Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, "How Democracies Die"

it's my pleasure to introduce Steven Levitsky and Daniel zib let steven Levitsky and daniels a blatte are both professors of Government at Harvard University Levitsky x' research focuses on latin america and the developing world SIB let's studies Europe sorry zib lot studies Europe from the 19th century to the present their new book is called how democracies die while they didn't expect to address the breakdown of democracy in the United States that change too when Trump was elected who Levitsky and Sublette both provide a provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump's ascent and the fall of other democracies building on their December 2016 New York Times op-ed which asked is Donald Trump a threat to democracy they emphatically answer yes they outline the specific risks keep risks he poses and chart ways we can avert the threat of authoritarianism drawing on examples of troubled States from around the world Levitsky and sublet point out that warning signs of collapse include the weakening of institutions such as the judiciary and the media erosion of political norms and the rise of incivility without further ado please welcome Ian Levitsky and Daniel's a blatte to politics and prose thank you it's wonderful to be here tonight i'm daniel zip lat i'm gonna talk we're gonna this is stephen Levitsky we're going to tag-team tonight i'm going to start by talking for a few minutes then i'll hand things over to Steve so it is great to be here and to see such a great crowd our book just came out last week and I wanted to begin this evening by just saying a few words about the motivation why we why we wrote this book so as mentioned Steve and I teach together in the government department at Harvard and we work closely and talked together over the last 15 years research very similar topics we both study democracies in crisis around the world I study European politics Steve has mostly studied Latin American politics but we haven't have not really focused our research and our teaching on the United States but we were really motivated to write this book because like many of you perhaps over the course of the 2015-2016 elec we kind of watched what was happening in the United States we had the sense of uneasiness at first and growing shocked at the tenor of the political debate so this book was really born literally in the halls of our department as we would have these conversations in the hall and you know we had spent much of our lives as I said studying democratic breakdown in other parts of the world again me in Europe but mostly and Steve mostly in Latin America and so like all of you that we had a sense of fear and kind of trepidation about what was happening but there was another layer of trepidation because of what we had studied and at first really it was just the small echoes you know in the 2016 Republican presidential candidate railed against the media we've all have seen all this an unprecedented weight he refused to say you would necessarily abide by the results of elections he threatened to lock up his political rival if elected and he worked crowds into frenzies we've seen videos of these if you didn't attend the rallies of condoning violence so this was very frightening to lots of people this is very frightening to lots of people to us as well a lot of people thought these are just words but Steve and I recognized in all of this that these were the clear hallmarks of an authoritarian no major Party presidential candidate in American twentieth century history had ever behaved this way but many candidates who eventually become authoritarian leaders elsewhere in the world do behave this way so both of us had this uncanny feeling that we had seen this movie before in other places and we knew usually been well so we decided we really had to write this book we wanted to draw upon the knowledge we have of other countries where democracy facing these kinds of challenges had overcome these challenges in other places where democracy facing these kinds of challenges did not overcome these challenges so while working on the book and researching the book and writing the book we came to a conclusion though that I think departs from how many think about the Trump presidency today we came to the conclusion the problem facing our political system is not Donald Trump alone it's not just as outrageous of comments it's not just as psychology that people try to understand attempting to focus on the latest outrageous tweet or political gossip but at some level this is a distraction we think it's important to keep your eye on the ball at the end of the day we came to realize that Donald Trump was not just a cause of America's current predicament he was in many ways a symptom it was a symptom of deeper warring ills that run through the American political system and short we realized that the problem run dump it runs deeper than Donald Trump so tonight Steve and I will talk to you about three discoveries we made in the process of writing this book that led us to this conclusion that the problem lies deeper than Trump and will sketch out for you some of what we think are the most important points will kind of elaborate this all food that we elaborate more fully in the book so I'm gonna start off by talking about the first discovery and Steve's gonna talk about the second and third so discovery number one discovery number one is this the best way to stop authoritarians is to prevent them from coming to power in the first place okay so what does this mean really well in the context of the United States this means we have to pay attention to not just why Donald Trump was elected but also why he ever became the nominee of one of our two major political parties in the first place so let me elaborate and the Cold War three quarters of democratic breakdowns are on the world happened at the hands of men with guns in the form of military kids since the collapse of communism most democratic breakdowns now arrive at the ballot box through elections demagogues come to power you know and once in power through elections and once in power they usually inflict serious damage on democratic institutions so a great paradox if you can think about this for a moment facing democracies today is how does a democracy prevent an autocratic mind demagogue from getting elected in the first place now through most of American history we've happily avoided this paradox but it was not because there was there was a kind of absence of demagogues or an absence of people who might support demagogues in fact we kind of have a tendency I think to whitewash our own history and to forget that there's nearly a really a continuous strand of would-be authoritarians who generally gained around 30% approval support in opinion surveys so this runs from the strand runs from Henry Ford in the 1920s the for auto company a vocal and extremely popular anti-semite who was actually quoted in mine comp who considered running for president in the 1920s Huey Long in the 1930s Joe McCarthy in the 1950s George Wallace in the 1960s so a Gallup poll data actually exists going back to the 1930s and each for each of these figures you see around roughly 3035 percent approval ratings for each of these figures this is a continuous figure that runs all the way up to around 35 percent approval for our current president so I don't think it's actually too