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b8a4c7e
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It was the Civil Rights Act, which Democratic president Lyndon Johnson embraced and 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater opposed, that would define the Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party of racial status quo.
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Steven Levitsky |
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94c86d2
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In his 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," historian Richard Hofstadter described the phenomenon of "status anxiety," which, he believed, is most likely to emerge when groups' social status, identity, and sense of belonging are perceived to be under existential threat."
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Steven Levitsky |
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884adc0
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Concerned about the court's history of striking down pro-labor legislation, Peron's allies in congress impeached three of the justices on the grounds of malfeasance (a fourth resigned before he could be impeached). Peron then appointed four loyalists, and the court never opposed him again.
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Steven Levitsky |
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50e072b
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When we agree with our political rivals at least some of the time, we are less likely to view them as mortal enemies.
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Steven Levitsky |
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8537559
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This perception may explain the rise of a discourse that distinguishes "real Americans" from those associated with liberals and the Democratic Party."
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Steven Levitsky |
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7f1f2f3
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Political leaders have two options in the face of extreme polarization. First, they can take society's divisions as a given but try to counteract them through elite-level cooperation and compromise. This is what Chilean politicians did. As we saw in Chapter 5, intense conflict between the Socialists and the Christian Democrats helped destroy Chilean democracy in 1973. A profound distrust between the two parties persisted for years afterward..
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Steven Levitsky |
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b51f191
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Donald Trump's first year in office followed a familiar script. Like Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chavez, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, America's new president began his tenure by launching blistering rhetorical attacks on his opponents.
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Steven Levitsky |
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d1edaff
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The Republican House members also moved ahead with impeachment without bipartisan support, which meant that President Clinton would almost certainly not be convicted by the Senate (he was acquitted there in February 1999).
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Steven Levitsky |
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cc9d839
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Challenges to President Obama's legitimacy, which had begun with fringe conservative authors, talk-radio personalities, TV talking heads, and bloggers, was soon embodied in a mass political movement: the Tea Party, which started to organize just weeks after President Obama's inauguration. Although the Tea Party framed its mission in terms of such traditional conservative ideas as limited government, low taxes, and resistance to health care ..
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Steven Levitsky |
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6c6f58a
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Seeking to diminish minority groups' influence in the party--and we cannot emphasize this strongly enough--is the wrong way to reduce polarization.
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Steven Levitsky |
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210676f
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One way of tackling our deepening partisan divide, then, would be to genuinely address the bread-and-butter concerns of long-neglected segments of the population--no matter their ethnicity.
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Steven Levitsky |
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961c280
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Social policies that benefit everyone--Social Security and Medicare are prime examples--could help diminish resentment, build bridges across large swaths of the American electorate, and lock into place social support for more durable policies to reduce income inequality--without providing the raw materials for racially motivated backlash. Comprehensive health insurance is a prominent example.
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Steven Levitsky |
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9ad7fdf
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To better understand how elected autocrats subtly undermine institutions, it's helpful to imagine a soccer game. To consolidate power, would-be authoritarians must capture the referees, sideline at least some of the other side's star players, and rewrite the rules of the game to lock in their advantage, in effect tilting the playing field against their opponents.
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Steven Levitsky |
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9d4b8aa
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In the darkest days of the Second World War, when America's very future was at risk, writer E. B. White was asked by the U.S. Federal Government's Writers' War Board to write a short response to the question "What is democracy?" His answer was unassuming but inspiring. He wrote: Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the "don't" in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through whic..
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Steven Levitsky |
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362444f
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Meanwhile, the Democrats grew divided between supporters of Johnson's foreign policy and those who had embraced Robert Kennedy's antiwar position. This split played out in a particularly disruptive manner at the Democratic convention in Chicago. With Kennedy tragically gone, the traditional party organization stepped into the breach. The party insiders who dominated on the convention floor favored Vice President Hubert Humphrey, but Humphre..
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Steven Levitsky |
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b6b958f
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The McGovern-Fraser Commission issued a set of recommendations that the two parties adopted before the 1972 election. What emerged was a system of binding presidential primaries. Beginning in 1972, the vast majority of the delegates to both the Democratic and Republican conventions would be elected in state-level primaries and caucuses. Delegates would be preselected by the candidates themselves to ensure their loyalty. This meant that for ..
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Steven Levitsky |
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4ea8a70
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The police can crack down on opposition protest while tolerating acts of violence by progovernment thugs
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Steven Levitsky |
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db63bbb
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Donald Trump, by contrast, has rarely exhibited forbearance in any context. The chances of a conflict occurring on his watch are also considerable. They would be for any president--the United States fought land wars or suffered major terrorist attacks under six of its last twelve elected presidents. But given President Trump's foreign policy ineptitude, the risks are especially high. We fear that if Trump were to confront a war or terrorist..
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Steven Levitsky |
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ab226d8
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Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the "don't" in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of..
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Steven Levitsky |
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1b0a84e
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Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic.
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Steven Levitsky |
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cf96478
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In an act without precedent in U.S. history, House Republicans had politicized the impeachment process, downgrading it, in the words of congressional experts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, to "just another weapon in the partisan wars."
