Getting it wrong on the future of democracy?

John, everywhere we look in the USA, we see well-respected political scientists, former politicians of all stripes, generals, etc all saying that the worst is yet to come, that Jan 6 was nothing as to what is coming down the pike. Everywhere, people are ringing alarm bells. So ….. it would take some pretty strong evidence to contradict all those warnings, yes?

JQ,
Yes, I think you’ve overcorrected.

Unfortunately, I just spent a good deal of time writing a longish comment on the abortion thread, and I when I tried to post it I got a “sorry, comments on this item are closed” message. So comments must have closed between the time I started composing the comment and the time I finished it.

Having spent that time on that comment, I don’t have the time or energy now to explain why I think you’ve overcorrected, except to say that the U.S. political system has survived a lot in the past without devolving into outright dictatorship or dynastic succession, and I see no compelling reason to think this time will be all that different. I’m not suggesting that complacency is in order, not at all, but I do think that there will be some kind of mass national uprising if Republican state legislatures or election administrators in 2024 decide to ignore the popular vote outcomes in their states and pick or certify contrary slates of electors. Ditto if large numbers of people feel that they were disenfranchised, in any of a number of ways.

That said, journalists who focus on this issue (like B. Gellman and others) are doing necessary work, even if at the moment they seem to be mostly preaching to the converted.

I’m a pretty careful follower of what’s going on here in the US–particularly in Wisconsin, where the US mood and political alignment is carefully reflected in the state with a red legislature, a blue governor, and gerrymandering that will not go away due in part to a state supreme court that almost exactly represents the alignment in the federal Supreme Court. It’s almost a given we will turn to being a red state in 2022.

Here’s one small place for hope. People are being disenfranchised and women and people of color in particular are being marginalized. Whether they will wake up in sufficient numbers to the fact that white males are driving all this despite being a shrinking minority is not in any way a given. But maybe–and maybe a stolen Trump victory in 2024 will energize a real democratic movement. The wild card is violence, particularly if Trump loses by something like 2020 margins in crucial states. Quite frankly I have never felt so hopeless about the future, so small places for hope is all I have now, but realistically I share your bleak vision.

Prof, I’ve heard your prediction several times now, and in part it rings frighteningly true. However, firstly we may be saved by the fact that Trump’s laziness or poor health rule him out of actually running in 2024. He seems highly motivated by spite and ego, so we can only hope. But secondly I don’t get the jump to an hereditary autocracy. He doesn’t seem to particularly like his children, and none of them have his populist appeal sufficient to carry it off. So in 2028, assuming he hasn’t died of a heart attack while in office, the Republican Party would have to fall in behind a successor, which I think would be difficult. He isn’t going to anoint one, he’s not that strategic.

AS the Virus rules the world-

from the NYT.

‘Harsh new lockdown measures are unlikely anywhere in the country, especially since the Omicron variant may be milder than its predecessors. But between the new infection wave and the demise of BBB, the economy could soon look a lot like this past weekend’s Saturday Night Live episode: cobbled together with a skeleton crew and not very good. The one-two punch sent markets into a free fall on Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding more than 650 points before recovering a bit, in one of the worst days since news of Omicron first spooked markets on Black Friday. It’s a stark turnaround from the state of play last week, when BBB seemed weakened but passable and the finance sector viewed Omicron as a positive development that ultimately could herald the end of the pandemic era.

That narrative seemed less popular on Wall Street after the weekend. In New York City, more than 11,000 people received a positive diagnosis on Saturday, the largest daily number since the pandemic began, and almost certainly a significant undercount. The new variant is now spreading rapidly across vast swaths of the country, and the footage of long lines at testing sites and record numbers of infected have made the threat far less abstract than it had seemed. Omicron, one Wall Street trader told me, is “not as bad as the initial strain in terms of people getting sick, but if you multiply the numbers by four, five, and you do the math around who’s not vaccinated, that puts the health-care system under stress.” (Why this wasn’t clear to traders last week, when many epidemiologists were making exactly that point, is unclear.)

Take a look at how our economy is structured, and the problems Omicron presents become obvious. About 128 million people work in jobs that require human interaction, as bank tellers, baristas, cashiers, and the like. That makes the service industry by far the largest sector of the economy. “In the larger scheme of things, it’s the inability of the services economy to pick up the pace in a situation where the infection rates are rising. That’s a bigger risk to the first quarter,” said Madhavi Bokil, a senior vice-president at Moody’s Investors Services. The country was already dealing with a persistently high level of cases per day, but a huge spike — even without a correlating rise in hospitalizations and deaths — could depress some portion of the service industry, which was just finding its footing again.

