Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy

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To our children

Introduction

Democracy Under Siege

When the president used his power to target immigrants, the press, and his political opponents, the sheer overreach of his actions shocked many citizens.

Tensions among the nation’s political leaders had been escalating for years. Embroiled in one intense conflict after another, both sides had grown increasingly distrustful of each other. Every action by one camp provoked a greater counterreaction from the other, sometimes straining the limits of the Constitution. Fights and mob violence followed.

Leaders of the dominant party grew convinced that their only hope for fixing the government was to do everything possible to weaken their opponents and silence dissent. The president signed into law provisions that made it more difficult for immigrants (who tended to support the opposition) to attain citizenship and mandated the deportation of those who were deemed dangerous or who came from hostile nations. He then put his pen to a law that would allow for the prosecution of those who openly criticized his administration, such as newspaper publishers.

The year just described was not 2017 or 2018. Rather, it was 1798, when President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. His allies in Congress, the Federalists, argued that these measures were necessary, in anticipation of a possible war with France, to protect the country from internal spies, subversive elements, and dissent. The Federalists disapproved of immigrants, viewing them as a threat to the purity of national character. They particularly disliked the Irish—the largest group—because they largely favored their political opponents, the Republicans, and sympathized with the French. Or as one Federalist congressman put it, there was no need to invite hordes of Wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all the world, to come here with a basic view to distract our tranquility.¹

Critics of the new laws raised their voices in protest. The Republicans charged that they amounted to barefaced efforts to weaken their faction, which happened to include most Americans not of English heritage. Two leading Republicans, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, went so far as to advise state governments to refuse to abide by the Sedition Act, resolving that it was unconstitutional.

Political conflicts boiled over into everyday life. Federalists and Republicans often resided in different neighborhoods and attended different churches. Federalists, centered particularly in New England, prized their Anglo-American identity, and even after the Revolution they retained their affinity with the mother country. Republicans saw themselves as cosmopolitan, cherishing Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality, and they championed the French Revolution and held disdain for Britain. By 1794, partisans in urban communities were holding separate Fourth of July ceremonies. Republicans read aloud the Declaration of Independence—penned by the founder of their party, Thomas Jefferson—as evidence that independence had been their own achievement, while the Federalists offered toasts to their leader, President George Washington. The Republicans viewed themselves as the party of the people; one prominent politician among them chided the Federalists for celebrating not we the people but we the noble, chosen, privileged few.²

To many people at the time, the Alien and Sedition Acts bore an unsettling resemblance to the kinds of government overreach that had spurred them to fight a war for independence just a few decades earlier. The acts comprised four laws, three of which placed restrictions on immigrants and appeared to be a strategic attempt to shape the electorate by excluding potential voters for the opposition in order to tip the scales of power. The fourth, the Sedition Act, made it illegal to publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States, or either House of the Congress of the United States, with intent to defame … or to bring them … into contempt or dispute. By denying freedom of speech and freedom of the press, it outlawed criticism of the government and deprived citizens of the opportunity to become more fully informed by hearing alternative points of view. The measures gave the president power to exert control over Americans’ lives in ways removed from congressional authority, and therefore less accountable to popular control. Some state governments outright refused to abide by the new federal law, intensifying divisions. And on the streets, mock violence—the burning of effigies—was swiftly transforming into the genuine article, as politically motivated beatings and open brawls proliferated. In one case, on July 27, 1798, Federalists in New York marched up Broadway singing God Save the King just to antagonize the Republicans; the latter responded by singing French revolutionary songs. Soon the singing contest gave way to violence as fighting ensued.³

Watching the growing chaos and division, Americans of all stripes worried that their experiment in self-government might not survive the decade. They feared that monarchy would reassert itself, aristocracy would replace representative government, or some states might secede from the Union, causing its demise. The early beginnings of democracy in the United States were fragile—even at a time when some of the Constitution’s framers themselves, along with other luminaries of the era, held public office.

