Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zablatt on the fate of American democracy

This conversation between New Republic editor Michael Tomasky and the the authors of How Democracies Die is worth your time. Here is a taste:

TOMASKY: What’s your long-term prognosis for American democracy?

LEVITSKY: Mine is evolving. I’ve been repeating the same prognosis for years, which is that I believe that we were passing through a storm; that the reaction to ­multiracial democracy was fierce, fiercer than we anticipated. That it was threatening, destabilizing. But that we as a society were going to grow out of—it’s not the right word, but survive, muddle through, and eventually consolidate a multiracial democracy. That would’ve been my answer six months ago. I’m far less certain of that today. I don’t think Trump will lock in authoritarian power, but he can do a lot of damage with the power he has, and he could send us into a spiral that gets pretty dark. And from which it’s going to be harder to climb back to that kind of consolidated, multiracial democracy that I aspired to a year or two ago.

ZIBLATT: I think there’s an analogy here to Bonapartism in France. When Napoleon Bonaparte came along, he added a new element to French political culture. And that continues through today. You know, his nephew then ran for president some decades later, [and] every French president ever since has these kind of overreaching tendencies. So it’s now a part of French political culture—along with a Republican tradition and the socialist tradition, there’s a Bonapartist tradition.

Maybe this is what has happened in the United States. Political scientists used to talk about the liberal tradition in America. But there’s always also been an illiberal tradition. But there’s now a new distinctive illiberal tradition in American politics today, which is the Trumpist tradition. And so, even if we get through this over the next several years, there’s an electorate that’s out there, there’s a way of thinking about—and talking about—the world that is not going anywhere. And so, to make our democracy stable means, on some level, that we need to have at least two political parties that are committed to democracy, that are committed to the rules of the game. And so if we want our democracy to be stable, our parties need to figure out how to sideline that now persistent part of our political culture.

TOMASKY: Speaking again of parties and specifically of the Republican Party, we obviously don’t have a Republican Party that’s committed to democracy. How could a more moderate and pro-small-d democratic Republican Party be rebuilt?

ZIBLATT: That’s the $3 billion question. Or a hundred-billion-dollar question! There’s only one way to do it. The only tool a democracy has is that politicians lose power and come up with new strategies to win power. That’s the only way parties change. Parties don’t change because an asteroid comes from outer space. Parties change once politicians realize that the strategy they’re using doesn’t work. It’s the self-correcting mechanism of democracy. And so as long as Trumpism is a strategy that works, I think we can’t get away from it. And so what happens in a democracy that’s spinning out of control is that people, when they lose, rather than adjusting strategy, they double down on the radicalizing strategy. And that’s where we are right now. And so until we get out of that spiral, we will remain where we are.

LEVITSKY: None of these scenarios is particularly likely in the short term. But I think there is another scenario in which the Republicans continue to evolve in a more populist direction, and in fact a sort of multiracial populist direction. I think a lot of the statements in that regard are way overblown, overstated. But look, [the] Stop the Steal movement went quiet as soon as the Republicans won the popular vote. I continue to firmly believe that the driver of Republican authoritarianism over the last decade has been a fear of losing—a fear that the party couldn’t win national majorities. And that electoral defeat was going to bring an existential threat to the party’s white Christian base.

If the party can rest comfortably knowing that it can compete, eventually this could be a sort of protectionist, socially conservative, populist, somewhat illiberal, right-wing party that competes in elections. I think it is at least as likely to evolve in that direction as back in a Mitt Romney and Nikki Haley direction.

ZIBLATT: The most overt form of authoritarianism possible in a democracy is using violence to try to gain power and not accepting the results of elections. When Republicans won in 2024, these two threats vanished. And of course you might say, well, this is a very superficial or conditional change that came because they won. I agree with that. But another interpretation: Perhaps this is a kind of positive sign? A multiethnic, populist, right-wing party might be a party that I wouldn’t vote for, but it may be a party that doesn’t use violence to gain power, because it doesn’t need to. And it’s a party that accepts elections. That’s a small achievement. But perhaps it’s an important one?

Read the entire interview here.