Is democracy in America really coming apart? Lucan Way on the challenges and sources of resiliency in the U.S. system.

Donald Trump and top Republican officials appear to have been serious about trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. There also appears to be a broader context for the threat to democracy this episode represents: Across the country, Republican-controlled state legislatures have been moving to take partisan control over local elections, whether by creating local election boards to inspect voting records or by threatening election officials with criminal punishment for counting irregular ballots. Last year, 17 Republican-controlled states passed laws restricting access to voting. For years, meanwhile, the Democratic and Republican parties have both been undermining competitive elections by drawing outlandishly shaped electoral districts designed solely to give themselves comfortable majorities. At the same time, Democratic and Republican voters have become more hostile toward one another—even more disinclined to live near or interact socially with one another. In recent years, measures of the quality of U.S. democracy have plunged to the point where the research institute Freedom House now ranks the United States below Mongolia. Where is all of this going?

Lucan Way is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the author of three books about authoritarianism. As Way sees it, U.S. democracy isn’t so much in decline as it is entering an age of sustained instability. Republicans’ increasing willingness to abandon democratic rules—in its most dangerous form, trying to subvert the outcome of an entire presidential election—is stressing the democratic capacity of the American system. But, Way says, the U.S. has sources of democratic strength that can keep it from falling into the ranks of authoritarian democracies like Hungary. What’s unclear even to Way, though, is how America can ultimately escape this era of sustained instability, given how much of it is grounded in Republican voters’ existential fears about the country and their place in it.

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Michael Bluhm: How do you understand the health of U.S. democracy these days?

Lucan Way: The biggest challenge to it right now comes from the fact that one of its two major parties has become functionally authoritarian. That puts the United States on the level of an unstable democracy. It puts regime structure fundamentally under question. This is the central node that connects to all the current problems in American democratic life. Twenty years ago, saying this about the United States of America would have seemed insane—but now it’s an inescapable reality.

Bluhm: You’re saying that the central problem is with one political party—but also that factors connect to that central problem. People talk about polarization between the parties, for example; or structural issues, such as the disproportionate power the U.S. Senate gives to small states; or procedures in the Senate that make it difficult for a majority to pass laws; or elitism in the Democratic Party; or material factors, like the influence of donor money or increasing income inequality. Which of them do you see as most important?

Way: It’s true, there are a lot of these factors, each of which partially explains why one of the two major U.S. parties is willing to do what it’s doing. They variously contribute to a developing fear among Republicans that they won’t be able to win a presidential election democratically. Now, it’s hard to talk about this without sounding very partisan in favor of the Democrats—but any party that felt it couldn’t win a free and fair election might have a similar response. It’s not that Republicans are immoral; it’s that they tend now to feel this growing threat to their survival as a party, and that’s part of what’s behind this move into authoritarian territory with their response to the 2020 election.

That wasn’t solely because of Trump. He pushed them over the line, but it fits with the general crisis that the Republican Party is facing. They’ve only won a popular majority in one of the last eight presidential elections. They could respond to this by broadening their electorate, but instead, they’ve made a commitment to this largely white, dominantly Christian electorate that feels a demographic threat from immigration.

This commitment turns everything in politics into an existential threat. It underlines the deep partisan polarization in the U.S. today. Juan Linz and other great scholars of democratic decline from the 1970s would say that if one side feels its whole way of life is under threat from a loss in an election, then democracy is really in trouble.

“We can’t compare the U.S. to a dictatorship like Russia, where elections are completely meaningless, or even to a place like Hungary, where elections are meaningful but there’s really no opposition to authoritarianism in the political system. The United States has core sources of strength in this regard that Russia or Hungary don’t have. First, one of its two major political parties remains committed to democratic norms and practices, and that party is both strong and cohesive: The Democratic Party is very well funded and no one thinks it’s in danger of splitting. Some centrist Democrats complain about their progressive wing, but overall, the party is united, which is a major functional check against authoritarian tendencies in the Republican Party—and which is something you don’t have in other unstable democracies. Second, American civil society is strong. News media that hold governing powers and politicians to account are well-established. There are all sorts of NGOs that monitor what’s going on, can mobilize popular support, and would be very difficult to shut down. Third, American federalism is strong. As bad as things might get, it is wholly implausible that one political party is going to dominate every state. You don’t have this kind of bulwark in democracies that are truly in decline.”

“To say that U.S. democracy is in decline would be a little misleading. It’s not entirely wrong, but there’s a limit to it. U.S. democracy is declining, yes, but it can only decline so far, because the resilience in the system is ultimately very powerful. Democracy in America is now unstable. Instability is the best word for the condition.”

“This is the context for Donald Trump. He’s not a strategic genius; he just came into the Republican Party with a political formula that could take some of its preexisting tendencies to a new level. Historically, many found it easy to believe that the Republican electorate just cared about cutting taxes. But a large segment really cared about identity politics. That allowed Trump to activate a still relatively latent impulse in the Republican Party to question free and fair elections that didn’t go their way; and it allowed him to activate a relatively latent racism in the Republican Party’s white, Christian base. Before Trump, Republican politicians thought that they could only approach racial issues with a ‘dog whistle,’ a notion that came from Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. The idea is that you evoke race in an indirect way that doesn’t alienate people who want to think of themselves as non-racist. In 1968, Nixon talked about crime and ‘law and order.’ In 1980, Ronald Reagan talked about ‘welfare queens.’ But Trump just came out with directly racist rhetoric, and it struck a vein.”