History Professor Answers: Is American Democracy Going to Die?

Many people around the world [bright music]

are concerned about the future of democracy.

They have good reason to be.

Some estimates show that over 70%

of the world's population now lives

under some form of autocracy.

I'm historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Today, we're answering one of the most searched,

misunderstood and debated questions of our time,

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is American democracy going to die?

Most people think democracies are dying when they see things

like this, angry protests, bitter partisanship,

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culture wars, scandals and contested elections.

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But democracies can survive all these things.

Instead, experts on autocracy like myself look for patterns

that appear in countries' democracies are being weakened.

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The first is electoral manipulation.

Changing the rules of the game to benefit those in power.

There's a whole bag of tricks autocrats use.

First, you make it difficult

or dangerous for people to vote.

They can use paramilitaries or gangs as observers

to make people feel watched when they're voting.

In Italy, would-be autocrat Mussolini used

his Blackshirt fascists

to harass people when they were casting their ballots.

In the 21st century, they still use armed enforcers

and paramilitaries as Maduro did in Venezuela

to make voting difficult for those in the opposition.

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What if you're an autocrat and you fear someone

from the opposition can beat you

in a fair and free election?

Well, if you're Erdogan in Turkey

or Putin in Russia, you remove those people from the ballot.

Erdogan jailed the Mayor of Istanbul, Erkem Imamoglu,

that he could not run for office.

Putin made sure that Alexei Navalny was disqualified

from the ballot.

The United States has a long history of suppressing fair

and free elections.

The racialized voter suppression, gerrymandering,

redistricting, this was used

in the Jim Crow South and after.

Today, the Supreme Court attempts to take the power out

of the Voting Rights Act to make it more difficult

for non-whites to vote.

When we think of dictators, what comes

to mind is often old one-party states like fascism

or Stalin's communism.

So it's surprising that today, wannabe autocrats

and dictators are often elected.

That's been the case with Erdogan of Turkey, Putin

of Russia, Orban of Hungary, Duterte

and Marcos in the Philippines, and Donald Trump.

The end game of electoral manipulation

is to remove confidence in the public

that elections are free and fair.

If you think the elections are a sham,

you're much less likely

to exercise your precious right to vote.

In doing so, you're doing the autocrat's job for him.

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Another warning sign

that a country is heading into autocracy

is weaponized government.

All government institutions

and agencies have to be transformed

so that impartial civil servants are out

and loyalists who will do your bidding are in.

That's the essence of weaponizing government.

Since authoritarians are lawless people who live in fear

of being held accountable,

they especially go after the judiciary.

In Nazi Germany, Hitler brought the German courts

into alignment with Nazi policies,

including using the courts

to have new race-based laws and racial punishments.

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In Italy, Mussolini had a new penal code

which brought fascist values into the legal system.

In Turkey, after the 2016 coup against Erdogan, a vast purge

of the judiciary was launched,

even though the judiciary had nothing to do with the coup,

and hundreds of lawyers and prosecutors

and judges have been put behind bars.

Similar things are happening in the United States today.

The Supreme Court gave Trump a gift

by giving the presidential office immunity

for official acts.

The tax system has been repurposed

so that the IRS can no longer investigate

the president or his family.

The Department of Justice has been repurposed

as the president's personal tool,

for example, launching investigations

into the former FBI Head, James Comey.

Candidates for judicial positions are asked

the important question, Who won the 2020 election?

If you give the wrong answer, you are considered not fit

for government service.

Who won the 2020 election?

Joe Biden was certified president.

That is not what I asked you.

Courts don't disappear under authoritarian rule,

but they can stop acting as an independent check on power.

Today in the United States, legal actions are one

of the centers of resistance

against encroaching authoritarianism.

In hundreds of cases,

judges have ruled against President Trump's policies

and actions, thus acting to slow down

or reverse the march to autocracy.

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Another hallmark of weakening democracy, press intimidation.

If you want to know if a politician

has authoritarian aspirations,

see how they talk about the press.

Do they label them as corrupt, as fake news?

Do they try and discredit the free press?

If so, you're in the presence of someone

who has autocratic ambitions.

For Mussolini, beating up

the opposition journalist Piero Gobetti in the early 1920s

when he was still trying to become a dictator.

To Hitler, outlawing criticism in art

and culture and in the press in the 1930s.

Media capture is an integral part

of the authoritarian playbook.

In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi retained control of all

of the private news networks

and television channels while he was prime minister,

and exercised pressure on the state broadcaster, The RAI,

resulting in many journalists being fired or resigning.

Autocrats can go after media outlets

and individual journalists

who reveal their corruption and their violence.

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This happened in the Philippines.

Rodrigo Duterte sued Maria Ressa

and the Rappler, her outlet, for tax evasion

and ultimately liable.

Being an investigative journalist is one

of the most dangerous professions in an autocracy.

Vladimir Putin had Anna Politkovskaya killed,

and the Saudis had Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist,

chopped into pieces for investigating their crimes.

In the United States, media capture has proceeded

with billionaire allies of Trump buying up historic outlets

such as CBS, and criticizing the administration's policies

has become more risky.

Even The Washington Post, which is owned

by billionaire, Trump ally, Jeff Bezos, had one

of its journalists, Hannah Natanson, investigated

and her house was searched.

The Trump administration has also sued many news outlets,

including The New York Times

and 60 Minutes, in order to create a chilling effect.

