This is a re-review of a prior book. The original review appears at The Rise and Fall of Anti-Democracy.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point
When Levitsky and Ziblatt published this book in 2023, it seemed reasonable to discuss the Trump Administration in the past tense. The once and future President lost his midterm election overwhelmingly, then became the first sitting president to lose his reelection bid in nearly thirty years. He left office with the lowest approval rating in polling history. Although Trump retained a loyal following, reasonable observers and political pundits assumed history had passed its final judgment.
The forces Levitsky and Ziblatt describe have, unfortunately, become relevant again. A plurality of American voters compared Donald Trump to an accomplished, eloquent, public-spirited Woman of Color, and decided they wanted Trump back. At this writing, Americans prepare to see which of Trump’s anti-democratic, authoritarian promises he intends to follow through on, and which will fall victim to sectarian infighting. American democracy really depends, now, on how incompetent the incoming administration actually promises to be.
Our authors describe how prior democracies shuddered and died. Their descriptions of France between the World Wars, and the anti-democratic forces that halted the legislature, seem chillingly like the swarms of angry insurgents who invaded and vandalized the Capitol Building on January 6th, 2021. The Peronists’ inability to comprehend their electoral loss in Argentina in 1983, despite their concrete pro-worker platform, remind readers of the Democrats’ inability to comprehend their loss in November of 2024.
But it’s difficult to avoid noticing that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t delve much into the strong anti-democratic tendency in American politics. Not that it’s absent: they do mention, say, Joseph McCarthy, who would’ve gladly overturned the entire government to purge Communist influences. They excoriate the filibuster rule, which allows only one or two Senators—in a legislative house that already protects poorer, less populous—to stop debate and kill bills with just a quick email.
But America has always had an aggressive anti-democratic contingent in its electorate. Around the same time Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote this book, Rachel Maddow wrote that a number of non-profit and civic organizations took money from the German government before World War II. These groups campaigned actively to weaken America’s small-D democratic institutions, bolster White supremacist government, and join the wrong side of the looming war. As with Trump himself, most pro-Reich conspirators went unprosecuted.
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| Steven Levitsky (left) and Daniel Ziblatt (via Harvard University) |
It’s not that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t address anti-democratictendencies preceding Donald Trump. Quite the opposite, they run out quite a laundry list. The way that, for instance, the Klan arose in direct opposition to the Reconstruction effort to enfranchise newly freed Black Americans. The way White leaders in Wilmington, North Carolina, overthrew the city government and installed their loyalists, the only successful coup d’etat in American history so far. Our authors acknowledge these happened.
Rather, they treat these events as atomized, existing within their own sphere. They don’t go beyond events to draw conclusions about why this happens, why every attempt to increase American democracy consistently generates violent resistance. Whenever Americans have attempted to give People of Color the right to vote, we’ve witnessed a countervailing move to make voting harder and more exclusive. It keeps happening, because it represents something deeper and more fundamental than the event itself.
In no small part, it represents a deification of the past because it’s the past. As Jason Stanley writes, great thinkers of prior eras—including the authors of America’s Constitution—have much to teach us. But we can only learn when we regard them as askers of important questions. When past masters become too important to question, their accomplishments sacrosanct and beyond the domain of doubt, a different dynamic sets in. We ourselves become fossilized.
America’s Constitution is approaching 250 years old, and at this writing, hasn’t been amended in 32 years. It’s become an artifact, something that demands preservation simply because it’s old, not because it provides us meaningful guidance in answering today’s questions. A major contingent of American lawmaking believes we need to preserve the vision of White slaveholders in powdered wigs and knee breeches simply because that which is older is necessarily more valuable than the present.
Levitsky and Ziblatt are responsible social scientists, limiting themselves to what happened, and what they can quantify. They trust readers to draw conclusions. But the 2024 electoral results, when a plurality of Americans chose the anti-democratic Presidential candidate, demonstrate that Americans broadly can’t identify patterns and draw conclusions. Real-world evidence shows that Americans don’t need scientists, we need pop philosophers, like Tocqueville and Burke, to go beyond the evidence and draw out the deeper story.
