In How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt examine democratic breakdowns around the world in order to assess the dangers that President Donald Trump poses to the U.S. political system. When they imagine the end of democracy, most people still think of sudden regime changes through revolution, conquest, or coups d’état. But since the end of the Cold War, democracies have mostly died in a slower, more gradual way, as elected leaders deliberately dismantle them to keep power. The authors worry that Trump will follow this playbook, arguing that like many authoritarian leaders throughout history, ranging from Mussolini and Perón to Putin and Chávez, Trump rejects basic democratic norms and attacks the institutional checks and balances that are designed to prevent him from abusing his power. He viciously attacks his opponents, promotes violence, and tries to manipulate election laws to his advantage. These “clear authoritarian tendencies” should trouble all Americans. But Levitsky and Ziblatt hope that Americans can better recognize and counteract these tendencies if they learn how they have played out in other societies across the globe.
In the first third of their book, Levitsky and Ziblatt focus on how authoritarians get themselves elected. Many start as charismatic, radical, populist outsiders, so they have to fight the political establishment to win recognition and legitimacy. However, the establishment often chooses to make “fateful alliances” with these outsiders in the hopes of neutralizing them and winning over their supporters. This usually fails: instead of bolstering the establishment, these alliances usually normalize and popularize the outsiders. For instance, German conservatives encouraged President Paul von Hindenburg to give Nazi leader Adolf Hitler the chancellorship in 1933 because they thought they could easily control Hitler and moderate his policies. Needless to say, the opposite happened: Hitler became the establishment, dismantled democracy, and seized absolute power for himself.
Instead of allying with prospective authoritarians, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, establishment parties should identify and stop them. For this reason, they call political party elites the gatekeepers of a healthy democracy. Throughout most of U.S. history, these party gatekeepers have effectively prevented popular far-right extremists like Father Charles Coughlin and George Wallace from winning public office. But since the 1970s, the presidential nomination process has relied more on primary voters than party leaders. Along with the growth of independent conservative media and political donations from the ultra-wealthy, this helps explain why Republican gatekeepers failed to stop Donald Trump from winning the nomination in 2016. Trump clearly fulfilled the four key characteristics of authoritarian rulers: he rejected the basic rules of democracy, denied his opponents’ legitimacy, promoted violence, and proposed curtailing his critics’ civil liberties. But even though many of them recognized these dangers, Republicans gave up on stopping Trump as soon as he won the nomination. In reality, the election was close enough that prominent Republicans could have swung it had they endorsed Hillary Clinton—but they didn’t.
In the next part of their book, Levitsky and Ziblatt examine how authoritarians attack democracy and how institutional norms can stop them. Using the example of Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, they point out that authoritarian leaders usually don’t follow a blueprint—instead, when they clash with the establishment, authoritarians lash out in an attempt to hold power. When they do attack democracy, they generally use three main strategies: they turn neutral agencies into partisan weapons, sideline their opponents, and change laws to expand their own power. Crises, like wars and terrorist attacks, give leaders a golden opportunity to use all these strategies at the same time.
The best way to stop these authoritarian tactics is through political norms, which Levitsky and Ziblatt compare to guardrails protecting democracy. The two most important norms are mutual toleration, which means that politicians accept their opponents’ legitimate right to participate in the political system, and institutional forbearance, which means that politicians respect the spirit of the law by refraining from using all their power. The opposite of institutional forbearance is “constitutional hardball,” in which politicians push the limits of the law in order to get their way. (Classic examples of hardball are politically-motivated filibusters and impeachments.) When democratic norms are weak, polarization spirals out of control and opposing sides take increasingly desperate measures to seize power. This kind of “death spiral” has led many democracies to collapse, like Chile in 1973.
Next, Levitsky and Ziblatt look at the history of democratic norms in the U.S. and explain how they started to weaken in the late 20th century. Actually, toleration and forbearance weren’t always the norm in the U.S.: in the early days of the republic and during the Civil War, each side viewed the other as illegitimate and was willing to destroy democracy in order to gain power. But during most of the 20th century, tolerance and forbearance did contain abuses of power. For instance, when Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court in 1937 and Richard Nixon tried to sabotage his Democratic opponents in the 1972 election, Congress stopped them. In other words, “the guardrails held.”
But this all changed after the civil rights movement, when the political parties changed their positions and constituencies. This created the polarized system that continues today, in which the Democrats primarily represent liberals, minority voters, nonreligious people, and the North, while most Republicans are conservative white Protestants in the South and Midwest. Following this polarization, democratic norms started to collapse. Nobody illustrates this shift better than Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who viewed politics as a “war for power” and attacked Democrats and the media with extreme anti-system rhetoric. During Bill Clinton’s administration, Republicans stopped exercising forbearance and started using powers like the filibuster and impeachment as political tools. In response, the Democrats also played hardball, and democratic norms gradually weakened. By the 2010s, Republicans were questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship and denouncing him as an illegitimate president.
This gradual erosion of democratic norms set the stage for Donald Trump’s presidency. Once in office, Trump immediately started using all three classic authoritarian strategies. He tried to turn neutral law enforcement and government ethics offices into partisan tools, disempower his media and opposition critics, and tilt elections in his favor through racist voting restrictions. But a year into his presidency—when Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote this book—democratic checks and balances had largely prevented him from succeeding. But this is little cause for celebration: authoritarian leaders can take years or decades to unravel the democracies that elected them.
Looking forward, the authors argue that three key factors will determine whether Trump succeeds or fails to dismantle American democracy: whether Republicans are loyal to him, whether the public supports him, and whether unexpected crises give him an opportunity to consolidate power. Regardless, Trump’s behavior will further erode democratic norms by normalizing “lying, cheating, and bullying” in American politics.
In their conclusion, Levitsky and Ziblatt consider the future of American democracy. The U.S. might bounce back from Trump and recommit to democracy, but Republicans also might seize power, rig the system to keep power permanently, and pass a “profoundly antidemocratic” agenda to maintain white political, economic, and social dominance in the U.S. However, the most likely outcome is “democracy without solid guardrails,” a polarized system in which constitutional hardball becomes the norm. This is already how politics works in several U.S. states, such as North Carolina.
To save democracy, Americans have to act urgently. Democrats should reinforce democratic norms and win power through democratic institutions. They must build new, diverse coalitions by implementing universal social programs that show voters what democracy can do for them. Meanwhile, Republicans should moderate their positions and restructure their party to give establishment leaders greater control. This is difficult, but it’s possible—for instance, German conservatives did it after World War II. Ultimately, however, the American people will decide whether their democracy falters or endures. If they succeed, the U.S. can still fulfill its promise and become the most inclusive, equitable, vibrant democracy in world history.