Should we contemporary Americans worry about the future of our democracy? Is it in danger? While we do not share our predecessors’ fears that the British crown might rule us once again or that the nation might lapse into civil war, subtler signs of danger abound. We face the weakening of the checks and balances that prevent democracy from sliding into tyranny. The rule of law, long taken for granted by Americans, has been eroded by a president who sees the government as an instrument to advance his own personal and political interests. Elections, the foundation of democracy, are becoming less free and fair due to the distorting influence of money, misinformation, and foreign meddling. While the United States has long distinguished itself by its relative absence of outright corruption, public office now increasingly appears to be—for some—a platform for private gain rather than an opportunity for public service. Hard-won civil rights, civil liberties, and voting rights face challenges; even journalists engaged in routine investigative reporting have been subjected to intimidation. And above all, American politics is becoming a matter of us against them among political leaders and ordinary Americans alike, dividing families and communities, fostering hostility, and impeding our collective capacity to solve problems and govern ourselves productively.

Many remain confident that democracy will endure, and certainly reasonable arguments can be made to support that assumption. After all, the United States boasts the world’s longest-functioning constitution and a long-standing reputation as a beacon of democracy for the world. We typically regard our political institutions as bulwarks against the emergence of tyranny or authoritarianism.⁴ And although American democracy developed slowly and haltingly—thwarted at the outset by the enslavement of African Americans, the subordinate status of women of all races, and the suppression of Native Americans—still the nation’s history is often depicted as a story of progress toward the fulfillment of a democratic ideal.

The trouble is, however, that a closer look at American history reveals a far more tumultuous past than this familiar narrative suggests. This book delves into our history in order to try to understand whether democracy today is in danger or not. We turn to several periods in which many Americans were worried about whether rule by we the people could endure. We investigate them to uncover the elements that presaged each crisis, how our institutions withstood serious threats, and what ensued. What we have learned from this history is that American democracy has been far from invincible. To the contrary, it has been under threat time and again, and has often proven to be fragile in the face of danger. In many instances, moreover, real harm occurred, sometimes with long-lasting consequences.

From the beginning of the republic to the present, the United States has endured repeated crises when the nation’s promise of popular government was in peril. At each of these junctures, political combat escalated to a point where Americans feared that the government might collapse, that the Union might dissolve, or that unrest, violence, or even civil war might break out. In the 1790s, people worried that political conflict over the Alien and Sedition Acts would plunge the nation into armed conflict or dissolve it through secession. In the 1850s, divisions over slavery did tear the country apart, leading to a destructive civil war in the next decade. In the 1890s, amid the convulsive changes in the industrial era and the upsurge in labor conflict and farmers’ political organizing, nearly four million African Americans were stripped of their voting rights. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many Americans welcomed a president who was willing to use greater executive power than his predecessors, but some worried that it paved the way for a strongman leader like those on the rise in several European countries. During the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, the president tried to use the tools of executive power that were developed in the 1930s as political weapons to punish his own enemies.

At each of these five moments we saw clear signs of damage to the pillars of democracy. Ambitious politicians frequently trampled the principle of free and fair elections, using intimidation, stuffing of ballot boxes, and other techniques to win office. They often dispensed with the rule of law and resorted to power and force instead, from the time when President George Washington led fifteen thousand troops into western Pennsylvania to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion to when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, during World War II, signed an executive order that sanctioned the imprisonment of more than a hundred thousand Americans of Japanese descent in detention camps. Parties openly undermined the legitimacy of the opposition, from the conflict over slavery in Kansas, when pro- and antislavery citizens adopted separate constitutions, held separate elections, and chose separate legislatures, to President Richard Nixon’s underhanded and illegal efforts to destroy those he regarded as his political enemies. The integrity of hard-won rights suffered, from the damage to freedom of the press and freedom of speech caused by the Sedition Act to the loss of voting rights by African Americans in the 1890s.

These crises of democracy did not occur randomly; rather, they developed in the presence of four specific threats: political polarization, conflict over who belongs in the political community, high and growing economic inequality, and excessive executive power. We know from the study of the rise and fall of democratic regimes elsewhere in the world that these conditions are harmful to the sustainability of democracy. When they are absent, democracy tends to flourish; when one or more of them are present, democracy is prone to decay.

