The below is a rather lengthy read, authored by Michael Finnegan
from the LA Times but it is in the interest of every citizen and voter to head
the clarion call of the diminishing of our democracy from our duly elected
government.
BACK STORY
Trump could be a danger to U.S. democracy, authors say
Two scholars say
president’s breaking of norms are key warning signs
PRESIDENT Trump has eroded confidence in core democratic
institutions, author Steven Levitsky said. (Evan Vucci Associated Press)
By Michael Finnegan
As scholars who study the death of democracies around the
globe, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt saw Donald Trump’s rise to power as
an alarming sign of dangerous times ahead.
The two professors of government at Harvard University found
parallels with fascism in Germany and Italy before World War II and with Latin
America’s struggle with dictatorships.
In the U.S., they argue in their new book, “How Democracies
Die,” the threat comes not
from a military coup, but from a duly elected leader who, like former
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, subverts democratic institutions one step at
a time in a steady march to autocracy.
It’s an offensive argument to many Trump supporters, who
welcome the president’s shattering of tradition in Washington.
Levitsky, however, said Trump’s latest efforts to undercut
the criminal investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia only buttress the
case that the president is imperiling U.S. democracy. Here are excerpts from an
interview with Levitsky.
What do you make of Trump’s demand for loyalty from the
attorney general and FBI leaders?
It’s difficult to think of an elected autocrat who did not
try to bring what we call the referees — law enforcement, intelligence and
judicial agencies — under their control. These agencies [then] serve as a
shield so that the government cannot effectively be investigated or prosecuted.
Law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies and the
courts in most democracies are at least supposed to be independent, neutral
arbiters. They are not
supposed to play on the government’s side. In many politicized, weak or failing
democracies, you see governments exert varying degrees of control over the
referees.
You see Trump as a threat to American democracy?
American democracy is pretty robust. Our democratic
institutions are strong. American democracy is therefore not easy to kill, so
I’m not one of those people running around crying that fascism is around the
corner.
However, this is a guy who prior to being elected clearly
showed that he had a weak commitment to basic democratic principles, that he
was willing to encourage violence, undermine the credibility of our electoral
process, attack the press.
Trump came in talking about locking up his rival, paying the
lawyer’s fees of supporters who beat up opposition activists, and so for good
reason, opposition groups began to push back. There were marches, rallies,
calls for impeachment within days of his swearing-in. So what happens — and
we’ve seen this in many other cases, including Turkey, Venezuela, Argentina,
Peru — the president then feels besieged and then pushes back harder.
What’s clearly happening, and I consider this threatening,
is that Trump’s attacks on core democratic institutions are eroding our
citizens’ confidence in those institutions.
What Trump has done, in insisting that our electoral process
is rigged, is convince large numbers of Americans that our elections are not
free and fair.
Are Trump’s attacks on the FBI a problem?
Yes. Since the post-Nixon reforms, the FBI has been a
professional, independent agency. It has been a pretty effective referee for
the last couple generations, and Trump is clearly tarnishing that.
He has convinced the bulk of his party and a good chunk of
the American electorate that the FBI is conspiring against him and working with
the Democratic Party, which of course could be used to justify measures taken
to purge its leadership and replace it with allies.
Why does his breaking of norms alarm you?
There are two specific norms that are really important for
democracy. One of them is mutual toleration: treating the political opposition
publicly and privately as legitimate. Secondly is forbearance, which is the use
of restraint in your exercise of power.
My fear is that Trump is not a man of forbearance. You see
it in his reckless calls for the Senate to get rid of the filibuster, and in
his firing of [FBI Director] James Comey.
Which leaders are most comparable to Trump?
I don’t know anybody, except for maybe [former President]
Alberto Fujimori in Peru, who really combines being such a political novice
with an authoritarian streak. The advantage that we have is that our democratic
institutions are much, much stronger than Peru’s.
Explain your comparison of the Trump era to the failures of
democracy in Europe in the 1930s and in Latin America in the 1970s.
There’s a very important role for mainstream political
parties in keeping authoritarian figures out of power. U.S. parties, throughout
our history, have done a phenomenally good job of [that].
In the interwar period in Europe, right-wing parties struck
these Faustian bargains with extremist candidates — the Liberal Party in Italy
in the early ’20s, the conservatives in Germany with Hitler in the late ’20s
and early ’30s. The comparison we make is that the Republican Party completely
abdicated in 2016 in nominating Trump, in not distancing itself from Trump and
now increasingly serving as his lap dog.
Can you explain your case that Trump meets all four litmus
tests for authoritarian inclinations?
We draw here on Juan Linz, a Spanish political scientist who
spent his career studying how and why democracies broke down.
The first test is a willingness to violate democratic rules
of the game. In Trump’s case, unprecedented in the United States, it was
implying that he might not accept the results of the election.
Second was the encouragement of violence, which Trump did during
the campaign repeatedly.
Third was denying the basic legitimacy of your rival. Trump
did this in casting Hillary Clinton as a criminal who deserved to be in jail.
And fourth, a willingness to violate civil liberties,
particularly those of the press, and this is something Trump did, saying he
would like to revisit libel laws to punish media outlets or journalists who
were unfriendly.
Would you argue he’s an authoritarian president?
Trump has said much more than he has done, and he’s thrown
many more punches than he’s landed. Our democracy’s record in the first year of
the Trump presidency was pretty good.
The title of your book implies that U.S. democracy is in a
fight for survival.
I wouldn’t go that far. We think it’s a mistake to take it
for granted that democracy will survive, because any democracy can break down.
What cases of democratic failures do you think Americans
should keep in mind?
No democracy in the history of the world, as old as ours or
as wealthy as ours, has ever broken down. The best comparison is Chile. It had
a pretty well-established set of democratic norms, and then in the 1960s and
early ’70s, polarization ripped apart the parties and began to erode those
democratic norms, eventually leading to a military coup in 1973.
We are not predicting a coup in the United States, and our
parties are not as polarized as Chile’s were.
But our political parties have now reached a level of mutual
fear and loathing that has not been seen since the end of Reconstruction. That
usually has the effect of eroding democratic norms. Those are warning signs.
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