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3 Democracy Is Deconsolidating

THE 1960S AND EARLY 1970S shattered many Americans’ trust in the po lit i cal class. The turbulence wrought by the student movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate started to call into doubt what had long seemed an unshakable faith. When it was becoming in creasingly clear that Richard Nixon would have to resign from of fice in disgrace, cultural critics proclaimed a severe crisis of con fidence in American democracy. “The revelations of presidential duplicity and paranoia,” David Runciman recently wrote about that time, “seemed to be stripping democracy bare, exposing some thing rotten underneath.”1

It’s hardly a coincidence that it was in this same year that Gallup first bothered to ask a question to which the answer would have seemed obvious a few years earlier: Did Americans trust the “men and women in po lit i cal life . . . who either hold or are running for public of ce?” But the picture the poll revealed was remarkably rosy. Even in 1974, amid all that scandal, a clear majority of Amer icans retained con fi dence in people holding of ce.2

In the de cades since then, by contrast, the number of Americans who trust their politicians has rapidly shrunk. Today, a clear ma jority of Americans say that they distrust people in public life.3

100 The Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Trust in institutions is just as low. In June 2014, for example, only 30 percent of Americans reported having con fi dence in the Supreme Court. Twenty nine percent expressed con fi dence in the presidency. Approval ratings for the legislative branch were even more dismal: in the early 1970s, over 40 percent of Americans had expressed con fi dence in Congress; by 2014, that fig ure had fallen to 7 percent.4

Given these stratospheric levels of dissatisfaction with the po lit i cal system, it is perhaps unsurprising that many young Americans simply don’t want to bother with politics. Even so, it is striking just how rapidly interest in politics has dwindled. While Americans born in the 1930s or 1940s are overwhelmingly likely to say that they take an active interest in politics, less than half of young Amer icans do.5

Similar trends are visible in many longstanding democracies across the world. In much of Europe, for example, citizens are less likely now than a few de cades ago to believe that their elected rep resentatives prioritize the interests of the general public.6 They par tic i pate less in formal po lit i cal institutions than they used to.7 And like their American counterparts, young Europeans are much less interested in politics than their elders.8

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This discontent is also expressing itself in unforgiving assess ments of particular governments. In June 2005, the approval rating for Jacques Chirac fell to a rec ord low. Only one in four French voters said that he was doing a good job, the lowest level the poll ster TNS Sofres had rec orded since it started to look at presidential approval ratings in 1979.9 Half a de cade later, Chirac could take some comfort in the fate of his successor. Nicolas Sarkozy had come to the presidency offering the French a different leadership style and a brighter future. But as he failed to deliver on his prom ises, the voters’ judgment was even more unsparing. By April 2011, no more than one in five voters approved of Sarkozy’s job perfor mance.10 Another half de cade later, it was Sarkozy who could take some comfort in the dismal fate of his successor. François Hollande swept to of ce on a wave of discontent. Then he became so dis liked by so many that he didn’t even seek reelection. By November 2016, only one in twenty voters approved of the job he was doing.11 When Emmanuel Macron was elected to the presidency in May 2017, pulverizing the existing po lit i cal system and enjoying tre mendous popularity, ev ery thing seemed to change. But by the end

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Approval Ratings of French Presidents

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102 The Crisis of Liberal Democracy

of that same summer, his popularity stood at 37 percent, the most precipitous decline of all.12

Across North America and Western Europe, in short, citizens trust politicians less than they used to. They are losing con fi dence in democratic institutions. And they take an increasingly negative view of their governments. All of this is worrying. But perhaps the most striking sign of the times is some thing rather less tangible: while politicians have always had to bear the public’s displea sure, the intensity of the mistrust, hatred, and intimidation they now en counter on a daily basis is unprecedented. Even veteran politicians are taken aback by the vitriol they face. After I gave a talk at a gathering of state legislators a few months ago, a se nior Republican—a staunch conservative who has helped pass highly controversial reforms in his state—came up to me. Over the years, he said, he has slowly seen his con stit u ents grow more angry and mistrustful. He has gotten used to the sour mood. And he has even started to accept that, when a rival offers a one sentence solution to a complex policy question and he offers a three sentence retort, most voters assume it is he who’s pulling wool over their eyes. But though this legislator was hardly a naive newbie, a recent encounter had left him shaken. He had, he told me, gotten into politics thanks to his sixth grade teacher, a woman who’d been his mentor since he was twelve years old, and who now knew him bet ter than just about anybody outside his family. “Why are you lying to us?” this woman demanded when she called him on the phone a few days before we talked. “What do you mean?” he asked. “They said it on the radio. They said you’re lying to us about this new bill.” He tried to explain that he hadn’t deviated from the conservative principles they share but merely delayed a vote for tactical reasons. “You know me,” he told her. “Won’t you let me explain what’s go ing on?”

