And here we go again. President-elect Donald Trump wasted little time in signaling to Americans, through his Cabinet nominations and White House appointments, that he plans to move quickly to act on his most extreme promises. What kind of United States will we have in a year, or in four? How will the country and its democratic institutions change? What are the chances he doesn’t succeed? And what if he does—and an apathetic, exhausted, and inward-looking populace shrugs? We could think of no one better to ask these questions than Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard scholars who were co-authors of the 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die. They spoke with editor Michael Tomasky on November 25. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
MICHAEL TOMASKY: I want to start with this question. I was struck by this passage in the last chapter of How Democracies Die, where you posit three possible futures of a post-Trump America. One was the optimistic one. One was kind of a wash. Then another, which was numbered your second, a much darker future, was “one in which President Trump and the Republicans continue to win with a white nationalist appeal. Under this scenario, a pro-Trump GOP would retain the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the vast majority of statehouses, and it would eventually gain a solid majority in the Supreme Court.”
Well … I’m not sure when you wrote that whether you thought that would come true, but here we are. And you say that this scenario could lead to confrontation, even violent conflict, which in turn could lead to heightened police repression. Daniel, now that this scenario is about to be reality, what’s your assessment of our situation in this country?
DANIEL ZIBLATT: When we wrote that, we didn’t think it was the most likely scenario. But as you say, here we are, and I think there are serious reasons to have concerns. There continue to be sources of resilience that we’re happy to talk about. One point I would make at the outset is that the need to rewrite the Constitution, say à la Viktor Orbán, is probably not the thing that’s concerning at this moment, because our Constitution works pretty well for the party that’s in control of all branches of government, and really the more serious concern is the risk of those in power going after the democratic opposition in ways that undermine competition. So it’s not about changing the rules, but really attacking civil society, attacking the opposition. That’s something that we really didn’t spell out in that scenario back in 2018, but it’s something that is top of mind for me right now.
TOMASKY: Well, let’s spell it out here. Steven, what would that attack on the democratic opposition look like?
STEVEN LEVITSKY: This is really classic authoritarian stuff. We don’t know how stable the majorities that the Republicans just won will be. I could not have imagined in 2017 a future in which Trump would govern as he governed and then win the popular vote in 2024.
We don’t know whether they will have any success in locking these majorities in. We could still very much be in a scenario closer to regime instability than stable authoritarianism. In either case, we’re going to see really classic authoritarian behavior. Many of us tend to think that—particularly given that most of us haven’t experienced authoritarianism in the United States—we tend to think of authoritarianism as dissolving the Constitution, locking up opponents, and eliminating electoral competition. And that’s highly unlikely. It’s very, very unlikely that we see a move toward sort of Putin-style authoritarianism.
But what I think has gotten insufficient attention among Americans is the centrality of simply politicizing the state and deploying it in ways not only to punish rivals, but also to change the cost-benefit calculation of actors across the political spectrum and throughout civil society so that they have an incentive to sort of step to the sidelines. And so, you know, first and foremost, we’ve been told to expect that the Department of Justice will be wielded to punish those who have tried to hold the Trump administration accountable. I think we’ll see it wielded against some politicians. We’ll see it wielded against some businesspeople. We’ll see it wielded against some civil society leaders. We may see it wielded against Harvard and other elite universities.
Young lawyers will not jump into politics, but rather stay in the law firm. Young journalists will decide to stick to the sports beat rather than cover politics. Young CEOs will decide that it’s better just not to donate to the Democratic Party.—Levitsky
So I think this government will, far more than the first Trump administration, politicize key state agencies and wield them in ways that raise the cost of continued opposition. There may be a handful, dozens, of exemplary cases, but those cases have the potential to signal to thousands and thousands of other people that it’s just not worth engaging in politics the way they used to before. And so, young lawyers will not jump into politics, but rather stay in the law firm. Young journalists will decide to stick to the sports beat rather than cover politics. Young CEOs will decide that it’s better just not to donate to the Democratic Party. It’s very difficult to gauge how consequential that will be, but that tilting of the playing field is coming.
TOMASKY: Let’s go back, Daniel, to the use of the Justice Department against the opposition. How might that actually play out?
