(Image: Private Media)

In the provocatively named How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explain how once in power, our elected representatives can destroy the democratic system that delivered them power.

Their concern was not abstract. Even in 2018, when the book was published, Americans were already witnessing Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, though it’s taken filings from the “one-six” committee to clarify how advanced and serious Trump’s efforts were to stay in office, despite losing at the polls.

But for Levitsky and Ziblatt, the Trump problem — my terminology, not theirs — began even earlier than the day in 2016 when the 45th president was sworn in. It started with the failure of the Republican Party to stop him getting on the ballot in the first place.

Political parties around the world, not just in the United States, have long functioned as gatekeepers to the extraordinary powers of elected office. While Americans liked to think it was their unique political culture that stopped the wanna-be presidential demagogues so feared by the nation’s founding fathers from gaining higher office, it wasn’t. Just like Trump, men like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Joseph McCarthy and the southern segregationist George Wallace consistently drew between 30-40% of the country’s support.

What allowed Trump to rise while they sank was the loss of power, and intestinal fortitude, of the Republican Party’s gatekeepers. In the wake of changes in the 1970s to America’s primary system that opened it to a binding vote of the people, an acceptable balance seemed to have been struck between the public’s demand for an end to the smoky-room selection of homegrown white males as candidates, and the need to filter out aspirants who lacked the requisite temperament, experience and qualifications.

But by 2015, when Trump sailed down the escalator at Trump Towers to announce his run for the presidency, the last of the guardrails Alexander Hamilton believed were essential to exclude a candidate with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” were gone. The unmitigated flow of money into a candidate’s coffers to be spent however they liked, and Fox’s discarding of any obligation to endorse a responsible candidate in preference to giving their authoritarian-leaning audience whatever they wanted, made the rise of Trump — or a candidate like him — inevitable.

What can Australians, concerned about the corruption of our own democracy, learn from all this?  

The first is to be careful what we wish for. Over the years, I’ve heard Australians express envy of the ability of Americans to directly elect their federal leader. But this ignores the benefit of parliamentary democracy, in which the very process of government formation — the necessity that our PM be an elected member of Parliament and the favoured choice of his or her party’s majority — precludes an untested candidate, and reduces the chance of a demagogue, rising to the top.  

The second is to recognise the money-in-politics issue as the serious problem for democracy that it is, and to use our vote to ensure our elected representatives do something about it. Individual and democratic corruption sap citizens of the trust they must have in their elected representatives for democracy to thrive.

Finally, we have to regulate the flow of information into the analogue and digital public square. It’s the definition of madness to allow the same alternative reality that thrives on Fox News to flourish on Sky News, but expect the impact on our democracy to be different. We also need to regulate social media to put an end to what former Google staffer Tristan Harris calls their “civil war for profit” business model.

The model, which pays us in “more likes, more followers, more attention and more reach” the more we say nasty things and engage in conflict with our fellow citizens, is the antithesis of how social engagement, civil society and the fourth estate must work if Australians want to keep living in a democracy.