This year’s Fourth of July celebrations find America at a political crossroads. Eight months after a fair election, Trump and his supporters refuse to concede defeat. Behaving as though his return to the White House is a foregone conclusion, the former president and his enablers are effectively campaigning for his re-election while they troll the Biden-Harris administration with “audits” of contested ballots and the propagation of paranoid conspiracy theories.
The GOP’s anti-democratic tendencies extend much further than such mischief. Republican legislators in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas are passing, or trying to pass, laws that will restrict the right to vote, seeking to grant local election officials the power to overturn election results and adding rules and procedures that will discourage minority voters.
Three years ago, in the wake of Trump’s election the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warned that “Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.” In the book “How Demo-cracies Die” they note that once elected, autocratic leaders quickly move to weaken, or remove, democratic constraints on their power.”
Presciently, Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote: “Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. … The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”
Trump flouted democratic norms throughout his presidency. In many cases this was a strategic choice to enable his authoritarian ambitions. Levitsky and Ziblatt note that “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.”
Aside from Guyana, countries with similar recent experience of democratic erosion include Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. What makes Trump unique is his ability to continue undermining these norms even after his defeat. Denying the legitimacy of the results, Trump and his allies have begun to undermine the integrity of the elections process by invoking states’ rights and relying on hyper partisan local politics.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell makes no secret of his willingness to use the crisis to his advantage. Recognising the election results in January, he memorably declared: “The voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken … If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever. … If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again.” Fine words, yet six months later McConnell is allowing the former president and his most zealous supporters to do just that.
Two thirds of Republican voters do not believe Trump lost the election. Nearly half think the result should have been overturned. Rather than prevent a further descent into the abyss, the Republican party’s elite have kept silent in the hope that they won’t anger the party’s base. Such cowardice is what allowed Trump to gut the GOP in the first place. The longer its pusillanimous leaders allow him to propagate the Big Lie and nurture all sorts of conspiracy theories, the closer American democracy moves towards a death spiral.
