How Democracies Die may be ominously titled, but my heart may have skipped a beat or two when I first saw it. Aren’t we all desperate for dark yet accurate explications of how we all woke up one day and found ourselves in TrumpWorld? Co-authored by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, this book is in fact a shining example of truth in advertising, delivering exactly what its title promises: an exploration of how democracies deteriorate and fall, based on a broad historical overview that also focuses in on recent American politics. Though its lessons are often grim, the intent of Levitsky and Ziblatt is an activist, optimistic one: they urge Americans to learn from an analysis of past democratic downfalls, with specific emphasis given to the challenges we face under the current president.
The authors argue that nowadays, democracies don’t just puddle down into anarchy or ineffectiveness, but transform into various forms of authoritarianism, typically at the hands of a strongman or a single party. Various known elements of democracy’s decline, then, should not be viewed as simply a regrettable sign of things just not working so well, but as glaring warnings of its demise and its replacement by an antithetical form of government, with the rule of the many replaced by the reign of the one, and the rule of law replaced by the dictates of the authoritarian.
HDD carries a message that those of us feeling the surrealness and disorientation of our moment would do well to hear: that what we are going through in this country is in many ways not unique to the United States. There is a dark side to this observation, in that it raises the possibility that the same forces that took down other democracies will destroy our own. The flip side, though, is a positive one: this book removes any doubt that the United States is somehow immune to the evils of authoritarianism, and so indirectly makes the case that all Americans must make a choice as to how to defend our democracy. It is also oddly liberating to realize that far from being uniquely cursed and thus uniquely, inevitably fucked, familiar dynamics can be observed playing out in American politics. To be reminded that we are not alone, and that while other countries have succumbed to these forces, others have not, is to waken a little from a claustrophobic fever dream in which our problems feel uniquely awful and insurmountable.
HDD’s perspective is fundamentally institutional and procedural: it looks at how democracies can fall apart both when one institutional entity — typically, the executive —gains too much power relative to other forces in government and society, and when politicians violate the rules and norms of democratic governance. Early on, Levitsky and Ziblatt make a point that really can’t be overstated: although many of us associate the downfall of democracies in other lands, and thus in general, as the result of a sudden blow like a coup, there are in fact a range of slower, more gradual breakdowns commonly leading to democratic collapse, and that such a process has itself become the norm for democratic downfall in our times. The fact that this deterioration is less obvious carries its own set of dangers, the primary one being that it can blind people from seeing the larger democratic decline happening before their eyes.
Reading their autopsies of democratic destruction around the world, the echoes in our situation today are glaring and undeniable. One of the single most chilling charts that I’ve ever seen comes early, a table titled “Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior.” It summarizes common traits of anti-democratic leaders, and it is only a small spoiler to say that our current president and his enablers in the GOP display them to the hilt. From rejecting the democratic rules of the game and denying the legitimacy of political opponents, to tolerating or encouraging violence and supporting the curtailment of civil liberties, there is no area of the strongman playbook that President Trump has not embraced.
Similarly illuminating are the illustrations of how such maneuvers have been conducted in the real world. From the rise and fall of Salvador Allende in Chile and Alberto Fujimori in Peru, to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s institution of effective one-party rule in the heart of the European Union, we see the same de facto authoritarian playbook employed again and again, from the co-opting of “referees” like the media to re-writing the electoral rules to favor one’s own party.
This analysis of authoritarian behavior has helped settle a group of questions that have rattled around in my head since Trump’s election : how is it that in so many areas, Trump is attacking the structures of American democracy? Does he have a specific plan? Is he some sort of anti-democratic genius? Reading HDD, you understand that, first, there is something of an inevitable logic to all authoritarian movements and leaders. It is in their interest to discredit and undermine rival centers of power, and within the context of a democracy, there are certain approaches to doing this, since democracy establishes its legitimacy and exerts power in common ways. This has helped me see that it is far less important to call Trump a fascist or agonize about discerning his particular ideology, and more to understand that he simply shares authoritarian impulses with others who have come before him, albeit in different countries. This also helps explain how he knows what to do: as an avowed admirer of autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, he is simply applying the easy-to-follow lessons of what they’ve done in their own countries. The notion of an unwritten yet very real “authoritarian playbook” has never felt so tangible.
HDD emphasizes that the signs of a slide towards authoritarianism can be seen early on, and must be taken seriously by those who wish to defend their democracy. Their discussion of the use of inflammatory and criminalizing language to describe political opponents seems of particular importance to our current situation. I’ve written about the president’s increasingly deranged language toward the news media, and our need to take it extremely seriously. HDD describes an established pathway toward authoritarianism, in which terrible words prepare the way for evil and anti-democratic acts.
Although they don’t identify this distinction (possibly for reasons I’ll explore below), it has dawned on me that it’s helpful to divide Levitsky and Ziblatt’s argument into two broad concepts. The first is how a leader or a party can consciously attack the institutions and norms of democracy in order to subvert and ultimately destroy it in order to replace it with an authoritarian or dictatorial structure (this is the theme of the book that makes me think that it could also be titled How Autocracies Rise with no loss of accuracy). But there’s a second set of dangers to democracy they explore that, while overlapping with the authoritarian angle, have more to do with how the politics and parties of a democracy might turn against themselves even without the influence of a malign would-be strongman.