Democracy Is Deconsolidating 103

But his teacher would hear none of it. “I don’t know,” she said. “They’re saying on the radio that you are lying to us. I’m really disappointed in you.”13

Po lit i cal scientists have long been aware that trust in democratic institutions has declined; that appraisals of politicians have turned negative; and that approval ratings for of ce holders and institu tions have been falling. But until recently, they mostly waved these facts away. For many years, leading scholars like Ronald Inglehart, Pippa Norris, and Russell J. Dalton tried their best to see the light amid the darkness. Perhaps, they suggested, earlier generations of citi zens were simply too tame and credulous? Could the disillusion of today’s voters not be interpreted as a sign of ma tu ri ty rather than a portent of instability? As Lynn Vavreck argued as late as the sum mer of 2015, “some of the recent decline [in trust] may have less to do with how the government has disappointed people and more to do with an increasing knowledge of how the government works.” While she admitted that it is “of some concern that trust in govern ment is objectively low,” she ultimately put this trend down to “a steady march away from government opaqueness—a longstanding American tradition dating to the candid submission of grievances outlined in the Declaration of In de pen dence.”14

One common way of making the case for optimism was to distin guish between “government legitimacy” and “regime legitimacy.”15 Government legitimacy, these scholars admitted, had declined: citi zens have become much more willing to challenge their current rul ers. But regime legitimacy, they insisted, had remained stable: citi zens, they argue, are no more critical of the basic po lit i cal system than they were in the past. This is an appealing story. But over recent years, it has started to look less and less plausible. For one, it is dif cult to imagine that ordinary people might turn against particular governments so radi

104 The Crisis of Liberal Democracy

cally—and take such a dim view of the day to day functioning of their institutions—without becoming more critical of the system it self. For another, the evidence that democracy is under attack just keeps piling up. In Western Europe, parties that systematically assail core demo cratic norms keep rising in the polls. Across the world, from Egypt to Thailand, fledgling experiments with democracy have been crushed and existing democracies degenerated into dictatorship. For the first time in de cades, Freedom House—which mea sures the extent of democratic government across the world—has rec orded more countries taking steps away from democracy than tak ing steps toward it. In the words of Larry Diamond, a “democratic recession” is now underway.16

It is therefore high time to develop an empirical way to test the assumptions on which optimists have relied for so long. Is regime legitimacy still as high in North America and Western Europe as it once was? What would it look like if supposedly consolidated de mocracies were starting to deconsolidate? And at what point would we have reason to conclude that democracy is no longer the only game in town?

At least three things, I’d like to suggest, would have to be true for us to think that democracy is still the only game in town—and, by implication, that it is still as safe as most po lit i cal scientists as sume:

• Most citizens would have to be strongly committed to lib eral democracy.

• Most citizens would have to reject authoritarian alterna tives to democracy.

• Po lit i cal parties and movements with real power would have to agree on the importance of basic democratic rules and norms.

Democracy Is Deconsolidating 105

Is this still the case? There are many different ways of find ing an answer to this ques tion. Looking at opinion polls is only one of them. And yet, survey research is a very helpful tool for getting at a first answer. If the best available data showed that many citizens are critical not only of particular governments but also of democracy itself, this would lend real credence to the fear that democracy is no longer the only game in town. So, together with my colleague Roberto Stefan Foa, I set out to examine the level of support for democratic institutions by looking at the World Values Survey, the largest cross national sample of public attitudes on ev ery thing from politics to social issues. What we found shocked us: across North America and Western Europe, citizens really are turning away from democracy in large numbers.

Citizens Are Falling Out of Love with Democracy

One straightforward way to get a sense for how attached citizens are to their po lit i cal system is to ask them how im por tant it is to

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Share of US respondents who believe it is “essential” to live in a democ racy, by de cade of birth.

106 The Crisis of Liberal Democracy

them to live in a democracy. If citizens are deeply committed to de mocracy, they should find it unacceptable to live in a dictatorship. Conversely, if they don’t ascribe any real importance to living in a democracy, then the system’s defenses look rather weak.17

Most older people do seem to have such a fervent attachment to democracy. Asked on a scale of one to ten how im por tant it is to them to live in a democracy, about two thirds of Americans born in the 1930s or 1940s give the highest response: they consider it es sential. But most youn ger people are far less invested in their po litical system. Among American millennials, born since 1980, less than one third consider it essential to live in a democracy.18

Outside the United States, the picture is a little more com pli cated. In some countries that have a recent his tory of authoritarian rule, young people are not sig nifi cantly less invested in living in a democracy than older ones.19 But in most longstanding democra cies, especially in the Eng lish speaking world, millennials are simi larly disillusioned. Just as young people are less invested in their regime form in the United States, so too young people give less im

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Democracy Is Deconsolidating 107

portance to living in a democracy from Sweden to Australia and from Great Britain to the Netherlands. It is one thing for citizens to be indifferent toward living in a de mocracy, critics have pointed out, but quite another for them to reject democracy as a po lit i cal system.20 So would citizens go so far as to say that democracy is a “bad” or “very bad” way of running their country? Sadly, the answer is yes. In the United States, for example, close to one in four millennials now think that democracy is a bad way of running the country—an increase of over 100 percent compared to the oldest cohorts in the sample. The global picture is once again similar: disappointment with de mocracy has also increased in Great Britain and the Netherlands, in Sweden and New Zealand. Indeed, even young people in countries that are often portrayed as especially resistant to the current crisis of liberal democracy—like Canada, Germany, and Sweden—are much more critical of democracy than their parents or grandparents.21

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108 The Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Citizens Are Increasingly Open to Authoritarian Alternatives

All in all, it is painfully clear that citizens have more critical views of democracy than they used to and that young people are espe cially likely to give less importance to living in a democracy. This is evidently worrying. But it may also re flect a lack of alternatives. Perhaps citizens are less sanguine about their system of government without thereby becoming more open to alternatives? To test this hypothesis, we set out to look at explicit support for more authoritarian modes of governance. At first, we were a little skeptical how fruitful this undertaking would be. In a democracy, there is a strong taboo against saying that you favor abolishing elections or having the military take over the government. Even if many people did secretly wish for an alternative to democracy, it’s not obvious that a larger number would ac tually be willing to look a stranger in the eye and admit to their antidemocratic sentiments. And yet, we soon discovered, that is just what they did.

