We’re in strange times. In the U.S., we’re finding ourselves in a situation in which the possibility of genuine democratic retrenchment and some version of presidential authoritarian dictatorship is a real possibility. There’s a lot to consider as the liberal democracy we’ve become accustomed to could erode right before our eyes in the near future. Steve Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard and serves as the director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Levitsky is also a New York Times bestselling author of numerous books including, “How Democracies Die” and “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,” which he co-authored with Daniel Ziblatt. He joins WITHpod to discuss entering into a new era, the uncertainty of this moment, the process by which a democracy might backslide into something that’s less democratic and resisting the erosion.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Steven Levitsky: I think there will be an election in 2028. I’m not as pessimistic as some. I don’t think we’re sliding into fascism. I think there’s a very good chance that the Democratic Party wins the 2028 election, but it’s not clear how we rebuild a consensus in favor of basic small D democratic politics. So I think what would have to happen, and I don’t want to wish this upon our society, and I’m not even sure it’s possible at this point, having lived through COVID and seen Trump come within 40,000 votes of getting reelected. But Trump would have to be a major disaster so that we create a broader coalition of 60, 65 percent of Americans ready to do something different. And that’s possible, but we haven’t seen much evidence for that in the last eight years.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. I’m speaking to you the day after a remarkable scene unfolded in South Korea. Basically the sort of right-wing populist president of that country who had won a very narrow majority back in 2022, President Yoon, who had seen his sort of political fortunes decline over time, the opposition party had won big in the last elections, declared martial law, came forward and said martial law.
And the bullet points of martial law were basically the complete suspension of what we would call a free and open society. The media was going to be controlled by the state, that there would be no independent demonstrations, the right to protest, the right to peacefully assemble, free speech was curtailed, no strikes, all the sort of basic mechanisms of civil society were suspended.
And what the Koreans did was they took the streets immediately in the wee hours in the morning in their parkas in the very cold, cold Seoul winter and defied the orders. They rallied to the parliament building, which had been blocked off by troops and parliament members climbed into the building against the sort of stated wishes and orders of the military, of the martial law and cast unanimous vote to overturn martial law, 190 to zero, including members of President Yoon’s own party. President Yoon then came out and was like, well, I take it back, my bad. No martial law. As I speak to you now, there’s a process of impeachment that’s going forward. And this was a really amazing moment for a bunch of reasons.
One is South Korea is a young and tender democracy in many ways. It’s really only been sort of a durable democracy since basically 1987, 1988. It had a series of authoritarian rulers after the Korean War. There was a military coup in 1980 and a kind of coup regime that lasted from ‘80 to ‘87, which was brought down through mobilization and street protest. It’s a place like Brazil, another country that toiled under a military junta as recently as the 1980s, that has a real memory of what it looks like when democracy goes away and how precious it is and how it has to be fought for.
That’s something that I think we don’t quite have in the same way in the U.S., where by some measures, most measures, the longest existing democracy in the world, depending on how you wanted to define it. Depending on how you define it, you can make the argument we’re the longest existing democracy in the world, but generally people don’t have recent memory of, say, life under a military junta and what that would look like. And so now we find ourselves in this situation in which we are facing the possibility of genuine democratic retrenchment and some version of kind of presidential authoritarian dictatorship or something of that form, something that’s different than the kind of liberal democracy we’ve become accustomed to.
And I thought it would be great to talk to someone that just studies this, that studies basically the process by which a democracy might backslide into something that’s less democratic or not democratic. Steven Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard. He serves as the director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He’s a “New York Times” bestselling author of a number of books, including “How Democracies Die” and “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,” which he co-authored with Daniel Ziblatt. Professor, it’s great to have you in the program.
Steven Levitsky: Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris Hayes: So can we start first on how you got interested? This area of sort of democratic backsliding is now front of mind, not just in the U.S., but a lot of places. This is a sort of transnational trend, but it didn’t feel to me like this is a particularly like hot area study for a long time. And I’m curious how you found your way into thinking about this and studying this.
Steven Levitsky: Well, I wrote a more academic book 15 years ago about a regime type that we call competitive authoritarianism, but this is a time when democracy seemed to be spreading across the world and it was kind of assumed that everybody was democratizing. But my co-author, Lucan Way, I really observed that a lot of regimes would take the sort of constitutional form of democracy, hold regular elections, allow opposition, but tilt the playing field or allow the playing field to be tilted against the opposition. So many regimes in the world, in Latin America, in Eastern Europe, in Africa, in the former Soviet Union, were hybrids in which there were elections, there was opposition, there was a constitution, but the playing field was tilted against the opposition.
So I spent 10 years writing a book on this, and over the last decade or so, as it became clear that U.S. democracy was wobbling, began to think about how that could potentially happen in the United States, which, frankly, 20 years ago when I was doing this original research, I couldn’t have imagined. Maybe I should have.
Chris Hayes: Can you explain more what’s an example of a competitive authoritarian system and what are the features of that?
