- Democratic backsliding isn't limited to weak governments abroad.

Today's guest warns about the dangers facing American democracy, including the growing acceptance of intimidation, and even political violence in some communities.

She's Rachel Kleinfeld, this week on "Story in the Public Square".

(inspirational music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square", where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with "The Providence Journal".

- This week, we're joined by Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, who is a Senior Fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

She joins us today from New Mexico.

Rachel, so great to see you.

- Wonderful to see you, Jim.

- You know, I read a lot of your recent articles to get ready for this conversation today.

And these are not, you know, pick-me-ups.

(Rachel and Wayne chuckle) This is some really serious, heavy stuff.

Break down for us, though, starting at that global scale, what's happening to democracy globally?

- So democracy, globally, after World War II, was very moderate.

There just weren't that many countries that were democracies.

And in the '90s, they skyrocketed.

So we got, just the vast explosion of democracies.

What's been happening for the last 16 years is what's called a democratic recession.

So globally, we're losing democracies.

And actually, we just passed this year, the mark at which more people're now living in countries that're partially free or not free at all, as opposed to democracies.

And that's a real setback.

It's a real reduction in freedom.

But not just freedom, because democracy's strongly correlated with economic growth, with girls going to school, all sorts of positive things that are slipping backward.

- Well, and so we're gonna wanna talk a little bit about America in some specific context, but do you have a sense of what's driving the democratic recession globally?

- There's a lot of theories.

Some people say that a lot of countries became democracies that probably didn't have some of the underlying ability to be ready.

That makes sense, except that we're seeing a lot of slipback in countries that have all of those underlying conditions, places like Hungary, India, America, Poland.

So, that probably accounts for some of it, but not all of it.

We seem to be in a moment in which global authoritarian forces are learning a lot from each other, and're learning how to undermine more democratic systems.

And so, that's also seeming to be some portion of it.

And then I think the last part is probably that as kleptocracy has grown, as corruption has grown, it undermines people's faith in their own systems, and they actually vote away their own democracies, because they feel like what they're getting in terms of freedom, isn't worth what they're losing in terms of trust, and so on.

So it's a mixed bag.

- So if you can turn to what's happening to American democracy, give us an overview of, say, the last 10 years, and then where we are today.

We're in a midterm election year.

So give us that overview, if you wouldn't mind, Rachel.

- Sure, so I think for those of us who're of a certain age, we need to kinda reset our minds.

A lot has happened since 2000.

We basically had a situation, before 2000, where people voted based on their beliefs and their partisan interest.

But since then, what we've had is a lot of voting that's negative, that's against the other side, rather than for their side.

We've seen a real reduction in the strength of our democratic institutions, starting in 2000, but speeding up a lot in the last five years.

And we've seen a contraction of understanding of people on the other side, of openness to switching sides, to taking other ideas into account.

So really strict partyline voting, weakening institutions.

And all of this is causing international indices to downgrade America.

Pretty much every international indice, from Freedom House, where I sit on the board, to varieties of democracy have been downgrading America quite significantly since 2000, but really in the last five years a lot.

- So Rachel, what're the forces at play that're driving these trends, both internationally and here, domestically, in the United States?

- So, globally, we're seeing, we're at a height of immigration after 2015, and immigration seems to be driving backlash.

People're concerned, they feel like their societies aren't homogenous anymore.

The autocratic revolution, the ability of Russia and China, particularly, but also Iran, to interfere in our own systems.

Not just America, all over the world, they're interfering in democratic systems, and they're using it...

They're not just changing votes.

What they're doing is getting into our newsfeeds, helping us understand the world in a way that's much more polarizing, much more partisan.

So those're some of the global forces.

Also the economy is, since 2008 and the major recession that the whole world experienced in 2008, it led to more populist parties, more outsider candidates.

And some of those people are running against the current system that's bad, but some of them're also pretty egocentric, and running for themselves, and tend to concentrate power in themselves and harm institutions of democracy.

