How Democracies Die

Have they supported laws or policies that restrict civil liberties, such as expanded libel or defamation laws, or laws restricting protest, criticism of the government, or certain civic or political organizations?

Have they threatened to take legal or other punitive action against critics in rival parties, civil society, or the media?

Have they praised repressive measures taken by other governments, either in the past or elsewhere in the world?

Republican politicians from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump learned that in a polarized society, treating rivals as enemies can be useful—and that the pursuit of politics as warfare can be appealing to those who fear they have much to lose. But war always has its price. The mounting assault on norms of mutual toleration and forbearance—mostly, though not entirely, by Republicans—has eroded the soft guardrails that long protected us from the kind of partisan fight to the death that has destroyed democracies in other parts of the world. When Donald Trump took office in January 2017, the guardrails were still there, but they were weaker than they had been in a century—and things were about to get worse.

With tactics like these, the Republicans had begun to behave like an antisystem political party. By the end of the Obama presidency, democracy’s soft guardrails were becoming dangerously unmoored.

third norm-breaking moment was the Senate’s refusal to take up President Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

March 2015 brought another unprecedented event, when Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and forty-six other Republican senators wrote an open letter to Iran’s leaders insisting that President Obama had no authority to negotiate a deal over Iran’s nuclear program

The first was the 2011 crisis over the federal debt limit.

Three dramatic events during Obama’s presidency revealed how severely norms of forbearance had eroded

President Obama’s efforts to circumvent Congress triggered further escalation

The president’s actions were not out of constitutional bounds, but by acting unilaterally to achieve goals that had been blocked by Congress, President Obama violated the norm of forbearance.

The Democrats responded with norm breaking of their own. In November 2013, Senate Democrats voted to eliminate the filibuster for most presidential nominations, including federal judicial (but not Supreme Court) nominees, a move so extreme it was widely referred to as the “nuclear option.” Republican senators criticized the Democrats’ “raw exercise of political power,” but President Obama defended it, claiming that the filibuster had been transformed into a “reckless and relentless tool” of obstruction and adding that “today’s pattern of obstruction…just isn’t normal; it’s not what our founders envisioned.”