In How Democracies Die, co-authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue the cornerstone of democracy is not written laws or constitutions. Rather, they argue, democracy derives its strength from norms—unwritten rules and standards of conduct mutually agreed to by competitors within the political system. Adherence to these shared norms is what prevents political competition from straying outside the bounds of democracy.
The authors establish their case by:
The two democratic norms Levitsky and Ziblatt highlight are mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. The authors define mutual toleration as accepting the legitimacy of one’s political opponents and acknowledging their right to govern, as long as they win in free and fair elections.
The second norm Levitsky and Ziblatt identify is institutional forbearance. This is the unwritten rule by which political actors agree not to weaponize their control of institutions to marginalize their opponents.
Constitutional Hardball
Constitutional hardball is when political actors don’t follow these unwritten rules. In a 2004 paper titled “Constitutional Hardball,” Georgetown Law professor Mark Tushnet argued that when one side in a political system decides to abandon unwritten norms to secure some short-term partisan advantage, the other side often feels it has little choice but to respond in kind.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that extreme political polarization is often the decisive factor in triggering the abandonment of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. They define polarization as the disappearance of the middle ground in politics, in which parties do not differ merely on basic ideology or matters of public policy—but, instead, are sorted into mutually incompatible worldviews. If a party comes to believe that its opponents simply cannot be trusted to hold power, it becomes easier to rationalize any means to prevent those opponents from attaining power.
The Growing Partisanship of American Politics
Other scholars have explored this theme of polarization and the threat it poses to stable democratic governance. In Why We’re Polarized (2020), political journalist Ezra Klein observes that in the 1970s, there was only a 0.54 partisan correlation between someone’s vote for president and their vote for House or Senate. But today, there is a near-perfect 0.97 correlation.
Having argued that mutual toleration and institutional forbearance are the two main governing norms that uphold democracy, Levitsky and Ziblatt turn their analysis to explore how these democratic norms have historically played out in the context of American politics.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the U.S. political system only truly acquired the democratic norms it needed to survive in the post-Civil War period, when the Republican Party abandoned its commitment to Black civil rights. They agreed to look the other way as white Southern Democrats rewrote state constitutions and systematically disenfranchised black citizens.
This was the basis for what the authors describe as the great mid-20th-century era of cooperation, when mutual toleration and institutional forbearance held strong and major legislation, Supreme Court appointments, and even constitutional amendments regularly passed with strong bipartisan majorities.
The Era of Bipartisanship
The decades running from the New Deal of the 1930s to the Watergate crisis of the 1970s were the high-water mark of bipartisan governance in the United States. But it was not necessarily a time of progressive or liberal governance. Congressional politics at the time were dominated by the “conservative coalition” of Southern segregationist Democrats and their conservative Republican allies. Together, they were able to keep a range of progressive legislation—from national health insurance to expansion of Social Security to increased federal funding of schools—from passing into law.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that each branch of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—has a role to play in upholding democratic norms. By the same token, each branch has the ability to violate them if it so chooses.
For example, presidents can issue executive orders on a range of policy matters, which enables them to effectively sidestep Congress and legislate on their own.
Similarly, strong norms also govern behavior in the legislative branch, argue Levitsky and Ziblatt. In the U.S. Senate, for example, the filibuster (a procedural device unique to the upper chamber) can allow the minority party to force a ⅗ majority vote (60 votes) to end debate on a bill and proceed to a full vote. But, thanks to institutional forbearance throughout much of the 20th century, however, minority parties seldom weaponized the filibuster and allowed most legislation to come to a simple majority up-or-down vote.
Civil Rights and the Filibuster
In their celebration of the relatively restrained use of the filibuster throughout most of American history, Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t acknowledge that the filibuster was the favorite tool of Southern segregationist Democrats when they wished to block civil rights legislation—including federal anti-lynching bills—from coming up for a vote.
Ziblatt and Levitsky argue that the institutions best-positioned to uphold these norms are mainstream political parties. By refusing to join in political coalitions with anti-establishment, populist extremists and rooting them out of their own ranks when such figures arise, parties can be highly effective at limiting the growth of anti-democratic forces.
(Shortform note: Levitsky and Ziblatt’s argument for the importance of political parties conflicts with what the framers of the U.S. Constitution believed. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison argued that political parties, or “factions,” were a harmful—albeit inevitable—feature of free political systems.)
The authors argue that American political parties used to be far more effective at filtering out extremists. The proverbial “smoke-filled rooms” of party conventions and caucuses kept extremist outsiders from getting anywhere close to a major-party nomination. But they say this old party system began to decay in the 1970s, when both the Democratic and Republican parties changed their rules governing presidential nominations and shifted to a system in which rank-and-file party members directly elect delegates to the convention.
Donald Trump was well-positioned to take advantage of this weaker and less-centralized party structure when he launched his bid for the Republican nomination in 2015. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that his pre-existing celebrity as a real estate maven and reality television host of The Apprentice was his secret weapon in the primary—something that gave him near-universal name recognition among GOP primary voters.
(Shortform note: Trump’s name recognition was truly exceptional, even at the very earliest stages of the primary contest. According to Gallup, by July 2015, just a month after announcing his candidacy, 92% of Republican voters reported being familiar with Trump—compared to 66% for Ted Cruz, 64% for Marco Rubio, and 35% for John Kasich.)
According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, Trump excelled at generating enormous quantities of free coverage in the mainstream media. They cite one study done after the election showing that Trump’s antics generated approximately $2 billion worth of free media coverage. In the new world without party gatekeepers, this was far more effective than fundraising or endorsements from party leaders—the traditional methods by which candidates secured the nomination under the old system, that Trump’s campaign studiously ignored.
The Power of Free Media
Free media coverage may have been the most important asset in securing the 2016 nomination. To put the figures in perspective, Trump’s $2 billion worth of free coverage was nearly 10 times that earned by his closest rival, Jeb Bush.
As Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, the rules of the nomination process made it impossible to deny Trump the nomination once he’d secured a majority of pledged delegates. By 2016, it was primary voters, media figures, and celebrity candidates like Trump who held the real power—not party bosses. GOP voters, with whom Trump was already enormously popular, had overwhelmingly chosen him as the nominee and party leaders lacked any politically realistic mechanism to stop him.
The “Nuclear Option”
Some commentators pointed out that a majority of delegates could choose to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” by changing the rules on the floor to allow them to vote for the candidate of their choice, rather than the one to whom they were bound by primary voters.
Levitsky and Ziblatt state that Trump’s candidacy represented a unique threat to American democracy. Thus, GOP leaders faced a choice in the general election: to stand with Trump or to stand for democracy.
Unfortunately, when faced with this choice, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that GOP leaders chose to stand with Trump, putting their narrow partisan interests over their responsibility as democratic gatekeepers. In their estimation, high-profile Republicans chose party over country— and democracy—in 2016.
The Never Trump Movement
Many mainstream Republicans did in fact offer organized opposition to his candidacy—and, later, to his presidency. During the 2020 election cycle, the Lincoln Project—a political action committee formed by top anti-Trump Republican strategists—spent over $80 million to defeat Trump.
The authors argue that the emergence of Trump did not occur in a vacuum. They view him as a symptom of broader trends in the American political system—and the Republican Party in particular—that have gradually driven the degradation of democratic norms since arguably the middle of the 20th century.
According to the authors, for much of the 20th century, both major parties were big-tent coalitions, with their support cutting across religious, ethnic, geographic, and ideological lines. But this arrangement began to unravel as a result of the success of the civil rights movement. Major pieces of legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which were signed into law by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson stamped the Democrats as the party of civil rights.
These events helped spur the transformation of the GOP into a near-homogenous party of white Christians. For most of the country’s history, white Christians comprised the majority of the electorate and sat atop the social and economic order. But in a few short decades, this dominant position has collapsed, and white Christians now comprise a minority of the electorate (although they are still the plurality).
The authors theorize that this has given rise to a siege mentality within this community. They increasingly feel embattled by the profound demographic, social, and cultural changes that have swept the country.
The Twilight of White Christianity
Levitsky and Ziblatt’s portrayal of the white Christian demographic group as being on the path to political irrelevance may be somewhat overstated. Pew research shows that white Christian voters are highly overrepresented in key battleground states like Wisconsin (86%), Ohio (82%), Pennsylvania (81%), and Michigan (79%)—suggesting that they may have enhanced political clout that outweighs their numbers.
Given this history of democratic norms in U.S. politics—and what they argue is their erosion at the hands of an increasingly radicalized Republican Party—Ziblatt and Levitsky turn their attention to Donald Trump’s presidency. According to the authors, the first year of Trump’s presidency was marked by repeated and serial norm-breaking.
Levitsky and Ziblatt cite the example of Trump demanding that FBI Director James Comey—sworn to uphold the Constitution—pledge his personal loyalty to Trump and drop the agency’s ongoing investigation into collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. After Comey refused, Trump took what the authors characterize as the extraordinary step of firing him.
LBJ and the CIA
In fact, Donald Trump was not the first president to attempt to capture the referees or subvert the powers of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to serve his own political ends. During the 1964 presidential election, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson directed the CIA to infiltrate the campaign of his Republican rival, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.
Levitsky and Ziblatt further charge that Trump attempted to rewrite the rules of the democratic game through the Presidential Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity. The commission’s ostensible aim was to root out in-person voter fraud and clean up America's election system. Levitsky and Ziblatt counter that there was zero evidence for these claims of widespread voter fraud and that the true purpose of the commission was to encourage the adoption of state voter ID laws that would make it disproportionately harder for poorer and non-white voters—in other words, voters more likely to support Democrats—to exercise the franchise.
The 2021 Georgia Election Law
These efforts on the part of Republican state officials to change voting rules seem to have continued even after Trump left office. In 2021, the GOP-dominated state government in Georgia passed a sweeping new election law that Democrats and voting-rights advocates argue is designed to suppress ballot access and make voting harder, especially for the state’s large Black and urban population (which was crucial to the Democratic victories in 2020).
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that pro-democratic forces must overcome America’s deep structural divisions if they are to preserve democracy. They advocate the forging of broad, pro-democratic coalitions that cut across racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic lines. By their very nature and composition, they can appeal to a broader slice of the country and transcend the partisan divide. This can lead to depolarization, which in turn, strengthens democratic norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance.
Working Toward Depolarization
In 2020, Stanford scholars James Fishkin and Larry Diamond conducted an experiment called “America in One Room,” in which they brought together a representative sample of 500 Americans to discuss a range of hot-button issues from healthcare reform to global warming to immigration. Through moderated, small-group discussions, the researchers found that participants developed increased empathy for their opponents and gained a better understanding of how policy proposals would affect them.
Levitsky and Ziblatt recommend that the GOP moderate its hardline right-wing social and economic ideology and abandon what they see as its appeals to white nationalism. They believe these moves will help the party broaden its appeal to a more diverse cross-section of the electorate. Only when it becomes a big-tent party that straddles religious and ethnic lines, say Levitsky and Ziblatt, can the Republican Party resume its function as the center-right tentpole of American democracy.
GOP 2020 Gains With Minority Voters
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt decry what they see as the drift of the GOP toward white ethnonationalist politics, the Republican Party gained support among Black and Latino voters in the 2020 elections over previous cycles.
Levitsky and Ziblatt call on the Democratic Party to use its position as the nation’s center-left party to ameliorate what they see as one of the main drivers of extreme polarization—widening income inequality. They argue Democrats should embrace universal benefits like childcare, healthcare, and even a universal basic income. Because everyone benefits from this version of the welfare state, it can be supported by a broader political coalition—one that cuts across racial, cultural, and socioeconomic lines.
The Pitfalls of Universal Basic Income
Closely tied to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s proposal to replace targeted, means-tested programs with universal benefits is an idea that has gained steam over the last few years—universal basic income (UBI). Unfortunately, contrary to their hopes for a more universal benefit system, studies show that replacing the existing means-tested welfare state with UBI would actually increase the number of people living in poverty.
Ultimately, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that it will take committed citizens, not a single political leader or party, to renew American democracy. Democracy is a team sport and shared enterprise in which all participate together. Society can make the collective choice to destroy democracy—or enable it to thrive in a new, multiracial, multicultural society.
The Fate of Multiracial Democracy in India
The challenges of building sustaining a true democracy in a diverse society are by no means unique to the U.S. In India, one can also see the ethnocultural majority group resorting to increasingly anti-democratic tactics to stave off what it sees as impending numerical domination by minorities.
For example, since taking office in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cracked down on the free press, intimidated members of the judiciary who dare to investigate him and his allies, and made moves to transform India into an authoritarian Hindu nationalist state.
In How Democracies Die, authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt set out to analyze democracy’s long-term prospects for survival in the United States. Levitsky and Ziblatt primarily explore this problem through the lens of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016. Did the success of Trump—an inexperienced outsider with possibly authoritarian instincts—suggest that democracy in the U.S. was backsliding?
The authors try to answer this question through an examination of the historical processes by which democratic norms and institutions came to extinction in other countries in the 20th and 21st centuries and offering a blueprint for how to save them in the U.S. Their main thesis is that the cornerstone of democracy is not written laws or constitutions. Rather, they argue, democracy derives its strength from norms—unwritten rules and standards of conduct mutually agreed to by competitors within the political system. Adherence to these shared norms is what prevents political competition from straying outside the bounds of democracy.
Co-authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are prominent scholars on the topics of democratization, authoritarianism, and democratic backsliding.
Levitsky’s work has primarily concentrated on the problems of authoritarianism and democracy in the context of Latin American politics. His works as a co-author and editor on these topics include:
Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard University and a former visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Ziblatt—Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the Transformations of Democracy group at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center—is an expert on the history of European democracy. In his work, Ziblatt has explored the process of European state-building through the lens of the successful Italian and German unification efforts of the mid-19th century. He has also examined the special role that nations’ conservative parties play in determining the long-term survival of democracy.
Specifically, Ziblatt argues that democratic viability hinges on the willingness of conservative political parties such as the Tories in Britain—parties typically associated with nobility and landed privilege—to accommodate themselves to representative forms of government and keep in check the forces of the radical right. Where conservative parties accepted democracy and proved willing to compete in the electoral process (as in Britain in the 1830s), democracy survived; where conservative elites held themselves aloof from democracy or actively sought to undermine it (as in Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Germany) democracy proved stillborn and ultimately vulnerable to right-wing demagoguery.
