On Impeachment

I don't think this latest uproar will change anything.  Certainly it does not change my views on impeachment.

My views on impeachment are this.  An impeachable offense is whatever public opinion says it is.  Public opinion has to mean not just a majority, but a super-majority, including a sizable portion of the President's party.   In today's hyper-polarized atmosphere, Republican voters would not support impeachment if Trump shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.  Republicans in Congress are not willing to defy their constituents on this matter.

Furthermore Nancy Pelosi's reluctance to impeach is not just based on the knowledge that the Senate wouldn't vote to convict even if Trump shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.  It is based on the knowledge that so far she doesn't even have enough Democratic votes to sustain an impeachment.  I am honestly at a loss as to what purpose it would serve to bring articles of impeachment only to see them fail.

My greatest concern about impeachment is not just that Republicans will see it as purely partisan, but that they will retaliate by impeaching the next Democrat to be elected President.  Democrats will see little choice but to retaliate in kind, and impeachment will become a routine matter of partisan politics.  I would rather see impeachment become impossible than see it degraded to a routine matter.

Nonetheless, I have changed my mind about an impeachment inquiry.  I have always favored aggressive investigation of Trump's corruption, business dealings, etc.  His response has been to stonewall the proceedings, refuse to produce documents, claim executive privilege for all witnesses, etc, even in the face of clear law requiring him to cooperate.  His argument, supported by William Barr, is essentially that Congress has  no authority to hold the President accountable, except through impeachment.

This being the case, I don't see Congress has much choice but to declare an impeachment inquiry.  No floor vote is required to do so.  A member simply introduces an impeachment resolution.  Members introduce impeachment resolutions all the time.  Most go nowhere.  The Speaker then assigns the resolution to a committee to investigate.  If the committee approves the resolution, it goes to the floor for a vote on whether to impeach.

I therefore recommend that members of the House introduce impeachment resolutions, not just on Trump's dealings with Ukraine, but on the numerous other matters that require investigation.  Nancy Pelosi should then refer all these matters to the appropriate committee to investigate and see if there is an impeachable offense.  Of course, Republicans will cry foul.  They will complain that there is no evidence of impeachable conduct and that Democrats are abusing the process to conduct routine investigations.  The Democratic response is obvious.  We don't know if there is anything impeachable going on because you-know-who is stonewalling us.  There may or may not be anything impeachable, but until we pry his hot little hands loose, we really don't know.  Then investigate, see if you find anything scandalous enough to turn public opinion in favor of impeachment.  (I will bet no, see above).  If not, at least some of what you find may be useful in the upcoming election.  And no, there is no point crying foul about that.  Republicans in Congress spent four years investigating Benghazi in hopes of finding something to hurt Hillary Clinton in her upcoming run for President.

Of course, this carries the risk of a different kind of retaliation.  It means that Republicans will call every investigation of a Democratic President an impeachment inquiry.  It will be unnecessary because I really do not expect a Democratic President to stonewall in the way that Trump is doing, but Republicans will feel the need as a matter of politics and Democrats will doubtless respond in kind.  (No guarantee against future Republican Presidents stonewalling in Trumpian manner).

But you know what?  I can live with that.  I don't think it will hurt us too much to routinely call ordinary investigations impeachment inquiries, so long as actual impeachment resolutions only occur for serious misconduct.

Final Thoughts on Zimblatt

Zimblatt's book also sheds some light on a phenomenon we have been observing recently in the U.S. -- the tendency of a defeated party to respond, not by moderating, but by doubling down.  We saw that with Republicans in the wake of their defeat by Barrack Obama (and, before that Bill Clinton), and now by Democrats in the wake of their defeat by Donald Trump. 

We see the same thing happen to British Conservatives in the wake of their 1906 defeat and to the German DNVP in the wake of their 1928 defeat.  Perhaps one can pose a theory that it is a sign of political tranquility for parties to respond to defeat by moderating to win back lost voters, and a sign of political crisis for parties to respond to defeat by radicalizing.  But Zimblatt does not research this topic and neither have I.

An alternate theory is that it is normal and expected for a political party to respond to defeat by doubling down.  After all, defeat means the loss of moderate voters, so only the more ideological voters remain.  This theory would also hold that a party with a very narrow majority will be more ideological and less inclined to compromise than one with a broader majority.  Zimblatt offers a British example.  The Liberals lost their majority after the 1910 election and were able to hold onto power only by forming an alliance with the Irish Party.  In order to do so, the Liberals had to make excessive concessions to the Irish, promising home rule to all of Ireland, very much against the wishes of the Protestants in the North.  With a larger majority, the Liberals might have made the less controversial offer of home rule that excluded the North.

We see the same phenomenon with the Republican Party in the U.S.  A classic example would be the first election of GW Bush.  News media suggested that, since he had such a narrow victory (having lost the popular vote and holding a razor-thin margin in Congress), he should govern as a moderate.  But what they failed to take into account was that with such a narrow margin, the Republicans could not afford even a small number of defections and therefore were in no position to moderate or compromise.  Likewise, the narrower the Republican majority today, the more it has been dependent on the dogmatic Freedom Caucus, and the more ideologues have a veto.*

Finally, there is a deeply disturbing aspect of Zimblatt's theory of the value of conservative parties.  He argues that the key to a successful democratic transition is the creation of a strong conservative party, representing the interests of the pre-democratic ruling elite, that can find appeals cutting across class lines to the broader public and be competitive in elections.  These appeals tend to be appeals to social conservatism, to traditional values, and to national greatness.