One way to assess the extent of openness to authoritarian alter natives is to ask whether respondents think that having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections would be a good system of government. This isn’t asking people whether they want to abolish democracy outright. And yet, it clearly cap tures openness to a system that would, in crucial respects, be deeply antidemocratic: a strong leader who is unencumbered by elections and doesn’t need the support of the legislature would, to all intents and purposes, be a dictator by another name. So, have Americans become more open to a strongman leader? Yes. In fact, not only are young Americans much more likely to favor a strongman leader than their elders, Americans of all ages are more in favor of a strongman leader now than they were twenty years ago.

Democracy Is Deconsolidating 109

In 1995, 34 percent of young Americans aged 18–24 felt that a po lit i cal system with a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress or elections was either good or very good. By 2011, 44 percent of young Americans felt the same way. The story among Americans of all age groups is similar: whereas 24 percent of all Americans endorsed a strongman leader in 1995, 32 percent do so today. Surprised by the number of people who favored a strongman leader, we wanted to find out how many voters were willing to en dorse an even more radical alternative to liberal democracy. Would a sig nifi cant share of Americans be willing to say that they support an outright military dictatorship? The good news is that the number of people who say that army rule is a good way to run America is indeed smaller than the num ber of people who hanker after a strongman who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections. The bad news is that it is rising rapidly. In 1995, about one in sixteen Americans said that they favored army rule, a markedly lower number than had been rec orded in countries that ac tually experienced military coups. But over the past two de cades, that number has increased steadily. By the time the question was last asked, in 2011, over twice as many—one in six—favored military rule. This means that the number of people who support army rule is now about as high in the United States as it is in countries with such turbulent histories of civil military rela tions as Algeria (where 17 percent favored military rule in 2013) or Yemen (where 20 percent favored it). Remarkably, support for military rule has grown even in seg ments of the population that once rejected it with one voice. Back in 1995, wealthy Americans were markedly less likely than poorer ones to favor military rule. Now, they are more likely to do so. The speed of this transformation be comes clear when we look at sup port for military rule among young, rich Americans. Twenty years

110 The Crisis of Liberal Democracy

ago, only 6 percent of this group favored military rule. Since then, their support for military rule has increased nearly sixfold, from 6 to 35 percent. Once again, this development is not exclusive to the United States. Looking beyond the American context, there are some coun tries in which support for army rule has ac tually fallen over the past de cades. But for the most part these are nations, like Chile, with a very recent experience of military dictatorship. By contrast, in the vast majority of countries for which we have data—including long standing democracies like Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, and especially India—the number of citizens who believe that it would be good to have the army rule increased markedly.

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Support for Army Rule in the United States

Share of US respondents who think that “having the army rule” is a “good” or “very good” po lit i cal system, by age group, 1995–2011.

Democracy Is Deconsolidating 111

We see a similar trend in the percentage of citizens who support a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections. Once again, there are some countries, including Sweden and Switzerland, in which this number has declined. But there are many more, from Germany to the United States, in which it has sig nifi cantly increased. Worryingly, more recent (and as yet unpub lished) data suggest that the trend has only accelerated since. In a 2017 poll, for example, the number of German voters who sup ported a strongman leader had doubled from 16 percent to 33 per cent; that of French voters had grown from 35 percent to 48 percent. In Britain, the find ing was even more stark: while only 25 percent had supported a strongman leader in 1999, 50 percent now do.

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Percent change, per year, in worldwide respondents who think that “hav ing the army rule” is a “good” or “very good” po lit i cal system.

112 The Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Eroding Respect for Democratic Norms

These survey results are evidently concerning. But to see whether or not democracy is still the only game in town, we have to look be yond the numbers. When democracy is stable, it is in good part be cause all major po lit i cal actors are willing to adhere to the basic rules of the democratic game most of the time. Some of these rules are formal: A president or prime minister al lows the judiciary to investigate wrongdoing by members of his government instead of firing the prosecutor. He puts up with criti cal coverage in the press instead of shutting down news papers or persecuting journalists. When he loses an election, he leaves of ce peacefully instead of clinging to power.

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Support for a Strongman Leader around the World

Percent change, per year, in worldwide respondents who think that “hav ing a strong po lit i cal leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections” is “good” or “very good.”

Democracy Is Deconsolidating 113

But many of these rules are informal, making it less clear cut when they are violated. The government does not rewrite electoral rules months before an election to maximize its chance of winning. Po lit i cal insurgents do not glorify authoritarian rulers of the past, threaten to lock up their opponents, or set out to violate the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. The losers of an election refrain from limiting the scope of an of ce to which an adversary has been elected in their last days on the job. The opposition con firms a competent judge whose ideology it dislikes rather than leaving a seat on the highest court in the land vacant, and strikes an imper fect compromise about the budget rather than letting the govern ment shut down. In short, politicians with a real stake in the system may think of politics as a contact sport in which all par tic i pants are hustling to gain an advantage over their adversaries. But they are also keenly aware that there need to be some limits on the pursuit of their par tisan interests; that winning an im por tant election or passing an urgent law is less im por tant than preserving the system; and that democratic politics must never degenerate into all out war. “For democracies to work,” Michael Ignatieff, the po lit i cal theo rist and former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, wrote a few years ago, “politicians need to respect the difference between an enemy and an adversary. An adversary is someone you want to de feat. An enemy is someone you have to destroy.”22

In the United States, and many other countries around the world, that is no longer how democratic politics works. As Ignatieff put the point, we are increasingly “seeing what happens when a politics of enemies supplants a politics of adversaries.”23 And the new crop of populists who have stormed the po lit i cal stage over the last de cades shoulder a lot of the blame for this.

