Tag Archives: Steven Levitsky

2020 General Election, Democracy, Donald Trump, Republicans

Grand old Party sees only traditional American politics as usual in Trump’s lies and rampages

President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Saturday morning to urge him to persuade the state legislature to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state and asked the governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures, the latest brazen effort by the president to interfere in the 2020 election.

Hours before he is scheduled to hold a rally in Georgia on behalf of the state’s two GOP senators, Trump pressed Kemp to call a special session of the state legislature to get lawmakers to override the results and appoint electors that would back him, according to a person familiar with the conversation. He also asked the governor to demand an audit of signatures on mail ballots, something Kemp has previously noted he has no power to do. — Amy Gardner and Colby Itkowitz, “Trump calls Georgia governor to pressure him for help overturning Biden’s win in the state”

More than 2,900 Americans died of COVID-19 on December 3, one month after the election. The death toll has topped 2,600 every day this month, while the United States leads the world in overall fatalities at more than 285,000. The President of the United States — who predicted that the virus would “disappear” and asserted that it would no longer be featured in the media after November 3 — has demonstrated complete indifference to the raging pandemic since his defeat in the election. Instead he throws holiday parties in the White House.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die (written during the first year of the Trump administration) suggest, “Perhaps President Trump’s most notorious norm-breaking behavior has been lying.” Certainly the man has proven to be a prodigious liar; as of October 22 — reflecting the most recent update — Trump had told more than 22,247 whoppers since the inaugural.

Note also Donald Trump’s disregard for the welfare of the American people and refusal to serve the public interest — as we can plainly observe — which constitute among the most egregious violations of the governing norms that other presidents have adhered to. We have, before Trump, taken for granted that our presidents were committed to acting in our best interests.

This president is hell-bent on evading the decision of the electorate to remove him from office and put Joe Biden in the White House. His torrent of lies, attacks, and conspiracy tales in recent weeks have focused on discrediting the electoral process, denying the outcome, and — as in his phone call to Governor Kemp — to overturning the decision of the people.

This behavior is straight out of the authoritarian handbook. Trump lost the election. His off the rails conduct to fend off this fact does grave damage to democratic institutions, Americans’ trust in the integrity of our elections, and the nation’s standing in the world.

This would all be bad enough. The damage is compounded by the complicity of the Republican Party, whose leadership (with few exceptions) has made the decision to go along to get along with the Republican in the White House. Consider the 249 elected Republicans in the House and the Senate:

Just 27 congressional Republicans acknowledge Joe Biden’s win over President Trump a month after the former vice president’s clear victory of more than 7 million votes nationally and a convincing electoral-vote margin that exactly matched Trump’s 2016 tally.

Two Republicans consider Trump the winner despite all evidence showing otherwise. And another 220 GOP members of the House and Senate — about 88 percent of all Republicans serving in Congress — will simply not say who won the election.

Those are the findings of a Washington Post survey of all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate that began the morning after Trump posted a 46-minute video Wednesday evening in which he wrongly claimed he had defeated Biden and leveled wild and unsubstantiated allegations of “corrupt forces” who stole the outcome from the sitting president. — Paul Kane and Scott Clement, “Just 27 congressional Republicans acknowledge Biden’s win, Washington Post survey finds”

The lies, the disregard of the public good, the defiance of a free and fair election — these are the acts of a would-be authoritarian strongman, not a leader committed to democracy — no matter the wishes of the Republican base.

 As Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, it is political parties that sustain governing norms threatened by authoritarian incursions. Responsibility for opposing extremists, and upholding democratic institutions, falls on our political parties.

Potential demagogues exist in all democracies, and occasionally, one or more of them strike a public chord. But in some democracies, political leaders heed the warning signs and take steps to ensure that authoritarians remain on the fringes, far from the centers of power. When faced with the rise of extremists or demagogues, they make a concerted effort to isolate and defeat them. Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers.

The Republican Party has absolutely failed to safeguard democracy. After limited efforts at constraining Trump fell short, the GOP has chosen to remain loyal to an erratic, reckless leader. To do otherwise, as Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, would damage careers. So:

. . . Trump’s deviance has been tolerated by the Republican Party, which has helped make it acceptable to much of the Republican electorate. . . . There is no “containment” strategy for an endless stream of offensive tweets. Unwilling to pay the political price of breaking with their own president, Republicans find themselves with little alternative but to constantly redefine what is and isn’t tolerable.

