Writing in Foreign Affairs just before the 2020 election, two political scientists referenced five historical crises of American democracy: the late 1790s (a mere decade after the Revolution), the lead-up to the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These were episodes when authoritarian impulses threatened democratic principles and, at times, when democratic backsliding occurred.
Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman wrote:
These crises of democracy did not occur randomly. Rather, they developed in the presence of one or more of four specific threats: political polarization, conflict over who belongs in the political community, high and growing economic inequality, and excessive executive power. When those conditions are absent, democracy tends to flourish. When one or more of them are present, democracy is prone to decay.
Today, for the first time in its history, the United States faces all four threats at the same time.
I found the authors' analysis, including the four specific threats, to be helpful in understanding the crisis of our democratic institutions. Anyone familiar with 21st century American politics will recognize the four threats.
▪ Political polarization – and negative polarization make the give and take of everyday politics excruciatingly difficult, especially since our group identities and tribal loyalties have become more closely aligned with our partisan differences. As John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck describe recent developments:
Racial and ethnic minorities were shifting to the Democratic Party and voting for its candidates. Meanwhile, whites’ attitudes toward racial, ethnic, and religious minorities were becoming more aligned with their partisanship. People who expressed favorable attitudes toward blacks, immigrants, and Muslims were increasingly in the Democratic Party. People who expressed less favorable attitudes toward these groups were increasingly in the Republican Party.
What we are fighting over in American politics is group identity and status—fights that express themselves in debates over policy and power but cannot be truly reconciled by either. Health policy is positive-sum, but identity conflict is zero-sum.
▪ Conflict over who belongs. Which groups may legitimately participate in democratic governance? Who has the right to a voice in the public sphere? As suggested by the quotations above, attitudes regarding race, ethnicity, and religion are central to our political divisions.
We see these divisions play out in the inability of Congress to enact immigration reform and in raging controversies regarding the border. We see it as well in the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and in legislation across the country in Republican-controlled states to make voting more difficult and even to make it easier for state legislatures to overturn elections. Republican complaints about “rigged elections” often turn on their conviction that only real Americans, not Democratic constituencies, should cast ballots.
▪ Economic inequality. An economic chasm – which continues to grow wider – separates the richest among us from everyone else. This disparity undermines social and political equality.
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” (First attributed to Louis D. Brandeis by Edward Keating on October 14, 1941.)
Outsized political clout – including access to decision-makers – is among the resources the rich possess in abundance. The Supreme Court has opened the door to unlimited dark money campaign spending. Furthermore, congressmen who do the bidding of the rich may expect to have cushy, lucrative opportunities after Congress. That counts for something. The Republican tax cuts, the foremost legislative accomplishment during Trump’s four years in the White House, were hardly driven by populist politics. Too often public policies fail to address the concerns of the majority.
Wealth inequality leads to stagnant mobility, inequality of educational opportunities and of career prospects, all of which stifle economic growth. As social segregation becomes more pronounced, the poor are relegated to unsafe neighborhoods, with increased risks to health and higher mortality rates. None of this is good for democracy.
▪ Excessive executive power that resists constitutional limits. Attention to the Imperial Presidency is hardly new, but neither has the problem diminished in recent decades. We have seen executive overreach in administrations of both parties. We might cheer the executive actions of the presidents of our party, but that doesn’t lessen the threat to democracy. During the Trump years – which brought us epic norm-busting, legal violations, and open contempt for the rule of law – things veered off the rails.
The link to Mettler and Lieberman's piece is found in Thomas B. Edsall's recent review, the title of which dramatizes the stakes, "Trump Poses a Test Democracy Is Failing." Other authors cited by Edsall provide observations that are hardly more sanguine.