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Welcome to Talking Fed's One-on-One-on-one, deep-dive discussions with national figures

about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives.

I'm your host, Harry Littman.

I'm really pleased to welcome back.

Steve Levitsky for a discussion that will, by definition, be too short, however long it is, but will be full of insight about the grave challenges to our democracy and how they compare

to those of other countries that have succumbed to autocratic takeovers.

Stephen Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor

of Government and the Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard.

He's also a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a senior democracy fellow at the

Council on Foreign Relations.

His research focuses on democratization, authoritarianism, and political parties with a focus on

Latin America.

And he came, I think, to national prominence with the book he co-wrote in, I think, 2018,

How Democracies Die, which he followed up in 2023 with tyranny of the minority,

why American democracy reached the breaking point.

His commentary is widely published and in many ways he's the man of the day.

I think of Steve is the sort of profit of democratic decline in both senses of the term,

...