much to say that there's a continuous strand of authoritarianism running as a sub current in American political culture but here's the point none of these figures I just mentioned ever made it close to the presidency though they are popular that kept far from power so the question is how and what changed in 2016 so in our book we emphasize two contributing factors that we describe more fully but I'll kind of just highlight them for you this evening first the way we picked presidents has changed until 1972 in America the first three-quarters of the 20th century Democratic presidential candidates were selected by party leaders and what some political scientists have called a kind of system of peer review so party leaders who work closely with politicians who saw on a daily basis these were the guys who got together and decided who the candidates were this is a system often criticized rightly as smoke-filled back rooms where party leaders would get together and choose the candidates and voters are basically irrelevant voters mattered of course in general elections but if their primaries were not binding not most most states didn't have them it was party leaders who picked candidates again this system the smoke-filled back room has a lot to criticize about it had them downsides it was exclusive it wasn't very democratic and sometimes sometimes some mediocre and very bland candidates emerged out of this warren g harding is the kind of prototype of this 1924 who emerged and you know as somebody who was not an impressive president but this was the systemic downsides all systems have advantages and disadvantages and the advantages of this system was that it worked quite well in fact perfectly in keeping extremists from ever becoming viable candidates at the top of the ticket earth for office in the first place so as a screening system a filtration system now we all know American life changed in many profound ways in the tragic year of 1968 it was a tragic year in American history but it also changed in the way we select our presidential candidates the presidential system after 19 presidential candidates election system after 1968 was opened up the smoke-filled rooms were open primaries were made binding voters can now select their candidates and general election was now preceded by long continuous primary season where voters had a say and we all know this system now the certain system was certainly more open but two political scientists in the early 70s warned that the fall of the filtration system could also open the door to demagogues now to be clear we don't advocate going back to the old system but at the same time we have to recognize the current system is double-edged if a debt ever debt in this new system if a demagogue ever ran for office the road was much clearer for him/her it's true the Democrats in the 1980s introduced a system of super delegates elected officials who carried extra weight which contains some of the elements of the old system but Republicans never adopted this they never adopted a system of super delegates so this left the door open this meant that if a demagogue ever decided to run for president especially in the Republican Party without super delegates there was much more open road for him and this is exactly what happened in 2016 Donald Trump a modern day demagogue became the nominee of the Republican Party but there's a second factor we also elaborate in the book in some ways I think you know I think we both think this is a more important factor and this is a second factor which cleared the way for the rise of Donald Trump because even after Donald Trump won the nomination he could have been defeated by Hillary Clinton that's certainly true but almost as importantly there was an absolutely imperative role to be played by the Republican Party allies so here's really the central pivot of this part of our story authoritarian scum to power not on their own but with the enabling aid of political Allie's allies from the political establishment so throughout history this repeats itself from the in Italy in the 1920s Germany in the 1930s Latin America in the 1990s when demagogues who clearly violate democratic norms get close to power one of the last off-ramps is whether or not establishment politicians party allies finally break with the demagogue or the autocrat in the making do they draw a line in the sand and say beyond this we will not go or do the abdicate they overlook the democratic violations they let party Trump country and commitment to democratic norms an effect form a Faustian bargain allowing their ideological ally but who may be an autocrat in the making into power do they enable the authoritarian so when elected autocrats get into power at this last stage it's nearly always because mainstream politicians out of miscalculation or opportunism let them in the door the enabling role of the Republican Party is not actually unique this happens remarkably often so in Venezuela with we can recount this in the book in Venezuela and the 1990s Hugo Chavez got his political start by being given a big boost from a long time mainstream fixture of Venezuelan politics President Rafael Correa who freed Chavez from jail in 1994 giving him a big boost and legitimacy encouraging him to run for president so president calderas Correa was on the wane and he actually sort of thought he could tack he thought Hugo Chavez he could tap into some of Hugo Chavez's popularity turned out coderre miscalculated calderas career ended up being finished and Chavez was soon elected president a similar story can be told about Italy in the early 1920s Benito Mussolini was a total outcast of the mainstream but a long-standing prominent liberal politician Giovanni Gillette II thought he could tap into Mussolini's mass appeal and co-opt him so he included him on an establishment Liberal Party Party list for parliamentary elections within a year Mussolini was in power and Gillette he was long gone in by more Germany the leader of the German Conservative Party in the late 1920s allied himself with Hitler issue joint proclamations organized joint rallies the the point the goal was to try to tap into some of the energy of the Nazi movement to shore up this relatively mainstream elitist party but this backfired conservatives disintegrated Hitler was elevated and by 1933 he was in power so in every instance mainstream or establishment politicians opened the door abdicating failed in their gatekeeping function out of miscalculation or opportunism and let the extremists in the door and in every instance the mainstream politician makes the same mistake the kind of Faustian bargain they hope to draw on the enthusiasm enthusiastic support for the outsider and every instance they think they can control the demagogue but in every instance the Faustian bargain backfires the establishment politicians will lose control so the same thing happened in the United States in 2016 Republicans enabled Donald Trump most leading Republicans even after candidate Trump won the nomination openly despised him were offended by him they could have both crossed party lines they could have but didn't endorse Hillary Clinton they could have put country ahead of party and this could have made a difference now some of you are probably thinking well come on is this realistic endorse somebody from the other side well I think you know it's not it's not as naive as you may think this in fact has happened in