Molly Shewan reviews Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky’s Tyranny of the Minority: How to Reverse an Authoritarian Turn and Forge a Democracy for All (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2023), 316 pgs. This review was written in advance of the 2024 US presidential election; its analysis and conclusions reflect this context.
Molly Shewan is an Assistant Editor at the Review of Democracy and researcher on nationalism.
American democracy has scarcely ever appeared so fragile as it does today. Over the past decade in particular, scholars have increasingly sought to understand and explain this troubling state. Frequently attributed, at least in part, to the impact of President Trump’s successful nationalist-populist movement, democratic backsliding in the US has been characterized by a marked rise in political polarization, a slow erosion of civic norms, and even a growing threat of political violence.
In their much-anticipated follow-up to the best-selling How Democracies Die, released back in 2018, Harvard-based scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt posit that the current crisis facing the US is, fundamentally, the product of institutional failure. With decades of academic studies of democratization and political institutions, Levitsky and Ziblatt successfully communicate their expertise to a broader audience in this new book. They present a compelling argument that US democracy is being harmed by numerous counter-majoritarian institutions at the core of government that, in recent decades, have allowed the Republican Party to retain a level of power and influence increasingly disproportionate to their voter support. Their subsequent calls for widespread institutional reform are well-reasoned, though unlikely to be implemented in the near future.
The book Tyranny of the Minority opens at a powerful moment of contrast. On January 5, 2021, Raphael Warnock was elected the first African American senator of Georgia. Only a day later, a violent mob of Trump supporters, white nationalist groups, conspiracy theorists, and others favorable to their cause stormed through police barriers and breached the US Capitol building – an act of insurrectionist violence that shocked publics across the world. Their aim, Levitsky and Ziblatt posit, was to obstruct the ratification of the 2020 election.
In a span of twenty-four hours on January 5th and January 6th, 2021, the full promise and peril of American democracy were on vivid display: a glimpse of a possible multiracial democratic future, followed by an almost unthinkable assault on our constitutional system. (p. 4)
Throughout what follows, the authors seek to make sense of the society and governing system that produced both of these seemingly paradoxical events, illuminating the political and social trajectories that brought us here. Why is it, they ask, that at a time when support for multiracial democracy is higher than ever before, does American democracy appear to be on the brink?
The answer is, inevitably, complicated. In the chapter titled “Why the Republican Party Abandoned Democracy,”the authors argue that a key component of the growing democratic crisis in the US is the significant internal shift of the Republican Party, away from democratic values and towards an embrace of authoritarianism. While Trump’s rise may have escalated this process, as those adverse to his nationalist populism have since fled the party ranks, the authors rightly note that authoritarianism has been a prominent thread running through the entire history of American politics. This was strikingly evident, they point out, in the long history of violent, systemic, white supremacist suppression of African Americans’ voting rights in the Southern states in the century following Reconstruction.
In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, those Democrats who continued to oppose the cause of racial equality slowly found a home in the Republican Party. As a result, from the 1970s onwards, the Republican voter base has gradually become more homogeneous, to such an extent that the party is now home to the vast majority of white evangelicals. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that as anxieties have grown over demographic change— white Americans now make up barely half of the national population—the Republican party has effectively “abandoned democracy.” Instead of seeking to expand their platform beyond the white evangelical base, many Republican politicians have ceased to play by the rules of a liberal democratic system, instead adopting tactics such as gerrymandering; introducing new, racially targeted voter suppression laws; and weaponizing an increasingly divisive political discourse.
Yet, as Levitsky and Ziblatt further argue, this is only half of the story. While racial resentment—or ‘cultural backlash’—in some quarters of American society and political life is clearly an important piece of the puzzle, the current crisis of American democracy cannot be attributed to social and demographic change alone. As the authors illustrate effectively, the current democratic crisis in the US is also a product of an institutional environment that is no longer fit for purpose.
The crux of their argument for institutional reform therefore comes as Levitsky and Ziblatt methodically demonstrate how the Republican party has been increasingly able to capture control of governing institutions in the US, despite a declining trend, in proportional terms, of support. In “Fettered Majorities,” they map US governance as beholden to a number of counter-majoritarian institutions—including the Senate and the Supreme Court—which have allowed minorities to exert disproportionate influence over the political process and its outcomes. The US, for example, is the only mature democracy in the world to host a supreme court wherein there are no term limits nor age limits attached to the tenure of judges. While, in previous decades, liberal norms of ‘fair play’ typically constrained officials from taking advantage of these institutions, their erosion in recent decades has seen a significant rise in ‘lawfare’—the exploitation of institutional loopholes to further partisan goals.