Besides How Democracies Die, his works include:
Social Links:
Learn More:
How Democracies Die was published in 2018 by Penguin Random House.
Although both co-authors were already acknowledged experts in the fields of democracy formation and downfall at the time of the book’s publication, How Democracies Die is the best-known and bestselling work for either Levitsky or Ziblatt. It attracted a great deal of attention and commentary within academic journals as well as mainstream media as it rose to #12 on the New York Times Best Seller list. Since publication, the authors have appeared on multiple podcasts, television interviews, and have published joint op-eds in major publications discussing the topics in the book.
Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book was part of an outpouring of works by commentators, journalists, and political scientists in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Other notable books from this period arguing that Trump’s presidency was an attack on democracy include:
How Democracies Die was hailed by many as an important contribution to political science (especially in understanding the contemporary rise of right-wing populism) by publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Former president Barack Obama even listed it as one of his favorite books of 2018.
Commentators viewed Levitsky and Ziblatt’s work as an important analysis of how, in the modern era, a new wave of charismatic, demagogic outsiders have successfully eroded democratic norms in country after country without resorting to violent coups or military overthrows—instead, winning elections legitimately and then using their power to rewrite the rules and lock their opponents out of power.
However, some critics did think that the authors exaggerated or overplayed the threat to U.S. democracy posed by Trump. Writing in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof argued that America’s democratic institutions had stood up well to Trump at the time of the book’s publication.
Kristof and other critics argued that America’s democratic system of government and tradition of democratic politics was older, more robust, and better-tested than those of countries like Venezuela, Peru, Hungary, and others profiled in How Democracies Die. As such, they argued, comparisons between those countries and the U.S. were inappropriate and misleading. In The Guardian, David Runciman argued that the book’s approach of using comparative historical analysis of other democratic collapses to get insight into the contemporary U.S. situation was fundamentally flawed. Given the enormous differences between the contemporary U.S. and countries profiled in the book (like 1970s Chile or Weimar Germany), he believed the historical parallels only offered limited insight.
Critics on the political right, meanwhile, claimed that Levitsky and Ziblatt, with their harsh criticism of Trump and the Republican Party, were guilty of violating the very same democratic norms they purported to cherish. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, reviewer Jason Willick argued that the book demonized Republicans and conservatives by representing them as a singular threat to democracy. This demonization of one’s opponents, argued Willick, was the very thing Levitsky and Ziblatt were warning against. He and other conservative commentators argued that How Democracies Die was an overly partisan work, calling out allegedly anti-democratic behavior by right-wing politicians while ignoring similar transgressions committed by the left and the so-called “Resistance” to Trump.
Finally, some reviewers simply found the prose style somewhat dull and repetitive, drifting too much into political science jargon for the average reader.
Levitsky and Ziblatt establish the patterns and practices by which democracies succumb to authoritarianism, highlighting the shared characteristics of authoritarian leaders of the recent past (generally, though not exclusively, focusing on leaders who rose to power after World War Two). They then apply this analysis to Donald Trump and his surprising rise to power in the U.S., using the success of his campaign to indict the Republican Party’s leadership for what they see as its failure to stop him from securing their nomination. They finish by analyzing Trump’s performance in office (although his presidency was barely a year old at the time of publication) and evaluating how democracy had fared under him thus far.
The core thesis of the book is the importance of norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance among political competitors in a well-functioning democracy. Indeed, understanding these two norms is central to understanding everything else in How Democracies Die.
Ziblatt and Levitsky, however, don’t fully introduce this thesis until Chapter 5. Therefore in this guide, we’ve chosen to explore these norms first before introducing and commenting on the other concepts. After introducing these norms, examining how they’re upheld in a healthy democratic system, and exploring how 20th- and 21st-century authoritarians have undermined them, we then turn our analysis to Trump. Any exploration of how Trump and the modern Republican Party have or haven’t undermined American democratic norms can only happen after we’ve fully fleshed out exactly what those norms are and how they’re supposed to function—a different organizational approach from that taken by Levitsky and Ziblatt.
More generally, the authors occasionally drift away from the book’s core principles to critique Donald Trump and the Republican Party more broadly. We’ve consolidated much of this commentary and have incorporated alternative viewpoints, including from more conservative and right-leaning commentators, who argue that the Republican Party and Donald Trump haven’t been the only serial violators of democratic norms. Specifically, we include examples of norm-breaking on the part of Democratic politicians, to bring a more balanced and nuanced perspective.
With the benefit of hindsight, we’ve also included some commentary and additional insights from the last three-fourths of Trump’s term, as well as the period after his presidency—events that Levitsky and Ziblatt could not have commented on in 2018. This gives the reader greater insight into how Trump’s presidency truly affected American democracy and enables one to make a more thorough evaluation of whether the alleged threat to democracy posed by the 45th president turned out to be as serious as Levitsky and Ziblatt warned.
Levitsky and Ziblatt’s central thesis is that constitutions and written rules are not, by themselves, enough to protect democracy. They argue that, in fact, it is political norms—the unwritten rules that govern political conduct—that provide the best protection for democracy.
In the authors’ model of a well-functioning democracy, political actors adhere to shared norms governing what is and is not acceptable behavior, regardless of what might be technically permitted by the written rules.
(Shortform note: As mentioned in the Shortform Introduction, we’ve started our guide with Levitsky and Ziblatt’s Chapter 5, which lays out the book’s central thesis: that informal, unwritten democratic norms are the main guardrails of a functioning democratic system. We’ve made some other restructuring and reordering choices throughout this guide and have noted these editorial choices where they occur.)
The two main democratic norms Levitsky and Ziblatt highlight are mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. The authors define mutual toleration as accepting the legitimacy of one’s political opponents and acknowledging their right to govern, as long as they win in free and fair elections—regardless of ideological differences.
The second norm Levitsky and Ziblatt identify is institutional forbearance. This is the unwritten rule by which political actors agree not to weaponize their control of institutions to marginalize their opponents. For example, the majority party in the legislature might technically have the legal authority to uniformly and unequivocally block the judicial nominations of a president of the opposite party. But doing so would not only hamper the functioning of the judiciary, but be a violation of the norm of institutional forbearance. This could lead to a tit-for-tat cycle of retaliation—resulting in the ultimate destruction of democracy.
Judicial Appointments and Constitutional Hardball
Other commentators had explored these themes before Levitsky and Ziblatt. In a 2004 paper titled “Constitutional Hardball,” Georgetown Law professor Mark Tushnet argued that when one side in a political system decides to abandon unwritten norms to secure some short-term partisan advantage, the other side often feels it has little choice but to respond in kind. This set of practices is known (as the title of his paper would suggest) as constitutional hardball—when politicians abandon restraint and abuse their institutional prerogatives to maximize their advantage over their opponents.
Tushnet identified two examples of such constitutional hardball from recent American history. The first episode was the highly unusual use of the filibuster (a parliamentary procedure to indefinitely prolong debate on a bill) by the minority Senate Democrats in 2002-03 to block Republican President George W. Bush’s federal judicial appointments. Tushnet argues that, while this behavior did not violate any law, it was nonetheless a breach of longstanding norms and customs within the Senate, dictating that a minority party ought not abuse parliamentary procedures to obstruct the majority.
Another example Tushnet cites is the 2003 redistricting of Texas’s state legislative and congressional districts by the Republican-dominated state legislature. While state legislatures do have the right to redraw political boundaries, they usually do so immediately following the decennial census. The timing of the 2003 redistricting was highly unusual in that it occurred out of cycle, between the 2000 and 2010 censuses.
The new district lines were also drawn so as to maximize partisan advantage for the Republicans at the state and federal levels. In response to this episode of norm-breaking, Democrats in the state legislature responded with their own violation of political norms—by literally fleeing the state so as to deny the majority Republicans a quorum and temporarily prevent a vote on the redistricting plan from taking place. Ultimately, however, enough of the holdout Democrats returned to the legislature, which created a quorum that allowed the plan to pass.
Recent history offers several examples of democratic-norm breaking by powerful political leaders.
In 2016, Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines. Before his elevation to the nation’s highest office, Duterte served as mayor of Davao City, the country’s third-largest city. As mayor, Duterte was known for his hardline tactics against small-time drug dealers and had given public praise to extrajudicial death squads that are believed to have slaughtered approximately 1,400 petty criminals in the city during his mayoralty. Critics allege that Duterte even used his office to actively encourage this vigilante violence by directing police and investigators not to look into the slayings—effectively weaponizing the powers of the state to serve his political interests (which Levitsky and Ziblatt would label a violation of institutional forbearance).
As president, Duterte has continued his hardball, anti-democratic tactics to silence and intimidate journalists. One online media outlet, Rappler, has been banned from participating in press conferences, its journalists have been subjected to death and rape threats on social media platforms by Duterte-aligned bots and trolls, and the company has been selectively targeted by state prosecutors on trumped-up financial charges.
In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. Known for his fiery right-wing populist style, Bolsonaro came to power by presenting himself as an outside alternative to the corrupt and ineffective Brazilian political establishment, which had presided over a 9% contraction of the nation’s economy and mass unemployment.
In office, Bolsonaro has faced his own accusations of corruption and nepotism and has been investigated by the Supreme Court. In response, Bolsonaro has discussed with his top advisers the possibility of using the military to depose the Supreme Court and replace it with loyalists, compiled extensive dossiers on critics in the government and academia, and given the state intelligence services broad latitude to harass and intimidate his political opponents.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that extreme political polarization is often the decisive factor in triggering the abandonment of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. They define polarization as the disappearance of the middle ground in politics, in which parties do not differ merely on basic ideology or matters of public policy—but, instead, are sorted into mutually incompatible worldviews. If a party comes to believe that its opponents simply cannot be trusted to hold power, it becomes easier to rationalize any means to prevent those opponents from attaining power.
The Growing Partisanship of American Politics
Other scholars have explored this theme of polarization and the threat it poses to stable democratic governance. In Why We’re Polarized (2020), political journalist Ezra Klein observes that American voters have become more and more reliably partisan. In the 1970s, the typical voter was far more likely to split their ticket between Republicans and Democrats by voting for one party at the presidential level and for the other party at the congressional and state levels. Back then, there was only a slight 0.54 correlation between someone’s vote for president and their vote for House or Senate. But today, there is a near-perfect 0.97 correlation.
Klein argues that this is due to the growing ideological homogeneity of the two major parties and the consolidation within them of two monolithic and mutually exclusive worldviews—across which it’s become impossible to seek common ground. Furthermore, partisanship has become a closely held form of identity for many American voters because it is now bundled together with so many other forms of identity such as race, gender, and religion.
As we’ll see later in How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt delve further into the problem of polarization and offer some tentative suggestions for how to address it. Despite the attempt, however, they don’t fully address just how difficult it is to get people to question their core political beliefs and identities. In fact, political scientist Norm Ornstein points to studies showing that when you expose partisans to the views of the other side, they become more entrenched and unflinching in their own political identities.
Examine how norms influence behavior.
Are there norms or unwritten codes of conduct in your organization? Briefly describe and explain them.
How do these norms influence positive behavior in your organization?
Are there situations where people engage in the equivalent of constitutional hardball and seek to bend these norms to their advantage?
Having argued that mutual toleration and institutional forbearance are the two main governing norms that uphold democracy, Levitsky and Ziblatt turn their analysis to explore how these democratic norms have played out in the context of American politics. They explore how they evolved, the historical challenges posed to them by anti-democratic politicians, and how those challenges were overcome in the past.
(Shortform note: We’ve moved up Levitsky and Ziblatt’s Chapters 5 and 6 to be the first two chapters of this guide. The analysis of democratic norms is the core argument of the book, and therefore, we’ve put it front and center to immediately establish how these norms operate, how authoritarian actors abuse and violate them—and, in this chapter, how they have historically functioned in American politics.)
How have mutual toleration and institutional forbearance operated in the context of American politics? At first, argue Levitsky and Ziblatt, they hardly operated at all. Immediately after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the political system was characterized by intense partisan warfare between America’s two original parties—the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans.
The two parties viewed each other with mutual hostility. Both parties engaged in constitutional hardball, most notably through manipulating the size of the Supreme Court (whose size is not fixed by the Constitution) to maximize partisan advantage and censorship laws that targeted newspaper editors sympathetic to the other party.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that this tit-for-tat cycle only subsided when a new generation of politicians rose to prominence in the aftermath of the War of 1812 following the demise of the old Federalist Party. These leaders had come of political age under the Constitution and were not defined by the bitter struggles of the early republic. They accepted the give-and-take of democratic politics.
Truly an “Era of Good Feelings”?
This age of post-partisan reconciliation has even been given a name by historians: “The Era of Good Feelings.” It typically refers to the period that coincides with the presidency of James Monroe (1817-1825).
One of Monroe’s chief aspirations as president was to inaugurate an era of political life free from the bitter partisan struggles that had marked the years immediately following independence. In an early precursor to modern political campaigning, he even launched a goodwill tour across the country in the summer of 1817, meeting with as many Americans as he could in an effort to transcend the ideological and regional conflicts that had so divided the young country.
However, this supposed era of comity was, in reality, far more hostile and contentious than Levitsky and Ziblatt portray it in How Democracies Die. Monroe, a Democratic-Republican, partially achieved this era of post-partisan togetherness by using the powers of his office to harshly attack and eliminate the rival Federalists, whom he viewed as traitors for having failed to support the War of 1812. He shut them out of all federal patronage and worked behind the scenes to remove them from public offices they held at both the federal and state levels—actions that would appear to violate Levitsky and Ziblatt’s democratic norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance.
According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, partisan tensions escalated once again in the 1850s during the struggle over the future of slavery in the United States. The rise of the anti-slavery Republican Party in the northern states during this time prompted a harsh reaction from the more southern-based Democratic Party, which viewed the Republicans as an existential threat to the South’s racial, social, and economic order. Mutual toleration was dead once again, paving the way for the U.S. Civil War.