the past in other countries in France in 2017 just a year ago the French presidential election in 2017 is a two-round system France off.we on who was the Republican center-right party candidate who everybody thought would make it into the second round the conservative didn't make it into the second round and in the second round you had McCrone the current prime minister of current president former cabinet minister and a socialist government facing off against marine lepen in many ways marine lepen program is much closer to the conservative front sophia on the center-right kennedy friend south lyon came out an endorsed Makran and many of his voters went and supported McCrone and this made a significant difference in the united states did not do this they let our tulip n in the door Donald Trump was elected president and once in a thought an authoritarian is in the door it's a changed game thanks can you hear me I like to be heard thanks so much for coming to to at least try to hear us so I'm responsible for Discovery's two and three the truth is that I'll be honest Daniel came up with all the discoveries I just thought of the title of the book that's why I'm here so second the second discovery and tell me if you're not hearing me was that our Constitution by itself is probably not enough to save us Americans tend to have a lot of faith in our constitutional system of checks and balances and for a pretty good reason we've the oldest we the most successful constitution on earth and it is contained powerful ambitious presidents in the past but constitutions do not work automatically if they did the constitution of my beloved Argentina which was in the in the nineteenth century essentially an exact replica of the US Constitution would have enabled that new democracy to to thrive to survive instead Argentina's first democracy lasted fourteen years and the country suffered six military coos in the 20th century so the Constitution itself none about what's written in the Constitution is not enough we argue that constitutions work best when they're reinforced by two key Democratic norms or unwritten rules one of them is what we call mutual toleration or accepting the legitimacy of our partisan opponent that means that no matter how much we may disagree with no matter how much we may dislike our partisan rivals we recognize publicly and privately that they're loyal citizens who love the country just as we do and who have an equal and legitimate right to compete for office govern in other words we do not treat our rivals as enemies the second norm this one's a little trickier is what we call institutional forbearance forbearance means refraining from exercising one's legal right it is an act of self-restraint it is an under utilization of one's power and we don't often think about forbearance in politics but it is absolutely vital think about what the President of the United States is constitutionally able to do the president can pardon whomever he or she wants whenever she her he wants any president with a congressional majority can pack the Supreme Court don't like the way the Supreme Court is ruling if you have a majority in Congress you could expand it to eleven to thirteen and fill it with allies perfectly legal or if a president's agenda is stalled in Congress he can circumvent the legislative process and make policy through things like executive proclamations or executive orders the Constitution does not explicitly prohibit circumventing Congress in that way or think about what Congress can do the Senate could use its right to advise and consent to block all of the president's cabinet and judicial picks it can prevent the president from filling supreme court vacancies legally Congress can as we know refuse to fund the government it can effectively shut the government down and of course it can impeach the president basically on any grounds that chooses my point here is simply that politicians can exploit the very letter of the Constitution in ways that can throw a democracy even hours into crisis legal scholar mark touch net calls this sort of behavior constitutional hardball using the letter of the law in ways that undermine or eviscerate its spirit look at any failing democracy now or in history and you will find an abundance of constitutional hardball Argentina under Peron Spain in Germany in the 30s contemporary Turkey Ecuador Venezuela hungry what prevents our constitutional system from descending into deadlock into the function and maybe even authoritarianism is forbearance it's a shared understanding among politicians that neither side will deploy its institutional prerogatives to the hilt that the spirit of the law will prevail over the letter law we view norms of mutual toleration and forbearance as the soft guardrails of democracy they help to prevent healthy normal political competition from spiraling into the kind of partisan fight to the death that wrecked democracies in Europe in the 1930s and in Latin America in the 1960s and 70s now American democracies not always had these soft guardrails didn't have them in the 1790s when partisan intolerance and constitutional hardball nearly destroyed our new republic and it lost them very clearly in the run-up to the Civil War but starting in the late 19th century Democrats and Republicans largely accepted one another as legitimate rivals and largely avoided destabilizing acts of constitutional hardball there were no impeachments there were no successful court packings senators were judicious in their use of filibusters and in the right to advise and consent they largely deferred to the President and presidential appointees and outside of wartime presidents largely refrained from acting unilaterally - circa media through the courts or Congress so for more than a century starting in the late 19th century our checks and balances worked but again they worked not because of what is written down in the Constitution so much as the fact that they were reinforced by norms of mutual toleration and forbearance what we argue and hopefully show in the book is that these democratic norms have been unraveling in the United States for the last 25 or 30 years we saw early signs of this in the in the 1990s with the Gingrich era government shutdowns in the partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton but the process really got going in the 2000s when Barack Obama ran for president Republicans called him a Marxist Pro terrorists on American Republican leaders like Giuliani Huckabee Gingrich said President Obama did not love America that Obama and the Democrats were not real Americans the birther movement of course took it a step further questioning President Obama's very legitimacy as president now America has always had an extremist fringe as Daniel pointed out but this wasn't fringe politics anymore these were national Republican leaders this was a vice presidential candidate the Republicans nominated a prominent birther as their presidential candidate in 2016 and that candidate accused his president's arrival of being a criminal law in jail so by the 2000s leading Republicans had begun to deny the legitimacy of their democratic rivals they had begun to cast the Democrats as the enemy the decline of mutual toleration and we've seen this in Europe and Latin America and elsewhere encourages politicians to abandon forbearance when we view when we come to view our partisan rivals as the enemy as an existential threat