In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Daniel Ziblatt, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University and co-author (with Steven Levitsky) of the bestsellers How Democracies Die (Crown, 2019) and The Tyranny of the Minority (Crown, 2023).

Ziblatt emphasizes the crucial role played by conservative parties that were committed to democracy in the United Kingdom and Germany and reflects on what makes democracy in the United States less prone to backsliding than these and other twentieth-century cases. Focusing on the arguments in The Tyranny of the Minority, Ziblatt discusses the need for profound change in American institutions to “democratize democracy” and make it more resilient. He stresses the vital importance of mobilizing civil society to preserve democracy, of which he sees optimistic signs in the recent American and German past.

Below, a slightly edited transcript of this interview.

John Torpey 

There’s a great deal of talk around the world about populism and the threat of democratic backsliding. But this concern has really been perhaps most serious in regard to the United States. This is not least because of the United States is tremendous power in the world, but also because it creates uncertainty for potential foes and partners alike. How does the situation in the United States compare to both other comparable countries and to its own past challenges?  My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. We’re fortunate to have with us today Professor Daniel Ziblatt, who is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, and Director of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. His research focuses on Europe and the comparative study of democracy. He’s the author of four books, including How Democracies Die, co-authored with Steven Levitsky, which was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into unbelievably 30 languages. In 2023, he published again with Steve Levitsky, a book called The Tyranny of the Minority, and again, was a New York Times bestseller, and indeed, in 2023, professor Ziblatt was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Congratulations, and thanks for being with us, Daniel Ziblatt.

Daniel Ziblatt 

Great to be with you, John.

John Torpey 

Thanks very much for taking the time. So, I guess I want to talk a little bit about these two most recent books with Steve Levitsky. In the 2008 How Democracies Die, you and Levitsky see the United States, it seems to me, which is often  enamored of its own special place in the history of democracy in the history of the world. You see it as unexpectedly given to a dying democratic future. And you ultimately suggest that we will have a reprieve from democratic death, but you’re not entirely sure. You offer three scenarios where things might go good, bad, and sort of in between. Where would you say we are in your post Trump presidency predictions about where we will be? And how optimistic are you now that we will avoid the death of our democracy?

Daniel Ziblatt 

Yeah, well, thank you. It’s good to be with you. Let me answer the question. I mean, I think I really regard the book How Democracies Die, we wrote that really, with the intention of really sending, not making predictions as much as sending warnings of what could happen, and trying to say what has happened in other countries around the world when democracy has gotten into trouble, what are the warning signs, and we saw some of the same warning signs in the US. So really, the goal is to send a message to fellow citizens that something like this could happen in the US. This is how we would know what’s happening. And we ended that book, though, sort of trying to reflect on what are prospects for the future. And I guess the only people worse than political scientists and making predictions are economists. So, I would say we were not really trying to make predictions, but trying to lay out different scenarios at the end of the book. And in that, I think one of the last chapters there, we kind of imagine one scenario may be the establishment of a smooth functioning authoritarian system. And I actually sort of think that they thought then, and continue to think that’s not likely, I mean, a sense Putin’s Russia or Orban’s Hungary, it’s sort of hard to imagine the US, because there’s sources of resilience that we could talk about in the US. I think the idea that we would just sort of jump back from this, and we would look back in the rearview mirror and say, “there was this terrible moment history, and everything’s fine.” Also strike me as unlikely in some ways, that middle scenario is sort of where we are. And I guess where I’ve always thought we would be, which is a highly unstable and increasingly unstable democracy and the roots of that instability are in some ways the resilience of American democracy. I mean, there are these threats, certainly that we face that are similar other countries, but in our federal system, we have a highly diversified economy with geographical locales of wealth spread out across the country, and the strength of the Democratic Party itself. I mean there’s a strong democratic opposition.  So unlike Hungary, unlike Russia, there’s great sources of resilience, and when faced off against threats, the result is instability. And so I think the kind of dysfunction that we see in Congress, the inability to address underlying real problems in our society, climate change, gun control, reflect that. And then also the increasing role of violence in the shadow of violence. That also makes me very worried. So these things, I think, in a way we are in the future now. And you know, things could get worse. But, you know, I think democracy is not operating as anybody would like it to in the US right now, anybody who’s committed to democracy, and so that’s not a particularly optimistic outcome. But that’s sort of where we are right now.

