Democracies, in this telling, don’t die so much as they decline. The rhetoric that underlies democracy, the self-identity that is adopted by a democratic people, all that is hard to dislodge. In 2011, long after Venezuela had tumbled into authoritarianism, a majority of Venezuelans said they lived in a vibrant, thriving democracy. The genius of modern tyrants has been in realizing you don’t need to dislodge democracy; you need to co-opt it, you need to make it your own.
Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process. Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy. [...]
That these norms are slipping into the mist is uncontroversial. By one count, there were 385 Senate filibusters between 2007 and 2012 — which is, Levitsky and Ziblatt note, equal to the number of filibusters in the seven decades between World War I and the end of the Reagan administration. The confirmation of circuit court appointments, which was over 90 percent in the 1980s, fell to about 50 percent during Barack Obama’s presidency. [...]
It’s these underlying trends, they argue, that are making it harder for Americans to tolerate each other, harder for partisans on both sides to accept each other. The parties have become more distant ideologically, racially, religiously. They look over the divide and see a coalition that doesn’t look like them or think like them, that doesn’t like them, that actively fears them — indeed, a recent Pew survey found that 49 percent of Republicans, and 55 percent of Democrats, say they are “afraid” of the other party. Keep that in mind as you read this paragraph:
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