we become tempted to use any mean any means necessary to stop them because if you if you believe that your rival if he or she or they come to power will destroy America you're gonna use every tool available to you no more restraint right and that's exactly we argue what's beginning to happen politicians are throwing forbearance to the wind filibusters are now routine politicians shut down the government they refuse to raise the debt limit a few years ago nearly throwing us into default we see extraordinary acts of constitutional hardball like North Carolina's 2016 legislative coup and the Senate's 2016 refusal to allow the president to fill a Supreme Court vacancy move that was unprecedented since the 1860s since the end of the Civil War so the problem and this is this is to repeat something daniel said is not just that Americans elected a demagogue in 2016 we did do that the problem the real problem is that we elected a demagogue at a time when the soft guardrails protecting our democracy were coming unmoored so why the hell is this happening we argue and this is I think discovery number three that what's driving normalization is partisan polarization Republicans and Democrats have grown so far apart that they now literally fear and load one another in nineteen sixty four or five percent of Republicans and Democrats told surveys that they would be displeased if their child married someone from another party four or five percent today that number is fifty percent both parties last year a Pew survey found that forty nine percent of Republicans and fifty-five percent of Democrats said that the other party makes them afraid we have not seen this kind of partisan hatred since the end of Reconstruction and this is not traditional liberal conservative polarization people do not fear and lows one another about health care or taxes they don't todays partisan differences run deeper there are about race religion and way of life our parties have changed dramatically during our lifetimes over the last 50 years if you go back to the 1960s 1970s the two parties were demographically were culturally very similar both of them were overwhelmingly white and Christian parties differed on taxes they differed on government spending they may have different on foreign policy but on race and religion on God and skin color they were almost indistinguishable certainly overlapping three changes have occurred in the last 50 years first of all the achievements of the civil rights movement led to a massive migration of southern whites from the Democratic to the Republican Party and of course the enfranchisement belatedly of african-americans in the south led to a ratio of African Americans into the Democratic Party second the United States experienced a massive wave of immigration primarily from Latin America and Asia most of those immigrants in their children ended up in the Democratic Party and third beginning under Reagan evangelical Christians who you who had once been evenly distributed between the two political parties a little more Democrat the Republican moved overwhelmingly into the Republican Party so by the 2000s Democrats and Republicans were very very different beings they were demographically and culturally very different the Democrats were a rainbow coalition of urban educated whites in a range of ethnic minorities the Republicans by contrast remained overwhelmingly white and Christian that's important because white Christians are not just any group they were once the majority electorally and they used to sit unchallenged atop the the country's social economic political hierarchies they filled the presidency Congress supreme court they were the pillars of local communities there were the CEOs there were the newscasters there were the sports stars the movie stars they were the college professors and crucially they were the face of both the Democrat and Republican parties those days obviously are over but losing ones majority losing ones majority status in a society can be deeply threatening many certainly not all but many Republican voters feel like the country that they grew up in is being taken away from them and we think that ultimately is with fueling polarization in this country the problem is that polarization can kill democracies this is a major lesson that we take from the failure of democracy in Europe in the 30s from the failure of democracy in Latin America in the 60s and 70s when politics is so deeply polarized that each side sees the victory by the other side as intolerable as beyond the pale democracies in trouble when an opposition victory is viewed as something that cannot be accepted that's on intolerable you start to justify using extraordinary means to stop them violence election fraud coos Americans have not reached that point obviously but we have reached a point where according to 2016 exit polls one out of four Trump voters believed that he was unfit for the office of Presidency and yet they still prefer them to the Democrat we've reached a level where according to Gallup Republicans have a much more favorable view of Vladimir Putin than if Hillary Clinton those are dangerous levels of polarization so Donald Trump is a challenge but the most fundamental challenge that we face today is extreme polarization extreme polarization driven by a radicalized Republican Party that today represents a declining white Christian majority many of whose members perceive themselves to face an existential threat Trump is a symptom of that polarization he didn't cause it but and he's a departure from the presidency whether it's in 2020 2024 or before his departure from the presidency will not end that polarization so quickly what can be done we don't know it's all in the book really good it is clear for one that the Republican Party has to change it has to become a more diverse political party as long as the Republicans remain overwhelmingly white and Christian in a society as diverse as ours it will be prone to extremism but looking Democrats do there's been a lot of talk in progressive circles recently since Trump's election about Democrats learning to fight like Republicans if Republicans are going to play constitutional hardball Democrats need to learn to play tit for tat they don't they will be victims of an endless series of sucker punches stolen Supreme Court seats and the light and in fact Democrats are beginning to fight like Republicans they just used a filibuster to trigger a make their first ever major government shutdown that is a page out of the Newt Gingrich playbook many Democrats will run on a platform of impeachment in this year's election and it's a Democrats win control of the Senate there's talk of denying President Trump the ability to fill any additional Supreme Court vacancy just like the Democrats did to Obama excuse me sorry you didn't know that huh Republicans we worry a lot about that response fighting like Republicans as understandable as it may be will inevitably reinforce and even accelerate the process of normalization it will further weaken democracy's guardrails and in our experience studying democracies in crisis elsewhere in the world that sort of spiral that sort of escalation rarely ends well so in our view opposition to Trump certainly to Trump's abuses should be vigorous it should be muscular it can include protests but it should be norm defending rather than norm violate these days forbearance is not a pretty word in American