Will America Remain a Democracy in 2020? - The American Interest

Here's the money shot:

Perhaps unexpectedly, it is the democratic component of liberal democracy that is now most seriously at risk, raising the prospect, as the perspicacious commentator Hussein Ibish has recently warned, that the United States could become the first liberal non-democracy in modern times.
The core issue before us is whether, in the face of a deadly pandemic that is likely to persist for some time and resurge in the fall, America can preserve a core element of democracy—universal suffrage.

Will America Remain a Democracy in 2020? - The American Interest
LARRY DIAMOND

In the wake of the coronavirus, it’s an open question.

At the start of each academic year, I ask my freshman class, “When did the U.S. become a democracy?” The question exposes important ambiguities in the meaning of democracy. Is the answer 1776, when the American states declared their independence from King George III; or 1781, when our first constitution for self-government was ratified; or 1788, when the current U.S. Constitution was ratified; or 1789, when that constitution (and later that year a Bill of Rights) came into effect; or 1865, when slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment; or 1868, when African Americans were able finally to vote nationwide; or 1920, when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution finally gave women the right to vote?

As a scholar of democracy, I believe the only correct answer is 1965, when the U.S. enacted the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited racial barriers to voting and thus ended the sordid “Jim Crow” practices that prevented southern blacks from exercising their democratic rights. The fact that most Americans—that is, white Americans—could vote and run for office before then was not enough to call the U.S. a democracy. Strong protections for freedom of the press and basic civil liberties—again for most, but not all, Americans—were not enough. A democracy requires that the people—all the people, through universal suffrage—be able to choose their leaders and replace their leaders in free and fair elections. And a liberal democracy requires more: strong protections for basic liberties; fair treatment of all citizens, regardless of race, religion, or gender; a robust rule of law, in which all citizens are equal under the law and no one is above it; an independent judiciary to uphold that principle; independent oversight institutions to control corruption and prevent abuse of power; a vigorous civil society to defend citizen interests; and a political culture of mutual tolerance, respect, and restraint.

As I have argued in my recent book, Ill Winds, the liberal elements of democracy in America have been fraying and eroding for some time as political polarization has relentlessly intensified, tolerance has diminished, facts have been distorted or invented, and politics have taken on the desperate coloration of a zero-sum game. This decay was well under way when Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy in 2015, but it is misleading to claim that Trump is more symptom than cause of our current democratic travails. Leaders (especially elected leaders) have an outsized impact on the fate of democracy, and in the long checkered line of American presidents, Trump has had no peer in demagoguery, deceit, and hostility to the norms and institutions of democracy.

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