Just Finished Reading: How Democracies Die – What History Reveals About Our Future by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt (FP: 2018) [231pp]

As usual I picked this book up at least a year or more ago (when it came out in paperback) and it has been languishing in a pile ever since. Now seemed a particularly apposite time to pick it up (along with the following 2 books) and read it.

Despite everything happening on both sides of ‘the pond’ I’m not one of those believers who think that Democracy itself is under any existential threat nor would I even go so far as to say that it is under crisis. This is clear, I think, from the amount of engagement – both appropriate and even inappropriate that’s happening presently with protest marches and much else besides. I felt that Democracy was far more in danger from the seemingly inexorable disengagement of a bored and uninterested electorate. You can say many things about the present state of our Democracies in both the UK and US but you cannot say that they are boring, uninteresting or that people are generally disengaged – quite the opposite in fact!

This book was written as a reaction to the election of Donald Trump that shocked and dismayed so many people on the ‘Left’ of US politics. The authors – both professors at Harvard – wanted to understand how such a thing could happen and what it meant for the future of American democracy. Not only did they look for external examples of failed or failing Democracies – Pinochet’s Chile and Erdogan’s Turkey – but, rather inevitably, Italy in the 1920’s and Germany in the 1930’s. They also looked at the historic examples of both France and Britain in the 1930’s who managed to fight off any drift into authoritarian or totalitarian regimes there. But their main focus was the growing erosion and subsequent failure of the American electoral system to first allow the rise of someone like Trump – and as they point out there had often been someone like Trump on the fringes of the Republican Party in particular (with figures like Coughlin, Long, McCarthy and Wallace regularly winning 30-40% support) – and then actively supporting them within the Party to the necessary exclusion of moderates and the dismantling of any idea of a ‘broad church’ approach. The prevention of previous authoritarian demagogues rising to the top and getting their names on nomination tickets was deeply undemocratic and generally took place during discussions between the Party grandees in smoke filled rooms, in private, away from the Press and the electorate – the Party Machine. As the 1960’s moved into the 1970’s this process became less and less acceptable and less and less palatable to the public. Ironically, the authors observed, an increase in democracy has actually put Democracy in peril.

The authors make it very clear that Trump is not an aberration and is far from unprecedented. What is new is that the Republican Party in general supported him as much as they did to get him elected. Trump could never become President on his own as many Independent candidates have found out to their (dollar) cost. The Party Machine got him elected so even if he leaves office next January the ‘age of Trump’ style politicians – or even Presidents - may not be over.

This was a very good and timely read. I picked up a great deal of how American politics works and, probably more interestingly, was introduced to just how much of the American electorate has ALWAYS supported people like Trump. For at least the last 60 years – and maybe the last 160 years – around 30-40% of Americans seem to WANT an authoritarian leader. That honestly knocked me back on my heels for a while. So much for the ‘Land of the Free’. Most definitely recommended.