Three political scientists join Jeffrey Rosen to discuss democratic instability, backsliding, and demagogues from a historical and global perspective. Guests included Harvard’s Steven Levitsky, author of Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point, the University of Texas-Austin’s Kurt Weyland, author of Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat, and Princeton University’s Frances Lee. This program originally aired on November 27, 2023.
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Today’s episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Bill Pollock, and Tanaya Tauber. It was engineered by Kevin Kilbourne and Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Yara Daraiseh, Cooper Smith, Samson Mostashari, and Lana Ulrich.
Participants
Frances Lee is jointly appointed in the department of politics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs where she is professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. She is the author, co-author, or editor of numerous books, including The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era. She co-chaired the Institutions Working Group for the Social Science Research Council’s Anxieties of Democracy Program and co-edited an associated volume, Can America Govern Itself?.
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he is also Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of twoNew York Times best-sellers, including How Democracies Die, and most recently, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.
Kurt Weyland is the Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of several books, includingThe Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies; Revolution and Reaction; Assault on Democracy: Communism, Fascism, and Authoritarianism during the Interwar Years; and his forthcoming book is Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources:
- Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point
- Frances Lee, “Populism and the American Party System: Opportunities and Constraints”
- Kurt Weyland, Democracy's Resilience to Populism's Threat: Countering Global Alarmism
- Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die
Excerpt from Interview: Kurt Weyland compares Trump's outsider stance and disregard for norms to past populist leaders globally, highlighting their skill in forming diverse coalitions. Despite posing a threat to democracy, the United States' robust institutions have contained this challenge.
Kurt Weyland: So, I'm of course not a specialist in American politics and American history, but I think there are many similarities to these earlier instances of populist leadership. No wonder that President Trump had a painting of Andrew Jackson in his office as a kind of inspiration. And like those earlier incarnations of personalistic, charismatic leadership, Trump has also been constrained by this institutional framework. Now, Trump, of course, was much more of an outsider in many ways, and as Frances had mentioned before, it was in some sense a really terrible accident that he even made it to the presidency. And it's in some sense the one loophole, the surprising openness and democraticness of primaries were also, of course, the Republican primaries were more open, not having superdelegates than the Democratic primaries. And so Trump can get into office in that way, and in that sense, not having risen through party politics and coming on as a complete outsider in some sense had more of a transgressive and aggressive attitude than earlier ones, and no respect for not only liberal democratic civility, but also for institutional rules, institutional norms.
In that sense, in my view, he is a bigger threat than the earlier incarnations. But in a comparative perspective, we've seen this coming from the left or from the right with Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey. We've seen this kind of type of personalistic, domineering, headstrong leaders who have an anti-institutional transgressive bent and who draw on this plebiscitarian mass support in many different incarnations. A lot of political commonality despite a lot of contextual differences in terms of politics, ideology, electoral base. And one thing that is, I think, very noticeable that these populist leaders are very skillful at stringing together very heterogeneous parts of coalitions. Steve in the book emphasizes in some sense the impact of racial cleavages in the United States, but there are also a number of other cleavages that Trump appealed to, the culture, war, economic dissatisfaction. And so these populists are based on a very heterogeneous kind of coalition that can come in with a good amount of support and force and try to do this damage to democratic institutions. And fortunately, in the United States, with its strong institutional framework, managed to contain that transgressive force.
Excerpt from Interview: Frances Lee argues that the American political system is resistant to authoritarian concentration of power but often leads to gridlock and prevents decisive leadership.
Frances Lee: I see our political system as one that's designed for circumstances, circumstances when, in the words of the Federalist Papers, enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. It's a system that was very suspicious of concentrated power. So, it has a whole series of institutions that have the effect of fragmenting power. So, an extensive system of checks and balances, including strong bicameralism. Layered on top of that are staggered elections, which tend to operate so that presidents suffer a referendum on their performance two years in, one that routinely dilutes their strength in the legislature.