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Steven Levitsky |
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144acfc
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this book has reminded us that American democracy is not as exceptional as we sometimes believe. There's nothing in our Constitution or our culture to immunize us against democratic breakdown. We have experienced political catastrophe before, when regional and partisan enmities so divided the nation that it collapsed into civil war. Our constitutional system recovered, and Republican and Democratic leaders developed new norms and practices ..
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Steven Levitsky |
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37af924
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There is a mounting perception that democracy is in retreat all over the world. Venezuela. Thailand. Turkey. Hungary. Poland.
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Steven Levitsky |
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107ae35
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The erosion of basic norms expanded the zone of acceptable political action. Several years before shots were fired at Fort Sumter, partisan violence pervaded Congress. Yale historian Joanne Freeman estimates that there were 125 incidents of violence--including stabbings, canings, and the pulling of pistols--on the floor of the U.S. House and Senate between 1830 and 1860.
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Steven Levitsky |
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9b95cbe
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The Civil War broke America's democracy. One-third of American states did not participate in the 1864 election; twenty-two of fifty Senate seats and more than a quarter of House seats were left vacant. President Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus and issued constitutionally dubious executive orders, though, of course, one notable executive order freed the slaves. And following the Union victory, much of the former Confederacy was plac..
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Steven Levitsky |
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fff0622
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Rebuilding democratic norms after a civil war is never easy, and America was no exception. The wounds of war healed slowly; Democrats and Republicans only grudgingly accepted one another as legitimate rival
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Steven Levitsky |
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c0c7c32
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It was not just time, however, that healed partisan wounds. Mutual toleration was established only after the issue of racial equality was removed from the political agenda.
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Steven Levitsky |
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c62cc4a
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America's democratic norms, then, were born in a context of exclusion. As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party was likely to view the other as an existential threat. The process of racial inclusion that began after World War II and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the United States..
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Steven Levitsky |
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472e64c
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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 ma..
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Steven Levitsky |
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1cab5b2
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Building on Linz's work, we have developed a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.
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Steven Levitsky |
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3e1e2c2
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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)"
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Steven Levitsky |
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7b4b3b9
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But the world had changed by 2016. Now, in a radical departure from historical precedent Senate Republicans denied the president's authority to nominate a new justice. It was an extraordinary instance of norm breaking.
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Steven Levitsky |
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6451239
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You're fighting a war. It is a war for power....This party does not need another generation of cautious, prudent, careful, bland, irrelevant quasi-leaders....What we really need are people who are willing to stand up in a slug-fest....What's the primary purpose of a political leader?...To build a majority.
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Steven Levitsky |
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3f5929e
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Backed by a small but growing group of loyalists, Gingrich launched an insurgency aimed at instilling a more combative approach in the party. Taking advantage of a new media technology, C-SPAN, Gingrich "used adjectives like rocks," deliberately employing over-the-top rhetoric. He described Congress as "corrupt" and "sick." He questioned his Democratic rivals' patriotism. He even compared them to Mussolini and accused them of trying to "des..
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Steven Levitsky |
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f546946
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In the early 1990s, Gingrich and his team distributed memos to Republican candidates instructing them to use certain negative words to describe Democrats, including pathetic, sick, bizarre, betray, antiflag, antifamily, and traitors. It was the beginning of a seismic shift in American politics.
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Steven Levitsky |
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ea2c5b3
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The apogee of 1990s constitutional hardball was the December 1998 House vote to impeach President Clinton. Only the second presidential impeachment in U.S. history, the move ran afoul of long-established norms. The investigation, beginning with the dead-end Whitewater inquiry and ultimately centering on President Clinton's testimony about an extramarital affair, never revealed anything approaching conventional standards for what constitute ..
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Steven Levitsky |
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582c9e1
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Although Gingrich was succeeded as Speaker by Dennis Hastert, the real power fell into the hands of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Nicknamed "the Hammer," DeLay shared Gingrich's partisan ruthlessness. He demonstrated this, in part, through the K Street Project, which packed lobbying firms with Republican operatives and instituted a pay-to-play system that rewarded lobbyists with legislation based on their support for GOP officeholders. R..
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Steven Levitsky |
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61285d1
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President Bush governed hard to the right, abandoning all pretense of bipartisanship on the counsel of his political advisor Karl Rove, who had concluded that the electorate was so polarized that Republicans could win by mobilizing their own base rather than seeking independent voters.
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Steven Levitsky |
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9f81816
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Norm breaking was also evident at the state level. Among the most notorious cases was the 2003 Texas redistricting plan.
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Steven Levitsky |
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ab27205
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The Electoral College, made up of locally prominent men in each state, would thus be responsible for choosing the president. Under this arrangement, Hamilton reasoned, "the office of president will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications." Men with "talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity" would be filtered out. The Electoral College thus became our orig..
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Steven Levitsky |
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e126bb0
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President Trump also tried to punish or purge agencies that acted with independence.
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Steven Levitsky |
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7e7c859
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President Trump also attacked judges who ruled against him.
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Steven Levitsky |
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bb48ddc
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Knowing how citizens in other democracies have successfully resisted elected autocrats, or why they tragically failed to do so, is essential to those seeking to defend American democracy today.
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Steven Levitsky |
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6ee3649
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As constitutional scholar Martin Redish put it, "If the president can immunize his agents in this manner, the courts will effectively lose any meaningful authority to protect constitutional rights against invasion by the executive branch."
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Steven Levitsky |