Books to Ponder: "How Democracies Die"

Five thoughts on democracy, authoritarianism, and politics in America

As I continue mixing in new types of posts at “The Riel World,” here is another one I plan to make part of the rotation here: “Books That Made Me Think.” I’m not a book reviewer and I don’t particularly want to get into that role, but I’m trying out a way of writing about books that works for me.

I’m starting with this: What are five thoughts I have about a book? Something I learned? An intriguing comment by the author? A new way of thinking about an issue?

Today’s book is about a political theme, but in the future I’ll try alternating between politics and other topics. I expect this will all be a work in progress, so we’ll see how it goes.

To kick it off today, here is How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

Today’s book: “How Democracies Die”

This is certainly a topic that’s relevant to current politics — and not just in the United States. What makes this book more intriguing, though, is that it was published seven years ago, in 2018. So it looks at threats to democracy from the perspective of writers who hadn’t yet seen January 6th or either of the past two U.S. presidential campaigns.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are scholars of democracy and they write with history in mind, using examples that range from 1930s Europe to the American South after Reconstruction to present day Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela. They relate these lessons to the contemporary situation in the U.S.

The lessons are partly, but not entirely, about Donald Trump — because, remember, this was published early in his first presidency. So the authors spend time not just on Trump but also on various other issues that had been weakening democracy for several decades prior to the 2010s. They also consider historical analogues for all of it.

Here are five thoughts from the book.

1. Democracies today don’t die from coups. They’re more often killed from within, by elected leaders.

This, honestly, is the most basic and yet most frightening thought to come from the book. Democracies that wither and fall apart these days aren’t usually toppled by revolutionaries with guns or by military leaders; they’re killed by the very individuals who were elected to lead. It happens piece by piece, in “barely visible steps,” until voters wake up one day and realize their government no longer belongs to them.

Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance … Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening … Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.

The authors cite numerous examples of how this has happened in various other countries. The one thing that connects each example is that the authoritarian first came to power through an election. And, crazily enough, other political leaders knew the would-be authoritarians were potentially dangerous but declined to stop them, sometimes out of fear but more often because they naively thought the autocrat could be constrained.

Not only were they all outsiders with a flair for capturing public attention, but each of them rose to power because establishment politicians overlooked the warning signs … The abdication of political responsibility by existing leaders often marks a nation’s first step toward authoritarianism.

Levitsky and Ziblatt make clear that even the Constitution can’t prevent a country like the U.S. from sliding into autocracy if political leaders don’t defend it. The Constitution is words on a piece of paper — its strength is derived solely from a commitment to upholding democratic norms. So if the political parties won’t (or can’t) stand up to a would-be authoritarian, the Constitution is fairly worthless.

2. U.S. democratic traditions have been slowly unraveling for years now.

The argument most people make when suggesting there is no particular danger of authoritarianism in America is that we have a system of checks and balances that has survived numerous threats over more than two centuries, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Levitsky and Ziblatt put it this way:

Historically, our system of checks and balances has worked pretty well — but not, or not entirely, because of the constitutional system designed by the founders. Democracies work best — and survive longer — when constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms…

Today, however, the guardrails of American democracy are weakening. The erosion of our democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s … Donald Trump may have accelerated this process, but he didn’t cause it …

The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization — one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture … And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracies.

The book goes through a litany of events that contributed to this polarization, but essentially it comes down to the reality that, for a democracy to function, political parties need to “accept one another as legitimate rivals,” and they need to resist “the temptation to use their temporary control of institutions to maximum partisan advantage.” Those two norms have been weakening for decades.

The authors also issue a warning about “political deviance — the violation of unwritten rules of civility, of respect for the press, of not lying.” While they acknowledge that Trump didn’t start the country down this road, they note that his “routine use of personal insult, bullying, lying, and cheating has, inevitably, helped to normalize such practices.”

In the face of widespread deviance, we become overwhelmed — and then desensitized. We grow accustomed to what we previously thought to be scandalous.

Furthermore, Trump’s deviance has been tolerated by the Republican Party … Unwilling to pay the political price of breaking with their own president, Republicans find themselves with little alternative but to constantly redefine what is and isn’t tolerable.