The rise of po lit i cal newcomers is as likely to be a sign of demo cratic health and vitality as it is of impending sickness. Po lit i cal

114 The Crisis of Liberal Democracy

systems bene fit from a thorough competition of ideas and from a regular substitution of one ruling elite for another. New parties can help in both ways: By forcing long neglected issues onto the po lit i cal agenda, they increase the representativeness of the po lit i cal sys tem. And by catapulting a new crop of politicians into of ce, they inject the system with fresh blood. Even so, there is good reason to think that the recent thawing of the party system is far from benign. For many of the new parties do not just provide ideological alternatives within the democratic sys tem—they challenge key rules and norms of the system itself. One of the earliest populists to rise to prominence was Austria’s Jörg Haider, a slick, charismatic politician from Carinthia. After winning the leadership of Austria’s Freedom Party in 1986, Hai der quickly took the party to the far right. His stridently anti immigrant stance might be defended as put ting a topic largely neglected by mainstream po lit i cal parties onto the po lit i cal agenda to the evident delight of his voters. But the degree to which he was willing to un dermine core norms of liberal democracy became apparent when ever he engaged in a sly revaluation of Austria’s Nazi past. Speaking to an audience including many former SS of cers, Haider claimed that “our soldiers were not criminals; at most, they were victims.” Doubling down on his flirtation with the Third Reich, he saluted veterans of Adolf Hitler’s murderous Waffen SS by saying that “there are still decent people of good character who also stick to their convictions despite the greatest opposition.”24

Breaking po lit i cal norms is also a specialty of Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV). Islam, he has argued, is “a dangerous totalitarian ideology.”25 While other pop ulists have sought to outlaw minarets or burkinis, Wilders, deter mined not to be outdone, has gone so far as to demand a ban on the Koran. By comparison to Haider and Wilders, a fig ure like Beppe Grillo seems far more benign at first blush. Grillo first entered the po lit i cal

Democracy Is Deconsolidating 115

scene by railing against the—all too real—corruption of Silvio Ber lusconi in hilarious, expletive laden rants. When he founded the Five Star Movement (M5S), he promised to take power from a self serving and ge ri at ric “po lit i cal caste,” and to fight for a more mod ern and tolerant Italy.26

But once the movement gained in popularity, it quickly took on an antisystem hue. Its attacks on the corruption of individual poli ticians slowly morphed into a radical rejection of key aspects of the po lit i cal system, including parliament itself. Anger against the po lit i cal establishment was sustained by a growing willingness to en gage in conspiracy theories or to tell outright lies about po lit i cal opponents.27

The reason why populists and po lit i cal newcomers are so willing to challenge basic democratic norms is in part tactical: Whenever populists break such norms, they attract the univocal condemna tion of the po lit i cal establishment. And this of course proves that, as advertised, the populists really do represent a clean break from the sta tus quo. There is thus some thing performative about popu lists’ tendency to break democratic norms: while their most pro vocative statements are often considered gaffes by po lit i cal observ ers, their very willingness to commit such gaffes is a big part of their appeal. But their recklessness is no less dangerous for all of that: Once some members of the po lit i cal system are willing to break the rules, others have a big incentive to follow suit. And that, increasingly, is what they do.

Some of the most spectacular attacks on basic democratic norms have come from po lit i cal newcomers. But over the last years, the representatives of old, established parties have also become increas ingly willing to undermine the basic rules of the game. At times, this has simply been a response to the new competition from the populists. Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, had always ac

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knowledged the existence of manmade climate change when he was president of France. But, vying for far right voters when he was running for a second term in of ce in 2016, he radically changed tack: he now claimed that the “climate has been changing for four billion years . . . You need to be as arrogant as men are to believe we changed the climate.”28

Established parties on the left have at times been guilty of violat ing democratic norms as well. In the United States, Democrats have long engaged in unacceptable forms of gerrymandering.29 And dur ing the Obama presidency, the executive continued to expand its role in some worrying ways, prosecuting a rec ord number of jour nalists for handling clas si fied information and using executive or ders to bypass Congress in policy areas from the environment to immigration.30

Even so, most po lit i cal scientists agree that the Republicans are now, by far, the best example for a concerted attack on democratic norms perpetrated by a nominally establishment party.31

Back in 2008, John McCain demonstrated that he understood the im por tant distinction between treating a competitor for high of ce as an adversary and treating him as an enemy. When a voter at a town hall meeting said that he was scared about what would happen if Barack Obama won the election, McCain came to his adversary’s defense: “I have to tell you: He is a decent person, and a person that you do not have to be scared [of] as President of the United States.” Later at the same town hall, when an old lady wor ried aloud that Obama could not be trusted because he was an “Arab,” McCain was similarly unequivocal: “No Ma’am. He’s a decent family man and citizen that I just happen to have disagree ments with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”32

The moral clarity that moved McCain to forego partisan advan tage to af rm the legitimacy of the po lit i cal opposition has, over the last years, been conspicuous by its absence. By the time Obama