So whether they're good or bad, they almost always tend to harm democratic institutions In America, the other trend that's been going on, well, two, one is that the parties're extraordinarily close.

We haven't seen parties contest power for Congress, and so on, this closely since Reconstruction.

And that means that every election matters a lot.

Because you could have control of Congress, so you're gonna fight to the death for every election.

The other thing that's been happening, and sped up since 2000, is a homogenization of the Republican party, and a heterogeneralization of the Democratic party.

Basically, people used to be less identifiable as Democratic or Republican.

You could be a white, working-class man who was unionized, who held pretty conservative views about a lot of things, went to church, but voted Democratic 'cause you were in the union, and vice versa on the Republican side.

That's virtually gone now.

Now, the Republican party is much more white, much more male, much more conservative ideologically than it used to be, much more homogenous.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have picked up everybody else.

So it's much more heterogeneous.

What we find in other countries is that when you get a homogenous party, they tend to play on those identity factors, 'cause it's easier to unite your party around identity than around policy.

So we're seeing more, kind of, racial and other factors coming in on the Republican side that're driving identity markers.

On the Democratic side, you are seeing some of that, but because there's such a heterogeneous party, they have to appeal to a lot of different groups to win a majority.

So it's different in different constituencies.

- You know, Rachel, you and I are contemporaries.

We were both, 15 years ago, running around Washington DC, working in the same general space.

You said something that just resonated with me.

You talked about parties being so closely aligned that, in terms of their support, that they contest these elections on language that's do or die.

It's death of the Republic if one side or the other wins.

How dangerous is that kind of framing?

Are we over-inflating the stakes, thereby making the decay of democracy more likely?

Is the way we talk about it that has something to do with what's happening here?

- There's a lot of questions in there, let me unpack them.

So yes, the way we talk about it really matters.

We are not entirely wrong to frame it that way.

But let me unpack it a little.

So, because the parties have moved into such different demographic spaces, they've also moved quite far in their ideological spaces.

So there used to be a lot of overlap between conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, especially when you had the Blue Dog Democrats.

You had the Southern Democrats who're kinda holdovers from the Jim Crow era, and you had these Rockefeller Republicans.

So voting for Republican didn't necessarily mean voting for a slate of policies that a normal Democrat would disagree with.

The centers were actually fairly overlapping.

That's changed vastly in 20 years.

So now, the Republican're very far right.

And the left, the Democrats have moved somewhat to the left.

It's not symmetric, it's asymmetric, but both sides have moved to some degree.

So it is more existential in that way.

People are right to feel like the other party is gonna change policies quite a bit, whereas in the past, that wouldn't've been the case.

On the other hand, there's a lot of research that shows that leaders who use rhetoric that dehumanizes their opponents, and so on, amp up violence.

And we're seeing a lot of violence in America.

Not quite at the levels of the 1970s and late '60s, but getting there.

And that kind of leadership rhetoric that paints the other as evil, as less than human, as a threat to the Republic, is incredibly dangerous, from that perspective.

- Well, let's talk about that political violence, because you have been sounding the alarm about the rise of political violence in the United States.

What're you seeing, and what're you worried about?

- So, unfortunately, I think a lot of people think, "Oh, there was January 6th, then, you know, whatever you think about January 6th, it's over."

That's not what the statistics show.

So what the statistics show is that white supremacist activity is 12 times higher than it was five years ago.

We're getting 13, more than 13 incidents a day of kind of major white supremacist organizing, whereas it used to be less than one a day.

And it's also much more public, things like unfurling sheets on major highway bypasses, and so on, not kinda in the shadows.

Members of Congress are getting 10 times more death threats than they were when Trump took office.

And you're hearing people like Fred Upton, the Republican House Member, who's leaving saying those death threats are affecting their votes.

They're making it very hard to vote in a bipartisan way, they're scaring people.

They're causing people, especially parents with kids of both genders, but parents with kids who get these death threats, they're often against their children.

And sometimes they'll say, you know, "We know where you live."

If they do know where you live, they'll dox them.

