Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How Democracies Die, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
American Tyranny
Authoritarianism vs. Democratic Norms
Extremism and Gatekeeping
Polarization and Inclusive Democracy
Global and Historical Patterns
Summary
Analysis
Americans have long viewed the U.S. as a special nation and attributed its success to the Constitution. Indeed, constitutional checks and balances have stopped many abuses of power throughout U.S. history—for instance, they limited executive power after the Civil War and forced Richard Nixon out of office after the Watergate scandal.
Levitsky and Ziblatt agree that the U.S. has a particularly long and robust democratic history, in which the kind of abuses they described in the previous chapter are rare and generally unsuccessful. But they are very careful about explaining this relative democratic success. Many Americans think of their government as inherently free and stable, as though the Constitution has somehow guaranteed permanent democracy forever. But this is taking democracy for granted, when it shouldn’t be. Levitsky and Ziblatt instead emphasize how democracy has depended on people’s actions throughout history and continues to do so in the present. Americans who see democracy as inevitable are unlikely to stand up to defend it, while Americans who understand that people create and sustain democracy are much more likely to stand up in its defense.
Themes
But a good constitution isn’t enough to protect democracy. For instance, Hitler toppled Germany’s sturdy 1919 constitution. Most Latin American countries’ constitutions and systems of government are closely based on the U.S., but most of them have failed to stop authoritarianism. The same is true of the Philippines. Constitutions are never complete enough to deal with every situation, they’re always open to interpretation, and they’re always subject to malicious distortion, which can violate the spirit of the law. In the U.S., it’s constitutional for the president to fill the FBI with loyal allies and rule by decree during crises.
Constitutions can’t act on their own—instead, they’re tools for politicians to use. While the quality of a constitution matters, the way that politicians use it is even more important. For instance, authoritarians can defeat the strongest democratic constitutions if other members of the government don’t enforce them. Therefore, it’s wrong to credit the relative longevity and strength of American democracy to the U.S. Constitution alone. The way that leaders have chosen to implement, protect, and improve the Constitution over time is more important than the document itself.
Themes
Democracy’s greatest protector isn’t a nation’s constitution, but rather its democratic norms. These norms are like the rules of pickup basketball: they’re the unwritten codes of conduct, based on shared understanding, that keep the system functioning. During ordinary times, they’re often invisible, because they work in the background. But politicians who break them face serious consequences. The two main rules are mutual toleration and institutional forbearance.
People’s actions determine whether democracies live or die, so norms are essential because they determine how leaders act in any given political system. Just like basketball players who break the rules, politicians who violate democratic norms are likely to be thrown out of the game. This is a self-reinforcing cycle: strong norms protect democracy by stopping people who threaten it. When these people are stopped, the democratic norms that stop them also get reinforced, which deters anti-democratic behavior in the future. In short, when everyone in the government faithfully follows democratic norms, it is extremely difficult for authoritarians and their allies to destroy democracy because the entire system aligns against them.
Themes
Mutual toleration means that politicians accept their opponents’ right to participate in the system as equals, so long as they follow constitutional rules. In other words, it’s “politicians’ collective willingness to agree to disagree.” This is a relatively new idea in history: for a long time, opposing the existing government was automatically considered treason. In the early U.S., both the Federalists and Republicans accused the other party of treason and tried to punish them through the law. It took decades for the main parties to become “rivals rather than enemies.”
Under mutual toleration, the losing side in an election or legislative fight recognizes the winning side’s victory as fair and legitimate. For instance, when the government passes a law, politicians who disagree with or voted against the law should still recognize its legitimacy and enforce it if necessary. They see the opposition’s claim to participate in the political system as legitimate, so they recognize that they lost in a fair political contest and don’t try to sabotage the rules of that contest in order to get their way. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s examples from early American politics also show that the U.S. has not always been a perfectly democratic country. This further disproves the misleading popular idea that the Constitution is solely responsible for making the U.S. a functioning democracy.
Themes
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Similarly, in newly democratic Spain in the 1930s, right-wing Catholics saw the socialist government as a threat to their survival, while leftists thought those same right-wing Catholics wanted to overthrow democracy. Neither saw the other as a legitimate opponent. Without mutual toleration, democracy fails, because each side is willing to take antidemocratic measures to win. That’s what happened in Spain: the right took over the government, the left rebelled and created its own parallel government, the right attacked the left, and the country fell into civil war. Virtually all authoritarians portray their opponents as threats to the nation’s existence.
Norms like mutual toleration are self-reinforcing—when everyone sees everyone else’s claim to power as legitimate, it’s very difficult for political newcomers to think otherwise. (If they do, they’ll likely get expelled from the government.) But the opposites of democratic norms, like mutual intolerance, are also self-reinforcing. This is why polarization often increases over time. When one side gives up on mutual toleration, they stop playing the political game fairly, so the other side has a strong incentive to do the same (lest they be forced to play at a disadvantage). Therefore, once mutual toleration is broken, tension and conflict tend to escalate over time (unless both sides manage to reestablish it). For contemporary readers, it’s probably easy to see parallels between Spain’s increasing polarization in the 1930s and the United States’s since the 1960s.
Themes
Next, institutional forbearance means that politicians avoid actions that are technically legal but violate the spirit of the law. This norm goes back to monarchies, in which kings technically had the divine right to rule with unrestrained power. But in practice, they knew that they had to act with self-restraint in order to prove their “godliness” and maintain order. In democracy, like in basketball, it’s important to make sure that both sides will want to keep playing the game the future. Therefore, players should play fair and avoid dirty tricks.
