Written for War and Peace: International Relations since 1914 (History 162B), UC Berkeley, Spring 2022. A review of How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

The year is 2022 and the tides of authoritarianism continue to swell. The annual Democracy Index, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Group, noted that 2021 continued the downward spiral in democratic values across the globe. The metaphor of democracy being besieged by populist authoritarianism became terribly real this year, as a revanchist Russia invaded a sovereign Ukraine on February 24th. In such a precipitous environment, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s 2018 book How Democracy Dies is an informative and bracing comparative study on the ways and means by which democratic values have been historically eroded and/or subverted in Latin America and Europe, and the context for how such a process can, and indeed already is, occurring in the United States of America. While the authors perform an excellent job in distilling the key lessons from the demise of numerous democracies throughout history, as well as providing a succinct breakdown of the dangers of the contemporary American political climate, their analysis ends up feeling incomplete and unsatisfying for two reasons. One, the authors simply fail to mention, let alone explore indepth, the profound effects of the rise in digital technology and social media on the landscape of democracy. Two, the book never really grapples with some of the big questions inherent in America’s history with democracy - specifically the complex relationship between identity and ideology, and its mediating role in political partisanship.

This essay will be structured in three parts. First, it will outline the book’s main theses — highlighting the nature of democratic decline, examining the ‘litmus test’ to identify a would-be authoritarian leader, and emphasizing the fundamental role of democratic norms in ensuring democracy’s longevity. Second, it will evaluate the strengths of the book’s specific claims regarding the United States in relation to the types of evidence used and the potential for bias emerging from the author’s situated perspective. Finally, the two gaps of the book that render it incomplete will be identified and explored further to provide a more thorough account of the trials democracy faces in our modern world.

The central thesis of How Democracies Die is rooted in the claim that unlike the popular perception of democracies dying in lightning coups orchestrated by military generals, their demise is often at the hands of elected leaders “who subvert the very process that brought them to power”. Elected autocrats coat their actions with a “veneer of democracy” (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.5) despite their eviscerating properties. Thus, what is crucial to preserving democracies, is ensuring such aspiring autocrats never gain a foothold in power to begin with, and upholding strong democratic norms that prevent their actions from causing lasting damage.

The manner in which autocrats get their foothold can be often due to the hubris of political elites. The authors cite several cases - from Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Hugo Chavez - who started as political outsiders and gained power through fateful alliances with inside elites who believed that such invitations to power would enable them to contain their influence as well as use their popularity to bolster their own political agendas. Despite their initial lack of power, less than 2% of the German population were Nazi party members before Hitler was given the rein (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.19), this cast of outsiders rapidly gained influence and used their new-found clout to corrode democratic values, often with devastating consequences. Provocatively, the authors claim that the people holding democratic values is not enough as “It assumes too much of democracy— that the people can shape at will the kind of government they possess” (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.78). Hence, the authors argue that it is crucial for political parties to avoid picking autocrats by acting as “democracy’s gatekeepers” (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.20) and successfully navigate the challenge of the trade-off between “choosing a popular candidate and keeping out demagogues”. (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.41)

How can party leadership ensure they don’t ally themselves with such demagogues? It begins with identification and Levitsky and Ziblatt are armed with a nifty ‘litmus-test’ based on Juan Linz’s 1978 The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes. The test consists of four criteria — a) Rejection of democratic norms, b) Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents, c) Toleration or encouragement of violence, d) Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media. To prevent an assault on democracy, any would-be leader who displays such traits should be held at arm’s length by established political leaders.

When leaders with the above traits do end up seizing power, their primary goal tends to be a consolidation of power. The authors deploy a soccer metaphor to categorize the three kinds of tactics that authoritarians must use to do so “ capture the referees, sideline at least some of the other side’s star players, and rewrite the rules of the game to lock in their advantage”. (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.78)

The final vital part of the book’s thesis is the underscoring of the importance of democratic norms, in particular, the norms of ‘mutual toleration’ and ‘forbearance’. The claim being made is that “Democracies work best — and survive longer — where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms.” (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.8) Mutual toleration is defined as “understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals” while forbearance is understood as “politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives”. (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.8) These norms act as the ‘guardrails of democracy’, and their degradation can lead to a vicious cycle of political action that can threaten the basis of democratic partnership. Hence, no matter how perfect the constitutional design of ‘checks and balances’, an atmosphere of sincere belief in oppositional legitimacy and exercising restraint are crucial in maintaining the robustness of democracy and were the keys to preserving democracy in America.

Understandably, Donald Trump’s 2016 election occupies the spotlight in the book’s treatment of contemporary America. The authors argue that Trump illustrates their account of democracy’s decline perfectly — Trump arrived on the scene as a political outsider, surfed the waves of political support from conservative media re-brands before his emergence as a winning figure caused the rest of the Republican party to buckle in support, and once in office, swiftly moved towards consolidating power and flouting democratic norms. The events of January 6th, 2021, where protestors stormed the U.S Capitol after being goaded by Trump’s false claim that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, all but confirm the book’s argument of Trump’s authoritarian impulses.

