National Post (National Edition)
Advice for America
FIGHT CLEAN, TOGETHER TO PRESERVE DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS
Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are experts on authoritarianism in Europe and Latin America. In their new book How Democracies Die, they argue that Donald Trump’s America also is headed toward democratic breakdown — unless both sides of the political divide can come together on common moral ground. This is part of a series of excerpts from books shortlisted for this year’s Lionel Gelber Prize, an award for exceptional writing on foreign affairs. The winner will be announced on Feb. 26.
When American democracy has worked, it has relied upon two norms that we often take for granted — mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance. Treating rivals as legitimate contenders for power and underutilizing one’s institutional prerogatives in the spirit of fair play are not written into the American Constitution.
Yet without them, our constitutional checks and balances will not operate as we expect them to.
This has important implications for how citizens oppose the Trump administration. In the wake of the 2016 election, many progressive opinion makers concluded that Democrats needed to “fight like Republicans.”
If Republicans were going to break the rules, the argument went, Democrats had no choice but to respond in kind. The GOP’s refusal to allow President Obama to fill a Supreme Court vacancy left Democrats feeling suckerpunched, particularly after Trump’s victory ensured that they would get away with it. Political scientist and writer David Faris typified the calls to “fight dirty”:
“The Democratic negotiating position on all issues ... should be very simple: You will give us Merrick Garland or you may go die in a fire. ... Not only that, but they should do what they should have done the day Antonin Scalia died: Make it clear that the next time the Democrats control the Senate while the Republican Party controls the presidency. ... there will be an extraordinarily high price to pay for what just transpired. The next Republican president facing divided government will get nothing. ... Zero confirmations. No judges, not even to the lowliest district court in the country. No Cabinet heads. No laws.”
Some Democrats even raised the specter of an early impeachment. Less than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters tweeted, “my greatest desire to lead @realDonaldTrump right into impeachment.” Impeachment talk picked up after FBI Director James Comey was fired, reinforced by Trump’s sliding popularity, which raised Democrats’ hopes of winning the House majority necessary to lead an impeachment process.
In our view, the idea that Democrats should “fight like Republicans” is misguided.
Evidence from other countries suggests that such a strategy often plays directly into the hands of authoritarians. Scorched-earth tactics often erode support for the opposition by scaring off moderates. And they unify progovernment forces, as even dissidents within the incumbent party close ranks in the face of an uncompro- mising opposition. When the opposition fights dirty, it provides the government with justification for cracking down.
This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. Although the first few years of Chávez’s presidency were democratic, opponents found his populist discourse terrifying. They tried to remove him preemptively — and by any means necessary. In April 2002, opposition leaders backed a military coup, which not only failed but destroyed their image as democrats. Undeterred, the opposition launched an indefinite general strike in December 2002, seeking to shut the country down until Chávez resigned. The strike lasted two months, costing Venezuela an estimated $4.5 billion and ultimately failing. Anti- Chávez forces then boycotted the 2005 legislative elections, but this did little more than allow the chavistas to gain total control over Congress. All three strategies had backfired. Not only did they fail to knock Chávez out, but they eroded the opposition’s public sup- port, allowed Chávez to tag his rivals as antidemocratic, and handed the government an excuse to purge the military, the police, and the courts, arrest or exile dissidents, and close independent media outlets. Weakened and discredited, the opposition could not stop the regime’s subsequent descent into authoritarianism.
Opposition strategies in Colombia under President Álvaro Uribe were more successful. Uribe, who was elected in 2002, launched a power grab not unlike Chávez’s: His administration attacked critics as subversive and terrorist, spied on opponents and journalists, tried to weaken the courts, and twice sought to modify the constitution to run for another term. In response, the Colombian opposition focused their efforts on the congress and the courts. This made it more difficult for Uribe to question his opponents’ democratic credentials or justify cracking down on them. In February 2010, the Constitutional Court struck down Uribe’s bid for a third term as unconstitutional, forcing him to step down after two terms. The lesson is this: Where institutional channels exist, opposition groups should use them.
Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, they would inherit a democracy stripped of its remaining protective guardrails. If the Trump administration were brought to its knees by obstructionism, or if President Trump were impeached without a strong bipartisan consensus, the effect would be to reinforce — and perhaps hasten — the dynamics of partisan antipathy and norm erosion that helped bring Trump to power to begin with.
As much as a third of the country would likely view Trump’s impeachment as the machinations of a vast leftwing conspiracy. American politics would be left dangerously unmoored.
This sort of escalation rarely ends well. If Democrats do not work to restore norms of mutual toleration and for- bearance, their next president will likely confront an opposition willing to use any means necessary to defeat them. And if partisan rifts deepen and our unwritten rules continue to fray, Americans could eventually elect a president who is even more dangerous than Trump.
Opposition to the Trump administration’s authoritarian behaviour should be muscular, but it should seek to preserve, rather than violate, democratic rules and norms. If Trump is defeated via democratic institutions, it will strengthen those institutions.
We should learn from our own history. Anti-Trump forces should build a broad prodemocratic coalition.
Contemporary coalition building is often a comingtogether of like- minded groups. Coalitions of the like-minded are important, but they are not enough to defend democracy. The most effective coalitions are those that bring together groups with dissimilar — even opposing — views on many issues. An effective coalition in defense of American democracy, then, would likely require that progressives forge alliances with business executives, religious ( and particularly white evangelical) leaders, and red- state Republicans. Business leaders may not be natural allies of Democratic activists, but they have good reasons to oppose an unstable and rulebreaking administration.
Building coalitions that extend beyond our natural allies is difficult. It requires a willingness to set aside, for the moment, issues we care deeply about. If progressives make positions on issues such as abortion rights a “litmus test” for coalition membership, the chances for building a coalition that includes evangelicals and Republican business executives will be nil. This does not mean abandoning the causes that matter to us. It means temporarily overlooking disagreements in order to find common moral ground.
A broad opposition coalition would have important benefits. For one, it would strengthen the defenders of democracy by appealing to a much wider sector of American society. Rather than confining anti-Trumpism to progressive blue-state circles, it would extend it to a wider range of America. Such broad involvement is critical to isolating and defeating authoritarian governments.
In addition, whereas a narrow (urban, secular, progressive) anti-Trump coalition would reinforce the current axes of partisan division, a broader coalition would crosscut these axes and maybe even help dampen them. A political movement that brings together — even if temporarily — Bernie Sanders supporters and business people, evangelicals and secular feminists, and smalltown Republicans and urban Black Lives Matter supporters, will open channels of communication across the vast chasm that has emerged between our country’s two main partisan camps.
We may disagree with our neighbours on abortion but agree with them on health care; we may dislike another neighbor’s views on immigration but agree with them on the need to raise the minimum wage.
Such alliances help us build and sustain norms of mutual toleration. When we agree with our political rivals at least some of the time, we are less likely to view them as mortal enemies.
AMERICANS COULD ELECT A PRESIDENT EVEN MORE DANGEROUS THAN TRUMP.