By SUSAN CHIRA
MAY 12, 2017
For scholars of democracy who have kept anxious watch over the tumultuous first months of this presidency, this week’s firing of James Comey set off a new round of alarm bells.
As President Trump attacked judges, intelligence agencies, the press, even the Congressional Budget Office — all potential independent constraints on presidential power — they constantly adjusted their scorecards, trying to sift the alarming from the merely noisy. But firing the official who heads an investigation into possible collusion between a presidential campaign and a foreign power crossed a line, they agreed.
“My alarm-o-meter definitely jumped,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “I’d say I went from a 4 to a 7 out of 10.”
Few argue that the United States is in imminent danger of becoming an autocracy, a term much chewed over by pundits these days, including some conservative ones like David Frum, President George W. Bush’s former speechwriter. But in conversations over the past few months, scholars’ moods and assessments have soared and plummeted.
Fear when Mr. Trump castigated a judge in personal terms. Relief when the administration heeded a court’s temporary stay of the first executive order closing the border to those from seven Muslim-majority countries. Alarm over denunciations of the press. Admiration for a robust American tradition of protest.
“Whenever I run into somebody, they ask me, ‘How worried should I be?’ ” said Yascha Mounk, a lecturer on government at Harvard who has warnedof declining commitment to democratic institutions in several countries.
There is a lively debate in the profession over the answer to that question.
Mr. Mounk’s own concerns have skyrocketed. “It’s the first time he’s done something, rather than said something, that is straight out of the playbook of would-be authoritarians,” he said this week. Other political scientists argue that the Trump administration has shown itself too chaotic and incompetent to harm democratic institutions.
Bright Line Watch, a survey of more than 1,500 political scientists on the state of democracy in America, has so far not recorded an existential threat.
But Susan Stokes, a professor of political science at Yale who is one of the survey’s organizers, said that she and her colleagues decided after Mr. Comey’s firing to add a new question to the latest survey: “Law enforcement investigations of public officials or their associates are free from political influence.” She added dryly, “It will be interesting to see how our colleagues respond.”
Mr. Drutman is particularly concerned by the way congressional leaders immediately backed Mr. Trump.
“That suggests that partisan loyalty is still far more powerful than checks and balances,” he said.
Ms. Stokes worries about Mr. Trump’s temperament. “Political scientists assume that politicians are ambitious and mainly motivated by a desire to win and retain office,” she said. “It’s not an uplifting image of our leaders but at least it makes them predictable, their actions explicable. An ever-improvising president, one who is utterly undisciplined, even to the point of undermining his own positions — that really does worry me.”
Many of the political scientists speak in unusually emotional terms about wrestling with their personal political beliefs (in this case, liberal) and their professional assessments.
“I lived through Reagan and Bush, and I know how it feels to settle in for a long term of policies you don’t like,” Ms. Stokes said. “But this doesn’t feel like you’re settling into anything. You’re on a bus and the axle broke and you’re careening toward you don’t know what.”
Mr. Mounk decided to leave Germany for what may seem like a peculiar reason: As a Jew, he was treated with such suffocating deference that he felt he would never feel normal there. He attended college in Britain and then watched with dismay from the United States as the country voted to leave the European Union.
“2016 has not been an easy year for me,” he told me back in February. “The places I lived turned out to be not quite the beacons of multiethnic democracy I took them to be. It’s personally confounding because this is the America I love, where attitudes are in many ways more tolerant than in Europe.”
Some of the scholars who have issued the most passionate warnings are those who come from countries where democracy has imploded in spectacular fashion.
N. Turkuler Isiksel, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia, watched as a leader she at one point saw as a potential check on Turkey’s powerful military went on to gut other political institutions, jail enemies and cripple independent journalism. Mr. Mounk grew up as a Jew in Germany keenly aware that political safeguards could disappear.
A fellow political scientist labeled Ms. Isiksel hysterical in a Twitter tirade after she wrote an article warning Americans that what she’d seen in her native Turkey could happen here.
Even as they acknowledge that neither Turkey nor Germany has the same long tradition of stable democracy as the United States, both she and Mr. Mounk say Americans have a complacency born of a fortunate history.
Mr. Mounk speaks of a “muscle memory” of how abruptly the political winds can shift that his family and many Europeans possess but most Americans lack.
As bedtime reading, Ms. Iskisel turned to the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” which envisions the election of an American populist who imposes totalitarian rule. Her sense of urgency is heightened because she is a Muslim immigrant married to an American and waiting for her green card to become permanent.
“I don’t trust the American sense of how much trouble they are really in,” she said. “I think overconfidence can be a danger here. I don’t know who has the accurate sense — people with the experience or people who haven’t experienced it before and may not realize they’re in a pot of water that is gradually heating up.”
As an example, she argued that Mr. Trump’s address to Congress in February, praised by many commentators as appropriately presidential, would have been denounced a year ago for Islamophobia and race-baiting, but that his previous speeches had been so incendiary that the bar for what was unacceptable had shifted. And she rejects the arguments of incompetence, saying, “You don’t have to be competent when you have the awesome powers of the U.S. president.”
While average citizens can shield themselves from the emotional whipsaw of the news, political scientists who track the health of democracies find their work drawing them inexorably into the headlines.
“It’s very easy to go down the rabbit hole and lose the big picture,” Mr. Drutman said in March. He had to install an app blocking him from the web for hours at a time so that he could tear his attention away from the latest headlines to focus on writing about American political polarization.
The scholars agree on what to watch for next: Who will be nominated as head of the F.B.I. and what will Republicans do?
“Does Trump nominate a professional or does he nominate a crony?” Mr. Mounk said. “His ability to undermine independent institutions is in the hands of the Republicans.”
Mr. Drutman said that if Republicans continue to reflexively back Mr. Trump, he would raise his “alarm-o-meter” to 8.
For now, the democratic temperature-takers are resigning themselves to a life of perpetual checkups as this extraordinary presidency unfolds. “It’s like that family member who’s the doctor,” Ms. Stokes said. “You go to a family dinner and they want you to look at the pain in their elbow.”
Susan Chira (@susanchira) is a senior correspondent and editor on gender issues for The New York Times.
NYT
No comments:
Post a Comment