Recall that this was written during Trump’s first year in office. By the end of 2020 — in a process accelerated following a near party-line vote to acquit an impeached president — the ongoing redefining required thrashing core democratic institutions, such as fealty to the results of free and fair elections; graceful, timely embrace of the peaceful transition of power; and (as outlandish as it appears today) doing what one could to ensure the success, for the benefit of the American people, of the incoming president. Instead, Trump is deliberately sabotaging his successor — through vindictive purges, frantic rulemaking, capricious national security actions, and — by doing nothing, except boxing Biden in – ensuring that both the raging pandemic and the faltering economy are far less manageable on January 20, than they are today.

All this — with the GOP’s silent blessing — has been redefined as American politics as usual. Citing Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s concept of defining deviance down, Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, “in the face of widespread deviance, we become overwhelmed—and then desensitized. We grow accustomed to what we previously thought to be scandalous.”

The Republican Party, in the wake of Donald Trump, sees no scandals among its partisans (though mean tweets from Neera Tanden may threaten her cabinet appointment).

(Image: Trump in Georgia via NBC News.)

Democracy, Off the Rails, Republicans

Is democracy alive and well in the U.S. and unthreatened by a “bugnut insane” GOP?

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.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Off the Rails, Republicans

An increasingly authoritarian GOP has a plan to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump

President Donald Trump on the November 2020 election:

● “The only way we’re gonna lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that. The only way we’re gonna lose this election. So we have to be very careful.”

● “So this is a disaster waiting to happen. The only hope we have, really, other than going through a long unbelievable litigation at the end after it’s over, is we’re gonna win. We’re not going to lose this except if they cheat. That’s the way I look at it.

We can’t let ’em cheat. We can’t let ’em. . . .Our country is at stake . . . Our country is at stake, because these people will destroy our country. We can’t let this happen. And this is a scam. They know it, the media knows it, but the media doesn’t wanna cover it. They know exactly what’s going to happen and so do I. But the Democrats know better than all of us what’s gonna happen.”

● “We’re gonna have a victory on November 3rd the likes of which you’ve never seen. Now we’re counting on the federal court system to make it so we can actually have an evening where we know who wins, okay? Not where the votes are gonna be counted a week later, or two weeks later. . . .”

[Q: Win, lose, or draw in this election, will you commit here today for a peaceful transferal of power after the election?]

● “Well, we’ll have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster. . . .

We wanna have — get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very trans — you’ll have a very peaceful — There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation. The ballots out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”

The relentless campaign to deny the integrity of the upcoming election is part of a larger Republican plan, set out in plain sight, to throw the election to Donald Trump.

In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe the informal rules or norms that serve as the guardrails of our democracy, forestalling a democratic breakdown  – and a Republican Party more than willing to plow through those guardrails to gain political advantage. As the authors explain, “political leaders, and especially political parties,” play the critical roles in preserving democracy. The GOP has shunned this role.

Nearly two decades after the ascendency of Newt Gingrich, after Bush v. Gore, and half a dozen years after publication of Mann and Ornstein’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, no political observer in 2018 (when How Democracies Die was published) could have been surprised by the indictment of the pre-Trump GOP, and not simply of the party since Trump’s takeover.

The book, which I read in early 2019, is a warning to small-d democrats. I regarded the warning as less urgent, and the threat as less imminent, on that first reading than I do now. I recognized then that the Republican Party continued to trash democratic norms and that Trump had pushed the GOP even further off the rails, but I believed that our institutions would protect us. We were safe from the worst. We would vote Trump out of office, just as we had rejected the Republican majority in the House in November 2018.

But the Republican Party has become increasingly extreme with each year of the Trump presidency. So, the passages that I regarded as perceptive observations have become alarming portents. As our country loses prestige and influence abroad, and as the chaos at home betrays our image as the world’s greatest democracy, our democratic institutions appear less robust than they did even a short time ago.

Shockingly, today the United States of America doesn’t seem a world away from Venezuela, Turkey, or Hungary (to cite a few of the countries discussed in How Democracies Die where people still cast ballots, but authoritarians rule). The threat of a free and fair election — offering a judgment on Donald Trump’s presidency — being subverted so Trump can stay in office regardless of the will of American voters is right upon us, here and now in 2020.

Recognition of this impending threat has come in stages.

On August 19, election-law expert Richard Hasen wrote about the broad Republican strategy:

The threat to the 2020 election’s legitimacy finally broke through into everyday conversation last week. People who pay little attention to politics started talking about whether President Trump was looking to mess with the United States Postal Service to slow down the receipt of mail-in ballots.

