Review of Samuel Issacharoff, Democracy Unmoored: Populism and

the Corruption of Popular Sovereignty (Oxford U. Press, 2023)

Walter Horn*

The introduction to Samuel Issacharoff’s new book on the rise of

populism, Democracy Unmoored, leaves little doubt about the depth of
anxiety that current governmental trends around the world produce
within the author’s breast. He ponders: How much power can an
executive be granted in a legitimately democratic regime? Is there a limit
to the largess that can be distributed by an incumbent government
during the run-up to an election? Is nearly constant direct
communication between a head of government and an electorate via
television or social media, an abuse of power? Is legislative activity a
safer bet for citizens than executive power? Does a populist movement
always require a “strong man” to get it going…and eventually to pull all
the strings? Are comparisons between elected populist leaders with such
earlier tyrants as Hitler and Stalin inapt? These are all good questions.
But when Issacharoff frets about the danger to minorities that might
accompany the ditching of what many would consider the wildly
undemocratic U.S. Senate Filibuster rule (p. 8), or suggests that in 2016
both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders managed to convince numerous
supporters that, because American elections are a “failed elite endeavor,”
they pose dangers for the working class (p. 7), one may wonder about the
precise focus of Issacharoff’s apprehensions.
The huge family of new books focused on democracy’s recent or
imminent expiry around the world contain a number of genera.
Democracy Unmoored quickly settles itself within the literature where
much of the blame is placed on economic stagnation and administrative
inefficiency. Issacharoff shows that over the past several decades the
economies of democratic polities have not grown at the pace that those of
authoritarian countries like China or Singapore have. He also voices
distress at the fact that neither Britain nor the U.S. seems capable of
quickly building an attractive, operational airport. Indeed, he laments,
some U.S. government agencies are actually still programming with
Fortran! Many older Americans will have previously considered that no
contemporary President could replicate Eisenhower’s construction of the
Interstate Highway System back in the 1950s, but they may have
connected this incapacity with increased avenues of litigation rather than
with administration that is so impotent it is no longer acceptable to
working-class voters.

It is important to note that the “Failure to Get Things Done” shelf within
our “Why Democracy is Foundering” libraries is surrounded by other
sections containing works that espouse quite different explanations for
the ascent of populism. Furthermore, this “Failure” shelf is itself divisible
into several subcategories based on their differing proposed remedies.
For example, while Issacharoff takes increased executive power to be a
dangerous symptom of a turn toward caudillo-style strong men, other
observers, like William Howell and Terry Moe, who join Issacharoff in
holding that it is basic failures of public administration that are most
responsible for current dissatisfaction with democracy (rather than, say,
forms of racism or xenophobia not requiring the appearance of
disagreeable airports), argue instead that it is only significant increases
in the capacity of government heads to accomplish things efficiently that
can provide any hope for the retention of sustainable democracies. It is
interesting to contrast Issacharoff’s landing place among this panoply of
available analytical options with the Howell/Moe position, not only
because the latter scholars prescribe a stronger executive that is less
encumbered by constitutional maze-running, but because they hold that
the current version of American populism is “dedicated to retrenchment
and getting the government out of people’s lives.” They add, in fact, that,
“aside from programs that get tough on immigration, what the
Republicans mainly have to offer working-class whites is provocative
rhetoric—demonization, fearmongering, racism, and saber rattling.”
(Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, p. 212) So perhaps
the only thing that supporters of right-wing populism really want
governments to accomplish is to wall off potential immigrants. Those
voters may believe that governments just need to stay out of the way of
airport builders.