Each of these threats by itself can damage democracy. Polarization tends to divide citizens into opposing teams that are geared more toward defeating one another than governing effectively. Disputes over who belongs in the political community and the status of members—categorized along lines of race, gender, national origin, or religion—can engender deep divisions that result in political exclusion, the widespread denial of rights, and violent reprisals. Economic inequality can pit society’s haves against its have-nots and induce the wealthy to use their resources to protect their privileged place in the social order. And the growth of executive power enables the concentration of authority in the hands of a single person, which is precisely what the framers of the Constitution hoped to avoid.

In none of these periods of democratic fragility in American history were all four threats present simultaneously. Each of the threats has waxed and waned at different times, and on only some occasions have a few joined forces. And it is these combinations that have proven particularly dangerous. In the 1850s, for example, the paired emergence of extreme political polarization and the intensification of conflict over the status of African Americans pushed the country into a calamitous civil war. In the 1890s, polarization and ardent white supremacy resurged, and in combination with the soaring economic inequality of the Gilded Age they led to the wholesale exclusion of African Americans from rights of citizenship. Democracy has not fared well in these periods when the threats coalesced.

Now, for the first time in American history, we face all four threats at the same time. As in the 1790s, or during the conflict that led to the Civil War, we confront deep political polarization. Political leaders exaggerate their differences in order to win elections, and they have grown more willing to circumvent long-established norms in order to gain, wield, and keep power. And ordinary Americans are increasingly sorting themselves into separate camps based on where they live, where they go to school, where they work, what they read, listen to, and watch—and how they vote. In the process, they have grown more polarized and antagonistic toward the opposing party. Increasingly, partisans view one another not as honorable competitors but as an existential threat to everything they stand for.

What’s more, partisan divisions today overlap with other conditions that are also familiar from the history of American politics—rising racial antagonism, pitched battles over gender, and soaring economic inequality. The combination of intense political combat, social tribalism, and plutocracy now threatens to undermine our government’s legitimacy and its capacity to seek common solutions to collective problems. No corner of contemporary politics has been spared from this dysfunction: not Congress, the bureaucracy, the courts, the media, or the presidency. Making matters worse, today’s merger of threats, unlike that of earlier periods, coexists with extreme and growing executive power. This creates the opportunity for excessively partisan presidents to use the government to serve their own personal and political ends.

It is this unprecedented confluence of all four threats—more than the rise to power of any particular leader or party—that lies behind the contemporary crisis of American democracy. The threats have grown deeply entrenched, and they will likely persist and wreak havoc for some time to come. These circumstances are troubling indeed, and we make light of them at our peril. In order to understand what the combination of threats might portend for American democracy, in this book we will consider how the nation navigated them in the past—or, in some instances, failed to do so—and then apply what we have learned to the present.

1

Threats to Democracy

Many Americans think of the United States as synonymous with democracy. After all, the nation was born through a revolution against tyranny and monarchy. Emboldened colonists insisted on the creation of a government in which authority flows from the people themselves. The nation’s founding documents herald democratic ideals, from the Declaration of Independence’s claim that all men are created equal to the Constitution’s preamble identifying We the People as its source. The ancient Greeks, in city-states such as Athens, had practiced direct democracy, in which citizens made decisions by deliberating face-to-face in assemblies. It was Americans who brought the concept to scale for a larger society, particularly through the Constitution, which established national institutions of government with representatives selected by the people themselves, through a combination of direct and indirect means. By the early nineteenth century, states extended the vote to nearly all white men, regardless of whether they owned property. These measures made the United States more inclusive than its European counterparts in that era, and the nation became renowned for its boisterous, highly participatory politics that included newly enfranchised men of modest means.¹

Yet the young nation simultaneously repudiated democracy in crucial ways that would shape its development down to the present. It did this by embedding social hierarchies into the Constitution and cementing them with the power of law. When the Constitution was ratified, nearly one in five Americans—all of them of African descent—were enslaved, and the document itself sanctioned the practice. In the case of women’s status, which was among the topics relegated to the states under the Tenth Amendment, once women married—as was expected of them—they relinquished their legal and economic rights to their husbands. As the country moved toward universal voting rights for white men, inclusion occurred on the basis of race and gender, establishing the United States in its early years as a white man’s republic.² Full membership in the political community—entailing the right to vote and to participate fully in public affairs—expressly excluded women and African Americans.

