David Remnick: For months, years, even Democrats and even some Republicans have worried about the day after the election. Donald Trump gave no sign that he would ever accept a loss so we spent time worrying about the security of our elections, we worried about state officials who had intervened to skew the result, about a Republican Congress refusing to certify the result. Above all, we worried about another January 6th or worse. Statements from Trump like in four years, it'll be fixed and you won't have to vote again. That was concerning to say the least. So was his repeated threat to punish his political opponents and on and on but in the end, the election was peaceful and apparently fair and Donald Trump won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College.

This is not the first time in the history of the world that a democracy has brought an anti-democratic leader to power. As we try to see where America is going now, I called up two keen observers of our politics, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. They're both political scientists and they co-wrote the books How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority.

Your book How Democracies Die was published in 2018, which is in the teeth of the first Trump administration but our troubles didn't start with Donald Trump. How would you assess the condition of our democracy now? I assume you're telling us that it's in considerably worse shape than when you published your book How Democracies Die in 2018.

Steven Levitsky: It is in considerably worse shape. Just about every international organization that measures the level of democracy annually across countries shows a pretty significant decline. The level of democracy in the United States, we're still a democracy, but Freedom House now scores the United States as less democratic than Argentina.

That's because in Argentina, there are not widespread efforts to limit access to the ballot, there are not violent threats against prosecutors, election workers, elected officials, judges, and there had not been in recent years or recent decades, efforts by an incumbent President to overturn an election.

We've already experienced a degree of democratic backsliding. I think the biggest change, though, looking back to 2018, when we published How Democracies Die, and the most concerning change is the transformation of the Republican Party. When we wrote How Democracies Die, Donald Trump had been nominated, he'd been elected but there was a large mainstream faction of the Republican Party, that we expected would be both able and willing to constrain Trump.

That faction disappeared very quickly. Trump has thorough control over the Republican Party. It's been clear now for several years that any effort to oppose Trump within the Republican Party is political suicide, is a career killer because no single leader can kill a democracy on their own or even do great damage to a democracy on their own but with a political party, and with a political party that controls both House of Congress and many state governments, one can do a lot of damage.

And so Trump plus a Republican Party willing to act in a disciplined way on his behalf, I think is not only a great threat to democracy but a much greater threat than we faced when we published How Democracies Die.

David Remnick: Daniel, your recent book is called Tyranny of the Minority. One of the things that that title conveys is the idea that the Electoral College often delivers a minority leader to the President. We know that, but that didn't happen this time. A lot of our listeners are probably thinking, well, the Republicans won fair and square. What's the problem here?

Daniel Ziblatt: Yes, it's true. In a democracy, when voters are dissatisfied, in some ways, the genius of democracy is that voters can vote the incumbent out of office. In every democracy in the world, the way this happens is every Presidential democracy in the world, whoever gets the most votes wins. Of course, we don't have that.

As you mentioned, we have an Electoral College and so that adds up to some distortions in our political systems. And I think in many ways the thesis of the book is the reason we are where we are in the last five years is because of our institutions.

David Remnick: What's wrong with our institutions? If somebody just won a majority both in the Electoral College and the popular vote, we'll get to what Donald Trump himself pretends for democracy but what's wrong with our institutions?

Daniel Ziblatt: We have a set of institutions that favor sparsely populated territories for good or for ill. We argue that in ways that have proven to be anti-democratic. That led, for example, in 2016 to the election of a President who won fewer votes and control of the Senate by the party that won fewer votes for the Senate.

That President and that Senate went on to appoint and confirm three Supreme Court justices, dramatically changing the face of the Supreme Court. If we were like other democracies and majority rule were used to determine who held public office, who won and lost public office, we would have a 6-3 liberal majority on the Supreme Court.

If we had a popular majority determining who controls the Senate, some key legislation, including voting rights legislation, would've passed during the Biden administration. Our counter-majoritarian institutions badly distorted our politics in the eight years leading up to it in a way that I think it's pretty safe to argue that we wouldn't have Trump today were it not for those institutions.