After the northern victory in the war, Democrat Andrew Johnson acceded to the presidency following Lincoln’s assassination. Congressional Republicans, angered by Johnson’s insufficient commitment to protecting the civil rights of formerly enslaved people, began a new cycle of hyper-partisan brinkmanship. They used their veto-proof majorities to pass acts severely curtailing the president’s authority. This culminated in 1866 with Johnson’s impeachment in the House of Representatives and near-removal by the Senate.
Clearly, the Constitution hadn’t prevented American democracy from spiraling into civil war and dangerous partisanship. What the political system needed was better norms to guide politicians’ behavior.
The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
Levitsky and Ziblatt treat the partisan back-and-forth following the Civil War, during the presidency of Andrew Johnson, as a dangerous era of brinksmanship that could have torn apart the country’s clearly fragile democracy.
If we accept their characterization of Johnson’s impeachment as a particularly alarming episode, then it’s worth noting just how close it came to being even worse. As the authors note, Johnson was impeached in the House of Representatives for alleged misdemeanors (stemming from Johnson’s refusal to abide by acts passed by congressional Republicans that he believed unconstitutionally limited his presidential authority). But two-thirds of the U.S. Senate would have been required in order to convict Johnson of the charges and remove him from office.
As it happened, Johnson was acquitted in the Senate by a single vote. As the roll call was taking place, a Republican senator from Kansas named Edmund Ross decided to switch sides and cast a “Not Guilty” vote for Johnson, stunning his fellow Republicans, saving Johnson’s presidency—and, possibly, stopping institutional forbearance from being further violated.
In Levitsky and Ziblatt’s analysis, the political system eventually regained the democratic norms it needed to survive when the Republican Party began abandoning its historical commitment to black civil rights (the Republicans were generally the more progressive of the two parties on these issues at this time).
Following the contested presidential election of 1876, Republicans and Southern Democrats came to an agreement known as the Compromise of 1877. This agreement let the Republicans take the White House, in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. After the removal of the troops, white Southern Democrats rewrote state constitutions and systematically disenfranchised black citizens.
This was the basis for the great mid-20th-century era of cooperation, when mutual toleration and institutional forbearance held strong and major legislation, Supreme Court appointments, and even constitutional amendments regularly passed with strong bipartisan majorities. Racial apartheid, argue the authors, was the glue of bipartisanship in the 20th century.
The Era of Bipartisanship
As noted in The New Yorker, the decades running from the New Deal of the 1930s to the Watergate crisis of the 1970s were the high-water mark of bipartisan governance in the United States. It was a time of political dominance for the Democratic Party, which won eight out of 11 presidential elections from 1932 through 1976 and held large majorities in both houses of Congress throughout almost the entire period.
But it was not necessarily a time of progressive or liberal governance, despite the hammerlock on federal power held by Democrats. Congressional politics at the time were dominated by the “conservative coalition” of Southern segregationist Democrats (usually known as “Dixiecrats”) who headed most of the major congressional committee, and their conservative Republican allies. Together, they were able to keep a range of progressive legislation—from national health insurance to expansion of Social Security to increased federal funding of schools—from passing into law.
This cross-party cooperation toward generally conservative policy ends was only possible in a relatively non-polarized era for U.S. politics. The Democratic and Republican parties were not yet neatly sorted into distinct ideological camps, as social and economic conservatives still had significant clout within both parties. There was less incentive for either party to violate norms to try to gain advantage over the other because their ideological convergence on many issues made them something more akin to coalitional partners rather than enemies.
After providing this brief overview of the ups and downs of democratic norms throughout American political history, Levitsky and Ziblatt make their case for how the political system is supposed to function. They argue that the U.S. Constitution’s system of checks and balances across the three branches of government are meant to operate the same, regardless of which party happens to control which branch.
In their analysis, each branch of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—has a role to play in upholding these norms. By the same token, each branch has the ability to violate them if it so chooses.
The Constitution does not clearly set the limits of presidential power. This can leave open gaps that can be exploited by a creative and unscrupulous executive. For example, presidents can issue executive orders on a range of policy matters, which enables them to effectively sidestep Congress and legislate on their own.
Because of this potential for abuse, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue for the importance of norms in the absence of formal limits on presidential power. Presidents must exercise some self-restraint, lest they set a dangerous precedent. And, for much of the modern era, this is indeed what they did. Presidents, according to the authors, have generally resisted the opportunity to use the powers of their office to gain an advantage over the other two branches or override their authority, even when adhering to such norms came at a political cost.
Downsides of Executive Restraint
Despite Levitsky and Ziblatt’s celebration of presidential restraint, some commentators have made the opposite case, arguing that an overly cautious approach on the part of a president can lead to political impotence and failure to unite the country behind a bold agenda.
In 2010 in The Nation, liberal journalist William Greider argued that Barack Obama’s hesitancy about fully using the powers of the presidency was to blame for government gridlock during his administration, the failure to adequately deal with the fallout from the Great Recession, and the continuation of unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that he’d promised to end.
Strong norms also govern behavior in the legislative branch, argue Levitsky and Ziblatt. In the U.S. Senate, the filibuster is a procedural device that can allow the party in the minority to require a ⅗ majority vote (60 votes) to end debate on a bill and proceed to a full vote.
In theory, this rule is in place to ensure that the minority party plays a role in governance and that the other party can’t exercise undiluted power with just a bare majority. But the filibuster can also be abused, giving the minority party extraordinary power to grind the business of government to a halt.
The authors cite the norm of institutional forbearance as the reason why parties in the minority historically refrained from abusing the filibuster to obstruct ordinary legislation. Indeed, for much of the 20th century (especially 1917 through 1959), parties adhered to this norm, allowing most legislation to come to a majority up-or-down vote and only invoking the filibuster rule in exceptional circumstances.
(Shortform note: Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t acknowledge what the filibuster was primarily used for. It was the favorite tool of Southern segregationist Democrats when they wished to block civil rights legislation—like federal anti-lynching bills—from coming up for a vote. During the bipartisan era that Levitsky and Ziblatt celebrate in How Democracies Die, over 200 anti-lynching bills were proposed in Congress, nearly all of which had majority support. But because of the use of the filibuster (which was rarely ever used against any other kind of legislation), none of them succeeded in becoming law.)
As Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, the bipartisan agreement to abandon Black civil rights set the stage for the long era of bipartisan cooperation and upholding of democratic norms that characterized much of 20th-century American politics.
Despite what they describe as a general adherence to mutual toleration and institutional forbearance during the 20th century, Levitsky and Ziblatt do acknowledge that there were real challenges to these norms during this era.
One prominent episode the authors point to is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1937 court-packing plan. After winning a landslide reelection in 1936, Roosevelt proposed an ambitious plan to fundamentally reshape the constitutional order. Frustrated by the conservative Supreme Court’s practice of routinely striking down New Deal legislation, he proposed legislation that would have given him the power to appoint an additional justice for each sitting justice over the age of 70.
Since, at the time of the legislation, six of the nine justices were already over the age of 70, the plan would have given Roosevelt the authority to appoint six new justices and expand the size of the court to 15.
While it would have been allowed under the rules of the Constitution (which does not set limits on the size of the Court), this plan’s success would have represented a major breach of forbearance by the executive at the expense of the judiciary.
But the plan met with fierce bipartisan opposition, even from Roosevelt’s erstwhile allies, and was ultimately defeated. The defeat of the court-packing measure stands as an example of a norm holding firm in the face of challenge.
Court-Packing Today
Despite the failure of FDR’s efforts to manipulate the size of the Supreme Court, there is a growing chorus of activists—particularly on the left—who argue that the current court must be reformed or expanded in order to preserve democratic norms.
Mark Tushnet, a Harvard Law constitutional scholar who has written extensively about constitutional hardball and democratic norms, believes that the 6-3 conservative majority on the present Court has itself repeatedly breached institutional forbearance by acting as a nakedly partisan body on behalf of the Republican Party. He argues that the Court’s unilateral and unchallengeable ability to nullify laws enacted by popular legislative majorities is inconsistent with how democracies should operate. According to Tushnet, this strong form of judicial activism is increasingly out of step with how courts and legislatures interact in other democratic systems.
Tushnet proposes reforming the system of lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court and replacing it with fixed 18-year term limits, to bring some measure of democratic accountability.
Having now explored what democratic norms are and how they’re meant to function, it makes sense to examine the processes by which they come to be violated. In this chapter, we’ll analyze Levitsky and Ziblatt’s arguments for:
Before looking at how anti-democratic forces take over the political system, it’s important to delineate exactly what constitutes authoritarianism. Levitsky and Ziblatt identify four warning signs of authoritarianism, singling out politicians who:
Robert Reich’s Warning Signs of Tyranny
Other commentators have cited additional shared characteristics of authoritarian political leaders, separate from those labeled by Levitsky and Ziblatt. Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich claims that authoritarians are marked by 15 common features, some of which include:
Repeated lying in an attempt to “gaslight” the public and make them doubt the veracity of information sources other than those approved by the leader
Nepotism and the appointment of family members and personal friends to positions of high power
Treating public office as an opportunity for graft and personal enrichment
Blurring the lines between civilian and military authority, especially by appointing active-duty generals to high-ranking positions in the civil bureaucracy
When How Democracies Die was published in 2018, Levitsky and Ziblatt argued that Donald Trump, in his successful 2016 bid for the presidency, was the only U.S. major-party candidate in history who met all four of their criteria. They concluded that this made him a unique threat to the stability of American democracy.
Trump and the 2020 Presidential Election
In the book, the authors mainly cite examples of Trump’s statements and behaviors as a presidential candidate (like calling for Hillary Clinton to be jailed or encouraging his supporters to rough up protestors at his rallies). With the Trump presidency now concluded and with the benefit of hindsight, we can look back at how now-former President Trump behaved in office.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the results of the election, in which he lost to Joe Biden by a margin of seven million votes and was defeated in the Electoral College 306-232, according to the official results from the Federal Elections Commission. By Levitsky and Ziblatt’s signs of authoritarianism, these actions would appear to indicate 1) a rejection of democratic competition.
Trump further alleged that Biden was an illegitimate president who owed his victory to voter fraud and vote tampering, despite presenting no credible evidence to back this assertion. This would similarly indicate 2) a refusal to accept the legitimacy of political opponents.
And on January 6, 2021 a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the certification of Biden’s victory, resulting in four fatalities (including a U.S. Capitol Police officer) and hundreds of arrests. In the aftermath of the attack—whose perpetrators repeatedly cited Trump’s assertions of a stolen election as their rationale—Trump minimized its seriousness, claiming that the rioters were essentially harmless protesters. This episode seems to fit Levitsky and Ziblatt’s third sign of authoritarianism—a willingness to encourage or condone violence.
Ziblatt and Levitsky argue that the institutions best-positioned to safeguard a free society and form of government are mainstream political parties. They identify four main strategies that political parties can use to act as democracy’s gatekeepers:
By refusing to join in political coalitions with anti-establishment, populist extremists and rooting them out of their own ranks when such figures arise, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that mainstream parties can be highly effective at limiting the growth of anti-democratic forces.
Unfortunately, they note, this is easier said than done. It is often very difficult for politicians and parties to resist the temptation to forge short-term alliances with popular demagogues—particularly if those demagogues are adept at delivering votes. Moreover, it is difficult for mainstream parties to work with their rivals in order to close ranks against a demagogue.
The Case for Strong Parties
Ziblatt and Levitsky’s argument that political parties are essential to the functioning of a healthy democracy is backed up by other authors. In Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself (2018), co-authors Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro point to the deterioration of strong, mainstream political parties as a key reason for voter anger, disillusionment, and attraction to fringe movements in democracies around the world. Rosenbluth and Shapiro claim that attempts to make political parties more internally democratic and representative (like primaries and caucuses where ordinary voters, rather than party elites, select candidates) have tended to decentralize party decision-making power.
This makes them less cohesive; more fractious; and ultimately, too weak to adequately respond to the needs of the constituencies they serve. This in turn draws voters to more extreme political leaders out of frustration with gridlock and ineffectiveness.
Rosenbluth and Shapiro argue instead that political power must be re-centralized and placed back in the hands of party elites, who will be better able to broker differences between factions and restore public confidence in political parties, which they view as the fundamental unit in a democratic system.
(Shortform note: Levitsky and Ziblatt’s argument for the importance of political parties conflicts with what the framers of the U.S. Constitution believed. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison argued that political parties, or “factions,” were a harmful—albeit inevitable—feature of free political systems. They argued that the constitutional framework and large federal union of states they established represented the best safeguard against any one faction becoming too strong or powerful.)
The 1990 race for one of Louisiana’s seats in the U.S. Senate was what political scientists call a nonpartisan blanket primary or “jungle” primary—meaning that all the candidates run at once in the general election on the same ballot. There are no party primaries in such a system, so these elections often feature several candidates from the same party running simultaneously.
That year, state representative, avowed white supremacist, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke garnered national media attention when polls showed him emerging as the leading Republican candidate in the months and weeks leading up to the election. Although the GOP establishment attempted to promote a number of mainstream Republican alternatives to Duke, none of them were able to surmount his polling lead—leading to real concern that Louisiana might elect an unapologetic racist and Klansman to the U.S. Senate.
In order to prevent this, the Louisiana Republican Party consolidated around the Democratic candidate in the final weeks of the election. State Republican leaders endorsed the Democrat over Duke and the other Republicans dropped out of the race and similarly endorsed the Democrat in an effort to unite the anti-Duke vote. The Republican Party’s work to act as responsible democratic gatekeepers paid off when the incumbent Democrat J. Bennett Johnston, Jr. defeated Duke by a 53-44% margin.
Having examined Levitsky and Ziblatt’s model for how political parties uphold democratic norms by limiting the influence of extremists, it makes sense to examine what happens when this process fails and autocrats succeed in coming to power. In this chapter, the authors detail what such figures do once they have control of the government. As they argue, authoritarians use three main tactics to dismantle democracy:
While these changes may all technically be within the bounds of the law, they all represent major violations of democratic norms—and, potentially, threats to a free democratic system.
