How Democracies Cry: The Endless Wailing of Levitsky and Ziblatt

Benjamin Studebaker

May 13, 2025

During the first Trump administration, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put out a bestseller – How Democracies Die. It’s a work of comparative politics. You look at other countries where democracy has bit the dust. You see what happened in those countries. Then you look for analogous dynamics in the United States.

Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, India, Nazi Germany – Levitsky and Ziblatt told you the story of what happened in each of these places. Erdoğan, Orbán, Maduro, Modi, Hitler – they’re all norm violators. They’re rude about their opponents. They question the legitimacy of the procedures when they lose. They aren’t tolerant, and they’re always testing the limits of the institutions. They’ve said and done bad things, and Donald Trump has said and done similar things, and therefore our situation is just like theirs.

Their answer? Gatekeeping. Party elites have to stop norm violators from penetrating the institutions. There can be no compromises with them. When the procedures allow these bad people to win, they’re not working and need to be reformed. Regulate the internet, strengthen the party system, restore the gatekeepers.

Hang on, wait just a minute. This sounds like an instance of “accusation in a mirror.” Levitsky and Ziblatt accuse the authoritarians of the very things they themselves are doing. They’re being rude about their opponents. They’re responding to defeat by proposing to change the procedures. They aren’t being tolerant – they won’t compromise with their political adversaries. Instead, they want to use gatekeeping to prevent their opponents from participating in politics.

Nevermind all that. Remember Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance? If you tolerate the intolerant, the intolerance will spread. The only way to save tolerance is with intolerance.

The thing is, two can play this game. Your intolerance justifies your adversary’s intolerance. If, in trying to prevent authoritarianism, you look authoritarian, why shouldn’t your adversaries regard you the same way you regard them? Why shouldn’t they try to exclude you, just as you try to exclude them? The paradox of tolerance can result in a ladder of escalation.

The argument rests on it really being the case that Trump is one of these authoritarian leaders. It’s not just a case of mutual misrecognition – Trump really is the bad man. And it’s not just Trump. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s follow-up article for The Atlantic, “the bulk of the Republican Party is behaving in an antidemocratic manner.”

But is the United States really like Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, India, and Nazi Germany? The American constitution has been in operation for nearly 250 years. When the United States was 100 years old, Turkey was ruled by a sultan, Hungary by an emperor, Venezuela by a general, India by the Raj, and Germany by a kaiser.

Indeed, when the United States was 200 years old, Turkey was in between its second and third coup, Hungary was run by Stalinists, Venezuela was run by a president who would eventually be impeached and forcibly removed, India was in the midst of its “emergency,” and Germany was bisected by the iron curtain.

The United States is not a nation-state in the conventional sense. Americans have no common ethnic, religious, or cultural background. What does it mean to be American without the constitution? We’ve kept the constitution as long as we have in part because we don’t have a good answer to that question. And while we’ve retained the constitution, a variety of other political systems have come and gone around the world. The United States outlasted the tsars, the sultans, and the emperors. It outlasted Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Indeed, the United States played a direct role in destroying these other systems.

Americans are terrified of tyranny precisely because they remain thoroughly committed to democracy as they understand it. That understanding is shaped by a shared political history. The most effective way to get Americans to support authoritarianism is to create fear that authoritarianism is necessary to save the constitution, to save democracy. Woodrow Wilson criminalized espionage and (briefly) sedition on the grounds that he was making “the world safe for democracy.” The red scare chased socialists out of the federal state on the grounds that there was an international communist conspiracy against the constitution.

Millions of Americans fought in the 20th century to stop authoritarianism. Hundreds of thousands died. Both my grandparents fought for the United States in World War II. My father’s father risked his neck flying bombers over Germany. My mother’s father sailed with the navy in the Pacific. Before Nixon eliminated the draft, Americans from all walks of life put everything on the line to save democracy, as they understood it.

Yet folks like Levitsky and Ziblatt now tell us that the children and grandchildren of the greatest generation don’t know what democracy means, don’t value it, won’t defend it. Indeed, they’re so clueless that they have to be kept out of politics by elite gatekeepers.

Of course, elite gatekeepers love their argument. How Democracies Die was praised by the legacy media and by the defenders of neoliberal orthodoxy – The Washington Post, Ezra Klein, Fareed Zakaria, that whole gang. And now, they have a new book out. This one is called Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. It’s already received a glowing review from The Washington Post.

Why did American democracy reach the breaking point? Well, according to Levitsky and Ziblatt, it’s that gosh darn constitution. The senate, the primary system, indirect elections, lifetime tenure for judges, all of these things allow a partisan minority to dominate the majority. Other countries – like Germany, Sweden, and New Zealand – have procedures that prevent all of this from happening. They have more political parties, they have proportional representation, and these procedures not only keep out the bad man, they facilitate majority rule.

Yes, Levitsky and Ziblatt think they can be for gatekeeping and majority rule at the same time. You see, Germany is able to keep the intolerant baddies out. It has gatekeeping:

1. Germany excludes any party that wins less than 5% of the vote from the legislature.

2. German political parties refuse to cooperate with the bad parties (the Alternative for Germany and The Left).

3. German political parties are strong and difficult to penetrate via entryism.

4. Germany bans hate speech and rigorously enforces its hate speech laws.

5. Germany uses the public purse to influence what academics, religious leaders, and the media say and do, denying funding to the baddies.

And yet, at the same time, Germany is always governed by a coalition representing a majority of voters. The chancellor is always either a Christian Democrat or a Social Democrat. Sometimes the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats are supported by the liberals or the greens. Sometimes they come together to form a unity government.

It's possible for the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats to govern together for years at a time. There’s really very little difference between them, so they get along pretty well. Because you can get into parliament in Germany with just 5% of the vote, disaffected people often try to start their own parties. But then they get 3% or 4% of the vote, and they fail to get into parliament. If they join the Alternative for Germany or The Left, you know never to include them in the government. So, serious people become Christian Democrats or Social Democrats, and then the parties mentor them and mold them into reasonable little deliberators. And by “reasonable” we of course mean that they are willing to completely ruin a country like Greece to keep inflation down and the books balanced.

It's democracy, because the majority always governs, but it’s full of gatekeeping, so there’s no dynamism. If you want to defend an embattled consensus, this is how you’d do it. It would probably work, at least for a few decades, if they could get Americans to go for it.

But that’s the rub – they can’t. They can’t win the elections, because they don’t understand democracy the way many Americans understand it. Their efforts to save democracy strike large numbers of Americans as efforts to destroy the constitution.

Democracy has a history in the specific places where it operates. That history shapes the way people understand the concept. American history has given us a particular constitution that shapes the way democracy is understood here. Intellectuals can rail against this, normatively. They can denounce the system as ideology. But this crying and wailing doesn’t change the historical context in which we are bound.

This crying and wailing is not unique to Levitsky and Ziblatt. It is the sound we hear all the time now, and not just from the neoliberal center. It comes from Trump and from the Republicans when they lose. It comes from the democratic socialists when they fail. It is not the cry of the authoritarian – it is the cry of democracy, as it confronts, over and over again, its limitations. It is the banging of a head, repeatedly, against a wall, until the CTE sets in.