But there can be darker things at work, too.  The authors focus on electoral democracy (majority rule), rather than the distinction between electoral democracy and liberal democracy, i.e., majority rule with protection for the rights of the minority.  And the minority here means not just the losers of the last election, but permanent minorities of excluded identity groups.

Simply put, one form of cross-class appeal the old conservative party can find is in scapegoating some minority identity group.**  As I understand it, that is what the landed aristocracy ultimately did in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South.  And there are traces of that in the examples Ziblatt gives in Britain and Germany. 

In Britain, one of the cross-class appeals the Conservatives found was in matters of religion.  Most of the Church of England's old privileges were gone by then, but Conservatives did find an identity appeal to Church of England members while the Liberals appealed to dissenters.  I don't think appeals to a common identity are necessarily dangerous -- so long as they don't include denying rights to outsiders.  And when Conservatives emphasized denying home rule to Ireland -- well, one can see a definite danger there.  The danger was rather more obvious in Germany.  All attempts by the German Conservatives (pre-WWI) or DNVK (post WWI) to expand their appeal seemed to mean cutting a deal with anti-Semites and adopting some measure of anti-Semitism that party leaders disliked but could not get rid of. 

So this may be the answer to the defect in Zimblatt's theory that I pointed out before.  A successful conservative party, representing the interest of the pre-democratic ruling elite has to find some sort of cross-class appeal to a broader public.  This cross-class appeal may lie in a shared identity with a large section of the public.  But ties of shared identity can easily descend into bigotry.  Perhaps what Zimblatt is arguing is that the delicate task of a democratic conservative party is to hold its members together in a sense of common identity while holding the outright bigots in check. 

Thus the British Conservative were able to appeal to a sense of solidarity with Irish Protestants and their legitimate fear of their fate in a Catholic Ireland, but without letting those fears run riot and define the party.  A weaker party might have allowed the Irish Protestant fears to take over the party and turn it into an anti-Irish, anti-Catholic band of bigots.  And he may be arguing that a strong German Conservative Party might have made itself over into a rural party, championing the traditional culture and religion of the German countryside, low land taxes, pro-agriculture trade policy and agricultural improvements without yielding too much to anti-Semites.  Like all counter-factuals, we will never know.

But I am confident of this.  People who believe that the success of democracy depends on the absence of identity groups are living in a fantasy world.  Identity groups will always be with us.  Even South Korea, one of the most ethnically uniform countries in the world, has important splits between Christians, Buddhists, and the non-religious.*** 

Zimblatt has written another book entitled How Democracies Die that addresses contemporary failures of democracy, and the issue of identity in US politics.  I have begun but not finished it.  I intend to review it here at a later date.





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*This has served to block compromise on ordinary legislation.  On the other had, for must-pass items such as passing some sort of budget or raising the debt ceiling, it has forced non-Freedom Caucus Republicans to make an alliance with Democrats and therefore served to moderate.
**The sources I link offer another alternative as well.  The ruling elite can also form an alliance with minority identity groups and offer them protection from the majority, thereby forming a liberal autocracy.  That has frequently been done.
***Japan may be a rare example of a country without significant identity splits.

My Biggest Criticism of Zimblatt

Clearly I have voiced criticisms of Zimblatt's work.  I find it too full of charts, graphs and tables for the general public. I find that it assumes the reader knows a great deal more about 19th and early 20th century British and German politics that one would expect of any American who is not a professional historian, while its treatment of other countries is superficial in the extreme.

But these problems are dwarfed by a deep contradiction that lies at the heart of the entire book.  Zimblatt makes clear that the threat to democracy lies on the right.  But who are these "right" that he speaks of?  Sometimes the threat appears to come from the pre-democratic ruling elite, fearful of giving up its privileges.

But other times, the threat seems to come from somewhere else -- from the right-wing grassroots, from interest groups and activists on the right, while Zimblatt sees the role of the pre-democratic ruling elite as reigning them in.  So who are these right-wing grassroots, these interest groups and activists?  Zimblatt never exactly says.

Some of what he means can be inferred from his two examples -- Britain and Germany. Although Zimblatt never says it in so many words, the British crisis that followed the defeat of the Conservatives in 1906 was actually two crises.  One was a crisis of the old landed aristocracy seeing its class privileges threatened by redistributionist taxation and the beginnings of the welfare state.  The other was a crisis regarding Irish home rule.  Irish Catholics demanded home rule for the entire island, while Irish Protestants in the North feared for their future in a Catholic Ireland and opposed the project.  One one side of the political divide was the Conservative Party -- the party of the landed aristocracy and the social conservatives it was able to attract -- and the Irish Unionist Party,* which consisted of Irish Protestants opposed to home rule.  On the other side were the Liberals and nascent Labour Party creating the beginnings of the welfare state, and Irish Party -- a party of Irish Catholics seeking home rule.