(Shortform note: We’ve moved this chapter to immediately follow Chapter 1 and its discussion of how parties play the key role in limiting the rise of authoritarian leaders. This provides the theoretical framework through which we can then analyze Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency and the threat that the authors argue he posed for American democracy.)
Levitsky and Ziblatt use the metaphor of a referee to illustrate how authoritarian politicians capture and manipulate the political system. In a team sport, the role of the referee is to act in a neutral manner and never to selectively apply the rules to favor one side over the other. They argue that politics also has referees—non-political, neutral actors who can sanction the behavior of politicians. Typically, they are judges, state prosecutors, police, and civil servants. Their role is to enforce laws and regulations in a neutral and disinterested manner.
The neutrality of these figures is often established by law, precisely to guard against the kind of political interference pursued by authoritarians. In the United States, for example, the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, passed during the 1880s, stipulates that the overwhelming majority of federal positions be awarded to candidates based on their qualifications—and not their political ties to powerful politicians. It also makes it illegal to fire most government workers for political reasons.
This act, and others like it in other advanced democracies, helps to ensure the smooth functioning of and public confidence in government, especially since many departments perform duties that could have literal life-or-death consequences if done in a negligent or incompetent manner. It is, after all, in the public’s interest to have qualified experts in charge of agencies that are tasked with functions like pandemic responses and nuclear site management.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that an aspiring authoritarian will naturally see these neutral figures as a threat. Because they are usually career civil servants, and not party loyalists or cronies, they are unlikely to have particular allegiance to him or her and could stand as impediments to their consolidation of power. Therefore, the goal of the authoritarian is to neutralize them.
According to the authors, this can be achieved several ways. One tactic is to simply fire civil servants from key agencies and pack those agencies with loyalists. Alternatively, they can wield the intelligence and espionage powers of the state to surveil and harass state officials who refuse to knuckle under. These tactics can be applied against officials in the tax and regulatory agencies, the law enforcement system, and even the courts themselves.
Bipartisan Abuse of the Civil Service
It’s worth noting that these abuses of power have existed in the United States long before Donald Trump’s presidency.
In the 1970s during the height of the Watergate scandal, Republican president Richard Nixon pressured officials at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to launch politically motivated audits of his political enemies—hoping to either financially ruin them or intimidate them into silence.
And during Barack Obama’s administration, over 40 conservative groups alleged that the IRS subjected them to undue scrutiny as they sought tax-exempt status—practices for which the IRS subsequently apologized as part of a legal settlement.
Levitsky and Ziblatt cite several examples of referee-capturing by aspiring autocrats.
In 1946, President Juan Perón of Argentina engaged in court-packing, working with his partisan allies in the legislative branch to impeach and remove conservative members of the supreme court who opposed his populist agenda. Perón then replaced these justices with loyal partisans.
(Shortform note: Although Levitsky and Ziblatt have labeled Perón as an autocrat, Peronist parties—those inspired by his ideas and governing philosophy—have continued to be popular with Argentinian voters, even decades after his death in 1974. Since 1946, they have won 10 of the 12 elections in which they’ve competed, including the most recent 2019 presidential election, won by incumbent Alberto Ángel Fernández.)
In Hungary in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party did their own twist on court-packing. They used their supermajorities in parliament to enlarge the size of the constitutional court and then filled those newly created seats with loyalists.
(Shortform note: In December 2018, after the publication of How Democracies Die, Orbán’s party further consolidated its gains over the nation’s judiciary by creating a separate, parallel judicial system whose authority largely supersedes that of the original judiciary. All appointments and promotions within this new system are controlled by Orbán’s handpicked justice minister.)
Levitsky and Ziblatt then argue that once an authoritarian has captured the referees and ensured that there will be no meaningful checks on his power from within the government, he can turn his attention to his opponents—typically politicians from opposition parties, but also business leaders, media outlets, and journalists.
According to the authors, the previous step of capturing the referees plays a crucial role here. By stacking the courts, tax and regulatory authorities, law enforcement apparatus, and intelligence agencies with loyalists, the authoritarian can use corruption as a weapon—wielding the power of the state to reward and protect his friends and punish and intimidate his enemies.
The authors outline several tactics that authoritarian governments use to sideline potential opponents. These can include outright bribery, privileged access for pliant media outlets, and the use of the legal and regulatory apparatus of the state to harass and intimidate opponents.
The Controversial Relationship Between Corruption and Authoritarianism
Other scholars have had a different perspective from Levitsky and Ziblatt on the relationship between autocracy and corruption. In a paper published in 2011 in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, co-authors James R. Hollyer and Leonard Wantchekon show that authoritarian regimes are actually associated with low levels of corruption—citing data showing that states as different as Rwanda and South Korea each experienced a reduction in corruption as they simultaneously grew more authoritarian.
Hollyer and Wantchekon argue that governments that inspire intense ideological loyalty and commitment—as many authoritarian regimes do—tend to 1) recruit mostly ideologically committed (and thus, less prone to corruption) individuals to work in government and 2) be more effective at rooting out petty corruption where it does occur.
Levitsky and Ziblatt point to the actions of President Alberto Fujimori In Peru. Fujimori used the power of the purse to pressure television stations into giving him and his regime favorable coverage. He did this by awarding lucrative state broadcasting contracts exclusively to friendly media outlets that promised to present his government in the most favorable light—creating a strong financial incentive for private media to collude with the regime.
(Shortform note: Fujimori’s authoritarian, repressive tactics went far beyond bribery and capture of the media. His government also engaged in serious human rights abuses against Peru’s indigenous and rural population. According to the BBC, more than 200,000 Peruvians were pressured into undergoing sterilization procedures during Fujimori’s presidency from 1990 to 2000—either by being offered material incentives or threatened with financial punishment if they had more children.)
Alternatively, note Levitsky and Ziblatt, the government can abuse its tax and regulatory authority to break up businesses that it fears might provide campaign funding for political opponents. The authors argue that this has been a favorite tactic of Vladimir Putin, President of Russia. Alleging financial impropriety, Putin has ordered politically motivated investigations of large media and oil conglomerates who refuse to align with him. These investigations result in the breakup of such businesses, after which they are sold off to friendly oligarchs at below-market value—thus rewarding Putin’s allies and punishing his opponents.
Putin has even imprisoned wealthy business leaders who have dared to stand in his way, usually on trumped-up charges. This was the fate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who drew Putin’s ire when he began to handsomely fund the Russian president’s political opponents in the early 2000s. Putin had him jailed for a decade, before pardoning him in 2013.
(Shortform note: Despite these heavy-handed tactics against the oligarchs, Russia’s wealthy have generally done very well under Putin’s rule. According to a 2013 article in The Guardian, Russia is home to the world’s most glaring income inequality, with 35% of the nation’s wealth (much of it related to energy production) in the hands of just 110 individuals. This stands in contrast to the world average, in which billionaires control between 1 and 2% of a nation’s wealth.)
According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, the final step in the authoritarian consolidation of power is to change the rules of democratic competition to neutralize opponents. The most effective tactics are gerrymandering (the redrawing of election districts to lock in a political advantage for one party) and restricting who is eligible to vote.
A gerrymandering example they cite is Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party in Hungary. After winning power in 2010, Fidesz members of parliament redrew the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies to give massively disproportionate power to the party’s base of rural voters. Because of the gerrymander, Fidesz holds two-thirds of the seats in parliament despite winning only 44 percent of the nationwide vote.
The International Response to Democratic Backsliding
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t explore the topic, the example of Hungary illustrates the challenges faced by the international community when a neighboring country begins to slide toward authoritarianism. Hungary is part of the European Union (EU), a body whose basic criteria for membership includes a free and democratic political system. It is widely accepted that Hungary’s democracy has eroded since 2010—the think tank Freedom House even downgraded the country’s status in 2020 to “partly free” in response to Orbán’s anti-democratic moves. Yet the EU has struggled to deal with Hungary’s eroding democracy under Orbán.
Since Orbán came to power, the EU has attempted to confront the Hungarian leader over several issues—from media suppression to court-packing to gerrymandering—only to see Orbán successfully stop any outside pressure to democratize his regime. Critics argue that he has gotten away with his authoritarian practices while still retaining Hungary’s EU membership by skillfully exploiting divisions within the EU and taking advantage of the body’s overly slow and legalistic grievance processes.
Levitsky and Ziblatt also point to the successful efforts by Southern Democrats to marginalize Black voters in the late 19th century.
After the U.S. Civil War, emancipation, and the defeat of the Confederacy, Black men were given the right to vote in the South for the first time in history. This right was enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Black voters overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party, which was the party of Abraham Lincoln and emancipation. This was an outrage to white voters in these states—almost uniformly Democrats—who saw Black enfranchisement as an unacceptable threat to the region’s racial, social, cultural, political, and economic order. These Southern Democrats thus made it their mission to destroy Black voter rights.
Under new state constitutions that were eventually drafted in all 11 states of the former Confederacy, Southern Democrats severely curtailed the Black franchise. They achieved this by requiring voters to pay poll taxes when they showed up to vote, pass literacy tests, and navigate through deliberately complicated ballots before they could cast their votes. These obstacles made it especially difficult for Black voters (who, being formerly enslaved people, were largely poor and illiterate) to exercise the franchise. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that these new state constitutions effectively killed true democracy in the South for over a century and made the region a one-party authoritarian state.
Racial Violence in the Post-Civil War South
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt do not directly address it in their analysis of Black disenfranchisement in the Reconstruction-era South, violence played a key role in reestablishing the white supremacist racial order—in addition to legal sanctions like poll taxes and literacy tests.
According to the NAACP, 3,446 African-Americans were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, with the majority of these murders taking place in the South. Scholars estimate the real number, however, to be much higher, since many lynchings went unreported.
And the period immediately following the Civil War through the early 20th century—called the “nadir of American race relations” by some historians—was also the period when the white supremacist terrorist organization the Ku Klux Klan was at its most powerful. A crucial mission of the Klan was to use violence to prevent Black people from voting, holding office, or attaining economic power. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Klan engaged in a lethal campaign of extrajudicial violence against African-Americans in the South as part of its efforts to suppress and intimidate Black voters during the 1868 election.
Extremism is nothing new in American politics, and it certainly existed before the rise of Donald Trump in 2016. Levitsky and Ziblatt have argued that—by acting as responsible gatekeepers— mainstream, institutional political parties are the best defense against an authoritarian takeover.
But they also make the case that the American political system—and political parties in particular—used to be far more effective at filtering out extremists and keeping them from the levers of power. In this chapter, they explore the processes by which, in their analysis, the two major U.S. parties lost this ability during the second half of the 20th century.
(Shortform note: Since Chapters 2 and 3 are thematically and narratively linked, we’ve merged them into one chapter. We’ve also moved them to follow the analysis of democratic norms, party gatekeeping, and authoritarian tactics.)
According to the authors, party insiders once played a decisive role in choosing nominees for the presidency. These were the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms” of party conventions and caucuses. A candidate had to win over such party insiders to even have a chance of winning a major-party nomination. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that this crucial gatekeeping function is why an outsider like Henry Ford ( a notorious conspiracy theorist and rabid anti-Semite who sought a major-party nomination in 1924) never had much of a chance as a presidential candidate—despite his popularity with rank-and-file voters.
Over a generation later, George Wallace suffered a similar fate. Wallace, a staunch segregationist and supporter of American racial apartheid who ran for president in 1968, was considered unacceptable by the leadership of both major parties. As such, he was forced to mount a third-party bid for the presidency in 1968 under the American Independent Party banner. Given America’s two-party system and the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College, this doomed his longshot presidential bid to failure.
George Wallace’s Legacy
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that Wallace had little long-term impact on American politics due to being constrained by the two major parties, he might be more accurately understood as a deeply significant figure. Besides earning an impressive share of the popular vote in the 1968 election (13.5%), he also earned 46 electoral votes by winning the states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. To date, he remains the last third-party presidential candidate to win any votes in the Electoral College, a feat that subsequent high-profile challengers like Ross Perot and Ralph Nader never managed to achieve.
Moreover, Wallace understood full well that he had little chance of winning the Electoral College. His strategy was instead predicated on winning enough states in the Deep South to deny both the Republicans and Democrats the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election. This would have then thrown the election to the House of Representatives, where Wallace hoped his Southern Democrat allies would hand him the presidency. In fact, this very nearly happened. Had a relative handful of votes in a few states like Tennessee, South Carolina, Illinois, or Ohio shifted, neither Richard Nixon nor Hubert Humphrey would have received enough electoral votes to clinch victory.
Lastly, observers have argued that Wallace’s 1968 bid represented a significant event in the long-term realignment of the two major parties. His surprisingly competitive campaign and his success in the Deep South helped draw many white Southerners out of their longtime political home in the Democratic Party. By loosening their traditional allegiance to the Democrats, Wallace helped start the process by which these same voters would ultimately become the new conservative base of the Republican Party.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that this old party system began to decay in the 1970s, when both the Democratic and Republican parties changed their rules governing presidential nominations. They date the beginning of this process to the turbulent events of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Party delegates, deeply divided over the Vietnam War, entered the convention with no clear consensus on who the nominee should be, as no candidate had secured a majority of delegates during the primaries. At the convention, party insiders installed Vice President Hubert Humphrey—a candidate perceived as being pro-war because he served in the incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson administration—as the nominee, despite him not having competed in any primaries. The authors contend that rank-and-file delegates, many of whom were bitterly opposed to the war, took Humphrey’s nomination as a deep betrayal.
But this was to be the last such presidential nomination carried out in this fashion. At a time when people were taking to the streets to protest the Vietnam War and popular candidates like the recently slain Robert F. Kennedy had helped open the door to a more representative form of party politics, the installation by a handful of party insiders of Humphrey at the top of the ticket was no longer considered acceptable.
According to the authors, the circumstances under which Humphrey was nominated dealt a crushing blow to the old party boss system and prompted calls for reform.
Hubert Humphrey: Party Reformer?
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt describe the perception of Humphrey in 1968 to be that of a stodgy political insider, he actually spent much of his career fighting for the expansion of political representation and for the enfranchisement of politically powerless minorities—often despite bitter opposition from Democratic Party insiders.