David Remnick: That's inscribed in our system, period. Am I correct? I mean, it's not just the past eight years. The Senate is essentially in a minoritarian institution in all the ways you've described but nevertheless, Donald Trump won the popular vote. What were Trump's voters voting for, in your view, Daniel?

Daniel Ziblatt: Well, again, in democracy, this is how it's supposed to work. Since COVID hit, we've just been looking at some numbers and others have been reporting on this as well, that incumbents around the world have performed very badly everywhere in the world since 2019, 2020, in all Western democracies, nearly every incumbent has been thrown out of power at election time.

Exactly what's behind that? There's a lot of things behind it, COVID, inflation. Everywhere, voters are dissatisfied with the status quo and again, this is how a democracy is supposed to work. People, when they're not happy, should vote for the incumbent out of power and that's absolutely fine. Again, that's actually a good thing in many ways.

David Remnick: But Steven, one of the things that Kamala Harris put at the very forefront of her campaign was not only the character of Donald Trump, but that this was a campaign for the preservation of democracy and democratic and liberal democratic institutions.

Steven Levitsky: Right, but we cannot depend on-- it's not up to voters to defend a democracy. That's asking far, far too much of voters to cast their ballot on the basis of some set of abstract principles or procedures. Voters nowhere in the world, with a tiny handful of exceptions of electorates just after authoritarian rule.

South Africa in the '90s, Chile in the '90s, Spain in the '70s, with the exception of a handful of cases, voters never ever prioritize in any society, in any culture, prioritize democracy over all else. Individual voters worry about much more mundane things, as is their right. It is up to elites and institutions to protect democracy, not voters.

Daniel Ziblatt: Let me just add here that, again, people are dissatisfied. They vote. The issue is not why do voters vote for Donald Trump. The issue is why was the only alternative where people could express their anger and dissatisfaction, somebody who represents a threat to democracy? That's the real question.

David Remnick: How do you answer it?

Daniel Ziblatt: Well, it's a function of a whole bunch of things. I think in many ways, our institutions have contributed to it. As we said at the beginning, he wouldn't have won in 2016 if it weren't for our electoral college. He wouldn't have probably run for reelection again without that potential pathway but I think even behind that, there's a deeper set of cultural changes that have wracked the Western world.

Demographic changes, economic changes that have given rise to around 30 to 35% of most national electorates voting for often radical right populist parties. In a two-party system like the one we have, that voting base, which is the core base of the MAGA base, 35% of the electorate roughly, can capture one of our two parties. And that puts our democracy more so than any other Western advanced old democracy at greater risk.

David Remnick: Reading both of your books, it seems to me that what's required, what you're demanding, and what you're saying is the path to a better democracy, a healthier democracy, a true democracy requires a rewriting of the Constitution, requires a Constitutional convention and all kinds of amendments. What are the reforms that are necessary and how could they come about?

Steven Levitsky: Some of them could come about without a constitutional reform. We think they're a set of basic electoral reforms that would make it easier for voters to vote. Automatic registration is a simple one. A set of measures to eliminate gerrymandering and facilitate access to the ballot. We argue, although many, many, many of our Democratic party friends would disagree today, we argue that the US democracy would benefit from eliminating the Senate filibuster.

Term limits on the Supreme Court, which is actually something that doesn't have a clear partisan advantage, would facilitate the extreme intergenerational counter-majoritarianism of the Supreme Court. And we advocate for-- this would take a constitutional reform but abolition of the electoral college and replacement with a direct popular vote, and much, much, much more difficult, in fact borderline impossible is restructuring of the US Senate to make it more proportional to the population.

All of these things would make our democratic institutions more responsive to popular majorities without a Constitutional Convention.

David Remnick: Isn't it true though, Daniel, that every time the filibuster comes up as an issue, it happens in a particular political moment and is called for by a particular party? We know what the origins of it are, but it seems so highly politicized that it gets kicked down the road.

Daniel Ziblatt: Yes, and one could say that about all of these proposed institutional reforms that there's always winners and losers and so it makes it really hard to change, which is why our Constitution has only been amended 27 times, including the first 10 amendments and so that's in the nature of it. Other democracies have also faced this. We've faced this in our own history.