So what you're seeing is a withdrawal from the public sphere, of certain people.

And then, on the local level, it's also quite bad.

I think, I'm gonna get this study wrong.

It was the National League of Cities, I think, took a poll before 2020, which was when violence skyrocketed.

And 13% of mayors said that they'd had death threats.

A newer poll, post-2020, shows that 81% of local elected officials have faced physical violence or significant intimidation.

And it's not all online.

We used to never have threats against election workers, for instance, now the DOJ has had 850 filed threats.

50% of election workers say they don't bother to file, 'cause they don't think anything'll happen.

And 50% also say they're in-person, these life threats against their physicality.

So, you know, it's not like you get paid a lot to be an election worker, and it's not a very glorious job.

If you're getting that kind of feedback, you're likely to quit.

And our election workers, our elections are highly local.

And they're very specific to, you know, esoteric, old, computer technology, or new computer technology.

Most of those people, the median length of stay is 12 to 15 years.

The big cities usually have people who've been in those jobs for 25 years.

So when they leave, it's a huge loss of knowledge to our Republic.

- And it's not just elections either.

You know, we've seen in this part of the country, and around the country, small cities, small towns, school committees, that used to be peaceful, where people show up and there're threats or actual violence.

We've seen this, certainly, during COVID.

Talk about that.

It isn't necessarily, it isn't only at the congressional level, where these threats and intimidation are undermining democracy.

It's, in many instances, at a very local, hometown level.

Talk about that, 'cause I find that chilling too.

- So you're absolutely right, Wayne, that's exactly right.

First of all, the election officials often are local.

You know, they're your neighbors, that're sitting at the poll, taking your ID, and so on.

But you're absolutely right that school boards're seeing a huge increase.

Public health officials, 80% of Colorado's public health officials say that they've been threatened.

You're seeing a huge group of public health officials leave, probably the greatest ever in our country's recorded history, of one-year loss of public health officials.

What we're seeing is these groups're being targeted for political reasons.

You're seeing, kind of, campaigns that're national against these local school board officials, or what have you, to amp up, usually culture war issues.

But we're also seeing that extremist groups, like the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, militia groups, are piggybacking on that mainstream concern, and're showing up at these events.

And then, you've been in, maybe, concert crowd or something.

There's kind of a feeling of a crowd.

So you get a couple of violent folks in a crowd, egging people on, and a crowd that might've been angry, but not violent becomes more violent.

So that's what we're seeing at this local level.

And you're right, that it's all over the country.

It's in blue and red states, and it's very much affecting real people, just regular people.

- Rachel, do you have a sense, so I mean, the groups that you've mentioned, we know that they have real organizational structure, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, groups like that, but do you have a sense that the adoption of violence as a political tactic is, is this just learned from experience?

Is there some plan, or strategy behind it?

What's going on?

- So America, first of all, has a long history of political violence.

And when we look at other countries, you look for that history, because there's a lot of correlation between past use and present use.

So we had the Know Nothing party; we had the Reconstruction period; we had lynching through the '60s, actually, after Brown v. Board, and so on.

So we have this history, unfortunately, and then the assassination of multiple presidential candidates in the '60s.

And, what we're seeing now is a big change in violence.

So most violence all over the world is committed by young men.

Young men who tend to be unmarried, childless, often without jobs.

They often have criminal history.

That's who commits violence everywhere.

And they often age out of it, frankly.

But that's also, in America, who commits spontaneous hate crimes.

But what we're seeing now, is a group on the right... And the right, by the way, is just skyrocketing in its violence, if you look at the global terrorism database.

The left is growing, but not as fast.

On the right, what we're seeing is a mainstreaming of violence for political reasons.

So you're seeing middle-aged men who're married with kids and jobs, often good jobs, often college degrees, who are showing up at violent Stop the Steal events, at the January 6th insurrection.

That's really worrisome, 'cause it shows that violence is becoming a political tactic of the mainstream.