Steven Levitsky: Well, today I think the best example in the world is Hungary, which is, I mean, Viktor Orban doesn’t lock up any of his opponents, doesn’t have any blood on his hands, has reformed the constitution but maintains a constitutional system. At least thus far, elections have not been stolen. They’ve been technically clean, but the government has managed to use the state apparatus, use the apparatus of government to co-opt and to bully a lot of the private sector, the media, either onto the sidelines or into self-censorship, has been able to change some of the rules of the game, to pack the courts and the prosecutor’s office, gerrymander electoral districts, to give the incumbent party a significant leg up over the opposition.
So competition, there is competition, there is an opposition, there are regular elections, but the competition is not fair. Venezuela under Hugo Chavez is another example. Turkey, contemporary Turkey is another example. There are dozens of such regimes across the world.
Chris Hayes: And one of the things, I mean, Turkey’s a really interesting case because I remember being in Turkey relatively early in Erdogan’s trajectory where there was a much more open question about, you know, he came in with the AKP and it was a big deal that this party, this formerly opposition party had won. And it wasn’t clear if he was an aspiring authoritarian, if he was just a populist figure who was going to actually in some ways solidify Turkish democracy, which had been wobbly in its own way throughout the years. But I mean, one of the mechanisms I’m interested in here is how public opinion works. Because the thing that I worry about most in the U.S., I worry about public opinion being taken out of the picture or manipulated in such a way that you don’t have genuine sort of competitive open debate, right?
So that’s what we’ve seen in these places where it’s been effective in Turkey, in Hungary, where you’ve got a ruling party that has 60 percent approval rating, right? Now, is that real in some sense, or organic? Not really because you can’t detach it from the mechanisms by which civil society’s manipulated, but the ruler is popular. Like if you call an election tomorrow, they’re going to win, you know, win in quotation marks. And I’m curious how you think about the role of public opinion in these kind of competitive authoritarian regimes.
Steven Levitsky: Public opinion is crucial, and there’s a wide range of variation. There are some cases, and the cases where autocrats do the most damage are where they’re really popular, where they have 80 percent approval rating. Alberto Fujimori in Peru going back to the 1990s, Putin, Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Bukele today in El Salvador. But these guys, when they get 70 or 80 percent approval they can do a tremendous amount of damage.
By contrast, less popular autocrats. I would say Bolsonaro is one case. Trump’s first presidency in another case. Extreme cases, President Yoon in South Korea.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Steven Levitsky: His approval rating was 19 percent.
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Steven Levitsky: Lesson for future autocrats. Don’t try to declare martial law when you’ve got a 19 percent approval rating. You’re likely to fail. And so the difference between an autocrat with 70, 80 percent approval rating, even 60, versus an autocrat with 30, 40 percent support is huge. And one of the key things for the Trump administration going forward is, I mean, he won the popular vote for the first time ever in this election. I think people are kind of assuming he has potential for majority support. I’m skeptical. I think he’s going to be pretty unpopular pretty quickly and that’s going to present opportunities for the opposition.
Chris Hayes: I strongly agree with that. I know this is an impossible question. You can’t answer some sort of like in some systemic comparativist way, but given the fact that you have worked across different systems. Like the alchemy of this public opinion. Why is it like Bukele in El Salvador, he’s sort of classic kind of populist demagogue, really interesting character in many different ways. But the big thing was, in one of the highest homicide rates in the world, certainly in the Western hemisphere, a promise to, similar Duterte in the Philippines, to sort of clean up the violence and the application of severe government force towards the problem of crime, the problem of violent cartels, often with the suspension of human rights and sort of constitutional niceties.
And the crime rate has come down and there’s like a very clear sort of input, output, legible story about his popularity there. But I wonder if there are broader lessons about like when it works, what makes someone popular versus not? What is the difference between a Bolsonaro and an Orban and an Erdogan, for instance?
Steven Levitsky: Well, I think the primary thing is whether there’s a severe crisis and whether the government is able to overcome that crisis.
Chris Hayes: Interesting.
Steven Levitsky: The real recipe for someone like Bukele, is you inherit a terrible crisis, one that discredits, really badly discredits the political establishment, allows you to run against the entire elite and win, and then you resolve that crisis, or at least are perceived to resolve that crisis. And Bukele brought the homicide rate down literally from over 100 per 100,000, which is I think the highest in the world to, I think right now below the United States. I mean, El Salvador was unlivable and it became livable again. And so he got the credit for that and he will have 80 percent, 90 percent of people ready for at least a few years to come.
Alberto Fujimori did the same thing in Peru. He came to power in a context of hyperinflation and a Maoist guerrilla movement closing in on Lima, and he managed to end hyperinflation and defeat the Shining Path guerrillas. That gave him massive support for, turns out to be about six years, seven years. Doesn’t last forever, but you can do a lot of damage with that support.