We have to step back and remember the US Constitution today isn't as it was at the end of the 18th century. It's been reformed, including at the beginning of the 20th century, the direct election of US Senators, the enfranchisement of women. These are things that were very difficult, there were opponents, there were losers and that's the nature of politics is to try to build coalitions.

It's obviously not happening anytime soon in the next four years, certainly but I think the broader point is that what we love about our Constitution, many of the things we love about our Constitution, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, are things that came about through constitutional reform and to treat our Constitution as if it's this frozen document that's just simply unchangeable. Our political system more broadly. I mean, I think Steve's point is important here, that there are features of our political system that can be made more democratic without changing the Constitution. We should be striving to do that because if we don't do that, we're going to continue to find ourselves in this ongoing crisis.

And I think, again, we're the only advanced, old rich democracy that has faced the level of democratic backsliding that we've experienced and we're also the only democracy in the world with all of these institutions and so we need to kind of step back and say, okay, well, you know, what has gone wrong here? And if we don't ask those hard questions, we're going to continue to be in this roiling crisis.

David Remnick: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, political scientists who teach government at Harvard University. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. We're flooded right now with hot takes about why Kamala Harris lost the election.

Joe Biden stayed too long, too much inflation, the Democrats are too far to the left, too much in the center because of "Woke". It's Biden's fault. It's Tim Waltz's fault. Liz Cheney told me it was Mitch McConnell's fault for not standing up to Trump when he could have. My guests today argue that what's really ailing democracy runs much deeper.

Faith in our system of government is dangerously low across the political spectrum And the United States is not alone in electing a leader who expresses real contempt for democracy. I'll continue my conversation with political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Steven, you mentioned the hardening, as it were, of the Republican Party into a kind of MAGA institution and one that really is built around one person.

What does that portend for the months to come in the first year of Donald Trump's administration and how will it affect democracy itself?

Steven Levitsky: Well, I think that's one of the big questions that we are about to see. In some ways, it's easier to remain united behind a single figure when you're out of power and you're not making many decisions of consequence. The Trump administration is about to be making a whole slew of decisions of great consequence, whether it's foreign policy decisions regarding Ukraine or how to move on immigration, how to treat unions, just how much to favor billionaires.

The coalition that Trump assembled for the 2024 election, which was an opposition coalition and in some respects a populist coalition, they're not all going to agree on these policies and so we'll see just how much of a hold Trump has on his party and I don't think we can know but again, the more disciplined the party is, and there's pretty good evidence in recent years that there was a great cost.

Republicans now know that there's a great cost to opposing Trump and particularly on things that he cares about. The consequence for democracy is Trump is going to move against democracy. He's not going to end it, at least not quickly. He's not going to cancel the 2028 elections. He's probably not going to lock up Biden and Harris, but I think I'm pretty confident in saying that he is going to weaken the civil service and pack key state agencies like Justice Department with loyalists and he will try to use key government agencies beginning with the Justice Department as weapons against his rivals.

We need to see how far the Republican Party will-- now, to some extent, that doesn't have to go through Congress so he doesn't even need a lot of Republican cooperation to do that but the great danger is that the Republican Party will close ranks behind some fairly authoritarian, fairly abusive behavior in this government, much more so even than in 2017- '18.

David Remnick: I guess, Steven, what would be some of the indicators that democracy is being whacked away at in real time? What would signal to you as hugely dangerous moments?

Steven Levitsky: Dangerous moments would include, and this is not always so easy to observe, but the use of government policy and government agencies to change the behavior of key societal actors, whether it's business people who fund civil society, business people who fund opposition parties, whether maybe it's universities, politicians, the media, key media actors, whether we see the use of the FCC, the FTC, the IRS, the Justice Department, threats from government agencies, whether that begins to change the behavior of, again, media, business, universities, societal actors, who should be checking government power.

For example, I mean, I don't know what was going on exactly in Jeff Bezos' mind in the weeks prior to the election.

David Remnick: You're talking here about the Washington Post. Bezos refusing to publish its endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Steven Levitsky: That sort of hedging behavior in which potentially wealthy, independent, powerful societal actors change their behavior in anticipation of potential either rewards or punishments doled out by the government. That's the kind of thing we should be watching for because it's not going to be--

David Remnick: It's what Timothy Snyder calls obedience in advance.