The crisis over a landed elite fearing loss of its prerogatives came first, over the years 1906 through 1911.  It was characterized by clear violations of established norms, but not by extra-legal much less illegal actions.  Established custom at the time allowed the House of Lords some obstructive or delaying role, but ultimately did not allow it to block legislation passed by the House of Commons, especially spending bills, which threatened the House of Commons' power of the purse strings, a power going back to the Middle Ages.  But the House of Lords blocked or significantly changed many (though by no means all) of the proposed legislation and vetoed a spending bill that would have established a welfare state supported by progressive taxation -- the first such veto in two centuries.  The Liberals responded in 1911 by passing the Parliament Act which ended the House of Lord's authority to veto legislation (although it retained authority to delay).  The House of Lords submitted only when the House of Commons persuaded the King to threaten to create enough new Lords to pack the House. 

At this point the crisis escalated, but the issue changed from economic and budgetary issues to Irish home rule.  Zimblatt suggests this may have been because the Conservatives were able to poll their voters and determine that blocking the Liberals' economic agenda was not a winning issue, but that home rule for Ireland was.  And certainly from then on, Ireland became the issue.  This was at least in part because the Liberals lost their majority in Parliament.  In order to hold onto power, they had to form a coalition with the Irish Party and offer home rule to all of Ireland -- a thing unacceptable to the Protestants in the North, or the public opinion in general.**  Opposition moved from mere norm violation to the extra-legal, as Conservative leadership began to use the language of violence and revolt, and Irish Protestants began forming their own radical wing, complete with private militias. Crisis was precipitated when 57 out of 70 mid-level officers in North Ireland resigned rather than implement the Liberal government's decision, an attempt by the military to pressure the civilian government on policy and clear threat to civilian control of the military.  This shock, along with the brewing crisis in Europe that became WWI, persuaded all parties to reach a compromise, and the crisis passed.

So, in this case it would appear that the right wing grassroots consisted of militant Irish Protestants fearing for their fate in Catholic Ireland.  That the main issue shifted from economic issues to Ireland showed on the one hand, that the old landed aristocracy was willing to concede some of its privileges under democracy, and that the Conservative Party had developed a strong enough party and electoral elite to see electoral success as more important than upholding aristocratic privileges and thus be willing to yield on the former issue in favor of one with more public support.  On the other hand, it showed that the Conservative Party had dangerously radical elements in the form of militant Irish Protestants.  Though Zimblatt calls these the right wing grassroots, in the sense of not being part of the elite, they were a small portion of the total population, exercising influence all out of proportion to their numbers. 

Zimblatt goes on to discuss the Conservative Party during the interwar period, and how British democracy remained solid even as democracies fell across Europe.  Conservatives encouraged the Labour Party, feared by many as dangerous radicals, to participate in the political process, both hoping to split the left and fearing that Labour would otherwise be radicalized.  In this, they were opposed by two right-wing media moguls, Lord Beaverbrook and Viscount Rothermere (consider them the Rupert Murdochs of their day), but the strong party apparatus was able to contain both.  The author also suggests that fascism did not arise in Britain because a strong, cohesive conservative party left no space for the far right.

And then, of course, there is Germany.  Zimblatt describes not only the weakness of Germany's Conservative Party in the 19th Century, but also ill-fated search for allies, which left it unable to contain activists and interest groups.  These took two main forms -- the Agrarian League, and anti-Semites. 

The Agrarian League might seem like a promising opportunity for the landed aristocracy to broaden its appeal.  The landed aristocracy, after all, was an agricultural interest.  While there are obvious differing interests between great aristocrats and small holders, they have common interests as well, such as keeping land taxes low, pursuing a pro-agriculture trade policy, and protection from the various risks that plague agriculture.  The Agrarian League was both territorially diffuse and hierarchically centralized.  In other words it provided the broad base and strong organization that the Conservatives were so sorely lacking.  Why couldn't the Conservatives remake themselves as a farmer's party?  The problem was that the Agrarian League was not a political party, but an interest group.  It had no interest in running as a party, but only in providing support to parties that favored its program.  Better organized than the Conservative Party, the Agrarian League could regularly bend elected officials to its will.  It also had unpleasant anti-Semitic, anti-urban and militaristic undertones.  Zimblatt describes this as capture of a party by an interest group, pushing it to the right of the monarchy and the old pre-democratic order.

The Conservative Party also tried outreach to urban lower middle class groups of conservative outlook.  These tended to be demagogic and anti-Semitic in ways that the leadership found distasteful but was unable to stop.  Zimblatt comments that party activists, whether of the left or right, are more ideologically extreme than election-minded party leaders.  This would imply that activists are also more extreme than the general public, even as they (often) regard themselves as the true voice of the people.  Hence his emphasis on the need for a strong, electorally-minded party leadership to reign in the activists.

Fast forward to Weimar.  As discussed before, Zimblatt sees the true downhill turn for the Weimar Republic, not as the Great Depression, but as the 1928 election in which the DNVP (the successor to the German Conservative Party) lost and seemed to hopelessly fragment.  Always skeptical of the Republic, the DNVP responded to its defeat by radicalizing, by seeking more to enforce ideological purity than to start winning elections again.  The process ultimately led to Germany's conservative parties complete self-destruction and the rise of the Nazis to take their place.

