The big picture

Public Notice begins with a conversation with Brian Klaas about the fragile state of US democracy.

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

---

As Public Notice launches, it seems fitting to begin with a macro look at the perilous state of US democracy as we head into a high-stakes midterm cycle — and with the prospect of another Donald Trump presidential campaign looming uncomfortably on the horizon.

This newsletter will cover lots of moments and trends that illustrate a bigger picture. And there is no trend more significant in American politics today than the Republican Party’s increasingly open embrace of authoritarianism.

---

Public Notice provides independent, reader-supported coverage of US politics and media. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. The best way to support my work is with a paid subscription.

---

Suffice it to say that if 2020 highlighted the grave danger confronting American democracy, 2021 made clear that even after Trump was defeated, that fight is far from over.

The Biden presidency began hopefully. As the nation reeled from the Trump-inspired January 6 insurrection, the 46th president took office and got off to an undeniably strong start. An orderly vaccine rollout successfully (albeit temporarily) got Covid under control. A major stimulus bill was signed into law amid record-setting job gains during the first 100 days of the new administration. The positive trajectory of the country and Biden’s high approval ratings made it seem that the appeal of Trumpism might have crested, and that the nation’s politics had pulled back from the brink.

But things changed over the summer. Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths rose as Trumpworld politicized a vaccine that just months before many strained to credit to the former president. The Covid resurgence and a mix of other factors, including a withdrawal from Afghanistan in which 13 US troops were killed during an attack outside the Kabul airport, hit Biden’s approval numbers, which dipped underwater for the first time in August and are down a full 10 points from the spring. Now, as October begins, Democratic divisions and Republican obstinacy are imperiling major parts of Biden’s domestic legislative agenda in Congress — not to mention voting-rights legislation that appears dead on arrival unless the filibuster is reformed.

Meanwhile, even as Trump’s political platform is reduced to little more than bald-faced lies about the 2020 election being stolen for him, his hold on the Republican Party is stronger than ever.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

Trump claims that the Arizona "audit," which affirmed Biden's victory in the state, actually concluded that he won. Shameless lying and his fans eat it up. #TrumpRally

Republicans who reject those lies, such as Reps. Liz Cheney (WY) and Adam Kinzinger (IL), are being purged from the party, while legislators in states like Georgia and Arizona invoke them to enact laws aimed at tipping the scales for Republicans in future elections.

To get an expert view on all of this, I spoke to Brian Klaas, a professor of global politics at the University College London who, after working in Democratic politics in his native Minnesota, has spent the last decade studying democratic breakdown throughout the world.

Recently, Klaas been sounding the alarm about the Republican Party’s increasingly open embrace of authoritarianism.

Brian Klaas @brianklaas

Now that the GOP has effectively become an authoritarian party that readily discards democratic principles, each election becomes not about alternation of power but a referendum on the survival and continuation of American democracy. The stakes are now so, so much higher.

Klaas, author of the forthcoming book “Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us,” argues that US democracy will remain in jeopardy until major democratic reforms become law at a federal level.

“You can't have a healthy democracy if one party — one of the major parties — is actually authoritarian at its core,” Klaas told me. “I don't think American democracy as we know it will survive another Trump presidency.”

Klaas urges Democratic members of Congress to take a long view.

“The Democrats are gonna really regret in two decades not taking action now when they're in control, because the one thing that I've taken away from doing field research in all these different authoritarian dictatorships is once it's gone, it's gone,” he said.

A transcript of my conversation with Klaas, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

Aaron Rupar

As the Republican Party has become more invested in Trump's lies about the election, we've seen in 2021 that the authoritarian threat is still very real. What's your 30,000-foot read on the prospects of US democracy heading into next year, and a 2024 cycle in which Trump is the consensus frontrunner for the Republican nomination?

Brian Klaas

I hate to be this guy, but I'm very pessimistic. It's been a depressing five, six years to be somebody who studies democracy. 

I worked on Mark Dayton's campaign [Dayton, a Democratic former US Senator, was elected governor of Minnesota in 2010 and served two terms]. I was his deputy campaign manager back in 2010. And I left America because the politics were sort of boring to me. They worked reasonably well in 2010. 

So I moved and started studying basically the breakdown of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism in the rest of the world. And the last five years or so has been like, oh my gosh, all the stuff that I saw over there is happening in the United States now — similar themes, similar trajectories, similar types of personalities drawn into the Republican authoritarian orbit, and so on.

