Columnist David Brooks writes in The Atlantic: "America may well enter a period of democratic decay and international isolation. It takes decades to develop strong alliances, and to build the structures and customs of democracy — and only weeks to decimate them, as we’ve now seen. And yet I find myself confident that America will survive this crisis. Many nations, including our own, have gone through worse and bloodier crises and recovered.
"In 'Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis,' the historian and scientist Jared Diamond provides case studies — Japan in the late 19th century, Finland and Germany after World War II, Indonesia after the 1960s, Chile and Australia during and after the ’70s — of countries that came back stronger after crisis, collapse, or defeat. To these examples, I’d add Britain in the 1830s and '40s, and the 1980s, and South Korea in the 1980s.
"Some of these countries (such as Japan) endured war; others (Chile) endured mass torture and 'disappearances'; still others (Britain and Australia) endured social decay and national decline. All of them eventually healed and came back.
"Even now, as I travel around the country, I see the forces of repair gathering in neighborhoods and communities. If you’re part of an organization that builds trust across class, you’re fighting Trumpism. If you’re a Democrat jettisoning insular faculty-lounge progressivism in favor of a Whig-like [Whigs emphasized traditional morality and progressive improvements, Brooks says] working-class abundance agenda, you’re fighting Trumpism. If you are standing up for a moral code of tolerance and pluralism that can hold America together, you’re fighting Trumpism.
"Over time, changes in values lead to changes in relationships, which lead to changes in civic life, which eventually lead to changes in policy and then in the general trajectory of the nation."
Laura Gamboa, an assistant professor of democracy and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, says in Foreign Affairs: "For democracy to survive, it must be protected. In the past few decades, in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Poland, opposition groups pushed back successfully against leaders with authoritarian tendencies early in the process of democratic backsliding, when they still had institutional levers to pull.
"The Democratic Party in the United States can make the erosion of democracy visible to the public and costly to the perpetrators. It can obstruct legislation in Congress, compete in electoral districts where Republicans typically run uncontested, and coordinate to maintain a presence, even if only in protest, in as many institutional spaces as possible. Recent attempts to lead town halls in districts where Republicans refuse to hold them are great examples of this strategy.
"Well-organized social movements and civil society groups can shelter democratic institutions, mobilize voters, and increase the costs of antidemocratic behavior."
Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, and Lucan Way, a professor of democracy at the University of Toronto, write in Foreign Affairs: "Civil society is another potential source of democratic resilience. One major reason that rich democracies are more stable is that capitalist development disperses human, financial, and organizational resources away from the state, generating countervailing power in society. "Wealth cannot wholly inoculate the private sector from the pressures imposed by a weaponized state. But the larger and richer a private sector is, the harder it is to fully capture or bully into submission. In addition, wealthier citizens have more time, skills, and resources to join or create civic or opposition organizations, and because they depend less on the state for their livelihoods than poor citizens do, they are in a better position to protest or vote against the government. "Compared with those in other competitive authoritarian regimes, opposition forces in the United States are well-organized, well-financed, and electorally viable, which makes them harder to co-opt, repress, and defeat at the polls. American opposition will therefore be harder to sideline than it was in countries such as El Salvador, Hungary, and Turkey."
In a webinar, Levitsky and Erica Chenoweth, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, say the important thing is for individuals to act, to choose the cause that’s most meaningful them. They cite as a resource the website Choose Democracy.