Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point:
Levitsky, Steven, Ziblatt, Daniel
A call to reform our antiquated political institutions before it’s too
late—from the New York Times bestselling authors of How Democracies
Die
America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it?
With the clarity and brilliance that made their first book, How Democracies Die, a global bestseller, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a coherent framework for understanding these volatile times. They draw on a wealth of examples—from 1930s France to present-day Thailand—to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within: It is a pernicious enabler of minority rule, allowing partisan minorities to consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities. Most modern democracies—from Germany and Sweden to Argentina and New Zealand—have eliminated outdated institutions like elite upper chambers, indirect elections, and lifetime tenure for judges. The United States lags dangerously behind.
In this revelatory book, Levitsky and Ziblatt issue an urgent call to reform our politics. It’s a daunting task, but we have remade our country before—most notably, after the Civil War and during the Progressive Era. And now we are at a crossroads: America will either become a multiracial democracy or cease to be a democracy at all.
https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Minority-American-Democracy-Breaking/dp/0593443071
‘Tyranny of the Minority’ Warns Constitution is Dangerously Outdated
The U.S. Constitution desperately needs updating, say Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
“We have a very, very old constitution; in fact, the oldest written constitution in the world,” notes Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government. “It was written in a pre-democratic era. It hasn’t been amended much compared to other democracies. As a result, we have these institutions in place that most other democracies got rid of over the course of the 20th century.”
In their new book “Tyranny of the Minority,” the comparative political scientists argue that these antiquated institutions, including the Electoral College, have protected and enabled an increasingly extremist GOP, which keeps moving farther to the right despite losing the popular vote in all but one of the last eight presidential elections. The scholars also survey governments worldwide for examples of democratizing reforms. And they draw from history in underscoring the dangers of our constitutional stasis.
The Gazette interview with Levitsky and Ziblatt,
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/09/scholars-warn-of-danger-in-an-outdated-constitution-democracy-tyranny-of-the-minority
A New Book Lays Out the Markers of Democratic Backsliding–and Takes Aim at the U.S. Constitution.
Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that “[s]carcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.” Had he toured America today, Tocqueville might similarly conclude that scarcely any critique of our politics fails to devolve sooner or later into a critique of our constitutional law.
...Levitsky and Ziblatt pinpoint three “basic things” that politicians in a functioning democracy must do: first, respect the outcomes of free and fair elections; second, repudiate violence as a means of achieving political goals; and third, distance themselves from antidemocratic forces—particularly those on their own flank. Democratic nations run into real trouble when autocratic forces—often small yet committed minorities—are buoyed by “semi-loyal democrats” on their own side of the partisan divide. “Democracies get into trouble when mainstream parties tolerate, condone, or protect authoritarian extremists—when they become authoritarian enablers.” These semi-loyal democrat enablers are the sorts of politicians who prioritize their own short-term electoral goals and career advancement within the party over upholding basic democratic principles.
Consider Levitsky and Ziblatt’s account of a mob attack on the French parliament in 1934, that “badly weakened” French democracy. The assault’s damage ran deeper than the rummaged parliament. The real damage occurred in the aftermath of the riot as the conservative party, the Republican Federation, failed to condemn the violence. Some conservative party members “dismissed the importance of the attack,” while others openly celebrated it. Indeed, some had even been directly involved, and had then helped thwart parliament’s investigation into the attack. Not coincidentally, argue Levitsky and Ziblatt, democracy died in France within a few years with the Vichy government.
Having established this framework, Levitsky and Ziblatt turn their focus to today’s Republican Party.
They argue that in the wake of January 6th the vast bulk of Republican officials have violated those three core prerequisites for maintaining a functioning democracy. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, the GOP has devolved into a minority party, but one that can still hold onto power thanks to our system’s various anti-majoritarian political structures like the Electoral College, the malapportioned Senate, and its filibuster. The authors contend that the system creates perverse incentives: even as Republicans consistently lose popular elections, they still have a shot at holding onto sizeable amounts of political power since the political playing field is supposedly tilted in their favor.
In making this argument, the authors acknowledge that democracy requires anti-democratic checks to persist—and to protect the rights of minorities. But they distinguish such necessary and proper checks from undue constraints on majoritarian rule. That distinction is as crucial as it is difficult to draw, but the basic points are intuitive enough. First, certain topics, like basic civil liberties, must lie beyond the reach of majorities. Second, those who win elections should be able to govern. The problem is that this second point is no longer holding true in the United States. As a result, our once pioneering democracy is now “a democratic laggard.” The United States is “now more vulnerable to minority rule than any other established democracy.”
