Book Review | ‘How Democracies Die’

— from Jens Kruse —

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are professors of government at Harvard University, who have been studying failures of democracy in Europe’s 1930s and Latin America’s 1970s for many years. But they open this book with a question they never thought they’d be asking; “Is our democracy in danger” (1)?

They try to reassure themselves: “Our Constitution, our national creed of freedom and equality, our historically robust middle class, and our large, diversified private sector – all of these should inoculate us from the kind of democratic breakdown that has occurred elsewhere”(1-2).

But they worry;

American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices. American states, which were once praised (…) as “laboratories of democracy,” are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose. And in 2016, for the first time in U.S. history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president.

What does all this mean? Are we living through the decline and fall of one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies? (2)

In the next nine chapters of their timely and important book Levitsky and Ziblatt bring their extensive knowledge and experience of the processes of democratic failure, both historic and contemporary, to bear on their attempt to answer this urgent question.

But already in their “Introduction,” from which the above quotes are taken, they hint at what they develop in full in the body of their book:

• Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. (5)
• Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended – by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. (7)
• The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, and even legally – to kill it. (8)

The titles of the nine chapters outline the narrative and analysis that Levitsky and Ziblatt develop: “Fateful Alliances” (about what happens when traditional parties strike implicit bargains with authoritarian populists because they – foolishly and falsely – feel they can control them for their own purposes); “Gatekeeping in America” (about the necessity that parties serve as gatekeepers to prevent demagogues from running for office and their diminishing capacity to succeed as gatekeepers; “The Great Republican Abdication” (about how the Republican party utterly failed at keeping Donald J. Trump from getting the nomination and then in the general election not only failed to warn against him, but normalized him even though his authoritarian tendencies and his unfitness for the presidency became ever more clear); “Subverting Democracy” (about the various methods leaders and parties can use to undermine democracy); “The Guardrails of Democracy” (about the importance of democratic norms, unwritten rules, to support the more formal constitutional arrangements, particularly the norms of “mutual tolerance” and “institutional forbearance”); “The Unwritten Rules of American Politics” (in which the authors give a review of how these norms and unwritten rules have worked, or not, in our history); “The Unraveling” (in which the authors give a recent history of how these unwritten rules have increasingly been disregarded and broken, beginning with Newt Gingrich in 1978 and culminating in Mitch McConnells theft of a supreme court seat in early 2016); “Trump Against the Guardrails” (in which the authors trace Trump’s increasing assault against the guardrails and norms).

The ninth chapter is titled “Saving Democracy.” I will not try to characterize it with a parenthetical phrase; it is too crucially important for that. But I will leave you, dear reader, with two quotes from it:

Our constitutional system, while older and more robust than any in history, is vulnerable to the same pathologies that have killed democracy elsewhere. Ultimately, then, American democracy depends on us – the citizens of the United States. No single political leader can end a democracy; no single leader can rescue one, either. Democracy is a shared enterprise. Its fate depends on all of us. (230).

To save our democracy, Americans need to restore the basic norms that once protected it. But we must do more than that. We must extend those norms through the whole of a diverse society. We must make them truly inclusive. (…) Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic. That is our challenge. It is also our opportunity. If we meet it, America will truly be exceptional. (231)

How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018) can be checked out from the Orcas Library. It is available through Darvill’s Bookstore.