PDF Summary:How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

The election of Donald Trump has sparked a great deal of discussion about the fate of American democracy. How Democracies Die explores some key questions that have become paramount in the Trump era. Does the election of a figure like Trump—an inexperienced outsider with obvious authoritarian instincts—suggest that democracy in the US is backsliding? Are we doomed to suffer the fate of other 21st-century democracies, like Hungary, Venezuela, and Turkey, where true democracy ceased to exist? By what processes was democracy killed in those and other countries—and how might we prevent it here?

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Media Dominance

According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, Trump excelled at generating enormous quantities of free coverage in the mainstream media. They cite one study done after the election showing that Trump’s antics generated approximately $2 billion worth of free media coverage. In the new world without party gatekeepers, this was far more effective than fundraising or endorsements from party leaders—the traditional methods by which candidates secured the nomination under the old system, that Trump’s campaign studiously ignored.

The Power of Free Media

Free media coverage may have been the most important asset in securing the 2016 nomination. To put the figures in perspective, Trump’s $2 billion worth of free coverage was nearly 10 times that earned by his closest rival, Jeb Bush.

Constrained by Nomination Rules

As Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, the rules of the nomination process made it impossible to deny Trump the nomination once he’d secured a majority of pledged delegates. By 2016, it was primary voters, media figures, and celebrity candidates like Trump who held the real power—not party bosses. GOP voters, with whom Trump was already enormously popular, had overwhelmingly chosen him as the nominee and party leaders lacked any politically realistic mechanism to stop him.

The “Nuclear Option”

Some commentators pointed out that a majority of delegates could choose to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” by changing the rules on the floor to allow them to vote for the candidate of their choice, rather than the one to whom they were bound by primary voters.

Standing With Trump Vs. Standing for Democracy

Levitsky and Ziblatt state that Trump’s candidacy represented a unique threat to American democracy. Thus, GOP leaders faced a choice in the general election: to stand with Trump or to stand for democracy.

Unfortunately, when faced with this choice, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that GOP leaders chose to stand with Trump, putting their narrow partisan interests over their responsibility as democratic gatekeepers. In their estimation, high-profile Republicans chose party over country— and democracy—in 2016.

The Never Trump Movement

Many mainstream Republicans did in fact offer organized opposition to his candidacy—and, later, to his presidency. During the 2020 election cycle, the Lincoln Project—a political action committee formed by top anti-Trump Republican strategists—spent over $80 million to defeat Trump.

The Demise of Big-Tent Parties

The authors argue that the emergence of Trump did not occur in a vacuum. They view him as a symptom of broader trends in the American political system—and the Republican Party in particular—that have gradually driven the degradation of democratic norms since arguably the middle of the 20th century.

According to the authors, for much of the 20th century, both major parties were big-tent coalitions, with their support cutting across religious, ethnic, geographic, and ideological lines. But this arrangement began to unravel as a result of the success of the civil rights movement. Major pieces of legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which were signed into law by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson stamped the Democrats as the party of civil rights.

Identity Politics and Asymmetric Polarization

These events helped spur the transformation of the GOP into a near-homogenous party of white Christians. For most of the country’s history, white Christians comprised the majority of the electorate and sat atop the social and economic order. But in a few short decades, this dominant position has collapsed, and white Christians now comprise a minority of the electorate (although they are still the plurality).

The authors theorize that this has given rise to a siege mentality within this community. They increasingly feel embattled by the profound demographic, social, and cultural changes that have swept the country.

The Twilight of White Christianity

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s portrayal of the white Christian demographic group as being on the path to political irrelevance may be somewhat overstated. Pew research shows that white Christian voters are highly overrepresented in key battleground states like Wisconsin (86%), Ohio (82%), Pennsylvania (81%), and Michigan (79%)—suggesting that they may have enhanced political clout that outweighs their numbers.

Trump vs. Democratic Norms

Given this history of democratic norms in U.S. politics—and what they argue is their erosion at the hands of an increasingly radicalized Republican Party—Ziblatt and Levitsky turn their attention to Donald Trump’s presidency. According to the authors, the first year of Trump’s presidency was marked by repeated and serial norm-breaking.

