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Page 1: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY LECTURE SERIES · 2019. 3. 29. · The Constitutional Democracy Lecture series begins the new academic year for ... international dimension of democratic

CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY

LECTURE SERIES

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International Lincoln Center Booklets

l. The Center at 35 Years, 2018

2. Constitutional Democracy Lecture Series, 2019

3. Abraham Lincoln Lecture Series, 2019

4. International Conferences: Home and Abroad, 2019

5. The Washington Semester: Oldest, Least Expensive, and Most Creative, 2019

6. The Center’s Resources at LSU Shreveport, 2019

International Lincoln Center Shreveport, LA: Paragon Press, 2019

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International Lincoln Center

Selected Awards and Honors

Award of Achievement Abraham Lincoln Association

Springfield, IL 1994

Rose Award Journalpage, The (Shreveport) Times

September 12, 1995

Regional Award in the Humanities Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games

Cultural Olympiad Atlanta, GA

1995-96

Chancellor’s Distinguished Achievement Award Louisiana State University Shreveport

2018

Wendy Allen Institutional Award Lincoln Forum Gettysburg, PA

2018

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Contents

1. The Constitutional Democracy Lecture Series 4

2. Constitutional Democracy Lecturers at LSUS 14

3. Select Sources 15

4. The 2018 Constitutional Democracy Lecture by Dr. Norman W. Provizer “The Darkening Hour: Celebrating the Constitution and Facing the Challenge of Soulless Democracy:” Flyer and Lecture 16

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Constitutional Democracy Lecture: Annual Fall Academic Opening Event

The Constitutional Democracy Lecture series begins the new academic year for

the International Lincoln Center at Louisiana State University Shreveport each

September 17th, appropriately coinciding with national Constitution Day. The

observance commemorates the fact that the United States is governed under the oldest

written constitution in the world, in sharp contrast to most national constitutions that on

average are changed every two decades. Abraham Lincoln enunciated the best-known

definition of America’s constitutional democracy as “government of, by, and for the

people.” In addition to giving the world his enduring and understandable definition,

Lincoln also modeled a unique democratic leadership style that ranks as one of the

United States’ major contributions to democracy.

This booklet has a three-fold purpose: (1) to recount how the Constitutional

Democracy Lecture series developed both before and after the nation’s five-year

bicentennial commemoration of the U.S. Constitution; (2) to discuss the standards used

by the International Lincoln Center to define constitutional democracy; and (3) to identify

the local and national origins of the Center that facilitated development of the

international dimension of democratic constitutional values, a transformation with many

parallels to Lincoln’s personal transformation from a frontier villager into a cosmopolitan

democrat.

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The Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution

Following the launch of the Center’s successful—and unique—Washington

Semester offered each year between the end of the spring term and beginning of the

summer session, a lecture on American Studies was developed for the fall semester.

That lecture soon was blended into the Center’s annual September 17th observation of

Constitution Day. With the addition of the fall lecture, the Center expanded its offerings

for the campus and broader local community to complement the Washington Semester.

In part, this was to signal that Shreveport, the last Confederate capital, had become part

of “the New South.” The Center would eventually further highlight this cultural change

by bringing to Shreveport prominent speakers whose presentations were transformed

into an ongoing series of publications that elevated the Center’s scholarly profile

nationally and internationally.

1987 U.S. Postage Stamp

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The foundation for it all was the foresight and determination of the late, local

philanthropists Peggy and Norman Kinsey who championed a broader vision for the

American Studies program than its initial Washington Semester. The five-year national

commemoration of the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution that occurred 1987-1991

was the ideal impetus to extend the local Washington Semester’s emphasis on

“experiential” learning rather than mere classroom sessions in the nation’s capital.

Peggy Kinsey was instrumental in the creation of then-Shreveport Mayor John Hussey’s

Committee on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, an activity encouraged by the

National Committee for state and local governmental levels. In fact, the Shreveport

Mayor’s Committee became one of the most active local committees in the entire

nation, helping to secure reputations for a progressive vision for both LSU Shreveport

and the City of Shreveport.