Manchin’s “no” throws up another obstacle to economic growth. The Build Back Better plan would have essentially worked as a stimulus bill, pumping in money to the economy and easing the way back to relative normalcy. Instead, people will find it harder to access money as stimulus and welfare payments dry up, borrowing costs surge, and student-loan payments return — all of which will be harder to withstand without a fiscal cushion. Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius published a research report Sunday forecasting that smaller piecemeal legislation is unlikely to pass, which shrunk the firm’s economic-growth expectations by hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of this year. That’s partly because the Child Tax Credit, which delivers as much as $6,000 a year to some parents, is set to expire on December 31. The money from the program tends to go directly back into the economy, as parents spend it quickly on their children. “Where it really would have supported immediate growth is the extended Child Tax Credit aspect of the bill,” Bokil said. Over the long term, it would increase growth by funding training and education for workers and supporting fast-growing industries like electric vehicles and sustainable energy’.

Globally, the big question that keeps coming back to my mind is this: if democracy in the US is much more seriously eroded than it already has been, what will be the reactions of politicians and populations in other countries? I don’t mean only how it will affect the ways other countries deal with the US; I mean to what extent it will prompt people in other countries to react with approval ‘We should try to do something like that here’ and to what extent it will prompt people in other countries to react with disapproval ‘We must try to forestall anything like that from happening here’.

Things that may yet save the day:

1. Through death or other causes, Trump is unavailable to run.
2. Possibly as a result of 1., the Republican party splits, nationally or locally, so as to nullify their advantages.
3. Possibly as a result of 2., some of the conservative SC justices are unwilling to go the whole hog.

We ought to critically scrutinise our pre-existing ideas about democracy. In the West, democracy has come to be associated with a particular set of institutions centred around elected representative. But democracy hasn’t always been so narrowly construed.

I like Amartya Sen’s much broader definition of democracy which simply entails having a broadly equal say over how we are governed. If we take that broader (outcome based vs procedural based) idea of democracy, it’s easy to see that Western democratic institutions have not historically given everyone broadly equal say on how they are governed. It has tended to give capitalist elites a disproportionate say, along with non-capitalist elites like journalists, the defence-security establishment, …)

The other issue is that “democracy” is seen as essentialist terms. So the US, UK, Canada, Australia are categorised as “democracies” no matter how undemocratic some of their institutions are in practice (e.g., in privileging the voice of capitalists and NYT columnists); whereas a country like Singapore is deemed “authoritarian” no matter how much the Singapore government consults its people in decision-making. So “democracy” has become an “in-group identity”, to exclude other countries no matter how much actual say their populations have in how they are governed.

Democracy is a much broader concept that Western style institutions. We should be interested in how other countries practice democracy, including those that we unreflectively label as “authoritarian”.

“Looking to the future, I’d still have some optimism if it weren’t for the situation in the US.”

Indeed. Since about the 2020 US election, there been presidential elections in Bolivia, Equador, Honduras and Chile (among others). All of these are countries with a recent history of coups and authoritarian / dictatorial rule. (The Chilean right wing candidate Jose Kast openly endorsed Pinochet during the campaign). In Bolivia, Honduras and Chile, left wing candidates won, in Equador the right wing candidate. In each instance, the losing party quickly accepted the outcome and conceded defeat. I think on the same day or the day after the election. (Peru, where the left wing candidate also won, was an exception. Here, the election was extremely close, and the right wing candidate alleged election fraud.)

It is remarkable that the US GOP cannot be counted on these days to have even as much commitment to democracy than right wing authoritarians in countries like Honduras.

Ronal: “… The United States is doing well economically with rising wages, so I am hoping the anti-democracy party will lose ground in the midterms and will be so far behind in the Presidential election that the not yet ruined nation will won’t collapse and become a nuclear armed banana non-republic.”

1) The strong norm is for the non-presidential party to pick up seats. IIRC, the current GOP gerrymandering is supposed to guarantee them 11 more seats, if all else was equal.

2) As has been pointed out, the GOP is conducting an all-out push to make sure that they can gerrymander, suppress votes and in the end simply ignore votes against them.

(sorry for misspelling your name, Ronald)

Cheez Whiz: ” There are 2 problems with this plan: the current Republican Party has little interest in governing (it’s an old conservative trope that the government that governs least governs best, despite the fact that this is no longer the 19th century), let alone the latest generation of social media Republicans that have no idea what governing might be. This means that the next crisis, whether economic, weather, geopolitical, or health related, will not go well.”

