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It’s now undeniable that American democracy is in very big trouble. An autocratic president, abetted by collaborators in the Supreme Court and the Republican party, is actively attempting to use the military, the Justice Department, regulatory agencies, trade policy, voting rolls, federal spending, and any other weapon he can get his hands on to punish his critics and lock in permanent power. Yet it still comes as a shock to have the dire state that the country is in confirmed by the experts.
On Wednesday G. Elliott Morris directed us to the findings of Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists who monitor the functioning of democracy in many countries. They now rate the United States as an “illiberal democracy”. That means that the ruling party can still lose elections, so we aren’t a full autocracy just yet. However, that democracy is on the ropes because the power of the state is being used to put a heavy thumb on the scales, tilting us towards autocracy.
Much of our legacy media is still in denial about this reality, or is actively trying to cover it up. I still see news reports describing some offense by the Trump administration as potentially “worse than Watergate” – a description that is ludicrously quaint when applied to an administration that does things worse than Watergate several times a week. Two weeks ago I hosted a recorded interview with Karen Attiah, the former Global Opinions editor of the Washington Post, who was summarily fired for refusing to canonize Charlie Kirk, while the Times’s Ezra Klein has faced no consequences, despite widespread outrage, for declaring that Kirk did politics “the right way.” And I needn’t remind you about the Disney-Jimmy Kimmel saga.
But how did we degenerate like this? Nixon, who was a piker by comparison to Donald Trump, was repudiated by his own party. Not only is Donald Trump a wannabe dictator, surely the worst person on multiple dimensions ever to occupy the White House, but he made his intentions clear in the January 6th insurrection and his promises of retribution if re-elected. But unlike Nixon, Trump is backed by a Republican party that has become so extreme, so unwilling to acknowledge that opposition is even legitimate that none of his actions matter. Today’s Republicans show no hesitation whatsoever in adopting the Führerprinzip, the “leader principle”, in which Trump’s diktats override all written law and democratic norms.
Is calling the modern GOP an extremist party just my subjective assessment? No, it’s an assertion backed by solid evidence. And like Morris, I loves me some visual data. So let’s talk about political polarization supported by hard data.
I’m a big fan of Voteview, which uses roll call votes in Congress to place politicians along an ideological spectrum. The details are complex, but it turns out that you can predict senators’ and representatives’ votes on most legislation by assigning them positions in a two-dimensional, abstract “issue space.” One dimension is left versus right — support or lack thereof for progressive taxation and social spending. The other dimension historically had to do with racial equality, although it’s harder to interpret now.
Here’s where Republican and Democratic senators were located in that abstract space during the Watergate affair:
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Source: Voteview
As you can see, there was a lot of overlap between the parties. There really was a political center, illustrated by the red and blue dots straddling the half-way mark of the horizontal axis. And it was that center that basically decided that Nixon must go.
We shouldn’t romanticize this era of relative bipartisanship. The primary reason the parties overlapped on economic issues was that the South still voted Democratic. So there were still Dixiecrats, politicians who were economically conservative and anti-civil rights, but who caucused with the Democrats. Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, that faction has switched parties, and is a wing — arguably the dominant wing — of the GOP.
As a result, the Republican and Democratic parties are completely polarized. Here’s the current picture:
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What this chart shows is that the center did not hold. There is now a wide gap between even the least conservative Republican and the least liberal Democrat, illustrated by the absence of any blue or red dots near the half-way mark of the horizontal axis. And this means that the centrist, bipartisan bloc that forced Nixon out no longer exists.
How did Congress become so polarized? It’s true that, on average, Democrats moved left. But this is sort of an optical illusion: what really happened was that Dixiecrat Democrats moved into the Republican camp, leaving the remaining Democratic Party to Northern Democrats. Ideologically, Northern Democrats have hardly moved since 1950. Republicans, on the other hand, moved very far to the right, as shown by the upward trajectory of the red line in the graph below:
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Source: Voteview
These changes have produced asymmetric polarization. While the de-Dixiecratted Democratic Party broadly looks like a center-left European party, the GOP doesn’t look like the European center right. Instead it looks like Germany’s AfD or Hungary’s Fidesz, extremist parties with a clear authoritarian streak.
And all of this happened before Trump, certainly before Trump’s return to power in the 2024 election. Trump is clearly hell-bent on destroying American democracy and turning us into a rogue nation. He is personally cruel, corrupt and vindictive. (Hey, I think I’m allowed to say that about a man who called me a “deranged bum.”) But it’s the nature of Trump’s party, not his personal depravity, that is responsible for the decline of American democracy.
The obvious next question is how such a party came to power in a nation that has long, for all its flaws, been a beacon of freedom for the world. This in turn is part of the larger question of why “populist” parties have been on the rise throughout the Western world. I use scare quotes around “populist” because neither the GOP nor its counterparts abroad are, in fact, representing the interests of ordinary people. But that’s the term everyone uses.
Anyway, the answer to that question is that there are a lot of potential explanations, ranging from rising income inequality and the power of the plutocracy, to the problems of left-behind regions, to men not working, to the injured pride of white men who feel that they have lost their dignity and their privilege, to the social anomie caused by the Internet. Also, racism never went away and has become increasingly overt again. I take all of these issues seriously, but don’t have firm views about their relative responsibility for our current moment of democratic peril.
The only thing I’m sure of is that the threat to U.S. democracy is much bigger than Trump himself. And it won’t end when he leaves the scene.
MUSICAL CODA