To further community involvement in observing the national and international

importance of the U.S. Constitution, the Mayor’s committee helped to sponsor

conferences and other special events at LSU Shreveport that attracted outside scholars

and political leaders. All events were open to the public free of charge. These events

were well attended by university faculty and students, community leaders, and area

secondary school students and teachers.

To leave a more permanent record of this local effort, LSU Shreveport’s two

political scientists brought together a group of area scholars to recount how Shreveport

evolved with both the state and nation in terms of interacting with the U.S. Constitution.

The result was the first book on the topic, Grassroots Constitutionalism. Shreveport, the

South and the Supreme Law of the Land (University Press of America, 1988), edited by

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Norman W. Provizer and William D. Pederson. This volume set the stage for the

ongoing lecture series (see list of Constitutional Democracy lecturers). One of the most

prescient lectures was delivered by Henry J. Abraham (University of Virginia).

Participants in the Washington Semester program receive further immersion about the

national and international significance of the U.S. Constitution through special lectures

at the Smithsonian and the U.S. Supreme Court, contributing to a large number from the

Washington Semester group who later become lawyers.

The International Lincoln Center’s Constitutional Standards

At the same time that the focus on the U.S. Constitution was occurring, the

History and Political Science Department at LSU Shreveport was putting together its

first edited book that sought to use the results of polls of scholars to determine the most

respected leaders in American history. If the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written

constitution in world history still in use, its authors must have understood the

underpinnings of democratic values. Also, the Constitution created the office of the

President of the United States, an original political office suggested by the Federalist

Papers, so special attention should be paid to its most successful occupants. The result

was The Rating Game in American Politics (Irvington Publishers, 1987), edited by

William Pederson and Ann McLaurin. The volume included both new and previously

published articles on the rankings of the best political office holders accompanied by

case studies that put the results in historical and political context.

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U.S. First Day Cover Noting Where the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are Housed

The book also reinforces the fact that the Federalist Papers by James Madison,

Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, designed to gain ratification of the new Constitution

in 1787, is the unique American contribution to 2,500 years of Western political thought.

The authors of those papers divided power structurally into three branches of

government and geographically into one federal and multiple state and local

governmental units, but they realized that a constitution alone does not guarantee the

endurance of democratic political systems. Political leaders “with character” were an

essential element. The polls cited in The Rating Game rank Abraham Lincoln,

acknowledged for his character, as America’s greatest president.

Lincoln has become a universal standard, not only for defining democratic

government but also for his unique leadership style, considered with the Federalist

Papers as the two greatest gifts of American democracy to the world. Lincoln’s

leadership style was partly conservative and partly progressive.

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Of particular interest to the International Lincoln Center is the special relationship

that Lincoln had with Louisiana. His “international” outlook was rooted in the

experiential education he gained as a young frontiersman making two flatboat trips

down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, the largest and most diverse city in the

South. The experiences opened his eyes to the broader world, just as the

Constitutional Democracy lecture series is designed to expose students and local

community members to the meaning of that term in both a historical and contemporary

sense.

Lincoln practiced law for a quarter of a century before he became president and

faced many constitutional issues related to the Civil War. He found creative ways to

resolve the natural law in the Declaration of Independence with the positive law (“man-

made law”) in the U.S. Constitution. His Emancipation Proclamation and unusual

lobbying effort for ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment exemplify his ability to

creatively address issues as president. Lincoln’s commitment to democracy in practice,

not just in theory, is evident in his insistence in holding the 1864 election, despite his

belief that he would lose re-election. Moreover, Lincoln pioneered America’s first major

contribution to international law by offering protections to prisoners of war as well as

civilians during episodes of armed conflict, precedents for the Geneva conventions of

1929 and 1949.

It is for these reasons that the International Lincoln Center uses America’s

sixteenth president as its touchstone for evaluating constitutional democracy at home

and abroad.

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The Center’s International Dimension

After a decade of its Washington Semester and local lectures, the International

Lincoln Center expanded its offerings through a new triennial conference series at LSU

Shreveport. The event is now the oldest presidential conference series in the South.

