The Republican Party Cannot be Saved
A Review of How Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Stephen Levitsky
“What is a Constitution anyway?…. The people can abolish a Constitution if they want to,”
~George Wallace
The events that transpired at the Capitol on January 6 inspired me to read a book that had been gathering dust on my nightstand ever since I purchased it at the Bloomsbury used bookstore on the way back from a study session at the British Library. The book is How Democracies Die written by two acclaimed political scientists and historians of democratic breakdown. The main takeaway from the book is that once an authoritarian demagogue begins his assault on institutions and the broader authorizing environment, it is not the demagogue’s most natural adversaries who save democracy. Rather, it is conservative, often elite-driven movements who recognize the inherent danger of the would-be authoritarian’s assault on institutions and is willing to make strange bedfellows with liberals to preserve those institutions and enhance norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance.
This awkward alliance can never be executed perfectly. After all, there is quite a lot Mitt Romney and Bernie Sanders disagree about. But when leadership attempts this grand bargain it has the effect of filling the void caused by the erosion of norms that authoritarian demagogues would otherwise exploit.
The authors of this important book offer a practical suggestion based on decades of historical evidence in comparative politics for the American predicament—to court the small but critical group of Never Trumpers and set aside the salient disagreements progressives may have with them on issues ranging from immigration to tax policy to preserve those norms vital to sustaining the Republic. To drive home this point, they rebut the notion popularized by writer David Faris that democrats ought to “fight dirty”, embracing the tactics of Republican obstructionists.
They write that becoming anti-democratic in an equal and opposite direction would play into the hands of the demagogues themselves, feeding the monster they ostensibly seek to slay. Indeed, in an atmosphere of extreme polarization, such as that which prevailed in Chile in the 1970’s with the election of the socialist Salvador Allende, the left flank’s insistence that the leader must dissolve democratic norms in the face of increasingly intransient efforts from the opposition to obstruct their agenda and censure socialist ministers set democracy on a death spiral. When these dynamics were set in motion, even the Chilean leader’s refusal to cave into the left flank and sustained commitment to democratic norms could not avert democratic backsliding.
I am not entirely convinced. There has been a devolution of the Republican Party to the point that the party of Eisenhower transformed into Nixon which then gave way to the birth of populism in Reagan, the tragedy of the second Bush administration, and the culmination of the populist drift during the Trump moment. Even that framing of what has happened to America’s great conservative party is likely too generous. The devolution facilitated by purity spirals—a value moral foundations theory proposes as especially salient for conservatives, is ongoing and therefore can neither be characterized as a “culmination” or a “moment”. As the authors grimly warn, “If partisan rifts deepen and our unwritten rules continue to fray, Americans could eventually elect a President who is even more dangerous than Trump.”
In spite of this devolution, which is readily apparent to anybody paying attention regardless of partisan affiliation, many Trump skeptic Republican voters—represented by the two Georgia election officials Trump would later deride as RINO’s—continued to cast their ballots for Trump. This happened even though both Clinton and Biden campaigns conducted active outreach efforts to reach across the aisle on the basis of competence and sanity.
The authors seem to be arguing that the number of people on the right who can be persuaded in the virtues of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance is a group that is sizable enough to make a difference in coalitional politics. It may be the case that many political elites will be tried by fire as the party continues to drift from sanity. Raffensperger and Gabe Sterling may have finally learned their lesson when they received death threats. But up until that point, they did not believe Trump was an existential threat, instead preferring to believe that he could be an effective vehicle to achieve their policy priorities.
This is important. The only way to ensure that the next iteration of the GOP’s devolution is not elected to public office, is to make sure educated Republicans, people like Raffensperger who know better, do not support them. That candidate may be Tommy Tuberville, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Donald Trump himself emboldened by a party that protected and enabled him to seek a second term.
The alternative to these critical Republicans accepting reasonable guardrails that sideline those who are operationally extreme and conspiratorial is to expel the GOP through rhetorical warfare former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, championed and set us on the current escape velocity trajectory toward peak polarization. The advantage of instilling this kind of message discipline among Democrats is that his buzzwords, such as pathetic, sick, anti-American, bizarre, and traitor, would have the advantage of being true. This fact is difficult to deny when the most that can be hoped for from Republican officials following the surreal attack on the U.S. Capitol driven by the President’s election lies is tepid criticism of the seditionists.
The experience of both post-war Germany and Pinochet’s regime in Chile suggests that a society can only banish political extremism following trauma so great that is both unwise and immoral to recommend it explicitly as a strategy. So what I am doing here is not a prescriptive argument but merely a positive statement about what I believe to be true. The Republican Party has reached the point of escape velocity polarization such that it is beyond saving. The Reformicon and Never Trump sects of the conservative movement are simply too small and irrelevant to make a difference coalitionally. Other more important players in the GOP donor class are both untethered from the populist base and from any semblance of a governing agenda with even minimal popular support. When that trajectory causes it to make a permanent break from terrestrial reality, a new home will have to be built for psychological conservatives.
The story of reconciliation with the Nazi past to form the Christian Democratic Union as a bulwark against the brand of racial resentment politics that the Nazis supercharged to the sadistic apex during WWII is an enlightening if imperfect lesson. It bears remembering that the current leader of the CDU is Prime Minister Angela Merkel. During their meetings at G-20 summits and fortifying the Atlantic security alliance, Merkel identified President Obama as a kindred spirit to the point that their friendship was routinely parodied on SNL. Temperamentally and ideologically, President Obama, a figure many Republican activists absurdly portrayed as a sinister Marxist, may share the center-right space of German politics with Merkel. Evoking this comparison clarifies the scope of the challenge that currently confronts American politics. Gradually, the U.S. must recalibrate its political system so as to expel the radicals currently leading the Republican Party from relevance and give psychological conservatives an option to vote for candidates like Obama who believe they can inspire to revive the American spirit of achievement but are also completely devoid of the fiery radicalism to remake the American economy and society offered by progressive alternatives.
America may already be on course for this political realignment as demographic upheaval continues apace. California offers a model. Republican extremists remain (and in fact have been further radicalized), but they have been prevented from having influence over the agenda. As a result, psychological conservatives vote for moderates and psychological liberals vote for progressive candidates in statewide offices, both subsumed within the Democratic Party. In spite of the numerous challenges that continue to plague California’s governance, a state that was previously ungovernable can now be considered a limited success story. The upshot is that national politics may very well break the fever dream of the Gingrich-McConnell-Trump era without the national trauma and mass bloodletting that enabled other countries in other times to overcome their bouts of anti-system politics through after the fact reconciliation.