How Democracies Die

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, News Commentary, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2018

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The year is young, but Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die is going to be one of its most important books. It will be read as a commentary on Donald Trump, which is fair enough, because the book is, in part, a commentary on Donald Trump. But it deserves more than that. It is more than that. How Democracies Die is three books woven together. One summarizes acres of research on how democracies tumble into autocracy. The second is an analysis of the troubling conditions under which American democracy thrived and the reasons it has entered into decline. The third book is a fretful tour of Trump’s first year in office, and the ways in which his instincts and actions mirror those of would-be autocrats before him. Of these, the book about Donald Trump is the least interesting, and so in this interview, I didn’t focus on it. Instead, this is a discussion about how modern democracies fall, and the ways in which American democracy has been creeping towards crisis for decades now. Viewed this way, Trump is much more a symptom of our democratic decline than its cause. So let's talk about the cause. Books and Articles Mentioned The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 by J. Morgan. Kousser The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1) by Robert Caro Political Order in Changing Societies by Samuel P. Huntington (edited) Donald Matthews' book about the Senate in the 1950s Julia Azari's piece, Weak parties and strong partisanship are a bad combination: Rosenthal political polarization The webcomic Ezra mentioned, "Different" James Carse's book, Finite and Infinite Games Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	There is this internet comic that went around a bit after the 2016 election that was for somebody standing in room
0:05.8	I just said I want things to be different and there's like this panel kind of whirlwind
0:10.8	Activity and then in the third panel just everything's broken and the pressure says oh no
0:14.8	Hello, welcome to the Ezra Clanchon on the Box Media Podcast Network my guest today are Stephen Lovitsky and Daniel Ziblatt who are the authors of the new book How Democracy's Die
0:36.5	The year is young yet, but I think this is gonna be one of the most important books of 2018
0:41.9	You know the public reaction the book if you read the reviews about any read the commentary about it
0:47.1	It's really been about Trump and and that's not unfair the book does have a lot to say about Donald Trump
0:52.5	But that is not by any means the most important part of the book
0:56.0	And so it is not what I have focused on in this discussion with them
0:59.6	Rather the book sort of has three parts one is a part about Donald Trump
1:03.2	That's sort of a little book into itself and then there is another one on how modern democracies have fallen
1:09.5	How they have fallen across the world in other countries?
1:12.2	What are the conditions? What is maybe true about democratic deconsolidation as it is called that we do not know
1:18.5	And then the second and and I found this really really interesting is a
1:25.2	RECASTING of American democracy a look at it as less stable on less from footing than we often think a look about what has happened
1:33.3	To make American democracy vulnerable to a moment like this one
1:37.5	Trump is symptom not cause of it and and so when we look at it
1:41.9	We are are are looking at some that is ongoing. I sometimes think about Donald Trump. I'm a comic books reader
1:47.6	In comics you sometimes have these storylines where some kind of portal opens to to another dimension or whatever it might be and things begin coming through it
1:55.9	He is one of the things that I think has come through the cracks in our political system
1:59.7	But he's not going to be the only thing he is not the only thing even so far
2:03.0	And so I think we need to do a lot more work to understand what has gone wrong in America's political system
	...

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