Example #1: Loyalty Pledges

Levitsky and Ziblatt cite the example of Trump demanding that FBI Director James Comey—sworn to uphold the Constitution—pledge his personal loyalty to Trump and drop the agency’s ongoing investigation into collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. After Comey refused, Trump took what the authors characterize as the extraordinary step of firing him.

LBJ and the CIA

In fact, Donald Trump was not the first president to attempt to capture the referees or subvert the powers of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to serve his own political ends. During the 1964 presidential election, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson directed the CIA to infiltrate the campaign of his Republican rival, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

Example #2: Voter Suppression

Levitsky and Ziblatt further charge that Trump attempted to rewrite the rules of the democratic game through the Presidential Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity. The commission’s ostensible aim was to root out in-person voter fraud and clean up America's election system. Levitsky and Ziblatt counter that there was zero evidence for these claims of widespread voter fraud and that the true purpose of the commission was to encourage the adoption of state voter ID laws that would make it disproportionately harder for poorer and non-white voters—in other words, voters more likely to support Democrats—to exercise the franchise.

The 2021 Georgia Election Law

These efforts on the part of Republican state officials to change voting rules seem to have continued even after Trump left office. In 2021, the GOP-dominated state government in Georgia passed a sweeping new election law that Democrats and voting-rights advocates argue is designed to suppress ballot access and make voting harder, especially for the state’s large Black and urban population (which was crucial to the Democratic victories in 2020).

Saving American Democracy

Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that pro-democratic forces must overcome America’s deep structural divisions if they are to preserve democracy. They advocate the forging of broad, pro-democratic coalitions that cut across racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic lines. By their very nature and composition, they can appeal to a broader slice of the country and transcend the partisan divide. This can lead to depolarization, which in turn, strengthens democratic norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance.

Working Toward Depolarization

In 2020, Stanford scholars James Fishkin and Larry Diamond conducted an experiment called “America in One Room,” in which they brought together a representative sample of 500 Americans to discuss a range of hot-button issues from healthcare reform to global warming to immigration. Through moderated, small-group discussions, the researchers found that participants developed increased empathy for their opponents and gained a better understanding of how policy proposals would affect them.

What Republicans Can Do

Levitsky and Ziblatt recommend that the GOP moderate its hardline right-wing social and economic ideology and abandon what they see as its appeals to white nationalism. They believe these moves will help the party broaden its appeal to a more diverse cross-section of the electorate. Only when it becomes a big-tent party that straddles religious and ethnic lines, say Levitsky and Ziblatt, can the Republican Party resume its function as the center-right tentpole of American democracy.

GOP 2020 Gains With Minority Voters

Although Levitsky and Ziblatt decry what they see as the drift of the GOP toward white ethnonationalist politics, the Republican Party gained support among Black and Latino voters in the 2020 elections over previous cycles.

What Democrats Can Do

Levitsky and Ziblatt call on the Democratic Party to use its position as the nation’s center-left party to ameliorate what they see as one of the main drivers of extreme polarization—widening income inequality. They argue Democrats should embrace universal benefits like childcare, healthcare, and even a universal basic income. Because everyone benefits from this version of the welfare state, it can be supported by a broader political coalition—one that cuts across racial, cultural, and socioeconomic lines.

The Pitfalls of Universal Basic Income

Closely tied to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s proposal to replace targeted, means-tested programs with universal benefits is an idea that has gained steam over the last few years—universal basic income (UBI). Unfortunately, contrary to their hopes for a more universal benefit system, studies show that replacing the existing means-tested welfare state with UBI would actually increase the number of people living in poverty.

Democracy: A Shared Enterprise

Ultimately, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that it will take committed citizens, not a single political leader or party, to renew American democracy. Democracy is a team sport and shared enterprise in which all participate together. Society can make the collective choice to destroy democracy—or enable it to thrive in a new, multiracial, multicultural society.

The Fate of Multiracial Democracy in India

The challenges of building sustaining a true democracy in a diverse society are by no means unique to the U.S. In India, one can also see the ethnocultural majority group resorting to increasingly anti-democratic tactics to stave off what it sees as impending numerical domination by minorities.

For example, since taking office in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cracked down on the free press, intimidated members of the judiciary who dare to investigate him and his allies, and made moves to transform India into an authoritarian Hindu nationalist state.