politics forbearance particularly I think among Democrats is seen as a sign of weakness it's a sign of giving in to the other side that the giving in to the bully but in reality forbearance takes great political courage and strength it often means stand and you'll see this much in politics today it means standing up in front of an angry base and saying you're not going to do what they want but you're gonna do what's best for the country or you're gonna do what's best for our institutions Republicans have systematically failed to show that kind of leadership over the last decade I want to suggest that Democrats should not follow in their footsteps let me stop there cuz I think I've taken too long [Applause] so you haven't you haven't mentioned the Koch brothers I remember the 50s very well I was born before that and life was quite different then one factory job could support the man a wife at home two children he could buy a house he could buy a car he could send his kids to a public school he had a retirement that's gone it was mostly for whites the blacks weren't able to participate I'm from New England uh but you haven't talked about that now the Republicans have offered a series of scapegoats first it was the blacks then it was the immigrants but it's not it's the Reagan he thought freedom meant the free market and unions were done away with all kinds of laws were changed what do not consider that - yeah yeah so yeah thank you for the question and thanks for raising that issue that is something we deal with I mean we and especially in the last chapter of our book we talked about the role of inequality I think you were highlighting something very important you know I think in a lot of ways that these dynamics of polarization the Steve is describing that have emerged really since beginning really in the 1960s the realignment of the parties in some ways is a backlash against the Voting Rights Act the Civil Rights Act I mean that's one way of thinking about what has happened this has been exacerbated certainly by growing economic inequality I mean it's the it's the combination of these two things that I think is so if that is potentially dangerous you know or that it has caught that has caused this back up so we have to figure out ways of dealing with that and obviously you know we you know in a book we say that one way of reducing polarization is by reducing inequality there's a dilemma of course there which is you know in order to reduce to come up with the policies to address these kinds of economic problems our politics needs to become more functional and less polarized but in order to become less polarized we need to address inequality so as a catch-22 and there's an important role here for political leadership just just one other point imagine for a moment you know had the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and and increases in immigration begun in 1948 and then you had 50 years of uninterrupted basically economic growth we might be live in a very different place I mean we had that kind of misfortune in some ways that these democratizing reforms that came in the late 60s were followed within several years of a transformation the global economy and slowed economic growth rates and so it's really that combination that I think has you know that's that's the reality the question is that you know how do I do our politics cope with that so thank you thank you as you know the Electoral College has historically voted in tandem with the populist vote so my question is what is it that the electoral college members soand Donald Trump that they preferred to Hillary Clinton okay there is a long long established a 200 plus year old norm in the United States that delegates vote in line with with with the with the with the state election so delegates are with Alexander Hamilton imagined an electoral college full of independent essentially local note notables who would then who would deliberate and vote independently that it net that that existed for a few years disappeared that's not the way our Electoral College works in practice the way our electric College works in practice is simply transferring the state-level outcomes into they're a rubber stamp there's there supposed to be a rubber stamp so what it wasn't it's not it's not the poor members the electoral colleges fault that Donald Trump was was selected president that's not where the problem lies now there's there's a very good argument I think for eliminating the electoral college they're very I don't think it's going to resolve all of our problems it will prevent the I mean forty percent of the last presidents have been determined by someone other than the winner of the popular there's a problem with that so I think you make an argument a good argument for eliminating the electoral college but even that would not eliminate the problems of polarization that we highlight in the book the person who spoke second I'm sorry I forgot names Steve you suggested the Democrats should practice forbearance if they do the Republicans will just bully them more won't it just become a cycle and make it worse if the Democrats don't fight back with the same tactics as the Republicans I want to say first of all that this is a really tough dilemma first of all any time you elect as president somebody's not fully committed to democratic rules of the game opposition's are in a tough place because if they put their guard down they can get stepped on as we've seen in many countries but if they fight it can often spiral even worse so it's it's there's no easy choice there is no easy choice for opposition and as I mean think what the Democrats have to do is take advantage of Institutional opportunist we continue to have free elections in this country Democrats need to win the election and when the government that's the thing that's the single best blow for democracy that the Democrats can land in the next year the choice what to do when you get punched in the gut by a bully when you get sucker-punched is is a tough one it's we and we've we have no magic bullet solution to that none but we have seen democracies die in every continent on earth except the Middle East where there haven't been a democracy and and we've we've seen this movie before the erosion the spiralling erosion of democratic norms can kill democracies and so it's a it's a it's a very very serious dilemma the Democrats face so if they're going it's and there there is there is it's very hard to identify the point there is a point where you have to fight back there is a point where opposition needs to engage in hardball I would say that one it needs to be deliberated seriously that that that that Democrats have to be very careful about that choice and secondly if they do it if they employ hardball tactics they should build the biggest possible coalition behind it it's really important that they bring in as many actors from red states from the Republican Party from the private sector as possible and have it not be a partisan spiral because the costs of fighting back as reasonable as it is can be deadly for democracy long run a quick comment then quick question my comment is something you didn't mention that's more recent which is that now we see Congress being faced with adopting major legislation with no public hearings no time to for deliberation and comment and that is truly frightening and second my question is particularly mister is it blood I look for