A House Divided

Philip Roth, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt on coins with one face

At the behest of my friend and the godfather of this here blogstack upon which your eyes are currently feasting—a certain Kenny G (not that one)—I recently picked up a copy of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. To say it’s a good book is like giving the Sistine Chapel four stars on Yelp!. “Ceiling is pretty but the place is old and smells like cat pee and I saw a cockroach in the bathroom.” I can see Plot becoming part of the canon, if the canon exists any longer and if anyone reads it. I can imagine it being assigned to indifferent high school students who then go home and ask ChatGPT to give them a synopsis, maybe in place of something like The Great Gatsby on the grounds that the degree of wealth inequality therein would now be regarded as ridiculously slight.

Well, if rich and poor are no longer hot, authoritarianism is. It’s unfortunate, though, that authoritarianism should be called authoritarianism. Eight syllables.¹ It’s a long, stuffy word, better suited to the back of a medicine bottle than to a political system based around the principle of jailing and killing those who refuse to kneel. Despotism is better. Despot has a sort of South American flair—olive drab uniforms and patrol caps, extravagant facial hair. Roth is a classicist. His book deals with Nazis. Nazi is short and sharp, with that jagged z. And even if you don’t know about Hitler and Goebbels and the Beer Hall Putsch and the Enabling Act and von Ribbontrop and all the rest, you probably at least recognize them as the bad guys in an array of exciting action movies and video games.

If you don’t know, The Plot Against America, told from the point of view of a prepubescent Roth himself, recounts an alternate history in which aviator hero and Nazi-admirer Charles Lindburg sweeps into a deadlocked 1940 Republican National Convention to take the nomination by acclaim. Subsequently, on the strength of his feats of arial legerdemain and sexy leather chaps, he defeats Roosevelt in the general election and then begins to chip away at American democracy, slowly at first and then with exponential rapidity, leading to a crisis in which Roth and his family are threatened to be engulfed by the explosive force of American anti-Semitism granted legitimacy and encouraged from the seats of power. You know, like in Germany. 

Now, Roth’s book is fiction. As alternate histories go it seems more plausible than ones in which, say, people go back in time and arm the Confederates with machine guns and jet airplanes. But its aim is to provide a subjective view of what it might look like to watch American democracy collapse in the papers and radio and in front of your house, not to provide a flowchart for the various ways such a calamity might come to pass. That is the ambit of another book which I happened to pick up right after I finished Plot, namely How Democracies Die, written by two Harvard government professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. 

An actual divided house failing to stand. Photo: George Thomas

Honest to God I didn’t explicitly plan to read two such closely related books in succession. My reading habits are those of a crow collecting shiny bits of metal. I don’t think the thematic connection even really occurred to me until I reached the second chapter, which begins with a synopsis of The Plot Against America.² Weird, right? Well it was a timely combination, because if Plot describes the horrors of authoritarian rule, Levitsky and Ziblatt capture the mechanism.

In brief, How Democracies Die is a comparative analysis of those democracies which have, since the interwar period, slid into authoritarianism via electoral means (as opposed to good old fashioned coups). This includes the classics—Italy and Weimar Germany—but also the tales of Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Hungary, Peru, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Similarly, the authors identify a few  democracies—Belgium, Britain, Costa Rica, and Finland—which at one time or the other managed to fend off authoritarian assaults (I would add France and Poland to the latter group, given their recent electoral records). Unemotional without being dry, like this sentence, Levitsky and Zablatt identify commonalities among each group, arriving at a handy rubric for identifying authoritarian threats. 

Published in 2018, the book was clearly inspired by the rise of Donald Trump, but it does not seek to rationalize a preexisting conclusion. It does, in the end, apply its analysis to Trump and the GOP, however, and the results are pretty startling, unless you’ve been paying attention. The rubric is the golden nugget at the center of this book, and it’s worth reproducing in detail:

Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior

1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game. 

2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents.

3. Toleration or encouragement of violence.

4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media.

