Book Review: How Democracies Die

Written by Mahpara Gull

This book is written by professors at Harvard University, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Steven’s research and teachings focus on political parties, democracy, authoritarianism, and weak and informal institutions in America and other countries, while Ziblatt’s research focuses on democracy, its breakdown, state building, and political economy and focuses mainly on Europe. This book is the best-selling book of 2018, with translations in 25 different languages. This book is all about the subversion of democracy by political leaders to influence their power.

Core Argument:

The early chapters of this book are about authoritarian politics around the world, which the authors linked with the present, and the same patterns are repeating. While the later chapters are about authoritarianism in America and how democracy again died after the presidency of the Trump regime by relating it to the past mistakes of different states, the author looks into history to provide guidance for defending democratic norms under threat and to suggest possible ways to fight back.

This book emphasizes that it’s not necessary that democracies fall only in the hands of the military or coups, but sometimes they begin to fall in the hands of elected political leaders through certain actions. In the modern world, democracies die slowly and take place piecemeal in baby steps, and the cases analyzed by the authors have one thing in common: all political leaders come to power through democratic means, destroying democracies from within.

Here Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that America was not strong democratically as it was not born with strong democracy, while the politicians were busy playing constitutional hardball and changing the norms for their own benefit. They gave examples of how both parties were blaming each other after breaking the norms, which highly affected the elections of 1864 as well as the court of state. Here, the authors are blaming Republicans and autocratic leaders for all the incidents happening in the US Constitution, they are not looking at the actions of democratic parties in the state, as democratic leaders were also somehow breaking the norms. Americans have a strong belief that the democracy of the US was strong from the beginning, while democratic leaders as well as autocratic leaders were fighting to have control and influence over the US. They have to follow the norms, as norms are an important part of the constitution. These norms were not strong from the very first day of American democracy, but with the passage of time, norms were established, broken down, and again reestablished (this process continued for decades), especially after giving the right of vote and freedom of speech to the Blacks of Southern America, which played a greater role in strengthening the norms. Due to this, a system of checks and balances was created while the democracy of America strengthened itself. But again, those norms fell as the Republicans and Federalist leaders saw each other as rivals and were busy changing the size of courts to achieve their goals. The authors listed four behavioral warning signs of authoritarians:

Rejecting rules of Democracy
Denying opponent’s legitimacy
Encouraging violence
Restricting opponent’s civil liberties

Levitsky and Ziblatt supported their argument by giving many national and international examples, such as Donald Trump, who is also known as “a serial norm breaker.” He broke all the norms, attacked the judiciary, threatened the media, attacked his opponents, and wanted to enforce his policies on the public forcefully. He wanted to maximize his power in his first year of the presidency.

Analysis:

The authors have given a lot of examples as evidence for proving their argument, but they have only highlighted the problems of the Republicans, or authoritarians, as they are being held responsible for the problems in American democracy and did not want to cooperate with the norms of the Constitution. They did not highlight the democratic leaders who were also responsible for breaking the norms. They focused on one side, i.e., Republicans, who are shown as radicals and gun lovers, but American democracy declined due to the role played by both parties, i.e., Republicans and Federalists. Authors compare Donald Trump with the other South American leaders, as they have used their power to destroy the norms of government, but from my point of view, Trump did not try to use his power to destroy the parts of governments, changing them into dictatorships, as he started using authoritarian strategies, but the American Constitution will never allow him to do so. The authors avoid quantitative research and jargon and use a wealth of historical examples to prove their arguments. It has shown us how the government of a state works, how norms are built, and how the president works.

The book briefly examines authoritarian politics around the world and finds that the same pattern repeats itself: The strongmen of the 21st century will not overturn the constitution and replace it with tanks in the streets. They pay lip service to the Constitution and pretend it doesn’t exist. Consider Putin formally replacing the role of president with that of prime minister and playing by the rules. Turkey’s Erdogan, Hungary’s Orban, Venezuela’s Maduro, and India’s Modi all mock their opponents as criminals, despise their critics in the media, fuel conspiracy theories about the movement, and question the legitimacy of their negative votes. Trump is no exception. Much of this is slander rather than stick-and-stone politics, much of it on social media. But this also includes broad tolerance for violence. Sticks and stones can also hurt, but only if abuse doesn’t silence them first. So the author covered two levels of analysis, i.e., individual level and state level.