After reports from NPR and the Washington Post (on August 22 and 23, respectively) that upwards of 500,000 mail-in ballots had been disqualified in the Wisconsin primary jolted me, on August 24 I posted, “Democrats desperately need a Plan B.” If a half million votes could be lost in a single primary, maximal Republican interference in multiple states in a general election could be much more consequential. The GOP is preparing to pull out all the stops to prevent votes from being counted (the successful strategy in Florida in 2000), so Trump doesn’t face a reckoning.

By September 10, when Ronald Brownstein wrote the essay, “Democrats Won’t Cede the Streets This Time,” the previously fantastical idea (an authoritarian leader subverting a free and fair election in the U.S.A.) was widely anticipated. Not only did Democrats expect Trump to try to steal the election, they expected Republicans to employ shock troops (as they had in the well-orchestrated Brooks Brothers’ riot of 2000) to intimidate officials responsible for tabulating votes.

Hasen’s assessment now is that the Republican Party’s plan — to muck up the works and then, when bedlam breaks out, disregard the voters and declare Trump the winner — is “a five-alarm fire” that threatens democratic rule:

With less than six weeks to go before Election Day, and with over 250 COVID-related election lawsuits filed across 45 states, the litigation strategy of the Trump campaign and its allies has become clear: try to block the expansion of mail-in balloting whenever possible and, in a few key states, create enough chaos in the system and legal and political uncertainty in the results that the Supreme Court, Congress, or Republican legislatures can throw the election to Trump if the outcome is at all close or in doubt. It’s a Hail Mary, but in a close enough election, we cannot count the possibility out. I’ve never been more worried about American democracy than I am right now.

I initially shrugged off Trump’s attacks on the credibility of the election because he had done the same thing in 2016 — even after winning (when he claimed that 3 to 5 million illegal votes had been cast, unfairly depriving him of a popular vote victory). I regarded the continuing crusade as just blather and bluster. (And it would be were it not for the complicity of the Republican Party and its leadership.)

I shrugged off Trump’s tweets about postponing the November 3 election, which I took as evidence of his insecurity (after consistently trailing Joe Biden in public polling for more than a year) and his ignorance (of the structure of our governing institutions). Moving the date of the election was not a viable possibility — and so not the way to steal an election.

I never regarded as likely the suggestion that Trump would lose the election, but refuse to budge from the White House.  That’s not where the threat lies, as Barton Gellman explains:

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

The linchpin: “if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them.” Trump is Trump. He sends signals. It is his Republican allies — in Congress, on Fox News Channel, in a handful of legislatures and statehouses across the country, and at the Supreme Court — that could pull off the heist.

The Republican Party has moved unwaveringly toward a fulsome embrace of Trump’s authoritarian impulses. At every fork in the road — whether to enable Trump’s authoritarian incursions or to take a principled stand to defend democratic institutions — Republicans in the House and the Senate have chosen the former.

Consider 2020; that is, just the past nine months:

Apart from Mitt Romney (who acknowledges that he has no followers in today’s GOP), Republicans in both the House and the Senate were unanimous in refusing to hold Donald Trump accountable for his shakedown of Ukraine’s President Zelensky. This was a choice. The rejection of principle, in favor of raw political power, with the recent Supreme Court vacancy was a choice. The loudest voices among Washington Republicans have reinforced Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the election; other Republicans remain silent (implicitly standing behind Trump). Everyone — the vocal and the mute — has made a choice. Finally, the namby-pamby statements after Trump’s rejection of the principle of a peaceful transition represent a choice. (Not that a more definitive rejection from today’s Republicans, while still weeks away from the election, would count for much.)

The Republican Party has rejected Congressional oversight, Constitutional checks and balances, the rule of law, the sanctity of the vote and of democratic elections, conservative principles and policy commitments, and much else where this president is concerned. The party has collectively made choice after choice to go all-in with Trump wherever he has led.

In my August 24 post, I raised this question:

But — stop and consider for just a moment all that we’ve witnessed over the past three and a half years — are there any grounds to believe that, say, Mitch McConnell would object to a transparent theft of the election if he thought that he could get away with it?

Consider all of Trump’s enablers. Isn’t the same cynical calculation in play for each of them? If Fox News Channel and the rest of the conservative media universe were on board, nearly half the country would be convinced, if Trump claimed a victory, that Trump had won (or that McConnell had held his majority).

I would not have thought to write those paragraphs at the beginning of the year, much less in early 2019, after first reading How Democracies Die. Even understanding that the GOP was an insurgent outlier, which employed voter suppression as a primary electoral strategy, I would have regarded this contingency as a bridge too far. But here we are.

