Kevin Drum — indispensable blogger, over many years my favorite (though not someone whom I am “in basic agreement with on nearly everything,” nor do we think “the same way,” as he characterizes himself relative to Ezra Klein) — takes issue with a recent Klein observation that democracy in the United States is at great risk (and that the Supreme Court is central to that risk). Klein writes (in a passage that Drum quotes):
If Democrats win back power this November, they will be faced with a choice: Leave the existing Supreme Court intact and watch their legislative agenda — and perhaps democracy itself — be gradually gutted by 5-4 and 6-3 judicial rulings, or use their power to reform the nation’s highest court over fierce opposition by the Republican Party.
. . . Supreme Court reform matters — for good or for ill — because democracy matters. In his recent book, The Great Democracy, Sitaraman makes an argument that’s come to sit at the core of my thinking, too: The fundamental fight in American politics right now is about whether we will become a true democracy. And not just a democracy in the thin, political definition we normally use — holding elections and ensuring access to the franchise. The fight is for a thicker form of a democracy, one that takes economic power seriously, that makes the construction of a certain kind of civic and political culture central to its aims.
Drum rejects the thesis that this is a time of special threat to democratic governance. He grants that the Republican Party has grown “more bugnut insane ever since the ascent of Newt Gingrich in the early 90s followed by the Mudochization of the news a few years later,” that right-wingers believe that “Democratic rule threatens to destroy America,” and that huge numbers of Republicans believe QAnon conspiracy tales. (So far, so good.)
He continues:
Wherever it comes from, it’s real. And it’s toxic. Needless to say, liberals aren’t trying to destroy America. But neither are conservatives, and our toxic partisan swamp just gets worse if liberals join conservatives in believing that the opposition party is ready to literally destroy the nation.
If Drum is right, the view that there is a grave threat to democracy posed by conservatives (or more precisely, by the Republican Party) is unfounded. I disagree. I believe Klein (and other small-d democrats, not simply liberals) have a much stronger case to make than Drum acknowledges.
In the passage Drum quotes, Klein presents no arguments for his conclusion, but other commentators have done so. Among the most comprehensive attempts to establish this threat is Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die. To oversimplify: The authors identify two norms essential for democratic governance — mutual toleration (accepting one’s political opponents as legitimate) and forbearance (showing restraint, rather than launching scorched-earth assaults); they argue at length, and with many contemporary and historical examples, that political parties and party leaders are key to preserving these norms, so that democracy stays strong; they observe that in recent years the Republican Party has repeatedly thrashed both these norms; and they conclude that, as a result of these violations (and other widely observed developments), American democratic institutions are under threat.
Perhaps because Drum doesn’t even allude to this argument, his scattershot objections fall flat. For instance: “Democrats controlled Congress for nearly 50 straight years after World War II and liberals didn’t think it was a threat to democracy.”
If Democratic majorities in Congress had been in place for decades, even though most voters had cast ballots for Republicans, then he might have a point. But that’s not what happened. Large majorities of Americans, district by district, cast votes for Democratic candidates. And that’s consistent with majority rule, hardly a violation of electoral or governing norms, and not a threat to democracy.
Several things have changed since the era of Democratic Congressional dominance: the parties aligned in ideological opposition to one another, with virtually no overlap; partisanship and negative polarization increased, while Americans came to adopt strong, thick identities on one side or the other of the divide; and one party – with a shrinking electoral base – veered off the rails.
The GOP has ceased to have confidence in its ability to attract voting majorities and has come to rely on gerrymandering (a much more devastatingly precise and effective tool than back in Governor Gerry’s Massachusetts), voter suppression (reminiscent of Jim Crow and equally shameful), and judicial intervention by hyperpartisan Republican judges and justices to forestall democratic accountability.
Party-line votes in the courts on issue after issue, including voting rights; legal arguments — in the courtroom, the classroom, and at think tanks — reminiscent of the Lochner Era; and the burgeoning successes of the conservative legal movement to win judicial rulings that dismantle Democratic legislation and administrative rules, all place the Supreme Court at the center of these democratic skirmishes (and provide context for Klein’s comments).
Republicans have resorted increasingly to constitutional hardball, delegitimizing their opponents and employing tactics hostile to principles and practices that nourish democracy, while Donald Trump — unique among his 44 predecessors — has run amuck. Far more disturbing than Trump’s behavior has been the response of Republican leaders in Washington and a number of state capitols: murmur objections (at most) to Trump’s tweets or comments, while doing whatever is necessary (when possible) to enable his transgressions, no matter what harm results.
