In an earlier article in the September 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs, “The Fragile Republic: American Democracy Has Never Faced So Many Threats All at Once,” Lieberman and Mettler argue that
for the first time in its history, the United States faces all four threats at the same time. It is this unprecedented confluence — more than the rise to power of any particular leader — that lies behind the contemporary crisis of American democracy. The threats have grown deeply entrenched, and they will likely persist and wreak havoc for some time to come.
Trump, Mettler and Lieberman argue,
has ruthlessly exploited these widening divisions to deflect attention from his administration’s poor response to the pandemic and to attack those he perceives as his personal or political enemies. Chaotic elections that have occurred during the pandemic, in Wisconsin and Georgia, for example, have underscored the heightened risk to U.S. democracy that the threats pose today. The situation is dire.
How much of a danger do Trump and his allies continue to represent? I asked Pepinsky how likely anti-democratic politicians are to use democratic elections to achieve their ends. He replied by email:
It is very possible — not sure how likely, but entirely possible. The G.O.P.’s rhetoric is clear about what it believes a G.O.P.-led government should be able to implement, and the party has proven repeatedly unwilling to sanction its most visible political figure for plainly illegal and undemocratic behavior. And the G.O.P. machine at the state level is mobilizing to stack electoral bureaucracies with conspiracy-curious lickspittles who would love nothing more than to refuse to certify elections won by Democrats. The threat is real.
Lieberman, in turn, stressed in an email the key role of white discontent as a factor in the crisis American democracy faces:
The perception among many white Americans that their status at the top of the political hierarchy is eroding is certainly a critical factor fueling the crisis of American democracy today. This is a recurring pattern in American history: when proponents of expanded and more diverse democracy gain power, those who have a stake in old hierarchies and patterns of exclusion are often willing to defy democratic norms and practices in order to stay in power.
But, Lieberman continued,
It’s not necessarily inevitable that those defenders of old hierarchies will find refuge in the mainstream of a major political party, which gives their aims credibility and political force. When that has happened, as with the Democrats in the 1880s and 1890s, the result has been disastrous democratic backsliding. But in the 1960s, by contrast, a coalition of northern Democrats and Republicans was able to overcome those antidemocratic forces, at least for a short time.
The efforts by Republicans to take over control of elections through state laws giving local legislatures the power to overturn election results — as well as by running candidates for Secretary of State who espouse the view that the 2020 election was stolen — are troubling, to say the least.
Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University — and the author of “Delegitimization, Deconstruction and Control: Undermining the Administrative State” in the current issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science — wrote by email that he is “more worried about declines in democracy driven by formal changes in the law than by events like January 6th.”
Moynihan pointed out that at 3:32 a.m. on Jan. 7 — hours after protesters incited by Trump swarmed the U.S. Capitol — a majority of House Republicans
voted not to accept the results of the last election. This represents an astonishing signal by a group of elected officials of their willingness to play procedural hardball to upend democratic outcomes. State legislatures are passing laws that constrain individual rights via democratic means, and…
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