeworski stresses,

there is nothing "undemocratic" about the electoral victory of Donald Trump or the rise of anti-establishment parties in Europe.

These parties and candidates, he points out:

Do not advocate replacing elections by some other way of selecting rulers. They are ugly — most people view racism and xenophobia as ugly — but these parties do campaign under the slogan of returning to ‘the people’ the power usurped by elites, which they see as strengthening democracy. In the words of a Trump advertisement, “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people.”

In support of Przeworski’s argument, it is clear that the success of the Trump campaign in winning the Republican nomination was the result of a classic democratic insurgency: the Republican electorate’s rejection of its party’s establishment.

The danger in the United States, in Przeworski’s view, is the possibility that the Trump administration will use the power of the presidency to undermine the procedures and institutions essential to the operation of democracy:

That the incumbent administration would intimidate hostile media and create a propaganda machine of its own, that it would politicize the security agencies, that it would harass political opponents, that it would use state power to reward sympathetic private firms, that it would selectively enforce laws, that it would provoke foreign conflicts to monger fear, that it would rig elections.

Przeworski believes that

such a scenario would not be unprecedented. The United States has a long history of waves of political repression: the “Red Scare” of 1917-20, the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, the McCarthy period, the Nixon presidency.

Along similar lines, Anna Grzymala-Busse, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my inquiry:

My big worry is not simply that formal institutions have been eroded, but that the informal norms that underpin them are even more important and even more fragile. Norms of transparency, conflict of interest, civil discourse, respect for the opposition and freedom of the press, and equal treatment of citizens are all consistently undermined, and without these the formal institutions become brittle.

Trump, in Grzymala-Busse’s assessment, “articulates a classic populist message that we see in Europe: the elite establishment is a collusive cartel uninterested in the problems of ‘the people,’” and, she continued, he has begun to follow the path of European populist leaders:

Much of Trump’s language and actions are also familiar: there is a standard authoritarian populist template, developed in Hungary and faithfully followed in Poland and in Turkey: first, go after the courts, then the media, then the civil society, churches, universities.

The attacks on the courts, media and universities

are not simply the ravings of a lunatic, but an established strategy for undermining democratic oversight and discrediting the opposition.

Margaret Levi, another political scientist at Stanford, wrote me that she was

not sure Trumpism per se will survive Trump. But I do think it is the current embodiment of a right-wing populism that is likely to remain the basis of internal opposition within the Republican Party or be the basis of a split in the Party, leading to two new parties.

Some form of right-wing populism, Levi argued,

is already a competitive force in general elections. And it is once again a force in competitive elections in democracies world-wide.

She added that there was no guarantee that right-wing populism “will not transform into the fascist and Nazi forms.”

Unless the Democratic Party in this country and moderate parties in the rest of the world “find a way to address the populace’s underlying economic insecurity and deterioration in the perceived (and actual in many cases) standard of living, the possibility for irreparable damage does exist,” Levi wrote:

Otherwise, both confidence in democratic government, measured by the extent it is a reliable provider of needed goods and services, including domestic and international security, and its legitimacy, the normative belief in its right to rule, will decline significantly and dangerously — perhaps even to the point of no return.

While white identitarianism, anger over immigration and economic dislocation are often cited as causes of the emergence of right-wing populism, another argument is that there is a growing segment of the electorate that is alienated from cultural norms they see as imposed on them by a ruling elite — a repressive elite; politically correct and socially remote.

In a research paper published in the current issue of the Journal of Democracy, “Eroding Norms and Democratic Deconsolidation,” Paul Howe, a political scientist at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, describes the increasing size of the nihilistic segment of the American electorate.

This constituency of the disengaged and profoundly alienated provides a base of support in the United States and Europe for populist leaders who, in Howe’s view, fit the Trump mold:

They compete in the democratic process, yet with words and actions that convey disregard for core democratic principles such as the rule of law, minority rights, and checks and balances on executive power. At the same time, a number of these individuals are prone to brazen, dubious, and sometimes aggressive behaviors that suggest outsized egos, scant respect for others, and a degree of contempt for social norms.

Looking at data from World Values Surveys in recent decades, Howe finds that in the United States,

the rise of antidemocratic sentiment has less to do with dysfunction in the political arena than with corrosive changes that have reshaped the social and cultural landscape more generally.

These corrosive changes include an increase in the number of citizens who say it is O.K. to

claim government benefits to which one is not entitled; take a bribe in the course of one’s duties; cheat on taxes; and avoid a public-transit fare.

When answers to these questions were correlated with political attitudes, Howe found that

indifferent feelings toward democracy are interlaced with a broader set of self-interested and antisocial attitudes that are present among a substantial minority of the U.S. population.

He then argues that the

broader constellation of transgressive and antisocial attitudes among a subsection of the public is an important force behind rising disregard for democratic norms.

Clearly, a sense of isolation, actual isolation, the breakdown of the family, the rise of opiates, the disappearance of associations, a nation “bowling alone” and “coming apart,” have all played a role in creating an antisocial constituency. This very constituency has produced some of the strongest Trump supporters and backing for the so-called alt-right. As Howe writes:

Those with a high-school education or less are substantially more likely than those with a college degree to express skeptical views about democracy as well as tolerance of various antisocial behaviors, by variances that range from 5 to 30 percentage points across the questions.