In their account, Levitsky and Ziblatt identify troubling patterns of Republican behavior. Perhaps the story told in How Democracies Die is mistaken. Drum observes that “America has had gerrymandering, the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court since the beginning.” He comments that “the foundation of democracy is that the people mostly get what they want most of the time.” But neither rhetorical point, nor his other objections, undermine the argument that Levitsky, Ziblatt, and other democrats make.
Drum doesn’t grapple with the observations, historical review, and arguments that undergird the democrats’ fears, so he doesn’t show how they have gone wrong. The points he makes are often contentious or lack relevance or both. Drum’s off-point commentary suggests that he may have failed to grasp what Klein and other democratic critics have tried to articulate.
In a second post on the same topic, Drum begins with this:
It should be possible to view something as appalling without also insisting that it portends the end of democracy. There are lots of appalling things going on today, but this doesn’t mean that democracy is withering on the vine.
No one could disagree with that, including the small-d democrats who embrace the view that the behavior of the contemporary Republican Party and its leadership threaten democratic institutions.
Drum’s apparent lack of understanding also surfaces in another passage from the final paragraphs of his first post, as he reflects on an earlier time, and — in effect — offers a shout-out to Democratic leaders of the past. If they could best the Republicans, he suggests, without adding seats to the Supreme Court or admitting D.C. and Puerto Rico to the Union, then 21st century Democrats should be able to replicate these successes:
Old school liberal pols like Sam Rayburn or Tip O’Neill would laugh at present day progressives who complain that the system is rigged against them just because we’ve lost control of the Senate for a few years and now face a potentially hostile Supreme Court. In no uncertain terms they would tell us to stop whining and instead do the hard work of winning more votes in more places. The Senate is what it is and everyone knows it. The rules are simple and well known, so go out and say things that will appeal to enough people in enough places to win 51 senators. We don’t need a couple of new states or a packed Supreme Court or any of that. We need to convince the American public that our agenda is the right one, and just running up the vote in California won’t do it—and isn’t perhaps the most democratic approach anyway.
In principle, this is straightforward. Progressives can make better arguments and eventually get most of the American public on our side. Alternatively, we can moderate our agenda to win more votes. Or some combination of the two. That’s the democratic way to victory.
While I’m cheered by this celebration of Democrats taking it to the Republicans — I was a fan of Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy and Tom Perez’s every zip code strategy; I believe Elizabeth Warren’s bread and butter agenda is vital for American families, whether they be Democratic or Republican — it only glancingly addresses the threat that has galvanized small-d democrats.
By the time It’s Even Worse Than It Looks appeared, numerous scholars had begun to draw attention to the transformation of the Republican Party from earlier eras — including the Reagan years — into something twisted and threatening. In 2012, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein described the Gingrich and post-Gingrich era GOP in these words:
The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
This represented a mutation. Today’s Republican Party is not your father’s (or uncle’s) GOP. Not Sam Rayburn or Tip O’Neill’s opposition party. Absolutely not the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan. Yes, in previous eras, we had Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and paranoid activists in Kevin Drum’s Orange County. But they didn’t represent the leadership of the Republican Party. They were individuals on the party’s edge; they were outliers. The GOP itself was fit and healthy — and well within the mainstream: not an outlier and not a threat to democracy.
And things have gotten worse year by year. In an essay last month (in Ezra Klein’s Vox), “insurgent outlier” had become “authoritarian outlier.”
Although Drum has noticed that the GOP has become “more bugnut insane,” he hasn’t acknowledged the significance of the changes articulated by the small-d democrats. He still sees the same old political battlefield and the same old GOP (though nuttier). His approach insists, Nothing new here.
Drum has neglected a rigorously argued, well documented account that deserves to be taken seriously, as Ezra Klein does. In February 2018, when How Democracies Die came out, Klein wrote:
In most modern cases, “democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.” They rot from the inside, poisoned by leaders who “subvert the very process that brought them to power.” They are hollowed out, the trappings of democracy present long after the soul of the system is snuffed out.
…
Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.
Kevin Drum hasn’t touched on anything resembling deep structure. His appeals to Rayburn and O’Neill fail to acknowledge that the Republican Party — and its leadership — have fundamentally changed since the bygone eras of Rayburn and O’Neill.
To appreciate this transformation, consider Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan. They had a mutual respect for one another. O’Neill had watched the first challenger in nearly a half century — since FDR toppled Hoover — defeat a sitting president (with the exception of Carter’s victory over Ford, who had never before faced voters in a national election, not even as a candidate for vice president). Ronald Reagan (never mind the fanciful revisionism of pre-Trump Republicans) was an eminently pragmatic president (just as he had governed in California), willing to work with Democrats. He was the furthest thing from the Tea Partiers and Trump enablers — and from the unprincipled Mitch McConnell and his ilk.