The version of reality he wants promoted

must be the only reality that Americans hear.

The 21st century poses challenges, however, to autocrats

who want a total media capture.

There's a whole world

of individual creators and influencers.

Think of YouTube, Substacks, TikTok.

Independent journalism has also had a huge revival.

Short of internet-free countries such as Eritrea

or total dictatorships such as North Korea, the defenders

of democracy cannot all be silenced.

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Another sign of a weakening democracy

is the normalization of extremism.

It's when ideas that used to seem outlandish

or fringe, marginal, or crazy become accepted

and even integrated into state policy.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister,

said, We have to bring the Jewish question

into the public's attention so that Jews would be recognized

as enemies of the state.

Every autocracy targets certain groups who are said

to be not only a threat to public safety,

but to the entire country and to civilization itself.

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Traditionally, communists have been seen

by right-wing dictators as a source of social anarchy,

and thus policies have been supported by the population

to detain them and kill them,

and that happened in the military dictatorships

of the Cold Wars, such as Pinochet's Chile.

A through line of autocracy is homophobia,

and LGBTQ groups have been targeted

by autocrats throughout history, from the Nazis

who sent LGBTQ people to concentration camps,

to the Hungary of Orban, the Italy of Giorgia Meloni,

who say they're a danger to the quote, Natural family,

which is one man, one woman, both straight.

Nomadic peoples, Muslims are targeted

around the world today.

Think of in India, Modi, convincing the population

that these groups pose a threat

to the country's national identity, which must be Hindu.

In the United States and Europe, it's been non-whites

and immigrants, often targeted.

Immigrants are said to be eating cats and dogs.

They're likened to vermin.

They're dehumanized, all to create an environment

that will lead people to think that perhaps violence

or detention or deportation is the answer.

ICE agents in the United States are allowed to be lawless

to put down and detain and police these groups who are seen

as enemies of the state.

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In the United States, the long history of tolerance

for militias, the fetish for guns

and race-based violence such as lynchings made fertile soil

for someone such as Donald Trump to come along

and normalize extremism.

From 2016 onward, he made the MAGA Movement a big tent

for all kinds of extremists, neo-Nazis, homophobes, people

who were apologists for the Jim Crow South,

and people who believed

that violence is the way you deal with difference.

The normalization of extremism

is why so many autocrats give pardons to violent extremists.

After all, why should people

with perfectly useful criminal skills be sitting in jail

when they could serve your cause?

Mussolini pardoned all the violent Blackshirts who got him

to power when he became a dictator.

Augusto Pinochet in Chile pardoned

all the human rights abusers, and Donald Trump pardoned

the January 6th rioters who assaulted the Capitol

and threatened Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers.

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The last sign of a declining democracy

is a transfer of power crisis.

Sometimes, despite trying their best to capture the country,

an autocrat can lose an election

and then they have to act to stay in power at all costs.

In 2022, Pedro Castillo, the President of Peru,

tried a self-coup or autogolpe.

An auto-coup is when a president who is in office tries

to stay there by illegal means.

He was promptly jailed.

As a journalist said, He was president at breakfast

and a prisoner by dinner.

In 2024, South Korean President Yoon declared martial law

to avoid prosecution possibly of his family

and to neutralize the opposition.

The National Assembly promptly acted against him,

and President Yoon is now sitting in jail for life.

In the 20th century, one of the biggest risks

to declining democracies were coups,

that somebody would come from outside,

often military officials,

and replace the democratically elected politician.

That happened in Chile in 1973

where Salvador Allende was forced out of office

and Pinochet took over for 17 years.

That's a transfer of power crisis for sure.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election

and then plotted a coup to stay in power illegally.

First, he claimed electoral fraud,

and then he planned, as we now know from his trial,

to assassinate Lula Da Silva,

who was the incoming head of state, and other officials.

This backfired in Brazil because in 1964,

Brazil had a military coup,

and the dictatorship that followed lasted until 1985.

So the people prosecuting Bolsonaro

had lived through the dictatorship.

They knew the stakes.

Bolsonaro was convicted

and is now serving a 27-year prison sentence.

The United States has had [suspenseful music]

a quite different outcome for a self-coup.

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election

and did not want to leave office.

He claimed the election was rigged.

He tried to overturn the results.

When all else failed, he incited a violent mob

to assault the Capitol

and force Mike Pence, the Vice President,

not to certify the results.

This failed and Trump had to leave office,

but he has turned January 6th into an element

of patriotism today.

And it is very rare that someone

who tried a self-coup was not held accountable

and allowed to run for office again.

The authoritarian we now have in the White House

is a direct result of not holding him accountable.

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As we've seen, the United States has many signs

of being a democracy in decline.

The institutions have been severely damaged.

We have a head of state who has been given immunity

for official acts.

However, we are not a full autocracy.

There are many counters for each category,

from judicial resistance, to civil society action,

to independent media being stronger than ever.

Trump's policies have created disaffection, which happens

with many autocrats.

The institution of militarized occupation in places

like Minneapolis has also been a training ground

for civil resistance and community activism.

More people are more conscious [protestors shout]

of the stakes of autocracy than ever before.

That is why I believe the US will come back

from this experience of brush with autocracy,

come back a stronger democracy with reforms

of our institutions and resume our path

toward being the world's preeminent example

of a multiracial and multi-faith democracy.

Democracy is not going to die in the United States.

I'm Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Thank you for watching.

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