How Trump Could Further Erode Democracy During Impeachment
How Trump Could Further Erode Democracy During Impeachment
Elsewhere in the world, similar patterns of polarization and reprisal have ultimately led to the collapse of democracies. In the bracing book “How Democracies Die,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who are professors of government at Harvard, trace many of the worrisome patterns of the Trump Presidency and outline the ratcheting of consequences that has ultimately led to failures of democracies in other countries:
The erosion of mutual toleration may motivate politicians to deploy their institutional powers as broadly as they can get away with. When parties view one another as mortal 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. When the perceived cost of losing is sufficiently high, politicians will be tempted to abandon forbearance. Acts of constitutional hardball may then in turn further undermine mutual toleration, reinforcing beliefs that our rivals pose a dangerous threat. The result is politics without guardrails. . . .
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A central challenge is that Trump and his allies in the right-wing media have proved extraordinarily skilled at distorting the narrative, casting his opponents as “crooked” and “corrupt.” In this narrative, impeachment is not a measure to defend the Republic but a plot to thwart the will of the people and overthrow a democratically elected President. Trump’s lies and obfuscation, coupled with the level of polarization in the country today, give him the ability to inflict long-term damage on American democracy as impeachment unfolds.
In the past, Trump has sought to sow suspicion—unmoored from facts—of alleged voter fraud in the 2016 election and of a “deep state” pitted against him, along with countless other wild conspiracies. Now the stakes will be even greater, as he hammers away at impeachment as an unlawful and partisan “scam.” The danger for democracy depends on the degree to which this notion takes hold with even a minority of Americans, and on the manner in which, going forward, Republican leaders incorporate this belief into their political playbook. On Sunday, the President escalated matters, tweeting an embellished quote from a Fox News interview with an evangelical pastor: “If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-trump-could-further-erode-democracy-during-impeachment
