Relevant article
https://crookedtimber.org/2020/09/19/the-supreme-court-and-normcore/What this means, pretty straightforwardly, is that norms don’t just rely on the willingness of the relevant actors to adhere to them. They also rely on the willingness of actors to violate them under the right circumstances. If one side violates, then the other side has to be prepared to punish. If one side threatens a violation, then the other side has to threaten in turn, to make it clear that deviating from the norm will be costly. A norm governing relations between two opposing sides, where one side acts strategically (to exploit opportunities) and the other naively (always to support the norm) can’t be sustained.
The Levitsky and Ziblatt logic suggests that democratic breakdown is a process of unraveling, whereby tit for tat dynamics lead to accelerating norm breakdown and the breakdown of ordinary politics. That is indeed a plausible dynamic, and one can tell a story of judicial confirmations in which Republican move and Democratic countermove have led to increasingly brutal power politics.
But as the game theory suggests, tit for tat may play a crucial role in norm maintenance as well as norm breakdown. Without a willingness to punish, we end up in the McConnell equilibrium, where one side concocts ever more extravagantly contrived normative justifications for doing what it wants to do, while the other issues grave statements deploring the breakdown of civilty. That is not precisely a recipe for norm maintenance either, unless by “norm maintenance” you mean a mere preservation of outward forms and decorum – something far feebler than either Levitsky or Ziblatt advocate as I understand them.
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