Levitsky and Ziblatt’s analysis is largely compelling up to this point. But their willingness to blame the U.S. Constitution in particular for our democratic failings—for the emergence of “fettered majorities”—seems misguided from the standpoints of both practicality and prudence.
Levitsky and Ziblatt explain that other countries have outpaced America’s democracy because their constitutions are easier to change. For example, the United States isn’t the first country to undergo a process of urbanization that leaves an upper legislative chamber disproportionately slanted in favor of rural, conservative interests. But other nations who’ve run into this problem have amended their constitutions to correct the imbalance.
What Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t recognize is that, in the aggregate, the comparative difficulty of constitutional change in the United States might be more of a feature than a bug: our Constitution actually constituted a nation. It’s the Constitution that made the United States the United States—it’s a big part of what makes us, us. Because that’s not true for most other countries, fundamentally altering their respective constitutions is not as big a deal; it doesn’t necessarily touch their national soul. Germany would still be Germany absent its Basic Law; France would still be France absent the Constitution of the Fifth Republic (indeed, this even helps to explain why the French are on republic number five). For most nations, the ties that bind run deeper than those of politics and constitutions: shared language, culture, history, and race do most of the cohesive work. Not so for the United States—and happily so: that deep-seated, thicker unity comes at a cost. Those countries are deprived of the diversity of worldviews, religions, and ideas that helps to make the United States so dynamic, so interesting, and so worth preserving.
Altering the United States Constitution is accordingly a more momentous event—it changes who we are in a more fundamental way than if we were a pre-existing, more organic nation-state. This is particularly true for changes that center on our political process, as opposed to expanding the substantive scope of legal protections to previously excluded groups. It’s not a coincidence that many of the post-founding constitutional amendments have centered on expanding civil rights as opposed to fundamentally restructuring our governing institutions. More often than not, we’ve extended the sphere of the political community to recognize more Americans as equal participants in our institutions rather than altering the underlying character of those institutions and the processes that govern them. We’ve bettered ourselves while still being ourselves; a more perfect Union, but the same Union.
Thus, Levitsky and Ziblatt are right as a general matter that we must “double down on democracy” if we’re to be a successful multiracial democracy. But we should do so at the sub-constitutional level. Their proposed constitutional reforms to the Senate, the Electoral College, and the like lack merit. Given the constancy of the structure of the U.S. Constitution and its centrality to our national identity, it seems prudent to draw a distinction between the anti-democratic pitfalls that Levitsky and Ziblatt identify: constitutional ones versus sub-constitutional ones. Altering the constitutional ones would not only require clearing the nearly insuperable requirements of Article V, but would also alter the core of our national political identity. Pragmatism and prudence counsel against such reforms.
That’s not the case when it comes to reforming our current system’s sub-constitutional pitfalls. Institutions like first past the post voting in single member districts, winner-take-all voting arrangements in the Electoral College, and the Senate filibuster are not constitutional requirements. They weren’t part of the set of compromises that the framers reached as they constituted a new nation. They aren’t core to who we are as a polity.
In fact, it’s not a coincidence that these sub-constitutional strictures are the proximate causes for so many of the democratic failings documented by Levitsky and Ziblatt. Absent the filibuster, for example, Levitsky and Ziblatt themselves lay out how many pieces of proposed legislation would have been signed into law. The Constitution’s less than democratic features are certainly an underlying cause for the frustrating and now even destabilizing inability of majorities to govern. But what we’ve overlaid atop that constitutional structure might be more to blame. The Senate alone might not be a problem; the Senate with a de facto supermajority voting requirement might be.
After all, the Constitution’s framers like James Madison were not against majority rule. They understood that the majority would ultimately govern, but they designed our constitutional structure to help slow the pace at which the majority governed, in part to ensure that it would rule reasonably and justly. When we warp the institutions that comprise that structure—like through supermajority voting requirements within the legislature—the majority’s will is thwarted rather than tempered.
Before we fundamentally alter the Constitution’s mechanisms for shaping and constraining majorities, we might do well to first reform the sub-constitutional strictures that are currently fettering those majorities. In other words, Levitsky and Ziblatt have laid out a real problem worthy of our attention, but their advocacy for constitutional change seems misguided. We are indeed at a decision point: “either America will be a multiracial democracy or it will not be a democracy at all.” But getting to the right result might not require something so great as constitutional change. Tinkering with institutions like the filibuster, the primary system, and single-member districts might be a more effective, and more realistic, path forward.