Few people have looked at these issues as long and as hard as Ron Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. In “The Danger of Deconsolidation: How Much Should We Worry?” (published alongside the Foa-Mounk essay in the July 2016 issue of the Journal of Democracy) Inglehart raises this question:

What makes the United States so distinctive? One reason may be that in recent years U.S. democracy has become appallingly dysfunctional. It suffers from 1) virtual paralysis at the top, as exemplified by the willingness of Congress to shut down the federal government, regardless of the damage to the country’s credit, after failing to get its way via normal procedures in a budget standoff with the White House; 2) massive increases in income inequality — greater than those found in any other established democracy, with most of the population’s real income declining during the past few decades despite substantial economic growth; and 3) the disproportionate and growing political influence of billionaires, as money plays a greater role in U.S. politics than in almost any other democracy.

The economic boom in the post-World War II years “produced rising security and an intergenerational shift toward self-expression values,” Inglehart wrote, but “in recent decades most advanced industrial societies have experienced economic stagnation, rising unemployment coupled with massive immigration, and the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”

The resulting “high levels of existential insecurity,” Inglehart argues,

are conducive to authoritarianism, xenophobia, and rejection of new cultural norms. The economic stagnation and rising inequality of recent decades have led to increasing support for authoritarian, xenophobic political candidates, from Marine le Pen in France to Donald Trump in the United States.

While the contemporary explosion of right-wing populism is a recent phenomenon, its roots go deeper, best captured by Daniel Bell in his 1972 essay “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” which foreshadowed the Trump era.

American capitalism, Bell wrote,

has lost its traditional legitimacy which was based on a moral system of reward, rooted in a Protestant sanctification of work. It has substituted in its place a hedonism which promises a material ease and luxury, yet shies away from all the historic implications which a “voluptuary system” — and all its social permissiveness and libertinism — implies.

The conflict between “the principles of economics and economizing” and a culture “rooted in a return to instinctual modes” has produced a “disjunction which is the historic crisis of Western society. This cultural contradiction, in the long run, is the deepest challenge to the society.”

For the moment, the Republican Party has become the main battleground for the struggle over authoritarianism, xenophobia and the erosion of received standards.

At the Yale conference, Daniel Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard, warned that Trump and other right-wing leaders have breached traditional political boundaries that serve as “the soft guardrails of democracy.” The two “master norms,” in Ziblatt’s view, are mutual toleration, that is, the acceptance of “the basic legitimacy of our opponents,” and institutional forbearance — the responsible exercise of power by those in office.

Both his detractors and his supporters recognize that Trump has flouted countless rules — and revels in doing so. On Monday, Senator John McCain, awarded the Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, challenged Trump on this score:

To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain “the last best hope of earth” for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

Mounk and Ziblatt, writing for Vox in March of 2016, made the case that “Trump isn’t a fascist; he’s a demagogue.” Their conclusion, however, was that Trump’s demagoguery does not make him any “less dangerous.” Instead, Trump and politicians like him are “a profound threat to the survival of democratic politics.”

Politicians in the Trump mold

wreck the informal rules of civility that democracies require to survive. Once voters are activated along violent lines and fervently believe the myths propagated by the demagogue, the dam is broken; the ordinary rules of democratic politics no longer apply, and there is no telling what might come next.

Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale and the author of “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth” (and also a contributor to these pages) was a participant at the conference in New Haven. He introduces his most recent book, “On Tyranny,” this way:

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.

Writing in 2012, well before the advent of Trump, three economists, Luigi Guiso, Helios Herrera and Massimo Morelli, argued that the populist political tradition itself is based first on “promises of redistribution to the masses” and second on “concealment of government budget constraints from the voters.” Promising redistribution to the masses and concealing government budget constraints was the essence of Trump’s campaign strategy, as he promised to build a multibillion dollar wall “which Mexico will pay for”; to repeal Obamacare and replace it with “health care which will expand choice, increase access, lower costs & provide better care”; to preserve Medicare; and to enact a gigantic tax cut for the middle class. So far, Trump has failed to fulfill any of these promises, boxed in by the reality of “government budget constraints.”

Paul Waldman, writing in The Washington Post on Oct, 17, summed up Trump’s approach to veracity and to reality itself:

Trump takes his own particular combination of ignorance, bluster and malice, and sets it off like a nuclear bomb of misinformation. The fallout spreads throughout the country, and no volume of corrections and fact checks can stop it. It wasn’t even part of a thought-out strategy, just a loathsome impulse that found its way out of the president’s mouth to spread far and wide.

Trump’s recklessness is disturbing enough on its own. But what makes it especially threatening is that much of the public — well beyond the 40 percent of the electorate that has shown itself to be unshakable in its devotion to the president — seems to be slowly accommodating itself to its daily dose of the Trump reality show, accepting the rhetorical violence that Trump inflicts on basic standards of truth as the new normal.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter, @Edsall.

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