Donald Trump speaks at an Election Night event on November 5. Lynne Sladky/AP; illustration by Alex Connor
The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
Prices went up during a post-pandemic recovery, and American voters elected a convicted felon and fascist who incited political violence as president. Okay, that may be a bit glib. But it’s clear that Donald Trump’s election is a giant step toward authoritarianism in the USA. He and his crew have openly talked about consolidating power in the Oval Office and targeting political foes with investigations and prosecutions. Trump aims to turn much of the federal bureaucracy into a corps of loyalists who pledge fealty to him, and he has raised the possibility of deploying the military against protesters and taking action against news outlets that expose his wrongdoing. And if he implements his plan for the mass deportation of 11 million or so undocumented immigrants, that will likely require police-state-like tactics. It’s a grim moment as the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding.
Four years ago, when it appeared that Trump had a good chance of reelection, I wondered whether there were examples of other countries sliding toward authoritarianism but recovering before it was too late. There is a tremendous amount of research devoted to democracies descending into autocracies. The decline of democracy in Nazi Germany, of course, has been deeply studied. But have there been nations heading in that dark direction that put on the brakes and reversed course?
I found that two years earlier, University of Chicago professors Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq had had examined this question. In an article for the Journal of Democracy, they chronicled occasions when democracies suffered “substantial yet ‘non-fatal’ deterioration in the quality of democratic institutions and then experience[d] a rebound.” These “near misses,” they noted, “have received little or no attention in the new wave of scholarship on why democracies die (or survive).”
Ginsburg and Huq looked at three historical episodes not well known within the United States: Finland in 1930, Colombia........