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gave his first State of the Union address, a Republican lawmaker broke a longstanding tradition of decorum by shouting “You lie!” at the president.33 By the time the Tea Party—led by Sarah Palin, McCain’s pick for vice president—was gaining ground twelve months later, some Republican politicians were willing to echo a conspiracy theory that denied President Obama’s standing as a natural born citizen.34

More broadly, their total opposition to Obama made Republi cans willing to abuse parliamentary rules that were meant to be re served for exceptional circumstances, or even to engage in outright dereliction of their duties. Nowhere is this transformation more prominent than in the US Senate. Its rules and procedures were de signed on the assumption that senators would, when necessary, forego their partisan advantage to make the system work. But to day, senators play constitutional hardball on a daily basis. Though they respect the legal limits of their authority, they unabashedly in sist on getting the most mileage out of ev ery rule and procedure— even when it evidently subverts the spirit for which it was intended. The upshot has been a slow moving form of institutional mayhem. The filibuster, for example, has historically been reserved for use in rare circumstances. When Lyndon Baines Johnson was president, the minority party in the Senate used the filibuster 16 times. When Obama was president, by contrast, the minority party in the Senate used the filibuster 506 times.35

An even more blatant abuse of constitutional norms came in the wake of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. On March 16, 2016, Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a moderate jurist who had enjoyed strong bipartisan support throughout his distinguished ca reer, for the vacant seat on the Supreme Court.36 But though the Constitution charges the Senate with the task of advising on the president’s nominees, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell refused even to let the Judiciary Committee hold hearings on Garland’s con fir ma tion. Against all precedent, a seat on the Supreme Court re

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mained vacant for most of 2016. And while the Senate’s refusal to consider Garland’s nomination was especially visible, it was part of a much wider pattern of stonewalling Obama’s judicial and execu tive appointees.37

But it is in the states, away from the national limelight, that vio lations of basic democratic norms have been most blatant. For many de cades now, partisan commissions have drawn electoral maps with the obvious purpose of giving the Republican Party an advantage at the next elections.38 For many de cades, Republican lawmakers have tried to disenfranchise minority voters by passing unnecessary ID laws or shutting down polling stations in heavily Democratic neighborhoods. In states like North Carolina, their de termination to win has long exceeded their desire to hold a fair election.39

But even by those low standards, what happened in the wake of the 2016 gubernatorial elections in North Carolina was jaw dropping. Roy Cooper, the Democratic candidate, won a highly contentious election by an extremely narrow margin. But instead of recognizing that this gave him a mandate to rule for the next four years, Republicans decided to rewrite his job de scrip tion. North Carolina’s governor used to be responsible for appointing 1,500 gubernatorial staffers; according to a law passed by the outgoing Republican legislature, he would henceforth be permitted to ap point only 425. The governor once had the power to appoint a majority of commissioners to the state’s election boards; from now on, he would split the responsibility with the Republican controlled legislature. Fi nally, the governor had previously been charged with appointing up to 66 trustees to the school boards of the University of North Carolina; now, he would be permitted to appoint a grand total of zero.40

The naked partisanship of these actions is undeniable. So is their import: Republicans in North Carolina have effectively rejected the notion that we resolve po lit i cal differences by free and fair elec

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tions, and are willing to submit to the rule of our po lit i cal rivals when we lose.

Donald Trump is now importing a supercharged version of consti tutional hardball that has increasingly been practiced in the halls of Congress and of various state legislatures into the White House. Over the course of his campaign, Donald Trump broke just about ev ery basic rule of democratic politics. He promised to jail his po lit i cal opponents. He refused to say that he would accept the outcome of the election. He bullied the press and threatened to ex pand libel laws. He invited a foreign power to sabotage his main competitor. He incited hatred against ethnic and religious minori ties and promised to take unconstitutional action against them.41

After his election, Trump continued to disregard basic demo cratic norms. As president elect, Trump made baseless claims about widespread voter fraud. He denigrated the neutrality of in de pen dent state institutions from courts to the intelligence agencies. He inquired about the sta tus of planning permits for his building proj ects on of cial calls with foreign heads of state. He refused to create a blind trust for his private businesses. And he repeatedly compli mented the dictatorial leader of a rival power.42

As president, Trump has doubled down on the same behavior. He has refused to resolve his substantial con flicts of interest. He has used the machinery of government to spread outright lies. He has tried to bar permanent residents from reentering the country. He has railed against “so called judges.” He has dubbed journalists “enemies of the American people.” He has threatened the owners of critical media outlets with higher taxes. He has undermined at tempts to investigate his links with Russia by colluding with loyal ist legislators, firing the director of the FBI, and publicly threaten ing him with secret rec ordings.43

All in all, it is clear that the man who now occupies the highest

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of ce in the most powerful democracy in the world has a reckless disregard, and perhaps even a proud disdain, for the most basic rules of democratic politics. We are only just beginning to under stand what that might mean for the stability of the system.

The Young Won’t Save Us

Citizens are less committed to democracy and more open to au thoritarian alternatives than they once were. Respect for demo cratic norms and rules has precipitously declined. No longer the only game in town, democracy is now deconsolidating. That conclusion, I know, is hard to swallow. We like to think of the world as getting better over time, and of liberal democracy as deepening its roots with ev ery passing year. That is perhaps why, of all my claims, the one that has elicited the most skepti cism is the idea that young people have been especially critical of democracy. For good reason, Americans and the British find it especially hard to believe that young people are most disaffected. After all, young people heavily leaned toward Hillary Clinton, the candidate of continuity, in the last US elections: among voters below the age of 30, 55 percent supported Clinton while only 37 percent sup ported Trump. The story of Brexit was very similar. Whereas two thirds of pension age Brits voted to leave the European Union, two thirds of millennials voted for the sta tus quo.44

It would nonetheless be facile to conclude that openness to radi cal change, much less to straightforward alternatives to democracy, is the exclusive preserve of the old—or that the crisis of liberal de mocracy will take care of itself as youn ger, more liberal cohorts re place their elders. On the contrary, young people in a broad range of countries are ac tually more likely to identify as radical than older people. And their attraction to the po lit i cal ex tremes has grown over time.