Steven Levitsky: Absolutely. Or now that Trump is in power, we may see both more of that and actual efforts to punish. One thing to look at early on is whether there will be an effort to use a few exemplary cases, a few exemplary punishments. Maybe going after Harvard, maybe going after the New York Times, maybe going after one or two key funders of the Democratic Party and punishing them.

Using the law or government policy to punish them, make them hurt. That will, if it's done successfully, send a message to many, many other citizens, other businesses, other universities, other media.

David Remnick: I couldn't agree more. Living in Russia in the late '80s and early '90s, you saw this flowering of kind of proto-democratic institutions, but they were very shallow and they were much more easily obliterated and one of the shrewd aspects of Putin's rule, once he got to power in 2000, was that he didn't. It wasn't like Stalin era, where you arrest everybody and fill a gigantic gulag system filled with tens of millions of prisoners.

He would very publicly make an example of this businessman or that journalist, whether through violence or imprisonment and everybody knew what that signaled and people fell into line. The history of dissidents is very rare.

Steven Levitsky: Right. It'll be more subtle in the United States. I hope there won't be assassinations or the kind of long term jailing that we saw with Khodorkovsky in Russia.

David Remnick: You think it'll be tax audits?

Steven Levitsky: It'll be tax audits. It'll be regulatory moves that can really affect the bottom line of CEOs.

David Remnick: I grow increasingly skeptical of polls, as I'm sure you do but polls still show that the great majority of American people think that democracy is preferable over dictatorship. Okay, that's a starting point but an increasing number of younger people are suspicious of democracy and support for democracy on a generational basis seems at least partially in question.

At the same time, the leaders of Russia and China are both convinced that democracy is not only really a hypocrisy, but also an inferior system for modern economies and for ruling modern populations. Is democracy itself as an idea in this country under threat?

Daniel Ziblatt: The evidence runs counter to what those who say the authoritarianism has an advantage. I mean, if you on average, really the most skeptical view would say there's no difference, authoritarianism and democracy in terms of economic growth and so on but people debate this, scholars debate this, looking at the evidence.

The idea that there's some clear cut advantage for authoritarian systems is just really-- there's no evidence for that. One can point to Singapore, but for every Singapore you can think of an authoritarian country that's really a basket case. I would make the broader point that democracies are the only form of government in the world where you can throw out a bad leader peacefully.

That's a great strength and democracies are better than any other kind of political system in the world, protecting the basic civil liberties and civil rights, freedom of press, freedom of association, freedom of expression that we all value so much. And so as we can point to the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of democracy, but we have to remember that democracies deliver on these two things that are essential that no other system in the world does.

Steven Levitsky: If I could say one other thing, this is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that democracy as a system, as a model, as an idea is challenged. For most of history, there have been significant challenges to democracy and alternative regimes that have posited that have pitched themselves and been believed to be preferable to democracy, better performers.

Whether it was the left enamored with the early Soviet Union, or people on the right enamored with early fascism, or my lefty friends in Latin America enamored with the Cuban model in the 1960s, and now increasingly China or even Hungary or El Salvador. There have been very few times in history where there haven't been alternatives championed as solving problems better.

As Daniel pointed out, in the long run, that turns out not to be true but democracy and supporters of democracy always have to be engaged in this challenge. We have to get up every day of every year and defend democracy, improve democracy, and ensure that it is delivering for people. I think a lot of us were spoiled by in particular the 1990s with the collapse of communism.

A lot of us grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s, when democracy really seemed to be the only game in town. We spoke of the end of history and it seemed like all other alternatives were dead and buried, but if you take a couple steps back in history, that's really never been the case.

David Remnick: That was a delusion, a triumphalist delusion.

Daniel Ziblatt: Think about this election that we've just experienced. Again, at one level it's a sign of democracy working where people are dissatisfied with the incumbent, they then throw the incumbent out. That's a self happy self correcting logic that authoritarian systems don't have. The problem is that that system relies on, that happy self-correcting logic relies on the players in the game wanting the game to continue.

