Democracy under Fire
The Rise of Extremists and the Hostile Takeover of the Republican Party
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Donald Trump's presidency offered Americans a dire warning regarding the vulnerabilities in their democracy, but the threat is broader and deeper-and looms still.
"January 6th was a disgrace," Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell solemnly intoned at the end of Donald Trump's second impeachment trial on February 13, 2021. As to the culprit, Senator McConnell declared that "there is no question that President Donald Trump is practically and morally responsible." Before Trump even ran for President, his disdain for the rules, procedures, and norms of American democracy and the US Constitution was well-known and led prominent Republicans to repudiate him as "unfit" for the GOP nomination. Given the clear-eyed assessment of candidate Trump, why did the Republican Party nominate him as its presidential candidate in 2016 and then stand by him during the next four years?
Much of the attention paid to Trump's rise to power has focused on his corrosive personality and divisive style of governing. But he alone is not the problem. The vulnerability is much broader and deeper. The ascendance of Trump is the culmination of nearly 250 years of political reforms that gradually ceded party nominations to small cliques of ideologically-motivated party activists, interest groups, and donors. Trump's rise is not an aberration but a predictable outcome of trends deeply rooted in American history but which accelerated in the last few decades.
In Democracy under Fire, Lawrence Jacobs provides a highly engaging, if disturbing, history of political reforms since the late-eighteenth century that over time dangerously weakened democracy, widened political inequality as well as racial disparities, and rewarded toxic political polarization. Jacobs' searing indictment of political reformers concludes with recommendations to restrain the unbridled ambition of politicians who thrive on division and instead generate broad citizen engagement with tangible policy making.
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Jacobs (Who Governs?), the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, contends in this unconvincing diatribe that the primary elections process is the cause of the country's current political dysfunctions. Calling Donald Trump "a singular threat to American democracy," Jacobs claims that Trump's rise was a predictable product of a presidential nominating process "that sidelined party officials and senior officials and deferred to a relatively small number of ideologically motivated party activists, interest groups, and donors." Though he briskly runs through the rise of political parties in the U.S. and the evolution of the primary system, Jacobs fails to convincingly explain why increasing the influence of party bosses or superdelegates would be more democratic and less likely to lead to a candidate like Trump reaching the White House. The book's dense prose ("The history of democratic rules and procedures is contingent within the parameters of institutional development") doesn't help matters, but readers will be most disappointed by Jacobs's failure to consider other factors in Trump's rise, including social media algorithms, the Citizens United campaign finance decision, and race-baiting precedents set in earlier campaigns. This incomplete analysis falls short.
