Over the past few decades, American democracy has declined and lost its original luster. The decline of American democracy has severely diminished the United States’ soft power, making it difficult for it to export American-style democracy. It has also made tampering with other countries’ internal affairs under the pretext of democracy appear hypocritical and ineffective. Over the past decade, some signs of authoritarianism have gradually emerged with the rise of right-wing forces in the US. Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University, and Lucan Way, professor of political science at the University of Toronto in Canada, bluntly stated that the US has embarked on authoritarianism. The main reason is that US President Donald Trump constantly “weaponizes” executive power, laws, and regulations to bring down adversaries and win over supporters. They portended: “US democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.”
Today, many American political scholars are deeply concerned about the current state and prospects of American democracy and are constantly thinking about how to revitalize or reshape it. In recent years, some scholars have begun to believe that the collapse of American democracy has much to do with the inherent defects of the US Constitution. They argue that to save American democracy, major surgery must be performed on the Constitution.
In this case, the future of American democracy is indeed worrying. However, at the US-China meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, on March 18, 2021, national security adviser Jake Sullivan still bragged that “a confident country can look hard at its shortcomings and constantly seek to improve. And that is the secret sauce of America.” He stressed that the US is “a country that is constantly reinventing itself.” However, the unmistakably continuous breakdown of American democracy has given a loud slap in the face to the overconfident Sullivan.
Throughout history, American democracy has experienced many crises, but it has always been overcome in one way or another. In their book How Democracies Die (2018), Harvard University political science professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt asserted that democracy is dead when two basic unwritten norms of democratic politics are no longer universally supported. They are “mutual toleration”, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and “forbearance”, the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives. They suggested that when four phenomena occur, people should worry about the death of democracy. They are: “when a politician (1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, (2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, (3) tolerates or encourages violence, or (4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media”. These two scholars said they believed these four phenomena had already appeared in the US. Of course, we can also add another phenomenon: The Constitution is not respected or wantonly violated.
In the eyes of many scholars, there are too many signs of the decline of American democracy to count. They include political inequality, the continuous loss of representativeness of political leaders, rampant money politics, the constant accumulation of political power by financial and technology tycoons, the struggle between the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress, the operation of the Senate being plagued by ruthless filibusters, the executive power being unrestrained, the Supreme Court becoming increasingly out of touch with mainstream public opinion, the unabated decline of governance capacity, the public policy being out of touch with the needs of the people, the political system increasingly losing credibility, a seriously divided and conflictual society, pervasive hatred, and rampant political violence.
In January, after Trump became US president again, some American scholars even believed that the country had already faced a crisis of “ungoverning”. In the words of Russell Muirhead, professor of democracy at Dartmouth College, and Nancy L Rosenblum, professor emerita of ethics in politics and government at Harvard University, “ungoverning” means “the degradation of state capacity and the substitution of unchecked personal will for the difficult, necessary business of shaping, implementing, and assessing policy for the nation”. The administration will sideline experts and circumvent regular processes of information gathering and consultation. In so doing, it will degrade state capacity; the premium Trump places on personal loyalty will result in confounding his ability to govern.”
Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who jointly won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in October, also contended that the Trump administration would cause the further collapse of the American system, and Americans would lose trust in the system. As a result, the US would lose its economic vitality. This would further reduce trust in democracy and public institutions. Worse, with intensifying distrust, something essential to democracy — compromise — would become increasingly challenging.
At the same time, America moving toward authoritarianism will no longer advocate “democratic ideals” worldwide. It will retreat from exporting American democracy, be less keen on “regime change” in other countries, and be less prepared to pay the price to win over allies. Instead, it will proceed with its narrow interests and actively bargain and exchange interests with other countries in political transactions. From this perspective, America’s transformation may improve China’s security, development, and further rise
US scholars have proposed different theories and explanations for the parlous state of American democracy. A more reasonable explanation is that both major political parties in the US are unwilling to abide by the formal and informal rules of the democratic game. The transformation of the Republican Party is particularly concerning because anti-democratic right-wing political and social forces led by Trump increasingly control it. These forces comprise working-class white Americans, residents of backward areas, people who hold conservative political, social and cultural values, rabid racists, religious fanatics, etc. In the past, due to the peculiar arrangements of the American Constitution, although the Republican Party was only a minority political force in the United States, it could, however, obstruct government administration, paralyze the operation of Congress, and even govern by being able to win presidential elections, control one or both houses of Congress, or garner the support of a majority of judges in the Supreme Court. With Trump in power again, these minority forces have even transmuted into a slight majority, thus fully controlling the presidency, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. As of now, we cannot be sure whether these forces can become a long-term majority. However, even if they become a minority again, they can still disrupt American politics and continue to shake the foundations of American democracy.
The rise of minority or majority forces that are anti-democracy is closely related to the drastic economic, political, social, and cultural changes in the US in the last several decades. The US has experienced gargantuan changes, including deindustrialization caused by economic globalization, the financialization and virtualization of the economy, the ever-widening income gap, stagnation of living standards of the middle and lower classes, shortage of development opportunities for young people, increasingly fierce conflicts in values (gender, religion, guns), an increasingly complex social structure, intensified racial conflicts, the continued decline in the proportion of whites in the population, both the Republican and Democratic parties having an impregnable and equal-size political support base, the elites’ alienation from the general public, the demise of the forces that can play a buffering and mediating role in society, such as local forces, the media and social organizations, the rise of extreme religious forces, the influx of a large number of illegal immigrants, and worsening crime and drug problems. These changes have become fertile grounds for right-wing populism and other extreme ideologies.