ZIBLATT: One of the things that we’ve learned looking at other cases is that simply opening an investigation can have a serious effect, whether or not there is follow-through. And so whether it’s the Justice Department or the IRS or any kind of body that has investigative powers, threatening to use the law can send a chilling effect on an opposition. Of course, the Justice Department and all the agencies of government should investigate things when they suspect there’s a crime. But the point in this instance is that the mere opening of inquiries can be used to send a message to people to keep their heads down. That’s the purpose of it. So, let’s say high-profile members of the January 6th committee would be threatened with an investigation. This on its own would dampen future potential critics. That’s what I’m concerned about.
TOMASKY: And what about the media, Steven? He can’t wake up one day and announce, “New York Times, I am closing you.” He can’t even, I don’t think, do the kinds of things Orbán did, which was to steer the ownership of prominent media properties to his cronies. So what can he do?
LEVITSKY: It’s not clear. I mean, all of this is new terrain. On the one hand, outside of The New York Times, most of the major media are owned by conglomerates. And so, presumably, if the government worked at it, it could create a set of carrots and sticks that induce the major figures within these conglomerates to pull back and to engage in a degree of self-censorship. There’s no way, given the pervasive role of social media and access to online media, that Trump can close off information to voters who seek it. I think you’re right that he can’t tilt the media playing field even as much as in Hungary.
But at the margins, if, you know, MSNBC were to collapse, and CNN and the major networks were to tone it down a little bit, there’s a sector of the electorate that I think would not be exposed to some of the worst behavior of this government. So I think those of us who have the time and the wherewithal to seek out information will clearly still be able to get it. But for those who rely sort of only on half an hour of CNN or the nightly news each night, there may be a marginal effect.
TOMASKY: You write a lot in the book about guardrails, and you have a chapter about Trump and his interaction with the guardrails of democracy early in his first term. I think people reading this would really like to know from you, the experts, what signs they should watch out for as we head into a second term. What are you looking at? What are the little tells that you are on guard for? Daniel?
ZIBLATT: Well, I think there’s two things. One, the attacks; but also, the responses. I think when you don’t see the media reporting on things, or when you see people who previously were critical pulling their punches, then you begin to see that the silences are speak[ing] volumes in a way. So that’s one thing to look out for. Because in many ways, these investigations and efforts to intimidate and quiet threats and so on will be hard to detect. And so we have to look at the response to potential abuses.
LEVITSKY: Another thing to watch for, and it’s already very visible, is the appointment of hacks to key public agencies. So when an autocrat wants a loyalist institution, he or she will appoint somebody who is grossly unfit for that [job], and whose position will depend entirely on the whim of the leader. So placing people who clearly do not have the credentials or the independent authority to be a Cabinet secretary in DOJ or in other agencies that matter a lot, that’s a clear tell that Trump seeks loyalists to weaponize these agencies. And the second thing: The response of the Republicans who might constrain him is also critical. Are the few remaining non-Trump Republicans in the Senate and the House and elsewhere going to stand up to outrageous behavior? Trump is already clearly testing them, and so that’s something we’re watching closely.
There’s also the possibility of appointing loyalists who actually are effective, but who are effective at using the state as a weapon to go after the opposition. In those instances, that’s a much more direct and immediate threat to democracy.—Ziblatt
ZIBLATT: Yeah. I think there are different ways in which the construction of a kind of neo-patrimonial state can take place, or two different purposes to it. One is to appoint incompetents into positions of power to help oversee the dismantling of an effective state. And so if you appoint people, let’s say Robert Kennedy, somebody who has no idea how to evaluate scientific reports and so on, that’s a recipe for a disastrous, ineffective state, which is terrible for society. But it has a slightly different meaning for democracy. I think there’s also the possibility of appointing loyalists who actually are effective, but who are effective at using the state as a weapon to go after the opposition. In those instances, that’s a much more direct and immediate threat to democracy. The appointment of competent loyalists may even be worse news for democracy than the appointment of incompetent loyalists.
TOMASKY: Let’s talk about the Republicans in Congress. In the House, it’s going to be awfully pro-Trump. On the Senate side, there has been tension in the past between John Thune and Donald Trump on a few points. And, of course, the Senate did send the message that they weren’t going to confirm Matt Gaetz. Now, we’re speaking on the Monday before Thanksgiving, and we don’t know what’s going to happen, say, with Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, or some of these other nominees. But do you hold out any hope that Republicans in the Senate might provide some kind of guardrail? You write a lot in the book about the importance of political parties as a line of defense against authoritarianism. Steven?
