“It'll all go back to normal if we put our nation first."
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse.
-- Bruce Cockburn, “The Trouble With Normal”
We are constantly being told that "norm erosion" is a serious problem in the age of Donald Trump. But precisely what the problem is depends on what we mean by "norms." Are they simply conventions, ways that things are normally done? That’s what Trump himself would like you to think, and a chorus of MSNBC commentators constantly chanting, “This is not normal” seems to echo his own script in the hapless guise of opposing it. If Trump’s actions are not normal doing by the standards of a badly broken political system, in a badly polarized nation, then so what?
Are norms simply a code of good manners, observed by the powerful as they run roughshod over the rest of us? That’s even closer to the heart of what Trump would like everyone to believe. Again, the chorus of MSNBC-style liberals often seems to echo this theme, inadvertently or not.
Or are norms something more substantive, like a set of guardrails protecting our democracy?
That’s what many Trump critics assume, but in a blog post republished by Jacobin, political scientist Corey Robin stood that formulation on its head. "Democracy Is Norm Erosion," Robin argues, critiquing a New York Times op-ed by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of the just-released book "How Democracies Die." Robin writes: "Nowhere will you find the word authoritarianism, though there is a quick reference to 'Trump’s autocratic impulses.' What you find is concerns about 'dysfunction' and 'crisis.'”
What Robin finds troubling, above all, is where he sees this discourse heading, echoing patterns from the past:
The discourse of norm erosion isn’t really about Trump. Nor is it about authoritarianism. What it’s really about is “extremism,” that old stalking horse of Cold War liberalism. And while that discourse of norm erosion won’t do much to limit Trump and the GOP, its real contribution will be to mark the outer limits of left politics, just at a moment when we’re seeing the rise of a left that seems willing to push those limits.
Levitsky and Ziblatt identify “two basic norms” as their primary focus: mutual toleration, meaning “accepting partisan opponents as legitimate,”and “forbearance, or self-restraint in the exercise of power.” Norms of forbearance “unraveled during the Civil War,” they write. “During the 1850s, polarization over slavery undermined America’s democratic norms.” (Levitsky and Ziblatt recently visited our New York studio for a Salon Talks interview; see below.)
This is a key focus of Robin’s critique, and with good reason. “If American slavery were going to be eliminated, someone had to call the question,” he writes. “And the result — however awful the Civil War was (and make no mistake, it was more awful than you can imagine) — was not the destruction of democracy and its norms but the creation of democracy — a 'new birth of freedom.'”
I share Robin’s concerns, with three caveats: First, as already suggested, I think the discourse about norms is more fluid and contested than Robin does. Second, the Civil War hardly delivered the "new birth of freedom" Lincoln had hoped for — it took another century and more of struggle to accomplish that. Third, we are as far removed from the era of Cold War liberalism as we could possibly be.
Taking up this last point first: While the narrative echoes of that era are real, the surrounding socio-political reality is dramatically different. As shown by Peter Turchin’s "Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History" (Salon review here), we’re currently approaching a peak period of political instability, characterized by political polarization and driven by long-term demographic trends and their interactions with existing social structures. Such peaks are when both the norms Levitsky and Ziblatt identify are most seriously fractured. The Civil War occurred during a similar peak — as did the English Civil War of 1640 and the French Revolution of 1789, the first two of several dozen such cases that have now been examined in detail, spanning some 2,000 years.
In contrast, Cold War liberalism took shape in books like "The New American Right," a 1955 essay collection edited by Daniel Bell, at a time when political polarization was near an all-time low, along with several dozen demographic proxy trends connected to the rise of political instability. In fact, Turchin refers to this period as the “second era of good feelings,” echoing the political and demographic conditions of around 1820, the original “era of good feelings” during which James Monroe was re-elected president effectively unopposed, with no partisan opponent.
Alternating trends of social integration and disintegration — crowned by eras of good feelings and ages of discord — have occurred repeatedly throughout much of human history long before modern democratic ideas, movements and norms started to appear. The first study of such trends, Jack Goldstone’s "Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World," showed that neither modernization nor democratization had necessary connections to revolutions, as had been widely supposed.
Similar revolutionary periods in China and the Ottoman Empire around the same time produced no such changes, and England reverted back to monarchy barely a generation after its revolution — more constrained, to be sure, but a monarchy nonetheless. In France, where the ideology of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” most explicitly broke with the past, rapid shifts in the political struggles of the day produced quite the opposite — first the Terror, then Napoleon’s nationalist dictatorship. In short, the narratives of liberty, progress and the like had very different histories than the realities on the ground.