Note that this has so far not hurt the GOP, so far as we can tell. Trump botched the pandemic, and came within a hair’s breath of winning, IMHO a margin easily achievable by state legislatures throwing out a few districts’ votes.

We are seeing poor approval figures for Biden (albeit better than Trump’s) even as the economy takes off. This is due to both the GOP base being 100% against him, no matter what, but also due to the ‘liberal’ MSM happily going back to a ‘both sides’ normality.

I like Amartya Sen’s much broader definition of democracy which simply entails having a broadly equal say over how we are governed. If we take that broader (outcome based vs procedural based) idea of democracy, it’s easy to see that Western democratic institutions have not historically given everyone broadly equal say on how they are governed. It has tended to give capitalist elites a disproportionate say, along with non-capitalist elites like journalists, the defence-security establishment, …)

No-True-Scotsmanning away all historical examples of democracy doesn’t solve the problem so much as attempt to sweep it under the carpet. We still need a term to distinguish rule of the demos from oligarchy or monarchy.

Democratic government in the US failed decades ago, dying of its internal contradictions, of the unwillingness of democratically elected representatives to govern. If an administration or legislative majority were to actually do anything that required exercise of govt power, that would have to alienate some group of voters or another, thus endangering their ability to win the next election. The exercise of govt power, and the source of that power in a democracy, have been allowed to get into an unacknowledged opposition so deep that it can’t be resolved under our current party system.

For all of those decades since govt in the US failed we could tell ourselves until quite recently that, since democracy was still operational, since free and fair elections had become more of a norm than at any previous time in our history, well, then, democratic govt was healthier than ever. We avoided the logical connection these two things: 1) the decline of the political machines that had for most of our history in most places in the US kept honest popular elections from choosing govt officials, and 2) the increasingly non-existent stakes to election results. If govt officials no longer exercised substantial govt power, well, of course the power hungry lost interest in exercising power to distort and suppress free elections, and that left the field free for disinterested good govt types to clean up our elections. Yay for democracy! But that victory was made possible by the fact that our shiny new democratically elected govts no longer much governed.

The events of 1/6 have finally ripped the mask off that contradiction. The foundational responsibility of govt is to preserve its monopoly on violence, at the very least to keep any private actors or combinations from using violence to get into public office and the govt power that office confers. If 1/6 is to be taken seriously as an insurrection aiming at giving the presidency to the loser of the election, then any govt so threatened has to treat the ideology that motivated the insurrection as sedition. The current identifying ideology of the Republican Party is this and only this, that Trump Really Won. Belief that Trump Really Won both justifies and requires the overthrow of the current govt by any means necessary that happen to be expedient at the moment. This belief has already produced one act of violence, 1/6, that had a non-trivial chance of succeeding at overthrowing democracy in the US. This belief is still publicly and fervently espoused by one of our tow major political parties.

Public espousal of the identifying credo of the Republican Party, Trump Really Won, is sedition, and the basic responsibility of governance requires at least that party’s public office-holders to be charged with sedition. That step would require suspension of habeas corpus and the creation of special tribunals because the current law enforcement apparatus of the US is lousy with R seditionists, and any juries chosen under ordinary rules could not exclude seditionist Republicans.

The current D administration and legislative majority has to choose between actually being a govt and outlawing the R party, ending the illusion of democratic governance, or of going Micawber on us and letting things take their ungoverned course. Lord knows that doing nothing, refraining from the course of ending democracy by outlawing the Rs for at least as long as it takes to end the R threat to democracy, could end up producing the best outcome. History famously is supposed to repeat tragedy as farce, and so maybe the Trump Really Won movement will collapse any day now underneath the weight of its own internal contradictions and absurdities. Maybe the current administration doing its duty and rounding up the Rs is actually the only way the Rs succeed. That action would be obviously undemocratic, and the US has for so long lived without govt exercising power that the need to outlaw the Rs is not something that will be understood by enough people to hold back the reaction, by the general public or just by the people in the military, to outlawing the Republican Party, and so we would end up with the Ds all in prison or worse.

At any rate, there seems little prospect on the Ds agreeing among themselves to take any dramatic course of action, so it’s not as if we have to worry much that they will start another US civil war. The Ds will predictably do nothing and let events take their course. Maybe there is some act more overt than 1/6 that will get Ds to a consensus on the need to outlaw the Rs, but God knows what that would have to be, and that overt act not be too late for us to react effectively.

