“Our country today stands at a crossroads,” Steven Levitsky told a crowd assembled for the Democracy Summit at Howard University. “America will either be a multiracial democracy in the 21st century, or it will not be a democracy.”
That Levitsky highlighted such a stark junction in a speech one week after the midterm elections is a clear sign that the Harvard professor and coauthor of How Democracies Die is not yet celebrating a democratic resurgence in the US.
After fretting over the US’ democratic backsliding for the better part of a decade, I am looking for reasons to be optimistic, if only in the brief interregnum between the midterms and the start of the House Benghazi hearings on US President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
Certainly the republic has a little more breathing room after the results of Nov. 8. Even as the Republican Party took a narrow majority in the US House of Representatives, swing-state voters blocked an array of cranks, demagogues and authoritarians from positions of political power. Defeated Republican candidates mostly conceded defeat, as candidates in democratic systems do.
The results led many to conclude that Republican extremism had extracted a high cost.
“We underperformed among independents and moderates because their impression of many of the people in our party and leadership roles is that they are involved in chaos, negativity, excessive attacks — and it frightened independent and moderate Republican voters,” US Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said.
For the foreseeable future, the hinge on which democracy swings in the US would remain the Republican Party. You can understand why an academic of democracy would be uncomfortable with that. Republicans put a demagogue in the White House in 2017 and then largely acquiesced when he incited a violent attempted overthrow of his democratically elected successor. Republicans followed by nominating hundreds of anti-democratic candidates and conspiracy theorists for political office in this month’s elections.
As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, wrote on Twitter, denying the results of an election is “a form of corruption. It is an entire party colluding in a deception, it is institutionalized lying of the type authoritarians specialize in.”
Former US president Donald Trump’s appeal to the beer-putsch crowd was never subtle, and Nazis, Klansmen, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and others rallied to his call. Yet a paradox of Trumpism is that his demagogic showmanship brought millions of alienated white people not into the streets, but into the electoral system. Trump won almost 63 million votes in 2016. He won more than 74 million in 2020. Millions of new voters exercised their democratic rights to support an end to democracy.
Is it possible that, now that they are inside the democratic tent of voters, these and other Trump supporters could be coaxed into joining the democratic compact — even at the price of accepting the multiracial democracy that they fear? If Republican elites can reaffirm their own commitment to democracy, could they not also help channel the anger of Trump supporters in more constructive ways for both the party and the nation?
“Yes, I think that’s a possibility,” Levitsky wrote in an e-mailed response. “How real is hard to say. One alternative scenario is for those alienated whites to drift back out of politics post-Trump. Another, which I suspect is perhaps most likely in the near run, is that the combination of (1) those alienated whites inside the GOP [Republican] tent and (2) primaries will mean that Republican politicians will continue to compete for MAGA [“Make America Great Again”] votes and thus continue to reproduce extremism.”
The radicalization of millions of MAGA voters is the loaded gun on the US table.
“They think we are sliding into some sort of woke socialist Armageddon,” Levitsky said. “Can they be talked down by responsible Republican elites? Yes. But it won’t be easy or immediate — and the temptation to appeal to their fears will remain, at least for a while.”
Elite response to Trump’s presidential campaign announcement was decidedly cold. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s influential propaganda enterprises appear to have turned, for the moment, against Trump. While few Republicans dared to criticize the former president, even fewer flocked to Mar-a-Lago to flatter him.
Yet there is no reason to believe that Republican elites eager to be through with Trump are necessarily eager to be through with the democratic assaults of Trumpism.
Democracy in the 21st century might depend on figuring out which incentives can induce Republican elites to rejoin the democratic team. The concept of “honor,” which US Representative Liz Cheney cited as a motivating factor in her opposition to Trumpism, clearly has limited appeal.
As a rare never-Trumper, Cheney was stripped of her Republican leadership position before suffering a landslide defeat in a party primary. Her replacement, US Representative Elise Stefanik, is devoid of honor, but holds her political ambitions intact.
Only Republican elites can enlist the MAGA base to commit to democracy. So the question is how to move elites to commit first. Corporations, many of which straddle ideological (and preferential policy) loyalties to Republicans and the marketing imperatives engendered by a multiracial, pro-democracy consumer base, are a potential source of leverage.
Consumer brands thus far have paid little or no price for supporting anti-democratic politics. Raising that price would simultaneously raise the price for a party that depends on corporate support.
The Trump-era development of a self-consciously pro-democracy constituency creates a foundation for influence in corporate America and beyond.
“The more optimistic story I would tell is that the rise of Trump has greatly increased awareness of the democratic limitations of the American system of government,” e-mailed Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College. “Progress seems somewhat less unlikely than it did a few years ago, especially at the state level. But the odds are still against major reforms and I fear things would have to get worse before they can get better.”
The US’ constitutional system cannot by itself protect democracy from an anti-democratic insurgency that equates multiracial rule with conservative white obsolescence. To repel the insurgency would require a vast pro-democracy constituency. Enlarging that constituency, especially among Republicans, is the vital task ahead.
Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US politics and policy. Previously, he was an editor for The Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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