The problem with calling Trump a... is that we have a really narrow idea of what it looks like when
democracies fail. We imagine democratic failure as being some spectacular event
a military coup or an illegal power grab or the declaration of martial law. To protect the Republic of the Philippines and our democracy. We don't really
imagine it looking like this. This is a child's desk, but that's okay. It's the smallest desk I've ever seen. But political scientists do, because in a
country like the US, the death of democracy is going to start off looking
kind of normal. So normal, you might not even notice it's happening until it's
too late. Well I respect the group but the entire thing has been a witch hunt and
there is no collusion. Trump's firing of former FBI director James Comey has gotten a lot of
media attention, in part because it's really easy to explain why it matters. If Trump fired Comey over the Russia investigation that would be obstruction
of justice, which is a crime but a lot of what worries political scientists about
Trump is tougher to explain in a soundbite like that. Because for the most
part it's stuff that's totally legal. It turns out that government officials can
exploit weaknesses in the law in ways that are destructive to the rule of law as
a whole. This bearer of bad news is Aziz Huq. He's a law professor at the
University of Chicago and he's written a lot about a concept called "democratic
backsliding", which kind of sounds like something Hillary Clinton does at a
wedding. Backsliding is what happens when a democratically elected government,
starts attacking the institutions that make democracy work. I know the dance
thing was cooler. And Huck argues that what makes backsliding so dangerous is
that it's really hard to know when it starts. In many other countries the way
that we see democratic backsliding happening is through a series of
discrete legal changes, each of which is on their own completely lawful. A great
example of what backsliding looks like is Venezuela's former President Hugo
Chavez. Ah, the 90s. Chavez was elected as a
democratic populist, but over time he changed. And while remaining popular Chavez
has been anything but democratic. He got frustrated with opposition from courts
and the media, so he started doing things like firing judges, using anti-defamation
laws to silence journalists, and even describing unfriendly news organizations
as quote "enemies of the homeland". What's scary about Chavez's story, is that he didn't need a military coup
to screw up Venezuela's democracy. The man who came to office by democracy, he's
doing everything he can just snuff it out. He did it legally, by slowly turning
his supporters and political allies against the country's democratic
institutions. Autocrats in other parts of the world
have gone after those institutions very early on in the process of backsliding. And that's what worries political scientists about Trump. Trump shows a
deep distrust of America's democratic institutions. He lashes out at judges,
calls journalists, the enemy of the people, accuses watchdog agencies of
conspiring against him. He questions the legitimacy of an election that he won. His White House stonewalls reporters to avoid answering questions. Off. It's off-camera. Off. It's off. He's suspicious of the mechanisms that limit his authority. This is an unprecedented judicial overreach. And he encourages his supporters to be too. that is a catastrophic thing to be happening in a democracy. It's how democratic backsliding starts, but the thing is none of this is illegal. As long as Republicans
in Congress go along with it, there's nothing to stop Trump from publicly
criticizing basic democratic institutions. Our Constitution just
doesn't do a very good job of protecting us against certain
kinds of democratic failure. Whether you're in a moment of democratic backsliding really
depends upon the character of our political leaders. Which brings us back
to Comey and why it's so hard to talk about Democratic backsliding without
sounding paranoid. We live in a media environment that is really bad at
putting things in context, that is designed to bombard us with breaking
news and discrete pieces of information and that makes it hard to identify
democratic backsliding when it starts. Because unless it clearly breaks the law,
it's really tough to explain why any one Trump tweet or scandal poses a threat to
democracy. Wo when Trump calls a federal judge a "so
called judge", it's just a one-off comment. Does anyone honestly believe President
Trump is going to ignore this judge's order because he's a quote so-called judge? When Trump calls the press the enemy of the American people, it's all talk. He sounds like a broken record it's just kind of like what else you got Donald Trump? I don't think that new media are well designed to tell this kind of story, because those
media are designed to convey information in very small chunks. The real story is not the discrete action in a particular moment in time, there's some
bigger picture. Democratic backsliding is one of those things that you can't really
see from up close. It is only when you when you look at changes in the
aggregate that one sees the effect upon democracy after, a set of
institutions and practices. That doesn't mean the Comey stuff isn't important. Obstruction of justice is obviously a big deal. But some of the biggest threats
to democracy are way less dramatic, way more normal looking. And if you're
waiting for the CNN chyron announcing that it's time to panic, you're going to be waiting for a long time.
