How Democracies Die, Page 6

  The nomination process was now wide open. While the rules of the game hardly guaranteed the rise of a Trump-like figure, they could no longer prevent it, either. It was like a game of Russian roulette: The chances of an extremist outsider capturing the presidential nomination were higher than ever before in history.

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  Although many factors contributed to Donald Trump’s stunning political success, his rise to the presidency is, in good measure, a story of ineffective gatekeeping. Party gatekeepers failed at three key junctures: the “invisible primary,” the primaries themselves, and the general election.

  Trump finished dead last in the invisible primary. When the actual primary season began on February 1, 2016, the day of the Iowa Caucus, he had no endorsements among Republican power brokers. Measured by the backing of governors, U.S. senators, and congressional representatives at the time of the Iowa Caucus, Jeb Bush won the invisible primary with 31 endorsements. Marco Rubio finished second with 27. Ted Cruz finished third with 18, followed by Rand Paul with 11. Chris Christie, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, and Carly Fiorina all won more endorsements than Trump. By all standard wisdom, then, Trump’s candidacy was a nonstarter. If history were any guide, his lead in the polls would inevitably fade.

  Trump’s performance in the first state contest, Iowa—24 percent, good for second place—did little to alter these expectations. After all, outsiders Pat Robertson (25 percent of the vote in 1988), Pat Buchanan (23 percent in 1996), and Steve Forbes (31 percent in 2000) had all finished second in Iowa but faded away soon thereafter.

  Then Trump did something no previous outsider had done: He easily won subsequent primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Still, he was shunned by the party establishment. On the day of the South Carolina primary, Trump did not yet have a single endorsement from a sitting Republican governor, senator, or congressperson. It was only after winning South Carolina that Trump gained his first supporters: congressional backbenchers Duncan Hunter (California) and Chris Collins (New York). Even as he proceeded to rout his Republican rivals at the polling stations, Trump never gained a substantial number of endorsements. When the primary season ended, he had forty-six—less than a third of Marco Rubio’s total and barely as many as the long-ended Bush campaign.

  By the time Trump rolled to victory in the March 1 Super Tuesday primaries, it was clear that he had laid waste to the invisible primary, rendering it irrelevant. Undoubtedly, Trump’s celebrity status played a role. But equally important was the changed media landscape. From early on in the campaign, Trump had the sympathy or support of right-wing media personalities such as Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, and Michael Savage, as well as the increasingly influential Breitbart News. Although Trump initially had a contentious relationship with Fox News, he reaped the benefits of its polarized media landscape.

  Trump also found new ways to use old media as a substitute for party endorsements and traditional campaign spending. A “candidate with qualities uniquely tailored to the digital age,” Trump attracted free mainstream coverage by creating controversy. By one estimate, the Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC—four outlets that no one could accuse of pro-Trump leanings—mentioned Trump twice as often as his general election rival, Hillary Clinton. According to another study, Trump enjoyed up to $2 billion in free media coverage during the primary season. As the undisputed frontrunner in free mainstream coverage and the favorite son of much of the alternative right-wing media network, Trump did not need traditional Republican power brokers. The gatekeepers of the invisible primary were not merely invisible; by 2016, they had left the building entirely.

  After Trump’s Super Tuesday victories, panic set in among the Republican establishment. Prominent insiders and conservative opinion leaders began to make the case against Trump. In March 2016, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a high-profile speech at the Hinckley Institute of Politics in which he described Trump as a danger to both the Republican Party and the country. Echoing Ronald Reagan’s 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech, Romney declared that Trump was a “fraud” who had “neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.” Other party elders, including 2008 presidential candidate John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham, warned against Trump. And leading conservative publications, including the National Review and the Weekly Standard, rejected Trump in blistering terms. But the #NeverTrump movement was always more talk than action. In reality, the primary system had left Republican leaders virtually weaponless to halt Trump’s rise. The barrage of attacks had little impact and possibly even backfired where it counted: the voting booth.

  Republican leaders’ toothlessness was on display at the July 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. In the lead-up to the convention, there was much talk of a deadlocked vote, of convincing committed delegates to cast their support to another candidate. In late June, a group called Delegates Unbound began to air national television advertisements telling Republican delegates that they were not, strictly speaking, legally bound to Trump and urging them to abandon him. Groups such as Free the Delegates, Courageous Conservatives, and Save Our Party led a campaign for the Republican National Committee’s 112-member Rules Panel to modify the rules binding delegates to candidates, freeing delegates to vote as they had before the 1972 reforms. All these efforts came to naught; they, indeed, never had a chance.

