39: How Democracies Die with Dr. Steven Levitsky
The Lincoln Project
The Lincoln Project
4.6 • 9.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2021
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
Host Reed Galen is joined by Dr. Steven Levitsky (Professor of Government at Harvard University) to discuss his book, How Democracies Die, the state of play of our nation’s democracy today, and how we extract ourselves from where our democracy is currently heading. Plus, the importance of maintaining a multi-party, pro-democracy, coalition.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Rie Gaelin. Today I'm joined by Dr. |
| 0:12.9 | Steven Lewitsky, a professor of government and Latin American studies at Harvard University, |
| 0:17.6 | as well as the director of Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. |
| 0:21.8 | His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and |
| 0:26.8 | week and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America and his written and array of books, |
| 0:31.4 | including How Democracies Die with Daniel Ziblatt, which we'll discuss today, which has been |
| 0:36.3 | referenced more than a few times not only on this podcast, but in many of our discussions, |
| 0:40.4 | both public and internal. So Dr. Lewitsky, Steve, thanks for joining me today. |
| 0:45.1 | Thanks for having me. So as I told you before, we started for democracy nerds like us, |
| 0:49.7 | what you and Daniel have written is really part how to book and part Rosetta Stone. And so |
| 0:56.6 | how democracies die, we were talking about this a little bit. You all wrote this in 2017 right |
| 1:03.1 | after Donald Trump had taken office, but if you read it, it reads as if you guys wrote it a week ago. |
| 1:09.0 | And so give me a sense of your background. Obviously, as we noted, with your study of Latin America, |
| 1:14.5 | we've seen its troubled history, not always successful history with democracy, but give us a sense of how |
| 1:19.8 | you get your start in the interest of this subject and then how you got to this book and then we'll |
| 1:24.7 | go from there. I've been passionate about democracy since I was a college student in the 1980s when I first |
| 1:31.7 | started studying Latin America and started traveling to Latin America. At that time in the 80s, |
| 1:37.0 | there were civil wars going on in Iqrago and El Salvador, Guatemala and I had a very young age |
| 1:41.8 | got exposed to some of the costs of losing or not having democracy and just began to study Latin |
| 1:49.7 | America at a time when military rule was ending, when Latin Americans were coming to grips in many |
| 1:55.4 | countries with the terrible conspense of military dictatorship. And I really came to value liberal |
| 2:02.4 | democracy and spent really the first 25 years of my career studying democracies, how they're built, |
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