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In countries like Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, for example, the number of young people who locate them selves on the radical left or the radical right has roughly doubled over the course of the past two de cades; in Sweden, it has increased by more than threefold. Polling data for populist parties bear out this story as well. While young people were less likely to vote for Trump or Brexit, they are much more likely to vote for antisystem parties in many countries around the world. This is most obviously true in Southern European and Latin American countries, where the populist threat primarily comes from the left. Italy’s Five Star Movement, Spain’s Podemos, Greece’s Syriza, and the France Insoumise movement led by Jean Luc Mé

−0.6

Spain

Germany

Norway

Republic of Korea Japan

Chile

Slovenia

Poland

Australia

Sweden

Estonia

Switzerland

France

Finland

−0.4 −0.2 0 0.2 0.4

Romania

Netherlands

0.6 0.8 1.0

Italy

United Kingdom

United States

Hungary

Percent change per year

Canada

Political Radicalism among the Young

Percent change, per year, in millennials who position themselves on the far left or the far right of the po lit i cal spectrum.

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lenchon are all extremely popular among the young. In Italy, for example, 40 percent of voters below the age of forty supported the Five Star Movement in February 2016, compared to only 15 per cent of voters over the age of sixty five.45

It is not only far left parties that profit from youth disenchant ment with democracy. In many countries, the young are also more likely than the old to support far right populists. Marine Le Pen, for example, can count young people as some of her most fervent supporters. In the second round of the 2017 presidential election, some exit polls suggested that only one in five older voters favored Marine Le Pen; among the youngest voters, nearly one in two did. (There was also some con flicting evidence, suggesting that Le Pen only outperformed her overall vote share among the young by a much smaller margin.)46 In this, France is hardly an exception. On the contrary, polls have found similar results in countries as varied as Austria, Sweden, Greece, Finland, and Hungary.47

Even in Great Britain and the United States, the picture is rather less clear cut than widely portrayed. Jeremy Corbyn, long regarded as a fringe fig ure, ascended to the leadership of the Labour Party and outperformed expectations in the 2017 general election in part because of his fervent support among young voters.48 Young people are more open to populist appeals than has widely been suggested in the United States as well. Among white voters below the age of 30, for example, Donald Trump ac tually beat Hillary Clinton by a 48–43 margin.49

One possible explanation for why a lot of young people have grown disenchanted with democracy is that they have little conception of what it would mean to live in a different po lit i cal system. People born in the 1930s and 1940s experienced the threat of fascism as children or were raised by people who actively fought it. They spent their formative years during the Cold War, when fears of So viet expansionism drove the reality of communism home to them in

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a very real way. When they are asked whether it is im por tant to them to live in a democracy, they have some sense of what the al ternative might mean. Millennials in countries like Great Britain or the United States, by contrast, barely experienced the Cold War and may not even know anybody who fought fascism. To them, the question of whether it is im por tant to live in a democracy is far more abstract. Doesn’t this imply that, if they were ac tually faced with a threat to their system, they would be sure to rally to its defense? I’m not so sure. The very fact that young people have so little idea of what it would mean to live in a system other than their own may make them willing to engage in po lit i cal experimentation. Used to seeing and criticizing the (very real) injustices and hypocri sies of the system in which they grew up, many of them have mis takenly started to take its positive aspects for granted. It’s tempting to think that the relative unpopularity of Trump among the young indicates that millennials who are openly critical of liberal democracy will come to its defense in a moment of peril— and that the crisis will subside as youn ger voters replace older ones. But I fear that a more pessimistic conclusion is warranted: A huge reservoir of antisystem energy still remains to be tapped. While young voters might come to the rescue of the system at the next election, it is just as likely that their opposition to the sta tus quo might be activated in the ser vice of some as yet obscure, in sig nifi cant, or inexistent populist movement.

The Dangerous Consequences of Deconsolidation

The evidence is highly concerning: In many countries around the world, from the United States to Great Britain, and from Sweden to Australia, democracy no longer appears to be the only game in town. A growing share of citizens either has negative views about democracy or doesn’t think it’s especially im por tant. A smaller yet more rapidly growing share of citizens is open to straightforwardly

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authoritarian alternatives like a strongman ruler or a military dicta torship. Meanwhile, populists who have little or no attachment to basic democratic norms are gaining immense power—and one such politician has recently captured the most powerful of ce in the world. But while it is clear that democracy is deconsolidating, it is as yet dif cult to know what the consequences of this pro cess are going to be. Is democratic deconsolidation a temporary pro cess, which will soon awaken a strong immune defense—making for a turbulent de cade but not much more than that? Or does democratic deconsoli dation signal a real danger for the survival of po lit i cal institutions that had once seemed exceptionally stable—raising the prospect that the long period of democratic stability, which has shaped the past three quarters of a century, is drawing to a close? In theory, the way to settle these pressing questions is to look to past instances in which wealthy, consolidated democracies started to fracture. The prob lem is that no such examples exist. Until re cently, the pro cess of democratic consolidation really has been a one way street. There are few examples in the historical rec ord that give us an idea of the mayhem that might ensue when trafc sud denly starts to flow in from the other side. But while there is no clear precedent for the situation in which we now find ourselves, a few cases do come closer than others. Countries like Poland and Venezuela, for example, were widely thought to be well on their way toward democratic consolidation until the election of populist candidates did grievous damage to their po lit i cal systems. If we want to know whether we should be worried that the rise of illiberal democracy may end in dictator ship, we need to investigate whether the same pro cess was taking place in these countries before their democracies deteriorated.

