The United States: A seriously ill giant

Between government and chaos, the Republican Party always chooses chaos. The House of Representatives, a key institution to approving budgets, has been left without a speaker, and its activities have been suspended pending the election of a new one. It is not a minor mishap, but rather an astonishing development in American history, which leaves the superpower without its third-highest authority, after the president, Joe Biden, and the vice president, Kamala Harris.

The protagonist of such a feat is the Republican Party, now possessed by the destructive spirit of Donald Trump, the former U.S. president who is convinced that he is above the Constitution, to the point of using such a belief to defend himself before the four judges who have prosecuted him in three criminal cases and one civil suit. Kevin McCarthy — who was the speaker of the Lower House up until last week — is the third Republican leader to be devoured by the fierce Trumpist extremism, despite his shameful submission to the dictates of the most radical and crackpot members of the conservative party. His unforgivable sin was to reach an agreement with the White House to extend the budget for 45 days in order to avoid a federal shutdown and suspension of payments of the federal administration. But he paid a high price for it, a cost that included his head, as well as the paralysis of the House and the freezing of aid to Ukraine until the difficult vote to choose his successor takes place.

If at one point Trump’s presidency could be perceived as an episodic accident, the turn that the Republican primaries are taking — with the tycoon leading the polls to win the 2024 presidential nomination by a double-digit margin — signals that U.S. democracy is in fact suffering from multi-organ failure, incapable of governing at home and of maintaining its position and its interests abroad. If the decision to suspend aid to Ukraine is not reversed, the consequences will be serious and even tragic. Not only for Kyiv and NATO, but also for the superpower, since it will lose whatever authority and reliability it has left. It will give a green light to countries aspiring to rise by force in the new multipolar map, such as China with respect to Taiwan or Azerbaijan with respect to Armenia.

But it’s not just the United States that is sick. So too is liberal democracy, which has been kidnapped by radical minorities that block government action and even institutions, as Levitsky and Ziblatt explain in their new book, The Tyranny of the Minority, which follows their earlier work How Democracies Die.

This is not only happening in the United States. Thanks to the systems of balances and controls of counter-majoritarian democracy, which serve to preserve the rights of minorities, now it is minorities disloyal to democracy, in some cases with negligible presence, who have come to impose their tyranny.

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