How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

"This book was published early on in the Trump administration, and it was a very useful warning. Maybe it was mainly useful to political scientists like me, because we used to have this idea of a ‘consolidated democracy.’ Basically, democratization is a one-way ratchet and once you became a democracy, you didn’t fall back. What Levitsky and Ziblatt have done in this book is to show that that’s not true, that you actually can have consolidated democracies that do decay and revert to authoritarian government. As you said, the thing they point out is that today it doesn’t happen through a military coup or through an overtly authoritarian takeover of power, it happens in a much more subtle way. So, for example, Viktor Orbán in Hungary has gradually been putting all of the Hungarian mainstream media under the control of his cronies. He can say, ‘Yes, we still have a free press, the newspapers are owned by private individuals, we have lots of competition’ but, in fact, he has eroded the ability of opposition parties and figures to criticize him because his friends control the media. Similarly, the Law and Justice Party in Poland has been appointing party stalwarts to positions. It abolished the tenure system in the Polish Supreme Court and is gradually politicizing that institution. We see this in spades in the United States where, for example, Donald Trump, even before he was elected, wanted to use the justice system in the United States to go after Hillary Clinton . At his rallies, everybody would start chanting, ‘Lock her up, lock her up.’ This is really something that we thought only happened in young democracies that weren’t mature and didn’t have the strong institutions that would separate law enforcement from politics as they’re supposed to. “It’s the constraints on executive power that have come under severe attack” What Ziblatt and Levitsky do in the book is give you a checklist you can go down of the different warning signs of a slide towards authoritarian government. This is a big debate we’ve had in the United States, because a lot of people who didn’t like Donald Trump—and that meant a lot of mainstream Republicans—over the past four years kept saying, ‘Well, yes, I mean, he may not be that great a guy, but he’s not an authoritarian, he’s not a threat to the American system, we’ve still got a really strong set of institutions.’ What Ziblatt and Levitsky are arguing is, ‘No, you’ve got to look at these little danger signs where there’s an authoritarian instinct at work. It may not come on in a full-blown way at first, but what’s been going on in all these different countries is it gradually creeps up on you, and then at a certain point, you can’t do anything about it.’ That’s where we are now, after what happened on January 6, 2021. There was no Republican repudiation of the big lie that Trump had won the election. Now, every single Republican legislature in the United States on a state level is trying to make access to the vote more difficult because, as Trump has said himself, if everybody in the United States voted, you’d never have another Republican elected. In a sense, they’ve accepted the authoritarian premise that if democracy doesn’t yield the right results, we should discard it. It’s an overt slide back into authoritarianism that we should have recognized some time ago. They do. I think one of the things that’s happened is that the elite in the Republican party has abdicated any leadership role in terms of turning the party away from this overt authoritarianism, except for certain noble exceptions, like Liz Cheney, who was just dethroned as the third ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. It is the result of a moral failure on their part, but it’s also a reflection of the Republican base. Any elected Republican official is terrified that at the next election there’ll be a primary and one of these Trump supporters is going to run against them if they take a stance that’s remotely critical. This is the situation that we’re in right now."

"This book looks at how democracies all over the world rose and fell, and what caused them to fall. Americans had an almost arrogant attitude that the collapse of democracy couldn’t happen here. Then it started happening here. And it’s still going on. Almost everybody on the Republican side repeats ‘the big lie’—that Donald Trump won the 2020 election—as though it’s true. Levitsky and Ziblatt show us the symptoms to look out for and suggest how to restore health to democracies. It’s widespread. It’s not just Trump, it’s the Congress and the Supreme Court . Trump, who lost the popular vote when he won the presidency in 2016, made three appointments to the Supreme Court, his appointees are a full third of the Supreme Court. We are seeing the impact of those appointments in recent extreme Supreme Court rulings involving issues like abortion. In Congress, even mainstream Republicans remain silent or parrot Trump’s ‘big lie.’ Although they admit it’s false off-camera and they know that Biden was fairly elected with a popular vote and electoral college majority, they’re too afraid of Trump and his followers to speak the truth. Right there, is the beginning of the unraveling of the American republic. When people are afraid to speak the truth, the decay of democracy is well underway."