I’m especially worried about the US going forward. In general presidential republics don’t have a good track record. Luckily the US has benefited from strong notions of democratic legitimacy over most of its history. Also, except at the very beginning, for a brief period around the birth of the Republican party, and recently with the introduction of open primaries US political parties haven’t had strong ideological partisanship but were mostly very ideologically mixed with most partisanship being over spoils rather than ideology.
In How Democracies Die the authors argue that the most worrying sign for a democracy is an escalating pattern of constitutional hardball where contestants continue to adhere to the written rules but more and more break unwritten norms. Within the last couple of decades we’ve seen filibusters go from a rarely deployed emergency break to a routine legislative tactic, repeated showdowns over the debt ceiling, a breakdown in norms around supreme court appointees, etc. I don’t expect any disaster imminently, but the trends are very bad.
I’m especially worried about the US going forward. In general presidential republics don’t have a good track record. Luckily the US has benefited from strong notions of democratic legitimacy over most of its history. Also, except at the very beginning, for a brief period around the birth of the Republican party, and recently with the introduction of open primaries US political parties haven’t had strong ideological partisanship but were mostly very ideologically mixed with most partisanship being over spoils rather than ideology.
In How Democracies Die the authors argue that the most worrying sign for a democracy is an escalating pattern of constitutional hardball where contestants continue to adhere to the written rules but more and more break unwritten norms. Within the last couple of decades we’ve seen filibusters go from a rarely deployed emergency break to a routine legislative tactic, repeated showdowns over the debt ceiling, a breakdown in norms around supreme court appointees, etc. I don’t expect any disaster imminently, but the trends are very bad.