PDF Summary:How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
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The election of Donald Trump has sparked a great deal of discussion about the fate of American democracy. How Democracies Die explores some key questions that have become paramount in the Trump era. Does the election of a figure like Trump—an inexperienced outsider with obvious authoritarian instincts—suggest that democracy in the US is backsliding? Are we doomed to suffer the fate of other 21st-century democracies, like Hungary, Venezuela, and Turkey, where true democracy ceased to exist? By what processes was democracy killed in those and other countries—and how might we prevent it here?
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Media Dominance
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.
Constrained by Nomination Rules
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.
Standing With Trump Vs. Standing for Democracy
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 Demise of Big-Tent Parties
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.
Identity Politics and Asymmetric Polarization
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.
Trump vs. Democratic Norms
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.
Example #1: Loyalty Pledges
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.
Example #2: Voter Suppression
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).
Saving American Democracy
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.
What Republicans Can Do
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.
What Democrats Can Do
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.
Democracy: A Shared Enterprise
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.
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PDF Summary Shortform Introduction
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- Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (2006)
- Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (2010)
- The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (2011)
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...
PDF Summary Chapter 5: The Role of Norms
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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...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: American Political Norms
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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...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 1: Political Gatekeepers
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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...
PDF Summary Chapter 4: Tactics for Dismantling Democracy
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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...
PDF Summary Chapters 2-3: The Rise and Fall of American Parties
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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...
PDF Summary Chapter 7: The Downfall of American Norms
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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.
The Clinton Impeachment
Levitsky and Ziblatt cite the 1998 party-line impeachment of Bill Clinton—on...
PDF Summary Chapter 8: Trump vs. Democratic Norms
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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.
Capturing the Referees: Loyalty Pledges
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that Trump attempted to capture the referees of the American political system—law enforcement officials,...
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PDF Summary Chapter 9: Saving American Democracy
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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.
Authoritarian Takeover
The next scenario presented by Levitsky and Ziblatt is what...
PDF Summary Shortform Commentary
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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...