Institutional forbearance is just a fancy way of saying that politicians should use wise restraint when governing. It’s necessary because, for different parts of a government to balance one another’s power, each part needs to have some legal right over the others. (For instance, in the U.S., Congress has the power to rule on executive appointments, while the courts have the power to strike down Congress’s laws.) But politicians can only use these extraordinary powers when it’s truly necessary to prevent overreach and keep the government in balance. Ultimately, this depends on their judgment and their willingness to prioritize the effective functioning of democracy. If, instead, they use this power whenever and however they wish, they cause conflicts and threaten their own legitimacy.
Themes
Many democracies rely on forbearance. For instance, in Britain, the Crown technically has the power to select the prime minister—but in practice, it always chooses the majority leader in Parliament. Similarly, in the U.S., presidents normally limited themselves to two terms, following the precedent set by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. When Franklin D. Roosevelt broke the norm in the 1940s, Congress formalized it in the Twenty-Second Amendment.
The Crown chooses the majority leader as prime minister because the U.K. is now a democratic country. If the Crown selected its own prime minister, regardless of the people’s will, it would widely be seen as illegitimate and undemocratic. Similarly, U.S. presidents limited their own terms in order to show that they believed in the peaceful, democratic succession of power. Again, this was a way for them to highlight the democratic value of sharing power and reinforce their own legitimacy. For more than a century, the U.S. didn’t even need to make this norm a law, which attests to how widely presidents followed it and how consistently they chose to promote democratic values instead of gaining more power for themselves.
Themes
When they abandon forbearance, democracies become divided and dysfunctional. Parties play “constitutional hardball,” pushing the rules to their limit and sacrificing democratic norms for the sake of political power. Juan Perón stretched the law to impeach supreme court justices in the 1940s, Argentine President Carlos Menem did so to rule by decree in the 1990s. In 2015, Nicolás Maduro manipulated the supreme court to block every law passed by Venezuela’s congress. In Paraguay in 2012 and Ecuador in 1997, congresses booted unpopular presidents Fernando Lugo and Abdalá Bucaram from office through rushed impeachment trials. And in the 1800s and 1900s in the U.S., Southern Democrats took similarly extreme measures to limit Black people’s power.
Hardball is the opposite of forbearance. Hardball involves politicians exploiting the letter of the law in order to violate the spirit of the law for personal gain. In contrast, politicians exercise forbearance when they try to fulfill the spirit of the law, even if it means limiting their own power in order to maintain a balance between different parts of the government. Perón, Menem, and Maduro’s behavior was all legal. But they all violated the spirit of the law by usurping powers that weren’t supposed to be theirs. Again, global examples can show Americans how their own democracy could deteriorate when forbearance breaks down, but so can episodes from their own history. This is another reminder that U.S. history isn’t as spotlessly democratic as many Americans would like to imagine.
Themes
The two key democratic norms, mutual toleration and institutional forbearance, tend to work together. When forbearance predominates, rivals are more likely to see each other as legitimate, and when rivals see each other as legitimate, they tend to use forbearance. But when they can no longer tolerate the other side, politicians are often willing to do anything within their legal power to win. And when the other side is willing to do anything, parties stop seeing each other as legitimate rivals. When these norms erode, politics loses its “guardrails.”
Because they work together, democratic norms can create both vicious and virtuous cycles: they can build democracy up or tear it down. When politicians agree on democratic norms and are willing to punish those who violate them, these norms tend to get stronger over time, until they’re the unstated assumptions behind all politics. But when politicians start to break these norms and get away with it, others tend to follow suit because they feel that they have to do so in order to stay even with the opposition. It's as though one side tilts the playing field and the other side starts tilting it back in their own direction. Levitsky and Ziblatt compare democratic norms to guardrails because they save democracy from the serious threats it faces. When the guardrails are working, authoritarians don’t stand a chance. But when they aren’t, authoritarians can easily take power.
Themes
One example of politics without these norms is England in the 1640s. The monarchy and Puritans accused each other of treason in Parliament, and Parliament refused to collect taxes to support the monarchy, even during a war with Scotland. King Charles dissolved Parliament, and eventually, England fell into civil war.
In this example, once neither side tolerated the other, both abandoned forbearance and started doing everything in their power to achieve their agenda. When both sides pushed their vast legal powers to the limit, the government literally could not function, and English society temporarily fell apart.
Themes
Similarly, democratic norms were strong in Chile until the 1960s, when leftists started abandoning them and the right started running hate-filled, fearmongering campaigns. Pro-democracy leftist Salvador Allende won the presidency in 1970, but the U.S.-backed conservatives tried to circumvent the election result in congress. They failed, but they successfully blocked Allende’s agenda and removed his ministers by weaponizing the censure process. Each side started viewing the other as illegitimate. Such deep polarization often tears democratic norms apart—and in Chile, it did. After neither side won a definitive majority in the midterm elections, Allende kept insisting on dialogue, but neither his left-wing allies nor the right were interested. Eventually, the right declared him illegitimate and the military took power.
The breakdown of democracy in Chile again started when polarization gradually escalated over the course of years, then both sides started to abandon mutual toleration. And again, without mutual toleration, institutional forbearance quickly fell apart, too. Soon, both sides fell into a self-fulfilling prophecy: each saw its opposition as an existential threat, so both tried to eliminate the opposition, thereby turning each party into an actual existential threat to the other. Eventually, when there was no longer a clear democratic solution to the nation’s woes, it fell into authoritarianism. The key question that Levitsky and Ziblatt must confront in the rest of the book is how nations can put the brakes on this kind of runaway democratic breakdown.
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