How did America get so vulnerable to dictatorship?

Plus, a rare opportunity to reform national emergencies

BEN RADERSTORF

We were supposed to be so invulnerable. The oldest and wealthiest of democracies with an almost dogmatic tradition of constitutionalism and a mythos of great leaders deferential to the consent of the governed. Resistance to tyranny, we were all taught, is just part of who we are.?

And yet we’re staring down the possibility of an openly authoritarian leader. Could we really lose our democracy to a strongman? How did it come to this??

This week, the British magazine The Economist devotes its cover story to this question — with the clear-eyed perspective that comes easier across an ocean. (It’s behind a paywall, but it’s worth creating a free account to read it in full.)?

The short answer:?

[I]f Americans believe that their constitution alone can safeguard the republic from a Caesar on the Potomac, then they are too sanguine. Preserving democracy depends today, as it always has, on the courage and convictions of countless people all across America—especially those charged with writing and upholding its laws.

But while democracy has never been guaranteed — the words on paper are only meaningful because we all agree to follow them — recent trends have opened the door to an unchecked presidential despotism that the founders could never have imagined.?

So, no, it’s not just vibes. Democracy today is more vulnerable today than in decades past.?

The three cracks in the firewall against autocracy

Democratic decline defies simple explanations. Our current crisis stems from everything from globalization, the atomization of modern social life, and backlash to demographic change to the fracturing of a shared fact-based reality and an electoral system that advantages authoritarian politics.

But for the narrow question — how could an American Caesar hope to succeed? — there are three key trends:?

One, polarization has eroded checks & balances. As The Economist writes, “[t]he Founding Fathers did not anticipate the rise of partisanship.”?

That means checks and balances — like impeachment — that were designed around branches of government competing with each other for power don’t work as well when the main competition is political parties jockeying across the branches. (Note: the rise of parties is not actually a bad thing. Political scientists pretty much universally agree they’re inevitable and critical for modern democracy — the flaw was not anticipating their inevitability.)

And this isn’t just partisans in Congress being unwilling to check a president of the same party. The increasingly partisan politics of some Supreme Court justices may explain the Court’s unwillingness to be an effective check, at least in cases where the president shares their ideological views.

Two, legislative dysfunction has increased the temptation to work around the system. In part because of that same polarization, the lawmaking process designed by the Constitution doesn’t work as well as it used to. Congress, simply put, has lost the ability to solve big problems.?

Read the full piece here >>