On the left, we're seeing violence from people who identify less with the Democratic party, who are young, often white progressive, kind of your typical, angry young man from college sort of thing.

That's where we're seeing the most violence on the left, but on the right it's this highly-established group, and it's people who identify more with the Republican party.

So, because of that asymmetry, on the right it's more easy to harness the violence for political purposes.

On the left, it's very hard to harness the violence for political purposes, 'cause these people are disaffected with the Democratic party.

- If, (coughs) excuse me, is there any way to counter these trends?

I mean, as you noted, this country has a long history of violence.

I mean, going back to the founding, and of course, even before the founding.

Is there anything that can counter these trends?

I mean, I'm always trying to look for solutions, and I realize that there's no quick answer, or no quick solution to this, but what do you see that might give a degree of hope or optimism?

- So first of all, we're not at a very high level of violence.

We have a lot of threats.

We have a lot of intimidation that has effects politically, even without violence, but it it's at a low level.

That's really good, because violence builds on itself.

So it means that we can actually do a lot, and there's a lot we can do.

I mean, the most important would be for leaders to take down the rhetoric.

The research on leadership rhetoric is just solid, and it shows that followers follow their leaders.

They wanna be, kind of, part of a social norm of what's acceptable or not.

So reducing the dehumanizing, reducing the level of anger, the rhetoric, the campaign ads that show people in gunshot hairs, and so on, reducing all that would help a lot.

Another thing that would help is just, in our communities, resetting the norms.

You can be really angry, you can't use violence, you can't use intimidation, you can't dox people.

You know, there's just rules of democracy.

And the more that our social communities, our churches, and our mayors, and our local areas, our local areas're the most trusted.

People trust their local politicians the most, despite the threats.

The more we reset those norms societally, to say, you know, "There're certain things that're outside the bounds, we're not going to normalize them," especially with jokes.

One of the things that we know is that jokes slip past our mental barriers.

So you might say, "Oh, I'd never believe in assassination, but this is a pretty funny joke about a politician I don't like, I'm gonna send it along."

That's actually really bad, because it tends to normalize a certain level of violent rhetoric, which sounds like, "Oh, it's just a joke."

But then, what we see in the extremist space is that they use jokes, they use memes, they use pictures, and it can be really hard to tell whether they're joking or not until a violent activity occurs.

And they use that to, first of all, hide culpability.

But second of all, to slip past your brain's ability to kind of tell whether something's wrong or not, 'cause jokes are supposed to be a little wrong.

That's what makes them funny, is that they're a little wrong.

So, that kind of thing is particularly dangerous, and we should be careful about spreading, you know, just a joke.

- Yeah, Rachel, in a recent article for the Journal of Democracy, you identified four risk factors for political violence.

And we won't tick through them all now, but, lot of them seem to apply to the United States quite clearly.

But one in particular, you noted, "Weak institutional constraints of violence, particularly security-sector bias toward one group."

What is the role of security-sector bias in the United States?

And are you concerned about erosion in that area as well?

- Yeah, so, internationally, what we see is that if one group, whether it's an ethnic group or a partisan group, or what have you, thinks that they won't be arrested or won't be prosecuted, that they're gonna be okay if they commit a certain level of violence, they're more likely to commit violence if they're egged on by their leaders.

If they're egged on by their leaders, and they think that they're gonna face repercussions, they're much less likely to commit violence.

You know, that stands to reason.

It's also what the research shows.

So when the security sector leans to one side, it's a strong indication to people that they're not going to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and it makes violence much more likely.

We see that in places like India.

What we're seeing in America is, you know, our security institutions have always been conservative, small c conservative, it's a kinda conservative profession set.

But actually quite bipartisan, if you look at political giving.

You know, unions are part of policing in many, many cities, so that has cut across partisan belief.

What we've been seeing in the last couple years is a growing hardening of the security sector, and a growing sense that their main threat comes from the left, even though all the research shows that the greater level of violence is coming from the right.