LEVITSKY: The Republican Party has been transformed much more rapidly and much more thoroughly than we anticipated when we wrote How Democracies Die. When we wrote that book in 2017, John McCain was still active in the Senate. There was a faction of truly non-Trumpist, even Never-Trumpist Republicans who we could imagine would be able to impose significant constraints on Trump. The change over the last seven years has been stunning. I think we sometimes forget just how much the party has transformed, and we forget that every Republican figure who has gone toe to toe with Trump has not only lost but seen his or her political career ended. And Republicans who want to continue their careers are not stupid. And I’ve yet to see anything in the political environment change such that that calculus is changed. Now, we may reach a point where Trump’s popularity declines, and he’s beginning to look like a lame duck, where we see the emergence of anti-Trump Republicans again. But in the next year or two, I wouldn’t place much money on John Thune having much of a backbone against Trump.
ZIBLATT: This is a classic theme of democracies that get into trouble. When somebody comes into power, there are usually institutional constraints. When those who occupy those institutions willingly give up that capacity, social scientists who work on this topic have called this collective abdication, a kind of institutional suicide. And you can ask, why would a legislative body with power ever give up its ability to constrain someone trying to concentrate power? We’ve seen this happen over and over in history and now in the United States, too. What usually drives this is a short-term personal calculation about one’s political future. Once Trump’s popularity begins to decline, then you might imagine the possibility of some separation by allies. But until then, there is going to be a lot of collective abdications that put democracy at risk.
TOMASKY: These arguments were made by the Harris campaign, by places like The New Republic, by lots of politicians, by John Kelly; and they obviously didn’t resonate, or didn’t resonate enough. I’d be interested in your thoughts about why that is. Was the case not made the right way? Or is it simply that it’s hypothetical, and you just can’t get people to focus on a hypothetical? Or what?
LEVITSKY: Or on the abstract. I think it’s a combination of a couple of things. I don’t think you can ever depend on voters to vote for democracy. There are some specific exceptions to that in regimes that have just come out of a particularly brutal dictatorship. So, South Africa in the ’90s, or Chile in the 1990s, or Spain in the ’70s, maybe Poland in the 1990s, were [cases] where the cost of not having democracy, the cost of dictatorship, is fresh in an overwhelming majority of voters’ minds. Then, you might expect people to vote with democracy front and center.
But in most societies across history, that’s just not what voters do. Voters are thinking about a variety of different things. They vote, in part, in an expressive way, sometimes to express their frustration, their anger. They vote out of partisan loyalty. Or very often they vote because of particular issues. Those issues may be social or cultural. They may be economic. But very rarely do any but a small minority of voters—in any society, not just the United States, in any society—vote for democratic procedures. I know in the United States, we have this idealized vision of citizens defending democracy. But, like it or not, my view is that democracies are defended by elites. And, uh, if elites abdicate, as Daniel put it, and leave it to voters, you’re going to get an outcome where voters weren’t voting for authoritarianism, but they were voting against incumbents. Because voters in democracies all over the world, especially the West, are very discontent today and are voting out incumbents like never before. And so voters voted for a change, they voted against the incumbent, and now they’re gonna get authoritarianism. But I don’t blame that on the voters. Blame that on the elites that allowed us to get that far.
ZIBLATT: The way a democracy is supposed to work is that voters, if they’re not happy with the incumbent, are supposed to vote the incumbent out of office. And so, in some sense, that’s what has just happened. [It] is a sign of democratic success at some level. The issue is not why did voters vote out the incumbent, the incumbent party. The issue is why was the only way that people could have to express that dissatisfaction [was] to vote for somebody who is anti-democratic? Why was that the only choice on offer? That’s an elite failing at some level, that he’s even in this position, that Trump was a viable candidate to begin with—an elite failing, going back to the failure to convict after the 2021 impeachment, and the failure to filter him out over the last several years, and so on.
