Last week the US took another step on its journey towards autocracy, as Liz Cheney lost the Republican primary for her Wyoming district. Her father is former vice-president Dick Cheney, who masterminded the Iraq war under George W Bush. She is also unimpeachably conservative. Yet she has become anathema to Republicans. Her crime? She believes that accepting the outcome of fair elections is a higher duty than promoting the lies of their “great leader”. (See charts.)
The Republican party has adopted the Führerprinzip (“leadership principle”) of the Germans in the 1930s. This is the notion that loyalty to a leader who defines what is true and right is the overriding obligation. The Republicans’ embrace of Trump’s Big Lie that he won the last presidential election is a perfect instance of this principle. Here, moreover, it is directly set against a core value of liberal democracy, that of fair elections. Ten years ago, most of us would have thought such a development inconceivable in the US. But with the ascent of Donald Trump it became likely. Now, the reaction not so much of Trump to his defeat as of his party to his lies provides another decisive moment.
As Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue in their splendid book, How Democracies Die, it is not hard to subvert a democracy. It has happened many times, in both the past and more recently. First, subvert the electoral system. Second, capture the referees (the judiciary, tax authorities, intelligence agencies and law enforcement). Third, sideline or eliminate political opponents and, above all, the media. Supporting all such assaults will be a fierce insistence on the illegitimacy of the opposition and the “fakeness” of information that does not align with the lies the leader finds most useful today.