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Suzanne Mettler on Four Threats to Democracy and Five Crises in American Democracy

 
 
 
lpetrich

lpetrich

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Susanne Mettler, Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University, has written a book, "Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy", and she discusses five times when US democracy was under siege. She states that we are in a sixth time.

From the WaPo interview, standards of democracy:
  • holding free and fair elections
  • upholding the rule of law
  • recognizing the idea of legitimate opposition
  • protecting the integrity of rights

The threats are:
  • Political polarization
  • Conflicts over who can participate in politics
  • High economic inequality
  • Excessive executive power
Prof. Mettler says that these are threats that have been identified in several other nations.

Polarization reminds me of something from Bertrand Russell's essay, "Ideas that have Helped Mankind", in his book "Unpopular Essays":
In addition to religious freedom, free press, free speech, and freedom from arbitrary arrest came to be taken for granted during the nineteenth century, at least among the Western democracies. But their hold on men's minds was much more precarious than was at the time supposed, and now, over the greater part of the earth's surface, nothing remains of them, either in practice or in theory. Stalin could neither understand nor respect the point of view which led Churchill to allow himself to be peaceably dispossessed as a result of a popular vote. I am a firm believer in democratic representative government as the best form for those who have the tolerance and self-restraint that is required to make it workable. But its advocates make a mistake if they suppose that it can be at once introduced into countries where the average citizen has hitherto lacked all training in the give-and-take that it requires. In a Balkan country, not so many years ago, a party which had been beaten by a narrow margin in a general election retrieved its fortunes by shooting a sufficient number of the representatives of the other side to give it a majority. People in the West thought this characteristic of the Balkans, forgetting that Cromwell and Robespierre had acted likewise.
Click to expand...
 
More from the WaPo:
The confluence of all four threats today means that they are combining and interacting in particularly dangerous ways. Polarization has been on the rise since the 1980s, dividing Americans into hostile “us vs. them” camps. Conflict over inclusion and status, particularly regarding race and immigration, increasingly divides the parties. Economic inequality has been escalating since the 1970s, prompting the affluent to mobilize politically to protect their wealth from those who seek greater redistribution. For nearly a century, presidents of both parties have claimed greater power for the office and left it behind for their successors, increasing the opportunity and temptation to use power for personal or partisan aims.

Although the threats have been gathering steam for decades and have been on full view during the Trump presidency, events in the past few months have punctuated them even further. The coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis it precipitated have dramatically exposed partisan, economic and racial fault lines. Americans of color have disproportionately been victims of the virus. The pandemic-induced recession has exacerbated economic inequality, exposing the most economically vulnerable to job losses, food and housing insecurity and the loss of health insurance. And partisan differences have shaped Americans’ responses to the pandemic. Even the simple act of wearing a mask has become a partisan symbol. The Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd have further highlighted the deep hold that systemic racism has long had on American politics and society.
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Executive aggrandizement may also be called Caesarism, after Julius Caesar, who famously took over in a coup against the Roman Republic. That republic had suffered a lot of strife and civil war, and JC's coup was a fatal blow to it. But it did not completely die until his grandnephew Octavian became unchallenged ruler as Augustus Caesar.

SM was provoked to research this issue from her colleagues comparing Trump to such self-aggrandizing leaders as Viktor Orban of Hungary and Vladimir Putin of Russia. Like how he acts as if the Department of Justice is his own personal law firm. He fired Jeff Sessions for not acting like his personal lawyer, and he got what he wanted in William Barr -- for a while. Now he's dissatisfied with WB for not endorsing his vote-fraud claims.
 
SM has a table of which threats were dominant in various times of crisis:
[TABLE="class: grid"]
[TR]
[TD]Period[/TD]
[TD]Plzn[/TD]
[TD]Ptcp[/TD]
[TD]Nqlt[/TD]
[TD]Xctv[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]1790's[/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]1850's[/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]1890's[/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]1930's[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]1970's[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]2010's[/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[TD]X[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]


  • Plzn = polarization
  • Ptcp = participation in the political community
  • Nqlt = great economic inequality
  • Xctv = executive aggrandizement

Seems like a worse time than in those other crisis times.

In the radio show, she had a Q&A, and someone claimed that the real threat is socialism. SM seemed to think that that is a non-issue, and she notes that across the political spectrum, there is agreement over how much the excesses of capitalism should be reined in. They disagree on how much, she says.

