How Democracies Die

How Democracies Die What History Reveals About Our Future

In January 2018, as the world agonised over the replacement of the urbane Obama with an uncouth New York real estate developer, two Harvard professors published How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future. 

The book was an instant success. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, won the Goldsmith Book Prize, and was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2018 by outlets such as The Washington Post, Time, and Foreign Affairs.

Eight years on it is time to assess the authors’ perspicacity. How well did they predict what history reveals about our future? Was their fear that Trump would destroy American democracy justified?

The authors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, are professors of government at Harvard. The former focuses on Latin America and the latter on Europe.

In the early chapters of the book, they use their expertise to lay the groundwork.

Their publicity blurb promises:

From the rule of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile to the quiet undermining of Turkey's constitutional system by President Recip Erdogan, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt draw insightful lessons from history to shine a light on regime breakdown across the 20th and 21st centuries.

But the essence of the book, its raison d’etre, is to be found in the final two chapters –

8. Trump’s first year: an authoritarian report card, and

9. Saving Democracy.

These are the focus of my review.

Trump’s First year: an authoritarian report card

Russiagate

The tone of the Harvard professors indicates that they believe that Trump is a demagogue who will destroy U.S. democracy. The truth is more nuanced. The bureaucratic class in Washington were under threat from Trump’s avowed plan to “drain the swamp.” Over 90% of bureaucrats in Washington vote Democrat. Trump had good reason to be concerned that they might oppose the implementation of his policies.

176

Not a single week went by in which press coverage wasn’t at least 70 percent negative. And amid swirling rumours about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, a high-profile special counsel, Robert Mueller, was appointed to oversee investigations into the case.

Just a few months into his presidency, President Trump faced talk of impeachment. But he retained the support of his base, and like other elected demagogues, he doubled down. He claimed his administration was beset by powerful establishment forces, telling graduates of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that “ no politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.”

The question then, was how would Trump respond. Would an outsider president who considered himself to be under unwarranted assault lash out, as happened in Peru and Turkey?

177

President Trump demonstrated striking hostility toward the referees – law enforcement, intelligence, ethics agencies, and the courts. Soon after his inauguration, he sought to ensure that the heads of U.S. Intelligence agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency, would be personally loyal to him, apparently in the hope of using these agencies as a shield against investigations into his campaign’s Russia ties.

During his first week in office, President Trump summoned FBI Director James Comey to a one-on-one dinner in the White House in which, according to Comey, the president asked for a pledge of loyalty. He later reportedly pressured Comey to drop investigations into his recently departed national security director, Michael Flynn, pressed Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo to intervene in Comey’s investigation, and personally appealed to Coats and NSA head Michael Rogers to release statements denying any collusion with Russia (both refused).

It is now public knowledge that the Russiagate hoax was conceived by the Hilary Clinton campaign team. Moreover, there are allegations that between Trump’s election in November 2016 and his inauguration in January 2017, Obama instructed the intelligence agencies to alter their report on Russian involvement in the campaign to discredit Trump. Furthermore, the work of Mueller and the intelligence community continued in a partisan way to oppose Trump throughout his first presidency.

As a result of the forensic investigations into these matters by Senator Chuck Grassley, and the release of formerly classified documents, charges have been laid against former FBI Director James Comey. Investigations are continuing against former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. It has been suggested that Barack Obama could be charged with treason, but this is unlikely.

The Integrity of American Elections

The authors devote many paragraphs to a discussion of voter integrity laws from the perspective of the Democratic Party.

183

Perhaps the most antidemocratic initiative yet undertaken by the Trump administration is the creation of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

It strikes me as surprising that two Harvard professors of government are so stridently against ensuring that voters are legitimate and that they vote only once. Surely it is not beyond the wit of the Washington bureaucracy to devise strict identification that does not disadvantage “poor minority voters”. In Australia, we have managed to achieve that competently and without discord.

184

The push for voter ID laws was based on a false claim: that voter fraud is widespread in the United States. All reputable studies have concluded that levels of such fraud in this country are low.

In many States it is illegal to ask for voter ID.  Moreover, voting is not compulsory and postal voting is extensive. So how could you assess whether or not there is a problem? With no data, it is impossible to measure. Even if your study intensions are reputable.

Trump addressed the problem in an executive order early in his second term. He raised the issues again in his State of the Union address in February 2026.

Executive Order 14248 of March 25, 2025

Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose and Policy.

Despite pioneering self-government, the United States now fails to enforce basic and necessary election protections employed by modern, developed nations, as well as those still developing. India and Brazil, for example, are tying voter identification to a biometric database, while the United States largely relies on self-attestation for citizenship.

In tabulating votes, Germany and Canada require use of paper ballots, counted in public by local officials, which substantially reduces the number of disputes as compared to the American patchwork of voting methods that can lead to basic chain-of-custody problems. Further, while countries like Denmark and Sweden sensibly limit mail-in voting to those unable to vote in person and do not count late-arriving votes regardless of the date of postmark, many American elections now feature mass voting by mail, with many officials accepting ballots without postmarks or those received well after Election Day.

Free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion are fundamental to maintaining our constitutional Republic. The right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated, without illegal dilution, is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election.