One can imagine a scenario in which voters might have understood the risk a little bit more. But I don’t blame voters here. I blame elites again. I have in mind the relative silence over the past year of too many business leaders, too many religious leaders, and too many important labor unions.—Ziblatt
So that’s one thing. A second issue, though, is that one can imagine a scenario in which voters might have understood the risk a little bit more. But I don’t blame voters here. I blame elites again—in particular, social elites. I have in mind the relative silence over the past year of too many business leaders, too many religious leaders, and too many important labor unions—in particular, the Teamsters. When discussions were made public of the plans to round up migrants in an undifferentiated way that doesn’t distinguish between legal and illegal migrants, the failure of so many religious leaders, for example, to publicly and loudly condemn this and raise the stakes of what was involved, meant that many voters didn’t fully understand the stakes of these plans. Indeed, if you look around the world, in Germany back in January of 2024, when plans came out to have what was called the forced remigration of Germans of migration background, there were mass and peaceful demonstrations against this. Not only people in the streets, but importantly, social and political elites—civil elites—came out and publicly condemned this. And over the course of the year, the radical right party, the AfD [Alternative for Germany], has lost a quarter of its support in national opinion polls. This was in part because important people in society raised the stakes and made the case for the dangers of this agency. So, it’s true the Harris campaign tried to make the case. But the case was not made sufficiently vigorously by important civil society leaders.
LEVITSKY: I would add Republican leaders as well. It wasn’t important enough for Mitt Romney to endorse Kamala Harris, or for Mitch McConnell or for George W. Bush. Had those folks told the truth of what they thought about Trump, [that] would’ve made a difference as well.
TOMASKY: I want to raise the issue, which you touched on, of the deportation plans. Majorities said in polls preelection that they supported that; I saw one that was 56 percent. I keep wondering whether they really know what it entails. Most people assume that they don’t, and that people will be shocked. But what if they do understand what it entails? What does that tell us?
ZIBLATT: I share your hope or suspicion that once it’s made very immediate and concrete that families are being broken apart, that kids who are in school with your children’s kids are disappearing, that there’ll be an increase in understanding of the stakes of what’s going on. So that’s my expectation as well as my explanation for why there would be a difference between an abstract or theoretical issue of, for example, deportation and the actual immediate experience of it. Before the election, in public debate, there simply wasn’t a sufficiently vivid and concrete description of what’s involved in mass deportation.
There was a nice report on This American Life, which described the nature of the tents that are used when people are rounded up. But this was done after the election. The reporter asked, in effect, “How are you going to keep people in tents and not wander off?” A former agent of Homeland Security implied they would need fences or jails. The next logical question of course is “OK, well who’s going to guard those?” With this kind of vivid report, you suddenly have a clearer picture of what’s involved.
But you asked the question, what happens if the public doesn’t rise up? I guess I don’t really have an answer for that. I can only say it’s really important for society’s remaining moral authorities, and that may mean religious authorities in particular, to ask hard questions. They need to ask, is this compatible with, let’s say, Christian values? If one thinks that what’s happening is unjust, civil society leaders need to step up and say something about it.
LEVITSKY: I gotta say, I’ve undergone a shifting in my expectations in the last weeks and months. I grew up thinking that there are really horrendous episodes in American history that we need to teach and to know, but that couldn’t possibly happen again. Like the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II, like some of the violence of Jim Crow, like the couple of Red Scares that occurred in the twentieth century. We think that’s a dark but past period of American history, and we reject them as a society in retrospect, but they were accepted at the time. And I think we have to face up to the fact that that could happen again, that we could accept, even though it seems unthinkable that society would accept what the Roosevelt government did to Japanese Americans in the 1940s. We may live through it in the months to come.
ZIBLATT: It’s all about how the deportation is done and for reporters and civil society being ready for that. I’m not quite sure what the most effective response is, but one has to be alert to the fact that, as Steve is saying, that this will be done in an incremental way so that people may easily turn a blind eye to it.
TOMASKY: I want to raise the Supreme Court here, because they have told us, in the immunity ruling, that whatever Trump tries to do in office and is challenged on, they’ll just say, this is official business. So I can foresee Trump using the Insurrection Act, say, which is very vaguely written, and which has rarely been invoked in modern times, because we’ve not really had that kind of president, but now we have that kind of president, and he could invoke the Insurrection Act to do all sorts of things that would seem completely un-American to millions of people. And the Supreme Court will say it’s all right. That’s accurate, isn’t it, Steven?
