Corey
Robin

Loved this

Before Trump the talk was of maintaining civility. Now under the guise of anti authoritarianism ,we have the so called dangers of norm erosion. Of course it is important which nirms are eroded. Treating the DOJ as your personal protection racket is a norm that erodes democracy. Trying to use budget brinksmanship to help people is the right kind.

When Republicans have power they do everything they can think of to skew the rules of the game in order to maintain power for as long and as tightly as possible. Democrats think if they enact good policies that help people that is the way to get reeelcted and maintain power in order to do more good. They never think about changing strucutiral factors to keep themselves in power…which is actually more legitimate as they actually represent more people

“As it tries to overcome this deficit of the popular by means of the unpopular — as opposed to its heyday, when it overcame the popular by means of a counterpopular — today’s conservative movement calls to mind its predecessor in early 19th-century, pre-Reform Britain, dependent on a combination of rotten boroughs and stale rhetoric.”

(Corey Robin, 2017)

“The term Whig has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.”

(Lord John Russell, 1850s)

I’ve always been skeptical of “democracy” as an ideological master signifier for being vague enough to mean more or less whatever the speaker/listener wants it to mean, even by the normal standards of ideological equivocation that plague other political signifiers like liberalism, conservatism, socialism, fascism, freedom, totalitarianism, and so on. On the one hand, there’s a rhetorical current dating at least as far back as the US founding elites and their obsessive fear of the masses, where “democracy” signifies a norm-shattering mass uprising against a norm-governed “antidemocratic” establishment order signified by a term like “republic” — on the other hand, there’s another longstanding yet diametrically opposed rhetorical current dating back at least as far back if not further, where “democracy” stands for precisely the establishment of a norm-governed political order that an “antidemocratic” mass uprising signified by a term like “populism” might seek to shatter. (To those immersed in the ideology of the US creation mythos who might find this latter current far-fetched, recall that in ancient Greek democracy, leadership elections allowing for prestigious individual candidates to mobilize the masses outside the bounds of formal procedure were considered directly antidemocratic and potential inroads for tyranny, whereas the democratic option was to remove the choice of leadership from direct popular control via a rigidly proceduralized random lottery resembling a modern-day jury pool selection.)

If we accept the limiting yet also revealing interpretation of mainstream US politics as a conflict between those on either side of the proverbial aisle who stand for “the norm-governed establishment” versus those on either side of the same proverbial aisle who stand for “the will of the people” (think of Chris Arnade’s metaphor of “front row kids” versus “back row kids”), a common thread seems to be each group defining its own position as democratic and the opposing position as antidemocratic, even though the definitions being diametrically swapped are practically identical. When we find ourselves bound in practice to such a maximally vague signifier and we can’t precisely articulate our theoretical reasons for continuing to cling to it, apart from the tautological propaganda value of clinging to it to appeal to others who also cling to it, then maybe the best move for the sake of our own understanding and clarity would be to step away from it altogether.

from the OP:
“The authors want to posit the 1850s as a moment that ‘undermined America’s democratic norms,’ strongly suggesting that prior to the 1850s, there was a robust enjoyment of democratic norms in America. Most of us would argue that when one portion of the people enslaves another, denying them their humanity (and the vote), there’s no real democratic norm in play.”

from the op-ed:
“Norms of forbearance have not always been strong in the United States: They were weak in the republic’s early years and they unraveled during the Civil War.” (italics added)

So the op-ed doesn’t suggest “there was a robust enjoyment of democratic norms” before the 1850s. That said, I tend to agree that their treatment of the 1850s in the op-ed is somewhat problematic.

OTOH I’d suggest, contrary to the OP, that one doesn’t need the discourse of ‘norm erosion’ to “redescribe” antebellum America as a (flawed, imperfect, compromised) democracy. Tocqueville described antebellum America as a democracy in the 1830s. Contemporary historians refer to “Jacksonian democracy.” It’s not like no one has ever talked about antebellum America as a democracy and suddenly these two political scientists come along and “redescribe” antebellum America as a democracy. People talk about ‘Athenian democracy’ and it’s well known that there were slaves in classical Greece.

The real issue here is that Levitsky and Ziblatt think that extreme partisan polarization is bad or dangerous in itself, and Robin does not. That’s a legitimate disagreement and would be an interesting debate, but it gets lost in all the stuff about the 1850s and the quotes from Oakes and Woodward. Extreme polarization was arguably *inevitable* in the 1850s and arguably even desirable. We aren’t in the 1850s, and I doubt it’s esp. desirable today. The op-ed would have been better and focused the issue more if they’d left out all reference to the 1850s, IMO.

German political discourse at one point featured a distinction between “value conservatism” and “structure conservatism”. The latter comes in different strains, such as the preservation of natural structures evolved over millions of years, vs. the preservation of procedures and institutions mere decades old. A specific flavor of structure conservatism has been described as “cargo cult”.

Your conclusion is where I was hoping you would go. The problem with the pre-Civil War United States (and, to some extent still is) was that the northern colonies and southern colonies were established for two different reasons: the northern colonies (possibly excepting NY) were established by religious refugees who built a small-town based economy of modest agriculture and small industries. By contrast, the southern colonies were explicitly set up with economies characterized by large-scale commodity and agriculture exploitation. These very different economies resulted in the evolution of very social and cultural systems and, as a result different notions of democratic and ethical norms. The north valued broad-based public participation in civic affairs whereas the south set up a planter economy that viciously exploited black slaves and also economically exploited poorer white people. The Constitution, which was developed well after these types of society were set couldn’t possibly address the injustices of the souther system; in fact, its compromises (the Senate that favored states with rural and small populations, the 3/5ths status of blacks but no vote and the Electoral College) severely undermined democratic norms even by the emerging standards of the late 18th century. To this day, while the Constitution several times to make it ,more democratic, it is still structural anti-democratic in many ways.

So I agree. The country will continue to deteriorate if anti-democratic norms aren’t further eroded, especially with the high unlikelihood of any further Constitutional amendments to further democracy.