John Torpey 

So let me follow up on that a little bit, you’ve written a couple of other books, which I may not have mentioned in the introduction, but one of them is about conservative parties. And I think a lot of people have pointed precisely to conservative parties, as a kind of Achilles heel of democracies, in a certain sense, or at least in the current context. And having a conservative party that is, of course committed to democracy is a crucial fact or a crucial issue. And we have a Republican Party now that, in many ways, is not committed to democracy. And that presents a huge problem. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that issue. I mean, the importance of having a party that’s not necessarily, you know, committed to great goals, like social democracy and things like that, but rather wants to maintain in a certain sense that at least aspects of the status quo, but then kind of goes off the deep end, I mean, what has happened in those other contexts.

Daniel Ziblatt 

So the book you’re referring to, is really a comparative historical account of Britain and Germany in mostly in the 1900s through the 1930s. And the point was really to make the argument, or I came to the discovery, I think, against my own inclinations in a way that conservatives will create a critical factor in the stabilization of democracy. So you know, Britain had conservatives, reactionaries, anti Semites, racists, who had lots of power, who were, in principle opposed to democracy. But in Britain, the Conservative Party over the course of the 19th century, didn’t necessarily become convinced of democracy, but learn to comply and learn to actually win in democracy and to maintain access to power in a way. And so this allowed for a more stable, perhaps incomplete, not entirely satisfactory democracy, but democracy nonetheless, to emerge. You contrast this to Germany, where landed elites were powerful, landed elites were opposed to democracy. But in that case, they didn’t organize themselves in a form of a conservative party that could win elections. And they were existentially fearful of the working class and views it as a civilizational challenge, resistant democracy resisted party building. And so by the time Germany reached the Weimar period, they couldn’t compete, and this opened the door in a way to even more radical right forces, the rise of Nazism. So that led me to the conclusion, again, not really what I had expected to start when I began that project, that conservatives are critical, and in particular, conservatives committed to a constitutional democratic order. And by committed I mean, maybe partly convinced, but at least conservatives who think that it’s in their interest to play the democratic game, and that may be imperfect. But that’s really what democracy in part is about is getting the old regime, the opponents of democracy to buy in enough that there can be alternations of power, and we can achieve some of the things that people want to achieve.  So I think looking at the US,  that book was really ended in 1933, but there are clear implications that has really informed these other two more recent books that I’ve written, because, you know, there’s no question about it the US hasn’t turned into Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, but what’s unique about the US among peer nations is that it has experienced democratic backsliding over the last five-eight years. In 2016, the US had a Freedom House score of 93 on a scale scale of 0 to 100, putting it basically in league with Great Britain, Germany, Japan, other democracies that we’d like to compare ourselves to today, the Freedom House score has reached 84; dropped to 84, which puts us on par with Argentina, below Romania, other democracies, that kind of people are shocked to discover we’re being compared to. So how has that happened? And I think a big part of that story, what has happened is the Conservative Party in the United States, has turned against democracy in a way that is really unusual. All parties tend to participated peacefully in elections, for a long time have tended not to turn away from democracy. We in fact, writing the book, Tyranny of the Minority, we had trouble finding comparisons. I mean, there are some historically within the US, the Democratic Party, the southern Democratic Party in another countries. And so this turn away from democracy of the Republican Party, which we could talk about–we know why that has happened–but the unwillingness to accept election loses, the willingness to embrace violence, the unwillingness of mainstream politicians to distance themselves from really extremist anti-democratic forces are all signs of a party turning away from democracy, and it’s hard to sustain a democracy when one party, especially a very big, powerful party, turns away from democracy.

John Torpey 

Well, let’s indeed talk about why that happened. In your previous answer, you tiptoed up to the brink of the Nazis. And I suppose, in that sense, overlapped 10 years or so of Italian fascism. And people use that comparison to invoke that notion that we’re sort of fascist or are on the brink of fascism. And that historically had a lot to do with violence and politics. So I’d be curious, what you think has gone wrong in the Republican Party? And how close is that notion of “we’re going fascists” is kind of a distraction?