With the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth in 2009, the Center further expanded by

participating in as well as sponsoring international conferences held abroad that related

to democratic constitutional values. The Center’s role expanded from state and local

participation to national and international levels in conferences around the world.

Perhaps the most significant of these was the Center’s co-sponsorship of the only

international conference held in Asia during the 2009-2011 bicentennial commemoration

of Lincoln’s birth.

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1942 U.S. Postage Stamp. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925)

That conference was co-sponsored with the Centre for Contemporary Theory,

headquartered in Baroda, India. It was held on the campus of the India Institute of

Technology, Madras—one of the IIT “Ivy League” campuses established by Jawaharlal

Nehru (1889-1964), India’s first prime minister. The LSU System, which includes LSU

Shreveport, traces its roots to the Land Grant College Act of 1862 signed by Lincoln that

ultimately created the first public colleges in every state. It was an appropriate joint

effort also since India and the United States are the world’s two largest democracies

and Nehru greatly admired Lincoln, keeping a portrait and a bronze replica of the Great

Emancipator’s hands in his office.

The success of the fall 2009 Conference in Chennai (Madras) led to the first book

published during Lincoln’s birth bicentennial, Abraham Lincoln Without Borders (New

Delhi: Pencraft International 2010), edited by Jyotirmaya Tripathy, Sura Rath and

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William Pederson. Dr. Rath, a professor of English at LSU Shreveport, had also

established the campus India Studies program. Their book won the endorsement of the

Lincoln Presidential/Congressional Bicentennial Committee.

Lincoln’s devotion to democracy has continued to inspire others around the

world. Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), a Lincoln admirer, translated Lincoln’s definition of

democracy into Chinese. Sun overthrew dynastic rule and became the first president of

the new Chinese republic. Mohandas Gandhi considered Lincoln one of the half-dozen

individuals who most influenced him and even wrote an article about Lincoln. Dr. B. R.

Ambedkar, “the father of India’s constitution” considered the best-educated Dalit

(“Untouchable”) ever, regarded Lincoln as his hero.

France’s last two constitutions incorporated Lincoln’s definition of democracy.

During the final minutes of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination, the

Hungarian freedom fighters broadcast the Gettysburg Address over Free Hungarian

Radio before it was crushed. More than thirty years later, Chinese students waved

banners imprinted with Lincoln’s definition of government at Tiananmen Square.

Lincoln also inspired Anwar Sadat in Egypt. Sadat saw the 1939 film “Young Mr.

Lincoln” and identified with him as a fellow villager. In the late 1950s, an Iranian poet

composed the world’s only epic poem about Lincoln, later nominated by Tehran

University for a Nobel Prize but rejected because the Nobel committee at that time did

not consider works in Farsi. Recently, Shahab Ghobadi, who came to LSU Shreveport

from Kurdistan, Iran, because of the International Lincoln Center, translated the 500-

page poem into English for the first time before his 2016 graduation. Lincoln has been

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an inspiration for the post-World War II generation opposed to colonialism around the

world.

As with Shahab Ghobadi, the resources of the International Lincoln Center attract

students and scholars from around the globe. The only international Lincoln Center in

the United States has attracted scholars to LSU Shreveport from China, Bangladesh,

India, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Ireland, Italy, the United Kingdom, Ghana, and other

countries.

Shahab Ghobadi, the first LSUS student from Kurdistan, speaking on the only Abraham Lincoln epic poem in the world

at the Deep South Conference in 2015

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Constitutional Democracy Lecturers at LSU Shreveport

