Goodbye Democracy?

America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse.

Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we’re lucky, it won’t be violent. If we’re very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system. If we’re less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen.

From a prescient article from October 8, 2015 entitled "American democracy is doomed" by pundit by Matthew Yglesias.

In a nutshell Yglesias argues that:

1. Democracies with strong Presidents have a natural tendency to slip into dictatorships, which is why post-WWII democracies in Europe avoided them, to a great extent, because these systems are prone to unresolved gridlock, since "within a presidential system, gridlock leads to a constitutional trainwreck with no resolution."

He offers the politics of Honduras in 2009, when gridlock and litigation between the President and Congress over constitutional reforms there led to a coup, when the option to use a ballot issue not constitutionally provided for to resolve the dispute is ruled out by their Supreme Court.

2. The U.S. has returned to a historical norm of strong partisan polarization driven by racial issues involving divisions over principles rather than spoils, money, and jobs, much like it was on the eve of the U.S. Civil War that reflects genuine partisan divisions at the grass roots.

3. The U.S. is seeing a rise of "constitutional hardball" tactics that while they are not strictly speaking, violate strong political norms. He sees this as having a structural cause. Politicians and the grass roots are increasingly ideological and elected officials are insistent of carrying out their party's will as much as possible, and principle based politics leaves less room for compromise. In particular, this makes the stakes in Presidential elections very high because the President can have an edge in tipping the balance during periods of gridlock.

He concludes as follows:

The idea that America’s constitutional system might be fundamentally flawed cuts deeply against the grain of our political culture. But the reality is that despite its durability, it has rarely functioned well by the standards of a modern democracy. The party system of the Gilded Age operated through systematic corruption. The less polarized era that followed was built on the systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans. The newer system of more ideological politics has solved those problems and seems in many ways more attractive. But over the past 25 years, it’s set America on a course of paralysis and crisis — government shutdowns, impeachment, debt ceiling crises, and constitutional hardball. Voters, understandably, are increasingly dissatisfied with the results and confidence in American institutions has been generally low and falling. But rather than leading to change, the dissatisfaction has tended to yield wild electoral swings that exacerbate the sense of permanent crisis. . . . 

As dysfunctional as American government may seem today, we’ve actually been lucky. No other presidential system has gone as long as ours without a major breakdown of the constitutional order. But the factors underlying that stability — first non-ideological parties and then non-disciplined ones — are gone. And it’s worth considering the possibility that with them, so too has gone the American exception to the rule of presidential breakdown. If we seem to be unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis, it’s because we are unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis. The breakdown may not be next year or even in the next five years, but over the next 20 or 30 years, will we really be able to resolve every one of these high-stakes showdowns without making any major mistakes? Do you really trust Congress that much?

Trump has already run us through multiple constitutional crises, and there are surely more to come.

Scott Sumner's February 17, 2025 blog piece entitled "A simple model of authoritarian nationalism" references the earlier article by Yglesias and riffs further on it.

Sumner focuses on efforts by Trump and other authoritarian nationalists, such as Victor Orban in Hungary, Putin, and even to some extent FDR, to different degrees as he doesn't see it as an all or nothing matter, to "systematically eliminate any aspect of the . . . government that might potentially check his power, or expose corruption." He also argues for looking a foreign and historical examples because Americans are so close to it that it is hard for them to see what is going on. He explains that:

Authoritarianism has such a bad connotation that its supporters generally justify it as a necessary evil to fight a deeper form of authoritarianism, the stranglehold on power of the so-called deep state. Trump’s fans implicitly buy into a sort of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington framing. Ordinary democracy is a cesspool of corruption, and we need an honest outsider to come in and shake things up, someone like Elon Musk. Move fast and break things. But Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a myth, not reality. Washington cannot be fixed by sending authoritarian leaders there to shake things up, just as the French chaos of 1795 was not fixed by sending in Napoleon. The only way to fix Washington is to make our culture more rational, more honest, and less selfish.

The common thread in most authoritarian nationalists is an unwillingness to be constrained by rules. Thus Trump refuses to adhere to international trade agreements such as Nafta. Of course a president has a legitimate right to renegotiate a trade agreement that he believes is not in the national interest. But even after negotiating a new version of Nafta, a version that he insisted was a great treaty, Trump still refuses to adhere to its provisions.

To achieve the sort of lawless society envisioned by hardcore nationalists, you need to weaken your opponents, strengthen your supporters, and co-opt anyone who can be bribed or intimidated. . . . 

