How Democracies Die

  Something similar happened in Ecuador in the 1990s. President Abdalá Bucaram was a populist who rose to the presidency by attacking Ecuador’s political establishment. Nicknamed El Loco, or “The Crazy One,” Bucaram thrived on controversy, which tested the forbearance of his opponents. In his first months in office, he engaged in blatant nepotism, called former President Rodrigo Borja a “donkey,” and distributed subsidized milk named after himself. Though scandalous, these were almost certainly not impeachable offenses. Nevertheless, efforts to impeach Bucaram began within weeks of his inauguration. When it became clear that the opposition lacked the two-thirds vote required for impeachment, it found a dubious but constitutional alternative: Ecuador’s 1979 constitution allowed a simple legislative majority to remove the president on the grounds of “mental incapacity.” On February 6, 1997, congress did just that. In a clear violation of the spirit of the constitution, it voted to remove Bucaram without even debating whether he was, in fact, mentally impaired.

  The United States has also had its share of constitutional hardball. As we have noted, after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments formally established universal male suffrage, Democratic-controlled legislatures in the South came up with new means of denying African Americans the right to vote. Most of the new poll taxes and literacy tests were deemed to pass constitutional muster, but they were clearly designed to counter its spirit. As Alabama state legislator Anthony D. Sayre declared upon introducing such legislation, his bill would “eliminate the Negro from politics, and in a perfectly legal way.”

  —

  Mutual toleration and institutional forbearance are closely related. Sometimes they reinforce each other. Politicians are more likely to be forbearing when they accept one another as legitimate rivals, and politicians who do not view their rivals as subversive will be less tempted to resort to norm breaking to keep them out of power. Acts of forbearance—for example, a Republican-controlled Senate approving a Democratic president’s Supreme Court pick—will reinforce each party’s belief that the other side is tolerable, promoting a virtuous circle.

  But the opposite can also occur. The erosion of mutual toleration may motivate politicians to deploy their institutional powers as broadly as they can get away with. When parties view one another as mortal enemies, the stakes of political competition heighten dramatically. Losing ceases to be a routine and accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a full-blown catastrophe. When the perceived cost of losing is sufficiently high, politicians will be tempted to abandon forbearance. Acts of constitutional hardball may then in turn further undermine mutual toleration, reinforcing beliefs that our rivals pose a dangerous threat.

  The result is politics without guardrails—what political theorist Eric Nelson describes as a “cycle of escalating constitutional brinksmanship.” What does such politics look like? Nelson offers an example: the collapse of Charles I’s monarchy in England during the 1640s. A religious conflict between the Crown, the Church of England, and the Puritans in Parliament led to mutual accusations of heresy and treason and a breakdown of the norms that had sustained the English monarchy. England’s constitutional tradition endowed Parliament with the exclusive right to collect the taxes necessary to fund the government. But Parliament, which viewed Charles as dangerously close to the papacy, refused to fund the monarchy unless it met a set of far-reaching demands, including a virtual dismantling of the Church of England. Parliament maintained this position even after England was invaded by the Scots and desperately needed revenue for national defense. Charles responded to this norm violation with some of his own: He dissolved Parliament and ruled without it for eleven years. As Nelson observes, “At no point…did Charles claim the right to make law without parliament.” Rather, he “simply tried to make do without the passage of any new laws.” Eventually, the need for revenue drove Charles to circumvent Parliament’s monopoly on taxation, which left his outraged opposition even more unyielding when Parliament reopened in 1640. As Nelson concludes, “The spiral of legislative obstruction and royal overreaching continued until it could be resolved only by war.” The civil war that ensued dismantled the English monarchy and cost Charles his life.

  Some of history’s most tragic democratic breakdowns were preceded by the degrading of basic norms. One example can be found in Chile. Prior to the 1973 coup, Chile had been Latin America’s oldest and most successful democracy, sustained by vibrant democratic norms. Even though Chilean political parties ranged from a Marxist left to a reactionary right, a “culture of compromise” predominated throughout much of the twentieth century. As reporter Pamela Constable and Chilean political scientist Arturo Valenzuela put it:

  Chile’s strong, law-abiding traditions kept competition confined within certain rules and rituals, softening class hostility and ideological conflict. There was no argument, it was said, that could not be settled over a bottle of Chilean cabernet.

  Beginning in the 1960s, however, Chile’s culture of compromise was strained by Cold War polarization. Some on the left, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, began to dismiss the country’s tradition of political give and take as a bourgeois anachronism. Many on the right began to fear that if the leftist Popular Unity coalition gained power, it would turn Chile into another Cuba. By the 1970 presidential election, these tensions had reached extreme levels. Popular Unity candidate Salvador Allende faced what Radomiro Tomic, his Christian Democratic rival, described as a “gigantic campaign of hatred” in the media that “systematically foster[ed] fears” on the right.

