Even well-designed constitutions cannot, by themselves, guarantee democracy. For one, constitutions are always incomplete. Like any set of rules, they have countless gaps and ambiguities. No operating...
Building on Linz’s work, we have developed a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or acti...
All successful democracies rely on informal rules that, though not found in the constitution or any laws, are widely known and respected. In the case of American democracy, this has been vital.
We fear that if Trump were to confront a war or terrorist attack, he would exploit this crisis fully—using it to attack political opponents and restrict freedoms Americans take for granted. In our vie...
The disenfranchisement of African Americans wiped out the Republican Party, locking in white supremacy and single-party rule for nearly a century. As one black southerner observed, The whole South—eve...
The Trump administration also mounted efforts to sideline key players in the political system. President Trump’s rhetorical attacks on critics in the media are an example. His repeated accusations tha...
Sin embargo, existe otra manera de hacer quebrar una democracia, un modo menos dramático pero igual de destructivo. Las democracias pueden fracasar a manos no ya de generales, sino de líderes electos,...
Senator Joseph McCarthy, who used the Cold War fear of communist subversion to promote blacklisting, censorship, and book banning, enjoyed wide backing among the American public. At the height of McCa...
One way of tackling our deepening partisan divide, then, would be to genuinely address the bread-and-butter concerns of long-neglected segments of the population—no matter their ethnicity.
Backed by a small but growing group of loyalists, Gingrich launched an insurgency aimed at instilling a more combative approach in the party. Taking advantage of a new media technology, C-SPAN, Gingri...
Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially security threats—wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures.
Two events were critical in this regard. The first was the infamous Compromise of 1877, which ended the 1876 presidential election dispute and elevated Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency...
The strength of the American political system, it has often been said, rests on what Swedish Nobel Prize-winning economist Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed: the principles of individual freedom...
The second category in our litmus test is the denial of the legitimacy of one’s opponents. Authoritarian politicians cast their rivals as criminal, subversive, unpatriotic, or a threat to national sec...
The combination of a would-be authoritarian and a major crisis can, therefore, be deadly for democracy.
Some political scientists worried about the new system. Binding primaries were certainly more democratic. But might they be too democratic? By placing presidential nominations in the hands of voters,...
Most often, the capture of the referees is done by quietly firing civil servants and other nonpartisan officials and replacing them with loyalists.
Knowing how citizens in other democracies have successfully resisted elected autocrats, or why they tragically failed to do so, is essential to those seeking to defend American democracy today.
In his 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, historian Richard Hofstadter described the phenomenon of status anxiety, which, he believed, is most likely to emerge when groups’ social sta...
America’s democratic norms, then, were born in a context of exclusion. As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party...