That's the threat that I think some democracies, including the United States, face today is that you have players in that game who want to distort and interrupt that self correcting logic.

David Remnick: A lot of people, and I don't mean just in the media or academia or on the left, I mean in the national security system throughout the government, not only started talking about Trump as a bully or a neo-authoritarian, but the F word began to enter the mainstream really in the last few months of the campaign, fascism.

Nevertheless, a majority of the electorate voted for Donald Trump. It seems that this conversation was viewed by all too many people either dismissed out of hand or viewed as hysteria. Daniel?

Daniel Ziblatt: Yes, well, look, we are analysts of the world, we're not campaign consultants. I think it's up to campaign consultants to figure out what's the best message to win on. Speaking for Steven--

David Remnick: Was it an inaccurate descriptor?

Daniel Ziblatt: What? To call Trump a fascist, you're saying?

David Remnick: Yes.

Daniel Ziblatt: Well, it depends on your definition of fascism. I follow the wonderful work of Paxton and his great book on fascism.

David Remnick: Anatomy of Fascism. Robert Paxton's book.

Daniel Ziblatt: Yes, and there's certain family resemblances to be sure, but I tend not to use that word because it describes a particular historical period and one key element I think has been missing so far from Paxton's definition, which is a agenda of national aggrandizement and conquest and an unwillingness to accept national boundaries.

That's one area where there is a big difference but there are family resemblances. The casual use of violence, the sense of national humiliation and an effort to compensate for that. This is all in Paxton's definition. There are family resemblances, but I think describing all of the abuses in very concrete terms is a much more effective way of understanding-- or the threats of abuses are a much more effective way of understanding the problem.

Steven Levitsky: Fascism is not my F word of choice, but authoritarian fits pretty nicely. Now, I'm not saying voters don't really-- Again, voters don't and shouldn't be expected to vote based on abstract regime categories but as analysts, I think the term authoritarian fits Donald Trump very well. By almost all accounts, the cardinal rule of democratic behavior is accepting the results of elections.

If a candidate or party does not unambiguously accept results of elections, win or lose, you're not playing the democratic game. If there's a second cardinal rule of democracy, it's that you must under all circumstances avoid violence, eschew and unambiguously refrain from violence. Donald Trump has both consistently refused to accept the results of adverse elections and consistently flirted with, condoned, and sometimes encouraged political violence.

Although I don't use that particular F word, I'm very confident calling him an authoritarian figure.

David Remnick: Forgive me from reading for your book, but here you are in page 11, end of the introduction. Why are the threats to American democracy emerging now in the early 21st century? After all, the Constitution is centuries old. Understanding how we got here is a principal task of this book.

The more urgent question, however, is how to get out. One thing is clear. Our institutions will not save our democracy. We will have to save it ourselves. And so, Daniel, the question is how?

Daniel Ziblatt: Well, as Steve said, we don't really necessarily expect voters to defend democracy every-- All voters to do this. Voters--

David Remnick: Okay, so not our voters, not our institutions, then who?

Daniel Ziblatt: No, I mean, to be clear, the institutions, we do need better institutions but the way our institutions change is if voters demand this. The reason voters will demand changes to our politics and the reason voters could turn away from Trump in the next four years is if you see egregious behavior. Policy with the economy is harmed through protectionism, through the rounding up of illegal migrants and some legal migrants.

This potentially will pose a massive set of massive pain on American voters and American voters won't tolerate it. That's my expectation and so they will vote for something different. It's a long run project, I guess, is the other point. It's not going to happen in the next two years, it's not going to happen in the next four years, but the way our democracy has improved over time-- this isn't a fantasy, this has happened.

The way our democracy has improved over time is that voters demand changes to such a degree that politicians have to respond to it and to make our institutions reflect what voters want, which, as you said earlier, is a broad commitment to pluralistic democracy.

David Remnick: The book is Tyranny of the Minority. Daniel and Steven, I'm sure we'll be talking again in the future. Thanks so much.

Steven Levitsky: Thanks for having us.

Daniel Ziblatt: Thank you.

David Remnick: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are professors of government at Harvard. Their books are How Democracies Die, from 2018 and from last year, Tyranny of the Minority.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.