your name thank you you seem to use demagogue and authoritarian as the same interchangeably although maybe or maybe it's demagoguery leads to authoritarianism aren't they the same thing or are there some shades of grey particularly maybe on the demagogue side yeah great yeah thank you for the questions so on the first point I mean this is something we recount in the book because I think what you're describing its job in effect I mean that the product of procedures for considering legislation of change I mean this is you know we kind of recount this and one way to think about this is that each of each of the branches of government have a certain constitutional role to play and Congress you can think of as having a guard a kind of guard dog role to play which is to kind of watch you know fur abuses of power one thing that makes us nervous I mean what happens when forbearance declines is you kind of get this oscillation between attack dogs and laughs dog Congress's so in which when the other parties in charge the Congress turns into an attack dog and blocks anything from happening and when your own party's in charge of the presidency then the Congress turns into a lap dog and kind of protects you know protects essentially the president doesn't do its constitutional duty and so this dynamic is in part driven I think by polarization party polarization so that's that's that's how we kind of think about these things connecting terms of demagogue and authoritarian so demagogue you know this is a classical Greek kind of phenomena that was written about by Thucydides I mean it's it's a it's a tricky term because demos demagogue is a representative of the people so this sounds very Democrat I mean you know all Democratic politicians at some level are demagogues but the way that people have I think have thought about this and theorists have written about this in the way we think about this is that a demagogue is somebody who responds to the whims of the people but it doesn't act in responsible ways now of course responsibilities a bit in the eye of the beholder you know but there's a way in which a demagogue is one who who plays to the worst instincts in the crowd and so you know we talked about that the politicians needing to stand up and say it points you know this is not acceptable behavior and I'm not gonna give in to it even if it's unpopular this is not what a demagogue does now the relationship between demagogues and authoritarianism I mean as we pointed out one of the things that's transformed over the since the end of the Cold War is the way that authoritarians come to power now is often through elections and so rather than being generals coming to power through me you know Pinochet and Chile coming to power through a military coup the wait thora Terrans come to powers through elections and so they're off they often are demagogues so in the 1860 election Abraham Lincoln wasn't on the ballot in nine states and then during the Civil War he suspended habeas corpus so aren't these examples of like democratic norms are voting away during the Civil War so how are we able to overcome those and how can we apply that today and see a difference with 2016 versus the 1860s this is not gonna be a happy tale and good question oh yeah it's a great question so I mean what what the Civil War the Civil War isn't is a really great comparative case for us because it's a case where if you look at political discourse first of all intense polarization over slavery in the 1850s that led to a clear erosion of mutual toleration when this country was not born with mutual toleration the Federalists and the Republicans in the 1790s considered each other traitors who were trying to destroy the Republic but over the course of the first decades of the 19th century the second generation the generation that followed our founders did establish these these sort of embryonic democratic norms including mutual toleration it was it was it was partly invented in the United States in the early 19th century those those norms were shattered in the polarization over slavery particularly between though the white southern planters who ran the Democratic Party in the south and the emerging Republican Party which was allied with the abolitionist movement Southern Democrats if you look at discourse in the late 1850s and around the 1860 election considered the Republicans traitors and called them that and the Republic and and abolitionists saw the Southern Democrats same way so you saw a total erosion of mutual toleration and eventually the collapse of of the regime u.s. democracy broke down in the early nineteen and the early 1860s how and in fact the norms that collapsed remained very weak well after the Civil War we this surprised us as we did our research 1870s even into the 1880s you saw really low levels of partisan tolerance between Republicans and and ever keep going back to waving the bloody shirt yes so how does it get resolved it gets resolved in a in a tragic way the Republicans decision to abandon goals of racial equality to abandon reconstruction to abandon efforts to to enforce the the the the recent constitutional amendments guaranteeing suffrage to African Americans in the south and the Republicans willingness to allow the Democrats first of all to strip away suffered to african-americans which had been granted and to consolidate single party authoritarian rule in the south that is what allowed Democrats and Republicans to come together once Republicans allowed racial equality to be removed from the political agenda Democrats for the first time in 30 years stopped seeing them stopped seeing Republicans as an existential threat and so mutual tolerance did include increased and they were able in effect to play nice for the first time since since really the birth of the Republican Party and so paradoxically tragically the norms that were rebuilt in the late 19th century which I mentioned which sustained our democratic system throughout the 20th century were built and to a large extent sustained on racial exclusion toldja wasn't a happy story I mean just just let me just add something that means I see here some of you murmuring and muttering at that answer I mean I think this the mean this is that the reality is history doesn't move always in the same direction I mean there's a ways in which we know this isn't this is a very this was a tragic part of our history and at some level you know the point of our book is to try to think about how we can combine these norms of mutual toleration and forbearance with a more fully democratic society that we are today and so that's really the challenge and the dilemma that this account the steep just gave up suggests thanks for a great presentation I like that thank you found it very enlightening and I especially liked your answer to the last question which I found especially enlightening so and I appreciate the idea than assault what you were calling the soft guardrails and the importance of those I guess a quick comment it strikes me that polarization extreme polarization partisanship is sort of a symptom rather than a cause and yet you sort of wanted to describe it as a cause or rather than then as a symptom but here's the question I really seems even more fundamental you're saying we can't really depend on me or we we shouldn't count on the Constitution really to protect us here and I'm the specific question I have is what are the limits of the Supreme Court