It is not far-fetched to think that Reagan and O’Neill may have wished, since they worked together, for their counterpart to succeed — that they regarded this as far and away better than gridlock or dysfunction.
In the 1980s, Democrats and Republicans had competing agendas for governing. Both parties, on a par, put forward solutions to social problems for voters to assess. Republicans and Democrats campaigned, sought to turn out the vote, and abided by the results of elections. (Note that “. . . prior to the 2006 election, no state ever required a voter to produce a government-issued photo ID as a condition to voting.” That’s how recently Republican have cranked up their voter suppression strategy.)
When there was divided government — a Republican White House and a Democratic House of Representatives — the two sides came together to find common ground: that’s how they made progress, how they served the American public, how they regarded job number one.
Nancy Pelosi (as tough and savvy as Rayburn or O’Neill, by the way) would have worked well with Reagan (and with Republican majority leaders in the Senate, Howard Baker and Bob Dole). Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Chris Coons (two mainstream Democrats to help illustrate a point), neither of whom have recoiled at the idea of expanding the Supreme Court or admitting new states, are hardly shrinking from a fight with Republicans. Today’s Democratic leaders are made of the same stuff as those in the good old days.
What’s changed: Mitch McConnell (and the GOP caucuses in both the Senate and the House) often strategically opt for dysfunction, gridlock, and paralysis rather than cutting a deal, if they think they can shun accountability and win the next election — or the cycle or two after that. The Republican rejection of the two democratic norms — mutual toleration and forbearance — cripples the ability of the two sides to work together.
Donald Trump cheated contractors who worked for him. How many of those small business owners, after prolonged litigation and settlements for pennies on the dollar, would chose to work with him again?
Are Democrats in a position to trust the word and the enunciated principles of Mitch McConnell? Of Lindsey Graham? Or of any of the Republican Senators who follow their leader? How about Bill Barr or Brett Kavanaugh?
These folks aren’t backbenchers. They aren’t peripheral to the GOP. This is today’s Republican Party.
Newt Gingrich taught Republicans the words to vilify Democrats: sick, pathetic, traitors, radical … Republicans learned the lessons and Fox News Channel amplified the message. Now the insults (and lies — and they were always lies) are commonplace. That marked the end of mutual tolerance.
Gingrich, and the Republican leaders who followed, put an end to the second democratic norm as well: forbearance. McConnell’s Senate is the best current example of that. I won’t bother to list chapter and verse. There are examples aplenty. The federal bench, led by the Supreme Court, is well on its way to becoming the prime force to obliterate forbearance.
It’s a new day. If the Democratic and Republican parties embraced analogous, though competing goals, and recognized the same incentives in 2020 as they did from the ’50s through the ’80s, the present would be like the past (as Drum would have it).
But the Republican Party has figured out that they can generate dysfunctional government, so voters are frustrated and angry and gridlock reigns — and escape accountability (made possible because of negative polarization, opposing partisan identities, and FNC). They don’t have to try to make the system work. (Ronald Reagan, like Tip O’Neill, wanted the system to work.)
Republicans can erect barriers to voting, strive to disqualify votes cast, amplify their vilification of Democrats (and of Democratic constituencies — families who live in urban areas, people of color, immigrants from disfavored countries, and religious minorities) on cable television, radio, and the web, and still have a pretty good shot at reelection. And — best of all for the GOP — if they lose the Senate (as McConnell may do because of indifference to the toll from COVID and to economic havoc), he is confident that the GOP will win in another cycle or two, because there are only two parties to chose from. The pendulum will swing right again, especially since the GOP will do all it can to gum up the works when the Democrats seek to govern, to keep the anger and frustration amped up.
That wasn’t the Reagan agenda. Or the GOP’s. Not even close.
An off the rails Republican Party threatens democratic governance. Political scientists and other observers have made a strong case for this judgment. Kevin Drum’s appeals to previous eras of American politics, to past partisan skirmishes with wins and losses for each side, and to old school leadership fail to undermine this conclusion.
[Updated to correct misstatement: President Ford — who was appointed vice-president and took office after the president had resigned in disgrace — was defeated in 1976 while running for election for the first time.]
[Second update: In my first update, I tried to justify a contention in my initial post (expressed with a misstatement) that Reagan’s defeat of a sitting president was a singular political accomplishment. Jonathan Bernstein, with a better grasp of history than mine, noted subsequently that Carter was the only president in the 20th century “who was defeated in his party’s first term in the White House.” In my telling, the 1980 election revealed Reagan’s strength, while Bernstein points to Carter’s failure. In either case: Reagan’s victory suggested something rare in American politics, which Tip O’Neill was unlikely to overlook.]
(Image: The Spirit of ’76 from wikipedia.)
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