Testing The Strength Of American Democracy

American democracy faces challenges like never before, in part because our current president, Donald Trump, is displaying unprecedented authoritarian behavior and his style of authoritarian leadership is subverting our system of laws, threatening our electoral processes, and undermining our civil liberties. In addition, an authoritarian’s rejection of dissent can often lead to tolerance or encouragement of violence that threatens the value of civil discourse.

Democracy is weakened when certain types of leaders and their styles infringe on democratic principles. Juan Linz, a political scientist who studies the reasons why democracies fail, has developed a litmus test for autocrats or a set of warning signs about authoritarian behavior. These include: “rejection of democratic rules of the game, denial of the legitimacy of political opponents, toleration or encouragement of violence, and a readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, 60).

Democracy is defined as a system of government that combines the rule of law, constitutions, protected rights, and electoral representation (Parsons 2019). In a liberal democracy, one of the most defining and important values is an emphasis on the representation of the people by their elected representatives(?), which acts as the main pathway for determining governmental leadership. One of the greatest strengths of liberal democracy is “its powerful rational-legal logic wherein a long list of rights supports the high-quality representation of ‘the common people’” (Parsons 2019).

However, a democratic system with broad participation and contestation creates a situation where candidates with more extreme views that are outside of the political norms in the country from winning elections or running on a leadership style that challenges these norms. As the percentage of eligible voters who actually do vote in an election drops, the potential is there for more extreme candidates to win and impose the more extreme views and policies on the country.

Donald Trump is that type of candidate, winning the presidency despite not winning the popular vote, and seems determined to be a polarizing figure in American society. Some welcome his aggressive, challenging approach to the status quo, while others fear and protest his beliefs and methods and see evidence of him doing harm to our democracy with his authoritarian style.

Trump fits the authoritarian mold. According to Linz, the first warning sign of an authoritarian figure is a “rejection of, or weak commitment to, democratic rules of the game” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, 61). One of these long-standing democratic rules is respecting the notion of the rule of law, or “the idea that all people, including leaders, should be subject to the same legal rules” (Parsons 2019). Donald Trump has shown no respect for contestation, another critically important rule of democracy that encourages people to freely express and disagree about their beliefs. As a constitutional protector of freedom of speech, the president has to be able to publicly accept that there are people that will disagree with him or her and must find the strength to be tolerant of other people’s beliefs.

Contestation also comes with the underlying acceptance that all politicians and political groups must agree that if one side wins, the losing side has to accept the loss and respect the legitimacy of the winners as the ones who now hold power: “Every group must accept that it could lose, giving its adversaries control of government” (Parsons 2019). It’s important to remember that “all it takes for a democratic choice to fall apart is that the losers or winners of the next election decide to stop playing by the rules” (Parsons 2019).

Throughout his campaign in 2016, Trump “questioned the legitimacy of the electoral process and made the unprecedented suggestion that he might not accept the results of the 2016 election.” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, 61). After the election, Trump claimed that millions of ballots were illegally cast, but a commission he convened to investigate could not come up with any substantial evidence of voter fraud (Villenueve 2018). Trump questioning the legitimacy of the electoral process without evidence weakens peoples’ faith in the electoral system and can lead to an unstable political situation.

The second warning sign of an authoritarian figure is “denial of the legitimacy of political opponents” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, 62). “Authoritarian politicians cast their rivals as criminal, subversive, unpatriotic, or a threat to national security as the existing way of life” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, 62). Even before he was elected, Trump played a very influential role in the “birther” movement because he “challenged the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency by suggesting that he was born in Kenya and that he was a Muslim, which many of his supporters equated with being “un-American” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, 62).

By doing this, Trump encouraged people to question the legitimacy of Obama’s qualifications to be the president and his legitimacy as an American citizen with the country’s best interests at heart. Another political norm is that “competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals” (Parsons 2019). During the 2016 election, Trump discredited his Democratic opponent by saying that “he planned to arrange for a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton after the election” and declared that she should be in prison (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, 62). In December of 2016, the hashtag #HillaryforPrison was the second-largest trending topic on Twitter.

The third warning sign of an authoritarian figure is “toleration or encouragement of violence” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, 62). As stated in How Democracies Die, “in the last century, no major-party presidential candidate has ever endorsed violence” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, 62). Trump, unfortunately, has changed this.

During his campaign, Trump not only tolerated the violence displayed by his supporters but at times even encouraged them to continue their actions. “One thing that separates contemporary autocrats from democratic leaders is their intolerance of criticism, and their readiness to use their power to punish those - in the opposition, media, or civil society - who criticize them” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, 62).

When dealing with a protestor at one of his rallies, Trump said to thousands of spectators, “Knock the crap out of him, would you? I promise you, I will pay for your legal fees”, continuing with the promise to defend anyone in court who attempted to hurt someone who disagreed with him (Macguill). Instead of being a leader who encourages open debate and healthy disagreement, Trump’s style is to mock and discredit his dissenters, threaten to remove them from their jobs and even in some cases dehumanize them as dogs and animals (Resnik 2018).

The fourth warning sign of an authoritarian figure is “readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, 64). Trump popularized the phrase “fake news”, branding any media outlet who criticized him “biased” or blatantly accusing the media of reporting things that are false. Trump has made it clear that he doesn't respect facts as commonly agreed upon pieces of information and regular discounts media reports that are critical of him and his administration.

Trump then went a step further than just discrediting media. During recent press conferences, Trump has taken away microphones and even revoked White House press credentials for people that have been working in the White House for decades, just because they were trying to report an angle on a story that he doesn’t respect or agree with (Matthews 2019).

Authoritarian leaders weaken the ways that we as a country believe our democracy should work. By stoking divisions between people and using inflammatory statements, it becomes harder to have civil discourse and debate, in our official government institutions, in the press, and in casual settings among our citizens.

A central question, though, is should even a proven extremist, divisive leader actually weaken our democracy? After all, our country’s founders developed a constitution that place checks and balances to curtail any one branch of government asserting too much power. Norms of mutual toleration and political forbearance, not using all of the power you have been given to dominate and destroy your opponents, have kept these checks and balances strong. Authoritarianism weakens norms and when norms go away systems start to fall apart. One authoritarian leader is not going to destroy our democracy but can do damage to the norms and put our system in serious danger.