Democracies don’t usually die in a single dramatic moment. They erode quietly and gradually, through a thousand small surrenders. But occasionally, a government does something so blunt that it forces everyone to pay attention.

In early 2025, the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador on flights that took off after a federal judge ordered them stopped. When asked about complying with the court, officials shrugged it off. The planes had already landed.

In the American democratic system, courts serve as what political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell called a mechanism of horizontal accountability; independent institutions with the authority to check other branches of government. When the executive overreaches, courts push back. In theory.

For most of American history, the theory held; not because presidents lacked the desire to ignore rulings, but because they lacked the will. The norm against defying courts was so powerful it functioned almost like a physical constraint.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die, call this norm institutional forbearance, the unwritten agreement among political actors to not use every power available to them, even when they legally could. It is the invisible glue that holds democratic systems together.

Political scientists have long documented how democratic erosion usually happens quietly. Ozan Varol’s concept of stealth authoritarianism describes how leaders undermine democracy through technically legal means, packing courts, rewriting procedural rules, and selectively enforcing laws, all while maintaining a democratic façade.

For years, critics applied this framework to Trump’s first term. Norm violations, yes. But outright illegality? Rarely.

What’s different now is the boldness. Defying a standing court order is not stealth. It does not try to hide behind legality. It announces openly that the executive branch considers itself above judicial oversight.

This matters analytically. Nancy Bermeo’s typology of democratic backsliding distinguished between subtle forms of erosion and more overt executive aggrandizement, when leaders openly seize power at the expense of other institutions. The 2025 deportation flights look less like stealth authoritarianism and more like Bermeo’s aggrandizement: a public deliberate assertion that courts can be ignored. The shift from stealth to open defiance is a sign that the prior erosion has worked.

Democratic erosion has preconditions. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the first warning sign is the breakdown of mutual toleration, the shared belief among political rivals that each side is a legitimate participant in democracy, not an existential enemy to be destroyed. Once opponents are recast as traitors or criminals, the guardrails of democratic competition no longer apply to them.

The breakdown was years in the making, fed by affective polarization, where partisan identity became so emotionally charged that voters stopped evaluating leaders on policy and started evaluating them on tribal loyalty. This is why Congressional silence in the face of court defiance is not a surprise. It is a feature of the same erosion. Horizontal accountability requires institutions willing to act. A legislature that prioritizes partisan survival over constitutional funding is not a guardrail.

O’Donnell warned that when horizontal accountability collapses, what emerges is delegative democracy, a system where elected leaders govern as if electoral victory gives them unlimited authority, treating courts, legislatures, and independent agencies as inconvenient obstacles rather than legitimate co-equal institutions. The form of democracy survives, but the substance, constraint, accountability, rule of law, are hollowed out.

Levitsky and Ziblatt offer a sobering observation in How Democracies Die. Democracy is most vulnerable when the citizens assume their institutions are strong enough to protect themselves. The courts are not self-executing. They depend on political actors who choose, every day, to treat judicial authority as binding. If that choice becomes optional, the guardrail is already gone.

The planes have landed. The question now is whether anyone in a position to act will treat that as the emergency it is.

O’Donnell, Guillermo A. 1994. “Delegative Democracy.” Journal of Democracy

Levitsky, Steven and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die.

Varol, Ozan. 2015. “Stealth Authoritarianism.”

Bermeo, Nancy. 2016. “On Democratic Backsliding.” Journal of Democracy