To maintain its global hegemony, the US has adopted a plethora of policies and done its utmost to contain China’s rise, which also adversely impacts the operation and foundations of American democracy. In the words of Van Jackson and Michael Brenes, senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington and lecturer in history at Yale University respectively, “Scapegoating China allows politicians to spend their time circumventing democratic accountability. It also encourages them to ignore the real problems faced by everyday Americans — and the planet — beyond the China threat.
“Rivalry foments fears of the enemy ‘other.’ During the Cold War, paranoia about subversion, espionage, and disloyalty turned citizens against one another. And panic over Chinese subversion is, once again, rampant in the United States.
“The pervasive rhetoric about fifth column and subversion exploits and worsens a climate of racialized fear and resentment toward not only Chinese citizens but also those who simply look Asian, denying them the ability to experience political equality as it is enjoyed by others.” “(Great power rivalry) emboldens society’s anti-democratic fringe and debases the quality of civic democracy.” In short, rivalry with China jeopardizes equality and fuels extremism in the US.
The rise of anti-democratic forces in the US and their seizure of political power are closely related to the American Constitution. In other words, the Constitution provides anti-democratic forces with opportunities and channels to gain political power and, to some extent, empowers those forces. Many American scholars have long argued that the Constitution is essentially anti-democratic. The Constitution was the product of struggle and compromise among diverse forces, and it already had many flaws when it was born. The late American political scientist Robert A Dahl of Yale University wrote that the undemocratic elements in the Constitution include: slavery (it neither forbade slavery nor empowered Congress to do so); suffrage (it failed to guarantee the right of suffrage, leaving the qualifications of suffrage to the states); election of the president (the executive power was vested in a president whose selection, according to the intentions and design of the Framers, was to be insulated from both popular majorities and congressional control); equal representation in the Senate (each state was awarded the same number of Senators, without respect to population); judicial power (the Constitution failed to limit the powers of the judiciary to declare as unconstitutional laws that have been properly passed by Congress and signed by the president); congressional power (the powers of Congress were limited in ways that could, and at times did, prevent the federal government from regulating or controlling the economy by means that all modern democratic governments have adopted). In essence, political equality was not realized by the Constitution.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argued in their book Tyranny of Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (2023) that the Constitution allows a minority of forces to have enormous power to influence governance. In their words, “Designed in a pre-democratic era, the US Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them.” And they are especially dangerous when they are in the hands of extremist or antidemocratic partisan minorities.” “Electoral majorities often cannot win power, and when they win, they often cannot govern. The more imminent threat facing us today, then, is minority rule.”
In his book No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States (2024), Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, pointedly accused the Constitution of being the culprit for the decline of American democracy. To save American democracy, the Constitution must be reformed, he suggested. “The constitutional reforms that are essential to save American democracy are not difficult to identify. They must include the popular election of the president, the allocation of Senate seats based on population, the abolition or at least reform of the filibuster, term limits for Supreme Court justices, the elimination of partisan gerrymandering, the clearer empowerment of Congress especially with regard to civil rights, limits on campaign spending, greater advancement of racial equality, and more protection of voting rights.”
Admittedly, the Constitution has had 27 amendments since its promulgation, but its anti-democratic content has not been wholly removed. In any case, amending the Constitution is extremely difficult politically. To amend an article of the Constitution, two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures (currently, 38 out of 50) must be on board. Today, American politics is highly polarized and toxic, with a minority dead-set against undercutting their power. To amend an article of the Constitution, two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of state legislatures must be on board. Today, American politics is highly polarized and toxic, with a minority deadly against undercutting their power. To amend the Constitution in such a dire political situation is an exercise in futility. Convening a Constitutional Conference to draft a new Constitution is a non-starter.
Since the decline of American democracy is closely related to the defects of the Constitution, which cannot be fundamentally amended, given the irreconcilable political divisions in the country, and the US’ determination to be a rival of China, it is well-nigh impossible to revive or reshape American democracy and give it a new life. On the contrary, in all likelihood, American democracy will further languish because of the country’s persisting socioeconomic trajectory.
However, though the decline of American democracy has monumentally impacted the US, its effects on international politics are more elusive to grasp and estimate. Nonetheless, we can expect that as the US slides toward authoritarianism, it will no longer be willing to squander its national strength to undergird the political and economic “liberal international order” it designed and led. The US will pursue power politics for its interests, using coercion and inducement to oppress its allies, partners, and enemies simultaneously. “Might is right” and “the law of the jungle” will become the new rules of international politics. International disorders will be the norm, and global organizations will be too feeble to maintain international order. The US will provide fewer public goods to the world. Disputes and conflicts between nations will arise one after another.
At the same time, America moving toward authoritarianism will no longer advocate “democratic ideals” worldwide. It will retreat from exporting American democracy, be less keen on “regime change” in other countries, and be less prepared to pay the price to win over allies. Instead, it will proceed with its narrow interests and actively bargain and exchange interests with other countries in political transactions. From this perspective, America’s transformation may improve China’s security, development, and further rise.
The author is a professor emeritus of sociology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a consultant for the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