One can quibble with whether these add up to “authoritarian,” but in each of the failed democracies the authors identify, each of these characteristics is present. No American president but two have committed any of these sins (if you’re reading this I’m going to assume you know both of them), and only one president has exhibited all four. Let’s take a look at that one³:

1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game. 

   1. Donald Trump has stated his desire to be a dictator, and regularly praises dictators around the world.

   2. He has stated a desire to suspend the Constitution.

   3. He has encouraged extralegal means to change the government (violent insurrection, exhorting his VP to arrogate powers that definitely don’t belong to the office).

   4. He has attempted to undermine the legitimacy of multiple elections, denying their outcome and baselessly charging fraud.

2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents.

   1. He regularly calls for political opponents, including but not limited to Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden, to be jailed. 

3. Toleration or encouragement of violence.

   1. Trump has praised and encouraged armed paramilitary organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers.

   2. He has encouraged mob attacks on opponents and members of the press. 

   3. He has praised acts of political violence in other countries.

   4. He called for the use of the United States military against demonstrators.

4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media.

   1. Trump has threatened legal action against critics in rival parties and the media. 

   2. Trump has supported laws and policies that would restrict civil liberties. 

Now as I noted last time out, anyone crazy enough to try to justify the man’s actions could probably address any one of these with an argument that, while likely not terribly credible, would be at least distantly plausible. It’s the sheer elephantine volume of norm-breaking, like the sheer volume of crimes and lies, that really eats away at any reasonable rationalization of his behavior. Here’s a hill I’ll die on: it’s fundamentally indefensible. He is not only a criminal and a pathological liar, he is one hundred percent an autocrat. 

I choose the word “norm-breaking” with purpose, because it's upon the violation of democratic norms that the authors of How Democracies Die spend the most time and attention. Norms, in their narrative, form a sort of unwritten Constitution whereby each party gives space and a measure of forbearance to the other, not because they agree with one another, but because they are both committed to the larger aim of preserving our democracy for future generations. They present a metaphor of a pickup basketball game, in which every player is allowed to call a foul but few do except in the most egregious cases, on the grounds that they’re at the court to play basketball, not argue. There’s no written rule that says they can’t call fouls at every turn but doing so ruins the game.

The GOP has been ruining the game for a long while now. The massive increase in filibusters; refusing to confirm a president’s court nominations; holding up military promotions for months; allowing the government to regularly shut down and teasing default again and again to gain unwarranted and undemocratic leverage over unrelated issues—these and similar actions may accomplish short term policy goals but they also sow poison in the body politic, and the United States has been getting a regular injection of arsenic since at least the day that Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House. 

What Gingrich brought to American politics was a willingness to treat the opposition party as the enemy, to be not simply defeated on individual issues but eliminated entirely. Increasingly this has been the primary objective of the GOP, as exemplified by Mitch McConnell’s assertion, upon Obama’s election, that the aim of his party would be to make him a one-term president. As exemplified by the rash of between-census redistricting projects, which produce those ridiculous maps with districts shaped like a snake that swallowed an armchair. Or how about the Party of No. Anyone remember the Party of No?

This is not a recipe for good governance. We here in these disunited states have two parties; if we lose one, we are by definition no longer a democracy. The counter examples that Levitsky and Ziblatt give—democracies that have managed to avoid an authoritarian fate—are without exception parliamentary systems, and the winning tactic has always been the same: some responsible right-wing party would join forces with left parties, supporting a left candidate, in order to undercut an authoritarian right-wing party in ascendancy.⁴ This is not possible in the United States. The fact that we have parties at all is in fact another norm, established early in the republic who realized the strength and institutional stability that (healthy) parties provided. The fact that there are two is a product of the winner-take-all electoral system most states use (except, I believe for Maine and Nebraska, which are harbingers of a future that can’t get here fast enough). That there are two leads to a certain inescapable conclusion:

Our system of government only works when the two parties find common ground, reach consensus, and compromise. This is the idea behind centrism—not, as I long believed, that centrism is about constantly seeking the middle of issues and making a virtue of mediocrity. It’s a recognition that there are two halves to the country and that if we don’t find a way to coexist, we’re doomed. Seeking to undo the other party on a permanent basis is de facto totalitarianism, ipso fatso.

