It’s Too Early to

Celebrate the Survival

of American
Democracy
One year after Donald Trump’s elections, the U.S. political system is proving
resilient – and giving false comfort.

It’s been one year since the election of Donald Trump as president and, despite his
questionable commitment to the country’s political traditions, American democracy is still
standing. Some of Trump’s most dangerous policies have been stopped by the judiciary.
Others have not made it through Congress. Special counsel Robert Mueller is closing in on
the dangerous liaisons between the Trump campaign and Russia (and perhaps much
more). The president’s approval rating has hit a dismal 38 percent, and Democrats scored
a landslide in Virginia’s elections last week.

Is it time to rejoice in the strength of American institutions? That would be

underestimating the threat on the horizon and overestimating the strength of U.S.
institutions. There are two complementary prongs to Trump’s onslaught on American
democracy, and both are still clear and present threats.

The first is a systematic attack on democratic political norms.

Democracy is supported by a complex set of political norms that encourage restraint and
compromise from the main political actors. These norms are the lifeblood of democratic
institutions because no constitution can specify a complete recipe for resolving conflicts in
the disparate situations in which politicians, political parties, and other powerful actors
will find themselves. Even when certain rules are specified, they need to be interpreted and
are often vulnerable to abuse. Democratic political norms fill in this vacuum. They
encourage compromise and rule out actions that enable those who currently hold power
from impairing rivals. Without these norms, those in office will find ways to abuse their
power, undermining the workings of democratic institutions. The recent history of
Argentine democracy illustrates the disastrous consequences of the violation of such
norms. Argentina’s famous strongman Juan Perón was elected as president in 1946, after
his stint as minister of labor in the former military regime. One of his first acts was to
replace three Supreme Court justices with his cronies. Thereafter, Argentina’s Supreme
Court ceased to be viewed as a check on presidential power, and it became a new normal
for every president, even those who came to power via democratic elections, to oust
justices and replace them with loyalists.
Of course, the political norms of democratic compromise in the United States were
seriously strained even before Trump’s presidency, as illustrated, for example, by
systematic gerrymandering to lock in the domination of the party currently controlling a
state’s legislature or by the unwillingness of Senate Republicans to even consider former
President Barack Obama’s final nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. But
Trump’s demonization of opposition and media, blurring of lines between personal and
presidential, removal of all types of auditing and other control mechanisms on the
administration, and legitimization of uncompromising, or even hateful, views via his
implicit support for far-right protesters in Charlottesville and his pardon of former
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio have set new lows not just by U.S. but by any
international standards.

Political norms that are the bulwark of our democracy cannot be easily repaired once
damaged, even if Trump’s most dangerous policies are stopped. Nor can white
supremacist, anti-immigrant, and nativist rhetoric be swiftly sidelined once condoned by
the U.S. president.

The second prong of the Trump onslaught is an attempt to weaken institutions so as to

elevate the personal power of a would-be autocrat. The recent history of democratic
institutions succumbing to such attacks in Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela illustrate that the
takeover of democratic institutions is often a slow, gradual process. First comes the
silencing of internal opposition within the party or the political movement of the
strongmen. Then, there is the slow process of neutralizing the judiciary, followed by a
systematic, if uneven, sidelining of independent civil service. All throughout, the media
and other civil society organizations are increasingly muzzled and silenced by threats, co-
option, and smearing.

Of course, if democratic institutions are truly strong and alert against threats, these attacks
can be resisted. But the performance of U.S. checks and balances so far gives no comfort.

The last several months have shown clearly that Congress, so long as it remains under the
control of Republicans, will provide none of the checks on the president’s power that are
often presumed. On the contrary, the fact that only senators not seeking re-election have
been able to speak against Trump underscores the near-complete capitulation of the
Republican Party. And it is set to get worse as Republican lawmakers are witnessing how
the small but highly motivated and mobilized minority of Americans devoted to Trump will
bombard them with tweets, messages, or even threats if they so much as disagree with the
president.

Several judges stood firm against Trump’s travel ban for several Muslim-majority
countries. But in the next three years, Trump, through appointment, can completely
change the balance of the judiciary, especially for cases that make it up to the Supreme
Court, where he may have an opportunity to appoint several more justices. Banking on the
judiciary to defend democracy would be foolhardy indeed.

The growing chorus of Trump supporters demanding the termination of Mueller’s

investigation, fully anticipating that Republicans in Congress would not stand in the way,
should dispel any notion that the judiciary can single-handedly defend American
institutions.
It is heartening to see how several states and cities have stood for the rights of immigrants
and taken actions for protecting the environment, even as the Environmental Protection
Agency has turned into an anti-environment agency under Administrator Scott Pruitt. But
states can neither stop the buckling of federal institutions under the president’s onslaught
nor counter the collapse of political norms undergirding American democracy.

America’s most effective safeguards against Donald J. Trump so far are not to be found in
Congress, the judiciary, or the states, but in the media and in civil society.

Many media outlets, led by the Washington Post and the New York Times, have
enthusiastically embraced their critical role in these turbulent times and have spearheaded
the defense of our democracy, keeping the spotlight on the president’s campaign against
U.S. institutions and his and his family’s questionable business deals. But can we be sure
that Trump’s unremitting attacks on the New York Times, CNN, and other critical outlets
won’t work? It is true that when another would-be autocrat, Argentina’s previous
president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, tried to browbeat her country’s opposition
media group Clarín, it did not succeed. But that’s small comfort. Independent newspapers
did at first stand up to Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan too, but
they got worn down slowly by threats, financial pressure, and relentless smear campaigns
by other media blindly loyal to these strongmen. Even if the tradition of fierce,
investigative and sometime rambunctious journalism in the United States gives us some
hope, we cannot bank on these media outlets to defend our democracy in this age of
weaponized fake news.

The people who get their voice from democratic political institutions are — have to be —
their last line of defense. The American people have risen up to this challenge. Their
mobilization against the policies and the values of Trump’s administration are the true
silver lining of the dark clouds of today. It is this mobilization that has paved the way to the
defeat of the president’s ban on citizens of several majority-Muslim countries from
entering the United States, that made it impossible for even Republican congressmen to
repeal Obamacare, and that has egged on Democrats to stand firm against the president.
But history is full of examples where such mobilization peters out, especially when faced
with soft (and even worse, hard) repression, or when it runs out of steam or gives way to
internal squabbles (witness the emergence of Democratic litmus tests, already starting to
divide the opposition).

So the slow battle between America’s democratic institutions and its 45th president is set
to continue. But even more worryingly, there are the wild cards.

Putin’s subversion of Russian institutions would have been much harder without the
Chechen War and the alleged Chechen attack on four apartment blocks in Russia in 1999.
The suspension of the remaining constitutional checks on Turkish President Erdogan
would have been all but impossible without the intensification of the war between Turkish
security forces and the Kurdish rebels. What would happen if we witnessed a series of
foreign terrorist attacks on U.S. soil? Or if war broke out against North Korea?

It’s too soon to rejoice, and too dangerous to be complacent. We are still the last defense.