In cases where there isn’t a severe crisis, when you have just a really polarized society between two camps like Brazil or the United States, it’s really hard to get, you know, you’ve got a kind of a floor. It’s really hard for Trump to fall below the high 30s.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Steven Levitsky: But 50-ish percent of the population, maybe 55 percent of the U.S. population can’t stand Trump no matter what.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Steven Levitsky: Let’s say about 50 percent of the population.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Steven Levitsky: So Trump is not going to be able to pierce that ceiling not without some kind of exogenous shock that we’re not foreseeing right now.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and let’s hope there is not one, just a knock on wood. The Fujimori is interesting. You’re a Latin Americanist. I mean, that’s where your area of expertise is. And one of the things I think that’s interesting for this conversation is that, there’s always this tendency in the U.S. where we think of our peer countries as Europe, right? Like the OECD countries in Europe. And so we look to like, Hungary as an example, but America is very much a Western Hemisphere nation in many ways and lots of people make the argument that it’s illuminating to understand our particular institutional development through that lens.
And I wonder if your background in history is a Latin Americanist, like how you think of that and the U.S. relationship to examples we’ve seen of the rise and fall of democratic regimes throughout the Western hemisphere throughout the centuries.
Steven Levitsky: Well, first of all, political scientists, we’re not always so good with history, but I think your point that the United States actually shares a lot in common, in some ways more in common with Latin America over the last century than Europe. I think that’s right. First of all, our institutions are much more similar to Latin America. Latin America is presidentialist as opposed to the kind of parliamentary systems that exist in Western Europe. And I think that actually matters in terms of a populace being able to win and concentrate a lot of power.
And secondly, the United States has Latin American levels of social and racial inequality, which is very, very different from Western Europe. And we often compare, as you said, we compare ourselves to Western Europe And it is true that there is a kind of a liberal far right emerging, anti-immigrant, nativist far-right emerging across Europe, which is threatening to democracy. But that far-right has not done anywhere near the level of damage to democracy in Europe, at least today, as in the United States.
The United States is the only established Western democracy where the far-right has actually come to power alone, governed alone and assaulted democratic institutions. That hasn’t happened anywhere in Europe.
Chris Hayes: There’s a very famous political science scholar named Juan Linz who wrote the very famous paper called The Perils of Presidentialism and wrote about presidentialism. And since he just mentioned it, it’s probably worth talking about the structural aspects here. You know, presidential, the basic gloss on Linz, well, maybe I’ll have you do it since you’re the political scientist rather than me giving the gloss on Linz about what he sort of identified as the problem or the possible crisis that’s born of what we call a presidential system?
Steven Levitsky: Well, first of all, the executive branch becomes kind of a zero sum game. When there’s a presidency, it’s often very powerful, at least perceived to be very powerful, much more so than the legislature. A legislature is something, if all the power is in the parliament, that’s something that can be divided up and shared, and you can govern through coalitions. Only one guy or one person, one party can capture the presidency. So you get kind of a zero sum game and those who win the presidency win it all and those who lose are left out in the cold. And that Linz thought was destabilizing.
He thought that divided government was destabilizing. That is not always proven to be the case, but in a parliamentary system, the prime minister has to have at least the tacit support of a majority in parliament. And if she loses it or he loses it, there’s a vote of no confidence, you change the government, peacefully, democratically, et cetera. A presidential system doesn’t have that mechanism. A president can be very unpopular, can be in conflict with the Congress, and there’s no simple or peaceful way to resolve that conflict. And you often get things like what just happened in South Korea, which is a president gets fed up with Congress and tries to circumvent the Constitution. That was another of Linz’s concern.
The third one is fixed terms. And in a parliamentary system, when a government loses support, it can be, again, removed and replaced by a new government very easily, very peacefully. In a presidential system, you have fixed terms, you got to wait until the end of the term, which, at least in Latin America, is often proven to be destabilizing. So that was Linz’s concern. I think another institutional issue in the United States, which you don’t always think about, is our first-past-the-post electoral system, which basically makes it very likely we’re going to end up with two big parties.
And in parliamentary systems with a proportional representation election system, you’re much more likely to have multiple parties that form coalition governments. And I think we are increasingly seeing that democratic systems are better able to absorb this sort of far-right, illiberal third or 30 percent of the electorate in a parliamentary system than a presidential system. To oversimplify, the far-right represents about 30 percent of electorates across Western democracies. Little more here, little more there, roughly 30 percent.
Chris Hayes: Interesting.
Steven Levitsky: That 30 percent has not done a lot of damage in Europe. It’s either in the opposition, like in Germany, or it’s a junior partner in some governments like in Scandinavia, or it may even be a senior partner in government, like in Italy, but it shares power. And it has not yet at least assaulted democracy. The United States is the only country where that 30 percent was able to capture one of the two political parties and govern unilaterally. And I think that’s a big reason why we’ve suffered so much more backsliding than Europe.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Chris Hayes: When you say we’ve suffered more backsliding than Europe, which I would agree with, but I’m not a scholar. I’m just a cable news host who watches this every day. I mean, how bad is it? How bad has it been in the U.S.? How would you diagnose, characterize the degree of American democratic backsliding?