Alfred Hugenberg

Although he never expressly says so, Zimblatt appears to see the single individual most responsible for the failure of the Weimar Republic as neither Hitler nor Hindenburg, but someone most Americans have never heard of -- Alfred Hugenberg.  Hugenberg was a member of the board of directors of Krupp Enterprises, a co-founder of the National Industrial Association, and a media magnate.  Hugenberg worked in cooperation with Heinrich Class, head of the Pan German League.  Hugenberg used his media empire to pressure the DNVP to move right, while Class built grassroots activists to pressure in the same direction. 

Zimblatt contrasts the DNVP as a weak party with the Social Democrats as a strong party.  The Social Democrats were funded mostly by membership dues and had their own party newspaper.  The DNVP lacked either its own base of funding or its own newspaper.  Hugenberg supplied both.  He used his wealth to finance the party and to decide where to channel funds. (Zimblatt estimates he may have provided 30% or more of the DNVP's funds).  He used his newspapers to shape public opinion, particularly against moderation in the party.  He planted his own supporters as local party chairmen to direct local party organizations and used his wealth to decide what candidates to finance.  Following the 1928 defeat, Hugenberg was able to appointed DNVP chairman and used his position to purge the party moderates.  And just as the pre-war German Conservatives ended up to the right even of the Kaiser, Hugenberg's DNVP ended up to the right of Hindenburg.

The result was a disaster for the DNVP -- its share of the vote fell from 14% to 7% in the next election -- but a success for the radical right outside the DNVP.  Zimblatt sees the inability of Germany's leading conservative party to compete as a major factor in the neutering of parliament and the switch to Hindenburg's narrow presidential government.  German conservatives were unwilling to compete in parliamentary government, knowing that there was no way to make a coalition that would exclude the Social Democrats.  (The need on the German right to exclude Social Democrats from any governing coalition is not explored; Zimblatt simply takes it as a given).

As the DNVP shrank, the Nazi Party filled the void on the right that it had left.  Given that Hugenberg was purging the moderates and pushing the party in an ever more radical direction, this is a surprising development.  Zimblatt explains it by saying that Hugenberg made right-wing radicalism respectable and, particularly, by allying himself with the Nazis, he made the Nazis respectable. 

Yet this is a strangely unsatisfying account.  I am quite willing to concede to Zimblatt that the Nazis came to power because Germany had no strong democratic conservative party to block their way.  But he never addresses the obvious question.  Who were the Nazis?  Where did they come from?  It makes sense to say that the Nazis arose because the DNVP was too weak to stop them, and that Hugenberg's attempt to purge the party led to mass defections to the Nazis.  But why, if Hugenberg was purging the moderates, did they go over to the Nazis instead of a more moderate alternative?

And so we see the basic flaw of Zimblatt's theory.  He may well be right that ruling elites will only allow a democratic transition if they have a strong party capable of competing in democratic elections.  He may be right that in the absence of a strong, competitive party, pre-democratic elites will abort the process.  (He is probably right in calling Egypt a recent example). 

But at some point the threat ceases to be from pre-democratic elites and becomes a threat from right-wing activists at the party grass roots.  The role of a strong democratic conservative party stops being to allow the old ruling classes to protect their interest, and becomes to reign in the grassroots activists and channel dissent through democratic channels.  But, once again, that can only raise the question of who these right-wing grassroots activists are.  Where do they come from?***  How numerous are they compared to the general population?  And if the electorally-inclined party leadership is really closer to the general public, how do these activists get enough of a following to be dangerous.  And why is this so strongly a right-wing phenomenon? 

Zimblatt conflates two separate and distinct threats to democracy.  Both threats are on the right, and the remedy for both is a strong, well-disciplined conservative party.  But their origins and the nature of the threat posed are different.  And Zimblatt leaves a major hole in his theory by not addressing the distinction.

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*Mild expression of frustration at the author using "Conservative" and "Unionist" more or less interchangeably without explanation.  
**And, interestingly enough, this issue remains critical to this day and is the chief obstacle to any proposal for the Brexit.
***He gives a reasonably satisfactory answer in Britain -- they were Irish Protestants legitimately fearful of their fate in a Catholic Ireland.  But we are left without a clue in Germany, where such "activists" were vastly more numerous and powerful.

How Does the United States Fit into Zimblatt's Formulation

Zimblatt says little about democratic transition in the United States, other than to say that the South lagged the rest of the country.  Certainly it is true that the United States had regular elective government going back to the earliest colonial times, and had no landed aristocracy outside of the the South.  But true democracy in the form of universal (manhood) suffrage and mass parties did not arrive until the 1830's.*

Furthermore, the United States from the start had a very decentralized government and no single governing elite.  Instead, we had two governing elites -- the landed aristocracy of the South and the commercial/industrial elite of the North. This also meant that the whole right-left spectrum did not exactly apply to U.S. politics.