Thomas Koenig, a contributing editor of American Purpose, is a student
at Harvard Law School and author of “Tom’s Takes” newsletter.
Twitter: @thomaskoenig98.
https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/tyranny-of-the-minority/
Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point
“Without major changes to institutions such as the Electoral College and Supreme Court, the real majority rule will be out of reach.”
...No democracies that are long established and have middle class incomes have perished. So why has the United States reached a breaking point? Some vulnerabilities were baked into the system, but our present crises are triggered by a party that deliberately sabotages majority rule and approves violence to get its way—what can be seen as a war on America.
History shows that many of the country’s founding fathers did not want a democracy, which they saw as a form of mob rule like that overtaking France. To get smaller states like Delaware and the South’s slave-holding states to join the federation, the founders gave all states equal representation in the Senate and protected the institution of slavery—even allowing slaves to be included as three-fifths of a human being in the numbers by which seats were allotted in the House of Representatives, These compromises were seen as necessary to get the system up and running, but their pernicious consequences have endured for more than two centuries.
Today’s Republican war on democracy took off with the “southern strategy” of presidential candidate Richard Nixon, embroidered and enhanced by Ronald Reagan, the two George Bushes, and brought to a crescendo by Donald Trump with his vassals and imitators. The all-pervasive goal of their effort has been to preserve the hegemony of an elite dominated by white males professing to be faithful Christians.
This system has been reinforced by a Supreme Court that gutted the equal rights voting act and a Senate led by Mitch McConnell that refused to allow debate on how to save the voting act. Underlying all this has been the takeover of many state governments by GOP extremists who remap voting districts and seek to control what electors go to Washington to select the president. At all levels the GOP labors to keep blacks from voting and keep out immigrants likely to support Democrats. All these tactics are reinforced by cable news and social media that fill voters’ minds and emotions with half-truths and outright lies,
Why are so many Americans susceptible to brain washing? Whites no longer make up a majority in California, and, in a few decades, will become a minority across the country. The two consecutive elections of a Black president catalyzed a major backlash. Many whites fear they are losing their privileged status. Many oppose inroads by cultures and practices quite different from Evangelical and traditional Catholic values, Uncertainties are amplified by climate catastrophes, epidemics, hard-to-beat inflation, and the many challenges, known and unknown, inherent in new technologies.
Still, the authors argue, surveys show that a majority of Americans embrace the principles of liberal and multiracial democracy. So it is not unfettered majorities that threaten America, as many observers have feared, but fettered majorities. Republicans are strong in sparsely populated regions. The constitution’s small-state bias became a rural tilt in the 20th century and a partisan bias today. As in much of Europe, conservative values are supported by small town and rural voters. The biases of the U.S. system have permitted Republicans to win the White House and other high posts without a majority of the popular vote. The conditions that gave rise to the Trump presidency—a radicalized party empowered by a pre-democratic constitution—remain in place.
What can be done to bolster U.S, democracy? The authors point to the “containment” and “militant” strategies that brought positive results to parts of Europe after 1945. Without major changes to institutions such as the Electoral College and Supreme Court, the real majority rule will be out of reach. The authors remind us that Americans managed to ameliorate several democratic deficits in the past. Charismatic leaders such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson made a difference. But no such leader is visible just now and the foes of majority rule are deeply entrenched. This book shows the depths of our problems and points to the kinds of reforms that could address them.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/tyranny-minority-why-american
Is America Uniquely Vulnerable to Tyranny?
If a reactionary movement is popular or aggressive enough, it’s not clear that any kind of institution can stop it from threatening democracy. Hence why other advanced democracies with distinct institutional arrangements, like Israel, are currently going through democratic crises with root causes strikingly similar to America’s. It’s true that America’s institutions have paved a swift road for the Trumpist right’s attack on democracy. But they may not be quite as central to the story of its rise as Tyranny of the Minority suggests.
The American right’s turn against democracy
Ziblatt and Levitsky are two of America’s very best comparative political scientists, with expertise that makes them uniquely well-equipped for the subject they’re examining.
Ziblatt is the author of an important study of European conservative parties, concluding that their strategic choices played a unique role in determining the health of continental democracy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Conservative parties, by their nature, represent those forces in society — including the wealthy and powerful elite — opposed to radical social change. For this reason, Ziblatt found, they are especially important in determining whether defenders of the status quo attempt to stymie social change from within the democratic system or whether they reject elections and political equality altogether.