Steven Levitsky: Well, let me start with just some seemingly arbitrary numbers and then I’ll get to —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Steven Levitsky: — I’ll try to color that in. Every major index of democracy, every major organization that measures the level of democracy across countries has shown a market decline for the United States over the last decade. I’m going to take one, a very mainstream organization, Freedom House. Freedom House has a global freedom index, scores every country every year from zero. I think North Korea might be a zero to a hundred. I think Finland is a hundred. The United States used to be in the mid-90s, not quite Scandinavia, but 94, 95. A decade ago, we were, I think, at 94. Today, the United States has fallen to 83, which is still democracy, still above the bar for democracy, but it is below Argentina and tied with Romania and Panama.
And that may seem shocking to many Americans being below Argentina and tied with Panama, but we have had pretty systematic, pretty widespread efforts to restrict access to the ballot in many states in the United States over the last 15 years. We have had a dramatic rise in violent threats against election workers, election officials, elected officials, prosecutors and judges. And we’ve had an incumbent president attempt to overturn the results of an election and block, violently block a peaceful transfer of power. And our institutions did not hold that president accountable.
When those things happen, you fall to the point where Freedom House, considers you less democratic than Argentina, because those things don’t happen in Argentina. So it’s the rise in violence, it’s the effort to restrict access to the ballot, and it’s an effort without punishment by an incumbent president to overturn the results of an election that has led to the decline in the U.S. score.
Chris Hayes: So if we’re diagnosing the source of this, there’s a few things, right, that we’ve talked to, like first, the sort of institutional design of the U.S., which gives it certain susceptibilities. One of those being presidential system where presidential power can amass. And we’ve seen a kind of concentration in the executive over the years, particularly, I think it’s fair to say in the post-World War II era and the creation of the sort of defense apparatus that came with the Cold War. I think that was exacerbated by post-9/11, the war on terror, more and more concentration in the executive.
Increasing polarization has led to dysfunction in Congress, which has meant that authorities have sent a sort of flow from the first branch to the second, from Congress to the executive. We also have a broader context of sort of populist right-wing backlash. And your point about the sort of first-past-the-post two-party system means that through primaries, you could basically have this 30 percent capture one of the two major parties. And once it captures one of the two major parties in a kind of structurally polarized political system, it’s got basically a coin flip chance in a given election. How sui generis do you think Trump is as a figure in all this? This is a meta-historical question maybe, or a sort of theoretical question, but how much does the person matter, you know, the person in the moment?
Steven Levitsky: It matters. I mean, Trump clearly could appeal to some voters that I think no other contemporary right-wing politician has figured out to appeal to.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I think that’s an empirical fact. I think that’s shown in the numbers.
Steven Levitsky: And Trump, because of who Trump is, has been willing to cross some lines that I think even the Republican that you hate most would not cross. I’m not sure any other Republican would have just absolutely refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election. Trump goes to places that others would not go. The thing is, once he does it, and once we learn that you can get away with it, and you might even benefit politically from it, then you can’t unlearn that behavior. And so taking Trump out of the picture doesn’t make the effects of Trumpism go away.
I also want to say, I don’t think Trump is a completely sui generis figure. Just as there existed a liberal far-right across Europe, that liberal far-right was emerging obviously prior to Trump. You see very clear continuities with the Tea Party movement. And Trump was as much a product of this radicalization of the Republican Party as he was a cause of it. Trump won the primaries in 2026 because his ethno-nationalist nativist and in many ways authoritarian appeal, appeal to a lot of Republican rank and file. And so this isn’t just Trump dropping in by accident. Trump was very much a product of the radicalization of the Republican Party.
Getting back to your earlier question, Chris, I think, yes, our institutions made us vulnerable, but I think the real key variable here is the radicalization of the Republican Party, the transformation of what had been a pretty mainstream conservative party in the second half of the 20th century into an increasingly undemocratic party, a party that was no longer committed to democratic rules of the game, and that’s not just Trump.
Chris Hayes: How do you understand that happening? Why did it happen?
Steven Levitsky: Well, there’s a lot of debate about that, and Daniel and I have a position in this debate, which may or may not be right, but first of all, it’s important to point out that it’s really rare that this happens. It’s really unusual, it’s really rare in history or across the world to find a mainstream political party of the center left or center right that has been competing peacefully in elections for 150 years, as the case of the Republican Party, for a party to go off the rails, to turn away from democracy.
Daniel and I searched long and hard to find comparative examples and really outside of the Democratic Party during Reconstruction. We couldn’t find very many examples. The Thai Democrats in Thailand in the early 21st century is another case, but there are very few examples. This is an unusual event. It doesn’t happen every day. Our explanation has to do with the United States’ transition to multiracial democracy. That the United States over the last half century has been undergoing a massive transformation. And I think one in which, among other things, a long dominant ethnic majority is losing not only its majority status, but its dominant status in society. And that is a big deal.