Treating conservative and right wing to mean upholding the status quo of power (which, for the sake of brevity, I will call the SQP) and liberal or left as challenging the SQP, such labels did not apply well in the US because there was not a single SQP.  Rather, there were two SQP's -- one based on land and slave ownership in the South, and one based on trade, commerce and (later) industrial development in the North.  The United States also had two political parties.  One -- called the Republican Party in Jefferson's time, the Democratic Republican Party in Jackson's time, and finally just the Democrats -- was the party that upheld the SQP South and challenged the SQP North.  Opposed to it were a series of parties -- first the Federalists, then the National Republicans, and then the Whigs -- that upheld the SQP North.  Until the rise of Republican Party in the 1850's, no one challenged the SQP South, and even the Republicans originally did not intend to challenge the Southern SQP, but merely to contain it.

In the earliest years of our Republic, the Federalist Party held power, and did not challenge the SQP North or South.  The election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800 posed a challenge to the SQP North, and Federalists responded with the sort of hysterical overreaction that ruling elites so often show to even a mild challenge to their dominance.  First they attempted to block Jefferson by making Aaron Burr President instead.**  New England contemplated secession.  While the Federalist grudgingly acquiesced for a time, first Jefferson's embargo and then the War of 1812 under Madison led New England to near-revolt and serious discussions of nullification and secession.

The crisis ended with the end of the war, and the Federalist Party largely died out as a party of traitors, while the Republicans adopted the best parts of Federalist platform. An Era of Good Feelings ensued.  That era came to an end with the rise of Andrew Jackson and his challenges to the SQP North.  When Jackson won an electoral and popular plurality but not majority in 1824, Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams were sufficiently alarmed that they jointed forces to choose Adams as President, with Clay as his Secretary of State.  (If no candidate wins a victory in the Electoral College, Congress makes the decision).

In 1828, Jackson swept to power with a strong majority that could not be denied, posing a serious challenge to the SQP North.  And Northern elites grumbled but acquiesced, splitting the Republican Party into Democratic Republicans (Jackson supporters) and National Republicans (Jackson opponents).  The National Republicans soon began calling themselves Whigs, suggesting that Jackson was behaving like a monarch.  And, like British Conservatives, Whigs learned to form a mass party and to compete electorally, accepting defeat so they could live to fight another day.

While I, like many others, have referred to "mature" democracy, I have never been able to define the term, except in age. Zimblatt offers a useful definition of "mature" democracy.  A democracy is "mature" when the party of the SQP has lost an election, accepted its defeat, and learned to compete as democratic party.

By this definition, Athens became a "mature" democracy when the populist Themistocles banished the conservative Aristides, and Aristides submitted without complaint.***  And the Northern United States became a "mature" democracy when it accepted Andrew Jackson as President.

The South was a different matter altogether.  While Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politicians posed as champions of the common man against northern elites, they were themselves champions of the SQP South and were able to cover themselves with democratic glory only because no one challenged the southern SQP.  With the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850's, the South finally saw its SQP challenged and reacted with a hysteria that dwarfed any hysteria over Jefferson.  Secession and civil war ensued, and reconciliation was ultimately based on an agreement that Republicans would no longer challenge the SQP South.  (Democrats went right on challenging the SQP North). This arrangement remained in place until the Civil Rights Movement and the civil rights legislation of the 1960's.  So the South did not become a "mature" democracy until the 1960's -- and maybe not even then.  Many trace the current political crisis to the Democrats' decision to challenge the SQP South over 50 years ago.

So why has the South been so uniquely resistant to allowing any sort of challenge to the SQP?  Some people (I can imagine David Hackett Fischer among them) would argue that the culture of the South is particularly resistant to the sort of challenge to the SQP, compromise, and institutional disagreement that are so vital to a mature democracy.  Others would say that challenges to the SQP North never challenged its racial SQP, and that the issue of race is paramount, everywhere and always.  And I will simply say that it will take a great deal more knowledge and study that I have at hand to reach even a tentative answer on the matter.

Next: My biggest criticism of Zimblatt

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*Although political parties were a British invention, mass parties originated in the United States.
**The Electoral College at the time made the winner President and the runner-up Vice President.  To avoid having political rivals in the two offices, Jefferson and Burr ran in tandem and won equal numbers of votes.  There was no rule at the time to determine which of them we President and which was Vice President, even though everyone knew that Jefferson was at the top of the ticket.   
***Aristides was one of a series of conservative leaders who accepted temporary exile without complaint.  Kimon and Thucydides were also banished and submitted without complaint.  Over time, the Athenians learned to get along without exiling defeated leaders.

Zimblatt Beyond Britain and Germany

Zimblatt focuses on Britain -- strong conservative party, successful democratic transition -- and Germany -- weak conservative party, failed democratic transition.

But, of course, these are only two example.  His final chapter expands his horizons to democratic transition in other countries.  In particular, Zimblatt focuses on the importance of forming a strong conservative party before democratizing. He cites Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands as examples of countries with strong conservative parties that made a smooth, untumultuous, and successful democratic transition.  By contrast, Spain, Portugal and Italy failed in the transition.  France is an intermediate category. 