Levitsky is a Latin America specialist who, along with co-author Lucan Way, wrote a prescient analysis of a new style of autocracy back in 2002 — a system they termed “competitive authoritarianism” that subsequently emerged as the premier institutional means for turning a seemingly stable democracy into an autocracy (see: Hungary). Competitive authoritarian governments masquerade as democracies, even holding elections with real stakes. But these contests are profoundly unfair: The incumbent party ensures that the rules surrounding elections, like who gets to vote and what the media gets to say, are heavily tilted in their favor. The result is that the opposition has little chance to win elections, let alone pass their preferred policies.
Tyranny of the Minority analyzes the United States in light of these two broad themes, the importance of conservative parties and the ever-evolving institutional nature of authoritarianism. The first half of the book analyzes how and why the Republican Party went down an anti-democratic path. The second focuses on how the peculiar design of American institutions has created opportunities for the GOP to undermine democracy from within.
Around the world, they find two conditions that make political parties more likely to accept electoral defeats: “when they believe they stand a reasonable chance of winning again in the future” and when they believe “that losing power will not bring catastrophe — that a change of government will not threaten the lives, livelihoods, or most cherished principles.”
In the 21st century, these conditions no longer held among the GOP’s conservative white base. Democrats were no longer a mere political rival, but avatars of a new and scary social order.
“Not only was America no longer overwhelmingly white, but once entrenched racial hierarchies were weakening. Challenges to white Americans’ long-standing social dominance left many of them with feelings of alienation, displacement, and deprivation,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. “Many of the party’s voters feared losing ... their country — or more accurately, their place in it.”
This, they say, is what made the party vulnerable to conquest by someone like Trump. Rather than fight the base in democracy’s name, traditional Republican elites like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) acted as “semi-loyal democrats”: leaders who say the right things about supporting democracy and the rule of law, but value partisan victory over everything else — including basic, non-partisan democratic principles. This enabled the entire party to become a vehicle for an anti-democratic agenda.
“Openly authoritarian figures — like coup conspirators or armed insurrectionists — are visible for all to see. By themselves, they often lack the public support or legitimacy to destroy a democracy. But when semi-loyalists — tucked away in the hallways of power — lend a hand, openly authoritarian forces become much more dangerous,” they explain. “Throughout history, cooperation between authoritarians and seemingly respectable semi-loyal democrats has been a recipe for democratic breakdown.”
How America’s system makes life easy for would-be autocrats
In the US, Levitsky and Ziblatt see a democracy made vulnerable by its own
Constitution.
The Constitution’s framers were the first to take Enlightenment ideas about freedom and translate them to an actual political system. The only historical democratic experiences they looked at were from antiquity, in places like Athens and Rome. Classical sources repeatedly chronicled threats to democracy, even outright collapse, emanating from mob rule.
Though the founders knew that democracy was at heart about majority rule, they took the Greco-Roman experience seriously and designed a system where majorities were severely constrained. The tripartite separation of powers, bicameral legislature, indirect election of the president and senators, lifetime Supreme Court tenure, the laborious process for amending the Constitution: all of these were built, in whole or in part, as limitations on the ability of majorities to impose their will on minorities.
Some American counter-majoritarian institutions emerged not from well-intentioned design but political necessity. Leading founders like James Madison bitterly resented the basic structure of the Senate, where each state gets two seats regardless of size; Alexander Hamilton called it “preposterous” during a constitutional convention debate. It was included purely to mollify small states like Delaware and Rhode Island, who were refusing to join the Union absent sufficient protections for their interests.
Over time, the US shed some of these minoritarian trappings — senators are now directly elected, thanks to the 17th Amendment — but deepened others. In 1803’s Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court gave itself expansive power to strike down legislation that was not explicitly granted in the Constitution. More recently, the filibuster emerged as a de facto 60-vote requirement for passing legislation in the Senate — a practice similar to the supermajority vote that the founders explicitly rejected early on.
Levitsky and Ziblatt show that almost every other peer democracy went in the opposite direction.
The United States is “the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College,” “one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber,” and “the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.” Moreover, they note, “the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change” — making it extremely difficult for reformers to do anything about America’s minority-empowering institutions.
These institutions allow the Republican Party to rule despite being a distinctly minority faction — one that holds extreme positions on issues like taxes and abortion, and has lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.
So long as the party retains appeal among a hard core of racially resentful supporters, efficiently distributed around the country to take advantage of the Senate and Electoral College’s biases, it can remain nationally competitive. The right’s control over the Supreme Court will likely last decades, thanks to lifetime tenure, allowing it to remake American policy and institutions with impunity. The GOP’s disproportionate national power enables its cadres at the state and local level to pursue explicitly undemocratic policies for holding power, like felon disenfranchisement and extreme gerrymandering, without fear of federal intervention.
