Thirteen Cracks: Repairing American Democracy After Trump
By Allan J. Lichtman
Rowman & Littlefield, 2021

If the United States is able to halt the march towards authoritarianism that began in November of 2016, the nation may have Donald Trump to thank. Only a man as egotistical, venal, and devoid of democratic values who was simultaneously so clownishly incompetent could have ruthlessly exploited the faults that have long existed in the US system of government and still failed to hold on to power. In Thirteen Cracks: Repairing American Democracy After Trump Professor Alan Lichtman explains how close Trump came to destroying democracy in the United States and the loopholes and vagaries in the law he exploited to push the nation to the brink. What sets Thirteen Cracks apart from the slew of books chronicling the abuses of the Trump administration is that Lichtman does not just identify those abuses, he provides solutions designed to prevent future presidents from following Trump’s example.

Over the book’s thirteen chapters Lichtman, the author of several books on American politics and history including The Case for Impeachment, creates a “blueprint” for executive branch reform. Each chapter identifies a specific weakness that could allow an equally unscrupulous but more effective president than Trump to do more damage. Some of the weaknesses Lichtman identifies include ineffective campaign finance laws, ill-defined executive privilege, the lack of specific limits on the President’s military powers, and vague laws governing the handling of election results. Lichtman traces the history of each of these weaknesses from the founding period, through the administrations of presidents of both parties who exploited them, to Trump who, unconstrained by democratic norms or a political party willing to stand up to him, used them to advance his attempted authoritarian takeover. Lichtman then suggests specific Congressional actions that he believes should be taken to address each of those thirteen weaknesses.

Thirteen Cracks is an academic work and sometimes makes for dry reading. More often Lichtman’s sentences, which are packed with quotes from everyone from Hannah Arendt and Jeremy Benthem to Walter Cronkite and the punk band Lard, convey a sense of urgency that keeps the reader engaged, and the writing throughout is impassioned and incisive. This is most evident when Lichtman describes Trump’s corrosive effect on democratic norms. “Trump’s prolific lying is the indispensable predicate for his assault on democracy and his shift toward autocracy,” he writes. “A president who replaces truth with self-serving fiction may claim that the Constitution gives him unlimited power and absolute immunity from Congressional oversight. ” Later Lichtmann deftly exposes Trump as a fraud, noting how “he wrapped himself in the glory of American soldiers more than any other president -- even the apex commanders such as George Washington, Ulysses Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower, and decorated war heroes like John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush. In the process, he crossed the line between the military and politics.”

Ultimately the success of Thirteen Cracks rests on the specific and actionable solutions Lichtman offers for each of the weaknesses he identifies. Some of his proposals, like eliminating dark money, strengthening the Emoluments Clause, and restoring key elements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, are familiar. Others, such as creating new laws governing the financial divestment of Presidents, amending the Presidential Transition Act, and rewriting and clarifying the Counting Votes Act, are more obscure. All of his solutions require Congress to assert itself as an independent and equal branch of government tasked with the responsibility of acting as a check on the power of the President.

Most of Lichtman’s fixes depend on legislative action and the existence of two political parties committed to the preservation of democracy in America. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that today’s Republican Party is committed to preserving anything other than its own power. One of the biggest structural problems with the US Government is that equal representation in the Senate means that small states have power disproportionate to their population. Lichtman’s solution is to change to proportional representation in the Senate, but that would require the consent of all fifty states, which is not realistic. Though some of the solutions in Thirteen Cracks are unlikely to be implemented, those that could be enacted would likely do much to safeguard the future of democracy in America..

One of the most disturbing chapters in Thirteen Cracks: Repairing American Democracy After Trump describes how social media algorithms deepen mistrust in government and political divisions by directing misinformation to their users that confirms and reinforces their biases. This means the people who would benefit most from exposure to the ideas in Professor Lichtman’s book are more likely to see a tweet dismissing it as anti-conservative propaganda than they are to ever read it.

Brian Bruce is the author of Thomas Boyd: Lost Author of the Lost Generation and a retired teacher who talks about books at Bookish: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrrFo3tDRDVbX7PZjWx1qYA