A staunch liberal, Humphrey was one of the party’s early pioneers in the fight for civil rights. At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Humphrey shocked the political world (and outraged Southern Democrats) by delivering a floor speech in which he called for the Democratic Party to abandon the cause of “states’ rights” (by which Southern Democrats rationalized the disenfranchisement and segregation of African-Americans) and instead embrace the cause of human rights.
The reaction from the South’s party leaders was swift and fierce. Southern delegates bolted the convention and nominated their own candidate, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, under the banner of the States’ Rights Democratic Party.
In response to the chaos of the 1968 convention, the McGovern-Fraser Commission—a panel convened by the national Democratic Party—shifted the party to a system of state-level primaries for the 1972 presidential election. Instead of state bosses and other party elites choosing the party’s nominee, rank-and-file party members would directly elect delegates to the national convention, giving voters direct control over the presidential nomination process for the first time. Similar rules were adopted by the Republican Party before the 1972 presidential election.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that these reforms marked the death knell of the old gatekeeper system. Anyone could now run for the nomination and completely circumvent the traditional gatekeepers—opening the door to outsiders and extremists to capture major-party nominations.
One of the first “outsider” candidates to take advantage of the new nomination process was the U.S. Senator George McGovern—one of the co-chairs of the 1972 McGovern-Fraser Commission. McGovern used his mastery of the new primary system to win the Democratic Party nomination in 1972. An anti-Vietnam War candidate long considered to be on the far left of the Democratic Party, McGovern was precisely the kind of candidate that would have been highly unlikely to be nominated under the old system. He went on to lose in a historic landslide to incumbent Richard Nixon in the 1972 general election.
Extremist Candidates Under the Old Party System
Levitsky and Ziblatt’s argument that the old, pre-1970s party system was successful at keeping insurgent outsiders from winning presidential nominations doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny. For example, in 1896, 1900, and 1908, the fiery populist orator William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic nomination despite strong opposition from party establishment figures. And in 1964, U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater—a figure who contemporary politicos believed was too far to the right to be nominated and win—successfully captured the Republican nomination in the teeth of strong opposition from mainstream party leaders like Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon.
Both Bryan and Goldwater did, however, go down to landslide defeats in their respective general election campaigns—suggesting that perhaps party leaders were prescient in trying to block their nominations.
At first, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, the new nomination system appeared to work quite well. Party insiders may no longer have been in direct control of the delegates on the convention floor, but the parties were initially successful at defeating the campaigns of insurgent outsiders. Such candidates—like Pat Robertson and Steve Forbes, who ran for the GOP nomination in 1988 and 2000, respectively—generated lots of enthusiasm and media coverage, but they fell far short of party presidential nominations.
(Shortform note: Across two presidential runs in 1996 and 2000, Forbes spent $69 million of his personal fortune. Despite this largesse, the billionaire publishing executive won zero primaries during either of his failed campaigns and secured only 21 delegates. At over $3.2 million-per-delegate, Forbes may have gotten the worst return on investment of any presidential candidate in the modern era.)
Still, Levitsky and Ziblatt contend that bids like Robertson’s and Forbes’s should have been seen as early warning signs of just how vulnerable the new system could be to hostile takeovers by outsiders with lots of money and high name recognition—in other words, celebrities. These candidates earned a great deal of coverage from the media, which greatly boosted their already-considerable national profiles.
Before running, Robertson was already a famous televangelist, who boasted a built-in audience of millions of loyal viewers. Forbes, meanwhile, was a famous businessman with billions of dollars of his own money to spend—he could bypass traditional party donors, because he didn’t need to raise money from them.
The authors also point to the rise of alternative media like Twitter and Facebook, as well as explicitly ideological and partisan media (especially on the conservative side of American politics) as forces that served to weaken the parties as institutions. Through these media channels, they argue, an outsider celebrity candidate could get their message across far more easily and communicate directly with their supporters. Media and technology, like the nomination process itself, had become democratized.
All of these factors were in place by 2015, when Donald Trump launched his bid for the Republican nomination. They were to give his campaign, at first considered a longshot, a decisive advantage and prove once and for all that the old system of party gatekeeping was truly gone.
The “Fox Effect”
Even before Trump launched his campaign in 2015, political analysts had long studied the influential role of right-wing media in national politics.
In a 2006 paper titled “The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting,” researchers Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California at Berkeley and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University argued that the Republican Party benefited substantially from the debut of Fox News in U.S. cable markets in October 1996. According to their analysis of the data, the GOP gained between 0.4 and 0.7 percentage points in its share of the presidential vote between 1996 and 2000 in towns and cities where Fox News was available. They further calculate that the cable news outlet persuaded between 3 and 28% of its total audience to vote Republican.
Given the incredibly close margins in the 2000 presidential election, DellaVigna and Kaplan’s findings would indicate that George W. Bush owed his victory in the state of Florida (and thus, the election) to Fox News, which the researchers estimate to have generated 10,000 votes for the Republican above and beyond what he would have gotten in the state if the channel didn’t exist. This was more than enough to provide the margin of victory in a state that was decided by less than 600 votes.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the nomination and election of Donald Trump in 2016 represented the culmination and direct consequence of this loss of power by party elites. They label Trump as a singularly dangerous figure whom Republican leaders were unable and, ultimately, unwilling to stop during the primary—and whose ultimate success they enabled in the general election campaign.
They assert that when Trump launched his campaign for the Republican nomination in June 2015, he was a novelty candidate who stood little chance of actually winning. A total outsider to GOP politics, he had no close institutional ties to the party and seemed to lack even the most basic grounding in conservative ideology—not to mention his anti-immigration rhetoric that many leaders in the Republican Party considered to be extreme and outlandish.
(Shortform note: It should be noted, however, that many of Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination—including Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, and Lindsey Graham—adopted similarly harsh rhetoric against immigrants during the course of the campaign, putting forward proposals to ban birthright citizenship and even authorize the use of military drones at the U.S.-Mexico border.)
But, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, Trump’s pre-existing celebrity as a real estate maven and reality television host of The Apprentice was his secret weapon in the primary—something that gave him near-universal name recognition among GOP primary voters and helped him promote himself as a successful, hard-nosed businessman with the skills to bring the nation to prosperity.
(Shortform note: Trump’s name recognition was truly exceptional, even at the very earliest stages of the primary contest. According to Gallup, by July 2015, just a month after announcing his candidacy, 92% of Republican voters reported being familiar with Trump—compared to 66% for Ted Cruz, 64% for Marco Rubio, and 35% for John Kasich.)
Levitsky and Ziblatt also argue that Trump’s ability to dominate coverage on right-leaning media outlets like Fox News gave him a connection with Republican voters that was nearly impossible for party elites to break.
Although Trump had secured no major endorsements from leading party figures before the Iowa caucuses on February 1—and picked up hardly any even after winning early primaries and emerging as a clear frontrunner—the lack of endorsements turned out not to matter much at all.
Levitsky and Ziblatt rate the assets Trump did have as far more valuable than endorsements. For he had the loyalty of influential right-wing media figures like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and the popular website Breitbart News. Combined with his high name recognition, this enabled him to communicate with his supporters directly, get his message out, and earn far more coverage than high-profile endorsements or campaign donations ever could.
(Shortform note: The origins of Trump’s relationship with Fox News actually predate the 2016 campaign. In 2011, the network’s co-founder and famous GOP operative Roger Ailes gave Trump a standing call-in slot on the channel’s popular morning show, Fox and Friends, which further helped cement Trump’s relationship with Fox’s Republican-leaning audience.)
The Trump-Fox News Connection
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t devote much space to the subject, this symbiotic relationship between Trump and the conservative media ecosystem became a defining feature of his presidency as well as his candidacy. Popular hosts on right-leaning Fox News—like Sean Hannity, who spoke at Trump rallies during the president’s 2020 reelection bid—went on to become open surrogates for President Trump.
Fox News also shaped Trump’s presidential rhetoric and was a major force in guiding the Trump administration’s policy actions. Stories on Fox—like the alleged “caravan” of migrants headed to the U.S. southern border in fall 2018 or the debunked conspiracy theory that the Democratic National Committee had had a staffer murdered—quickly found themselves amplified on Trump’s Twitter feed. As progressive journalist Brian Beutler argues in Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth (2020), Trump even fired cabinet secretaries on the basis of attacks by Fox News hosts.
But, argue Levitsky and Ziblatt, it wasn’t just conservative media that boosted Trump. He also excelled at generating enormous quantities of free coverage in the mainstream media. He achieved this thanks to 1) being a major celebrity before he launched his campaign and 2) generating controversy—and thus, coverage—through outlandish and extreme statements. In effect, the media system rewarded him for his extremism. Levitsky and Ziblatt cite one study done after the election that showed that Trump’s antics generated approximately $2 billion worth of free media coverage—something that all the endorsements in the world couldn’t buy.
The Power of Free Media
Levitsky and Ziblatt point to Trump’s success in garnering free media, but it’s important to flesh out their argument and put his performance in context with that of his Republican rivals.
The data appears to show that free media coverage (which, unlike campaign ads, isn’t purchased directly by the campaign) was the most important asset in securing the nomination. Through February 2016, Trump’s paid advertising spending paled in comparison to that of ultimately ill-fated candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio—who spent $82 and $55 million on paid ads to Trump’s comparatively minuscule $10 million during the same period.
But he earned free media coverage estimated at approximately $2 billion—nearly 10 times the $214 million worth of free coverage earned by his closest rival, Jeb Bush.
Thus, boosted by name recognition and an uncanny ability to generate media coverage through extreme statements, Trump emerged as the clear frontrunner for the nomination, to the shock of many GOP insiders. Levitsky and Ziblatt do note that some party activists organized plots to change the rules at the convention to “unbind” delegates and let even those pledged to Trump (by virtue of him having won primaries in their states) vote instead for another candidate on the first ballot.
(Shortform note: For example, some conservative groups like the Our Principles PAC attempted to lobby the 168 members of the Republican National Committee to deny Trump the nomination in advance of the convention and even ran anti-Trump television advertisements in key primary states.)
But, as Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, these plans had little institutional backing from within the party and ultimately had little impact on events. The authors argue that this failure can be attributed to the fact that the rules of the nomination process made it impossible to deny Trump the nomination once he’d secured a majority of pledged delegates. These Trump delegates were bound by party rules to vote at the convention for the candidate who won their states’ primaries—Donald Trump.
In a previous era, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, party leaders might have been able to successfully organize an effort to block Trump. But by 2016, it was primary voters, media figures, and celebrity candidates like Trump who held the real power. GOP voters, with whom Trump was already enormously popular, had overwhelmingly chosen him as the nominee and party leaders lacked any politically realistic mechanism to stop him.
The “Nuclear Option”
The authors don’t note that some delegates at the party convention were bound by state law (not just party rules) to support Trump at the convention by virtue of him having won their states’ primaries. Thus, Trump’s nomination can’t entirely be blamed on what they present as the fecklessness of the Republican Party.
Still, Trump might have been stopped at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Some commentators pointed out that a majority of delegates could choose to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” by changing the rules on the floor to allow them to vote for the candidate of their choice, rather than the one to whom they were bound by primary voters. Since many pledged delegates were state and local party officials who were not necessarily personally loyal to Trump, some argued that the real estate mogul could have been defeated if the delegates were free to vote their conscience at the convention.
Notably, 2016 was not the first time such a course of action was considered. At the 1980 Democratic National Convention, challenger Ted Kennedy attempted to block the re-nomination of incumbent President Jimmy Carter by having his delegates force a floor vote on exactly this kind of rule change. The Kennedy and Carter campaigns each launched furious lobbying efforts to convince delegates to support the rule change (in Kennedy’s case) or oppose it (in Carter’s case). Kennedy’s effort ultimately failed and Carter was re-nominated.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the final failure of the GOP to stop Donald Trump—a candidate whom they regard as deeply abnormal and authoritarian—came in the general election against Hillary Clinton.
They posit that Trump satisfied all four of their criteria for authoritarianism:
(Shortform note: Although he knew that the claims made by “birthers,” like Donald Trump, were unfounded, President Obama understood that racialized fearmongering directed at himself—the nation’s first African-American president—could be a potent political force. In an attempt to confront the charges head-on, Obama famously mocked Trump for his birtherism (to Trump’s face) at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. To learn more about Obama’s reflections on his presidency, including his response to the birtherism charges, read our guide to his memoir, A Promised Land.)
Levitsky and Ziblatt state that such a figure becoming the nominee of a major political party was an unprecedented development in American politics. According to them, GOP leaders faced a choice in the general election: to stand with Trump or to stand for democracy.
Is Donald Trump Really an Authoritarian?
Despite Levitsky and Ziblatt’s assertion that candidate Trump exhibited clear authoritarian tendencies, some commentators—even on the left—questioned his authoritarianism as president.
Shortly after Trump became president, liberal political theorist Corey Robin argued that Trump’s alleged authoritarianism was more talk than action, citing Trump’s failure to fill the overwhelming majority of offices in the executive branch, leaving 85% of jobs either vacant or staffed with holdovers from the Obama administration. Robin argued that if Trump truly wished to subvert democracy, he and his allies would have made seizing control of key positions at the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, and the intelligence agencies one of their top priorities. Their failure to do so indicated that Trump’s often bombastic remarks were more bluster than statements of intent.
Unfortunately, when faced with this choice, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that GOP leaders chose to stand with Trump, putting their narrow partisan interests over their responsibility as democratic gatekeepers.
The authors believe that prominent GOP leaders could have made the opposite choice—to cross party lines and support Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. While acknowledging that such a move wouldn’t have shifted every Republican voter to support Clinton, they contend that it would have likely had a significant impact, sending a clear signal to the electorate that there was broad, bipartisan agreement on Trump’s unfitness for office.
But, they argue, high-profile Republicans did not do this and instead chose party over country— and democracy—in 2016.
The Never Trump Movement
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt castigate the Republican establishment for failing to form a united front against Trump by endorsing Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, many mainstream Republicans did offer organized opposition to his candidacy—and, later, to his presidency.