So we have, over the course of our lifetimes, really primarily in the 21st century, experienced a powerful challenge to long established social hierarchies, racial hierarchies, gender hierarchies, and other social hierarchies. And it’s happened very quickly. It’s happened relentlessly right before our eyes. And that has triggered a reaction. That has triggered a reaction among primarily white Christian men who feel like the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. And that generates a level of resentment and anger that you don’t see with people who disagree with over healthcare policy or disagree over foreign policy. This is a level of anger and resentment that is much more intense. And I think all of us underestimated the ferocity of that resistance to the gradual changes of the last half century. And that’s the base that Trump appealed to. That’s the 30 percent that got him to power within the Republican Party.
Chris Hayes: And that same 30 percent, we’ve seen similar changes in, I mean, in different ways in say across Europe, right, where countries have seen large influxes of immigrants, a sort of real change even the sort of nature of what it is to be Italian, right, if you go and look at an Italian kindergarten class, right? It looks very different than the old men in the piazza, right? There’s a significant and a very obvious demographic change happening across Europe. But in those countries that is channeled into those parties in these kinds of multi-party parliamentary coalitional situations, it’s channeled into what we’ve seen, which is rising support for what are these basically far-right populist parties, but then they’re embedded into the system in a very different way than what’s happened here.
Steven Levitsky: That’s exactly right. I also think this is a little harder to quantify, but I think that the reaction to immigration is very, very similar. I completely agree. I think the issue of anti-black racism and the legacies of slavery make it a particularly difficult problem in the United States. I think it adds to the —
Chris Hayes: Right. Of course.
Steven Levitsky: — ferocity of the reaction.
Chris Hayes: So, what have you learned about, there are obviously places. I think we tend to think in these kind of developmental terms. And I think we still have this framework, even if you actually look in the long sweep of history, it’s probably not smart because there’s been a lot, like one of the things I keep thinking to myself is, there’s a reason we have a Greek word for demagogue. It’s first invoked by Hobbes, which is that like charismatic leader who rallies the masses towards the project of undermining democracy itself is like one of the oldest problems of democracy, going back to Athens.
And so in some ways what we’re dealing with is not new. And another way that I think is useful to think about is there’s a teleological framework we have for the development of governance towards liberal democracy as the sort of endpoint. But as a historical matter, places have fluctuated and gone through different periods. You know, it always blows my mind to like read about like Polish parliament, you know, in the 19th century because you think like, oh, right, yeah, they were running a democracy in Poland at some point and then they weren’t.
Same thing in Latin America. There were countries that were democratic very early on and then they weren’t democratic. They became democratic again. If you think in these terms, right, not in this sort of arc, not in this line that ascends towards liberal democracy, are there lessons about what to do when a country that was democratic backslides and then what the next step to push it back towards democracy is?
Steven Levitsky: I’m not sure that there’s a simple recipe.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Steven Levitsky: I mean, first of all, I mean, I think all of us, and I certainly include myself, have bought into this sort of developmentalist or teleological view of history that you just mentioned, especially strong since World War II in the United States. And you know, one thing that is new, especially since World War II, is that the level of inclusion that we see in Western societies today, the level of racial and gender equality has. There’s no precedent in Western history for the level of occlusion that we’ve seen in the last half century. I’m not sure what that means, but that has been a true, that’s not cyclical.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Steven Levitsky: That’s the level of development that we haven’t seen before. There aren’t that many fully democratic regimes that have collapsed in the world. You can count them really on a couple of hands. In almost every case, I mean, you can go back to the Netherlands in the 19 teens for a case of an elite sort of stopping short of the abyss. But in most cases, it’s only after a society falls into the abyss that politicians sort of figure out, okay, we have to do this a different way. I think about obviously Germany, Spain in the 1930s, Brazil in the ‘60s, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile in the 1970s.
Polarization reached the point where democracy was lost entirely. People suffered often for a generation or more because of it. And only climbing out of it did politicians and activists sort of agree we have to do things differently. There were just not many cases of the regime beginning to slip or to slide and people kind of get together and push back. I mean, we’ll see what happens in South Korea. I mean, the South Koreans gave us an example, as you pointed out at the beginning of this broadcast, of people quickly mobilizing in the middle of the night in the cold and defending their democracy. I was very heartened to see that there were members of the president’s party —
Chris Hayes: Yes. Crucial.
Steven Levitsky: — who stood up and opposed martial law. I mean, that’s how you save a democracy, right? It’s when two political parties that don’t like each other, that compete against each other, that have been quarreling, join forces to defend democracy against an abuse like we saw a couple days ago in South Korea. That’s how you save it. That’s what happened in Spain when there was a coup attempt in 1981. Parties from the communist on the left to the pro-Franco right joined forces to oppose the coup and democracy emerged strengthened.
So does the world in which South Korea and democracy emerged is strengthened? We don’t know. But there are not many cases of politicians sort of coming back from the brink and not going over.