Daniel Ziblatt 

Yeah. So on the first part of that, I mean, there’s lots of stuff going on. And it’s really a question that I feel like we don’t fully have. There’s no consensus, as you know, among scholars who are studying this, because we’re living through it. The, the angle that we take in our in our book is to focus on the degree to which America’s demographic transformation, increased democratization. Make no mistake, I mean, between 1965 and 2016, the US was becoming more democratic, there’s today for the first time in American history: the percentage of black members of Congress is the same as the percentage of the US population. So there’s certain positive trends in US democracy. And, and a lot of these have to do with the transformation of US into what sometimes people call multiracial democracy, which basically just means that everybody of all backgrounds, individuals of all backgrounds have equal political rights, you know, facing the rule of law, political rights, the right to vote, etc.  So as we approach that, as America becomes more diverse, what’s striking about the Republican Party is that after the 1960s had doubled down and reached out to new segment of voters who felt left behind by the Democratic Party in the US South and the party, became the party of racial conservatives who were viewed these demographic and democratic changes with some ambivalence, if not resistance. And the Republican Party, has a smart electoral strategy. In the short run, the Republican Party did very well in the 1980s. And, you know, through the 1990s, into the 2000s. But what’s happened is, as American societies become more diverse, and the Republican Party has not become more diverse, it reminds me in many ways of the German conservatives before 1914, which is that they’re kind of locked into a kind of Bunker, a strategy that’s doubling down on a kind of segment of the electorate that’s shrinking, and unable to break out of that is increasingly fearful of what full democracy would mean. So, I understand that there’s kind of the sense that the Republican Party, that there’s one view of this, there’s strong continuities going back before Goldwater, to the New Deal, even, that the Republican Party is always been anti-democratic. And there is certainly strands within the Republican Party that have always been that way. But there’s been a battle between these two forces of kind of more democratic forces within the Republican Party. And the Republican Party did overwhelmingly support the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. I mean, there have always been strands within the Republican Party that have been reluctant and resistant to kind of renewing it. I mean, there is some Republicans who voted against renewing it. But by and large, the Republican Party has remained committed to democracy until really the time we got to that a little bit before the Trump era, in which it was increasingly turning away from it. And I think it was being driven by, in part by voters who had been kind of put into one party, and a generation of political parties playing on this kind of racial fear, we now have a large segment of the electorate, that views democracy in multiracial democracy in particular is a threat and a danger. And so I think that in large part is fueling what has happened over the last 10 years.

John Torpey 

All right, interesting…

Daniel Ziblatt 

You asked me about you asked me about fascism too

John Torpey 

Oh, right. Yes. Yeah.

Daniel Ziblatt 

So, this is a very heated debate. I mean, there are those who think that it’s naive to not call this fascist, there are those who say it’s ahistorical to call what’s happening fascist. And, I guess it’s an important debate. But I think it is maybe even more important to kind of call out the precise behaviors that are unacceptable and that are threatening. And I think, for instance, one thing that even in our most recent books that didn’t fully appreciate, we decry politician’s unwillingness to confront violence. Political violence is a real bad sign. So you know, to set the sense that election workers are being threatened, you know, Mitt Romney in this account of his after the impeachment vote in 2021, he claims that there were US senators, Republican senators, who wanted to convict Trump, but were fearful for their lives. You know, if that’s really true we’re living in an environment in which political violence is playing really, an outsized role in our politics.  And so that’s certainly connected to fascism. I mean, there’s no question about it. I mean, that’s what violence played a similar role in the 1920s and 1930s. But whether one calls it a fascist or not, it really doesn’t matter. I mean, I think more the point is to say that, that political violence is anti-democratic, and that set me in a lot of different ways. But one way that I hadn’t really, really fully appreciated is that it gives, in the same way that people have decried the outsized influence of money, those with more money and more influence. Those who threatened political violence suddenly gain more influence. The way that politics is supposed to work in a democracy is that politicians are supposed to make decisions based on what they think their constituents want, or what they think is the right thing to do. If they don’t do what the voters want, the voters vote him out. But if you have violence, the shadow violence hanging over these decisions, this is clearly not democratic. And it’s a basic violation of key principles of human rights and so on. And so I think it’s really, really very frightening.  And, I don’t really use the word fascist, but I clearly see the parallels. I think of these things in very evolutionary terms, so fascism was the kind of outgrowth of politics that emerged dynamically, one party at one point might not be fascist, but it may become fascist. And so to kind of have a checklist and to sort of try to centralize a party to this party is fascist or is not fascist, it’s sort of missed the point. You know, the German conservatives themselves weren’t fascists, but they enabled the fascists in and the politics became fascist. And I think there is that risk happening again. And so that’s, that’s what obviously concerns me.