This second argument focuses on the unwritten rules and norms of democracies, which they see as an essential supplement to the world of constitutions and laws. Levitsky and Ziblatt identify two basic norms of American politics that capture some of the necessary attitude and perhaps spirit required for democratic life. The first is forbearance, by which they mean that politicians refrain from using the full range of institutional powers technically available to them. The second is mutual toleration, which they describe as the idea that politicians consider their rivals to be legitimate competitors for power. If you’re like me, encountering these concepts almost immediately sets off a recognition of how deeply they’ve been violated in U.S. politics in recent years, which only reinforces how basic they really are to healthy democratic politics. (In fact, these concepts are so basic that I’ve come to believe they should be included as part of any decent civics education, as an easy-to-understand, yet profound baseline for how to behave in our democracy, not to mention for how to assess its relative health).
HDD raises a third internal threat to democratic governance that has in fact received increasing attention from various observers of the American scene: the polarization of political parties and political beliefs. As the authors describe the situation, “Over the last quarter century, Democrats and Republicans have become much more than just two competing parties, sorted into liberal and conservative camps. Their voters are now deeply divided by race, religious belief, geography, and even “way of life.” Polarization can in turn help lead to the destruction of both forbearance and mutual toleration, as opponents are seen as both illegitimate and undeserving of restraint.
It’s a credit to Levitsky and Ziblatt that even in the midst of their diagnostic framework for democracy’s ills, they open the door to a deeper exploration of not just how but why a breakdown might be occurring. In their discussions of mutual toleration and forbearance, they identify racial politics as perhaps the main driver of when these qualities have thrived and failed in American politics. They note that following the Civil War, these two basics of democratic life only returned after both political parties agreed to table the question of rights for African-Americans; by limiting the scope of politics to areas where there were no profound disagreements, members of both parties did not see their opponents as holding views outside acceptable bounds. You can also see how such an understanding would reduce polarization by taking the most vexed subject of American politics off the table. The authors then note that the modern trends against mutual toleration and forbearance, and in favor of increased polarization, started up again in the wake of the civil rights era, suggesting that the return of fundamental disagreements over basic societal questions around race, including conflicts around an increasingly diverse country, were driving this sea change. They also take note of how these issues have been aggravated by the slowing of economic growth for many Americans, particularly towards the lower end of the income scale.
I started off with a vague sense of the limitations of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s emphasis on how rather than why a democracy, particularly our democracy, might be in trouble. My frustrations focused in part on their highlighting of polarization as a problem for democracy, which as I noted seems to be on everyone’s radar as a problem for our country, and which I’ve sometimes viewed as a milquetoast way to avoid saying that American society is divided by irreconcilable sets of values. To decry polarization as an abstraction, without taking note of what actual issues are causing the polarization, risks failing to look directly at the causes of conflict, and thus to perpetuate and even worsen the polarization.
Their approach also felt problematic where their discussion turns to the United States and an account of how political norms have eroded over the last few decades. Their recounting of how the Republican Party has rolled back and attacked not only norms, but the actual structures of politics, via gerrymandering and voter suppression, is deeply chilling. However, in their pointing out the ways that the Democrats have responded in kind — though they make clear that the GOP has engaged in the lion’s share of this activity — I can feel my hackles going up; it is a case of even-handedness threatening to obscure the larger story, which surely is that one party in particular has increasingly turned to anti-democratic means to pursue its goals, particularly when a case can be made that outright opposition to democracy itself is at the center of the contemporary Republican agenda.
Yet I have come to see such shortcomings of their case as inevitable and excusable. The authors, after all, have chosen a particular frame for their argument, and their ability to make it necessarily requires minimizing certain aspects of reality. My critique is also mitigated by the conclusion of the book, which makes clear that they recognize the problematic turn the Republican Party has made; they in fact go so far as to write that “Reducing polarization requires that the Republican Party be reformed, if not refounded outright.” If those aren’t fighting words in the political science community, then I don’t know what are!
Most exonerating, though, is that I realized that the very issues they diagnose were clouding my own ability to follow their arguments. The purpose of the book is not to place blame, but to identify the strengths of democracy, and how intentional or unintended efforts may subvert these strengths. My concern over whether the GOP receives the full share of deserved blame within its pages obscured a more basic and disturbing observation: that an anti-democratic spiral, once begun, creates incentives for even well-intentioned parties to break norms or otherwise act in ways that further undermine mutual agreement as to the rules of democracy. The following passage captures the danger of our current moment:
Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic - for they would inherit a democracy striped of its remaining protective guardrails. If the Trump administration were brought to its knees by obstructionism, or if President Trump were impeached without a strong bipartisan consensus, the effect would be to reinforce - and perhaps hasten - the dynamics of partisan antipathy and norm erosion that helped bring Trump to power to begin with. As much as a third of the country would likely view Trump’s impeachment as the machinations of a vast left-wing conspiracy -maybe even as a coup. American politics would be left dangerously unmoored.
This sort of escalation rarely ends well. If Democrats do not work to restore norms of mutual toleration and forbearance their next president will likely confront an opposition willing to use any means necessary to defeat them. And if partisan rifts deepen and our unwritten rules continue to fray, American could eventually elect a president who is even more dangerous than Trump.
This leads to what I think of as the democratic paradox - how do you fight a fundamentally undemocratic party without undermining your democratic form of government further? The single largest solution, it seems to me, is for the Democrats to recognize and internalize this threat, and to place basic democratic procedure and transparency at the center of the party’s ideology. Against the slippery slope that leads to authoritarian, one-party rule, we may yet find our footing via a democratic friction generated from demanding that every vote count, that power resides in the people, and that every citizen is equal before the law.