Chris Hayes: Do you think, you know, immigration is one obvious thing to point to when you look at sort of transnational factors in this, right? Obviously we have just objectively more mobility among people now and we have more higher levels of immigration. Are there other things that you think of as driving the backsliding that we’ve seen? I mean, different candidates include along with immigration, the sort of neoliberal economic regime that really kind of hammered basically the working class of the democratic publics of the West specifically. A lot of people that benefited from these decades of liberalized trade. Liberalized is self-contested, but the trade regime that we had from say mid-1980s through today.
So, the folks that took it on the chin also happened to be the sort of working class of the voting publics of all these democratic countries that were not happy with what happened to them. Another candidate is the information environment, social media. I think we’ve definitely seen a close connection between populist authoritarian campaigns and messages and forms of low friction, viral propaganda dissemination in a bunch of different contexts. So those are two that people kind of nominate along with immigration. I’m curious just what you think about that or if there are others that I’m missing.
Steven Levitsky: No, I think those are the big three. I mean, I would step back and caution a little bit about claims. So these big three variables, immigration, globalization, and deepening inequality, and the new information environment, they apply most specifically to Western democracies. That’s less the cause of what’s going on in Latin America.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Steven Levitsky: Or even Eastern Europe, I would say. And so far, as we said earlier, only one rich Western democracy has really experienced backsliding so far, and that’s the United States. This hasn’t happened in Europe. I mean, there are things to worry about in Europe, and certainly the rise of a liberal right is worrisome. But it’s not yet clear that we’re going to be talking about widespread backsliding in Western democracies. It may happen. I would say it has not happened yet. We may end up saying this is another great case of American exceptionalism.
But even if democracy is in fact threatened in the West, yeah, I think those are the three. Europe, although it has certainly globalized, social policies such that levels of income inequality are nowhere near that of the United States, which may explain why we see a little less polarization there. I’m not an expert on the impact of social media. There’s been a lot of research increasingly showing that it does clearly have this intense polarizing effect, that part of the polarization that we’re experiencing in Latin America, in Europe, is at least exacerbated. It’s not caused, but it’s exacerbated by social media.
And I’m increasingly convinced that that’s playing not necessarily killing democracy, but in generating this extreme polarization. I mean, think about language. Think about language like, nobody used the words communist to depict the Western left in the 1990s and the early 2000s. And not only —
Chris Hayes: I mean, particularly in recent years where, I mean, it was a thing that you would —
Steven Levitsky: Right.
Chris Hayes: — encounter all the time in the Cold War, but it’s so weird to hear it hit your ears in the year of our Lord 2024.
Steven Levitsky: It is, it is, but it’s widespread. Same thing with fascist. I think fascist is overused. I mean, I’m not denying that there’s a whiff of fascism in the MAGA movement —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Steven Levitsky: — but the term fascist gets used for every right-wing movement I don’t like. And genocide as well. We can debate whether there’s genocide going on in Gaza, but we’re using the term very quickly, very easily. And that’s in part because it’s social media, the more extreme position, the more extreme language that you use gets clicks, gets likes, gets diffused. And I don’t think we as polities, as citizens, as politicians, as governments have learned how to deal with that.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Chris Hayes: If the sort of internal dynamics within the party are so key here, which is one of the lessons here, what are you looking for as sort of signs early on here in the second Trump administration along those lines? I mean, I’ll say for myself, right? Very early on, they announced there was this reporting that there was a plan to invoke a never before invoked article of the Constitution that would allow the president to essentially unilaterally adjourn Congress if the two houses couldn’t agree. So he would have to get sort of Mike Johnson on board with it, disagree with the Senate, unilaterally adjourn Congress, use the adjournment to take the entirety of his nominations and give them their jobs via recess appointment, thereby completely gutting the advice and consent provision of the U.S. Constitution in the Senate’s role, which is longstanding, durable, and I think quite important.
That to me felt like real alarm bells situation. That seems less and less likely to me a month later, partly for the reasons of public opinion and politics that we mentioned at the outset of the show. So that’s one thing that right off the bat, I was like, this is a real test. I think there’s other things, Matt Gaetz at DOJ, Kash Patel at FBI, they’re sort of tests, but I’m curious in a broader sense, are there things you’re looking at for lines that get crossed, decisions people make in key moments, particularly at this sort of elite inter-party level, where it seems to me like I think you think a lot of the kind of leverages.
Steven Levitsky: Yeah, no, absolutely. I’m looking at very similar things. I mean, I have been closely following and paying close attention to the Republican Party and the Republican Party leadership since we wrote “How Democracies Die,” which is now seven years ago. When we wrote “How Democracies Die,” there was still plausibly a large fraction of the Republican Party, you know, John McCain was still alive and working in the Senate. That could plausibly constrain Trump and we wrote in “How Democracies Die” that we thought the Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, would be able to draw certain lines.