Democratic governance is inherently contradictory in its basic structure, only long and continuous public acknowledgement of that contradiction can keep it functional, and the one outstanding characteristic of political culture in the US for decades now has been a refusal to publicly acknowledge much of anything, least of all anything at all difficult and contradictory.

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m defining democracy to include the system of government prevailing in the US before Trump, and asking whether it will be replaced by something that clearly isn’t democracy.

I’ll just go with “no, it won’t be replaced with anything that is clearly less based on voters controlling policy on key issues.”

Democracy is a bit overloaded: it might mean “rule by voters”, but in typical American usage it includes some amount of “getting the acceptable answers” and some measure of “rule of law”. But I do believe it is unlikely on the “rule by voters” definition to become less democratic: proposition 187 and proposition 8 were democratic, and I see no prospect of them being implemented.

Remember that the modus operandi of Trumpets is chaos, so all our thoughtful work will be out the window as soon as they start up again, as we leap from crisis to crisis trying to keep up as they destroy everything.

A contributing factor may be the difficulty in crafting policy that serves everyone more or less well enough, given the existence of a monied minority* with no reticence in making their case for policy that grants them favorable treatment. As policy is diverted to serving the squeaky wheel, the majority increasingly question the legitimacy of their government** . Ideally, the monied minority would work to maximize the overlap of their interests with those of the majority, as a customer base with spending money is in their long term interest. Some of them already understand this, more need to.

*Politicians having difficulty discerning “Vox populi” are offered the “Vox pecunia” as an easy alternative.
**Offering more leverage for clever dissemblers.

We ought to critically scrutinise our pre-existing ideas about democracy. In the West, democracy has come to be associated with a particular set of institutions centred around elected representative. But democracy hasn’t always been so narrowly construed.

I like Amartya Sen’s much broader definition of democracy which simply entails having a broadly equal say over how we are governed. If we take that broader (outcome based vs procedural based) idea of democracy, it’s easy to see that Western democratic institutions have not historically given everyone broadly equal say on how they are governed. It has tended to give capitalist elites a disproportionate say, along with non-capitalist elites like journalists, the defence-security establishment, …)

The other issue is that “democracy” is seen as essentialist terms. So the US, UK, Canada, Australia are categorised as “democracies” no matter how undemocratic some of their institutions are in practice (e.g., in privileging the voice of capitalists and NYT columnists); whereas a country like Singapore is deemed “authoritarian” no matter how much the Singapore government consults its people in decision-making. So “democracy” has become an “in-group identity”, to exclude other countries no matter how much actual say their populations have in how they are governed.

Democracy is a much broader concept that Western style institutions. We should be interested in how other countries practice democracy, including those that we unreflectively label as “authoritarian”.

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m defining democracy to include the system of government prevailing in the US before Trump, and asking whether it will be replaced by something that clearly isn’t democracy.

I’ll just go with “no, it won’t be replaced with anything that is clearly less based on voters controlling policy on key issues.”

Democracy is a bit overloaded: it might mean “rule by voters”, but in typical American usage it includes some amount of “getting the acceptable answers” and some measure of “rule of law”. But I do believe it is unlikely on the “rule by voters” definition to become less democratic: proposition 187 and proposition 8 were democratic, and I see no prospect of them being implemented.

In the contemporary world, there’s a rough distinction between countries where it is possible for a popular election to bring about a change of government and countries where this is not possible. To illustrate with a small number of examples: in Spain and in New Zealand it is possible; in Vietnam and in Swaziland it is not possible. There may be a few cases where there’s room for dispute about which category the country falls into, but the distinction is still worth making. For the past two centuries, the United States has been one of the countries where it is possible for a popular election to bring about a change of government; it may continue to be so, or then again it may not.

Within both categories, there is significant variation in how much influence the people at large have over political decisions. In a country where a popular election can’t change the government, the people at large may have significant influence over political decisions, or then again they may not. Countries where popular elections can change the government also vary in how much influence the people at large have over political decisions. These variations within each category are also important; popular influence on political decisions may increase or decrease in the United States (just as in any other country) without its necessarily changing from one of the two categories mentioned to the other; but to me it still seems worth recognising the distinction between those two categories even though there is significant variation within each of them.

It’s possible (indeed, it’s common) to have popular elections without the possibility of a resulting change of government; it’s possible to retain popular elections and other formal structures of a system with alternation in government while removing the practical possibility of alternation in government. Even if the United States changes to a system where it’s no longer possible for popular elections to produce a change of government, I would expect existing formal structures to be retained and I would further expect supporters of the entrenched government to insist that the US system had been retained, not replaced by a different one.