The Never Trump movement was a broad coalition of conservatives who opposed Trump’s nomination, many of whom ultimately left the Republican Party altogether in protest against what they saw as the party’s dangerous, rightward, xenophobic drift under him. And especially in the wake of the Access Hollywood scandal (in which Trump was caught on tape boasting about having sexually assaulted women) in October 2016, many prominent elected Republicans withdrew their support and called upon Trump to drop out of the race. Such figures included Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, and U.S. Senator (and former GOP presidential nominee) John McCain.
During the 2020 election, when Trump was running for re-election, many Republicans and conservatives once again proved willing to work with the Democrats to defeat Trump. Former Governor of Ohio and 2016 Republican presidential candidate John Kasich endorsed Democratic nominee Joe Biden and spoke at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, while the Lincoln Project—a political action committee formed by anti-Trump Republican strategists—spent over $80 million during the 2020 election cycle to defeat Trump.
Think about how partisan loyalty influences political behavior.
Identify and explain two ways in which the Republican Party failed to stop the rise of Donald Trump.
Why do you think the leadership of the Republican Party chose to support Trump over Clinton in the general election, despite concerns about his fitness for office?
Have you ever sacrificed your individual principles to help a group or team earn a victory? Briefly explain the situation.
Levitsky and Ziblatt have argued that American democratic norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance operated successfully throughout most of the 20th century, despite some challenges. But, they warn, these norms are under siege today and may be slipping away entirely. They see the success of Donald Trump as a critical failure by a major political party to stop an authoritarian figure from rising within their own ranks.
But, the authors argue, the emergence of Trump did not occur in a vacuum. They view him as a product or symptom of broader trends in the American political system—and the Republican Party in particular—that have gradually driven the degradation of democratic norms since arguably the middle of the 20th century. In this chapter, Levitsky and Ziblatt explore some key structural transformations in U.S. politics over the past few decades that have pushed norms to the brink.
The authors argue that the rise of Newt Gingrich as a major political player signaled the beginning of the transformation of American politics into the more partisan, ideological conflict that it is today. In 1978, Gingrich, a Georgia Republican, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. But Gingrich, say Levitsky and Ziblatt, was no ordinary Republican.
They argue that he had a view of politics as warfare, believing that defeating one’s enemies was its ultimate purpose—not working with rivals or seeking to find common ground with them. As he rose through the ranks, Gingrich formed the political-action committee GOPAC to train up-and-coming Republican politicians in these new attack messaging strategies, labeling Democrats as “sick,” “traitors,” and “anti-flag.”
Gingrich rose through the ranks of the GOP’s congressional wing throughout the 1980s, remaking it in his image and systematically destroying norms of mutual toleration. By 1994, say the authors, Gingrich had transformed the party into one deeply committed to social and economic conservatism, opposed to compromise, and scornful of its opponents.
Gingrich and the Revival of the GOP
Despite Levitsky and Ziblatt’s seemingly unflattering characterization of Gingrich’s role in American history, other commentators have defended him. It’s been argued Gingrich was an important figure in revitalizing the congressional wing of the Republican Party, which had been in the House minority for 40 years before the 1994 midterm elections.
During these four decades in the political wilderness, the Republicans were only able to amend, defeat, or delay proposals by the majority Democrats—they were never able to initiate a vision of their own. That changed in 1994 with Gingrich’s Contract With America, a sweeping legislative agenda of tax reform, tort reform, and welfare reform, among other items. Proponents credit the Contract With America with bringing ideas and a coherent governing agenda back to congressional politics, and to the congressional GOP in particular.
Levitsky and Ziblatt cite the 1998 party-line impeachment of Bill Clinton—on what they characterize as spurious and petty charges related to an extramarital affair—as the culmination of Republican-led hyper-partisanship during the 1990s.
The authors argue that this was a major breach of institutional forbearance and a blatant abuse of the impeachment power. In their account, Clinton’s behavior did not come close to meeting the standard for impeachment, and the Republican majority cheapened the constitutional power of impeachment by turning it into another partisan tool.
Bill Clinton and #MeToo
While Levitsky and Ziblatt dismiss the impeachment charges against Clinton as being spurious and motivated by partisan concerns, in the decades since the impeachment, many liberals—a group that was among his staunchest defenders during the ordeal—have taken a more critical view of Clinton’s extramarital affair with the White House staffer Monica Lewinsky.
In 2017, U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)—later a 2020 presidential candidate—was quoted as saying that Clinton should have been forced to resign over the scandal, which, in light of the burgeoning #MeToo movement, she saw as an act of sexual predation on the part of Clinton toward a female subordinate.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that partisan rancor rose sharply again when Democrat Barack Obama was elected to the presidency. As the first African-American president, Obama’s rise was a historic moment in the history of the nation. But once in office, the authors contend that he encountered a radicalized Republican Party that was openly committed to his political delegitimization and destruction from the first day of his administration.
During the 2008 campaign, right-wing media stars and prominent Republican politicians darkly hinted that Obama was a radical Marxist and secret Muslim. These charges were echoed most effectively by that year’s Republican vice-presidential nominee—Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska. Palin whipped crowds of rank-and-file Republicans into a frenzy by baselessly accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” Other prominent Republicans contributed to the erosion of mutual toleration by encouraging their voters to view the opposition party as an illegitimate entity.
(Shortform note: John McCain appears to have later suffered genuine guilt over the tone and rhetoric of his 2008 presidential campaign, particularly with regard to his running mate, Sarah Palin. In his memoir The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations (2018), published a few months before his death, McCain wrote that he regretted choosing Palin and only did so to shore up his support with the right wing of the GOP. He wrote that he had wanted to choose Joe Lieberman—an independent senator from Connecticut who’d been the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2000—but knew that the party would never accept this choice.)
The authors argue that their success in painting Barack Obama as a thoroughly alien and illegitimate president gave the GOP the means, motive, and opportunity to deploy extraordinary constitutional hardball tactics against him, withholding any cooperation with his administration, even on much-needed economic recovery legislation.
After the 2010 midterm elections brought Republicans back into the majority in the House, they had fresh opportunities to pursue their no-compromise agenda. They abused their congressional prerogatives to obstruct even the most routine legislation and slow the confirmation of federal judicial appointments, pushing forbearance to the brink.
While the GOP’s behavior was technically within the bounds of the law, they were using their control of Congress in ways that seriously undermined the constitutional system.
The Scorched-Earth Strategy
In fact, this was part of a carefully coordinated strategy on the part of Republican congressional leadership. After consecutive losses in the 2006 and 2008 elections, many commentators believed that the GOP’s only path back to power would be through compromise and accommodation with the Democrats. But the party deliberately took the opposite course.
As Barack Obama himself detailed in his 2020 bestselling memoir, A Promised Land, figures like House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell recognized that in a highly polarized political system, their best path back to power was to make Obama and the Democrats as unpopular as possible by refusing to work with them on any major legislation—denying Obama the bipartisan comity he’d campaigned on and handing Democrats the sole responsibility of taking tough votes.
They believed that any gestures toward bipartisanship would only benefit the Democrats. Thus, by withholding their support, the Republicans bet that they could make Obama and his party “own” the economic crisis and sluggish recovery, providing fertile ground for a GOP comeback in the midterm elections.
The authors cite the behavior of the GOP with regard to the Supreme Court as one of the most serious and consequential breaches of democratic norms during the Obama era.
In February 2016, Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away, creating a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Within hours of Scalia’s death, however, prominent Republican leaders were declaring that Barack Obama should not be allowed to appoint a replacement for him in an election year.
Undaunted, Barack Obama nominated federal judge Merrick Garland to fill the seat. Garland was widely regarded as a highly qualified and ideologically moderate candidate. But, as Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, Garland’s qualifications mattered little to the Republican-led Senate. Mitch McConnell, now Majority Leader, announced that the Senate would not consider Garland’s nomination, declaring that an outgoing president like Obama had no right to make a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.
The authors argue that the treatment of Garland constituted an unprecedented breach of institutional forbearance as Republicans declared that Obama lacked the right to even make a nomination. They held the seat vacant through 2016. When Donald Trump was elected president, Republicans quickly rushed Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch through the confirmation process and onto the Court.
(Shortform note: In 2016, McConnell justified his actions by claiming that he was in fact upholding longstanding norms by not filling a Supreme Court vacancy during a presidential election year. Observers noted that no such precedent actually existed and that nine justices had been confirmed in election years since the end of the Civil War. Subsequently, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, McConnell’s Senate majority quickly confirmed her replacement, Amy Coney Barrett—eight days before the presidential election.)
The Precedent of Blocking Judicial Nominees
While Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the non-confirmation of Garland represented an act of unprecedented obstruction, partisanship, and hardball on the part of Senate Republicans, some conservative commentators at the time countered that there was nothing particularly unusual about the majority party in the Senate blocking the judicial nominees of a president of the opposite party.
In The Wall Street Journal, James Taranto argued that what had been done to Garland was no different than what Senate Democrats like Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy had done to Ronald Reagan’s nominee, Robert Bork, back in 1987. Taranto argues that Democrats successfully smeared the conservative jurist Bork by labeling him a dangerous reactionary and racist, resulting in the withdrawal of his nomination and the addition of a new word to the American political lexicon—“borking.”
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that while these events were happening, major structural transformations were also reordering the composition of the parties themselves. These structural changes both reflected and contributed to the radicalization of American politics.
According to the authors, for much of the 20th century, both major parties were big-tent coalitions, with their support cutting across religious, ethnic, geographic, and ideological lines. The Democratic Party counted conservative white Southern Protestants, educated urban liberals, and working-class Irish and Italian-American Catholics as key voting blocs; the Republican Party, meanwhile, contained conservative midwesterners, but also liberal New Englanders in its coalition. Levitsky and Ziblatt posit that these heterogeneous parties provided fertile ground for bipartisan cooperation and shared adherence to democratic norms.
But, say the authors, this arrangement began to unravel as a result of the success of the civil rights movement, which began making major gains in the decades following World War Two. Major pieces of legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which were signed into law by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson (and which were opposed by 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater), stamped the Democrats as the party of civil rights. This prompted a major realignment of U.S. politics, as white Southern Democrats began moving into the Republican Party as a reaction against civil rights.
(Shortform note: Aware of the shifting political dynamics, President Johnson is said to have remarked to an aide as he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, “We’ve lost the South for a generation.”)
The authors argue that a new generation of Republican politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan welcomed and encouraged this development, adopting a “Southern Strategy” of making coded appeals to racially reactionary whites through their rhetoric against school busing, welfare spending, and urban crime. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the GOP became the party of white racial reaction and resentment.
In turn, they note, racial minorities, new immigrants from Asia and Latin America, and liberal white voters began to find their natural home within the Democratic Party—whereas, previously, such groups had been scattered across both parties. As the decades wore on, liberals neatly sorted into the Democratic Party and conservatives sorted into the Republican Party.
The Great Sorting and American Political Geography
The sorting described by Levitsky and Ziblatt hasn’t just influenced how Americans vote—it’s even determined where they live.
Data suggests that more and more Americans are living in partisan, ideological clusters, where they are unlikely to encounter supporters of the opposite party. For example, in 1976, 26.8% of Americans lived in landslide counties—that is, counties that were won by one of the two major parties by a margin of 20 percentage points or more. But by 2004, that figure had grown to 48.3%.
And by the 2016 election, a full 61% of voters lived in counties that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump won by 60% or more. Of the nation’s 3,100+ counties, a mere 303 were won by single digits. This has led some commentators to declare the end of Purple America.
But this polarization of the parties, argue Levitsky and Ziblatt, is about far more than traditional disagreements over political issues or liberal versus conservative ideology. Polarization reflects deeper and more fundamental divisions in society, like race, religion, sexuality, and culture. These are not new forms of division by any means, but Levitsky and Ziblatt contend that they’ve never before been so neatly folded into the structure of the two-party system. Partisan affiliation increasingly encompasses these other, more emotionally resonant forms of identity, not merely political belief—which makes compromise or accommodation far more difficult.
The Republican Party, they argue, has become overwhelmingly the party of exurban and rural white Christians. The Democrats, meanwhile, are increasingly the party of secular, urban non-whites. Thus, one’s political identity is about far more than just beliefs about public taxing and spending policy—it is about one’s core identity and set of values. This makes the parties more and more unrecognizable to one another—and less and less willing to extend mutual respect and institutional forbearance to one another.
Although these homogenizing trends have played out in the coalitions of both major parties, the authors argue that they have been far sharper in the Republican Party. They do not deny that Democrats have drifted leftward on economic and social issues; but they contend that the GOP has swung far more to the right. Beyond the influence of right-wing media, they attribute this asymmetric polarization to two factors:
The Democratic Shift to the Left
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt label the Republicans as the primary driver of asymmetric polarization, it’s worth exploring how much the Democrats have also moved away from the political center, especially in recent years.
In the 2020 Democratic primaries, viable candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders proposed policies that would have been considered far to the left of the median voter only a few election cycles before, including: reparations for the descendants of enslaved people, universal childcare, a wealth tax, and forcing corporations to reserve 40% of the seats on the boards of directors for workers. Self-identified liberals comprise a far larger share of the Democratic base than they did during the 1990s. In 1994, self-identified moderates made up half the party, while liberals made up only a quarter. In 2020, liberals represented half the party, while moderates represented only a third.
And this move to the left may be influencing how the broader American electorate views the party. A 2019 Quinnipiac poll showed that nearly half the country thinks the Democratic Party has moved too far to the left.
Ziblatt and Levitsky argue that Republican politics are also shaped by a network of powerful and well-funded conservative interest groups that put pressure on GOP officeholders to hold the line on ideology. One example they cite is the group Americans for Tax Reform, headed by longtime activist Grover Norquist.
Norquist’s group has successfully pressured nearly every Republican member of Congress to sign a “no tax” pledge, committing them to oppose any form of federal revenue increase. According to the authors, these pressure groups help to shape party orthodoxy, enforce ideological uniformity, and discourage norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance within Congress.
The “No Tax” Pledge and Conservative Goals
Some commentators have argued that pledges like Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes” creed not only make compromise and functional democratic government impossible, but also undermine the conservative ideological goals they’re supposed to help.
