In backsliding democracy, ‘public mobilization is the guardrail’

Some excerpts as we head into the weekend.

I. In a backsliding democracy, public mobilization is the guardrail against authoritarian overreach, Hardy Merriman, president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, told the New Yorker political scene podcast on Sept. 27:

In a stable democracy, you would expect that public opinion would be a guardrail on this kind of overreach; that if the public didn’t approve that, that would stop it. And again, that was a fairly stable assumption for recent decades, at least on some issues.

In a backsliding democracy, though, it’s really public mobilization. That’s the guardrail. And mobilization shows intensity, right? And it also has the capacity to impose costs. And the costs don’t just need to be imposed on the administration. They can be imposed on enablers of the administration…

So you start looking comprehensively, not just at the government, but the enablers. Those who are contracting with the government, those who are serving into it. What is the ecosystem that is supporting a tax on democracy?

There’s no one tactic that’s necessarily going turn things around. It’s going to be a lot of different people getting involved. It’s a huge country. Every state has their own political scene. So there might be heavily like very-localized responses in some cases. And then there might be cases like with Kimmel, where you actually can get a national scale response.

But the key thing is that when the government overreaches, that it backfire; that actually what happens is the opposite of what they want.

Need popular pressure to push institutions not to bend

The United States is not an authoritarian dictatorship. It is a backsliding democracy. And that context is quite different. We still have elections; we still have a legal system. They’re not working as well as they should, but it still works. And we need to use as much as possible the institutional options available to us, for sure. They’re valuable. We need to protect them, we need to use them.

I think the core insight, though, is that we need to also develop popular pressure so that the institutions function the way they should, because the default in an authoritarian regime is that they’re trying to bend every institution.

Unless there is countervailing pressure, the institutions do tend to bend. … But when you