My contribution to the general pessimism. Two factors make the decline of democracy especially dangerous just now. First, a long struggle with the effects of climate change lies ahead, which means that all governments are going to have to take difficult steps that will infringe on people’s rights and routines. Political absolutism arose during a previous climate crisis, and I expect authoritarian regimes to gradually become totalitarian in the absence of mechanisms of willing cooperation. Second, undemocratic regimes have a perpetual legitimacy problem. The bog standard way for shaky despots to safeguard their power is foreign war—Putin’s current round of saber rattling surely has something to do with rumblings of domestic discontent. I’ve thought for quite a while that the second era of fascism might be rather motor peaceful than the first because the political dinosaurs are operating in a world where nuclear weapons make big power collisions suicidal. These days I’ve come to wonder if I’m whistling in the dark.

Was Joe Biden a virtual certainty at the end of 2017, or George W Bush at the end of 1997, or Ronald Reagan at the end of 1977, or John F Kennedy at the end of 1957? Each was an obvious prospect, but none of them was a virtual certainty. Which President was, this far in advance? James Madison, at the end of 1805?

If somebody wanted to bet against Donald Trump being President again in 2025, what odds would you be prepared to offer?

Wonks Anonymous: uh, you cite Big Media Matt? The man alternates between quasi-reasonable accepted wisdom takes, and series of scorching hot takes. He’s not an expert in any of these things, and at this point, I ignore all his words (such as they are).

Why is he this way? Some think it’s lack of editors on his substack; others think he’s doing it because that’s how the click economy works: you need to elicit outrage to get clicks. I don’t really care.

BTW, it’s not just about L’il Donnie: it’s about the further entrenching of permanent GrOPer rule, the destruction of democratic governance. Lord Littledick was just a symptom, even as he showed his party the way forward.

Recent events suggest that the need to modify or eliminate the Senate filibuster is urgent. This bears on the thread bc it bears on Dems’ future electoral prospects. Absurd that everything shd be revolving now around a single Senator from WVa. Have nothing vs WVa (I lived there briefly a long time ago) but this is ridiculous.

So the activists/journalists/advisors get caught up in things that have essentially zero political upside, but relatively large potential for political downside if they caught looking stupid. (The “parents shouldn’t be involved in school decisions” gaffe being an excellent example of it, as was the idiotic Abolish the Police silliness, as is the ‘latinx’ stuff).

It’s not clear whether you’re suggesting that people shouldn’t say these things. If you are, it seems worth pointing out that it is not within the power of the Democratic Party to arrange affairs so that people don’t say these things, and even if it were it would not be a good thing.

If that’s not what you mean, then it’s not clear how what you mean is different from that. It’s true that political activists sometimes say things which are potentially damaging to their own political causes, but this is true of political activitists of all political stripes and it’s not clear why it would be worth pointing out in this discussion.

As I see it, it doesn’t matter how Trump wins in 2024, the outcome will be the same. As soon as cheating is needed, it will happen, and it will succeed.

Okay, 47 clarifies that this means cheating is certain to be needed, and therefore occur, at some point.

But it seems to me there’s an obvious follow-up question, which is whether it’s better for the opposition (or D’s) to win in 2024 (thus Trump cheats then) or whether it doesn’t really matter. Is the “outcome” the same in all senses? Or more generally, is there an optimal response or strategy to the inevitability of Trump’s abrogation of democracy, or not?

I should have added: In case it’s not obvious, the point of Gutfreund’s bet, was to make the stakes asymmetric, and hence deter Meriwether. This idea that betting “reveals truths” is almost-always bafflegab.

But there’s still no obvious path back to democracy. I’m still keen for suggestions.

It’s unlikely there’s anything you or I can do, here on the other side of the world; but the obvious first priority for people in the US is to strive to turn out as many people as possible to vote Democratic, for all positions at all levels, in 2022. It may not be enough by itself (and I hope people can come up with other ideas as well), but it would be a huge mistake to give up on it.

the unhappy end:

‘Albert Watkins represents the rioter who has come to be called the QAnon Shaman, and when Talking Points Memo asked him about motive, he had this to say: A lot of these defendants — they’re all fucking short-bus people. These are people with brain damage. They’re fucking retarded. They’re on the goddamn spectrum.