Along with fellow New York academics Nadia Urbinati and Richard
Pildes, Issacharoff attributes much of democracy’s recent decline to the
severe enervation of political parties over the past 50 years. Certainly,
the feebleness of parties is now frequently named by those looking for
causes of the rise of U.S. populism, but the discussion of that subject in
Democracy Unmoored is original and insightful. It is supported by
considerable data, and its explanation of the ineliminable importance of
parties to the coherent, long-term coordination of policy ideas is
valuable. In addition, Issacharoff provides an ingenious, Coaseian
explanation for what has gone wrong. He likens parties to firms and
applies the same sort of externalities-focused analysis that the Nobel
winning, libertarian hero did in his 1960 paper on economic deal-
brokering. It’s an intriguing approach, and one that Issacharoff also
applies to labor unions and broad-based business organizations. I think,
though, that there are a couple of gaps in his analysis. First, some of the
evidence used to support the theory is quite old and may not be
applicable in today’s political environment. For example, the only studies
cited in support of the controversial anti-proportionality claim that “Even
in our current polarized era where the centers of the two main parties
have pulled apart, the ideological distance between the parties tends to
be less than in the more fractured preferences of parties operating in
proportional representations systems,” (p. 66) date from 1941 and 2001.
Second, (and relatedly), Issacharoff’s Coase analogy relies in part on
Downs’ (1957) median voter theorem, an idea which has been subjected
to compelling criticism of late, notably in Lee Drutman’s Doom Loop book.
In addition, Issacharoff’s “hydraulic” metaphor regarding money in
politics suggests that effective political finance regulation is impossible. It
is thus unsurprising that he seems stymied by Fukuyama’s remark that,
while “interest groups are corrupting democracy…they are necessary
conditions for a healthy democracy.” (p. 106)

Nevertheless, the material on what might be called “the Four ‘Ps’ of

Parties” (i.e., Patronage, Payola, Primaries, and the Progressives) is
essential reading for students of populist insurgency. It’s my view that
powerful parties—however crucial they may be to good governance—are
as difficult to make consistent with majoritarian democratic principles as
meaningful federalism has always been, which is why the Progressive
movement tended to be anti-party and pro-direct democracy. But in any
case, Issacharoff leaves little doubt of the precipitous decline in party
identification among average voters in the U.S. and Britain over the last
half-century and the effect it has had on public policy. He notes, for
example, that in 1950, 20% of British citizens were members of a party,
but by 2014, only 1% were. And, of course, before any major party in
Britain was backing Brexit, a majority of the electorate did.

The middle chapters of the book are animated by the now perhaps
obligatory recitation of recent atrocities perpetrated by populist heads of
state around the world. Using Trump as his prime example, numerous
blatant lies, attempts to evade institutional oversight, examples of
corruption, attacks on the media and courts, and episodes of self-
aggrandizement and childish bellicosity are ticked off in the usual lively
colors. If there is a difference in Issacharoff’s telling of this depressing
story, it may be in his transparent appreciation for conservative anti-
democrats like Schumpeter and Burke. Perhaps the most revealing
remarks in the book involve his suggestion that Argentina’s broadening
of the franchise to include 16-year-olds and resident aliens should be
considered with the same disdain as gerrymandering or calling off an
election (p. 122). Those comments seem to me to demonstrate that it isn’t
so much democracy’s deterioration that troubles Issacharoff as it is any
arguably radical (i.e., “untimely”) push for changes to existing election
mechanisms—even where prevailing schemes are blatantly anti-
majoritarian. One wonders what he would have written about a sudden
enfranchisement of blacks or women in a jurisdiction where the change
might have helped keep an incumbent regime in power. Is it really his
view that legitimate alterations of electoral schemes must resemble the
courageous 2010 Columbian court decision that made third terms in
office illegal? Was the 2017 Bolivian high court opinion allowing for
additional terms necessarily destructive of democracy because it made
matters easier for incumbents who want to remain in office? Does
“democratic integrity” really mean nothing more than resolute retention
of all electoral provisions that might benefit parties currently not in
government—however undemocratic those provisions happen to be? To
be fair, Issacharoff did spend some time defending his preference for
pragmatic jurisprudence against rationalist objections of this kind in his
earlier book, Fragile Democracies (especially in the section on the Thai
Constitutional Court). But readers should not expect to find anything of
that kind within the pages of Democracy Unmoored.