Spain is a particularly interesting example.  Although Zimblatt seems to support my hypothesis that generally the danger lies on the right, there are exceptions.  Spain is an interesting example.  In Spain, the right wing, lacking a strong, democratic political party, instead rigged the system in such a way as to systematically shut out the left.  The left responded by becoming radicalized and increasingly dangerous and authoritarian, leading the right to have increasingly legitimate fears and resort to ever more extreme methods to exclude the left.  This may be in line with my hypotheses both that out-of-control polarization is a major cause of democratic downfall, and that the left is most dangerous in a government that is really a right-wing oligarchy merely masquerading as a democracy.

Spain's example is in contrast to Britain, where the Conservatives recognized that the Labour Party must be allowed to be competitive in elections or it would become radicalized, and it worked.  The British Labour Party became an eminently respectable party that followed the democratic rules of the game.  This would suggest that what is needed is not just a party of the right that can win in fair elections, but also a party of the left that can win elections, and that systematically shutting anyone out of power is the road to ruin.  On the other hand, Zimblatt makes clear that 19th century German conservatives systematically shut out the left-wing Social Democrat.  And while some of the Social Democrats became radicalized and ultimately formed the Communist Party, it also remained true that the majority continued to respect democratic norms long after everyone else had abandoned them.  That really needs some exploration.

Zimblatt's account of France is maddeningly vague and truncated.  He treats France as a stable democracy from 1879 to 1918.  (No mention of the Dreyfus Affair, which threatened the Third Republic in the 1890's, but ultimately blew over).  In 1919, the right won a parliamentary majority, which it had rarely done since the 1870's.  Again unaddressed, if a conservative party that can win is essential to the survival of democracy, how did the Third Republic survive shutting out the right for so long?  And why did the Third Republic start coming unglued after the right came back to power?  Why did the right endure being shut out of power for so long, only to turn against the Republican when normal alternation of power resumed?  Any serious analysis would require considerably more space than Zimblatt offers.
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Zimblatt also makes some interesting comments about present-day democratic transitions.  In 19th century Europe, the greatest foe of democracy was the landed aristocracy -- the pre-democratic ruling class, reluctant to lose its power.  Landed aristocracies are no longer a serious factor much of anywhere these days.  In their place is military rule one-party states, or patrimonialism.  Zimblatt suggests that democratic transitions were successful in South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia because the old elite had a political party in place that could make the transition to a competitive democratic party.  Likewise, he suggests that democratic transition failed in Egypt and might succeed in Tunisia because Tunisia allowed the old ruling party to integrate into the new order in ways that Egypt did not.*

But if Zimblatt's discussion of Britain and Germany is mind-numbingly detailed, his accounts of other countries are too brief to be very informative.

Next:  The U.S. in Zimblatt's formulation.

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*He does not discuss democratic transition in the ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe.  These are an unusual case in that the Communists were essentially a collaborationist government installed by a foreign power, with no domestic base of support.  This may mean that the usual rules of democratic transition do not apply.  

Daniel Zimblatt's Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy

So, the foregoing leads me to a discussion of Daniel Zimblatt's Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy.  Zimblatt focuses on the origins of democracy, and what factors lead to its success or failure.

His conclusion is that the most important factor in whether a democratic transition succeeds or fails is the existence of a strong conservative party (in the sense of a party upholding the pre-democratic status quo of power) that can successfully compete in elections and develops a stake in the democratic system.  This is quite consistent with the articles I previously reviewed that presented the hypothesis that liberal democracy consists of three bundles of rights -- property rights, political rights (i.e., majority rule) and civil rights (the rights of minority identity groups).  Electoral democracy is  compromise between the ruling elite and the general public -- the general public agrees to respect property rights in return for the ruling elite's agreement to respect majority rule.  How to incorporate civil rights and go from electoral democracy to liberal democracy is a trickier matter.

The article emphasize liberal democracy, Zimblatt's work might better be understood on how countries achieve electoral democracy and agrees with the general framework that it is a bargain between the governing elite and the general population -- to respect property rights in return for majority rule.  Zimblatt's basic thesis is that the governing elite is only confident enough in its property rights to allow majority rule if it has a strong conservative party that can compete electorally.  Without such a party, the ruling elite will invariably sabotage electoral democracy.

Zimblatt offers two contrasting cases from the 19th century -- a successful democratic transition in England and an unsuccessful transition in Germany.  A few words of caution are in order here.  Zimblatt's book appears to be written for professional historians, not for the general public.  It presupposes the reader knows a great deal more about the political parties and major issues of 19th century Britain and Germany than any ordinary American is likely to know, and it contains all sorts of charts, graphs and equations that make the average reader's eyes glaze over.

Nonetheless, he makes some very interesting points.  First, it is clear that the threefold definition of conservatism we see in the US -- upholding existing distributions of wealth, traditional social values, and nationalistic foreign policy -- are not limited to the US but have been the general pattern in Europe as well.  As in the US, traditional social values and nationalistic foreign policy have a lot more public support than upholding existing distributions of wealth.