Hence the titular “tyranny of the minority”: The Republican Party, having broken with its core commitment to democracy, has now embraced a peculiarly American strategy for taking and wielding power undemocratically.
“America’s countermajoritarian institutions can manufacture authoritarian minorities into governing majorities,” they write. “Far from checking authoritarian power, our institutions have begun to augment it.”
Can good institutions save a rotted society?
Levitsky and Ziblatt are, in my mind, clearly correct about both of their two major points: that the GOP has become an anti-democratic faction, and that America’s minoritarian institutions have given them a straightforward pathway to wielding power undemocratically. The evidence for both propositions is overwhelming, and the book’s style — engaging historical case studies accompanied by a precise deployment of data — hammers them home persuasively. Tyranny of the Minority is an exceptional book, one of the very best in its genre.
But there are some tensions inside of it: in this case, a subtle conflict between the two halves of the argument.
The United States, Ziblatt and Levitsky note, is hardly the only wealthy democracy to have experienced the rise of far-right parties hostile to social change — citing the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and “all of Scandinavia” as prominent examples. Yet those democracies, in their view, “remain relatively healthy.”
The key difference, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, lies in the institutions. Because those countries are considerably more majoritarian, it is far harder for an authoritarian minority to corrode democracy at a national level. Therefore, they conclude, the best way to safeguard America’s institutions is to make them more like our peers abroad: abolish the Electoral College, eliminate lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices, end the filibuster, switch to proportional representation in Congress, ban partisan gerrymandering, and make the Constitution easier to amend.
The obvious objection to these proposals is that they are impractical, that the very nature of the problem — Republican control over minoritarian institutions — makes reforming them infeasible. But there’s a deeper, and more interesting, question raised by Levitsky and Ziblatt’s diagnosis: Is it really the case that our institutions are what make America unique?
America’s minoritarian institutions certainly create a particular pathway for our domestic revanchist faction to gain power and wield it against democracy. But there are plenty of other ways for a democracy to eat itself.
Israel, for example, has an extraordinarily majoritarian political system. It is a parliamentary democracy, meaning limited separation of executive and legislative power, whose legislature is elected on a purely proportional basis. There is a simple majority requirement for passing legislation and even amending the Basic Law (its constitution-lite). The judiciary is, for all intents and purposes, the only check on unfettered majority rule.
Yet Israel is, at the moment, in the midst of a democratic crisis every bit as serious as America’s, perhaps even more so, in which an anti-democratic governing majority seeks to remove the court as a barrier to its radical agenda. The root cause of the crisis is very similar: a far-right faction of the population that wishes to protect existing social hierarchies from the threat of change. But the extremist strategy for cementing their power is the polar opposite: exploiting majoritarian institutions, not minoritarian ones. It’s the founders’ fear come to life, the Scylla to America’s Charybdis.
The point here is not that there are only two options for institutional design, America’s vetocracy or Israel’s blunt majoritarianism. Most advanced democracies fall somewhere in the middle, adopting a mix of majoritarian and counter-majoritarian institutions designed to generally permit majority rule while also preventing abuses of power.
Rather, the United States and Israel put together illustrate that institutions are an at-best-imperfect check on far-right authoritarian movements. The American far right has built a strategy tailored to American institutions; the Israeli far right has adopted a strategic approach tailored to the Israeli context. In both cases, the root of the problem is that there’s a sufficient social foundation for far-right authoritarian politics: one that provides the raw political muscle for bad actors to attack democracy using its own institutions.
Other democracies are not immune to far-right surges, including some that Levitsky and Ziblatt cite as relatively healthy.
The AfD, Germany’s far-right party, is surging in popularity, topping recent polls in four German states. A survey in May found that Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally, would defeat President Emmanuel Macron in their second rematch by a 55-45 margin. The UK approved Brexit by a majority referendum. Even in Canada, one of the most democratically stable Western democracies, extremist-linked legislator Pierre Poilievre is leading the traditionally center-right Conservative Party, which is currently ahead of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in the 2025 polls.
Not every far-right victory is a threat to democracy, of course, but it’s hard to be sure until they have power. Some Western far-right parties, like the AfD, are already showing troubling signs.
And in the US, where the far right is clearly undemocratic, surveys show a real chance that Trump wins the 2024 US election with an outright majority — not just in the Electoral College, but in the popular vote.
