The problem with calling Trump a...
is that we have a really
narrow idea of what it looks like when democracies fail. We imagine democratic
failure as being some spectacular event a military coup or an illegal power grab
or the declaration of martial law.
To protect the Republic of the Philippines
and our democracy.
We don't really imagine it looking like this.
This is a child's desk, but that's okay.
It's the smallest desk I've ever seen.
But political scientists do, because in a country like the US, the death of
democracy is going to start off looking kind of normal.
So normal, you might not
even notice it's happening until it's too late.
Well I respect the group but
the entire thing has been a witch hunt and there is no collusion.
Trump's firing of former FBI
director James Comey has gotten a lot of media attention, in part because it's
really easy to explain why it matters.
If Trump fired Comey over the Russia
investigation that would be obstruction of justice, which is a crime but a lot of
what worries political scientists about Trump is tougher to explain in a
soundbite like that. Because for the most part it's stuff that's totally legal.
It turns out that government officials can exploit weaknesses in the law in ways
that are destructive to the rule of law as a whole.
This bearer of bad news is Aziz Huq.
He's a law professor at the University of Chicago and he's written a
lot about a concept called "democratic backsliding",
which kind of sounds like
something Hillary Clinton does at a wedding.
Backsliding is what happens when
a democratically elected government, starts attacking the institutions that
make democracy work.
I know the dance thing was cooler.
And Huck argues that
what makes backsliding so dangerous is that it's really hard to know when it starts.
In many other countries the way that we see democratic backsliding
happening is through a series of discrete legal changes, each of which is
on their own completely lawful.
A great example of what backsliding looks like
is Venezuela's former President Hugo Chavez.
Ah, the 90s.
Chavez was elected as a democratic populist, but over time he
changed.
And while remaining popular Chavez has been anything but democratic.
He got frustrated with opposition from courts and the media, so he started doing things
like firing judges, using anti-defamation laws to silence journalists, and even
describing unfriendly news organizations as quote "enemies of the homeland".
What's scary about Chavez's story,
is that he didn't need a military coup to screw up Venezuela's democracy.
The man who came to office by democracy, he's doing everything he can just snuff it out.
He did it legally, by slowly turning his supporters and political allies
against the country's democratic institutions.
Autocrats in other parts of the world have gone after those institutions very
early on in the process of backsliding.
And that's what worries political
scientists about Trump.
Trump shows a deep distrust of America's democratic
institutions. He lashes out at judges, calls journalists, the enemy of the
people, accuses watchdog agencies of conspiring against him.
He questions the
legitimacy of an election that he won.
His White House stonewalls reporters to
avoid answering questions.
Off. It's off-camera. Off. It's off.
He's suspicious of the mechanisms that
limit his authority.
This is an unprecedented judicial overreach.
And he
encourages his supporters to be too.
that is a catastrophic thing to be happening
in a democracy. It's how democratic backsliding starts, but the thing is none of
this is illegal.
As long as Republicans in Congress go along with it, there's
nothing to stop Trump from publicly criticizing basic democratic
institutions.
Our Constitution just doesn't do a very good job of protecting
us against certain kinds of democratic failure.
Whether you're in a
moment of democratic backsliding really depends upon the character of our
political leaders.
Which brings us back to Comey and why it's so hard to talk
about Democratic backsliding without sounding paranoid.
We live in a media
environment that is really bad at putting things in context, that is
designed to bombard us with breaking news and discrete pieces of information
and that makes it hard to identify democratic backsliding when it starts.
Because unless it clearly breaks the law, it's really tough to explain why any one
Trump tweet or scandal poses a threat to democracy.
Wo when Trump calls a federal judge a "so called judge", it's just a one-off comment.
Does anyone honestly believe President Trump is going to ignore this judge's
order because he's a quote so-called judge?
When Trump calls the press the enemy of
the American people, it's all talk.
He sounds like a broken record it's just
kind of like what else you got Donald Trump?
I don't think that new media are well designed
to tell this kind of story, because those media are designed to convey
information in very small chunks.
The real story is not the discrete action in
a particular moment in time, there's some bigger picture.
Democratic backsliding is one
of those things that you can't really see from up close.
It is only when you
when you look at changes in the aggregate that one sees the effect
upon democracy after, a set of institutions and practices.
That doesn't mean the Comey stuff isn't important.
Obstruction of justice is obviously a
big deal. But some of the biggest threats to democracy are way less dramatic, way
more normal looking.
And if you're waiting for the CNN chyron announcing
that it's time to panic,
you're going to be waiting for a long time.