Regardless of how we may receive this assessment, which Watkins himself deemed perhaps disrespectful, a country that protects the right to spin fantasy necessarily risks the well-being of those who easily lose themselves to it. Freedom isn’t free is a true thing the right used to say, and the costs of freedom of speech are real costs, borne, in part, by those unskilled at sifting fact from fantasy: the people who join MLMs, who become Scientologists, who lie awake in bed at night worrying over small children drained of adrenochrome. To spear the fact in the sea of grift is not an act of intelligence, exactly, but a kind of sensibility, a certain instinct for grasping the structure of the social world. We like to think of conspiracy theories as outside the realm of intelligent consideration, but the idea of children trafficked via a discount-furniture retailer is not more strange than a network of cages, built to maintain a centuries-old racial hierarchy and kept so cold that Saran Wrap socks register as an act of resistance, in which white rioters who deny the existence of systemic racism now find themselves.

The four-year period in which Guy Reffitt became consumed by various falsehoods was a time when it was normal for people of some education to refer to the leader of the free world as intellectually stunted, and yet it was clear that he possessed the inverse of fact-blindness — a kind of genius for discerning social structure and delegitimizing authority, a man with deep and true intuitions about the rules and how far they would bend, for walking right up to the line and letting others cross it. You’ll never take back our country with weakness. If Watkins’s argument is that one should not imprison people who were incited by a sitting president, some to their own acts of incitement (You’re not going to take away our Trumpy-bear!; We need weapons!), the judge did not find this convincing. A defendant credulous enough to believe he was following Trump’s orders shows an inability (or refusal) to exercise his independent judgment and conform his behavior to the law.

Gina Bisignano, in other words, was a problem the state had no real means to solve, a person especially vulnerable to speech in a society protective of free expression. By late February, in Grady County, she had been imprisoned in one facility or another for over a month, during which she saw the sun exactly once: on the long day when she was transferred from L.A. to Oklahoma. She had been lost in the prison system; had, she says, contracted COVID for a second time at a jail known to be a superspreader site; and had lost 20 pounds by the time a judge agreed to supervised release as she awaited trial for seven charges that would cost her a lifetime’s worth of savings. A guard handed her the Balenciaga sneakers that had been taken from her in L.A. and buzzed her through a door. Her hair was unbrushed and her expression one of fixed panic. Gina had no ID, no credit card, no way to get home, and it was not clear what she would do on the scrubby, sidewalkless Oklahoma streets onto which she was being dumped’.

or in other words:

If too many people believe somebody like ‘trump’
(the worlds new word for: ‘Utmost Right-Wing Science Denying Stupidity’)
and the democratic vote for ‘trump’ him is called ‘democracy’ –
whose fault is that?

@Kien Singapore has no freedom of assembly and severe limits on freedom of speech. Defamation suits are pursued actively by the governing party against the political opposition and against the press and private individuals engaging in political comment. There is good reason to exclude it from the democratic ‘club’.

JimV @58
You speak for me – perfectly put. Bravo.

and ‘why are there so many unhappy with democracy’
form the NYT:

‘We pay too little attention to delivering effective government as a critical democratic value. We are familiar with the threats posed by democratic backsliding and the rise of illiberal forces in several democracies, including the United States. But the most pervasive and perhaps deepest challenge facing virtually all Western democracies today is the political fragmentation of democratic politics.

Political fragmentation is the dispersion of political power into so many different hands and centers of power that it becomes difficult for democratic governments to function effectively.

President Biden has recognized this historic challenge, calling the defining mission of his presidency to be winning the “battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.”

Yet even with unified control of government, the internal divisions of the Democratic Party postponed passage of his bipartisan infrastructure bill for several months and have made it uncertain which parts, if any, of the Build Back Better proposal will be enacted.
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When democratic governments seem incapable of delivering on their promises, this failure can lead to alienation, resignation, distrust and withdrawal among many citizens. It can also trigger demands for authoritarian leaders who promise to cut through messy politics. At an even greater extreme, it can lead people to question democracy itself and become open to anti-democratic systems of government.

The struggle of the Biden administration to deliver on its policy agenda offers a good example of the political fragmentation of politics taking place throughout Western democracies. It takes different forms in the multiparty systems of Europe and the two-party system of the United States. The European democracies are experiencing the unraveling of the traditionally dominant center-left and center-right major parties and coalitions that have governed since World War II. Support for these parties has splintered into new parties of the right and left, along with others with less-easily defined ideological elements. From 2015 to 2017, over 30 new political parties entered European parliaments. Across European democracies, the percentage of people who identify strongly with a political party or are members of one has declined precipitously’.