And so, what we're seeing is in cities, Albuquerque just to the south of us, here, had a militia event where the militia showed up with guns to a rally, and there's footage of the police kinda going over the militia, and sorta treating them as if they were part of to the same side.

You're seeing that in a number of cities.

Selfies at the capital, and so on.

That sends a message to people, especially when it's repeated on TikTok and on social media, and so on, they take those clips, that it's okay to commit violence, you're not gonna be prosecuted.

And it's why the rule of law, and accountability for these actions is so important, and why we need all levels of government.

'Cause you don't want just the federal government to do all the work.

There will be a backlash.

So you really need state and local governments to step up.

And unfortunately, in some places, we're seeing that not occur.

- So we are in a midterm election year, with primaries coming up, depending on where you are, at the end of the summer, early fall.

And then, of course, the general elections in November.

What do you foresee...

I know you don't have a crystal ball, but what do you foresee in terms of political violence associated with elections?

This is the first election we've had since president Biden was elected.

- So the good news is that I'm not expecting much violence at these elections.

The bad news is that that's because I don't think they're gonna be very close.

I think that, you know, most of the polling shows that Republicans're likely to win.

That means that the campaign rhetoric is less likely to gin up anger.

'Cause if you're not so worried, then you don't need to do that.

And so, there's probably not going to be significant violence.

There might be some intimidation, but what we're seeing in America's what we see in other countries, which is that electoral playing fields are set long before the election.

It's only really weak democracies that're very new, that use violence or intimidation close to an election.

It's just too obvious.

What you often see is years before, setting the playing field, changing the rules, making it harder for opponents to run, using intimidation to take your most popular opponents out, things like that.

We're seeing that in the United States already.

So I don't expect much at the midterms.

2024 might be a very different story.

But the reasons are not great.

- Rachel, what do you say to those who argue that the left wing, the left in American politics needs to start organizing militias of the road because of the rise of right-wing militias in the United States?

- That's a super bad idea.

It is happening, (Jim chuckles) to some extent.

Very small, but it is happening.

And it's just a horrible idea.

Not just because I don't like violence, but because what all the research internationally shows is that nonviolent movements toward democracy, for greater democracy, tend to succeed.

They tend to succeed because they get broad groups of people across partisanship, across society, together, who say, "I wanna be a part of that."

And they take their kids, you know, everybody to the goes to the rallies, and they say, "We believe in democracy, and kumbaya."

As soon as a violent wing comes up, that is on that same side, first of all, it scares away the parents with the kids, and a lot of the people from the other side who had joined, from the other partisan side that joined, say, "Oh, there's violence.

They're bad, and so, we're gonna pull away."

And so you lose your coalition.

And as lose your coalition, you're also giving figurative ammunition to the other side, to paint your side as the instigator.

And that's very common.

And actually, it's a strategy of a lot of white nationalist groups to get the left to instigate so they can retaliate.

And so, for all those reasons, it's just really dumb.

- Rachel, we've got about 90 seconds left, here, and you know, there are voices you hear periodically over the years, that warn of a coming civil war in the United States, and those voices seem to be growing in number now.

And I'm curious, again, in about the last minute that we have here, how concerned are you about the prospect of some new civil war in America's not-so-distant future?

- I'm not at all worried, but that's because the violence doesn't look like a civil war.

When we picture civil war, we picture both sides fighting it out, you know, in the streets like in the 1860s.

What we're seeing is violence on the left that's just very unfocused, and not being used for particular purposes.

And on the right, we're seeing violence that's quite focused around elections.

It rises and falls in 2016, 2018, 2020.

And it's really about taking control of government.

That's not what a civil war looks like.

You don't get civil wars, generally, in well-established, rich democracies.

They're vanishingly rare.

So what you get is people trying to take over the government using these kinds of techniques.

And that's what we're likely to continue seeing, but not the kind of streetfighting that... You know, it's not Portland-at-large kind of thing.

- We're gonna take that as a hopeful way to end this episode, (Rachel laughs) Rachel Kleinfeld, thank you so much for being with us today.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square", you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on old episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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