Can a Democracy Reverse a Slide Toward Authoritarianism?

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).” 

Their article looked at three historical episodes not well known within the United States. The first was Finland in 1930, when the right-wing mass Lapua movement that partly modeled itself on Mussolini’s movement gained influence and was welcomed by the conservative president and the ruling party, which then banned communist newspapers. This fascistic camp—which kidnapped political opponents—fueled the election of a former prime minister. “Finland appeared to be on the cusp of the sort of democratic erosion that was to engulf Germany and Austria soon thereafter,” Ginsburg and Huq wrote. “Yet Finnish democracy prevailed.” Key military officials did not join the Lapua movement, and judges issued tough verdicts in response to its use of violence. Other political parties banded together across ideological lines to oppose the Lapua movement, and some conservative politicians kept their distance from it. Come March 1937, a center-left coalition was in secure control of the government. 

Another near-miss: In Colombia, during the 2000s, President Álvaro Uribe tried to seize greater power for himself. He pushed for government reforms that would afford him more control and influence over the legislature and the courts. His regime waged a campaign of harassment against journalists. Ultimately, a court blocked his attempt to gain a third term as president. Uribe’s hand-picked successor, his defense minister, broke with him and restored the institutional status quo.

In Sri Lanka, Ginsburg and Huq pointed out, democracy was imperiled by the rise of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who won the presidency in 2005. As they put it, his “rule was marked by nepotism, corruption, and a degradation of rule-of-law institutions such as courts, prosecutors, and the police.” He appointed his three brothers to cabinet posts and developed a cult of personality. Journalists were imprisoned and murdered. He amended the constitution so he could run for a third term in 2015. “Sri Lanka seemed on the brink of seeing its democracy totally degraded,” Ginsburg and Huq observed. But a former minister of health in Rajapaksa’s government entered the presidential race to challenge him and quickly built a coalition that triumphed. Rajapaksa considered annulling the vote, but the army and police said no, as did the attorney general. Democracy was not upended.

Since then, democracy in Sri Lanka has remained in a precarious state. Rajapaksa’s brother, Gotabaya, was elected president in 2019, but he was forced to resign by anti-government protests in 2022 that demanded economic and democratic reforms. He was succeeded by Ranil Wickremesinghe, whose administration cracked down on dissent and civil liberties. In September, Wickremesinghe lost his reelection bid to Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a Marxist politician and third-party candidate who had scored only 3 percent of the vote when he ran for president in 2019.

In each of these close calls, Ginsburg and Huq wrote, elite players were instrumental in thwarting a move toward authoritarianism: “Paradoxically, the experiences of democratic near misses that we have explored underscore the role of political elites and nonelected institutions—courts, military commanders, and election administrators—in decisively repudiating authoritarian leaders bent on democratic erosion.”

In an article published in 2020, Larry Diamond, a Stanford professor who studies democracy, and Aurel Croissant, a professor at Heidelberg University, examined “democratic backsliding” in Asia. They contended that the recent wave of “democratic recessions” around the world stood out from democratic reversals of the past: Today, democratic downturns tend to “unfold gradually” and don’t “necessarily lead to full-fledged autocracy.” They often are caused not by military coups, revolutions, or foreign intervention but by “those elected to lead a democracy,” and the assault on “political rights and civil liberties is typically related to social polarization and the mobilization of identity politics.” (Sound familiar?) Croissant and Diamond noted that there had been at least 14 episodes of democratic decline in 10 Asian democracies since the early 2000s. In half of these, “democratic forces managed to contain the process before democracy broke down.” (This included Sri Lanka.)

Sri Lanka in the 2010s, Colombia in the 2000s, and Finland in the 1930s might not be good examples for the United States. There’s also Poland more recently. In its 2019 parliamentary elections, a right-wing coalition led by strongman Jarosław Kaczyński won overwhelmingly. But after it tried to create a commission that could block candidates from running for office, there were massive protests. In the 2023 election, with voter turnout hitting a record 74 percent, a collection of opposition parties earned a majority of the seats in the Sejm. Turnout for younger voters increased by 50 percent, and within this bloc, support for the far-right party fell by half. The kids threw out the anti-democrats.

What does this mean for the United States, now that an autocrat wannabe has won the White House? Diamond told me several years ago, “I am cautious about reasoning by comparison because the circumstances of a long-institutionalized and wealthy democracy like the United States are very different from India, for example. The plain and sobering fact of the matter is that there has never been a democracy nearly as long-established and liberal as the United States experiencing such a deep and potentially existential crisis of democracy.”

The circumstances here are indeed quite different from other countries, and the expansion of disinformation and the fracturing of the information ecosystem have made it easier for authoritarians to wage war on democracy. But it is encouraging that other nations have reached the brink and stepped back. Doing so is not easy. Ginsburg and Huq noted, “There is no single ‘magic institution’ that can be adopted to prevent democratic backsliding or to arrest it once it has begun…Sustained antidemocratic mobilization is hard to defeat.” In some instances, a small group of officials safeguarded a democracy by openly resisting the machinations of a would-be autocrat and his henchmen. Other times, people power fueled democracy-defending defiance.

In assessing the experiences in Asia, Croissant and Diamond observed that for democratic resilience and resistance to triumph, “a sufficient number of citizens must still prefer a democratic form of government and have some degree of trust in democratic institutions.” Throughout his presidential campaigns and presidency, Trump exploited widespread dissatisfaction with establishment institutions, and during the 2024 race he banked on the calculation that his cult of personality could overpower concerns about his trashing of democratic values and practices. His assault on democracy can be repelled, but only if there are enough citizens who give a damn.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at [email protected].