Over two centuries of struggle and contention, the United States democratized. The nation’s conception of the people slowly grew more inclusive and more Americans gained the rights of citizenship. But it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the United States formally extended civil and political rights to all Americans regardless of race or gender.³ The road toward full democracy was neither straight nor smooth. Generations of Americans organized, signed petitions, and marched in the quest for equal rights of citizenship, and they often faced violence, defeats, and reversals of progress.

But even though the United States has not been a full democracy from the beginning, the American Revolution established the modern idea of democracy—a system of government in which those who govern are held accountable to the people through competitive elections. However imperfectly the principles of American democracy may be realized, inherent in them are standards by which we can measure the state of American politics. At any given time, a regime can be more or less democratic, depending on how close it comes to meeting these standards of democracy. Think of democracy as a continuum rather than an on-off switch. A country can be somewhere between being a full democracy and not being a democracy at all. As we look at democracy through American history, we can assess where on the continuum it is.

Democratic regimes can also move along the continuum in either direction. A regime might be moving toward more complete democracy, as the United States did during Reconstruction after the Civil War and in the 1960s. But regimes might also move in the other direction, toward less democracy, a process known as backsliding.⁴ There is no guarantee, even in the United States, that we will move in the right direction, and it is a grave mistake to assume either that the United States is automatically democratic because of what our Constitution says or that we have moved steadily and inexorably toward greater democracy.

History reveals that neither assumption is correct.

THINKING ABOUT DEMOCRACY … AND BACKSLIDING

The United States has not always been democratic. Moreover, American democracy has not developed through steady progress over time; sometimes it has been subject to decay or derailment, and the question is whether that is occurring again now. Before we can assess the prospects of democratic deterioration, what do we mean by democracy?

We tend to think of democracy as a political system in which authority flows from the people, rather than from an individual leader or a small group of powerful elites. But of course many autocrats around the world also claim to be the people’s true representative. How then can we distinguish democracies from authoritarian governments—or, more to the point, identify whether a single nation exhibits signs of becoming more or less democratic?

Democracy is a system of government in which citizens are able to hold those in power accountable, primarily through regular competitive elections, and in which representatives engage in collective decision-making, seeking to be responsive to the electorate. Modern democracies that conform to this definition are systems of representative government, not direct democracies or systems of mob rule. Successful democracies also tend to be liberal democracies, regimes that effectively protect their citizens’ rights to express their views, participate in the political process, and have their voices heard. Effectively functioning democratic systems tend to share four key attributes.⁵

Free and fair elections constitute the most fundamental feature of any representative democracy. Elections permit societies to resolve conflict without bloodshed, by using the ballot box rather than bullets. They also provide a means for citizens to choose their rulers and to hold them accountable, throwing the bums out if they disapprove of how they govern.⁶

Inherent in representative democracy is also the idea that all members of society, including those in government, must adhere to the rule of law.⁷ This means that society is not run by individuals who exercise sheer personal power, by vigilantes who take the law into their own hands, or by hereditary or religious leaders. Rather, it is run according to rules that apply to everyone and to the operations of government itself. No individual can be considered to be above the law, no matter how powerful; the legal code is to be applied to all citizens evenly, by impartial courts. The rule of law also mandates procedures for elections and representation and establishes checks and balances between branches of government, limiting the power of any one branch. It prevents tyranny, arbitrary and cruel dominance by an autocrat, rule by sheer force and violence, and corruption.