What’s frightening to me are the increasing percentages of Republicans in polls who profess a desire for authoritarian rule; who say that political violence is justified. Personally I chalk this up to the Internet, which leaves us isolated even as it claims to connect us. We are about as “connected” to one another online—anonymous and digesting a flood of caricatures of the opposition, often with origins in countries that are literally our enemies—as we are behind the wheel of a car, where everyone else is a faceless lunatic out to get us because we didn’t pass that truck fast enough.

We urgently need to remember who the other party is, because it’s half of us no matter which one you’re in. Those of us on the left lament the family and friends who have vanished into Trumpism. I have an inkling that at least a few of them look at me as a heathen or a communist, as lost as I see them, but I think very few of us would like to see our politically wayward friends and relatives jailed or God forbid murdered for the sake of the freedom to impose our ideology without opposition. The mere thought should be monstrous. 

And yet that’s what’s happening. 

I don’t know what the solution is. The authors of How Democracies Die warn against responding to maximalist tactics in kind, offering concrete evidence of situations where this has been tried. All failed. I can’t see how the opposite would be any better: would unilateral disarmament really change the dynamic, or would it simply allow a Trumpian GOP to consolidate permanent power all the more quickly? Who would dare put that to the test?

The alternative Levitsky and Ziblatt offer is essentially political, exhorting the American left to seek to expand by finding common ground with those just outside the coalition. It’s hard to make a case for letting anti-abortion activists into the Democratic party, but then, I appreciate the allyship of a man like David French, with whom I disagree on many matters but with whom I share the much more important value of the primacy of democracy. Without democracy, the abortion question is utterly moot. Coalition building, mind, doesn’t have to entail giving up one’s principles, even when it requires compromise, because preserving democracy is the sine qua non for every man, woman, and child in the U.S., of either party.

Think of it as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Just as one can’t learn mathematics if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, every policy issue—every one!—depends either upon a functioning democracy or upon the lucky whim of the dictator. To those who didn’t live in the before times, it may seem like hyperbole that every election is billed as the most important one ever. But it’s true, just as it would be true that our next meal is the most important if we weren’t sure we were going to get it. And it just continues to be true until stability is reached. We have been wobbling for a decade on the edge of a cliff. The last couple elections staved off catastrophe, but the stakes are now all that effort plus this one. And they will keep being the most important election until we get an opposition party that isn’t bent on the utter destruction of its opposite number. Buckle up! It could get bumpy!

Anyway, since this appeal to good sense basically started out as a book review I’ll give both books the Fletch Stamp of Approval. I award this mighty honor unreservedly—there is no Amazon link you can follow to kick money back to me; they’re just good. And important, as they say. They’re both worth reading, regardless of your political affiliation. Especially now.

Editorial note: To those who succumbed to my ill-considered premium Substack attempt a few years ago, I have conquered certain internal demons and gotten the portrait prints rolling again. You may receive the next one before reading this, and the remaining ones are once more in process. Apologies for the lapse; I struggle with completing things.

To those who did not sign up, congratulations. I have extra portraits (hand drawn depictions of some of my favorite people—D.Boon, Satchel Paige, Flannery O’Connor, etc.—by a variety of talented artists) and will be making them available for purchase at a very humble price in the near future. They’re pretty awesome and before I die I hope to bring myself to make t-shirts and ultimately the Bestiary, about which more will be said later.

1. The same number as the phrase “relentlessly into the past.”

2. Students lacking access to ChatGPT can look here.

3. Reams of detail and supporting evidence available upon request.

4. It’s pretty clear from the polling numbers that this was what the GOP should have done to defeat Trump in the 2016 primary (lest we forget, Trump did not have the support of the GOP). If the weaker candidates had each chosen to fight for party and not themselves. they could have coalesced around a single candidate and squashed Trump, who regularly maxed out at around 20 percent in most of the early primaries.