And the transformation of the party, the Trumpization of the party, happened much more quickly in a much more thoroughgoing way than we, or certainly than I anticipated, to the point that one of the reasons why I think things are much more dangerous today than in 2016, is that the Republican Party has been almost entirely purged of people willing to stand up to Trump. But there are remaining non-Trumpists. There are several of them, certainly in the Senate. The House is really close. And so there are House members who have an electoral incentive not to be too MAGA if they want to be reelected in two years.
And so what I’m looking at is whether these guys are willing to stand up. And you know, my experience over the last seven years has been mostly disappointment. I mean, the fact that McConnell at all couldn’t or wouldn’t convict Trump after January 6th is stunning and may go down in history as one of the monumental self-goals, right? So the Republican leadership, the non-Trumpist Republican leadership performance so far has been pretty dismal. But still, it will be important. Whether these guys separate themselves even a little from Trump and push back a little will make a big difference. And so the behavior in the Senate, okay so far.
I think Kash Patel and the FBI director position is going to be pretty critical. But the two things I’m watching are, what are the signals that Trump’s sending? And so far he’s shown a total desire to pack key state institutions with absolute loyalists, which is basic authoritarianism. And then how does a Republican Party leadership respond to that? And so far, I would say the signs are mixed. It’s really not the worst case scenario, but obviously pretty far for the best case scenario.
Chris Hayes: Do you have a theory for why? Is there a systematic way to think about the incentives here that isn’t personal, psychology, acculturation, cowardice? Why is it that these people make the decisions they do? I mean, this is something I’ve covered and thought a lot about, and it seems to me like, much more in the realm of literature and a man for all seasons than science. Why does Rusty Bowers, a very conservative man of faith, a Mormon and the speaker of the house in the Arizona legislature, when he’s pressured say, no, my faith and my oath to the constitution doesn’t allow me to do this. Other people are willing to go along. Mike Pence doesn’t.
This question of how these decisions get made, again, to me it’s profound at a kind of human level, Shakespearean almost. But I don’t know, is there any systematic way to think about these incentives?
Steven Levitsky: Yeah, I think there are some. I have to say, I’ve spent probably an equal amount of time tearing my hair out over the same question. It’s crucially important. It’s enough to drive one crazy. But I think there are a couple of things. First of all, this is something you mentioned early on in the broadcast. A lot of Americans still take our democracy for granted.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Steven Levitsky: And this applies to business leaders. It applies to, I would say several Supreme Court justices, and it applies to a number of non-Trumpist Republicans. They just don’t think that democracy really will break. And so they’re acting under that assumption, which I think is flawed. And Romney may fall in that category too. Secondly, it’s super clear, incentive-wise, that since 2017, if you are a Republican who wants to continue a career in Republican politics, you cannot fight Trump and continue your career and you will end up like Jeff Flake. And so you have to know, and most Republicans don’t want to end up like Jeff Flake. They want to continue their career. This is their profession. This is their job.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Steven Levitsky: As one Republican put it to me, if taking a position on principle were to mean that you would not only lose your job at Harvard, but be unemployable in any political science department in the United States, you’d think twice about it, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yup.
Steven Levitsky: So that’s the sort of rational story. There’s another part of the story, which I think doesn’t get enough attention, which is frightening, but which several retired Republicans have told me is that is the level of fear is when you take a position against Trump, I mean, not only do you get isolated in right-wing social circles, but you get death threats and you get harassed. And Mitt Romney has said that he thinks the vote to acquit Trump the second time in the Senate was influenced, was affected by the fact that some Republican senators worried about what would happen to them and their families —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Steven Levitsky: — if they voted to convict Trump. So, you know, that means that we’re in some sense already living in a world of authoritarianism, right? If major decisions like whether to convict Trump or not are shaped by fear of violence against politicians. That’s a very dangerous place to be. So it’s partly careerism. It’s careers under the mistaken assumption that it can’t get that bad, but it’s also fear.
Chris Hayes: I wanted to end the conversation with a talk about the sort of international relations aspect of this. You know, one of the things when you read about the run of World War II, for example, you have these sort of domestic movements of reaction or authoritarianism, and then their international policy, often is complicated in kinds of different ways, the sort of Hitler-Stalin pact being the kind of ultimate example of that and then that falling apart.
But ultimately you do end up in a situation where there’s a kind of fundamentally expansionist nature to the particularly right-wing movements of reaction of that period of time, Nazism and particularly Nazism and the Japanese Empire. Do you have thoughts about the international implications of this kind of destabilization? I mean, I think the extreme version, the opposite, which is the sort of Thomas Friedman peak sort of post-Cold War neoliberal idea, democracies don’t go to war with each other. No two countries of the McDonald’s ever gone to war with each other. I think that’s been pretty disproven.
But I do think that I guess my instinct is that a world with fewer democracies and more authoritarian regimes is more dangerous. And that a world where U.S. democracy is less stable is a more dangerous world. And I wonder if you share that intuition.
