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How Democracies Die: A Book Review

May 5, 2024May 5, 2024 bklinger

With America staring down the barrel of a possible second Trump term, it is a good time to reevaluate assumptions about how robust our democracy is. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two political scientists at Harvard, addressed this question in their 2018 book, How Democracies Die. 

Some Patterns

Though the general sweep of the last two hundred years of history has been from autocracy to democracy, quite a few democracies have been taken over (at least temporarily) by dictators, including Italy (1922), Germany (1933), Chile (1973), Peru (1992), Russia (arguably by 2003), and Venezuela (approximately 2006).  Some of those democratic deaths occurred through nominally legal means. For instance, Germany passed laws giving Hitler practically unlimited powers. 

Levitsky and Ziblatt list four warning signs (Chapter 1) to “help us know an authoritarian when we see one”:

1. Rejects democratic rules, either nominally or in practice
2. Denies the legitimacy of opponents
3. Tolerates or encourages violence
4. Threatens the civil liberties of opponents and the media

They point out (Chapter 3) that “Trump, even before his inauguration, tested positive on all four measures on our litmus test for autocrats.”

The fact that Trump did not succeed in turning dictator should not give too much comfort. Hitler’s seizure of absolute power occurred quickly, but other “elected dictators” like Chavez (Venezuela), Fujimori (Peru), and Putin (Russia), and “mildly authoritarian” leaders like Orban (Hungary) and Kaczynski (Poland) did not make dramatic moves against democracy until after they had been in office for a while.

Parties Must Enforce Guardrails of Democracy

How is it that a democratic system can allow a dictatorship to form? How Democracies Die describes several strands that enable dictatorship.  One is the fact that it is difficult – or perhaps impossible – to write laws which cannot be abused.  Laws that allow the president to have special powers during an emergency may be intended to deal with invasion or insurrection, but can then be invoked on bogus grounds, such as in 1972 when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines.  A web of customs, which the authors refer to as “guardrails of democracy” restrain politicians from taking actions that are legal but dangerous. 

An example of a guardrail that has held so far: The US Constitution does not specify how many judges sit on the Supreme Court, so in theory a president whose party has a majority in the Senate could add to the court if the current members are thwarting them.  In practice however, this has not been done since 1869. “Packing the Court” in this way is widely seen as illegitimate and invites subsequent presidents from the other party to also pack the court, potentially eroding the Court’s independence and standing.  When Franklin Roosevelt considered packing the court in order to protect New Deal legislation, even members of his own party resisted, and Roosevelt backed down. 

Often countries that succumbed to dictators, including Germany and Italy, did so because mainstream parties elevated an outsider like Hitler or Mussolini who inspired fanatical enthusiasm in a relatively narrow segment of the population.  The book reviews these and similar cases, as well as cases such as Belgium in 1936 or Austria in 2016 in which parties sympathetic to an authoritarian party’s policy goals rejected the authoritarian in order to preserve democracy.

What differentiates the circumstances in which a mainstream party rejects a potential dictator from those in which it embraces him?  Levitsky and Ziblatt, like others, point to the degree of polarization in society. In 1933, German conservatives and communists saw themselves as enemies, not colleagues.  Several societies that allowed dictatorship were also undergoing extreme stress.  For Germany in 1933 it was the Great Depression.  For Peru in the 1990s it was a radical, fanatical, and bloodthirsty rebellion, by a leftwing group called Shining Path. 

The United States developed a strong tradition of collegiality between the two parties during the 20^th century. This attitude did not exist in the early years of the Republic, and broke down catastrophically in the decade leading up to the Civil War.  The authors point out that part of the peace between Democrats and Republicans came out of a deal with the devil: Republicans ended Reconstruction and the US allowed Southern Democrats to disenfranchise virtually their entire African American population from the 1870s till the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  Thus conflict between the parties largely stayed away from a deep division in the American psyche. Also, both parties were not ideologically very distinct – there were progressives and reactionaries in both parties. Conflict between parties was inhibited because party unity, geographic unity, and ideological unity did not always align.

America Has Been Removing Guardrails

Much of How Do Democracies Die is actually about the growing polarization in America rather than a comparison of various democratic failures.  The authors see Republican willingness to go along with the impeachment of Richard Nixon as a prime example of allegiance to institutions over party.  Like many other observers, they also lay most of the blame for increased polarization at the feet of the Right, notably New Gingerich, AM talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party, all of which portrayed Democrats as an existential threat by evil extremists “who hate America.” The Democrats that Republicans attacked were middle-of-the-road politicians like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Democrats, in turn, reacted to the Republicans with their own assaults on political customs.

At a deeper level, why were Gingerich and others successful in portraying Democrats as the enemy? The authors point to familiar causes, including Democrats losing Southern White voters by strongly backing civil rights laws, social dislocation from increased immigration, and economic stagnation for much of the population.  Many more books will undoubtedly be written about this question, assuming that we still have freedom of the press after this year.

America’s politics have gotten much worse since the book was written. When Trump was in office, his more radical ideas were either largely performative or were blocked by his own Republican allies and staff.  When Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, he was no longer playing a strongman, he was trying to be one.  Since then, a majority of Republican voters continue to back him, perhaps because they are so hostile to Democrats that they actively welcome a new dictatorship. Even some prominent Republicans who harshly criticized Trump’s attempted coup, including former Senate leader Mitch McConnell, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, are now endorsing the coup leader.

At least Trump has been refused endorsements from ex-military from his administration, including Secretaries of Defense Mike Esper and James Mattis, chief of staff John Kelly, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. It’s hard to read this book and not see that democracy hangs in the balance in America in 2024.

I recommend How Democracies Die because it summarizes episodes of dictators suppressing democracy in a way that points out similarities to and differences from our current situation.  I liked it better than another book I am currently reading, Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2021), which has more description and very little analysis.

[Cover photo: Jar Jar Binks in Galactic Senate, where he proposed giving emergency powers to Chancellor Palpatine, thus enabling him to become Emperor.]