and our judiciary but our Supreme Court in particular in using the Constitution as a as a protection against the worst outcomes I don't know what happened and with the Supreme Court in the Civil War how that things played out there but what's the what what are the limits of the court in in protecting us that's a great question and I'm not an expert on the u.s. judiciary so there there are limits to my answer to the question about the limits but the Supreme Court is historically the United States a a small C conservative institution it does not like to step in and rule the president's behavior unconstitutional so one of our colleagues a political scientist named William Howell has written a book that shows among other things that the that I mentioned that presidents there's nothing in the Constitution that explicitly forbids the president and in fact President Obama did this quite a bit if if he can't get something to Congress using proclamations or presidential memos or executive orders to do what he wanted to do through Congress that's you know circumventing Congress is not good for democracy but historically the Supreme Court has had nothing to say about that the Supreme Court has very rarely stepped in to say hey exactly if you can't do that the only time that's historically the Supreme Court will intervene and rule that the president has overstepped his bounds or her bow is when Congress rejects what the President does so if the president issue some sort of executive order and Congress votes that this was somehow unacceptable or shows public opposition to what the president did and there's a conflict between the two powers then the Supreme Court will step in if the Congress is silent if the Congress is a lap dog is Daniel just mentioned the Supreme Court historically has not stepped in now that's that self limitation if the Supreme Court could step in I mean said the the Venezuelan supreme court pact by Hugo Chavez when the opposition gain control of the of the Congress in 2015 everything in order to protect president Maduro ruled every single bill that the Congress passed was unconstitutional everything he did somebody got to go to the bathroom unconstitutional and so that you know the president if the Supreme Court could engage in hardball and and and and step in but historically the Supreme Court has used a lot of forbearance and a lot of strain it is restrained itself I don't know if you have anything to add yeah well I would just say that the that in in our current situation I mean our checks and balances I mean this is one of the points of our book is despite the dark cover in the dark title may I think our checks and balances have worked pretty well and in particular you know some institutions have worked better than others some social institutions some political institutions and I think the judicial branch has worked quite well I mean there's been effort in a blocking of very you know presidential executive orders and so on so you know I think media has worked quite well I mean there's been an incredible you know the New York Times is triple that subscription and so on and me has been very active I would say though the kind of weak point in our checks and balances currently is Congress in fact mm-hmm so how likely is it for this demagogue to start a war in order to avoid impeachment oh yeah so what you know I'm not I think one thing I mean it's a good question it's a good question the reason it's a good question is that one of the things that we've noticed looking around the world is that one of the most kind of the things that we worry about the thing that keeps us up at night is the possibility of a crisis and in moments of crisis what what authoritarians electoral authoritarians who've been slowly chipping away at the state do is they take advantage of that crisis so Ferdinand Marcos did this and and the Philippines you know there's been other cases of this you know whether or not yes okay there are cases in which the English the leader invents the crisis so the the crisis that led Ferdinand Marcos to impose martial law in the Philippines was was was invented no it's worse than that I mean every time the the that we've been in a major security crisis every time we've been in a major war where American lives are being lost presidential approval shoots to the sky right George Bush after the 9/11 attacks has saw his presidential approval rating reached 90 or 91 percent there was a period of time in which he could do whatever he wanted and actually to his great credit he exercised a lot of forbearance he did not use that power to wield it against Democrats he made some moves that many of us may disagree with he did not wield that power against Democrats so that does keep us so don't tell any of this to the president I I cannot predict the likelihood that he that he will try to do this I can I don't know something it's certainly something to worry about so we can take [Music] for the sake of transparency I should admit that I'm a white Christian and I think that I'm way to yes one of the reasons we're part of the problem is that extremism is institutionalized in the Congress gerrymandering in the house and the continuation of the Senate as as a rotten borough now the Congress should be the strongest opponent of an authoritarian executive and yet its approval rating is even lower than trumps so can we do anything about that such as changing redistricting okay do that electroform is I mean a matter for a couple of reasons go that far there are a couple of reasons why electoral form is hard and I agree with you that that there are a number of electoral reforms that would make our I wouldn't it there's no panacea there's no electoral system in the world that will do away with American polarization we shouldn't overstate the role of electoral reform or changing the rules but you know an awful lot of of electoral innovations have taken place in the last 200 years the reason why electoral form is hard in this too in our country there are a number of reasons one for better and worse we were really attached to our political institutions you know they're I don't think there's a country in the world that is still hugging its eighteenth-century institutions more or less intact in Europe the electric electoral systems were dramatically overhauled in and around and after World War one we are we are sticking with our eighteenth-century institutions there's a they're positive to that there are they're having strong institutions with a lot of sort of public legitimacy is beneficial if you don't believe that go check out politics in Argentina in Peru where nobody believes in any institutions but that said we Americans are very conservative small see in terms of political reform we kind of treat our institutions as sacrosanct which probably is not a great idea the other reason though is that electroform is always hard is that usually one side is benefiting from the status quo and that's certainly true with our electoral system today including the electoral college if one side is benefiting it's hard to get the consensus needed for a major overhaul of the system but I would just add that there are innovations taking place at the state level across the US and that's very interesting to kind of it you know it's not in the national headlines but you know there's you know in Maine in California you know it's a one reform that people have talked about is you know shifting