Henry J. Abraham

Danny M. Adkison

A. B. Assensoh, Ghana

Yvette Alex-Assensoh

Paul R. Baier

Warren M. Billings

Herbert Brownell

James MacGregor Burns

Sherman Shiyi Chen, China

James C. Davies

John A. Dixon

James C. Duram

Michael Dunn, UK

Brian Flanagan

William J. Flanagan

Rodney Grunes

John Douglas Hall

Zayed S. Hasan, Bangladesh

Kenneth M. Holland

D. Brennan Hussey

Harold M. Hyman

Victor Killory

William M. Leuchtenburg

Lee Morgan

Barbara Perry

Norman W. Provizer

Linda C. A. Przbyzewski

James H. Read

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Stephen K. Shaw

Jean Edward Smith

John R. Vile

Frank J. Williams

Scott R. Wolf

Donald E. Walter

C. Vann Woodward

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Selected Sources

International Lincoln Center, Abraham Lincoln Abroad, edited by W. Pederson, Donna Byrd, and Jason H. Silverman. Pederson, W. and Ann McLaurin, eds. The Rating Game in American Politics. NY: Irvington Publishers, 1987. Pederson, W. and Norman W. Provizer, eds. Great Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Ratings and Case Studies. NY: Peter Lang, 1993, 1994. Pederson W. and Norman W. Provizer, eds. Leaders of the Pack. Polls and Case

Studies of Great Supreme Court Justices. NY: Peter Lang, 2003. Pederson, W., “President Lincoln: The International Lawyer,” in Roger Billings and Frank Williams, eds., Abraham Lincoln, Esq. The Legal Career of America’s Greatest President. Lexington University Press of Kentucky, 2010. Pederson, W., “Abraham Lincoln” in Ken Gormley, ed., The Presidents and the

Constitution. A Living History. NY: New York University Press, 2016. Pederson, W. “Franklin D. Roosevelt,” in Ken Gormley, ed., The Presidents and the Constitution. A Living History. NY: New York University Press, 2016. Provizer, N. and William Pederson, eds., Grassroots Constitutionalism. Shreveport, the South and the Supreme Law of the Land. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988. Shaw, S., W. Pederson and F. Williams, eds., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Transformation of the Supreme Court. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004. Tripathy, J., Sura Rath and William Pederson, eds., Abraham Lincoln Without Borders. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2010. Vile, J., William Pederson and Frank Williams, eds., James Madison. Philosopher, Founder, and Statesman. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008.

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35th CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY LECTURE AT LSUS

THE DARKENING HOUR: CELEBRATING THE CONSTITUTION AND FACING THE CHALLENGE OF SOULLESS DEMOCRACY

Norman W. Provizer Professor of Political Science and Director of the

Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership Metropolitan State University of Denver

In the Summer 1989 issue of The National Interest, political scientist Francis

Fukuyama published an article that would have much more than 15 minutes worth of fame. In fact, the 18-page piece by Fukuyama, then deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning staff carried the provocative title “The End of History?” and it continues to resonate in the world of politics today, three decades after it first appeared.

Simply stated, Fukuyama, following a theme explored by Hegel (as well as others who followed such as Marx and Alexandre Kojeve), argued that at this point in history (1989) history itself might well be at its end in the sense that we had reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” In an article marking the magazine’s 175th birthday, The Economist put it this way, “Were a single document to mark the high-point of liberal-world-order hubris, it would surely be ‘The End of History?’, an essay written by Francis Fukuyama, an American academic, in 1989.”

In the “By Way of Introduction” to his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man that eliminated the question mark found in the original The National Interest article, Fukuyama again referred to the fact “that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government that had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism.” Of course, Fukuyama had some caveats in place. For example he writes, “While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the idea of liberal democracy could not be improved on.”

Events would certainly continue to occur: What would end is history “understood

as a single, coherent, evolutionary process.” Liberal democracy’s focus on liberty and

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equality are not points in history, but history’s end, based, in Fukuyama’s view, on both economics and the very human “struggle for recognition.” Just about a decade later, in The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution published in 2011, Fukuyama continued along this path pointing out that in the 40 years from 1970 until 2010 “an enormous upsurge in the number of democracies around the world” had occurred. In 1973, of 151 countries, 45 carried the democracy label according to Freedom House. By the late 1990s, some 120 countries carried the electoral democracy nametag. At the beginning of the 21st century, in Fukuyama’s words, the concept of “liberal democracy as the default form of government became part of the accepted political landscape.”