This applies to Levitsky and Ziblatt's formulas of "mutual toleration" and "forbearance ... in the exercise of power" as well. Goldstone and Turchin show that the same underlying forces that tear apart democracies, or threaten to, can do the same thing to a wide range of undemocratic polities as well.
Democracy certainly did emerge out of a general period of revolutions, but it was the long-term efficacy of democratic practices that gave them credibility. But democratic governments have done nothing fundamental to relieve the structural and demographic pressures that drive revolutions in the first place. So it’s entirely possible that future revolutions could bring about democracy’s demise. If we really care about democracy (as I fervently believe we should) then we have to face the deep, long-term demographic forces that repeatedly drive human societies into periods of profound dysfunction and political crisis — periods such as the one we Americans now face.
Turchin also talks about the role of norms, but he describes them in somewhat different terms: cooperative vs. competitive. Having been an evolutionary biologist before turning to history, he sees cooperation and competition in multi-level evolutionary terms: groups who cooperate out-compete groups who don’t. He’s written about this dynamic in "War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires" and most specifically in "Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth."
These books show there are powerful social and biological forces that move humanity in the direction of greater and greater cooperation, but the process is anything but linear and can easily crash, as it has done repeatedly in specific societies. What’s more, greater cooperation need not mean more democracy: China today represents a clear alternative future. It too can be expected to face a future structural-demographic crisis, but there are no guarantees of the outcome, and humanity’s future could well see democracy virtually disappear.
That's the larger fear about democracy that I have, but it’s not divorced from the concerns Robin cites. Levitsky and Ziblatt do continue some of the “both sides do it” condemnation of extremism seen in "The New American Right," particularly Richard Hofstadter’s kick-off contribution, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” a forerunner to much of today’s handwringing over Trump and his supporters. But in their book excerpt published in the New Republic, Levitsky and Ziblatt take a more asymmetrical perspective, recognizing the leading role that Republicans have played.
They start their account of democratic norm erosion with Newt Gingrich’s use of C-SPAN to demonize Democrats (“He even compared them to Mussolini and accused them of trying to destroy the country"), continuing through the GOP’s political witch hunt of Bill Clinton and reaching a crescendo with two threads of Tea Party discourse that violated established norms:
One was that Obama posed an existential threat to our democracy. …
The second thread was that Obama was not a “real American” — a claim that was undoubtedly fueled by racism. …
What Levitsky and Ziblatt fail to do, in my judgment, is three-fold: First, they don’t appreciate or explore how Democrats are ideologically constrained by a commitment to norm preservation, which makes them utterly unlike Republicans. As the party of government that believes in making government work for people, Democrats are fundamentally invested in preserving those norms and making them work as they’re supposed to. Republicans, quite simply, are not. This reflects the basic asymmetry between the parties described in Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins' "Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats" (Salon review here), which I’ve referred to multiple times. The second thing Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t do is dig beneath the surface to get at the long-term forces described by Goldstone and Turchin. The third thing they miss connects directly with Robin’s point: the democracy-enhancing content of the Civil War breakdown.
Above I said that I shared Robin's concerns. That was an understatement. In the end, he argues:
If your highest value is the preservation of American institutions, the avoidance of "dysfunction," the discourse of norm erosion makes sense. If it’s democracy, not so much. Sometimes democracy requires the shattering of norms and institutions.
I agree wholeheartedly. Yet as I said before, it took more than 100 years from the end of the Civil War to begin to vindicate Lincoln’s hopes, thanks to generations of sacrifice and struggle culminating in the civil rights movement, which, among other things, articulated some norms of its own: “to save the soul of America,” as the motto of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference put it. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. articulated this in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech:
We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!
This is essentially, the same framework articulated by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, in both his organizing work and his book, "The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement." When I interviewed Barber in 2016, he explained that his work was modeled on the example of the First Reconstruction. "Right here in my home state of North Carolina, a white minister and a black minister worked together in 1868 to write the constitution whose moral language has guided our 21st-century movement," he told me. "Our coalition built power as they did in the late 19th century — by helping people who are often pitted against each other see that we are stronger together."
There is, in short, a hidden history of progressive American struggle overflowing with its own set of norms that can help guide us forward. We will surely be called extremists, or worse, if we choose to do so. But if we fail to do so, we will not merely have failed the spirit of King and Langston Hughes, we will have failed the world.
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