Federalism adds to this fragmentation of power. Presidents governing parties at the national level routinely face states controlled by the opposing party. And federal state cooperation is generally necessary for all-important domestic policy-making. So, this is another way in which power is checked in the American political system. You have a national government of limited powers, which then in turn entails a great deal of litigation about where those boundaries are, and the role of an independent judiciary in policing those boundaries, and a rigid constitution that's very difficult to change. So all of these factors make it less likely that you'd see an authoritarian concentration of power, even under the circumstances when a populist leader gains the reins of power.
Now, there are numerous trade-offs involved with a political system designed this way. It often prevents decisive leadership, especially in the domestic realm. Gridlock is not unusual in American politics. A high bar of consensus is generally necessary for major legislation. But it's a system that's pretty well-designed to check the excesses of a populous leader. Now, unfortunately, we combine a system like this with a party system that has no such protections. We radically open-nominations process. There's nothing to stop racist or ethno-nationalist forces from taking over one of the major parties. There's a limit to what national party leaders can do to affect who receives party nominations in a system that is radically open, remarkably open in comparative terms. So populists can get nominated in American politics, the presidential level, at the congressional level, but they'll be checked in office due to the basic structure of the constitutional system.
Excerpt from Interview: Steven Levitsky on how historical events in North Carolina demonstrate the fragility of multiracial democracy and the radicalization of established political parties in response to perceived existential threats, drawing parallels to contemporary political dynamics.
Steven Levitsky: Well, interestingly, getting back to Frances' point, the populists, in this case, in North Carolina, were on the other side. The populists were aligned with the Republicans in founding a very, very fragile, multiracial democracy in North Carolina in the late 19th century. The Democrats were really in no sense populist at that time; they were authoritarian. We think that that period, the Wilmington coup and the failure of reconstruction, is important in a couple of senses. First of all, it's important that most Americans don't know a heck of a lot about reconstruction and the failure of reconstruction. It's really important historically for a couple of reasons.
One, it was our country's first experiment with multiracial democracy, multiracial male democracy, anyway. And second, it was a period in which the United States suffered some pretty ugly political outcomes: Violent terrorism, coups, violent seizures of power, election fraud, and substantial amounts of extra-judicial killing. So when we talk about 236 years of liberal democracy, that actually isn't so. The US South was quite authoritarian for nearly a century, which had important implications for our national political regime. By the middle of the 20th century, the United States was considerably less democratic than most Western democracies.
The other reason why I think that that period is very important, though, is, as I said earlier, it's very rare that established political parties that have been competing peacefully in elections turn away from democracy. Daniel and I are comparativists. We have a fair amount of experience in countries in two different regions of the world, and we actually could not find very many cases of mainstream political parties that sort of radically turned away from democracy. There are a few. We ended up discussing a case in Thailand, but there aren't a lot of examples. And the Democratic Party in the US South in the era of Reconstruction is an example. The Democratic Party, by today's standards, was not fully democratic before reconstruction. But it turned towards violence and the open use of fraud and other authoritarian measures in a pretty radical way in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s.
And so, we thought it was useful to look at why that's the case. And our interpretation, which is hardly the only interpretation, but ours is that this was primarily a response to a perception of existential threat by the main constituencies of the Southern Democratic Party. What reconstruction brought almost immediate widespread black suffrage. African-Americans were an outright majority in a small number of Southern states. They were a near majority in most Southern states, so combined with white Republicans, they could easily win elections. But not only that, Black suffrage meant a serious challenge to the entire racial order in the South. And that, for many Southern Democrats, was perceived to be an existential threat. That wasn't just differences over tax policy or healthcare; that was perceived to be an existential threat to their way of life. And we saw that as fueling the Democrat's radicalization. The situation with contemporary Republicans is not the same. It's very different in important ways. But we think there are important lessons and parallels to be drawn.
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