Book of the week How Democracies Die
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt Viking 320pp £16.99 The Week bookshop £14.99
“There are two must-read books about the Trump presidency at the moment,” said Andrew Marr in The Sunday Times. “This is the one you probably haven’t heard of.” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt – both Harvard professors – draw on their training as political scientists to pose a “once unthinkable” question: is American democracy under threat? Their answer should concern every US citizen, while also speaking “urgently to British democracy”. Would-be authoritarians, they write, display four characteristics: they reject the democratic rules of the game; deny legitimacy to opponents; tolerate – or even encourage – violence; and seek to curtail civil liberties. Donald Trump is guilty on all counts. Yet the authors see Trump as more symptom than cause, the product of a creeping decline in US political culture marked by the coarsening of discourse, a tendency to demonise opponents, and the erosion of “civility and restraint”. Democracies, they argue, need “gatekeepers” – political parties, essentially – to function properly, and America’s gatekeepers haven’t been doing their job.
This “provocative and readable” book argues that the biggest threat to democracy comes from the “erosion of norms”, said David Runciman in The Guardian. Norms, the unwritten rules and conventions that hold a democracy together, are based on the idea that all sides have a fundamental allegiance to the system, and that it’s often best to put long-term interest ahead of shortterm advantage. In short, they are what prevent politicians taking “every cheap shot going”. Trump, of course, has no such “impulse control”; he is the “norm-shredder-in-chief”. While Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t think he spells the death of US democracy, their fear is “what he will leave behind”.
Their case seems overblown, said Roger Boyes in The Times. Trump isn’t “pretty”, and he is arguably part of a trend towards authoritarian-minded strongmen, such as Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who use their popularity to “change the democratic rules and institutions in their favour”. Yet Levitsky and Ziblatt go even further, citing Nazi Germany as an example of what can happen when gatekeepers fail to keep demagogues in check. But “there is no sensible comparison between Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and today’s America”: Germany then was “in no sense a developed democracy”, and Trump has “nothing of Hitler about him”. Democracy in America may not be flourishing, but “it’s not dead yet, not by a long chalk”.