While dismissive of Rousseauvian progressives and their talk of “popular

wills,” Issacharoff is tolerant of traditional liberal heroes who have
engaged in practices he is quick to criticize when conducted by the likes
of a Chavez or Trump. For example, he finds both Franklin Roosevelt’s
“fireside chats” (p. 87) and Nelson Mandela’s identification of himself
with “the people” (p. 94) congenial. There is, however, one unmistakable
populist “tell” according to Issacharoff. He agrees with Jan-Werner
Muller that it can be found in an activity’s likelihood of destroying the
long-term potential for future peaceful transfers of power, what
Issacharoff calls “repeat play.” It is the weakening or loss of such
guardrails that causes democracy to become unmoored. Following Dicey,
Issacharoff takes the most important repeat-play institutions to be held
in place by unwritten and perhaps legally unenforceable principles, but
he confusingly likens those supports to the rule prescribing the number
of strikes to which a baseball player is entitled at any turn at bat (p. 85).
While it is no doubt true that the latter directive, like various democracy
stanchions, cannot sensibly be questioned during its use, the baseball
rule has been formally promulgated, so no inference regarding
“unwritteness” can properly be made. It thus might have been better to
have pointed to something like a willingness to abide by duly
promulgated MLB standards.

Issacharoff is concerned to distinguish newer populist nations from such

tyrannical regimes as Hitler’s Germany. He writes, “The emergence of
elected autocrats challenges inherited legal categories. The world no
longer turns on easy binaries such as democratic or not” (p. 110) And he
makes current disinterest in wholesale constitutional changes one
feature that distinguishes the two sets. But which group should be
congratulated? Surely, retaining a facade of concern about
constitutionality in spite of both law and fact is likely to make an
administration look good, even if it may complicate the work of courts
and scholars. And in a country like the U.S. in which the Constitution is
believed by many (perhaps Issacharoff included) to be a divinely inspired
document, it is bound to be beneficial to incumbents to insist that it is
really the other guys who are the infidels—especially when the media has
little power to effectively rebut such lies.
Although most of the stories about attempts at election subversion in the
U.S. mentioned in the book will be familiar to viewers of CNN or MSNBC,
Issacharoff does an excellent job calling out partisan (and, sadly,
sometimes successful) attempts to eliminate all vestiges of independent
election supervision, both in the U.S. and around the world. Those who
exalt democracy will surely agree with him that elections must be held
strictly aloof from partisan interests. But Isaacharoff improperly extends
this requirement of non-partisanship to other sorts of bureaucratic
management, repeatedly citing alleged failures in U.S. public health
administration during the height of the COVID pandemic (pp. 171-181).
The problem with such enlargement is that any claims about the
superiority of civil service to political patronage (or vice-versa) should be
understood to themselves be forms of party politicking, a fact one might
divine from Trollope’s Three Clerks or the BBC’s Yes, Minister. The failure
to strictly separate democracy-enforcing rules from other kinds of
governmental ideals—even those seen as solidly scientific ones—will
surely invite reasonable dissent both from the right and the left. Yes,
ingesting either hydroxychloroquine or Clorox bleach is useless against
COVID, but the appropriate conclusion to reach from such nonsense is
that Trump is a buffoon who was utterly unqualified for public office, not
that no executive should have the power to replace all of their agency
heads—if that’s what some electoral mandate really calls for.

It is not hard to infer most of the reforms eventually presented here from
the material in the earlier chapters. Some involve getting more money
and power into the hands of political parties and the memorialization of
opposition party rights. Naturally, Issacharoff also endorses the
independence of courts and commissions. A plea is made for immigration
reforms and additional border security: these are necessary, it’s claimed,
in any nation that is “overrun with foreigners” (p. 193). Issacharoff is not
sold on parliamentarism or increased federalism as preventions or cures
for either caudillo states or ineffectual ones, and he is skeptical of
sortition. But he does endorse such “small bore” reforms as
experimenting with the elimination of party primaries. Finally, he
expresses a somewhat pious hope for the education of a more virtuous,
enlightened citizenry, one that will share common goals and eschew
partisan bile (pp. 204-207).

Issacharoff doesn’t seem overly sanguine about much of this: in the end,
he seems to be hunkering down with the rest of us pessimists in our
various domains of despair. He does, however, find a glimmer of hope in
the fact that war-ravaged Ukraine is somehow managing to retain its
democratic bona fides. Perhaps even the gloomiest of us will join him in
that salute.