  Allende won, and although he was committed to democracy, the prospect of his presidency generated panic among conservatives. The extreme rightist Fatherland and Freedom Party demanded that Allende be kept out of office by any means necessary, and the right-wing National Party, funded by the CIA, engaged in hardball tactics before he was even sworn in. Chile’s constitution stipulated that if no presidential candidate won at least 50 percent of the vote, the election would be decided by congress; Allende had won with only 36 percent. Although established norms dictated that congress elect the first-place candidate, no rule required such action. Abandoning forbearance, the National Party tried to persuade the centrist Christian Democrats to vote for its candidate, Jorge Alessandri, who had finished a close second. The Christian Democrats refused, but in exchange for their vote, they forced Allende to sign a constitutional Statute of Guarantees requiring the president to respect free elections and civil liberties such as press freedom. The demand was reasonable enough, but as Arturo Valenzuela observed, it “marked a breakdown in mutual understanding” between leaders “for whom a respect of the rules of the game had been implicit.”

  Allende’s presidency witnessed the continued erosion of democratic norms. Lacking a legislative majority, his government was unable to fully implement its socialist program. So Allende exploited his presidential powers, threatening to pass laws via national referendum if congress blocked them and using “legal loopholes” to advance his program at the margins of the legislature. The opposition responded in kind. In a speech delivered at a social gathering during the second month of Allende’s presidency, right-wing senator Raúl Morales mapped out what he called a strategy of “institutional checkmate.” Although the opposition lacked the two-thirds vote in the senate necessary to impeach Allende, a senate majority could remove ministers via a vote of censure. On the books since 1833, the censure vote was designed for use only in exceptional circumstances and had been seldom used before 1970. Now, however, it would be a weapon. In January 1972, the senate impeached Interior Minister José Tohá, a close Allende ally. Allende responded by reappointing Tohá to the cabinet as defense minister.

  Partisan hostility intensified over the course of Allende’s presidency. His leftist allies took to describing opponents as fascists and “enemies of the people,” while rightists described the government as totalitarian. The growing mutual intolerance undermined efforts by Allende and the Christian Democrats to negotiate any sort of
modus vivendi: Whereas Allende’s radical allies viewed such negotiations as “opening the door to fascism,” right-wing groups criticized Christian Democrats for not resisting the communist threat. To pass legislation, the government needed Christian Democratic support, but by early 1973 the Christian Democrats had decided, in the words of party leader Patricio Aylwin, to “not let Allende score a single goal.”

  Polarization can destroy democratic norms. When socioeconomic, racial, or religious differences give rise to extreme partisanship, in which societies sort themselves into political camps whose worldviews are not just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain. Some polarization is healthy—even necessary—for democracy. And indeed, the historical experience of democracies in Western Europe shows us that norms can be sustained even where parties are separated by considerable ideological differences. But when societies grow so deeply divided that parties become wedded to incompatible worldviews, and especially when their members are so socially segregated that they rarely interact, stable partisan rivalries eventually give way to perceptions of mutual threat. As mutual toleration disappears, politicians grow tempted to abandon forbearance and try to win at all costs. This may encourage the rise of antisystem groups that reject democracy’s rules altogether. When that happens, democracy is in trouble.

  Politics without guardrails killed Chilean democracy. Both the government and the opposition viewed the March 1973 midterm legislative elections as an opportunity to win the fight for good. Whereas Allende sought the congressional majority he needed to legally impose his socialist program, the opposition sought the two-thirds majority necessary for Allende’s “constitutional overthrow” via impeachment. But neither side achieved the majority it sought. Unable to permanently defeat each other and unwilling to compromise, Chilean parties threw their democracy into a death spiral. Hard-liners took over the Christian Democratic Party, vowing to employ any means necessary to block what ex-president Eduardo Frei described as Allende’s “attempt to implement totalitarianism in Chile.” And Allende’s desperate efforts to reestablish a dialogue with the opposition were undercut by his own allies, who called on him to reject “all dialogues with reactionary…parties” and instead dissolve congress. Allende refused, but he sought to placate his allies by pushing harder against his opponents. When judicial authorities blocked the expropriation of forty firms seized by striking workers, Allende responded with a constitutionally dubious “decree of insistence,” which in turn triggered opposition calls for his impeachment. One right-wing senator proclaimed on national television that Allende was now “an illegitimate head of state,” and in August 1973, the Chamber of Deputies passed a resolution declaring that the government was unconstitutional.

  Less than a month later, the military seized power. Chileans, who had long prided themselves on being South America’s most stable democracy, succumbed to dictatorship. The generals would rule Chile for the next seventeen years.

  6

  The Unwritten Rules of American Politics

  On March 4, 1933, as American families gathered around their radios during the darkest days of the Great Depression to listen to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, they heard his deliberate, thunderous voice declare, “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis: broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Roosevelt was invoking the most open-ended enumerated power the Constitution offered him as president—war powers—to confront a domestic crisis.