Po lit i cal scientists have long portrayed Poland as the great suc cess story of postcommunist transition toward democracy. They

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had strong reason for their optimism. Between 1990 and 2005, Po land’s government changed hands through free and fair elections five times. The country’s GDP increased sixfold, comfortably sur passing the threshold of $14,000 per cap ita at which democracies are supposedly stable. Other signs seemed to be encouraging as well. The country developed an unusually active set of civil soci ety institutions. Many Poles were deeply rooted in associational life, from sports clubs to the Catholic Church. NGOs began to ad vocate for a wide va ri ety of social and po lit i cal issues. Excellent news papers held successive governments to account, freely criticiz ing po lit i cal mismanagement and investigating corruption scandals. Schools and universities flour ished.50

By 2004, this prog ress secured Poland a coveted membership in the European Union. To be admitted to the EU, a country has to prove that it has developed stable institutions “guaranteeing de mocracy, the rule of law, [and] human rights.”51 Poland fulfilled these criteria with fly ing colors. It is hardly surprising, then, that many po lit i cal scientists con cluded that Poland had already become “a consolidated democ racy.”52 While nobody would have gone so far as to suggest that democratic institutions in Poland were as firmly rooted, or as se cure, as they are in countries like Canada or the United States, lib eral democracy seemed to have taken hold. And yet, this well founded optimism soon turned out to be pre mature.

The 2015 elections came at a strange moment. The Civic Plat form government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk could boast a largely positive rec ord: It had competently steered the country through the global recession of 2008. It had improved Poland’s re lationships with its neighbors. It had made a success of Poland’s first turn at leading the presidency of the EU. All in all, Poland was doing remarkably well.

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But after nearly seven years in of ce, the government was start ing to run out of steam. Voters were ready for a change. So when secret rec ordings of private conversations between leading of cials showed them using crude language and engaging in suspect eco nomic deals, the government’s popularity plummeted.53

This gave an opening to the far right Law and Justice Party, which had already ruled the country from 2005 to 2007 under the leadership of Jarosław Kaczynski. During its first stint in of ce, Law and Justice had quickly become unpopular because of a series of high profile scandals and constant spats between members of the cabinet. Many Poles rejected the party’s staunch conservatism and its divisive rhetoric. But this time, the party had seemed to moder ate. Its main promises were to take back a planned increase in the retirement age, to cut taxes, and to increase childcare payments. Kaczynski, who had formally stepped down as the party’s leader but continued to dominate it behind the scenes, barely appeared in public during the campaign and promised not to take a leading role in the government.54

In the event, the Law and Justice Party won both the presidential and the parliamentary elections, giving the party sweeping powers. Once in government, it began to subvert the basic rules of Polish democracy. In a first step, Law and Justice undermined the neutrality of in depen dent state institutions. To gain control of the Constitutional Tribunal, the country’s highest court, the government increased the number of its judges, rushing the nomination of party loyal ists through parliament overnight while stripping three previous nominees of their vote. When the Tribunal ruled that the three opposition nominated appointees had a right to vote, parliament stripped it of much of its powers and dismissed the ruling.55

In a second step, Law and Justice used government funds to spread pro pa ganda and mufe critical journalists. While past Pol ish governments had also tried to in flu ence the po lit i cal slant of Telewizja Polska (TVP), the state broadcaster and the dominant

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television network in the country, its takeover by the new team was qualitatively different. Commentators who had frequently ap peared on TVP’s programs for de cades disappeared from television screens overnight. News programs that might at one point or an other have leaned in favor of the government of the day became unremitting purveyors of naked pro pa ganda.56

Not content with capturing state media, the government started to encroach on private networks and publications. Over the past years, it has stripped private companies of advertising contracts and strong armed foreign owners into selling media corporations to domestic allies. As one Law and Justice leader boasted, the party intended to “re Polonize” the country’s media, public and private.57

In yet another step away from liberal democracy, the Law and Justice Party has started to attack the right to voice unpopular opinions, to protest government policy, or simply to report on such protests. Unwilling to brook criticisms of the Polish nation, the government attempted to revoke the medal a previous government had awarded to Jan Gross, a Prince ton historian who has demon strated the extent of Polish complicity in the crimes of the Holo caust, and passed a law criminalizing the use of the phrase “Polish death camps.”58 When popular protests against the government erupted in the summer of 2016, Law and Justice moved to restrict the right to assembly. And when thousands of citizens took to par liament to protest, the prime minister banned private broadcasters from the parliament building.59

Called upon to investigate whether liberal democracy was now in danger in Poland, the Venice Commission—an advisory body of the Council of Europe composed of se nior academics and experts in constitutional law—came to an unusually undiplomatic conclu sion: “Not only is the rule of law in danger, but so are democracy and human rights.”60 Guy Verhofstadt, who had been intimately involved in negotiating Poland’s membership in the EU, was simi larly forthright: “The mea sures Warsaw is taking are . . . anti democratic and contrary to the principles of the rule of law signed