Under the Constitution, State governments must safeguard American elections in compliance with Federal laws that protect Americans’ voting rights and guard against dilution by illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error. Yet the United States has not adequately enforced Federal election requirements that, for example, prohibit States from counting ballots received after Election Day or prohibit non-citizens from registering to vote.

…

States fail to vet voters’ citizenship, and, in recent years, the Department of Justice has failed to prioritize and devote sufficient resources for enforcement of these provisions. Even worse, the prior administration actively prevented States from removing aliens from their voter lists.

…

It is the policy of my Administration to enforce Federal law and to protect the integrity of our election process.

Maintaining Conventions

Strangely, Levitsky and Ziblatt seem to believe that democracies die when they support the will of the people.

192

The higher President Trump’s approval rating, the more dangerous he is.

And, in a case of the pot calling the kettle black, they worry about how power might be misused to attack political opponents.

193

We fear that if Trump were to confront a war or terrorist attack, he would exploit this crisis fully – using it to attack political opponents and restrict freedoms Americans take for granted. In our view, this scenario represents the greatest danger facing American democracy today.

But they do make some good points about how the breaking of established norms lowers the standard for the future.

201

When unwritten rules are violated over and over, … societies have a tendency to ‘define deviancy down” – to shift the standard. What was once seen as abnormal becomes normal.

Certainly, Trump’s failure to separate his family business matters from his state responsibilities is a matter of continuing concern. But he is not alone in this: the Clintons and the Bidens also transgressed.

Saving Democracy

The Need to Eliminate Trump

In the final chapter, our Harvard academics nail their colours to the mast. It is clear that Levitsky and Ziblatt believe that democracy flourishes only when the American public elect Democrat politicians and when they are subject to the regulations of the Washington bureaucrats.

This should not come as a surprise. Over 90% of academics at America’s elite universities vote Democrat.

They see Trump as an impediment to their objectives. They believe that Democrats should find ways to remove him.

207

We see three possible futures for a post-Trump America.

The first, and most optimistic, is a swift democratic recovery. In this scenario, President Trump fails politically: He either loses public support and is not re-elected, or, more dramatically, is impeached or forced to resign.

The implosion of Trump’s presidency and the triumph of the anti-Trump resistance energises the Democrats, who can then sweep back into power and reverse Trump’s most egregious policies.

If President Trump were to fail badly enough, public disgust could even motivate reforms that improve the quality of our democracy.

…

This is certainly the future many of us hope for. 

Levitsky and Ziblatt set out their credo.

212

When American democracy has worked, it has relied upon two norms that we often take for granted – mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance. Treating rivals as legitimate contenders for power and underutilizing one’s institutional prerogatives in the spirit of fair play are not written into the American Constitution. Yet without them, our constitutional checks and balances will not operate as we expect them to.

Clearly, they do not regard Trump as a “legitimate contender for power”. There is no sense that Trump’s alternative policies, such as returning power from the bureaucracy to Congress, or protecting the rights of women to their own spaces, or granting parents authority over what their children are taught in schools, might have merit.

Restoring Democratic Institutions

They caution that eliminating Trump must be done with care.

217

Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic – for they would inherit a democracy stripped of its remaining protective guardrails. If the Trump administration were brought to its knees by obstructionism, or if President Trump were to be impeached without a strong bipartisan consensus, the effect would be to reinforce – and perhaps hasten – the dynamics of partisan antipathy and norm erosion that helped bring Trump to power to begin with.

Then, in suggesting ways to eliminate the polarization of the electorate, (see pages 228, 229) the writers recommend welfare policies that eliminate means testing – universal health care, universal basic income, universal childcare etc. – revealing their unconscious bias in favour of socialism. It does not seem to occur to them that such policies are at odds with the political philosophies that made America the most free and prosperous nation in the history of mankind.

However, just when you think that these guys can get nothing right, they quote the following beautiful prose from E. B. White (of Strunk & White Elements of Style fame) explaining “What is democracy?” to the War Board.

230

Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the “don’t” in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the polling booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea that hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

Then they return to their main theme with unconscious irony.

231

History shows us that it is possible to reconcile democracy with diversity. This is the challenge we face. Previous generations of Europeans and Americans made extraordinary sacrifices to defend our democratic institutions against powerful external threats. Our generation, which grew up taking democracy for granted, now faces a different task: We must prevent it from dying from within.

It never occurs to them that the corruption of democratic institutions - specifically the media and the judicial system - may prove to be a greater threat than their bête noire.

Reflections

Is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York?

In 2018, Levitsky and Ziblatt recommended that the Republican Party should find a way to broaden its base beyond white Christians. Well it did. Their electoral victory in November 2024 gave them the Presidency, the House of Representatives and the Senate. They made significant gains with racial and religious groups – especially Hispanic voters and young Afro-American males.

In Trump’s second term, power has shifted from a self-serving elite of bureaucrats, crony capitalists, academics and commentators to elected representatives. Political promises are being kept. (Have a look at the list in Coming to Grips with Trump .) Trump is initiating action through executive orders. Congress and the courts are modifying them. A diverse, talented and competent cabinet is managing their implementation. Democracy is working fine to the benefit of most citizens. But maybe not for the political bureaucrats. Certainly not for the New Class that Milovan Djilas warned us about so long ago.       

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