John Torpey 

Right. I mean, my colleague, Ben Hett, in the history department, I don’t know if you know, his work, but I think very much sees the situation in the kind of the early 1930s sort of comparison, as you say, the Conservatives not being fascist themselves, but kind of facilitating and assuming that they can control the beast. Because really there is.. 

Daniel Ziblatt 

Yeah, there’s this there’s this line from Churchill, he was talking about something different. But he said “appeasement is feeding a crocodile, thinking you’re gonna be the last one eaten.” You know, it’s really clear. I mean, my book on German conservatives, they’re these stories of this one aristocratic German conservative who was playing tennis after the Nazis came to power in his club. And when they came for it, he was somebody who had been critical of the Nazis, but a little too critical. And so they came for me to escape out the back of his club, in his tennis whites escaped to England. You know, and this is the fate of conservatives enabling fascists. And so obviously, I mean, there’s an uncanny parallels, I think, to the present day.

John Torpey 

Interesting, except that that guy probably then got to play at the All England Club. Life is unfair, in any case. So I mentioned earlier when we were talking about that I saw these two books as having a kind of Tocquevillian influences, strong Tocquevillian influences. But the earlier book, it seemed to me was about saying that the institutions won’t save us, it’s really more about the norms that we hold, or what Tocqueville called, and one of my dissertation advisors called “habits of the heart.” So it’s really about how people believe, you know, the world works and their own deep commitments to certain unstated norms, values and that sort of thing. But the new book, it seems to me is much more intent on as I think you say, democratizing the democracy, and reforming institutions in ways that seems to me the founders would be not necessarily enthusiastic about. So I mean, I think you’re aware that you’re swimming upstream to some degree with some of these proposals. But as you say lots of things have happened that people thought were crazy and would never happen, like the abolition of slavery, for example. And, it takes a long time often. So this gets back to your point, your earlier point about the sources of resilience, I think, and how you see those working.

Daniel Ziblatt 

Yeah, so I think the thing that really directed our attention into norms in the first book, and not all norms matter, not all norms are democratic, we have anthers anti-democratic norms that if they want us to investigate the context of the norms to know whether they help a democracy or not. And one of the key norms that we focus on is this normal we call mutual toleration, which essentially the idea that you can accept your competitors as legitimate contenders for power. And that’s really critical in a democracy. You know, going back to the first transition of power between parties in 1800, in the US, that was really very difficult. And so this is a norm that has to be learned. And it’s essential for democracy, that nobody has a monopoly on truth. And if you want to live in a democracy, you have to be willing to lose and to let the other guy win, even if you think they’re potentially dangerous. And at least, publicly tolerating what you privately despise. That’s all I think, toleration is publicly accepting what you privately despise. So which is a definition of tolerance that I got from my dissertation advisor, Ken Jowitt, which is something he I remember him once a thing and lecture publicly accepting what you privately despise. It’s a kind of minimalist definition. That’s critical. And it’s not something that’s written in any constitution. And, I think that’s very important, and the problem is the reason we kind of shifted to institutions, formal institutions in our second book is that we’re in a situation where the norms are no longer doing the job. I mean, they’re not enough. And this comes back a lot. I mean, the focus on institutions really comes back to our earlier discussion on conservative parties, because what’s pretty clear is that the second half of the story–and they said, what happened to the Republican Party is that it’s turned against democracy, because of a kind of bunker mentality–but the second parallel to 19th century Germany, in my mind is part of the reason the 19th century German conservatives continued down this path of radicalization without coming back because they were fearful because they were fearful of the civilizational challenges that they think they confronted.  But second, because they were protected by a set of undemocratic institutions. The German conservatives can retain access to power without actually having to compete and win majorities because of malapportionment, election institutions that gave extra weight to what the wealthy landowning classes because of their access to the bureaucracy. And so when a political party has these kinds of protections in place, it doesn’t have the same incentives to transform itself. I mean, normally, politics is supposed to operate like a market. I mean, that’s at least in principle, how democracy should work: you lose, you regroup, you figure out what you’re doing wrong, you come up with a new strategy, you try to reach out to new voters, to figure out ways of winning. Now in the US, I guess the parallel is that the Republican Party is not protected by the three class voting system as the German conservatives were, but it’s protected by a US Senate, that gives them extra boost, they are protected by the Electoral College, which gives Republican Party because it represents rural areas, predominantly as over represented in these areas, is given an extra boost, and because of those access to those two institutions has special access to the Supreme Court. And so the when faced off with this kind of perceived civilizational challenge, the party doesn’t need to win adjust, because it doesn’t need to win majorities.  And so the push to focus on institutions is to say, “well, we need to change the incentives facing the Republican Party.” Norms are no longer enough norms of fair play in whatever mutual toleration are not enough. And so our claim is we need to change our institutions. Because only through that way, that Republican Party will be convinced that it needs to actually win. If the Republican Party had to win majorities, it wouldn’t be doubling down on its white nationalist strategy, it’d be much harder to do that the incentives for change would be greater. The Republican party today can win the presidency with 47% of the vote. If it needed to win over 50% of the vote. That’s only a 3% difference, but I really think would make a big difference. And that would be across the entire political landscape. This would push the Republican Party to become much more a party that that is pushing towards the middle and trying to win over most Americans, which is not where the Republican Party is today.