I’ve written more than once about the go-to play in the Republican Party’s game plan, which Steve Bannon described as “to flood the zone with shit.” Republicans in Washington and state capitals, on FNC and talk radio, in social media and on the streets are always prepared to flood the zone with shit. Lies, conspiracy theories, denials, misdirection, and ceaseless vilification: that’s the route to creating chaos. Republicans are amply prepared to follow their authoritarian leader if, when push to comes to shove, they think they can get away with it.

Near the beginning of Donald Trump’s term, Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote:

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share . . . . An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

Once a would-be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them? Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and renewing the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.

Thus far, choice by choice, the Republican Party has failed both critical tests.

The authoritarian threat — as the country’s November election approaches — is nearer, more imminent than I had imagined just months ago. Killing democratic rule is not just an exotic foreign affair, it’s something that could happen here. The contemporary Republican Party has a plan for stealing the 2020 American election — if only a viable opportunity presents itself. It is up to democrats (and Democrats) to make sure that tabulated ballots, not chaos and chicanery triumph.

(Image: The Hill.)

2020 General Election, Democracy

For Democrats there is only one thing that matters politically now

I. Does Joe Biden take office on January 20 with a united Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate?

I’m not a political strategist or a pollster. I don’t know how the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the machinations of Mitch McConnell, the calculations of Republican Senators, or whatever Joe Biden and Democrats do or say will affect the outcome of the November 3 election.

But whether or not McConnell succeeds in seating a Trump nominee between now and January isn’t as significant as what happens after January 20.

If McConnell’s gambit fails (and a Trump nominee isn’t confirmed), if Joe Biden is elected and takes office, and if Chuck Schumer becomes the majority leader, then Joe Biden will name the justice to replace Ginsburg. If McConnell corrals Republicans to confirm Trump’s nominee, if Joe Biden is elected and takes office, and if Chuck Schumer becomes majority leader, Democrats will be in a position to increase the size of the Supreme Court to 13.

What’s constant: Biden must win and Democrats must control the U.S. Senate. This is a high stakes election. Nothing has changed with the passing of an extraordinary woman with a monumental legal legacy.

II. A separate point: There is a downside to increasing the size of the Supreme Court.

The move would hardly be unprecedented, nor would it be unjustified, as Edwin Chemerinsky notes:

One way for Democrats to make clear they will not tolerate Republicans trying to fill this seat in advance of the election would be for them to pledge that, if they take the White House and Senate in November, they will increase the size of the Supreme Court to 13 justices.

The number of justices on the court is set by federal law, not the Constitution. Since its beginnings, it has ranged from having between five and 10 members. Since the 1860s, it has remained at nine.

When President Franklin Roosevelt suggested expanding the Supreme Court in the 1930s to overcome court hostility to the New Deal, he was repudiated for trying to pack the court. But the current situation is different. This would be a response to chicanery by Republicans.

What happened with Garland’s nomination was unprecedented, and Democrats rightly believe it was a stolen seat. After Scalia’s death in February 2016, President Obama moved quickly, nominating Garland the next month.

But such a move would pose a risk to democratic governance, as we learn in Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s book, How Democracies Die. They warn (in Chapter 9) regarding a familiar Democratic activists’ refrain:

In our view, the idea that Democrats “fight like Republicans” is misguided. First of all, evidence from other countries suggests that such a strategy often plays directly into the hands of authoritarians. . . .

And (to cite their admonition regarding impeachment to make a more general point):

Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic—for they would inherit a democracy stripped of its remaining protective guardrails.

I get it. But in 2020, two years after publication of How Democracies Die, it’s past time to escalate the fight. Trump and the Republican party have trashed way too many guardrails to overlook. And as Trump has become more aggressively authoritarian, we have learned that for Washington Republicans no outrage is too great to accept. Their only calculation is purest power politics with no allegiance to democratic norms or values. The only reasonable option for Democrats (and democrats) is to push back within Constitutional restraints — even if it’s necessary to make basic changes, where there was formerly bipartisan agreement (such as the size of the Supreme Court or the number of states in the union).

Josh Marshall acknowledges the risk, but comes down on the right side of the issue (by my lights):

We are here because of the Republican party’s increasing unwillingness to accept limits on political action. To up the ante on that tendency, to meet it, is itself a grave threat to democratic governance. But an even graver threat is to remove any mechanism of consequences or accountability. Then there is truly no limit or disincentive to corruption, law breaking and bad action. That reality is precisely the one in which we currently find ourselves.