This will have terrible consequences for our democracy.

Republicans find themselves with little alternative but to constantly redefine what is and isn’t tolerable. Remember, this was written more than seven years ago. Before an effort to overturn an election. Before threats to jail political opponents, bully media outlets, disregard laws, or ignore judicial rulings. I’d say things are still being redefined, and not in ways that are healthy for democracy.

3. Racial polarization has had an even bigger impact on American politics than you might think.

I’ve long been aware that the civil rights movement and the backlash to it had a profound impact on American politics. It was one of the topics I wrote about it in my series, Three Years that Broke American Politics. Still, Levitsky and Ziblatt bring the impact home in a powerful way.

American democracy, they note, worked pretty well from the late 1800s into the 1960s. Prior to that period, the country was gripped by a debate over slavery which led to the Civil War. And ever since the 1960s one of the drivers of polarization in the country has been the growing diversity of American democracy.

You can point to the political realignment that followed the civil rights movement, when racial conservatives in the South fled the Democratic Party; or the birtherism controversy in response to Barack Obama’s election, or today’s disputes over identity politics and DEI, or numerous other topics. In ways big and small, racial and diversity issues have tormented U.S. politics for decades.

But why, then, did democracy suffer less polarization in the period between Reconstruction and the 1960s? The authors argue it’s because southern states, during those decades, successfully blocked Blacks from participating in government. While Blacks could vote in other states (an estimated five million Blacks voted in the 1960 election, for instance), they were shut out of democracy entirely in the South.

This was achieved by an authoritarian movement that dominated this region of the country for nearly a century. After the Civil War, white racial conservatives in the South didn’t want Blacks to be equal partners in government so “they changed the rules — and did away with democracy.” This led to the creation of “authoritarian single-party regimes in every post-Confederate state.”

The result was horrific for Blacks, but it largely took racial issues off the table in terms of national politics.

With racial equality off the agenda, southern Democrats’ fears subsided. Only then did partisan hostility begin to soften … As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party was likely to view the other as an existential threat.

The racial issue then erupted again in 1948 when Democrats put a civil rights plank into the party’s presidential platform. In response, a contingent of southerners walked out of the convention and formed their own party, the Dixiecrats, dedicated to states’ rights.

In the 1960s, Blacks finally gained full access to democracy with passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But the backlash to this success would upend American politics, realign the electorate, and ignite the first sparks of the polarization that has now plagued the country for decades.

It’s remarkable to think about it in these terms, that democracy in the U.S. worked best when it was restricted in large part to participation by whites — and, notably, when racial conservatives weren’t threatened by Black participation. But when Blacks gained a more equal footing, polarization rose.

4. Four signs that can help identify would-be authoritarians.

How do we identify would-be authoritarians? Levitsky and Ziblatt identified four warning signs. They write:

We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

And are there particular types of candidates who are more likely to be authoritarian?

Very often, populist outsiders … Populists tend to deny the legitimacy of established parties, attacking them as undemocratic and even unpatriotic. They tell voters that the existing system is not really a democracy but instead has been hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite. And they promise to bury that elite and return power to ‘the people.’

Here too, the warning signs are based on actual events and political actors in other countries, but it nevertheless sounds eerily familiar to what’s happening in the U.S.

5. Scenarios for America’s future.

The book ends with three scenarios for the future.

• One in which the authoritarian movement fails, leaders “end their flirtation with extremist politics,” and American democracy recovers.

• A second, darker, possibility in which authoritarianism prevails, moves further into white nationalism, starts gerrymandering elections to preserve its rule, and possibly uses violence to deal with a resistance movement.

• Or a third option between those two poles that sees continued polarization between the major parties, the continued crumbling of democratic guardrails, and a “system hovering constantly on the brink of crisis.”

Two of these options are bleak … and bleaker. In order to not fall prey to these scenarios, the authors suggest, the political parties must somehow work together to overcome the current state of polarization. This would require pursuing such goals as a colorblind society, abandoning appeals to white nationalism, reducing inequality, and reforming democratic institutions.

It’s a tall order, and maybe not even possible. But, as they conclude:

Democracy is a shared enterprise. Its fate depends on all of us.

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