Even if Donald Trump does not break the hard guardrails of our constitutional democracy, he has increased the likelihood that a future president will.
Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic—for they would inherit a democracy stripped of its remaining protective...
Despite popular enthusiasm for his candidacy, Ford was effectively locked out of contention. Senator James Couzens called the idea of his candidacy ridiculous. How can a man over sixty years old, who…...
Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980, the GOP embraced the Christian Right and adopted increasingly pro-evangelical positions, including opposition to abortion, support for school prayer, and, later,...
Although many factors contributed to Donald Trump’s stunning political success, his rise to the presidency is, in good measure, a story of ineffective gatekeeping. Party gatekeepers failed at three ke...
A poll taken prior to the 2012 presidential election found that 71 percent of Mexicans believed that fraud could be in play.
With tactics like these, the Republicans had begun to behave like an antisystem political party. By the end of the Obama presidency, democracy’s soft guardrails were becoming dangerously unmoored.
When norms of mutual toleration are weak, democracy is hard to sustain. If we view our rivals as a dangerous threat, we have much to fear if they are elected. We may decide to employ any means necessa...
Under President Trump, America has been defining political deviancy down. The president’s routine use of personal insult, bullying, lying, and cheating has, inevitably, helped to normalize such practi...
To better understand how elected autocrats subtly undermine institutions, it’s helpful to imagine a soccer game. To consolidate power, would-be authoritarians must capture the referees, sideline at le...
There is one thing more powerful than the Constitution….That’s the will of the people. What is a Constitution anyway? They’re the products of the people, the people are the first source of power, and...
The primary process had failed in its gatekeeping role and allowed a man unfit for office to run as a mainstream party candidate.
The post-1965 realignment also began a process of sorting out voters ideologically. For the first time in nearly a century, partisanship and ideology converged, with the GOP becoming primarily conserv...
The apogee of 1990s constitutional hardball was the December 1998 House vote to impeach President Clinton. Only the second presidential impeachment in U.S. history, the move ran afoul of long-establis...
The McGovern–Fraser Commission issued a set of recommendations that the two parties adopted before the 1972 election. What emerged was a system of binding presidential primaries. Beginning in 1972, th...
The Civil War broke America’s democracy. One-third of American states did not participate in the 1864 election; twenty-two of fifty Senate seats and more than a quarter of House seats were left vacant...
Smoke-filled back rooms therefore served as a screening mechanism, helping to keep out the kind of demagogues and extremists who derailed democracy elsewhere in the world. American party gatekeeping w...
President Trump also tried to punish or purge agencies that acted with independence.
Party gatekeepers failed at three key junctures: the invisible primary, the primaries themselves, and the general election.
Just as divine-right monarchies required forbearance, so do democracies. Think of democracy as a game that we want to keep playing indefinitely. To ensure future rounds of the game, players must refra...