When Crises Rally a Nation, and When They Don’t

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/world/political-crisis-trump-mexico.html

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LONDON — Two very different presidents, Donald J. Trump and Emmanuel Macron of France, are each pursuing a time-tested strategy for leaders trying to push through a major policy change: marshaling a sense of crisis.

For Mr. Trump, claims of mayhem at the border, which far exceed the reality there, are meant to draw support for a border wall. For Mr. Macron, the very real threat of climate change is meant to compel economic policy shifts, including new taxes.

Each is arguing that existential stakes demand drastic action, with Mr. Trump threatening to declare a national emergency, which would grant him extraordinary powers. And each is attempting to rally his country’s voters and policymakers around a common mission.

But each faces disappointment. Mr. Trump, three weeks into a government shutdown, so far has neither sufficient public nor congressional support for a border wall. Mr. Macron’s agenda has been derailed by mass protests.

Their setbacks illuminate when a sense of crisis does or doesn’t take hold — and when leaders can and can’t exploit that to get their way.

Time and again, in democracies and nondemocracies around the world, voters and government officials have shown that they will support drastic actions, and defer more readily to their leaders, during crises.

Power-hungry leaders have long exploited crises, real or engineered, to justify seizing control. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey used a failed coup against him, in 2016, to justify sweeping political purges.

It is not always about grabbing power. Leaders often use crises to promote policies that they see as necessary but that voters might otherwise not support.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, said in 2008, referring to Mr. Obama’s proposals for stricter regulations in response to the financial crisis. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us,” he said, “to do things that you could not before.”

There is, of course, no central authority or accepted checklist for determining when a crisis is real, and severe enough to merit drastic action. It’s a matter of subjective public perception. But there is growing research into what leads people to support drastic steps from their leaders.

Take Mr. Trump’s push for a border wall. Whatever his intentions — to win the wall, to rally the base, to distract from setbacks or merely out of impulse — during his election campaign, and again during the midterm elections, he has hit squarely on two psychological triggers that can make people want a strong leader to take control.

The first is a sense of demographic and cultural change, particularly when that change feels uncontrolled. Among some white Americans, the growing prominence of minority groups in politics and popular culture has created a sense of demographic threat, according to researchers, leading those voters to desire a strong leader who would impose control.

Mr. Trump used warnings about unauthorized immigration to cultivate a sense of crisis — though unauthorized immigration has been declining for a decade (and the migrants traveling to make asylum applications are exercising a basic legal right) — that hit on those fears. And he used promises of a border wall to reassure frightened voters that he would protect them.

The second trigger is fear of a specific kind of violence. People feel a sense of acute crisis if they believe that they may be attacked for their membership in a demographic group, such as race or religion, according to research by Daphna Canetti-Nisim, a University of Maryland political psychologist. They become more supportive of harsh policies to control outsiders, such as torture or extrajudicial detention, and more supportive of a strong leader who will go outside the law.

Mr. Trump tapped into this as well, warning that Hispanic and Muslim migrants posed a grave danger, though the threat was almost entirely invented. In Britain, proponents of withdrawal from the European Union, or Brexit, followed a similar playbook.

Meanwhile, Mr. Macron has struggled to find an audience for his warnings about climate change. That threat is perilously real. But it is also abstract and impersonal. It does not target individuals based on their identities or hit other triggers that make something feel like a crisis. So French voters, far from mobilizing behind Mr. Macron’s priorities, have protested against economic challenges that feel more immediate.

Mr. Trump’s case for a border wall may have cultivated a sense of urgent crisis among his supporters, helping his unlikely presidential bid succeed. But there was another audience he never quite captured: the policymaking and government elites who control the levers of power.

In a strong democracy, leaders need both voters and elites to radically change the national agenda. The Sept. 11 attacks, for instance, created a sense of crisis among regular Americans as well as policymakers in both parties, allowing President George W. Bush to make sweeping changes in domestic and foreign policy.

But elites and voters perceive crises very differently. Mr. Trump has yet to win enough support from congressional Republicans, much less from within the policymaking bureaucracy, to build his wall. Elites who otherwise supported the president were not as moved by his tales of dangerous foreigners.

Typically, when voters see something as a crisis but elites do not, the result is gridlock, as Mr. Trump found with plans for his wall. In weaker democracies, this sometimes tempts leaders to push elites and institutions like the courts aside, denouncing them as hurdles to popular will. It's why dictators love crises, the democracy scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have written, as an excuse to grab power — often to cheers from their supporters.

Sometimes leaders face the inverse problem, particularly with slow-moving crises like climate change that might worry elites more than voters.

Mr. Obama was able to rally international leaders behind a global climate agreement in 2015 — no small task — but struggled to pass legislation on the issue at home. Mr. Macron, likewise, has had more success with fellow European leaders than with his own voters.

Convincing voters to trust elites on what constitutes a crisis has not always been a such a challenge. Voters once tended to defer on complicated policy issues to trusted leaders or their preferred political party, according to research by Elizabeth N. Saunders of Georgetown University.

During the Cold War, for instance, governing elites in Western Europe considered the threat from the Soviet Union a major crisis, pushing through sweeping changes to military and foreign policy. European voters were more concerned with day-to-day economic issues, generally leaving their leaders to conduct foreign policy as they wished.

But, in recent years, public trust in establishment elites has broken down across the West. Voters are more skeptical of the elite’s priorities.

Some in France, not totally without reason, see Mr. Macron’s climate change agenda as a smoke screen for plans to shred the social safety net. In Britain, many voters shrugged off elites who told them that Brexit would bring disaster. And in the United States, some Republican voters came to believe that their party’s establishment was selling them out.

That widening mismatch in priorities between elites and voters has provided an opening for populist leaders. By telling voters that elites are ignoring the real crisis, populists can portray the establishment as part of the threat, justifying drastic action like Mr. Trump’s threatened declaration of emergency.

These breakdowns can bring their own sorts of crises — real ones.

In France, weeks of violent protests by the Yellow Vest movement have brought political uncertainty.

And in the United States, many migrants and refugees are trapped in detention facilities or at the border. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees are going without paychecks.

For the families broken apart or going without pay, there is little doubt that this is a crisis. But as long as many Americans and their leaders do not consider it an emergency, little appears likely to change.