Not surprisingly, despite the caveats issued by Fukuyama, “the end of history”

theme stirred up considerable criticism and debate, both direct and indirect. In 2003, Fareed Zakaria produced The Future of Freedom that carried the subtitle Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. That theme of illiberal democracy would only grow in use in the decades that would follow, calling into question exactly what has ended. As we celebrate the American Constitution each year, we need to restate that difference between a liberal, constitutional order that emphasizes freedom and Tocqueville-style equality and an illiberal one that, outside of formal elections, presents us with what we might call soulless democracy – democracy with its soul of the freedom of the press, an independent judiciary and legal system, the avoidance of an overconcentration of power, individual liberty and minority rights, tolerance and an overall commitment to the rule of law removed without remorse. Soulless democracy is a so-called democracy that lives under an authoritarian thumb in which a high-minded label covers an autocratic-oriented reality.

While every one likes to use the democratic label, over the years Freedom

House has provided a system that allows for the measurement of claims of freedom against the reality of its existence. Here, the 2018 report from that organization carries the straight-ahead title of “Democracy in Crisis.” In the Report’s words: “Political rights and civil liberties around the world deteriorated to their lowest point in more than a decade in 2017, extending a period characterized by emboldened autocrats, beleaguered democracies, and the United States’ withdrawal from its leadership role in the global struggle for human freedom.” As the Economist Intelligence Unit reports, “more than half of the 167 countries surveyed in 2017 were slipping backwards” when it came to measurements of democracy. “The backsliders included America where the president seems to prefer dictators to democrats.”

At the end of the Cold War 25 years ago, the Report continues, “it appeared that

totalitarianism had at last been vanquished and liberal democracy had won the great ideological battle of the 20th century. Today it is democracy that finds itself battered and weakened.” In The Coming Anarchy, Robert Kaplan wrote in 2000: “We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s Last Man,

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healthy, well-fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger part is inhabited by Hobbes’s First Man, condemned to a life that is “poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Today, however, in terms of the challenges to liberal, constitutional democracy, the First Man is not alone. The Last Man is there as well. Who would have imagined that in its 2018 Report, Freedom House would list the United States as a country to watch due to the efforts being made to undermine the legitimacy of both the media and the judiciary.

Little wonder that in his 2015 book Political Order and Political Decay: From the

Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, Fukuyama writes in an “Afterword”: “It is impossible to know at this point whether the current period is something like a stock market correction, in which the longer-term trend toward spreading liberal democracy has been momentarily interrupted, or whether it represents a more fundamental turning away.” A turning away, favored by China’s President Xi Jinping who advocates, as Fukuyama notes, “blazing a new trail” for the developing world to follow. A path of politicized courts, intolerance for dissent and elections that are predetermined. A path, perhaps save for the later, that has clearly entered the developed world as well, relative to the resurgent, right wing, “populist” movements in Europe along with the long dormant “America First” sentiment in the United States.

This reemergence of the strongman mentality has been fueled by what Mark Lilla

in The Shipwrecked Mind refers to as “the spirit of reaction.” A spirit that has inspired political movements for two centuries to counter the revolutionary spirit capturing social thought. Lilla writes, “Reactionaries are not conservatives.” For them, harmony existed in some past state. “Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals – writers, journalists, professors – challenge this harmony and the will to maintain order weakens at the top.” To the Shipwrecked Mind, according to Lilla, the betrayal of elites is always at the center of every reactionary tale. “Only those who have preserved memories of the old ways see what is happening. Whether the society reverses direction or rushes to its doom depends entirely on their resistance. Today political Islamists, European nationalists, and the American right tell their ideological children essentially the same tale.” While others see “the river of time flowing as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes. He is time’s exile.” And his motivator becomes irrefutable nostalgia.

As for Fukuyama, he certainly does not abandon the idea of the impact that

broad social forces have on historical trends. But he also notes that social forces are not alone. There are also individual leaders and political actors, he writes, “who interact and collectively shape the evolution of institutions.” Ironically, in populist politics, those leaders and actors frequently play a disproportionate role. Today when we talk of the rise of autocratic politics of the populist kind, we do so in terms of the rise of a list of individual leaders. Huey Long in the 1930s and Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s remind us of that basic point. And in her 2018 book Fascism: A Warning, the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright cites George Orwell saying that the best single word

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definition of Fascism is the word “bully.” A word that sounds all too familiar in the current American political context.