Although the pledge has indeed become party orthodoxy (more than 80% of Republicans in the 2021-2023 congressional session have signed it) it has largely robbed them of their ability to negotiate with Democrats, placing them in a maximalist, “all or nothing” position that makes it extremely difficult for them to vote for legislation that would help them advance the cause of conservatism.
For example, in August 2011, all eight Republican presidential candidates declared on a debate stage that they would not accept a deficit-reduction package with even a 10:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. In other words, they were forced to sacrifice long-desired spending cuts and sweeping deficit reduction (both major goals of the conservative movement) because the pledge bound them to accept no revenue increases whatsoever.
Finally, Levitsky and Ziblatt highlight the racial and cultural homogeneity of Republican voters themselves. They argue that the GOP has become a near-homogenous party of white Christian voters. For most of the country’s history, white Christians comprised the majority of the electorate and sat atop the social and economic order. But in a few short decades, this dominant position has collapsed, and white Christians now comprise a minority of the electorate (although they are still the plurality).
The authors theorize that this has given rise to a siege mentality within this community. They increasingly feel embattled by the profound social and cultural changes that have swept the country. Levitsky and Ziblatt cite surveys showing that white Christians believe the country is slipping away from them and that they see themselves as the “real Americans” (in other words, native-born, English-speaking white, Christian). Thus, conspiracy theories like birtherism are tapping into something very potent for a lot of white voters—a sense of loss for a country they no longer recognize.
The Twilight of White Christianity
The Republican party has indeed become highly dependent upon white Christian voters, a group that now comprises just 42% of the U.S. population as a whole. According to Pew Research, 79% of registered Republicans were self-identified Christians on the eve of the 2020 presidential election, compared to 52% for Democrats. Furthermore, the same research found that 81% of registered Republican-leaning voters were non-Hispanic whites, compared to 59% for Democratic-leaning voters.
However, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s portrayal of this group as being in an inexorable demographic decline toward political irrelevancy may be somewhat overstated. Pew’s research shows that white Christian voters are highly overrepresented in key battleground states like Wisconsin (86%), Ohio (82%), Pennsylvania (81%), and Michigan (79%)—suggesting that they may have enhanced political clout that outweighs their numbers.
To learn more about the anxiety among white Christians about their perceived loss of cultural dominance, read our summary of Robert Jones’s article in The Atlantic, “We’ve Reached the End of White Christian America.”
After exploring the history of democratic norms in U.S. politics—and what they argue is their erosion at the hands of an increasingly radicalized Republican Party—Ziblatt and Levitsky turn their attention to Donald Trump’s presidency.
According to the authors, the first year of Trump’s presidency was marked by repeated and serial norm-breaking. They cite:
Under the influence of Trump and the Republicans, warn Levitsky and Ziblatt, democratic guardrails are coming down, with political behavior once believed to be unthinkable now fully normalized.
(Shortform note: How Democracies Die was published early in 2018, barely a year after Trump had taken office. With the benefit of hindsight now that Trump has left office after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, we’ve incorporated some analysis and insights from the later years of his term in office, as well as his post-presidency. This gives the reader a more nuanced and more balanced perspective than that presented by the authors.)
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that as president, Trump employed all three authoritarian tactics:
They highlight several major episodes from his first year in office.
Anonymous Warnings From Inside the Trump Administration
Concerns about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies did not come solely from outside critics like Levitsky and Ziblatt. People inside the Trump administration itself were sounding the alarm bells about his presidency as well.
In A Warning (2019), an anonymous senior Trump administration official published an insider account detailing the president’s chaotic decision-making process and lack of focus, moral and intellectual unfitness for high office, desire to use the powers of his office to punish and harass those he perceived as his enemies, and general lack of respect for democratic norms and institutions.
The central thesis of the book is that a committed group of senior aides (including the anonymous author) thought of themselves as a “Steady State” whose mission it was to keep the institution of the presidency on track, while restraining Trump’s more dangerous instincts and impulses. The anonymous author warns, however, that these internal guardrails had largely come loose by the time of the book’s publication in late 2019 (on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic), with Trump having largely replaced his more principled advisors with loyalists and sycophants.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that Trump attempted to capture the referees of the American political system—law enforcement officials, judges, and civil servants—in several high-profile incidents. Early in his administration, they cite the example of Trump demanding that FBI Director James Comey—sworn to uphold the Constitution—pledge his personal loyalty to Trump and drop the agency’s ongoing investigation into collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
After Comey refused, Trump took what the authors characterize as the extraordinary step of firing him. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, this was a clear signal that Trump did not respect the customary barrier between politics and federal law enforcement.
LBJ and the CIA
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt single out Donald Trump as a unique threat to democratic norms, he wasn’t the first president to attempt to capture the referees or subvert the powers of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to serve his own political ends.
During the 1964 presidential election, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson directed the CIA to infiltrate the campaign of his Republican rival, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Howard Hunt—a CIA operative who later was to play a major role in the Watergate scandal—spearheaded the operation, collecting advance copies of Goldwater’s position papers, speeches, and press releases that were then passed along to the Johnson campaign.
Johnson benefited greatly from this espionage, as he was able to anticipate and respond to Goldwater’s statements before the latter even made them. Johnson went on to defeat Goldwater in one of the biggest presidential landslides in U.S. history.
Trump, argue Levitsky and Ziblatt, also attempted to sideline his opponents through his attacks on the mainstream media. Trump routinely labeled mainstream media, which tended to give unfavorable coverage to his administration, as “fake news.” He argued that the media was inflexibly biased against him and that voters should disregard what outlets like CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times reported about his administration.
Levitsky and Ziblatt contend that the president viewed the media as his opponents and saw launching these attacks on them as a way to discredit it—and signal to his supporters that he was the only source of truth. The authors argue that this anti-media campaign helped to condition GOP voters to live in an alternative-facts universe, while raising support for various forms of media repression among them.
The 2020 Election, Voter Fraud Claims, and Alternative Reality
Although it was impossible for Levitsky and Ziblatt to see into the future after their publication of How Democracies Die in 2018, evidence from later in Trump’s term—and after his defeat in the 2020 election—suggests that his efforts to create an alternative-information universe for Republican voters have been successful.
We discussed earlier in this guide how Trump refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election results, citing widespread voter fraud against him (despite even his own Justice Department finding zero credible evidence to support his charges). But this refusal to accept the reality of the election results appears to have caught on with the vast majority of the GOP base. After the election was called for Joe Biden, a Politico/Morning Consult poll showed that 70% of Republicans believe that the election was unfair and rife with fraud, compared with 90% of Democrats who accepted that the election was legitimate.
Levitsky and Ziblatt further charge that Trump attempted to rewrite the rules of the democratic game through the Presidential Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity, run by Kansas GOP operative Kris Kobach. The commission’s ostensible aim was to root out in-person voter fraud and clean up America's election system.
The impetus for this commission, argue the authors, sprang from Trump’s oft-repeated claim that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election and that he was the true winner of the popular vote. Levitsky and Ziblatt counter that there was zero evidence for these claims of widespread voter fraud and that the true purpose of the commission was instead to promote a Republican narrative of widespread voter fraud to encourage the adoption of state voter ID laws and push for state election authorities to purge voter rolls.
The authors argue that state-level voter ID laws, passed almost exclusively by Republican-controlled legislatures, make it disproportionately harder for poorer and non-white voters—in other words, voters more likely to support Democrats—to exercise the franchise. Because voters must go to the trouble of acquiring and paying for these forms of identification, Levitsky and Ziblatt contend that these laws are a 21st-century version of Jim Crow.
(Shortform note: Trump disbanded the commission in January 2018, after nearly all states refused to hand their voter data over to it.)
The 2021 Georgia Election Law
To expand upon the arguments made by Levitsky and Ziblatt, these efforts on the part of Republican state officials to change voting rules seem to have continued even after Trump left office.
In 2020, Democratic nominee Joe Biden narrowly won the state of Georgia, as did Democratic U.S. Senate challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, delivering the state to the party for the first time in a generation. In the wake of that defeat, the GOP-dominated state government in Georgia passed a sweeping new election law that Democrats and voting-rights advocates argue is designed to suppress ballot access and make voting harder, especially for the state’s large Black and urban population (which was crucial to the Democratic victories in 2020).
Among other provisions, the law imposes strict new ID requirements for absentee voting, prevents election officials from mailing out absentee ballots on a universal basis, bans mobile voting centers and ballot drop boxes, and makes it illegal to hand out food or water to voters waiting on long lines.
Voting-rights advocates are most concerned about a provision that enables the state legislature (which is dominated by Republicans) to suspend county-level election commissioners. Critics contend that this will enable the legislature to cite unfounded claims of fraud and use that as a pretext to tamper with election procedures or results in heavily Democratic counties.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that American democracy is going to face strong challenges. They present three key factors that they believe will determine whether or not democratic norms survive in American politics:
As the authors have argued, political parties are the best gatekeepers of democracy. According to them, party leaders have three options when dealing with an authoritarian in their own ranks:
There are a few ways for parties to remain loyal to authoritarian leaders. They can actively enable the autocrat by willingly repeating his lies, amplifying his attacks, and vigorously defending him against opponents. Or they can more passively empower him, either by remaining silent on his most aggressive violations of democratic norms, or issuing only mild criticisms without taking any concrete action.
Alternatively, party leaders might opt for a containment strategy, in which they side with the leader on traditional matters of party orthodoxy, but draw a line against the more egregious democratic norm-breaking. Thus, argue Levitsky and Ziblatt, a Republican Congress pursuing a containment strategy might vote for Trump’s tax cuts, but oppose his efforts to politicize federal law enforcement.
But, they warn, this “have one’s cake and eat it too” strategy is usually difficult to maintain, as party leaders know that their own political fortunes are tied to the success of the leader’s initiatives—and this is especially true in a highly polarized political environment like in the present U.S. If they stymie him too much, they will pay a political price. But by giving him victories on legislative matters, they help make him more popular with the public, which only increases his authoritarian power.
Lastly, party leaders can opt for a confrontation strategy. This would entail the party actively mobilizing and crossing party lines to remove the leader through the impeachment process or calling on him to resign.
Republicans, Impeachment, and Accountability for Trump
In 2019, it was revealed that the Trump administration had threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine in order to pressure the Ukrainian government into launching an investigation into the business dealings of Hunter Biden, son of Trump’s Democratic rival (and ultimate successor) Joe Biden. Based on the GOP’s steadfast support for Trump during this affair and their near-unanimous vote against the resulting impeachment charges in both the House and Senate, it could be argued that the party coalesced around a strategy of active collaboration with Trump.
This trend continued into 2021, when Trump was impeached for a second time—a first in U.S. history—on charges related to the riotous and violent January 6, 2021 insurrection in which a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol complex in an attempt to overturn the election. The impeachment vote held on January 13, 2021 (a week before Trump left office) saw nearly all House Republicans oppose the charges against Trump, with only 10 out of 211 Republicans voting for impeachment. In the Senate vote held a month later on February 13, 2021 (three weeks after Trump had left office), just seven out of 50 Republicans voted to convict the former president.
The second major factor cited by Levitsky and Ziblatt is public opinion. They argue that the more popular an authoritarian is, the more successful they will be in destroying democracy. Authoritarians are strengthened—and their opponents demoralized—when public opinion is on their side. When they choose to enable the leader’s norm-breaking behavior, high-ranking party officials can play a significant role in boosting his popularity by signaling to the public that the opposition to him is merely partisan. Of course, approval ratings are also influenced by the state of the economy and external events like wars and terrorist attacks, over which political leaders have less direct control.
Trump’s Approval Ratings
If we are to accept Levitsky and Ziblatt’s argument that an authoritarian leader’s popularity is a strong predictor of how successful they will be at dismantling democracy, it appears that this particular democratic guardrail—public opinion—held up quite well during the Trump administration.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can take a deeper look at Trump’s overall standing with the public than the authors could have in 2018. Trump left office with a poor 34% approval rating, largely owing to his perceived mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic fallout. Perhaps more notably, he finished with an average approval rating of 41% over the entire course of his administration—the lowest of any president since the advent of polling.
The third factor that Levitsky and Ziblatt contend will determine the survival of U.S. democracy is external crises like terrorist attacks or wars. In the aftermath of such events, they argue, a “rally-around-the-flag” effect tends to boost public support for the government.
The entire political system, including judges, law enforcement, and legislatures, tends to bend to the will of the executive under these circumstances, granting them extraordinary powers and deference. From Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of constitutional rights like habeas corpus during the Civil War to Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two, presidents have enjoyed greatly expanded powers during times of crisis.
But while these were extraordinary acts from leaders who were otherwise strongly committed to democratic norms, the authors argue that Trump could not be trusted to wield such powers responsibly. A national emergency could provide a dangerous opportunity for him to mount an effective assault on America’s already-weakened democratic norms.
Trump and the COVID-19 Crisis
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt couldn't have foreseen it, just such a crisis—the COVID-19 pandemic—did befall the U.S. in the last year of Trump’s term. The first U.S. case was diagnosed in January 2020 and as of April 2021, over 570,000 had died as a result of the pandemic. The spread of the disease wrought major social and economic changes, as workplaces, recreational venues, and other public spaces were ordered closed by state and local governments across the country and 14 million Americans lost their jobs—sending the unemployment rate to 13%, higher than it ever reached during the Great Recession.
Yet, Trump did not enjoy the surge in public support that Levitsky and Ziblatt’s model would seem to predict. On the eve of the 2020 presidential election, just 37% of Americans approved of his handling of the crisis, compared to 59% who disapproved. Moreover, Trump didn’t seize the moment of the crisis to consolidate his own political power. In fact, he forcefully spoke out against what he saw as restrictions on Americans’ liberties, including mask mandates and bans on public gatherings.
The authors note what they view as grave threats facing American democracy today—increasing polarization, no-holds-barred electoral competition, and the abandonment of traditional democratic norms. They further argue that democratic backsliding in the U.S. has emboldened autocratic leaders around the world, from Hungary to Turkey to Russia.
In this chapter, they explore what they believe might lie ahead for American democracy and propose some reforms that can help rescue and strengthen it.