Another very important point is his definition of a "strong" conservative party.  Essentially he sees a strong conservative party as one with with electoral appeal, and with an institutional interest in upholding democracy.  This means strong enough ties to the voters to know what appeals to them, enough flexibility to adopt to what is a winning platform, the sort of political machine that is deeply entwined with the election system and creates conservative elites with a vested interest in the survival of democracy, and institutions strong enough to hold anti-democratic elements on the right in check.  (More on that last later).  A "weak" conservative party is one that is too small to compete, or too divided to compete, or can only win by rigging the system.  Parties of this kind will be tempted to make common cause with outside interest groups and the radical right.  (Again, more on that later).

And third, the first time the conservative party loses, crisis will ensue.  Whether the democratic transition is successful depends on whether the conservative party is able to accept defeat and live to fight another day.  Unsurprisingly, that depends on the party's "strength."*

In the case of Britain, Zimblatt describes in greater detail than the lay reader can follow how the Conservative Party built a mass party machine, how it attracted members by organizing an entertainment association with a political tinge, and how it appealed to social and religious conservatism and national strength.  Democratic transition proceeded smoothly for roughly 20 years (1884-1906), so long as the Conservatives held power.  In 1906, the Liberals won a sweeping victory, which they held onto in 1910.  The Liberals offered home rule to Ireland and began to implement a welfare state, supported by aggressive taxes, and Conservatives began to panic.  Crisis struck.  Conservatives began to talk of resorting to extra-legal methods, even military coup.  The Conservative Party began losing control of the radical right -- in this case, mostly North Irish Protestants fearful of their future in an autonomous Catholic Ireland.

In the end, though, the Conservatives recognized that, while fighting on economic issues was an electoral loser, protecting North Ireland from being handed over to the Catholics resonated and could be used to win back seats.  Once it became clear that the Conservatives were still competitive, the parties reached a compromise on Ireland.  The political crisis was then shelved when WWI broke out.  Thereafter, the Conservatives acted as a model democratic party, respecting the rights of their opponents when they won, conceding defeat when they lost, and even accepting victory by the Labour Party, then seen as dangerously radical.  Conservatives recognized that the Labour Party, if shut out of power, really would become radicalized, and that if allowed to win, it would split the left.

Zimblatt contrasts this with 19th century Germany.  The German Conservative Party never built a mass base, an electoral machine, or any method of polling the public on what were winning issues.  Instead, it relied on the local aristocracy, which used fraud and economic coercion to ensure the support of rural voters.  German elites were divided between Catholics in the south and Protestants in the north and unable to form a conservative coalition.  The German Conservatives also lacked the strong institutional party to keep out special interests or the radical right, who gain inordinate influence as a result.  Conservatives also manipulated the levers of the state to sway elections in their direction.  The result, Zimblatt argues, was that governing elites did not dare allow true democratization because they would not be able to compete.

The old system was overthrown at the end of WWI, of course, and so began the Weimar Republic, seen as a sort of archetype of how democracies fail.  Once again, Zimblatt attributes this failure to the absence of a strong conservative party.  Its most stable time occurred from 1924 to 1928, when a conservative coalition was in power.  The party of the German right the German National Volkspartei (DNVP) was divided between radical and moderate wings.  In power, the moderate wing began to predominate and make its peace with democracy.

Zimblatt argues that the true turning point that doomed Weimar was not the Great Depression, but the election of 1928 when the DNVP lost badly, its electoral share falling from 20.5 percent to 14.5 percent.  Defeat radicalized the party, causing its moderate wing to lose all control over the activists.  Zimblatt attributes this to the weakness of the central party apparatus versus the much stronger organization of its grassroots activists.  This led to the fragmentation of the German Right into numerous competing parties and the ultimate triumph of you-know-who.

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*Another highly significant point he makes is that democratic breakthroughs, such as we saw in Germany in 1918, in Eastern Europe in 1989, in Russia in 1992, and in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, though they may be inspiring, usually do not bode well for the future and are normally followed by serious democratic backsliding.  Truly successful democratic transitions take place quietly, without dramatic breakthroughs, but also without backsliding.

Democracy and the Problem of Permanent Minorities

When I took Constitutional Rights in law school, way back in 2010, our professor discussed the landmark decision of Reynolds v. Sims, which held that representative districts all had to be of roughly equal population.  He commented that the decision was immensely controversial at the time, setting off dire warnings that rural areas would be disenfranchised.  And yet, he commented, the decision had become universally accepted.

Well, that was then.  The rural/urban split between Democrats and Republicans was already well established, but so far no one was challenging the basics of majority rule.  Since then, Donald Trump won the 2016 electoral vote by a not-so-narrow margin while losing the popular vote by three million and the issue of whether the majority should rule is very much on the table.

And let us concede opponents of majority rule a few points.  Democracy really has not solved the problem of the permanent majority.  What underlies the system and makes it work is the assumption that everyone can (and will) win sometimes and everyone can (and will) lose sometimes.  The knowledge that everyone will sometimes be in the majority and sometimes in the minority gives the minority the incentive to yield to the majority (since they can hope to win not too far down the time) and the majority the incentive to respect the rights of the minority (since they never know when they might be in the minority as well).  Any group that becomes a permanent minority is effectively disenfranchised.  The majority loses its incentive the respect the group's rights, and the group tends to lose faith in democracy, since it is permanently locked out of power.  

