Authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put the risks squarely on the table in their 2018 book How Democracies Die, published just at the new Trump Administration started taking aim at the American version. Their newest, Tyranny of the Minority, is not exactly the same but close to a followup. and uses some of the same approaches - notably, comparing conditions in the United States to some of those in other places and times - again to call out a warning.
But this one isn’t even so much a warning about where we may go, so much about where we already are.
At the time of the first book, one of the authors said in an interview, they didn’t see the Republican Party as speficially an anti-democratic organization: “we didn’t consider or call the Republican Party an authoritarian party. We did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.â€
But, they said, it has now. Any doubt about that should be easily dispelled for anyone paying attention to these pages, which do talk about the Trumpian GOP, and how it has gone full authoritarian (read: pro-dictatorship) in recent years.
They place more attention on dissecting the elements of our political and governmental system that threaten to enable - rather than stand in the way of - a loss of the democracy this country has had for more than two centuries. If the American system held during the Trump presidency, they say, it was a near thing, and the guardrails are weak. A creaky presidential election system that twice in the last generation has elected presidents who got less than half of the popular vote is one culprit. So is a Senate that gives vastly more power to the voters of certain states than to others, along with outdatd tools like the filibuster that chamber insists on keeping.
These self-imposed shackles make us, the authors argue, unacceptably vulnerable to attack - more than most western Democracies, which today rank as freer than the United States.
The set of solutions may come across as frustrating, because many of them (such as eliminating the electoral college, which would be a good idea but requires a nearly impossible constitutional amendment), are unlikely in the near future. Some can be launched sooner and more effectively, though, and all point in the direction we need to move.
If we value our freedom and liberty, that is.