Presciently, the authors emphasized that the damage Trump could wrought on American democracy would not necessarily subside even if he was displaced as President. The book ends with a prediction that the “most likely, post-Trump future is one marked by polarization, more departures from unwritten political conventions, and increasingly institutional warfare”. (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.208) The hyper-polarized state of the American politic would be ever-increasingly fuelled by the further collapse of the democratic norms of mutual toleration and forbearance. The authors point out that Trump was simply a symptom, not the cause, of this deterioration in democratic norms, and that the process has its roots in the 1964 Civil Rights Act which heralded the beginning of the end of the possibility of the Democratic and Republican party sharing common ground, as party lines were increasingly hardened along identitarian lines.

This last point is one of the book’s most intriguing, as the authors claim the adoption by the Democratic Party of liberal voting enfranchisement policies in the 60’s, ended up sealing the polarized fate of America’s politic. However, the authors also make note of how the racial disparity policies of the Southern Democrats during the Jim Crow era had clashed with many Republicans desires to expand voting rights to African-Americans. This apparent historical contradiction, of the Democrat and Republican parties switching roles with regards to the empowerment of minority voters and its differential impact on political partisanship remains under-explored.

How Democracy Dies ends on a hopeful note, noting that despite warranted claims of democratic decline worldwide and in America, “claims about a global democratic recession were exaggerated” and that the number of democracies peaked in 2005 and remained steady ever since. (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.205) The author’s optimism now seems misplaced, though of course they had no ability to predict the onslaught on the Covid pandemic that emboldened authoritarians worldwide. Indeed, they note how crises, that the pandemic certainly qualifies as, “facilitate the concentration and, very often, abuse of power” by producing a “rally round the flag effect” (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.93) and that the combination of a“would-be authoritarian and a major crisis can, therefore, be deadly for democracy”. (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p.94)

However, even before the pandemic, one could disagree with the assessment that concerns about democracy were exaggerated. Pippa Norris, the eminent Harvard comparative political scientist, runs counter to Levitsky and Ziblatt and claims that populist authoritarianism has been on the rise for the past two decades. She argues that major recent socio-political events like the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the exit of the UK from the EU are part of a larger pattern where “populist authoritarian leaders—appealing to nationalism and tradition, preaching hostility toward outsiders and elites—had attracted swelling support across Europe and the Americas, winning legislative seats and ministerial offices and gaining government power.” (Norris & Inglehart, 2019) Norris claims that the driving force behind this alarming autocratic flood is a phenomena she terms the ‘authoritarian reflex’. This reflex refers to the “cultural backlash in Western societies against long-term, ongoing social change”. In other words, the shift to increasingly liberal values in these societies have triggered visceral reactions amongst traditionalists who “feel threatened, marginalized, and left behind.” This, in turn, leads to the promotion of strongman leaders campaigning on the promise of a forceful return to what was once the status quo.

Crucially, over the same two decades that Norris claims authoritarianism has surged, the world has witnessed a wide-spread adoption of myriad forms of digital technology. Of these, the meteoric rise of social media is truly astounding and profound. In 2004, MySpace was the largest social media platform with 1 million users. 15 years later, the largest social media platform is Facebook with 2.4 billion users, representing almost a third of the world’s population. It would be inconceivable that such tectonic shifts in the way humans communicate and exchange information would not result in dramatic effects in our societies. Indeed, Norris acknowledges that social media has likely played an important role in weakening our democracies, by reinforcing “a bubble mentality and the feeling of us-versus-them”.

The creation of this bubble mentality can be understood as arising from two key features of social media — the real time curatibility of one’s digital expression that manifests in the utterly conscious creation of a digital self and the bi-directional nature of interactions wherein audience-driven media becomes identitarian media. The individual in the digital age is no longer as free or capable of changing their identity or ideology, indeed the lines between the two have increasingly been blurred. Moreover, the surge of disinformation and the proliferation of runaway echo chambers means that a core tenant of the democratic norm of mutual toleration - of being able to agree on the truth and being punished by a bipartisan consensus if you fail to do so - are under threat. The election of Donald Trump, that the book focuses so much on, was in many ways facilitated immensely by the these factors fostered by social media. Given these profound effects of social media on individual identity, cultural transmission, and global democracies, the complete omission of any discussion in How Democracies Die is unfortunate. As Marshall McLuhan’s work regarding ‘the medium is the message’ illustrates, the dominant media of an age can dramatically alter the message of that age. Much of democracies current woes, especially those regarding unwritten democratic norms, can be traced back to this digital degradation of democracy.

References

  • Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Broadway Books. ↗
  • Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press. ↗
  • Economist Intelligence Unit. (2022). Democracy Index 2021: The China challenge. EIU. Retrieved May 5, 2022. ↗