In the early 1990s, Gingrich and his team distributed memos to Republican candidates instructing them to use certain negative words to describe Democrats, including pathetic, sick, bizarre, betray, an...
In the darkest days of the Second World War, when America’s very future was at risk, writer E. B. White was asked by the U.S. Federal Government’s Writers’ War Board to write a short response to the q...
In many ways, President Trump followed the electoral authoritarian script during his first year. He made efforts to capture the referees, sideline the key players who might halt him, and tilt the play...
In February 2010, the Constitutional Court struck down Uribe’s bid for a third term as unconstitutional, forcing him to step down after two terms. The lesson is this: Where institutional channels exis...
If, twenty-five years ago, someone had described to you a country in which candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the government of stealing the election or establi...
Governments that cannot remove independent judges may bypass them through court packing. In Hungary, for instance, the Orbán government expanded the size of the Constitutional Court from eight to fift...
Germany’s 1919 Weimar constitution was designed by some of the country’s greatest legal minds. Its long-standing and highly regarded Rechtsstaat (rule of law) was considered by many as sufficient to p...
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...
Enfranchisement empowered African Americans: More than two thousand southern freedmen won elective office in the 1870s, including fourteen congressmen and two U.S. senators. At one point, more than 40...
By contrast, when the government’s approval rating is low, media and opposition grow more brazen, judges become emboldened to stand up to the president, and allies begin to dissent.
By contrast, a social policy agenda that sets aside stiff means testing in favor of the more universalistic models found in northern Europe could have a moderating effect on our politics. Social polic...
But are constitutional safeguards, by themselves, enough to secure a democracy? We believe the answer is no.
This book has reminded us that American democracy is not as exceptional as we sometimes believe. There’s nothing in our Constitution or our culture to immunize us against democratic breakdown. We have...
Governments prefer to co-opt popular cultural figures or reach a mutual accommodation with them, allowing them to continue their work as long as they stay out of politics.
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...
The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that had held us as slaves.
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 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...