  The idea that the nomination could be wrested from Trump at the convention was pure wishful thinking. In the primary-based system we now have, votes confer a legitimacy that cannot easily be circumvented or ignored, and Donald Trump had the votes—nearly fourteen million of them. As Cindy Costa, a Republican National Committee member from South Carolina, put it, Trump “won it fair and square.” To hand the nomination to anyone else would have created “magnificent chaos.” Republican leaders were forced to face reality: They no longer held the keys to their party’s presidential nomination.

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  As the battleground shifted to the general election, it became clear that this was no ordinary race. Quite simply, Donald Trump was no ordinary candidate. Not only was he uniquely inexperienced—no U.S. president who was not a successful general had ever been elected without having held an elective office or a cabinet post—but his demagoguery, extremist views on immigrants and Muslims, willingness to violate basic norms of civility, and praise for Vladimir Putin and other dictators generated unease in much of the media and the political establishment. Had Republicans nominated a would-be dictator? It was impossible to know for certain. Many Republicans latched on to the saying that whereas Trump’s critics took him literally but not seriously, his supporters took him seriously but not literally. His campaign rhetoric, in this view, was “mere words.”

  There is always uncertainty over how a politician with no track record will behave in office, but as we noted earlier, antidemocratic leaders are often identifiable before they come to power. Trump, even before his inauguration, tested positive on all four measures on our litmus test for autocrats.

  The first sign is a weak commitment to the democratic rules of the game. Trump met this measure when he questioned the legitimacy of the electoral process and made the unprecedented suggestion that he might not accept the results of the 2016 election. Levels of voter fraud in the United States are very low, and because elections are administered by state and local governments, it is effectively impossible to coordinate national-level voting fraud. Yet throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump insisted that millions of illegal immigrants and dead people on the voting rolls would be mobilized to vote for Clinton. For months, his campaign website declared “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary from Rigging This Election!” In August, Trump told Sean Hannity, “We’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged….I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.” In October, he tweeted, “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day.” During the
final presidential debate, Trump refused to say he would accept the results of the election if he were defeated.

  According to historian Douglas Brinkley, no major presidential candidate had cast such doubt on the democratic system since 1860. Only in the run-up to the Civil War did we see major politicians “delegitimizing the federal government” in this way. As Brinkley put it, “That’s a secessionist, revolutionary motif. That’s someone trying to topple the apple cart entirely.” And Trump’s words mattered—a lot. A Politico/Morning Consult poll carried out in mid-October found that 41 percent of Americans, and 73 percent of Republicans, believed that the election could be stolen from Trump. In other words, three out of four Republicans were no longer certain that they were living under a democratic system with free elections.

  The second category in our litmus test is the denial of the legitimacy of one’s opponents. Authoritarian politicians cast their rivals as criminal, subversive, unpatriotic, or a threat to national security or the existing way of life. Trump met this criterion, as well. For one, he had been a “birther,” challenging the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency by suggesting that he was born in Kenya and that he was a Muslim, which many of his supporters equated with being “un-American.” During the 2016 campaign, Trump denied Hillary Clinton’s legitimacy as a rival by branding her a “criminal” and declaring repeatedly that she “has to go to jail.” At campaign rallies he applauded supporters who chanted “Lock her up!”

  The third criterion is toleration or encouragement of violence. Partisan violence is very often a precursor of democratic breakdown. Prominent examples include the Blackshirts in Italy, the Brownshirts in Germany, the emergence of leftist guerrillas in Uruguay, and the rise of right- and left-wing paramilitary groups in early-1960s Brazil. In the last century, no major-party presidential candidate has ever endorsed violence (George Wallace did in 1968, but he was a third-party candidate). Trump broke this pattern. During the campaign, Trump not only tolerated violence among his supporters but at times appeared to revel in it. In a radical break with established norms of civility, Trump embraced—and even encouraged—supporters who physically assaulted protesters. He offered to pay the legal fees of a supporter who sucker-punched and threatened to kill a protester at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. On other occasions, he responded to protesters at his rallies by inciting violence among his supporters. Here are a few examples, compiled by Vox.