Steven Levitsky: Yeah, I think it says something about the transformation or the realignment of politics that I find myself in agreement with neocons in a way that I never did 30 years ago or 20 years ago —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Steven Levitsky: — or even 10 years ago. I think a world of democracies and a world in which a liberal cosmopolitan coalition governs as opposed to an ethno-nationalist one is going to be safer. I mean, it’s not just democracy and authoritarianism, it’s the kind of coalitions in power. And one fundamental difference between MAGA and the fascists of 1930s Europe, as you pointed out, is MAGA is very unlikely to be militarist and expansionist. They’re going to be inward oriented, they’re going to close off our borders, they’re going to not engage potentially with an expansionist Russia, for example, and they’d make trigger trade war.
But I think this ethno-nationalist turn, as opposed to a world in which broadly liberal powers are trying to create and sustain some sort of international architecture. There are downsides, there are costs to that. I don’t want to glorify the post —
Chris Hayes: No.
Steven Levitsky: — ‘45 architecture, but I think it’s better than what we seem to be lurching toward.
Chris Hayes: Well, it’s so funny because that’s like, the thing that haunts me and the thing that is as I’ve now spent, say, 20 years as a journalist covering public affairs and watching the trajectory of the world in that time, the sort of compared to what question is sort of always the big one. You know? And so it’s like, yeah, compared to what? There were all sorts of awful, awful aspects and have been awful aspects of the sort of post-war international order. But it doesn’t mean you can’t replace it with something worse. And you know, it’s true about American democracy, which has been flawed in a million different ways, deeply flawed. I mean, you could have something worse afterwards and that’s really the concern. Do you think if you had to chart how you think this ends well, what story would you tell?
Steven Levitsky: I’ve been trying to think of a happy ending and it’s getting harder and harder. The problem is, as I mentioned earlier, relatively ending well has often emerged after a period of really bottoming out. You really see political elites sort of doing the right thing after really horrible experiences of authoritarianism, thinking about places like Chile and Uruguay, Spain and Portugal, South Korea too.
I think, there will be an election in 2028. I’m not as pessimistic as some. I don’t think we’re sliding into fascism. I think there’s a very good chance that the Democratic Party wins the 2028 election, but it’s not clear how we rebuild a consensus in favor of basic small D democratic politics.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Steven Levitsky: So, I think what would have to happen and I don’t want to wish this upon our society and I’m not even sure it’s possible at this point, having lived through COVID and seeing Trump come within 40,000 votes of getting re-elected. But Trump would have to be a major disaster so that we create a broader coalition of 60, 65 percent of Americans ready to do something different. That’s possible, but we haven’t seen much evidence for that in the last eight years.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and Lord knows, I mean, I joke about this all the time, which is that I’m definitely rooting for Trump to fail politically, this political project, but I also don’t want the country destroyed or broken. Like, I’m definitely not rooting for catastrophe because we live here, and there’s certain things I can imagine where they pick certain political fights over massive austerity, for instance.
And some of these actually you’ve seen with President Yoon in South Korea, expanding the number of work hours, so going after the healthcare system in ways that have provoked strikes by doctors and nurses. These are big high-leverage political fights that they’re not like some catastrophic terrorist attack or enormous pandemic. You can imagine versions of that, but everything feels around the 45, 55, you know, 47, 53 margins in that world.
Steven Levitsky: Exactly, I mean, a slightly different scenario is a serious effort, I mean, put Steve Miller in charge and a serious effort at deporting 15 to 20 million people.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Steven Levitsky: That could be a disaster on a whole set of levels. Again, I would not wish that on any society because the level of human rights, I don’t think we fully grasp —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Steven Levitsky: — the level of human and civil rights violations that will inevitably occur if you try to deport 15 million people from the United States. I mean, the number of American citizens who will be illegally detained will be in the thousands at best. But I mean, that could create a social and economic disaster that could potentially weaken Trump, but God forbid we’d go in that direction.
Chris Hayes: Stephen Levitsky is professor of government at Harvard. He serves as the director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies there. He’s a “New York Times” bestselling author of several books, including “How Democracies Die” and “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point” with his co-author Daniel Ziblatt. Stephen, that was great. Thank you so much.
Steven Levitsky: Thanks, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Professor Steve Levitsky. I really enjoyed that conversation. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can e-mail us at withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the #withpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for #withpod. And you can follow me on Threads, Bluesky, and the app formerly known as Twitter with the handle #chrislhayes. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
And a reminder about MSNBC Premium, our subscription offering through Apple Podcasts. When you subscribe, you’ll get new episodes of this podcast and all of MSNBC’s original podcasts and the podcast versions of MSNBC shows ad-free. Plus exclusive bonus content every month. This week on the “Prosecuting Donald Trump” podcast, as the president-elect rolls out his choices for top jobs within government agencies, MSNBC legal analysts Mary McCord and Andrew Weissmann bring you inside the room to understand the structure of the U.S. national security apparatus. You can hear that episode when you subscribe to MSNBC Premium.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Fernando Arruda and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.