LEVITSKY: I think this is just like how the non-Trump wing of the Republican Party will respond to Trump if he’s as bad as is feared. I think the same uncertainty persists regarding the Supreme Court. Supreme Court justices have greater independence than senators. Their political calculations are going to be different than elected politicians’. And there’s therefore, I think, more room for hope that they could do the right thing. Obviously, the rulings of the last six months have been disastrous. And they give the impression of a Trump-ized court. I still don’t buy that. I think that the four conservatives outside of Alito and Thomas fall into this category of Americans who, at least until Election Day, just simply understated or underappreciated the threat posed by Trump. He’s not that bad, the institutions will hold. There are a lot of smart Americans, including some very smart colleagues of ours in political science, who have been arguing until very recently that people like Daniel and I are overstating the case, and that our institutions are strong, and they’ll hold. What they will do if Trump really starts to cross lines, I think is still up in the air. But the behavior of the court over the last six months leaves me pretty concerned.
ZIBLATT: The only argument for optimism, and I’m not sure if I really believe this argument myself, is that it’s one thing for the court to take Trump’s side when the presidency was controlled by a Democrat, but once you have both houses of Congress and the presidency in the hand of Republicans, one would think that just in the interests of institutional reputation, the justices might be a little bit more assertive than they otherwise would be. Whether that will be enough is less clear to me. The sense that they are an indispensable counterbalance may take on just a little bit more weight. I am somewhat skeptical. I would say that that even if this were the case, whether that makes enough of a difference, I’m not sure.
TOMASKY: I want to return to the book and discuss a concept that you use there, the three categories of activities that authoritarians engage in to change a democracy into a quasi-democracy or an authoritarian regime: capturing referees, sidelining players, and changing rules. Steven, just quickly define those and talk about Trump’s progress, if you will, on those three.
LEVITSKY: I think we are already seeing the first. We are very likely to see at least serious attempts at the second. And the third, for reasons Daniel pointed out, are somewhat less likely. Capturing the referees is placing loyalists in charge of all the key agencies that are responsible for investigating and prosecuting wrongdoing or that make vital decisions in the economy and society. So judges, the FBI, the Justice Department, key regulatory agencies, the IRS. So making sure that you’ve got political loyalists in charge of these agencies. And this is step one for just about every elected authoritarian.
Trump didn’t do a heck of a lot of that the first time around, in part because he didn’t expect to win. He wasn’t prepared, he didn’t have a team. I also think he had a very poor understanding of how the state works. I think he just assumed that he was inheriting a state that would be at his beck and call and was very frustrated to realize that we actually have a civil service and a set of laws and guidelines that prohibit that. So he now has a much better understanding of what he wants and needs. He’s got much more of a team to place in key agencies. And I think we’ll see much more of an effort to, in very classic traditional authoritarian fashion, pack key agencies and state loyalists. Once you’ve done that, once you’ve captured the referees, then you can weaponize them, then you can deploy them to go after rivals. [Then,] changing the rules is a more what you do to permanently lock in power.
I mean, this is classic authoritarian behavior. And it raises, to me, the question of why you don’t see it more often in democracies. But it also suggests to me that institutions that we had been assuming were strong were actually untested, or had not been tested in a long time, and are going to show themselves to be much weaker and much less constraining than we thought. They just had not been tested by somebody willing to push the envelope.
ZIBLATT: There is a paradox when it comes to authoritarians. They can be especially dangerous when they’re weakened because they fear for their survival. And at the same time, when they’re weakened, they lack the capacity to enforce their will. And so there’s this interesting dynamic as we look forward to the next four years, the next two years; if Trump remains pretty popular, some of the worst kind of abuses one might imagine are actually in some way unnecessary because he’s quite popular.
But at the same time, with that popularity, he currently has the capacities to carry out lots of abuses. At a later point in time, let’s say after the midterm elections, he may be much less popular and also more vulnerable; he may lack the capacity but also have much more of a serious interest in trying to bolster up his control of the federal government. So that’s one point. The second point is that there’s also this interesting dynamic in authoritarian systems where it’s not the single president who’s calling all the shots. Once you’ve placed loyalists in the positions of power, these guys become almost like free agents, and they can carry out abuses unsupervised or in competition with each other, and that, too, is a dangerous situation. It’s harder to predict how that one will unfold.
TOMASKY: Can we talk for a minute about Project 2025? We have now Russ Vought, who’s going to run the Office of Management and Budget, assuming he’s confirmed by the Senate, and he was a key author of Project 2025. What parts of that should be most concerning to people, Steven?
