Columnist -The Washington Post
In their book, “How Democracies Die,”
political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write: “How do
elected authoritarians shatter the democratic institutions that are
supposed to constrain them? Some do it in one fell swoop. But more often
the assault on democracy begins slowly. . . . The erosion of democracy
takes place piecemeal, often in baby steps.”
Our
nation is divided in many ways, and one of the most important chasms
involves the question of whether President Trump poses a threat to our
constitutional foundations. Is he merely a loud-mouthed demagogue, or is
he an autocrat in the making, willing to strike at the underpinnings of
republican government?
Those of us fearful that
Trump is subverting basic freedoms and the arrangements that sustain
them are frequently dismissed as alarmists who fail to recognize the
endurance of checks, balances and other circuit-breakers. In this view,
asserting that Trump imperils our liberties demonstrates a lack of
appreciation for the genius that is the American experiment.
It is certainly true that most of our rights are
still intact. We still have free speech and a free press, despite
Trump’s assaults on both. After all, I am writing this column, and you
are able to read it — and to disagree with it if you wish.
The
opposition party, moreover, has a good chance of taking over at least
one house of Congress in this fall’s elections. At levels below the
Supreme Court, judges have blocked many of Trump’s most egregious
actions, among them the separation of immigrant children from their
parents.
For all of this, one can be grateful.
But it is precisely because citizens of enduring republican democracies
easily fall into complacency that Levitsky and Ziblatt’s warnings are so
pertinent.
Begin with those much-touted checks
and balances. Their health depends — as my colleagues Norman Ornstein,
Thomas Mann and I argued in our book, “One Nation After Trump”
— on the willingness of those in the legislative and judicial branches
to put their institutional loyalties and their stewardship of the system
as a whole above their partisan loyalties.
The opposite is happening in the GOP-led Congress.
With the exception of a few Republican elected officials at the
periphery, Congress has worked to enable Trump’s abuses (witness the
behavior of California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes to undercut special
counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation) and to minimize the
outrageousness of his conduct.
When Trump
revoked former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance in
retaliation for Brennan’s criticism of him (and, as Trump confessed in a Wall Street Journal interview,
because he objected to Brennan doing his job in 2016 by probing
connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia), the response from most
Republicans was pathetic.
Trump’s actions were
an abuse of presidential power far beyond anything Republicans used to
complain about bitterly during President Barack Obama’s term. They are
aimed directly at intimidating critics and interfering with a legitimate
investigation. Where was House Speaker Paul D.
Ryan on the issue? When
Trump first threatened the security clearances of his critics last
month, Ryan (R-Wis.) shrugged it off and said Trump was
“just trolling people.” We still await a robust response from party
leaders now that the president has shown he had more than “trolling” in
mind.
And long before Trump ran for office, Republicans
were eager to change the rules of the game when doing so served their
purposes, as Michael Tomasky argued last week
in the Daily Beast. Consider just their aggressive voter-suppression
efforts and their willingness to block even a hearing for Merrick
Garland, Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.
The list of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin’s phrase
“enemies of the people” to describe a free press; the firing, one after
another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing,
starting with then-FBI Director James B. Comey; Trump’s effusive praise
of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially
charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by
traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of
interest and those of his family. Add to this the authoritarian’s habit
of institutionalizing lying as a routine aspect of governing, compressed
into the astonishing credo Rudolph W. Giuliani blurted out on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday: “Truth isn’t truth.”
This
is not business as usual. Yet our politics proceeds as if it is.
Slowly, Trump has accustomed us to behavior that, at any other recent
time and with just about any other politician, would in all probability
have been career-ending.
We know what a
military coup looks like. But as Levitsky and Ziblatt note, a
slow-motion dismantling of rules, norms and expectations can be more
insidious because we don’t even notice what’s happening to us.
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