How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

Trump and people like him (xenophobic, shortsighted, anti-science etc.) have gained political successes all over the world (with catastrophic consequences). I’ve been toying with the question of why for quite some time. This book answers it, at least in part. It also explains decades and decades of political instability in Thailand at institutional level.

Significance of political parties

Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers. However, an over-reliance on gatekeeping is, in itself, undemocratic—it can create a world of party bosses who ignore the rank and file and fail to represent the people. But an over-reliance on the “will of the people” can also be dangerous, for it can lead to the election of a demagogue.

The Great Republican Abdication

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 key junctures: the “invisible primary,” the primaries themselves, and the general election

A “candidate with qualities uniquely tailored to the digital age,” Trump attracted free mainstream coverage by creating controversy. By one estimate, the Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC—four outlets that no one could accuse of proTrump leanings—mentioned Trump twice as often as his general election rival, Hillary Clinton. According to another study, Trump enjoyed up to $2 billion in free media coverage during the primary season.

Trump fits the bill of authoritarians

The first sign is a weak commitment to the democratic rules of the game. Trump met this measure when he questioned the legitimacy of the electoral process and made the unprecedented suggestion that he might not accept the results of the 2016 election

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 security or the existing way of life.

The third criterion is toleration or encouragement of violence.

The final warning sign is a readiness to curtail the civil liberties of rivals and critics. One thing that separates contemporary autocrats from democratic leaders is their intolerance of criticism, and their readiness to use their power to punish those—in the opposition, media, or civil society—who criticize them.

Democracies work best—and survive longer —where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms.

The Guardrails of Democracy

Mutual toleration refers to the idea that as long as our rivals play by constitutional rules, we accept that they have an equal right to exist, compete for power, and govern. We may disagree with, and even strongly dislike, our rivals, but we nevertheless accept them as legitimate. This means recognizing that our political rivals are decent, patriotic, law-abiding citizens—that they love our country and respect the Constitution just as we do. It means that even if we believe our opponents’ ideas to be foolish or wrong-headed, we do not view them as an existential threat. Nor do we treat them as treasonous, subversive, or otherwise beyond the pale. We may shed tears on election night when the other side wins, but we do not consider such an event apocalyptic. If we see political opponents as enemies, the stakes of political competition heighten dramatically. Losing ceases to be a routine and accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a full-blown catastrophe. Put another way, mutual toleration is politicians’ collective willingness to agree to disagree.

The post Revolutionary generation grew accustomed to the idea that one sometimes wins and sometimes loses in politics—and that rivals need not be enemies.

I quite like this passage. It explains decades of Thai political instability as what was described in the passage is definitely not happening in Thailand.

Think different.

Think of democracy as a game that we want to keep playing indefinitely. To ensure future rounds of the game, players must refrain from either incapacitating the other team or antagonizing them to such a degree, that they refuse to play again tomorrow. If one’s rivals quit, there can be no future games. This means that although individuals play to win, they must do so with a degree of restraint.

Interesting idea that doesn’t catch on in Thailand where we focus on writing and rewriting rules of the game (constitution) but overlook the unwritten rules.

Gingrich transformed American politics from one in which people presume the good will of their opponents, even as they disagreed, into one in which people treated the people with whom they disagreed as bad and immoral. This is exactly what has happened in Thailand.

Courtesy and Reciprocity

Courtesy meant, first and foremost, avoiding personal or embarrassing attacks on fellow senators. The cardinal rule, Matthews observed, was for senators to not let “political disagreements influence personal feelings.” Your enemies on one issue may be your friends on the next. In the words of another senator, political self-preservation “dictates at least a semblance of friendship. And then before you know it, you really are friends.”

Norms of reciprocity entailed restraint in the use of one’s power so as not to overly antagonize other senators and endanger future cooperation.

Political norm and Race

The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion. The stability of the period between the end of Reconstruction and the 1980s was rooted in an original sin: the Compromise of 1877 and its aftermath, which permitted the de-democratization of the South and the consolidation of Jim Crow. Southern Democrats’ ideological proximity to conservative Republicans reduced polarization and facilitated bipartisanship. But it did so at the great cost of keeping civil rights—and America’s full democratization— off the political agenda.