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by Poland upon its EU accession. It is clear that if an accession agreement was to be sought now, it would fail.”61 Jan Werner Mül ler put the point even more clearly: “it is hard to avoid the feeling that Central Europe is living 1989 in reverse. In that year, peace ful revolutions in the name of liberal democracy spread from one Communist country to another. Today we witness the emergence of a new Authoritarian International.”62

Most po lit i cal scientists have been puzzled by Poland’s rapid slide from liberal democracy. The country seemed to be doing so well for so long. And yet, the po lit i cal system deteriorated so quickly. What could possibly explain such a rapid shift in fortunes? Or might it simply be a freak occurrence—one of those strange, unex pected twists of his tory that po lit i cal scientists could never hope to foretell? It would be tempting to think so. But in light of my recent work, the Polish case ac tually looks surprisingly straightforward. Long before democracy started to fail, Poles were already taking a re markably dim view of democracy, evincing a striking openness to authoritarian alternatives, and voting for parties that broke with fundamental democratic norms.

• Compared to their neighbors, or indeed to the global aver age, Poles have long been highly critical of democracy. While, globally, only about one in ten respondents claim that democracy is a bad or very bad way of running their country, about one in six Poles have long held this view. (Among American millennials, close to one in four respon dents share this bleak view.)

• Long before the current government took over, Poles had been unusually open to authoritarian alternatives. While fewer than one in ten citizens of the European Union be lieved that army rule was a good system of government in

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the early 2010s, more than one in five Poles took this view. (Among American millennials, the level is similarly high.)63

• Fi nally, powerful populist parties had long started to un dermine key democratic norms. Law and Justice built a mass following despite (or perhaps because of) its willing ness to spread conspiracy theories, to drum up fear of for eign governments, and to dismiss the parties in power as traitors to the Polish nation. In this, it was not alone. An drzej Lepper, the late leader of Samoobrona, an agrarian party, aspired to be “a positive dictator,” routinely en gaged in anti Semitic rhetoric, and issued dark warnings about clandestine plots to topple the Polish government. Meanwhile, the League of Polish Families, an ultraconser vative party, warned that the EU was a communist agent, intent on subverting the country’s Catholicism.64

In short, all the major warning signs that are now flashing red in large parts of North America and Western Europe were present in Poland long before the Law and Justice government started its con certed assault on democratic institutions. Had po lit i cal scientists paid closer attention to the signs of democratic deconsolidation— signs that are now burning just as brightly in North America and Western Europe—the worrying developments in Poland need not have come as such a surprise. The harbingers of democratic decline were there for all to see. But po lit i cal scientists did not care to look.

s High minded defenders of liberal democracy believe that there is some thing uniquely legitimate about the po lit i cal system to which they are committed. Its democratic element, they claim, ensures citizens’ equality. In a monarchy, the king is elevated above his subjects by the accident of

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his noble birth. In a democracy, by contrast, all citizens get one vote without regard to the color of their skin or the station of their ancestors. Its liberal element, meanwhile, ensures citizens’ freedom. In a to talitarian regime, the government can regulate the lives of its sub jects in the most minute detail and punish them at whim. In a lib eral polity, by contrast, the reach of the law is limited, and citizens are protected against arbitrary interference in their lives. The peculiar genius of liberal democracy is that it is able to honor both of these values at the same time. This account of democratic legitimacy is a little too blithe. As long as money can easily buy power, many citizens understandably feel that po lit i cal equality remains an empty promise. And as long as economic necessity radically constrains the kinds of choices they can make, many citizens understandably feel that the freedom they were promised has not materialized. To live up to the most exalted claims of its adherents, liberal democracy needs to be embedded in a broader context of social and economic justice—and make citi zens feel that they ac tually hold power. And yet, it seems to me that this rough account of what makes our po lit i cal system special is more right than it is wrong: for anybody who is deeply committed to both freedom and equality, the allure of liberal democracy re mains unrivaled. But while I am convinced that liberal democracy is more legiti mate than other forms of government, I am skeptical that this also explains why it has, historically, enjoyed such widespread support. People who believe in the unique legitimacy of liberal democracy tend to assume that this legitimacy has also been the major reason for its success: By ensuring that each citizen can stand tall in the public sphere and simultaneously remain free to enjoy his private life, this story goes, only liberal democracy can fulfill some of the deepest and most universal human aspirations. That is why it has gradually conquered the world—and will, the hope goes, dominate its future.

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The best available evidence, however, seems to suggest that citi zens have built up loyalty to their po lit i cal system because it kept the peace and swelled their pocketbooks, not because they hold a deep commitment to its most fundamental principles. Liberal de mocracy, this fear suggests, has only been so dominant because it has delivered such good results. If this is true, popular attachment to liberal democracy may be rather more shallow and more brittle than its most high minded supporters tend to think. And that would go a long way toward ex plaining its current woes. As liberal democracies have become less adept at delivering for citizens, they have entered a deep “perfor mance crisis.” The populist movements that are on the rise around the world are now exploiting this crisis to dismantle key elements of the system. There is little historical precedent that can tell us how institu tions in supposedly consolidated democracies fare when they stop delivering for their citizens. They may remain stable even as their economies stagnate and their power declines. To avoid nasty sur prises, we must grapple with the possibility that they might not— and investigate why citizens have grown so disappointed in the per formance of liberal democracy in the first place.