John Torpey 

So I mean, in making this argument in the book, and the newer book, you stress comparative differences with the countries that we typically compare ourselves with. And I mean, I think one of the differences that you highlight and emphasize is, of course, with regard to voting, the bedrock institution of a democratic process. So maybe you could talk about how we’re different, and the fact that we don’t have a constitutional right to vote in the Constitution. And that’s a pretty striking fact that you and Richard Hozen have also pointed to, but it sort of reminds me of this kind of notion, and I mean, I’ve written a little bit about American exceptionalism, how there’s a good one about how we’re great, you know, a great exemplar to World History. But there’s also a kind of bad exceptionalism, lacking certain things. I mean, for Tocqueville it was a state, which, later on people on the left said, “Yeah, well, that’s a problem because we don’t have much of a welfare state.” But in any case, this seems to me an example of what I call bad exceptionalism. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Daniel Ziblatt 

Yeah, I think actually, the good and the bad are very much tightly connected to each other in a way, because the US has the world’s oldest written constitution. It’s a model, it’s inserted in the 19th century, a model for Latin American countries as they were democratizing. The early experiment with Republicanism was a model for other countries and inspiration. And so that’s the good, I guess, right, in some respects. But there are also because it’s the oldest written constitution in the world, and it’s the most difficult constitution in the world to change, which is really critical,  there’s a lot of features of our Constitution as it was written, and still today that are pre-democratic, and was written before a democratic era. It’s written in an era when mass enfranchisement obviously, was not really on the table. And a lot of the kind of values that we associate with democracy weren’t as fully accepted, there wasn’t as much of a consensus about it. So we have this free democratic constitution that in some respects, liberal democracy is certainly about two core things. I mean, it’s about the collective will of the people a majority rule, that is also has the second pillar, which is the protection of minority rights, and the protection of individual rights.  And, our Constitution has that people point that out, you know, we have a Bill of Rights that’s been  more or less, more or less effectively enforced at different points in time. But in principle, we have these two features, but we also  have a kind of another counter majoritarian institution set of institutions in our constitution that are not particularly democratic. You know, and again, namely the Electoral College, which allows the loser of a popular vote to win the presidency. With the Senate, which has two senators per state, no matter the size of the state, the Supreme Court with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. So these are three core features of our constitutional structure as it has emerged, that give outsized weight to political minorities. Other democracies as they were established, other regimes as they were established in the 19th century had many of these same kinds of institutions. I mean, it’s very common to have an elected upper chambers, to have monarchical vetoes to have indirect elections to have plural voting, and so on. And so these are institutions that are clearly not democratic. But what’s striking, and this is really something that we kind of felt I discovered for myself and writing of this book is that and we tell the story of this, beginning really the late 19th century, early 20th century, a lot of democracies gradually shed these institutions. So the House of Lords lost its feet over tax bill in the beginning of the 20th century. Other upper chambers, especially in federal system, Germany, Austria made their upper chambers more proportional to population, not perfectly proportional, but more bigger states got more representation than smaller states, other countries Belgium, Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Sweden, Norway eventually got rid of upper chambers altogether, because these bodies were regarded as redundant. So the democratized upper chambers, other countries introduced proportional representation. Other countries introduced term limits, or retirement ages, for Supreme Court justices, every other democracy did this. And then every other presidential democracy on Earth got rid of its electoral college. Argentina was the last country in 1994. And so