  “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would ya? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you I will pay the legal fees. I promise.” (February 1, 2016, Iowa)

  “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. It’s true….I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.” (February 22, 2016, Nevada)

  “In the good old days, they’d rip him out of that seat so fast. But today, everybody’s politically correct. Our country’s going to hell with being politically correct.” (February 26, 2016, Oklahoma)

  “Get out of here. Get out. Out! This is amazing. So much fun. I love it. I love it. We having a good time? USA, USA, USA! All right, get him out. Try not to hurt him. If you do, I’ll defend you in court. Don’t worry about it….We had four guys, they jumped on him, they were swinging and swinging. The next day, we got killed in the press—that we were too rough. Give me a break. You know? Right? We don’t want to be too politically correct anymore. Right, folks?” (March 4, 2016, Michigan)

  “We had some people, some rough guys like we have right in here. And they started punching back. It was a beautiful thing. I mean, they started punching back. In the good old days, this doesn’t happen, because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, you know, they would not do it so easily again. But today, they walk in and they put their hand up and put the wrong finger in the air at everybody, and they get away with murder, because we’ve become weak.” (March 9, 2016, North Carolina)

  In August 2016, Trump issued a veiled endorsement of violence against Hillary Clinton, telling supporters at a Wilmington, North Carolina, rally that a Clinton appointee to the Supreme Court could result in the abolition of the right to bear arms. He went on to say, “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks….Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”

  The final warning sign is a readiness to curtail the civil liberties of rivals and critics. One thing that separates contemporary autocrats from democratic leaders is their intolerance of criticism, and their readiness to use their power to punish those—in the opposition, media, or civil society—who criticize them. Donald Trump displayed such a readiness in 2016. He said he planned to arrange for a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton after the election and declared that Clinton should be imprisoned. Trump also repeatedly threatened to punish unfriendly media. At a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, for example, he attacked Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, declaring, “If I become president, oh, do they have problems. They are going to have such problems.” Describing the media as “among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met,” Trump declared:

  I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money….So that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace—or when the Washington Post…writes a hit piece, we can sue them….

  With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century. As Table 2 shows, Donald Trump met them all. No other major presidential candidate in modern U.S. history, including Nixon, has demonstrated such a weak public commitment to constitutional rights and democratic norms. Trump was precisely the kind of figure that had haunted Hamilton and other founders when they created the American presidency.

  Table 2: Donald Trump and the Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior

  1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game

  Do they reject the Constitution or express a willingness to violate it?

  Do they suggest a need for antidemocratic measures, such as canceling elections, violating or suspending the Constitution, banning certain organizations, or restricting basic civil or political rights?

  Do they seek to use (or endorse the use of) extraconstitutional means to change the government, such as military coups, violent insurrections, or mass protests aimed at forcing a change in the government?

  Do they attempt to undermine the legitimacy of elections, for example, by refusing to accept credible electoral results?

  2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents

  Do they describe their rivals as subversive, or opposed to the existing constitutional order?

  Do they claim that their rivals constitute an existential threat, either to national security or to the prevailing way of life?

  Do they baselessly describe their partisan rivals as criminals, whose supposed violation of the law (or potential to do so) disqualifies them from full participation in the political arena?

  Do they baselessly suggest that their rivals are foreign agents, in that they are secretly working in alliance with (or the employ of) a foreign government—usually an enemy one?

  3. Toleration or encouragement of violence

  Do they have any ties to armed gangs, paramilitary forces, militias, guerrillas, or other organizations that engage in illicit violence?

  Have they or their partisan allies sponsored or encouraged mob attacks on opponents?

  Have they tacitly endorsed violence by their supporters by refusing to unambiguously condemn it and punish it?

  Have they praised (or refused to condemn) other significant acts of political violence, either in the past or elsewhere in the world?

  4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media

  Have
they supported laws or policies that restrict civil liberties, such as expanded libel or defamation laws or laws restricting protest, criticism of the government, or certain civic or political organizations?

  Have they threatened to take legal or other punitive action against critics in rival parties, civil society, or the media?

  Have they praised repressive measures taken by other governments, either in the past or elsewhere in the world?

  This all should have set off alarm bells. The primary process had failed in its gatekeeping role and allowed a man unfit for office to run as a mainstream party candidate. But how could Republicans respond at this stage? Recall the lessons of democratic breakdowns in Europe in the 1930s and South America in the 1960s and 1970s: When gatekeeping institutions fail, mainstream politicians must do everything possible to keep dangerous figures away from the centers of power.

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  Collective abdication—the transfer of authority to a leader who threatens democracy—usually flows from one of two sources. The first is the misguided belief that an authoritarian can be controlled or tamed. The second is what sociologist Ivan Ermakoff calls “ideological collusion,” in which the authoritarian’s agenda overlaps sufficiently with that of mainstream politicians that abdication is desirable, or at least preferable to the alternatives. But when faced with a would-be authoritarian, establishment politicians must unambiguously reject him or her and do everything possible to defend democratic institutions—even if that means temporarily joining forces with bitter rivals.