Democracy necessitates the legitimacy of the opposition: those on different sides of a policy debate or with different political parties must recognize each other not as enemies or as an existential threat who must be stopped at any cost, but as fellow citizens with equal stakes in the contest and an equal right to participate. The ongoing struggle for power between those with different points of view is intrinsic to democratic politics. This competition for influence, carried out according to previously agreed-upon rules of the game, is a good and necessary thing. Being part of a democracy requires participating over and over again in the quest to promote one’s values, interests, or ideas—and actually being permitted to do so. Democracy ceases if one party makes it impossible for another party to compete effectively or to govern when it wins elections. Democracy means that the loser of a contest must still be able to look to the future, to aim to win the next election or prevail in the next policy battle.⁸

While these three features came to be regarded as pillars of American democracy by the nineteenth century, only in the twentieth century did the United States embrace the idea that the government must also protect the integrity of rights, including civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press; civil rights, for example, ensuring that people cannot be turned away from jobs, schools, restaurants, or housing on the basis of their race or sex; and voting rights. Democracy means little for those who do not enjoy these protections, which foster equal civic standing among citizens and their meaningful inclusion in the democratic process.⁹ When the US Constitution was ratified in 1788, and even with the Bill of Rights added to it in 1791, states retained jurisdiction over rights and denied them to most people; the development of robust rights, guaranteed to citizens broadly by national government, involved a slow and uneven process of democratization, punctuated by instances of egregious backsliding.

These four attributes of democracy—free and fair elections, the rule of law, the legitimacy of the opposition, and the integrity of rights—provide us with clear indicators that we can use as standards to assess whether democracy is advancing or retreating in any given period of history. Nations that call themselves democracies may have some of these attributes but not others; variation abounds. Many nations, for example, hold democratic elections but do not respect their citizens’ freedom of expression or dissent, and they have leaders who rule arbitrarily with little heed to the rule of law. Scholars describe such regimes as competitive authoritarianism, a hybrid form of governance that combines democratic and nondemocratic elements.¹⁰ Just because a nation has attained a robust combination of all four attributes of democracy, moreover, is no guarantee that it will continue to maintain them: lapsing toward weakened or hybrid forms is common.

In recent years, some critics have begun to wonder whether the United States itself is undergoing democratic backsliding. Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that is highly regarded for its rankings of democratic fitness based on political rights and civil liberties, downgraded the United States from a score of 94 (out of 100 points) in 2010 to 86 in 2019. While the nation still ranks among the eighty-seven countries regarded as free, its rank fell from thirty-first to fifty-first in less than a decade. In a democracy index prepared annually by The Economist, the United States slipped from the classification of full democracy to that of flawed democracy in 2017. In doing so, it departed the ranks that included most western European countries and Canada, and joined Argentina, Greece, and several eastern European countries, among others.¹¹

Some scholars who study democratic deterioration worldwide seek to evaluate the United States today by comparing and contrasting it to Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini and, more recently, to Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Russia under Vladimir Putin, and Peru under Alberto Fujimori.¹² But none of those cases involves a country with such a long constitutional tradition and established political institutions, not to mention the United States’ wealth—all features assumed to ensure the continuation of democracy.¹³ For these reasons, we are better off turning to American history in order to understand the threats that have confronted the nation in the past and how well the attributes of democracy survived them.

THE FOUR THREATS

The history of American democracy has hardly been serene; to the contrary, it has involved extreme conflict and frequent violence and bloodshed. While developments in the past sixty years went far to deepen and expand democracy, earlier periods often witnessed it in peril and even being rolled back. In order to make sense of the conditions that most put democracy at risk, we have learned a great deal from scholars who study its rise and fall in countries around the world. In particular, we discern four major threats that can endanger it: political polarization, conflict over who belongs in the political community, high and rising levels of economic inequality, and executive aggrandizement.

POLITICAL POLARIZATION

Americans have heard plenty in recent years about the dangers of rising political polarization. Not many years ago, lawmakers in Washington frequently cooperated across party lines, forging both policy alliances and personal friendships. Now, hostility more often prevails, and it has been accompanied by brinksmanship and dysfunction that imperil lawmaking on major issues.

The public is no different. In the 1950s, when pollsters asked Americans whether they would prefer that their child marry a Democrat or a Republican, all other things being equal, the vast majority—72 percent of Americans—either didn’t answer or said they didn’t care. By contrast, in 2016 the majority—55 percent—did express a partisan preference for their future son-or daughter-in-law.¹⁴ For many Americans, partisanship has become a central part of their identity.