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 was likely to view the other as an existential threat.

Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the United States. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction.

Potential causes of polarization

As the political scientist Alan Abramowitz points out, in the 1950s, married white Christians were the overwhelming majority—nearly 80 percent—of American voters, divided more or less equally between the two parties. By the 2000s, married white Christians constituted barely 40 percent of the electorate, and they were now concentrated in the Republican Party. In other words, the two parties are now divided over race and religion—two deeply polarizing issues that tend to generate greater intolerance and hostility than traditional policy issues such as taxes and government spending. By the 2000s, then, Democratic and Republican voters, and the politicians representing them, were more divided than at any point in the previous century.

Nepotism

Existing legislation, which prohibits presidents from appointing family members to the cabinet or agency positions, does not include White House staff positions. So Trump’s appointment of his daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to high-level advisory posts was technically legal—but it flouted the spirit of the law.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former social scientist, made an incisive observation: Humans have a limited ability to cope with people behaving in ways that depart from shared standards. When unwritten rules are violated over and over, Moynihan observed, societies have a tendency to “define deviancy down”—to shift the standard. What was once seen as abnormal becomes normal.

Would this apply to numerous coup in Thailand? People get numb and feel that this is the way????

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 experienced political catastrophe before, when regional and partisan enmities so divided the nation that it collapsed into civil war. Our constitutional system recovered, and Republican and Democratic leaders developed new norms and practices that would undergird more than a century of political stability. But that stability came at the price of racial exclusion and authoritarian single party rule in the South. It was only after 1965 that the United States fully democratized. And, paradoxically, that very process began a fundamental realignment of the American electorate that has once again left our parties deeply polarized.

This paragraph is very eloquent and I can’t help but draw parallel of Thai political situation. Truly democratic or so-called people constitution in Thailand paved the way to sharp polarization and today paralysed politics.

Political activists can learn a thing or two from the following passage.

Opposition to the Trump administration’s authoritarian behavior should be muscular, but it should seek to preserve, rather than violate, democratic rules and norms. Where possible, opposition should center on Congress, the courts, and, of course, elections. If Trump is defeated via democratic institutions, it will strengthen those institutions.

Public protest is a basic right and an important activity in any democracy, but its aim should be the defense of rights and institutions, rather than their disruption. In an important study of the effects of black protest in the 1960s, political scientist Omar Wasow found that black-led nonviolent protest fortified the national civil rights agenda in Washington and broadened public support for that agenda.

Coalitions of the like-minded are important, but they are not enough to defend democracy. An effective coalition in defense of American democracy, then, would likely require that progressives forge alliances with business executives, religious (and particularly white evangelical) leaders, and red-state Republicans. Business leaders may not be natural allies of Democratic activists, but they have good reasons to oppose an unstable and rule-breaking administration.

We must lengthen our time horizons, swallow hard, and make tough concessions. This does not mean abandoning the causes that matter to us. It means temporarily overlooking disagreements in order to find common moral ground. When we agree with our political rivals at least some of the time, we are less likely to view them as mortal enemies.

Thinking about how to resist the Trump administration’s abuses is clearly important. However, the fundamental problem facing American democracy remains extreme partisan division—one fueled not just by policy differences but by deeper sources of resentment, including racial and religious differences.

What is democracy?

Democracy is grinding work. Whereas family businesses and army squadrons may be ruled by fiat, democracies require negotiation, compromise, and concessions. Setbacks are inevitable, victories always partial. Presidential initiatives may die in congress or be blocked by the courts. All politicians are frustrated by these constraints, but democratic ones know they must accept them. They are able to weather the constant barrage of criticism. But for outsiders, particularly those of a demagogic bent, democratic politics is often intolerably frustrating. For them, checks and balances feel like a straitjacket.

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 question “What is democracy?” His answer was unassuming but inspiring. He wrote: 

Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the “don’t” in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is. 

The egalitarianism, civility, sense of freedom, and shared purpose portrayed by E. B. White were the essence of mid-twentieth-century American democracy.