One can certainly argue, along with Fukuyama, that starting in the second

decade of the 21st century a “malaise in the democratic world” emerged that took several forms. And in considering that malaise, one must also recognize the ongoing appeal of bully politics – an appeal that continues despite it running counter to the key elements that make up liberal democracy’s soul.

Stanford University business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer provides the context for

this in a Fortune magazine article titled “Everything We Bash Donald Trump for Is Actually What We Seek in Leaders” and the 2015 book Leadership BS that followed. Despite running counter to what leadership experts promote, Pfeffer claims that “Trump actually embodies many of the leadership qualities that cause people to succeed.” As Pfeffer puts it, narcissism (at least of the non-malignant type), rather than modesty is frequently the best path to gaining the keys to the kingdom of the real world even though that path may contain potholes filled with big lies. As Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, the masses of people, “in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver.” And they will continue to accept the lies constantly repeated as if they were truths.

You must, from this perspective, understand how the world works before you can

set out to effectively change it. And part of that understanding is found in the title of Jean Lipmen-Blumen’s 2005 book The Allure of Toxic Leaders. Even when faced with toxic leaders’ most destructive behaviors, our search for security (often at the expense of freedom), for certainty and for a feeling of specialness can lead us to fall into line behind them. The search for demigods, heroic or otherwise, to save us, in short, can blind us to the price we will have to pay for empowering them.

A leader’s personality quite naturally is part of the leadership equation, but a cult

build around personality is something quite different, running as it does on a track that is completely opposed to the track of constitutional democracy. All of this brings up the uncomfortable fact that, at this juncture, we are no longer speaking about constitutional democracy’s ongoing conquest of the globe, but rather about the most sobering of questions concerning How Democracies Die (to borrow the title of Steven Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s 2018 book on the subject).

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In discussing the new forms of authoritarianism emerging in the current context and its willingness to kill democracy slowly, Levitsky and Ziblatt remind us that beyond a written constitution constitutional democracy is supported by critical norms: the two key ones being mutual toleration (accepting your opponents as legitimate) and forebearance (restraint and self-control). For the authors, these are the “soft guard rails” of American Democracy that protect the words in the Constitution. Without those guard rails, staying on the proper constitutional path is a questionable proposition. In contrast, the key indicators of authoritarian behavior, according to Levitsky and Ziblatt go in a very different direction: Deny the legitimacy of opponents; reject the democratic rules of the game and the rule of law; be ready to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including the media; and tolerate or encourage violence. Do these things and label anyone or anything that differs with you as an “enemy of the People” and you are knocking on death’s door for constitutional democracy.

In a 2018 book edited by Mark Gaber, Stanford Levinson and Mark Tushnet

(Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?), the author’s dedication is telling: “To those around the world resisting the slide away from constitutional democracy.” It is a dedication that reinforces the idea that constitutional democracy appears to be in trouble around the globe, including the United States. The essays in this volume revolve around questions of the weakening of the very foundations of constitutional democracy and the lack of growth of constitutional democracy. Beyond that what is truly frightening is the idea noted in an 2018 article by Michael Massing in The Nation that, ‘’Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism.”

In fact, the list of current day phrases describing the state of democracy helps

illuminate much of this story. Those phrases include, “Democracy in retreat,” democratic recession,” democratic backsliding,” democratic deconsolidation,” “constitutional retrogression,” “Constitutional failure” and “Constitutional rot.” Thus there is no surprise in Jan-Werner Müller’s comment in his 2016 book What Is Populism? -- despite the enormous benefits it has delivered, “all is not well for democracy.”

Müller goes on to write, “The danger to democracies today is not some

comprehensive ideology that systematically denies democratic ideals. The danger is populism – a degraded form of democracy that promises to make good on democracy’s highest ideals (“Let the people rule!”). The danger comes, in other words, from within the democratic world – the political actors posing the danger speak the language of democratic values. That the end result is a form of politics that is blatantly antidemocratic should trouble us all – and demonstrate the need for nuanced political judgment to help us determine precisely where democracy ends and populist peril begins.”