In a very backwards way, the only real glimmer of hope I had for democracy was on January 6, and I don't mean that because it was a good event for democracy. I mean it because I thought the spell might break. I thought that it would be the wake up call when I saw Lindsey Graham seeming to break with Trump for 12 hours or whatever it was, that that was going to be a watershed moment. 

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

"Trump and I, we're had a hell of a journey ... enough is enough ... we've gotta end it" -- Lindsey Graham

And I think what's really worrying to me — and this is why I'm so pessimistic — is that if that wasn't a watershed moment, and if in fact what people have taken away from that moment is that authoritarianism is popular and it's something the base demands — then it's hard for me to see where the reversal is going to come from.

The bottom line for me is that the trends from the Trump era are still happening — possibly in an accelerated way, because there's this sort of ratcheting effect of authoritarian extremism in the party — but I have never heard anyone give me a convincing explanation for where they think this stops. I don't understand how the Republican Party goes back to being moderate. If January 6 isn't something that puts the brakes on, I don't know what will.

This creates a very, very big problem for the Democrats, where the window they have to stop this authoritarian Trump train, so to speak — that window is closing. If they don't take substantive, sweeping action on democratic reforms, I think that US democracy will remain in peril, because you can't have a healthy democracy if one party — one of the major parties — is actually authoritarian at its core.

Aaron Rupar

What explains the Republican Party continuing to be so wedded to Trumpism and its underlying authoritarianism? There's pretty scant evidence it's a winning brand of electoral politics. The California recall is the latest evidence of that, but you can go back to the 2018 midterms, or the 2020 presidential election, which was certainly too close for comfort but ended up with Trump losing as the incumbent. 

Brian Klaas

To me it's a very simple answer. It's two things. It's gerrymandering, and it's primaries. 

I crunched the numbers in 2016 and the average margin of victory in a House race in the US was 37.1 percent. So the stereotypical House district in 2016 was a landslide. There's a tiny number of seats that are actually competitive. When we have these flips, we're talking dozens of seats usually that are in play out of 435. So the overwhelming majority of them are people who exist in a district where the only way they can lose is if they face a primary challenge.

The primaries, obviously, systematically amplify the voices of extremists. And in 2021 the Republican Party extremists are authoritarian zealots who love Donald Trump. To them, Donald Trump is practically God on earth.

And so those people who would normally be a smaller part of the electorate in an open primary, or a general election, wield substantial influence on who the candidates are. People like Lindsey Graham, I hate to say it, are behaving completely rationally. If he wants to get reelected in South Carolina, he's behaving how he should behave based on the polling data we're seeing about the base and how they feel about Donald Trump, and how they're not bothered, frankly, by authoritarianism or by January 6.

If I was going to go slightly deeper, the third thing that's part of this is the breakdown of party control. Thirty years ago where there was network TV and CNN and things like that as part of the newscycle, people like Mitch McConnell had a lot more control over who was the face of the Republican Party. They could say to the first-term congresswoman from Florida or Georgia, 'Sorry, wait your turn, in 20 years you can be on CNN or you can be the face of the party.'

But with social media and also the splintering of Fox News into a right-wing ecosystem that includes OAN and Newsmax, there's a ratcheting effect. You basically have no party control, and the way you break out is by out-Trumping Trump to become a media star. So you have people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who should be on the fringes of the party, instead are the rock stars of the party. 

So you have sort of a perfect storm against democracy in this regard, because the extremists have voices that are much louder than they should be in the Republican Party primaries, and then within the party itself, the people who are loudest are the extremists who end up breaking out because they are the ones who the base is most excited about. And that creates a problem for people like Mitch McConnell, because if they are too vocal in condemning Marjorie Taylor Greene, they could become pariahs. The base is actually much more aligned with her than they are with him.

So I guess I should modify my answer to say three things — it's really the primaries, the gerrymandering, and the lack of control for the mainstream, old guard Republicans who now cannot control the Trumpist elements in their base.

Aaron Rupar

For Democrats who are invested in the fight to preserve US democracy, what do you think they can do practically, whether it's on a policy level or campaign level, to deal with a Republican Party that's increasingly authoritarian? 

Brian Klaas

From a strategy standpoint, it's very simple. Again, I'm going to give you two answers. One is, you win elections. You keep the authoritarian party out of power. And two is, when you do win elections and you have power, you wield it to protect democracy. The Democrats have done the first but they haven't done the second.