At root, Levitsky and Ziblatt appear a little too confident in their argument that the GOP’s extremism dooms the party to minority status.
It’s true that their agenda is out of step with the majority of Americans. But many voters, especially swing voters, don’t always vote on policy or ideology. They make ballot box decisions based on things like gas prices, inflation, and whether the party in power has been there for too long — factors that are often out of the president’s hands. Even if they do not agree with Trump that Mexicans are rapists or that the 2020 election was stolen, they’re willing to vote for him if they’re sufficiently frustrated with either the status quo or the other party’s option.
The same is true in other countries. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government was briefly dethroned in the 2021 election — only to return to power in 2022 after voters experienced life under a fractious coalition that spanned the right-left continuum. Marine Le Pen’s recent rise seems to be less about a majority of voters agreeing with her on immigration than a sense that she’s the only real alternative to an unpopular Macron.
Far-right parties, even potentially anti-democratic ones, can be politically viable under nearly any set of institutions. The key is to establish sufficient support among a large segment of the population that agrees with them, enough for there to be a large ideologically driven backlash. Once that happens, the party can establish itself as a viable alternative to the mainstream. And once that happens, they gain the potential to win over less ideological swing voters who simply have frustrations with the political status quo and look to any port in a storm.
This is not to let America’s institutions off the hook. Levitsky and Ziblatt are absolutely right that its outdated constitution makes it easier for the GOP to travel down an authoritarian path.
But “easier” doesn’t mean “necessary.” While Levitsky and Ziblatt ultimately take an institutions-first approach, seeing their reform as our way out of America’s crisis, I take a more society-first view: that America’s problems are primarily the result of deep social fissures exacerbated by outdated and poorly designed institutions. Even if the United States had a more authentically democratic institution, we’d still be riven by divides over race and identity that have unerringly produced the worst political conflicts in the country’s history.
It follows from this that institutional reforms are not enough: In addition to policies for political reform, we also need to think about ways to reduce the social demand for extreme politics. More bluntly: If widespread hostility to social change enables the GOP’s far-right authoritarian lurch, we need to figure out ways to shift Americans’ beliefs in a more egalitarian direction.
But such a proposal should be considered in addition to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s proposals, not in replacement of them — much as my critique of their book more broadly is less a fundamental concern than a difference in emphasis.
Tyranny of the Minority is one of the best guides out there to the crisis of American democracy. It just puts a touch too much focus on institutions at the expense of the deeper social forces rotting their foundations.
https://www.vox.com/23873476/america-democracy-authoritarianism-tyranny-minority-levitsky-ziblatt
More Interviews
Writers say Constitution Not Strong Enough to Protect Democracy
We’re in the midst of seismic shifts, technological revolutions, demographic changes, and a widening class divide. But the problem isn’t confined to institutions or parties or politicians. It also lies with the people. Our nation has been conditioned for more than a century to distrust institutions, a sentiment that has only intensified over the years — from the turn of the last century’s era of industrialization and racial conflict through the Cold War, the Kennedy assassination, and more recently to the COVID pandemic. While Donald Trump may have been the catalyst, the real fuel comes from the voters willing to discard democratic norms to protect their vision of a “real America.”
Certainly, we’ve faced challenges before and risen to meet them, but the pressing question now is: Can we rise to meet this one? In his new book, Tyranny of the Minority, Ziblatt argues that our Constitution inadvertently encourages counter-majoritarian rule. We’ve fallen behind the rest of the world by failing to modernize our political operating system, thereby allowing partisan minorities to wield disproportionate power.
Jeff: One of the things that plays into this, and that we see inherent in our politics today, is this division between policy issues on the one hand and culture-war/emotional issues on the other hand. Talk a little bit about that and the way that is really feeding into this danger.
Daniel: We talked about race already, but there are a whole range of other hot-button cultural issues. And these are issues upon which it’s easy to mobilize voters. And so if you have policy positions, which are not particularly popular and can’t garner majority support, it’s very common for politicians to try to change the topic of conversation to issues that can generate enthusiasm. And so we have this outrage industry both in the media as well as among politicians.
If you’re pushing for complex policy proposals that aren’t very popular, and that are not going to mobilize voters, you’re not going to win elections. And so it’s much easier to talk about really hot-button, simplified issues. I was actually just recently looking at the 1912 Progressive Party platform — which was Theodore Roosevelt, after being president, ran for president a second time, and he lost the Republican nomination and ran as a Progressive Party candidate.
