When Democracy Goes South

Latin America provides the best model for thinking about U.S. politics over the past century.

A woman walks in front of a graffiti of the image of Donald Trump on October 14, 2020 in El Alto, Bolivia. (Photo by Gaston Brito/Getty Images).

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by Michael Lind

Are these the last days of Weimar America? Those who worry that liberal democracy in the United States is in danger tend to find parallels in the history of Germany under the Weimar Republic and the Hitler regime. Now and then Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship is invoked as a model as well.

In reality, there are few points of resemblance between the fascist regimes of interwar Europe and the contemporary United States. Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists had support among powerful elites—the military, civil servants, professors and business—and could draw on traditions of deference to centralized authority. By contrast, the American establishment closed ranks against Trump and nothing could be further from German authoritarianism than the anarchic anti-statism of MAGA zealots or the right-wing anti-vaxxers in the U.S. who booed Trump when he praised the COVID-19 vaccines.

This doesn’t mean that American democracy isn’t seriously ill. But harbingers of American democratic decline are best found in Central and South America, not Central and South Europe.

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In its structure, history and demographic diversity, the United States has always shared more in common with its neighbors south of the Rio Grande than with Western Europe. All of the former colonies of Britain, Spain and Portugal in the Americas have histories of slavery or peonage. All have legacies of a racial caste system with the descendants of European settlers on top, although the repressed groups have differed—Native Americans and blacks and so-called mulattos in Brazil, Native Americans and mestizos  in Mexico and much of Central America, Native Americans and blacks along with Hispanic and Asian minorities in the U.S. Brazil in particular is like a geographically upside-down version of the United States: the Brazilian North is the former plantation zone, heavily-populated by the descendants of African slaves, while Brazil’s South resembles the American North, with industrial cities and many descendants of European immigrants.

When it comes to politics, in many Latin American countries the major division is not between left and right so much as between outsiders and insiders. In an oligarchic society in which powerful civilian institutions—civil services, corporations and banks—are reserved for the children of the rich, the military may offer the only meritocratic opportunities for upward mobility for the middle and working classes.

A similar social pattern in the American South between the Civil War and the civil rights revolution produced Latin American-style populist politics. Like their counterparts in South America, elite families in New Orleans and Houston were often agents of capitalists in New York or London, for whom the South was a source of commodities—cotton, lumber, cattle. Their opponents—agrarian populists, radical workers, and entrepreneurs who sought to substitute local industry for imports from the British midlands or Pittsburgh—rallied behind demagogic politicians like James “Pa” Ferguson and his wife Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, both governors of Texas in the early twentieth century, and Huey “The Kingfish” Long, the de facto dictator of Louisiana as governor and U.S. Senator. Denied funding for their campaigns by the social elite, these demagogic populists resorted to corruption. The Fergusons sold gubernatorial pardons to the families of Texan prisoners. Long allegedly went into business with the Mafia to skim profits from slot machines in Louisiana, and also “dee-ducted” portions of state payrolls, keeping the money stashed in the “dee-duct box.” (The details are found in T. Harry Williams’s 1969 book Huey Long.)

Like their counterparts in Latin America, the oligarchs of the American South learned to fight populist insurgencies by hiring fake populists whom they could control. One was W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, governor and then Senator of Texas in the late 1930s and 1940s. A wise-cracking country music star with his own radio show, O’Daniel deferred to business interests and sided with the anti-New Deal faction of the Texas Democrats. He defeated young U.S. Representative Lyndon Johnson in a 1941 Senate election that was as disputed as Johnson’s successful first election to the Senate in 1948.

If Texas and other states had been independent republics, it is likely that their politics would have been even more Latin American, with populist colonels favoring protectionist import substitution policies challenging civilian oligarchs in favor of free trade. Instead, the South was modernized from the outside by the federal government, which built up Southern industry in the form of federally-funded defense factories in World War II and the Cold War, and sent U.S. troops to enforce desegregation. (Legend has it that Governor Earl Long, Huey’s brother, advised his Louisiana allies not to resist federal desegregation: “Boys, this time they’ve got the atom bomb.”)

More recently, flickerings of Latin American-style politics in the U.S. have reappeared. The 1992 candidacy of Ross Perot featured a combination of pro-military patriotism, pro-labor attitudes, economic nationalism and folksy style quite familiar south of the U.S. border. A modernizing populist who made his fortunes in the computer industry, Perot loathed the Bushes, a branch of a Yankee oligarchic family that went into the oil business in Texas to drain its natural resources to enrich investors who were mostly outside of the state.

Then, for a while it appeared that in 2016 Hillary Clinton, the wife of a recent president, would face off against Jeb Bush, the brother of one recent president and the son of another. It appeared that, in banana republic fashion, the future of American politics was to be alternating Clintons and Bushes in the White House, until, perhaps, the game of thrones came to an end at some point with a Clinton-Bush dynastic marriage. Those of us familiar with the political history of the American South and Latin America were not surprised when not one but two demagogic populists, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, soon appeared and assumed the role of tribune of the masses. Trump’s bungling attempt to reverse the results of the 2020 election brings to mind the electoral shenanigans of Southern demagogues or elected presidents in Latin America—like Brazil’s Vargas or, more recently, Peru’s Fujimori—who used corrupt or authoritarian means to stay in power after losing electoral support.

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In 1990, the political scientist Juan Linz argued that presidential regimes based on the separation of powers are more vulnerable to political instability and violence than parliamentary regimes, because both the president and the legislature can claim to represent the nation as a whole. Linz’s theory is disputed, but the recent history of Latin America, which has forty percent of the presidential systems in the world, seems to bear it out. In the last quarter century, nine Latin American presidents have either been impeached and removed from office or resigned to avoid that outcome. In the same period, three of the four impeachments in U.S. history have occurred (Bill Clinton, and Trump twice).

Americans who have watched too many PBS documentaries about the rise of the Third Reich no doubt will continue to fear demagogues in the European mold. A more plausible worry is the Latin Americanization of U.S politics, with the left-right distinction replaced by a dichotomy of insider oligarchy and outsider populism, and with impeachment weaponized by the party that controls Congress to expel presidents of the other party from the White House, for good reasons or bad. 

Forget Der Fuehrer and Il Duce. We need to worry about El Jefe.

Michael Lind is the author of The New Class War, a columnist at Tablet and a fellow at New America.

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to Earl Long as the son of Huey Long. He was Huey Long’s brother.