power of just redistricting out of the hands of state legislatures and into the hands of neutral bodies and that's happened in California and I think you know that's something that it turns out may be a very good reform but that but it's going to be happening at the state level not at the national level I think we tend to think of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as if they were one within each but there's actually wide differences within each party and those differences get played out pretty nastily in the primaries and then there's the independent Green Party and other parties do you see in on our horizon a splintering of the Democrats and Republicans do you see movements toward the left and toward the right and then possibly crossover in the center and what effect would that have on democracy in America you guys keep asking us to forecast political scientists are notoriously bad at predicting the future well I guess one thing I would say is that you know given our electoral system more likely to continue to have two parties what what those what what will be inside those two parties may all change I mean there's at different moments in American history there's been a realignment of parties like the one we've just described where where Southern Democrats migrated to the Republican Party I mean I think it's potentially there's the possibility that the current dynamic where you have moderate Republicans you know still may be calling themselves Republicans potentially joining with the Democrat this mate you know who knows it's it's hard to know how these things will play out but I think it's but you know on the other hand the Democratic Party there's certainly lots of energy on the left of the Democratic Party now to a degree that there hasn't been in a very long time so you know I as Steve said it's hard to predict but it's not one thing I guess I can predict is that realignment does happen and so it's likely to continue to happen you know what form it will take it's I'm not sure let me just add one point which is that our parties are so we're a very diverse country a big heterogeneous diverse country and because the electoral system we have a two-party system because of that inevitably inevitably both parties are internally heterogeneous it's impossible for two parties to represent the enormous diversity of this country without being big tense but historically our parties have been much more internally divided than they are today I don't think our parties have at particularly the Republicans have ever been as homogeneous as they are these days you know back in the 1950s and 60s the Democrats had a liberal wing and up here in the Northeast they had a very conservative wing in the south the Republicans had you know Goldwater Republicans and they had liberals up in New England that there was a big gap within the parties those gaps have been dramatically reduced so yes Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton fight it out you know primaries are competitive and people throw things at each other but the parties are actually much more homogeneous than they were in the past internally if we move quickly we can take this one last question over here in 2008 twelve and sixteen sixty million Republicans showed up in comparison 70 million 65 million 60 million Democrats showed up our Democrats fickle they have feet of clay that's one so too then what do you do about getting people to show up like why do you why does there have to be a what appears to be a as standard by which if somebody doesn't meet this level I'm just gonna stay home yeah so one thing to think about with people turning out to vote oh man see it's easy to blame voters directly themselves and you know voters of course are responsible to vote but the reality is parties mobilize voters and parties mobilize voters through groups it's much more efficient to mobilize a group and then get those people to turn out and so you know I just there's a recent study that's come out with and the National Bureau of Economic Research which shows that in states that have open open shop laws so in other words unions are not required that were they've adopted these laws voter so we unions are weaker and voter voter turnout declines and Democratic vote declines and so the weakening of social groups and civic society groups I think is one thing one plays an important role so this is you know what can be done I mean one one solution based on the findings of this paper this is just one there's many answers to this question but one answer is focus on building up groups because groups mobilize voters and parties need to be linked to groups and so it's hard boring organizational work but that's that's the reality let me just take that point very briefly in a very depressing direction if you're a Democrat sorry I just it's my mood today in any small town in the country or think you can think about red states or rural areas in any town anywhere in this country you have two things two organizations two groups as Daniel put out that that work that bring out votes because Dan's right political science research shows that people do not just watch television get up and vote some of us do but people have to be mobilized by by somebody but organizations in every small town in this country in every state there are Christian churches and there are NRA branches that is a powerful infrastructure of electoral mobilization for the Republican Party what do the Democrats have they used to have unions there are about a third of the strength that they were in the night fifties and there's nothing else what Democrat maybe are but our women are not I I wish but are women organized in every small town in Nebraska the way the NRA with the way the NRA is I would submit they are not I mean there's something but I mean that Daniels gonna offer collagen word of hope yeah I always he's the pessimist I'm the optimist is usually our roles here so you know so that you know the woman's March last year the women's March this year and then we kind of media focuses on it as a one-time event but I think there you know the idea that there's the possibility of new political leaders I mean I think the most important you know it turns out the abolitionist movement one of the main when a kind of legacy of the abolitionist when when women were involved with the abolitionist movement and they this gave rise to women's voting rights I mean these are the same people who get activated in one set of struggles turns to another set of struggles and I think in a similar way what's potentially the potential the kind of light that I see you know the positive side of this that I see is that these these marches generate a new generation of political leaders and people running for office and there's evidence that this is happening and so this this is you know this is a new dynamic in fact and so you know who knows we'll see keep an eye on this thank you those are great questions yeah thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 50,852

Rating: 4.643611 out of 5

Keywords: P&P TV, Washington DC, Politics and Prose, Authors, Books, Events, Literature, Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, Harvard, Political Science, democracy, Trump, Donald Trump, How Democracies Die, authoritarian, Republican, political norms, 2016 election

Id: 5v4NTtS2f5k

Length: 64min 55sec (3895 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2018