Political polarization is increasingly socially entrenched, notably reflected in the hardening urban-rural divide between Democratic and Republican supporters. As a result, the electoral regulations that were initially established to ensure equal representation of those in the cities and countryside (or between the North and South, to appease pro-slavery politicians in the antebellum period) are now consistently producing what they call “manufactured minorities”: winners who have received fewer voters than the losing side. As a result, the governance of the US is increasingly unrepresentative of the will of the people.
Imagine an American born in 1980 who first voted in 1998 or 2000. The Democrats would have won the popular vote in every six-year cycle in the US Senate and all but one presidential election during her adult lifetime. And yet she would have lived most of her adult life under Republican presidents, a Republican-controlled Senate, and a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees. How much faith should she have in our democracy? (p. 136)
The book concludes with the proposal of a number of institutional reforms, including the abolition of the electoral college in favor of popular representation; the expansion of voting rights to enfranchise ex-felons and make postal voting easier; and the empowerment of governing majorities to deliver on their electoral promises by removing counter-majoritarian obstacles such as the Senate filibuster.
Their proposals are bolstered by countless historical and contemporary examples of political systems around the world and provide hopeful examples of democratic systems which have thrived due to consistent institutional reform. In “America the Outlier,” they illustrate how in Norway, for example, the constitution is regularly revised to ensure that, despite being the second oldest in the world after the US, it remains aligned with the contemporary political and social needs of the day. On a graver note, they also cite a number of moments where political polarization and weak institutions were unable to safeguard democracy from collapse, as in the case of the Weimer Republic.
In the end, it is hard to argue with the fundamental notion that all citizens should be able to participate freely in all elections, that the candidates who receive the greatest number of votes should win them, and that, once elected, said candidates should enjoy the institutional capacity to affect change . It is hard, too, to remain unmoved by the urgency of their argument:
Previous efforts to build a multiracial democracy in America have failed. Unlike earlier periods, however, today’s experiment has the support of most Americans. […] We stand at a crossroads: either America will be a multiracial democracy, or it will not be a democracy at all. (p. 164)
Whether or not such widespread institutional change could actually be implemented is another matter altogether. This the authors themselves note: making changes to the US constitution is exceedingly difficult – perhaps more so than in any other constitutional democracy. The effort to do so would require large cross-party majorities, in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Considering the intense levels of polarization that the US is currently experiencing, any such change occurring in the near future seems at best unlikely. Levitsky and Ziblatt try to pre-emptively counter this critique by noting that all substantial progress towards a more just society was once seen as ‘fanciful.’ Yet, this generic assertion does little to appease the skepticism of the reader.
Moreover, while Levitsky and Ziblatt do mention the impact of rising economic inequality in passing, it could be argued that the authors pay insufficient attention to socioeconomic demand-side features of the democratic crisis. Although the Republicans’ embrace of authoritarianism is indeed likely to be primarily motivated by political opportunism, just as they describe, the book does not deal extensively with the—arguably more sinister—side of the narrative: tens of millions of Americans have been willing to embrace nationalist populism. While the status anxiety induced by demographic change and the relative decline of the white evangelical population are more than likely key drivers of this shift in the electorate, just as the authors claim, socioeconomic inequality plays its role too. As the rich get richer and the poor—the ‘losers of globalization,’ as they are sometimes called—become more desperate and resentful, they may become disillusioned with the entire democratic process and support a populist candidate instead.
In short, while Levitsky and Ziblatt make valuable and convincing suggestions for institutional reform in “Democratizing our Democracy,” the lack of discussion regarding the social factors fueling the demand-side of the equation is notable. Even if their omission of the role of contemporary capitalism and rising socioeconomic inequality in producing the current crisis does not significantly weaken their main argument, the point serves as a reminder of how complex, multifaceted and, ultimately, challenging the situation truly is.
To conclude, Tyranny of the Minority is a relevant addition to a growing body of literature that aims to come to terms with both the rise of nationalist populism in the US and its impact on American democracy. The result of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s efforts in a sweeping yet accessible, historically contextualized account of American democracy and the political, social, and institutional forces which threaten it today. Their core argument is compelling: the endurance of democracy fundamentally depends on its ability to function in line with liberal civic norms and values. History has shown us that when these norms erode, and strong democratic institutions are lacking, democracy itself may – and often does – follow.
The authors acknowledge the magnitude of what they propose: bipartisan support for widespread constitutional reform in the US seems far-fetched at best. However, owing both to the strength of their argument and to the evident urgency of the current moment, we are left compelled to join them in hoping otherwise.
