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Scene from the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol
This article appears in the December 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point
By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Crown
When historians one day try to explain the decline of 21st-century American democracy, they may well point to Republican leaders’ willingness to minimize and excuse the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In denying the seriousness of that effort to block the peaceful transfer of power, those Republicans conformed to a political type that Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call the “semi-loyal democrat.” This is a politician who nominally supports democracy but in practice ignores co-partisans’ extralegal and often violent efforts to subvert and overturn it.
Semi-loyal democrats are indispensable to a democracy’s undoing, Levitsky and Ziblatt explain in their crisply argued new book, Tyranny of the Minority. An authoritarian like Donald Trump would find it hard to take power without the cover that semi-loyal democrats provide. They are central to the question at the book’s heart: Why have Republicans become so disaffected with American democracy that they are now likely to give their 2024 presidential nomination to a person who has betrayed it? The question is the right one, but the answers they provide fall short of satisfactorily explaining how this has happened and what to do in response.
Best known for their 2018 book How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt are leading authorities on the rise and fall of democracies in the world and consequently well positioned to offer insight into American democracy’s troubles. According to a wealth of research, the United States was not a candidate for democratic breakdown. For example, a much-cited 1997 study by political scientists Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi found that no democracy richer than Argentina in 1975—at a per capita income of $35,682 in contemporary dollars—had ever broken down. The United States was the very model of a wealthy, mature, stable democracy. If past patterns held, it couldn’t break down, or so it seemed.
Yet American democracy has begun to unravel. People of all ideological shades are increasingly likely to disdain those with different partisan views. Among both Democrats and Republicans, similar, albeit low, fractions express support for political violence. But among the two parties’ elites, there is no similarity in the repudiation of democratic norms. The Republicans stand apart.
To underscore this point, Levitsky and Ziblatt cite a study ranking the 261 Republican members of Congress seated in 2021 on six actions advancing the false claim that Joe Biden lost the 2020 election. More than 60 percent, or some 161 elected officials, adopted antidemocratic positions on at least five of these six points. Another 54 flunked four of the five questions. Of the 6 percent who consistently prioritized democratic norms over partisanship, most had either retired or lost primaries by 2022. In contrast to the prevailing Republican pattern, Levitsky and Ziblatt point out, Democrats have made no analogous effort to deny the validity of the elections they have lost.
Levitsky and Ziblatt offer two lines of explanation for the change among Republicans—one concerned with the history of racial conflict, the other with the U.S. Constitution. Starting with the unjustly overlooked Wilmington, North Carolina, massacre of 1898, Levitsky and Ziblatt chart how racial conservatives, first in the Southern Democratic Party, and later in the national Republican coalition, have actively undermined election machinery in response to peaking racial resentment. Their tale jumps from Redemption to Strom Thurmond’s 1948 “Dixiecrat” party, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and the spike in racial resentment around Obama’s presidency. For Levitsky and Ziblatt, this history shows how anxiety over race has repeatedly overwhelmed fidelity to democratic norms.
Their second line of explanation turns on institutions largely created by the Constitution that now tilt systematically against democratic rule. The Senate, Electoral College, and impossibly difficult amendment rule of Article V are all hardwired into the Constitution. All flowed in part from the framers’ fear of popular, redistributive majorities. Other counter-majoritarian aspects of U.S. government have no anchor in the Constitution’s text: the Supreme Court’s use of judicial review to invalidate national laws, the Senate’s filibuster, and the use of first-past-the-post House districts. All these emerged after ratification. But all have also sunk roots deep into our political culture to the point that they are often mistaken for constitutional fixtures. The end result is a surfeit of counter-majoritarian bodies, and what Francis Fukuyama has called a “vetocracy.”
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Republicans have almost universally minimized and excused the violence of the January 6th insurrection.
At first blush, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s historical and institutional explanations fit awkwardly with each other. The historical story begins with Redemption and continues with the Second Reconstruction and the Obama presidency. The institutional story harks by and large back to 1787. But the threads aren’t hard to weave together. After all, the United States has been a multiracial democracy only since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And it has been during this recent period, Levitsky and Ziblatt rightly stress, that growing racial resentment has turned the American right into semi-loyal democrats.
Moreover, only in the late 20th and early 21st century have the anti-majoritarian biases of the Senate, the Electoral College, and first-past-the-post voting systems come to have a partisan accent. All favor low-population, primarily rural areas. As the split between rural conservatives and urban liberals has widened, America’s old political institutions have taken on new partisan implications. Only recently could Democrats consistently win the overall popular vote for the Senate, yet frequently lose control of the chamber to Republicans. Now it is commonplace for a party with fewer votes statewide (usually the Republicans) to win large and durable statehouse majorities.
All this seems true enough, but I’m skeptical it’s the whole story. For one thing, the story has an American accent—but democratic backsliding is a global phenomenon. For another thing, it’s hard to believe that racial resentment can carry the whole explanatory load that Levitsky and Ziblatt want to heft onto it. An obvious blank spot in their account is economic class. In the teeth of lively debate among scholars as to whether racial and cultural change or economic shifts better explain voters’ increasing indifference to democratic norms, Levitsky and Ziblatt appear to side almost completely with the first strain of explanation. Nearly absent from their narrative is the neoliberal turn in American public policy and the subsequent growth of financial and corporate power at the expense of labor, which began under Jimmy Carter and persisted under administrations of both parties.
By omitting that strand of recent history, Levitsky and Ziblatt need say nothing about the fealty of Democratic elites to regressive free-market nostrums. Perhaps there is more than one way, though, of shucking off democratic norms. A shift from listening to the median-earning voter to hearing only the well-off might also result in their erosion. The net effect of these gaps in Tyranny of the Minority is to absolve political elites of responsibility for their abandonment of working-class voters and the opening they provided for figures like Trump. It also closes off reflection on economic policy as an instrument in the pro-democracy tool kit.
Indeed, perhaps the most disappointing element of Tyranny of the Minority is its closing prescriptions. It’s not that Levitsky and Ziblatt want for good ideas. To the contrary, they offer a surfeit of good-government proposals. Electoral reform, franchise expansion, filibuster abolition, and Supreme Court term limits are highlights: All are ideas that have been aired in liberal circles. But whatever their individual merits, all face practically insurmountable political odds right now.
Levitsky and Ziblatt’s agenda doesn’t include any strategy for loosening the hold of semi-loyal, and utterly disloyal, democrats over the Republican Party and its voters. Perhaps some of the reforms they envisage would have that effect in the long run. But if the minds of white Americans have been fired and glazed shut in a kiln of unrelenting cultural and racial resentment, it is difficult to see how institutional reform alone could be much help. In the end, Levitsky and Ziblatt cannot offer a comprehensive remedy because their diagnosis of our democratic travails points to an intractable first cause, and nothing else. There may not be easy answers, but if we are to make a start on a more effective response to backsliding, we need a diagnosis that accounts for not just the cultural but also the economic sources of populist anger.