today, we’re the only democracy in the world with an electoral college for selecting a president. We have the largest upper chamber in the world except for Brazil and Argentina. We are the only democracy in the world with a lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. So we’re real. I mean, we are an exception, and institutionally speaking, and each on each of these dimensions. And when you add them all up, we’re really an outlier. And I guess the point is to say that this is partly to explain why we are where we are. So this is why I began to focus on these formal institutions. I mean, I’m not in such a hardcore institutionalist, that I think that you just change the rules of the game and everything changes. But at a minimum, you know, we could make our system a little bit more democratic on each of these dimensions. I think it would make our system more democratic. And you mentioned that kind of American exceptionalism of a kind of underdeveloped welfare state. And part of that has to do with the strength of our state, a part of that also has to do with the fact that we have a set of institutions that thwart the will of majorities, most Americans would support more aggressive social policies. I think most Americans would support at efforts to address poverty, higher minimum wage at a minimum, but our institutions often thwart that, and so I think in a way, if our system were more democratic, this would help address some of these underlying social ills that many of us see in our own society. And, I think this would also have the knock on effect potentially of changing incentives for the Republican Party.

John Torpey 

Right. So, since you’ve raised it, I mean, I guess I want to ask why do you think this outlier status or outlier character of the political system, among other things has come to be? I mean, why did that happen?

Daniel Ziblatt 

Yeah. So there’s really there’s a formal reason why that’s the case, a pretty obvious reason at some level, which is that we have the hardest. The people who study this, the scholars who study this, have ranked to the US is the hardest constitution in the world to change the two thirds of the house, two thirds in the Senate, three quarters of state legislatures, is it really a steep hill to climb, and as a result of that, we’ve only amended the Constitution a few dozen times. Whereas, Norway, we tell the story of Norway in our book, Norway, it’s the second oldest written constitution in the world, written at the beginning of the 19th century, it’s amended its constitution hundreds of times. And I think there’s concern that the founders were a little bit concerned about being able to cheat some founders anyway. Not Jefferson, but others about the Constitution being able to be changed too often. And I think that’s a legitimate concern. But I think we’re at the wrong we’re at the very other end of the spectrum. Norway is the most democratic country in the world, according to all the international indices, which is not to say that, that, you know, being able to change the constitution is the reason it’s there’s lots of other differences. I mean, scholar comparative politics, we know, there’s other things going on. But certainly if it were easier to change our Constitution, we’d be in a better situation. That’s one thing. But that doesn’t do much, I would say, and that’s part of the reason we wrote the book. I don’t think that’s going to change. But there, there needs to be a kind of reinvigoration of the idea that we can change our political system, whether constitutionally or not. I mean, the difficulty of changing the constitution has created a set of norms. In fact, it’s the norms do enter the story, again, that we simply can’t change our Constitution. And we can’t change our political system sort of out of reach. And this applies to many Americans who feel our Constitution, our democracy is out of reach. And there is a history in the US of moments of incredible democratic breakthrough after the Civil War, the early progressive era, the 1960s, through the 1970s, where major democratic reforms happened. And part of the point of the book is to try to make a call for reinvigorating this, and to kind of create a culture of amendment as Jill Lepore describes it in work that I think is coming out soon, where we need to broaden our constitutional imagination to realize, even if the constitutional reforms are difficult, and some of these take, you know, are serious, formidable challenges to changing our Constitution, there are way there are workarounds, there are ways either changing our Constitution, or through legislation, making our political system more democratic.