And this long document with detailed policy proposals, including things such as giving women the right to vote, an income tax, these complex policy proposals. What’s so striking today is the Republican Party in the 2020 election didn’t even have a party platform. Didn’t even have a platform because the party wasn’t really running on ideas.
And so I think what very often happens if a party doesn’t have ideas, what you do instead run on is resentments. The thing about running on resentments is it’s like a short-term fix for a party because you can maybe win an election in the short run, but over the long run you’re inflaming your population and it’s a very reckless form of politics.
Jeff: Since the constitutional solutions don’t seem to be effective, as we’ve been talking about, are there extra-constitutional answers to maybe begin to turn this ship around? Even things as controversial as they are, like third and fourth parties that may come along, that change the dynamic, change the landscape in a way that shakes it up enough that something positive could happen.
Daniel: -
And so I encourage your listeners to go look at that. Some of these are really stretches and others are more realistic. And it’s not a random list. There was a real logic to the list. The list is of reforms that other democracies have introduced, number one, so things that have been proven to work well. And in some of them in fact there’s a path to reform.
Some of these things that I think that don’t require constitutional change and are within reach include some institutional reforms, such as getting rid of or weakening the filibuster. The filibuster has been changed often throughout its history; as late as the 1970s, the threshold for getting a bill through was lowered. It could be lowered again. And all this requires is a vote in the Senate.
There’s carve-outs for the filibuster. You could add a carve-out for, let’s say, the protecting of voting rights. So this is one that only needs the Senate to approve, does not require a president to sign. It does not require the House of Representatives to support it, let alone other states. So that’s one thing — the filibuster reform. Something else on our list is to have states pass laws that have automatic voter registration. Pennsylvania just recently did this. A lot of states are doing this to make it easier to vote.
And in most democracies around the world, governments make it easier for voters to vote. Not more difficult. And this is something that can be done at the state level, does not require constitutional change. If you have automatic voter registration, it makes it easier to vote and you will allow majorities to speak more clearly.
And I think this ultimately would have a positive effect. Similarly, voting rights protections at the national level. There was a bill that almost passed two years ago that got held up by the filibuster. So if we eliminated the filibuster, or weakened the filibuster, you could then pass voting rights reform at the national level.
Now, to come to your particular suggestion of multiple parties, I agree entirely with you. I think our democracy would be enriched with multiple parties. Most democracies do in fact have multiple parties. But here’s the catch. In our current system, the rules are set up. We have an electoral system where each congressional district sends one member of Congress. That is a system that really political scientists have demonstrated, lends itself to a two-party system. It’s very hard for a third party to win.
And so, given the rules of the game that we have, I think it’s a mistake to try to support third-party candidates because they will in fact not make it into office. And you may think, well, you’re sending a message to politicians, and I can understand that, but often it backfires because, in fact, you split the vote in a way that’s counterproductive and the guy that you don’t like might end up in office. If you want a multi-party system, one of the proposals we make in our last chapter is to introduce a form of proportional representation, which requires changing the voting rules.
So you have to get the sequence right. If you change the voting rules, and this is something that’s left up to the states, a key term here for people to look up is ranked order voting. It’s up to the states to determine their own voting rules. If you introduce ranked order voting, various forms of proportional representation, then it would be easier for more parties to emerge, and I think ultimately would all work to the benefit of our democracy.
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/can-america-survive-its-own-constitution-the-tyranny-of-the-minority/
15 Proposals for Reform - (from the last chapter of the book)
Voting in America should be as straightforward as it is in democracies in Europe and elsewhere. This means we should do the following:
- Pass a constitutional amendment establishing a right to vote for all citizens, which would provide a solid basis to litigate voting restrictions.
- Establish automatic registration in which all citizens are registered to vote when they turn eighteen. This could be accompanied by the automatic distribution of national voting ID cards to all citizens. The burdens of the registration process should not deter anyone from voting.
- Expand early voting and easy mail-in voting options for citizens of all states. It should be easy for all Americans to cast ballots.
- Make Election Day a Sunday or a national holiday, so that work responsibilities do not discourage Americans from voting.
- Restore voting rights (without additional fines or fees) to all ex-felons who have served their time.
- Restore national-level voting rights protections. In the spirit of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, parts of which the Supreme Court struck down in 2013, we should reinstate federal oversight of election rules and administration. This could apply only in states and localities with a history of voting rights violations, following the VRA model, or to all jurisdictions equally, following the model of the 1890 Lodge bill.