On the second point, a lot of the bills that are being proposed are good. One of the things that I lament is that a lot of the discourse around democracy reform in the US is stifled from the beginning because so many ideas are just dead on arrival — they are never going to pass. But the thing that I've always been so frustrated with is that a lot of the problems that exist in American democracy do not exist in other democracies, and that's because there are solutions to them — normal solutions that right and left parties can usually agree on, but that Republicans will not agree to in the United States. So instead what you end up with is the half-assed solution that might be able to get Joe Manchin on board. It's better than nothing, but is it going to save American democracy completely? No, it's a half-measure that will have to be forged in compromise.

---

Public Notice provides independent, reader-supported coverage of US politics and media. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. The best way to support my work is with a paid subscription.

---

The final thing I'd say is that people who are enthusiastic about saving democracy should think about the local level a lot more. It's not just that the pipeline of politicians who end up at the national level come from the local level. It's also things like gerrymandering which is determined at the state level. Initiatives to try to figure out how you actually draw districts, those are things where reform has happened because citizens have gotten involved at the state level. Especially for a lot of the more powerful states, like California — you can affect a lot of stuff in the United States by being powerful in California. 

So at the national level, you need to pass these reforms, and then every possible form of pressure that can be put on Joe Manchin, in particular, should be, because it's too big. 

The really stupid thing about this that's so shortsighted is people making calculations based on the 2022 or 2024 election, when really what's happening right now is determining the state of democracy for the 2044 election. The Democrats are gonna really regret in two decades not taking action now when they're in control, because the one thing that I've taken away from doing field research in all these different authoritarian dictatorships is once it's gone, it's gone. You can rebuild democracies. It does happen. But it's very rare, and it takes decades. It is 1,000 times easier to protect a democracy than it is to rebuild one after it has died.

Aaron Rupar

Having studied authoritarian political environments across the globe, what lessons do you think they impart to people in the US about where we're headed as the prospect of another Trump presidential campaign looms?

Brian Klaas

I guess I'm going in twos in all of my answers, but I think there are two big lessons. 

One is, you need to build as big a tent as possible that's pro-democracy. So Democrats are right to be clamoring for a progressive agenda. You win elections, you want things to happen that are policy changes. But the Democrats need to have a very, very welcoming attitude on the democracy reform stuff. 

It's good that people like Adam Kinzinger are being praised by quite progressive people because the thing that I've seen in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, is that the successful movements that resist authoritarianism are ones that band together. They set aside differences on policy and they band together with allies who may disagree about taxes, or health care, or racial issues, but they completely agree on democratic institutions. So that's the first big lesson.

And the second thing is that the stakes of elections going forward are gonna be just much higher. And this is something that will not be lost on people, which compounds the problem. So what I mean is that if you have an authoritarian party that's trying to win power, every election is an existential threat to democracy to a certain extent. 

I don't think American democracy as we know it will survive another Trump presidency. I'm very pessimistic about that. Beyond that, it also means that the risks of violence are substantial around future elections, and even between elections. 

Political violence tends to happen most around elections when people do not believe that the election is a realistic pathway to power. So what Trump has done is so dangerous because he's basically told Republicans that when you lose, it's not legitimate, therefore if you can't take power by the ballot, you have to use bullets instead. 

Brian Klaas @brianklaas

9. Here's the bottom line: nobody has come up with a convincing explanation for how this authoritarian trend reverses itself. That's why, as someone who studies these dynamics for a living, I'm worried that the GOP is becoming irreversibly authoritarian. (Sorry to be depressing)

And so blocking off this shared sense of legitimacy in American elections, which Trump has now done, means that if 2022 goes the Democrats' way, that there will be people who chalk this up falsely to fraud, and potentially kill people.

One of the things that I have to say looking back on January 6 is that I'm surprised so few people died. I mean, the narrative of that day is obviously one that's terrible, but there were some very dangerous people who surely own a hell of a lot of guns, and somehow it didn't end up as a bloodbath in a much worse way. But I don't think we're gonna have that much luck the next time something like that happens.

So my longer-term projection is that consistent political violence is probably likely around US politics, and unless there is action taken by the Democrats in this short window where they control everything legislatively plus the White House, I think the prospects for American democracy over the medium term are quite dim.