John Torpey 

Right, so maybe one last question. I don’t want to take up your whole day. But I’m curious. There was another meeting of the G20 recently, very recently. And one hears all these stories in many ways, the main topic of conversation, it seems, is what’s going to happen in the US election. And I guess the question is, I mean, again, it goes back in a way to the issue of resilience. And I suppose, in a way to the idea of the deep state, which in many ways is what I thought kept us from disaster in 2016 to 2020. You know, what words of encouragement would you give our friends and partners in Europe?

Daniel Ziblatt 

Well, according to the social science theories, I mean, there’s two predictors of democratic endurance. One is the wealth of a country, rich democracies don’t die. The second is the age of a democracy, age democracy, old democracies don’t die. And however you count it, we’re rich democracy. And we’re pretty old democracy. You know, even if we say democracy fully began, and at 1965 in the US, that puts us in the camp of a pretty old democracy. So according to social science, we should be fine. You know, that’s not totally satisfactory, I think, because we’ve had experienced democratic backsliding over the last several years. Despite that,  to me the sources of resilience, and the ways in which our democracy can be saved are the mobilization of civil society. I think a strong state helps that that you pointed to that. I think that’s right. But one thing, I’m about to get on a plane to fly to Germany this evening, and one of the things I’m going to be doing there for the week is talking to people that were behind the kind of mass mobilization that’s happened over the last several weeks in Germany.  Millions of people across German cities, hundreds of thousands, often in very small towns, taking a very public stand saying with the slogan, “we are the firewall.” There’s this notion in Germany that there has to be a kind of legal firewall between far right parties and mainstream parties. And, there’s been the rise and increasing success of the far right in Germany. And German citizens have kind of taken to the streets. And people don’t take to the streets just on their own; it requires civil society organization, and a kind of declaration of what kinds of behaviors are unacceptable, a public statement of that a public firewall in a certain way. And about what kinds of institutional reforms or ideas of shipping migrants to concentration camps, on the border, and so on this kind of nonsense that’s being proposed by people connected to the bush to the Trump campaign. You know, so I think these kinds of public statements of this really are helpful in establishing the norms of what’s acceptable and unacceptable. And at the end of the day, I think it’s really critical when I say civil society, I don’t just mean activist, I mean, businesses, I mean, religious leaders, I think it’s really critical for the this challenge to not be viewed in partisan grounds. And I think the real difficulty is that anytime anybody connected to politics, makes a statement about the threats that our democracy faces, it’s kind of cast into partisan into partisan terms. And what I would hope is that business leaders, civil society, leaders, religious leaders, if conservative are not committed to democracy, kind of come out and make public stances not stand statements on this, that we kind of establish a set of kind of hard lines, normative lines, that I think can actually be quite powerful. I mean, the way that Viktor Orban came to power in 2010, and has stayed in power is that the Democratic opposition fractured. The way that the Law and Justice Party in Poland was ejected from power is that the Democratic opposition stayed together despite intense disagreements. And so I think there’s a lesson in that the way that our democracy will be preserved, at least in the short run, is that those who are committed to democracy overlook their intense disagreements on foreign policy on the Israel, Hamas, conflict on race and immigration to realize, at least we share a common commitment to democracy. That’s only a short run solution, I should say, though. Because, at the end of the day, democracy is about competition. But we have to all be competing within a kind of framework where we accept the rules of the game. And so I think we have to get through this short term, emergency in effect with this broad Democratic coalition. That’s how it’s happened and other places. And, look forward to a day where we don’t have to regard Liz Cheney as an ally and where people can really disagree on foreign policy on real policy, and, you know, hope that they can come. But in the meantime, I think a broad coalition is necessary.

John Torpey 

Oh, great. Thanks so much for that relatively optimistic ending, it’s more optimistic than your predecessor, Grzegorz Ekiert was when he did this interview, of course, he was coming from Poland and had a somewhat bleaker view of things, understandably. But thanks very much. Thanks very much for taking the time to do this. That’s it for today’s episode of International Horizons. I want to thank Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard University for his insights about the fate of democracy in the United States and around the world. I also want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance and to acknowledge Duncan Mackay for letting us use his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey, saying, thanks for joining us, and we look forward to having you with us again, for the next episode of International Horizons.