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Replace the current system of partisan electoral administration with one
in which state and local electoral administration is in the hands of
professional, nonpartisan officials. This will help ensure fairness in the
updating of voter rolls, access to polling places, and the voting and
vote-counting processes. Nearly every other established democracy, from
France and Germany to Brazil, Costa Rica, Japan, and South Africa, has
nonpartisan referees to oversee elections.
ENSURE THAT ELECTION OUTCOMES REFLECT MAJORITY PREFERENCES. Those who win the most votes should win elections. Nothing in democratic theory justifies allowing losers to win elections. The political philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that democracy should “giv[e] the powers of government in all cases to the numerical majority.” Unfortunately in U.S. presidential, Senate, and some state legislative elections, this frequently does not occur. Several steps can be taken to ensure that those who win electoral majorities actually govern: - Abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a national popular vote. No other presidential democracy permits the loser of the popular vote to win the presidency. Such a constitutional amendment very nearly passed as recently as 1970.
- Reform the Senate so that the number of senators elected per state is more proportional to the population of each state (as in Germany). California and Texas should elect more senators than Vermont and Wyoming. Because Article V of the U.S. Constitution stipulates that “no state, without its Consent, may be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate” (a form of liberum veto), we understand the barriers to such a reform are enormous. But because the structure of the Senate so subverts basic democratic principles, and with such great consequence, any list of important democratizing reforms must include it.
- Replace “first-past-the-post” electoral rules and single-member districts for the House of Representatives and state legislatures with a form of proportional representation in which voters elect multiple representatives from larger electoral districts and parties win seats in proportion to the share of the vote they win. This would require repeal of the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act, which mandates single-member districts for House elections. By ensuring that the distribution of seats in Congress more accurately reflects the way Americans vote, a proportional representation system would prevent the problem of “manufactured majorities,” in which parties that win fewer votes in an election capture a majority of seats in the legislature. As the political scientist Lee Drutman writes, a proportional representation system “treats all voters equally, regardless of where they live. And it treats all parties the same, regardless of where their voters live.”
- Eliminate partisan gerrymandering via the creation of independent redistricting commissions such as those used in California, Colorado, and Michigan.
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Update the Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the House of
Representatives at 435, and return to the original design of a House that
expands in line with population growth. At present, the ratio of voters to
representatives in the House is nearly five times higher than that of any
European democracy. Expanding the size of Congress would bring
representatives closer to the people, and, if the Electoral College and
the current Senate structure remain in place, mitigate the small-state
bias of the Electoral College.
EMPOWER GOVERNING MAJORITIES. Finally, Americans must take steps to empower legislative majorities by weakening counter-majoritarian legislative and judicial institutions: - Abolish the Senate filibuster (a reform that requires neither statutory nor constitutional change), thereby eliminating the ability of partisan minorities to repeatedly and permanently thwart legislative majorities. In no other established democracy is such a minority veto routinely employed.
- Establish term limits (perhaps twelve or eighteen years) for Supreme Court justices to regularize the Supreme Court appointment process so that every president has the same number of appointments per term. Such a reform would place the United States in the mainstream of all other major democracies in the world. This would also limit the court’s intergenerational counter-majoritarianism.
- Make it easier to amend the Constitution by eliminating the requirement that three-quarters of state legislatures ratify any proposed amendment. Requiring two-thirds supermajorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate for a constitutional amendment would bring America in line with most other established democracies, including federal democracies like Germany and India, as well as many U.S. states.
These reforms would have a simple yet powerful effect: they would allow majorities to win power and govern. Not only would our proposed reforms help stave off minority rule, but they would also eliminate constitutional protectionism, unleashing the competitive dynamics of democracy. Importantly, the reforms would compel the Republicans to build broader coalitions in order to win. In America today, these coalitions would necessarily be more diverse, which would dilute the influence of the most extremist elements in the Republican Party. A more diverse Republican Party capable of winning national majorities fair and square might be bad news in electoral terms for the Democratic Party, but it would be very good news for American democracy.
The reforms we propose might appear radical, but they are already in place in the vast majority of established democracies, including highly successful ones like Denmark, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden. Making it simpler to vote, ending gerrymandering, replacing the Electoral College with a direct popular vote, eliminating the Senate filibuster, making Senate representation more proportional, ending lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court, and making it a little easier to reform the Constitution—all of these changes would simply catch us up to the rest of the world.
From Chapter 8 - Democratizing our Democracy
https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Minority-American-Democracy-Breaking/dp/0593443071
Democracy’s Assassins Always Have Accomplices
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/opinion/trump-republicans-spain-brazil.html