But could rising polarization actually harm democracy? At first blush, this might seem unlikely; in fact, many political scientists have long argued that vibrant political parties are actually essential to the functioning of democracy. They bring elected officials together around a common set of priorities and foster cooperation so that they can accomplish goals on behalf of the public. They help citizens, who lack the time and expertise to study every issue, to make sense of politics and decide which candidates to support; this enables them to participate in elections and hold elected officials accountable. Distinctions between parties help make democracy work by presenting citizens with meaningful choices. Yet when parties divide both lawmakers and society into two unalterably opposed camps that view each other as enemies, they can undermine social cohesion and political stability. Democracy is put at risk.

The framers of the US Constitution, attuned to such threats from England’s previous century of experience with violent parties and factions, hoped the new nation could avoid them altogether. They worried that if groups organized around different priorities, they might exacerbate social and political divisions and pursue their own goals at the expense of the public good. They aimed to design government in ways that would manage and mitigate those differences. Yet no sooner was the new government up and running than political leaders—including some of the founders themselves—began to choose sides on the critical issues of the day, leading to the formation of the Federalist and Republican factions, which were really proto-parties or precursors to formal political parties, which were firmly in place not long afterward.

In fact, throughout much of the United States’ history, contrary to the framers’ fears, political parties have actually mitigated political and social conflict. The two-party system often compelled both parties to compete for middle-of-the-road voters rather than those at either extreme and thus it had a moderating influence. In addition, American society tended to generate cross-cutting cleavages, meaning multiple, overlapping ties that reinforce connections among citizens instead of a single overarching divide between them, as was the case in European countries, which were more often riven by overriding conflicts of class, religion, or language.

In the United States of the mid-twentieth century, from the 1930s to the early 1970s, for example, two moderate parties prevailed. The Republicans embraced not only fiscal conservatives but also some supporters of civil rights and proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, while the Democrats’ big tent took in both urban ethnic liberals and white southerners—who liked the federal government’s largesse but resisted its intervention in how they ran their affairs, particularly with respect to race. In some other periods of American history, however, parties exacerbated divisions.

Polarization grows when citizens sort themselves so that, instead of having multiple, cross-cutting ties to others, their social and political memberships and identities increasingly overlap, reinforcing their affinity to some groups while setting them apart from others. In the mid-twentieth century, this process commenced as white southerners, beginning as early as the 1940s and accelerating by the 1970s, distanced themselves from the Democratic Party and shifted gradually toward the Republicans while the Democrats increasingly embraced the cause of racial equality. These new groupings diverged more from each other on ideology (conservative versus liberal) and views of particular issues (such as civil rights, abortion, and more recently gun rights).¹⁵

Polarization intensifies as ambitious political entrepreneurs take advantage of growing divisions to expand their power. They may do this by adopting opposing positions on issues, highlighting and promoting underlying social differences, and using polarizing rhetoric and tactics in order to consolidate their supporters while weakening their opponents.¹⁶

Contemporary polarization in Congress advanced in this way starting in 1978. A young Republican congressman named Newt Gingrich, lamenting his party’s decades of minority status, launched a long-term scorched-earth strategy, attacking the institution of Congress itself in order to undermine public trust and convince voters that it was time for a change. He told Republicans, Raise hell all the time.… This party does not need another generation of cautious, prudent, careful, bland, irrelevant, quasi-leaders.… What we really need are people who are … willing to stand up in a … slug fest and match it out with their opponent. He rallied the base, found ways to embarrass the Democratic majority, and proved masterly at attracting media attention.¹⁷

As a political strategy, polarization delivered effectively: congressional elections became more competitive than they had been for the previous half century. Every election from 1980 to the present presented an opportunity for either party to take control of each chamber of Congress. In 1994, Republicans finally took the House majority (after being in the minority for fifty-eight of the preceding sixty-two years), electing Gingrich to be the Speaker.¹⁸ Partisan control of Congress has seesawed back and forth ever since.

Party leaders from Gingrich onward encouraged their fellow partisans to act as loyal members of a team, prioritizing party unity. They