HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE
By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
312 pp. Crown. $26.
Seize the military. Bombard the presidential palace. Topple the sitting leader. Take over the media. This is how we think of authoritarian regimes beginning. Yet democracy, to paraphrase The Washington Post, often dies in the light, as Levitsky and Ziblatt, professors of government at Harvard, write in their comprehensive, enlightening and terrifyingly timely new book. “Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders,” the authors say.
Levitsky and Ziblatt lay out a four-part test for identifying authoritarian leaders: rejecting democratic institutions, denying the legitimacy of political opponents, tolerating or encouraging violence and curtailing civil liberties. “With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century,” they note. “Donald Trump met all of them.”
Yet the authors show that he wasn’t the first in his party to shatter democratic norms. They highlight Newt Gingrich’s moves to impeach Bill Clinton and Mitch McConnell’s blocking of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. And they worry that even if Trump fails, what “was once considered unthinkable in American politics is becoming thinkable.”
For “a possible glimpse into America’s future,” Levitsky and Ziblatt point to North Carolina, where the Republican legislature has passed laws to curtail the voting power of African-Americans, ruthlessly gerrymandered the state and undermined the independence of the judiciary. What the authors call “democracy without solid guardrails” could also be called Authoritarianism 2.0.
AGAINST ELECTIONS
The Case for Democracy
By David Van Reybrouck
Translated by Liz Waters
200 pp. Seven Stories Press. Paper, $15.95.
Democracy is experiencing a “crisis of legitimacy,” writes Van Reybrouck, a Belgian cultural historian, who cites declining voter turnout, higher volatility in voter support and fewer people identifying with political parties. This is the fault not of politicians or the structure of the electoral system, but of elections themselves, Van Reybrouck says. “We have all become electoral fundamentalists, despising those elected but venerating elections.”
