This Is How Democracies Die

[Belsnickel]

I had to write a short little response to this article for a class I am in. I figured I would throw it up here:

Quote:The Guardian recently published an opinion piece by Steven Levitsky and Dabiel Ziblatt. These two Harvard professors of government, focusing on Latin America and Europe respectively, have written a book by the same title. The article was an excerpt from the book and it did a fine job of peaking my interest in the book itself, especially after reading On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder.

The article begins with the authors explaining the shift in the fall of democracies around the world. They point out that in the past thirty years these have occurred mostly by incremental changes taking place in the electoral process instead of the instant, and often violent, overthrows of the past. They point out that these movements are often legal, a result of people using and then systemically dismantling the very systems they used to gain power. If you have also read Snyder’s book you will notice here that this connects to chapter two in which the lesson is that we must defend our institutions. Snyder contends in the prologue that if we feel we are “threatened by tyranny, we can…contemplate the history of other democracies and republics” (Snyder 10). This means looking around the world for the signs of a falling democracy, and this is just what Levitsky and Ziblatt are doing in the beginning of this article.

Levitsky and Ziblatt continue on to discuss how this relates to the current situation in the United States with the rise of Trump. They observe that these figures will appear throughout history, but it is a “test for democracies…whether political leaders, and political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power”. In this, as they argue later on, the Republican Party failed by electing Trump. The other important test is whether the institutions in place will hold this rising power in check. The authors suggest that this institution is not only the legal framework, but it is the system of unwritten norms in place. That connection to Snyder’s work is again a strong one in this section for not only the institutions, but also the tearing down of the opposition party, the erosion of ethics, and other lessons that Snyder lays out in his book. That tolerance and restraint that the authors mention allows for a, if not harmonious, civil government of differing views and ethical behavior.

The argument that Levitsky and Ziblatt lay out in this excerpt is compelling. When viewed alongside Snyder’s work, another expert on politics in Europe, it is downright scary. There is no doubt that we need to work to prevent further erosion of the institutions in place, checking the power that our elected officials hold. This is something that is a continuous process for all democracies and does include the unwritten norms rather than just the codified ones. I, however, question the wisdom of leaving so many of them as unwritten norms. So many of the ethical norms in place with the office of President of the United States were unwritten, and those have been the first to be jettisoned. If we are to fight this battle there is no ground to stand on when we contest these actions if there is no formal, legal framework in place. We have no recourse until the next election cycle at which point those norms are gone. Unwritten norms are an important part of our institutions which we must defend, on that we can all agree, but if they are so important we should consider writing them down.

Not that the grading rubric for this was looking for specific things. Were I just writing a response to this article, or even the book, it would have been a bit different (and a lot longer), but this shares some of my thoughts on the article itself.