Jonathan Chait: “The 2020 election is the first presidential contest since perhaps 1864 in which the principal question is democracy itself. The reelection of Donald Trump, unlikely but terrifyingly possible, would hasten America’s evolution into an oligarchy along the lines of Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, whose illiberal leaders Trump admires and who are, in some cases, working to help him secure a second term.”

“School civics lessons have boiled democratic values down to inoffensive mush that we associate with clichés expressing supposedly universal values (‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’). But democracy is a radical concept, especially in a society as unequal as ours. The tension between an economic system in which power is concentrated in a few hands and a political system in which power is distributed equally places special stress on the political forces aligned with the rich. In Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, Daniel Ziblatt traces the origins of democratic government in Western Europe, arguing that choices made by the right have an outsize role in the success or failure of a fledgling democracy. States where the aristocratic elite accepted majority rule had peaceful and stable transitions (the para-digmatic case is Great Britain). States whose aristocratic elite resisted democratic intrusions emerged fitfully or violently (the paradigmatic case being Germany). The Republican Party appears to be a special and troubling case, in which the historical pattern has been thrown into reverse. In its original form, the GOP was a radical anti-slavery party, but it abandoned its progressive impulses and has evolved into a wildly reactionary and increasingly authoritarian formation.”