  Roosevelt concluded that even this wasn’t enough. In November 1936, he was reelected with 61 percent of the vote—the largest popular presidential mandate in American history. But he found his ambitious policy agenda straitjacketed by an unexpected source: the conservative (and, in his view, backward-looking) Supreme Court—a body composed entirely of men who had completed their legal educations in the nineteenth century. Never had the Supreme Court been as active in blocking legislation as it was in 1935 and 1936. The Court found large portions of the New Deal program unconstitutional, often on questionable grounds. Roosevelt’s agenda was hanging in the balance.

  So in February 1937, two weeks into his second term, Roosevelt unveiled a proposal to expand the size of the Supreme Court. The “court-packing scheme,” as his opponents called it, took advantage of a gap in the Constitution: Article III does not specify the number of Supreme Court justices. Roosevelt’s proposal would have allowed him to add a new justice to the Court for every member over seventy years of age, with a maximum court size of fifteen. Since six justices were seventy or older, Roosevelt would be able to name six judges immediately. The president’s motivation was, perhaps, understandable—he sought a more secure legal basis to achieve the goals of the New Deal. Had it passed, however, it would have set a dangerous precedent. The Court would have become hyperpoliticized, its membership, size, and selection rules open to constant manipulation, not unlike Argentina under Perón or Venezuela under Chávez. Had Roosevelt passed his judicial act, a key norm—that presidents should not undermine another coequal branch—would have been demolished.

  But the norm held. Roosevelt’s court-packing plan faced greater opposition than any other initiative undertaken during his presidency. It was opposed not only by Republicans but by the press, prominent lawyers and judges, and a surprisingly large number of fellow Democrats. Within months, the proposal was dead—killed by a Congress dominated by Roosevelt’s own party. Even amid a crisis as profound as the Great Depression, the system of checks and balances had worked.

  —

  The American republic was not born with strong democratic norms. In fact, its early years were a textbook case of politics without guardrails. As we have seen, norms of mutual toleration were at best embryonic in the 1780s and 1790s: Far from accepting one another as legitimate rivals, Federalists and Republicans initially suspected each other of treason.

  This climate of partisan hostility and distrust encouraged what we would today call constitutional hardball. In 1798, the Federalists passed the Sedition Act, which, though purportedly criminalizing false statements against the government, was so vague that it virtually criminalized criticism of the government. The act was used to target Republican Party newspapers and activists. In the 1800 election, which pitted President Adams, a Federalist, against Jefferson, the leader of the Republican opposition, each side aimed for a permanent victory—to put the other party out of business forever. Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton talked of finding a “legal and constitutional step” to block Jefferson’s ascent to the presidency, while Jefferson described the election as a last opportunity to save America from monarchy. Jefferson’s victory did not put an end to the intense partisan acrimony. The lame-duck Federalist Congress reduced the size of the Supreme Court from six to five to limit Jefferson’s influence over the Court. With its new majority, the Republican Congress repealed the move, and a few years later, it expanded the Court to seven to give Jefferson another appointment.

  It took several decades for this hard-edged quest for permanent victory to subside. The demands of everyday politics and the rise of a new generation of career politicians helped lower the stakes of competition. The post-Revolutionary generation grew accustomed to the idea that one sometimes wins and sometimes loses in politics—and that rivals need not be enemies. Typical of this new view was Martin Van Buren, a founder of the modern Democratic Party and later U.S. president. According to Richard Hofstadter, Van Buren

  typified the spirit of the amiable county courthouse lawyer translated to politics, the lawyer who may enjoy over a period of many years a series of animated courtroom duels with an antagonist, but who sustains outside the courtroom the mutual respect, often the genial friendship, of the co-professional.

  Although Van Buren had “many opponents” during his career, a biographer writes, he had “few enemies.” Whereas the founders had only grudgingl
y accepted partisan opposition, Van Buren’s generation took it for granted. The politics of total opposition had become the politics of mutual toleration.

  America’s nascent norms soon unraveled, however, over an issue the founders had tried to suppress: slavery. During the 1850s, an increasingly open conflict over slavery’s future polarized the country, investing politics with what one historian has called a new “emotional intensity.” To white southern planters and their Democratic allies, abolitionism—a cause associated with the new Republican Party—posed an existential threat. South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, one of slavery’s most influential defenders, described a postemancipation South in near-apocalyptic terms, in which former slaves would be

  raised above the whites…in the political and social scale. We would, in a word, change conditions with them—a degradation greater than has ever yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people, and one from which we could not escape…but by fleeing the homes of ourselves and ancestors, and by abandoning our country to our former slaves, to become the permanent abode of disorder, anarchy, poverty, misery and wretchedness.

  Polarization over slavery shattered America’s still-fragile norm of mutual toleration. Democratic representative Henry Shaw assailed Republicans as “traitors to the Constitution and the Union,” while Georgia senator Robert Toombs vowed to “never permit this federal government to pass into the traitorous hands of the Black Republican Party.” Antislavery politicians, for their part, accused proslavery politicians of “treason” and “sedition.”