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That peril comes in the form of autocratic leaders, who worship strongmen and the practices of malignant narcissists. Such leaders, quite obviously, can be found across the entire political spectrum, though the concern with Europe and America today produces a focus on the populist right that has even reactivated (rightly or not) the use of the term Fascism.

In his most recent book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of

Resentment, Fukuyama states without qualification that, “This book would not have been written had Donald J. Trump not been elected president in November 2016.” The 45th President’s pursuit of economic nationalism, blood-and-soil national identity and an attraction to authoritarian strongmen over democratic allies have led Albright to note that “we have not had a chief executive in the modern era whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.”

In the American case, the trend into the future is not quite determined. After all,

of the some 135 million votes cast in 2016 presidential election, the simple fact remains that if approximately 39,000 people properly distributed across three states had cast their ballots for a different candidate, Electoral College outcome would have made the loser in the election the winner, resulting in an Electoral College victory that was in line actually with the popular vote. Under those circumstances, we might well have left the idea of soulless democracy armed with slogans and simple answers to even the most complex issues locked in the closet for now.

But the closest is open and if we wish to keep honoring the Constitution on

Constitution Day and to face the very real challenges posed by soulless democracy, we must honestly recognize where we are today untainted by myth of an alternate truth universe. Part of that recognition comes in the form of distinguishing between those in a democracy who are, in the words of Robert McClosky and Alida Brillon, impeled “to honor and protect the liberties of others” and those who “assail the rights of those with whom they disagree and honor obedience, orthodoxy, and conformity over freedom.” In the 1983, data-filled study Dimensions of Tolerance, penned by McClosky and Brillon, the picture presented is one in which, “Individuals who, through any channel, have greater access to the articulate culture, or who enjoy opportunities to interact with informed, well-educated, and more ‘worldly’ people are more likely to comprehend the case for tolerance and the arguments against intolerance.”

Additionally, they write, “Narrow social and intellectual perspectives, insularity,

distance from the cultural mainstreams, ignorance of the varieties of human experience and subcultures and an incapacity (whether socially or psychologically induce) to identify with people perceived as ‘different’ tend to beget intolerance.” Also, they remind us that, “People who cherish the exploration and exchange of ideas and who are greatly concerned with the pursuit of knowledge, are especially responsive to civil libertarian values.“ Toleration is a leaned behavior and it is a behavior we had better learn well in

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order to face the challenges before us as we move toward the third decade of the 21st century. Tolerance also begets progress. As the 175th anniversary essay in The Economist points out, the 50 largest urban concentrations across the globe generate 40 per cent of gross product.

Of course, one might argue, as does Amy Chua in her 2018 book Political Tribes

that this view simply forgets that during the 2016 election “the most important tribal identity missed by America’s elites was the powerful antiestablishment identity forming within the working class that helped elect Donald Trump.” They did not see it coming and, “Even today, the tribal politics behind President’s Trump’s election still baffles many.” But, in her words, “What these elites don’t see is that Trump, in terms of taste, sensibilities, and values, actually is similar to the white working class. The tribal instinct is all about self-identification, and Trump’s base identifies with him at a gut-level: with the way he talks (locker room), dresses, shoots from the hip, gets caught making mistakes, and gets attacked over and over by the liberal media for not being politically correct, for not being feminist enough, for not reading enough books.”

Yet, the long-standing virtues of leadership, as Fukuyama notes in Identity,

“basic honesty, reliability, sound judgment, devotion to the public interest, and an underlying moral compass” are completely absent, replaced in the current administration by the politics of self-promotion that cares little about the foundation stones upon which liberal, constitutional democracy is constructed. Now, it is up to the people to choose – and the fate of true democracy awaits that decision.

In a 2018 issue of The Atlantic, that has a cover which asks “Is Democracy

Dying?”, David Frum writes, “The road to autocracy is long – which means we still have time to halt and turn back. It also means that longer we wait the further we must travel to return home.” In an early meaning of leadership, it is the task of leaders to show their people the way home. Today that means the way to return to the practice of democracy with its soul intact.