Levitsky and Ziblatt still make comparisons with other countries to marvelous effect, thickening their arguments in a gumbo of historical and contemporary examples from Brazil, Hungary, Argentina, Thailand, Italy, Chile, Germany, South Korea, and countless other states. But they also dig far deeper than before into America’s own violently authoritarian past, and the way that America’s uniquely veto-laden and counter-majoritarian rules of the game have buttressed that violence. It makes for an inversion. If How Democracies Die cried with alarm that the United States was not in fact exceptional and was just as vulnerable to lapsing into basket-casery as any other country, Tyranny of the Minority sounds a different warning: Our institutions really are exceptional in their aversion to majority rule, and they mark our pathway to doom.
The path back out of that doom, however, is strewn with land mines. An institutional critique demands institutional reform, and Levitsky and Ziblatt cap off their excellent book with a worthy wish list. Yet they still worry about the kind of partisan norm-breaking that had taken center stage in How Democracies Die. That presents a dilemma: Because one party benefits systematically from the system’s democratic deficits, democratizing reform unavoidably entails its own kind of partisan hardball. And since there’s no taking the politics out of political reform, there’s no real prospect for changing the system without intensifying the very polarized party conflict that’s currently destabilizing that system. Democracy is fragile, yes. But at the same time, to paraphrase an old muckraker’s adage: Democracy ain’t beanbag.
The shock of the new, rather than the burdens of the old, preoccupied analysts in the immediate wake of Trump’s election. A populist authoritarian had captured one of America’s two major parties and won the presidency. To some, it reflected a growing disaffection with democracy in the mass electorate, a phenomenon captured in the title of Yascha Mounk’s 2018 book, The People vs. Democracy. But Levitsky and Ziblatt saw in the populist threat less a story of popular dysfunction than one of elite malpractice and irresponsibility. Trump’s ascendance, they argued in How Democracies Die, was the symptom of a disease affecting the whole Republican Party. Certain institutional changes, like the rise of direct primaries to determine party nominations, came in for some scrutiny, but the authors’ central argument focused on the importance of informal tenets that guide political behavior. Over many years, they argued, an increasingly demographically homogeneous party, pushed toward the extremes by well-heeled donors and activists, had come gradually to abandon a set of norms essential to keeping political conflict within accepted bounds and stabilizing democratic self-rule.