LEVITSKY: There are many, many, many policies in there that I dislike and fear. But I think the core problem is the Project 2025 initiative reflects a much broader thinking in the Republican Party, and among the right, which is that not only state institutions, but a number of private institutions like universities, have been penetrated by pernicious forces of the left and need to be purged and packed for the good of society. And again, that’s just classic authoritarian thinking, right? There’s no liberal democratic way to respond to this problem. If you believe that the state is packed by your enemies, there’s no liberal democratic way of resolving that. It is a fundamentally authoritarian attitude that you saw, for example, in right-wing militaries in Latin America in the 1970s. The idea was that the left was kind of a cancer, that it pervaded the state and society and needed to be rooted out. This is a less violent variant of that.
ZIBLATT: Project 2025 includes these proposals to essentially circumvent the Senate confirmation process for Cabinet secretaries and to have acting officials and so on. And I think the most worrying thing is that we’re already seeing discussion of this within a week or two of the election victory. So we’ve seen the first steps already being discussed. Also, this idea that the Insurrection Act can be used on day one certainly is also worrying. Equally distressing is the plan to reimpose the Schedule F to allow for the manning of the state with loyalists. What’s worrying overall is that parts of Project 2025 lay out in very concrete steps exactly all the things we’ve been talking about for years.
TOMASKY: Where and why might Trump fail? Why might he not succeed at all this?
ZIBLATT: I think the fragility of his political coalition is one reason he might not succeed. Immediately after the election, there was a lot of talk about whether this was a realigning election, as well as talk about the strength of this multiethnic, multiclass coalition. Republicans were excited that they finally won a popular vote for the presidency. But I think Trump’s coalition is potentially a much more vulnerable and weaker coalition than it looks at first glance. The way Steve and I have talked about this is that it’s a populist coalition, by which we mean that it’s not a coalition that’s rooted in a shared set of economic interests. It’s much more a coalition that was formed as a rejection of the status quo and against the establishment.
And so, as a result, it’s precarious. If one looks at the economic policies proposed by the Trump administration, tax cuts for wealthy, protectionism, inflationary kinds of policies, you could very well imagine the economic policies failing, and very quickly this coalition falling apart.
LEVITSKY: In addition to that, Trump himself is not particularly popular. Easily 45 percent of Americans despise Trump no matter what. So there’s a real ceiling to his support. And [there’s] the fact that it’s pretty likely, it’s not certain, but it’s pretty likely that not only will there be infighting in the government, but a fair amount of incompetence. And many of the factors that have left publics discontented with the status quo across Western democracies will persist under Trump. And so I think there’s a very good chance that his public support drops at least modestly. And, you know, autocratic presidents with 40, 42 percent support can do some damage, but they do a lot less damage than autocrats with 80 percent support. It’s the Bukeles and the Chávezes and the Putins and the Erdoğans who have 65, 70, 80 percent support that do the most damage to democratic institutions. Trump will never have that kind of support.
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?
TOMASKY: Final question. What if, after watching all this and possibly more unfold, the people just don’t care?
I have always looked back at periods of abuse like the internment of Japanese Americans and McCarthyism and wondered why so few people rose up against it at the time. Now I fear we may see something similar. —Levitsky
LEVITSKY: That’s always a challenge when it comes to democratic backsliding. I don’t think the problem is merely apathy. A combination of factors—fear for some, exhaustion for others, resignation for others—may push many activists to the sidelines, limiting our capacity to slow down and eventually defeat Trumpism. Apathy would play a role in that. The reality is that life will go on as usual for most people during the Trump administration. Most people won’t be targeted by DOJ, the FBI, or the IRS. The economy may remain relatively healthy, so many people may continue to live good lives. So the combination of some people moving to the sidelines out of fear or exhaustion and others remaining on the sidelines because they don’t feel a compelling reason to join the fight—that could easily deplete the ranks of the opposition. It’s something I worry a lot about. I have always looked back at periods of abuse like the internment of Japanese Americans and McCarthyism and wondered why so few people rose up against it at the time. Now I fear we may see something similar under the second Trump administration.
ZIBLATT: I guess I don’t accept the premise. I think overwhelming majorities of Americans are committed to democracy. We may just take it for granted. But when citizens lose their democracy around the world, the record is pretty clear: They clamor to get it back, and they begin to appreciate it. I only hope we all have the collective imagination to realize what’s at stake before we lose it ourselves.
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