She discussed the Constitution very little, because as she notes, the Constitution does not enforce itself. It also does not say much about the issues that she discusses. One could make a case that executive aggrandizement is unconstitutional, since the Founders gave the most prominence to Congress and discussed the Presidency much less.

They made the Presidency independent of Congress instead of elected by the Congress. It was a missed opportunity on their part to create a quasi-parliamentary system like what Switzerland has. The Swiss executive is a collective presidency of 7 people, all elected by the nation's legislature, the Federal Assembly.
 
Suzanne Mettler discussed a horrible event in US history:  Wilmington insurrection of 1898 To quote that article's introduction,
The Wilmington insurrection of 1898, also known as the Wilmington massacre of 1898 or the Wilmington coup of 1898,[6] was a mass riot and insurrection carried out by white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States, on Thursday, November 10, 1898.[7] Though the white press in Wilmington originally described the event as a race riot caused by blacks, as more facts were publicized over time it came to be seen as a coup d'état, the violent overthrow of a duly elected government, by a group of white supremacists.

Multiple causes brought it about.[1][8][9][10][11][12][13] The coup occurred after the state's white Southern Democrats conspired and led a mob of 2,000 white men to overthrow the legitimately elected local Fusionist government. They expelled opposition black and white political leaders from the city, destroyed the property and businesses of black citizens built up since the Civil War, including the only black newspaper in the city, and killed an estimated 60 to more than 300 people.[2][3][4][5] It has been described as the only incident of its kind in American history,[14][15] because other incidents of late-Reconstruction Era violence did not result in the direct removal and replacement of elected officials by unelected individuals.

The Wilmington coup is considered a turning point in post-Reconstruction North Carolina politics. It initiated an era of more severe racial segregation and effective disenfranchisement of African Americans throughout the South, a shift which had been underway since the passage of a new constitution in Mississippi in 1890 which raised barriers to the registration of black voters. Laura Edwards wrote in Democracy Betrayed (2000): "What happened in Wilmington became an affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South and in the nation as a whole", as it affirmed that invoking "whiteness" eclipsed the legal citizenship, individual rights, and equal protection under the law that blacks were guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.[16][17][18]
Click to expand...
SM notes that late 19th cy. after Reconstruction in the South seems to have been erased from our collective memory. It's a rather horrible time, and one sadly not discussed very much. It was the time of the  Redeemers - counterrevolutionaries who sought to restore white supremacy, with violence and terrorism if necessary.

The civil-rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's was long overdue - the North essentially abandoned Southern blacks at the end of Reconstruction, and in two periods of big reforms afterward, the Progressive and New Deal periods, civil-rights activists had little success. They succeeded in organizing the NAACP in the Progressive Era and they got President Truman to desegregate the armed forces in the New Deal era, but they got started in a big way only during the Eisenhower Era, a conservative period that followed the New Deal Era. But it got big enough to help end that period and start a new period of big reforms, the Sixties Era.
 
I'd never heard of the Wilmington Massacre until just now, when I read Ipetrich's post. I first learned of the  Tulsa race massacre just a few months ago. And there were other very deadly insurrections, e.g. the  Red Summer of 1919 after soldiers were discharged and looking for work. I hadn't heard of them either. Heck, I'd never heard of the 1931  Harlan County War or the  1934 West Coast waterfront strike until I started hanging out on YouTube.

Perhaps Americans' politics would be less irrational if they knew their own American history.

Some of the riots stemmed from labor disputes. In the riots of 1919 it was often white laborers on strike who murdered black strikebreakers. In coal-mining country there was white-on-white violence, as owners resisted labor unionizers.

I didn't watch the Mettler video (Sam Seder's stuttering drives me crazy); does she predict how this dystopia will play out?

The huge anger of America's New Right today seems unfocused — does it originate from self-loathing? — but there is certainly much hatred against blacks. Some blacks, in turn, also have increasing anger. Proud Boys and other Republicans are already committing assaults against protestors; will one of these turn into a massacre? Will the traitors wait until Biden is in power so that their violence reflects their hatred for him? Or will they hurry to commit crimes in the next few weeks, hoping that the Hater-in-Chief will pardon them?
 
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