Following their comparative historical analysis of democratic failure in an international context and their examination of the threats they believe to be confronting American democracy, Levitsky and Ziblatt present three possible scenarios for the future of representative government in the United States:
In Levitsky and Ziblatt’s analysis, democratic recovery represents the most optimistic vision for American democracy. In this scenario, the Trump era proves to be short-lived, leaving behind few lasting effects. For example, he could lose his bid for reelection with Republicans suffering major electoral defeats at the federal, state, and local levels. Alternatively, he could be removed from office via impeachment or resignation.
As Levitsky and Ziblatt envision it, Trump would be swiftly replaced by new pro-democratic reforms that strengthen the republic. Future historians might look back on the Trump years as a brief aberration, a period during which America stared into the brink of authoritarianism and decided to step back.
However, the authors consider this scenario unlikely. They argue that the forces within the Republican Party that enabled Trump long preceded him—and they are likely to be in place long after he is gone from the political scene. In their ultimate analysis, Trump is more of a symptom than a cause of the current democratic crisis.
Has American Democracy Recovered?
Since the publication of How Democracies Die at the beginning of 2018, one could argue that the U.S. has witnessed many of the events Levitsky and Ziblatt would associate with democratic recovery—a scenario they rate as unlikely. The 2018 midterm elections delivered what political analysts called a “blue wave,” with Democrats picking up a net 41 seats in the House of Representatives and winning the House popular vote by nearly 10 million—the party’s best showing since 1974 and the largest congressional popular vote difference in American history.
Following the Democratic takeover of the House, Trump was impeached twice (although not removed from office) and was defeated in the 2020 presidential election. If we accept Levitsky and Ziblatt’s analysis, this would seem to indicate a robust pushback by pro-democracy forces.
The next scenario presented by Levitsky and Ziblatt is what they see as the darkest. This is a world in which the Republican Party continues to score electoral success with its shrinking and increasingly radicalized white Christian base. They see the Republican Party using its majorities at the federal and state levels to rig the rules in its favor and reshape the courts, gerrymander the electorate, and systematically disempower non-whites through voter ID laws, mass deportations, and harsh immigration restrictions.
The Ongoing Threat to U.S. Democracy
There is some evidence to back up Levitsky and Ziblatt’s argument that a Republican Party catering more and more exclusively to the interests of its predominantly white base can still be electorally viable—even when significant majorities of the American electorate as a whole oppose it.
Republican presidential candidates George W. Bush and Donald Trump each won their elections in 2000 and 2016 respectively despite losing the popular vote. And some scholars believe that this is a scenario that’s likely to repeat itself. One model produced by the University of Texas predicts that Republicans will win 65% of the presidential elections in which they lose the popular vote by two percentage points or less, owing to the structural advantage the Electoral College gives to small, predominantly rural states—which, in the modern era, tend to lean heavily Republican.
This raises concerns that a minority Republican Party will be able to wield substantial political power far out of proportion to the actual number of votes it receives—and that it will use these structural advantages to further entrench itself.
The third scenario highlighted by the authors is one of continually worsening polarization. They present this middle ground as the most likely course for U.S. democracy, citing the example of North Carolina as a possible glimpse into the nation’s future.
When Republicans took control of the state legislature there in 2010, they passed what the authors describe as one of the most aggressive and racially discriminatory gerrymanders in the country. This new electoral map was designed to virtually guarantee Republican supermajorities in the state legislature and congressional delegation, even in election cycles where the party was outvoted by Democrats.
This Republican majority also worked with the Republican governor to pass some of the harshest voter ID laws in the nation, while reducing early voting and ending voting pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds. According to the authors, these were nakedly partisan and anti-democratic maneuvers, done solely to make it more onerous for their political opponents to exercise the franchise.
When voters elected a Democratic governor in 2016, the Republican legislature continued its hardball tactics, using its veto-proof majority to strip powers from the incoming governor, allowing them to pack the state executive branch with GOP partisans—even after losing the election. Levitsky and Ziblatt cite these measures as extreme violations of institutional forbearance.
Resistance to Gerrymandering
Since the publication of How Democracies Die in 2018, there have been new developments in North Carolina. In 2019, the state courts in North Carolina ruled that the state’s gerrymandered maps of congressional districts were unconstitutional. The court ruled that the maps violated freedom of speech and assembly, equal protection under the law, and a state constitutional guarantee of free and fair elections. The courts also threw out North Carolina’s state legislative maps in 2019 on similar grounds. This suggests that judicial challenges to biased legislative maps could be one possible avenue of resistance to gerrymandering and other anti-democratic tactics.
The new maps, however, still appear to confer an advantage on the Republican Party. In the 2020 state legislative elections, Democrats received 49% of the statewide vote but ended up controlling only 42.5% of the seats.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that pro-democratic forces must overcome America’s deep structural divisions if they are to preserve democracy.
They advocate the forging of broad, pro-democratic coalitions that cut across racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic lines. In their analysis, it is not enough to simply build interest groups of like-minded activists. A broad coalition would entail liberals reaching out to conservative businesspeople, evangelicals, gun owners, and other traditional opponents. These groups all have sharp disagreements with one another on a range of issues, but would all potentially stand to lose if authoritarianism and lawlessness gained a stranglehold over the country.
The authors contend that such broad coalitions can be enormously beneficial. By their very nature and composition, they can appeal to a broader slice of the country and transcend the partisan divide. This partial defusing of partisan tensions, they argue, can lead to depolarization, which in turn, strengthens democratic norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance.
Working Toward Depolarization
Some research suggests that the depolarization envisioned by Levitsky and Ziblatt is indeed possible. Stanford scholars James Fishkin and Larry Diamond have seen some positive results with a technique called Deliberative Democracy. Through Deliberative Democracy, people from different backgrounds come together as “citizen delegates” to participate in a discussion about contentious political issues, consider the merits of opposing arguments, and try to consciously set aside their partisan labels.
In 2020, Fishkin and Diamond conducted an experiment called “America in One Room,” in which they brought together a representative sample of 500 Americans to discuss a range of hot-button issues from healthcare reform to global warming to immigration. Through moderated, small-group discussions, the researchers found that participants developed increased empathy for their opponents and gained a better understanding of how policy proposals would affect them.
The exercise seemed to deliver real results. At the beginning of the experiment, researchers found sharp divisions between partisans on all 26 issues under discussion. But after building mutual empathy and understanding, they were able to find significant common ground on 19 of the 26 issues. Currently, Fishkin and Diamond are working on a digital engagement tool that would enable them to implement Deliberative Democracy on a nationwide scale.
Levitsky and Ziblatt identify extreme partisan polarization as the main driver of the destruction of American democratic norms like mutual respect and institutional forbearance. Much of why the Republican Party is in such a deeply dysfunctional state, they assert, can be attributed to its ethnic and religious homogeneity as the party of white Christians—a shrinking demographic. As long as it maintains this basic structure, the Republican Party will be unable to act as a pro-democratic force—especially in an increasingly diverse society.
Accordingly, the authors recommend that the GOP moderate its hardline right-wing social and economic ideology and abandon what they see as its appeals to white nationalism. They believe these moves will help the party broaden its appeal to a more diverse cross-section of the electorate, much of which might be attracted to certain aspects of conservatism, but is turned away by the party’s extremism on cultural issues. Only when it becomes a big-tent party that straddles religious and ethnic lines, say Levitsky and Ziblatt, can the Republican Party resume its function as the center-right tentpole of American democracy.
GOP 2020 Gains With Minority Voters
Although Levitsky and Ziblatt decry what they see as the drift of the GOP toward white ethnonationalist politics, the Republican Party gained support among Black and Latino voters in the 2020 elections over previous cycles.
According to exit polls, Trump gained four percentage points with African Americans, three with Hispanics and Latinos, and five with Asian Americans when we compare his 2016 performance with his 2020 performance. And it had a real impact. Analysis of these results shows that Trump’s improved standing with these voters helped Republicans win close races in Texas, Florida, and North Carolina. This suggests that, contrary to what the authors say, Republicans may already have a path to broadening their coalition without significantly altering their policy agenda.
Levitsky and Ziblatt see the challenges facing the Democratic Party a bit differently. While they do not attribute the slide toward norm-breaking to the Democrats, they do argue that the party has a crucial role to play in rescuing American democracy.
They urge the Democratic Party to use its position as the nation’s center-left party to ameliorate what they see as one of the main drivers of extreme polarization—widening income inequality.
They call on Democrats to reject their traditional support for means-tested benefits, which are targeted to lower-income people but taper off as one’s income level rises. These programs tend to instill in middle-class people a belief that the government is taking their hard-earned money and giving it to the undeserving poor. And since poverty and race are so inextricably intertwined in the U.S., the authors argue that means-tested programs only add fuel to the fire of racial resentment on the part of whites—further driving the radicalization of the GOP.
Instead, they insist, Democrats should embrace universal benefits like childcare, healthcare, and even a universal basic income. Because everyone benefits from this version of the welfare state, it can be supported by a broader political coalition—one that cuts across racial, cultural, and socioeconomic lines.
The Pitfalls of Universal Basic Income
Closely tied to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s proposal to replace targeted, means-tested programs with universal benefits is an idea that has gained steam over the last few years—universal basic income (UBI). In 2020, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang made it his signature issue, and it’s attracted more and more adherents, on both sides of the aisle.
The most radical version of UBI would replace all existing public benefits (such as unemployment, veteran’s benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security) as well as tax benefits (like standard deductions, personal exemptions, and child and family allowances) with a regular, universal cash payment for everyone. Unfortunately, contrary to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s hopes for a more universal benefit system, studies show that replacing the existing means-tested welfare state with UBI would actually increase the number of people living in poverty. This would be especially true for people over 65—especially the poorest seniors, who already receive far more from benefits like Social Security and Medicare than they would from UBI.
Ultimately, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that it will take committed citizens, not a single political leader or party, to renew American democracy. Democracy is a team sport and shared enterprise in which all participate together. Society can make the collective choice to destroy democracy—or enable it to thrive in a new, multiracial, multicultural society.
In the authors’ analysis, governing norms like mutual toleration and institutional forbearance were stronger in an earlier age of American politics—but only when the nation’s white majority enjoyed the exclusive privilege of making political decisions. Although that era of explicit white political dominance is over, the move toward greater racial equity also prompted a backlash that destroyed those norms.
The key now is to move American politics to a place where it both embodies strong democratic norms and guarantees effective political representation for all members of today’s diverse society. Only then will American democracy be on truly solid ground.
(Shortform note: Critics have argued that the norms Levitsky and Ziblatt celebrate are not tenable in a truly diverse society. Therefore, a return to them won’t guarantee a truly multiracial democracy. We explore this argument in the next chapter.)
Having analyzed and absorbed Levitsky and Ziblatt’s ideas about democratic decline and what they perceive as the threats to U.S. democracy, it’s worth discussing the long-term impact of How Democracies Die—as well as some of the pushback the book has subsequently received, the analytical gaps in the authors’ approach, and how they’ve updated their thinking on these issues since the book’s publication in 2018.
How Democracies Die was a highly influential piece of scholarship upon its initial publication in 2018. One lasting impact of the book was the elevation of the concept of democratic norms to the forefront of the national discourse. This was an era in which President Donald Trump appeared to many to be a serial violator of traditional patterns of conduct for someone in high office—from his famously extemporaneous and undisciplined speaking style to his practice of government-by-tweet to his delight in public name-calling of his enemies to his penchant for conspiracy theories.
These behaviors, while not illegal, nonetheless appeared to many to be serious breaches of proper decorum in a healthy democratic society. How Democracies Die, through its detailed study of democratic norms, helped to define why Trump’s presidency seemed so threatening to so many.
In the book, Levitsky and Ziblatt place the blame for what they see as America’s faltering democracy and shredding of democratic norms at the feet of the Republican Party—which they characterize as being in thrall to white nationalist identity politics. In their analysis, a GOP that only appeals to the nation’s proportionally diminishing white population will remain a clear and present danger to democracy.
But Levitsky and Ziblatt’s analysis does not account for some of the democratic deficiencies embedded in America’s constitutional structure itself. These existed long before the authors argue that the GOP began its drift toward white identity politics in the 1960s.
For example, the U.S. Constitution, ratified in the 18th century, awards each state two senators, regardless of population. This immediately conferred an advantage on smaller states, giving them disproportional representation in the upper chamber relative to their actual number of voters.
Some political observers have argued that the Senate itself, by virtue of this unrepresentative composition, undermines democratic norms. At the time of the Constitution’s adoption, the largest state, Virginia, had a population roughly nine times greater than that of the smallest state, Georgia. Today, the most populous state, California, has a population approximately 70 times that of the smallest state, Wyoming. Put another way, Wyoming voters have 70 times the voting power of Californians.
Some observers fear that the Senate’s undemocratic character will only grow worse. If current population trends continue and the institution is not reformed, 2040 will see 66% of the country represented by a mere 30% of the Senate.
The book’s success in highlighting the importance of democratic norms also helped spawn a backlash against what critics called “normcore politics”—the belief that Trump represented a unique and unprecedented threat to American democracy and that what was needed was a restoration of the country’s tarnished democratic code of conduct.
These critics argued that a return to pre-Trump democratic norms was not possible or even desirable, since (as Levitsky and Ziblatt do acknowledge) those norms only existed in a context of relatively non-polarized and non-ideological parties and the large-scale political disenfranchisement of the nation’s Black population. Instead, these critics argued that the American political system needed to tear down the vestiges of many of its old norms and create new ones to shift the country more closely toward a true multiracial democracy.
Since the publication of How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt appear to have accepted this analysis and recommended their own set of major structural reforms to the American political system. In a joint New York Times op-ed published in October 2020, they called for:
They argue that these structural reforms will restore majoritarian rule in the US. They also contend that they will render the Republican Party’s strategy of appealing solely to its white base electorally untenable—forcing it to abandon its norm-breaking behavior and truly compete for the votes of all Americans.
Explore the main takeaways from How Democracies Die.
Why are written constitutions insufficient protection against authoritarianism?
What strengths do you think unwritten democratic norms have that written laws and constitutions lack?
Why does extreme partisan polarization tend to lead to the erosion of norms and the destruction of democracy? What might some solutions be to mitigate polarization?
What actions can you as an individual take to safeguard democracy?