This post was easy to write—any rational person can see what’s going on. To his credit, Matt Yglesias predicted the coming authoritarianism way back in 2015, even before Trump appeared on the scene. His entire Vox article is worth reading, but this paragraph caught my eye:

Those who like these actions on their merits comfort themselves with the thought that these uses of executive power are pretty clearly allowed by the terms of the existing laws. This is true as far as it goes. But it’s also the case that Obama (or some future president) could have his political opponents murdered on the streets of Washington and then issue pardons to the perpetrators. This would be considerably more legal than a Zelaya-style effort to use a plebiscite to circumvent congressional obstruction — just a lot more morally outrageous. In either case, however, the practical issue would be not so much what is legal, but what people, including the people with guns, would actually tolerate.

Replace “political opponents murdered on the streets of Washington” with “send a violent mob to the Capitol to try to intimidate Congress into overturning a presidential election”, and you’ve described what happened 6 years after Yglesias used that seemingly “far-fetched” example, including the pardons. And I doubt that even Yglesias expected the assassination hypothetical to be discussed in the Supreme Court just a few years later.

In the end, our Constitution won’t protect us, there are too many loopholes. What matters is how much authoritarian nationalism the public is willing to stomach. I’m an optimist by nature and still expect Trump’s project to fail. My bigger concern is that the trajectory that Yglesias so presciently described in 2015 is likely to continue for many more years. Future presidents will become even more authoritarian that Trump.

To summarize, here’s how I think about the authoritarian nationalist’s credo:

* We don’t need no stinking election monitors. We decide who won the election.

* We don’t need no stinking trade rules. We set the rules.

* We don’t need no stinking refugees, except Afrikaners who’d vote MAGA.

* We don’t need no stinking international criminal court. We decide what’s torture.

* We don’t need no stinking Nato.

* We don’t need no stinking IRS audits of our supporters.

* We don’t need no stinking press critics.

* We don’t need no stinking United Nations

* We don’t need no stinking federal court oversight

* We don’t need no stinking European Union rules

* We’ll do whatever the hell we want to, and who’s going to stop us?

I hope it doesn’t take another global war for the world to come to its senses.

The state of the nation in the early days of the second Trump administration certainly send chills down my spine. 

The Economist democracy index defines four degrees by which democracy may be present in a country:

• Full democracies are countries where civil liberties and fundamental political freedoms are not only respected but also reinforced by a political culture conducive to the thriving of democratic principles. These nations have a valid system of governmental checks and balances, an independent judiciary whose decisions are enforced, governments that function adequately, and diverse and independent media. These nations have only limited problems in democratic functioning.
• Flawed democracies are countries where elections are fair and free and basic civil liberties are honoured but may have issues (e.g. media freedom infringement and minor suppression of political opposition and critics). These countries can have significant faults in other democratic aspects, including underdeveloped political culture, low levels of participation in politics, and issues in the functioning of governance.
• Hybrid regimes are countries with regular electoral frauds, preventing them from being fair and free democracies. These countries commonly have governments that apply pressure on political opposition, non-independent judiciaries, widespread corruption, harassment and pressure placed on the media, anaemic rule of law, and more pronounced faults than flawed democracies in the realms of underdeveloped political culture, low levels of participation in politics, and issues in the functioning of governance.
• Authoritarian regimes are countries where political pluralism is nonexistent or severely limited. These nations are often absolute monarchies or dictatorships, may have some conventional institutions of democracy but with meagre significance, infringements and abuses of civil liberties are commonplace, elections (if they take place) are not fair or free (including sham elections), the media is often state-owned or controlled by groups associated with the ruling regime, the judiciary is not independent, and censorship and suppression of governmental criticism are commonplace.

The U.S. may still be a democracy, but any fair minded observer would have to downgrade us, at least, to a flawed democracy (the U.S. is currently rated by the Economist at the high end of the flawed democracy range and will probably fall to at least the low end of it in the next round of evaluation), and is on the path to being even worse, at this point. The next level is where Mexico, Peru, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Kazakhstan sit, and we could be there soon.

We may not plummet all of the way to the full on authoritarian regimes of Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, North Korea, and Afghanistan just yet. 

But we have lots of room to fall further, and it is increasingly plausible that we will. We are in the worst case scenario, and if the rearguard action to protect democracy and the rule of law doesn't prevail now, it can only get worse.