One may debate what should be done to protect permanent minorities from the tyranny of the majority.  But to propose minority rule instead is even worse.  Minority rule simply trades disenfranchisement of a permanent minority to disenfranchisement of the majority.  A larger group of people will start to lose faith in the system, with even worse results.

I suppose that anti-majoritarians may say that they don't favor minority rule in the sense of saying that the minority always should win, merely that the system should put a strong enough thumb on the scale to ensure that the minority always can win.  Then the whole dynamic of losers yielding to the winners and winner respecting the rights of the losers will be restored.  The trouble here is the question of how far this dynamic should go.  How small does a group have to be before we can say that there is no need for the system to be rigged to ensure that group can sometimes outvote the majority?

And make no mistake.  In any functioning system of government, the majority will sometimes have to override the minority, to the minority's detriment.  Yes, there are some decisions that should be placed beyond the power of minority.  The majority should not be allowed to dictate its religious preferences, for instance, or pass discriminatory laws that deny the minority rights allowed to the majority.  But there are plenty of ordinary policy decisions that in one way or another advantage one interest over another, and that produce winners and losers.  To allow every interest group, no matter how small, a veto is a recipe for paralysis.*

Democratic vs. Republican counties, by geography

These days the split between Democrats, who dominate urban areas and Republicans, who dominate rural areas, grows ever greater.  This is bad news for both parties.  It is bad news for Republicans because it means that their share of the vote continuously dwindles as population increasingly concentrates in urban areas.  

But it is also bad news for Democrats because our system does put its thumb on the scale for rural areas.  Single-member districts innately favor populations that take of large amounts of land over populations that are densely packed together.  the Electoral College gives a bonus to small states over large ones.  And the Senate allows all states two Senators regardless of population shifts, guaranteeing small states a permanent veto.

Democratic v. Republican counties, by population

So what is the solution to permanent minorities, and to the polarization that is tearing this country apart?  I would say that the only answer to permanent minorities is in coalitions.  A permanent minority, instead of seeking a minority veto, let alone minority rule, should reach out to other groups to form a coalition.  Admittedly, by joining a coalition, the group sees its voice diluted.  But diluted is better than disenfranchised, and the will of the majority must also be respected.  

By way of example, the antebellum South was clearly outnumbered by the more populous North.  But it avoided being shut out of power by forming a coalition of agricultural interests with Western state that shared a common interest in free trade, easy money, and cheap land.  (They differed on federal investments in infrastructure, but such is the nature of coalitions).  The breakdown of this coalition was a major factor leading to the Civil War.

Or, in a quite different example, the Democratic Party today is very much a coalition of minorities, combining black, Hispanic, and Asian voters with upscale white liberals.  Democrats see any attempt to peal off part of this coalition as dirty pool, but historically that does not have to be the case.  For some time in the post-bellum US despised ethnic minorities were very much split, with black people supporting Republicans and immigrants supporting Democrats.  

One does read among Democratic literature warnings that the survival of the party depends on learning to reach out beyond the cities and find a way to appeal to rural areas.  And I have seen similar warnings in Republican literature, that the survival of the party depends in learning to win urban votes.  I concur with both opinions and would add, it is not just the survival of the parties at stake.  The survival of our democracy depends on it.

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*I realize that certain libertarians would say that government should not be allowed to advantage one group over another or to make policies that create winners and losers, and that the only way to achieve this is to make government as paralyzed and nearly powerless as possible.  But make no mistake, the absence of government action will produce winners and losers just as much as the presence of government action.

A Brief Note on Hurricane Dorian and Media Bias

Without going into a long discussion on media bias, there is one bias that is beyond doubt.  That the US media are US-centric should not be surprising, although they often take it to unjustifiable extremes.  And their coverage of the US focuses inordinately on the New York-DC corridor.

The ruins of Paradise, California

We saw this with Hurricane Sandy.  There was immense coverage of the hurricane and its effects on New York City.  Once the hurricane moved off into New England, our news media lost interest.  We saw this last year in the Florida Panhandle, when our new media scarcely even noticed Hurricane Michael because of their focus on the Congressional elections.  We saw it in 2016 when catastrophic flooding in Louisiana went almost uncovered because of the focus on the Presidential election.  We saw it last year when the city of Paradise California was burned down with some media attention, but hardly what the magnitude of the disaster called for.  So, yes, even New England and California get neglected by our national media in favor of the New York to DC corridor.

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Which leads to the subject of Hurricane Dorian.  I wouldn't really expect the Bahamas to get the sort of coverage the US gets, and I note to the news media's credit that they have given some attention to the devastation in the Bahamas.  But when it comes to the US, the focus has been rather obsessively on Florida, as if our media don't really care what happens to Georgia or the Carolinas.  And yes, I get that the hurricane's initial path seemed headed straight toward Florida, so the focus on Florida was justified.  But other states are just as much in harm's way now, and getting a lot less attention.

Am I too cynical in suspecting that is because a lot more of our big name bigwigs (including Trump with Mar-a-Lago) have homes or second homes in Florida than Georgia or the Carolinas?