How Democratic Backsliding Happens with Steve Levitsky

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’re in strange times. In the U.S., we’re finding ourselves in a situation in which the possibility of genuine democratic retrenchment and some version of presidential authoritarian dictatorship is a real possibility. There’s a lot to consider as the liberal democracy we’ve become accustomed to could erode right before our eyes in the near future. Steve Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard and serves as the director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Levitsky is also a New York Times bestselling author of numerous books including, “How Democracies Die” and “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,” which he co-authored with Daniel Ziblatt. He joins WITHpod to discuss entering into a new era, the uncertainty of this moment, the process by which a democracy might backslide into something that's less democratic and resisting the erosion.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think there will be an election in 2028.
0:08.3	I'm not as pessimistic as some.
0:10.0	I don't think we're sliding into fascism.
0:12.2	I think there's a very good chance that the Democratic Party wins the 2028 election.
0:16.6	But it's not clear how we rebuild a consensus in favor of basic, small D democratic politics.
0:25.2	So I think what would have to happen, and I don't want to wish this upon our society,
0:30.1	and I'm not even sure it's possible at this point, having lived through COVID and seen Trump come within 40,000 votes, they're getting reelected.
0:37.7	But Trump would have to be a major disaster so that we create a broader coalition of, you know, 60, 65% of Americans ready to do something different.
0:49.3	And that's possible, but we haven't seen much evidence for that in the last eight years.
0:59.1	Yeah. possible, but we haven't seen much evidence for that in the last eight years. Hello and welcome to why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
1:06.4	I was speaking to you the day after a remarkable scene unfolded in South Korea, basically the sort of right-wing populist president of that country who had won a very narrow majority back in 2022, President Yun, who had seen his sort of political fortunes decline over time.
1:26.3	The opposition party had won big in
1:28.0	the last elections declared martial law, came forward and said, martial law, and the bullet
1:34.6	points of martial law were basically the complete suspension of what we would call a free and open
1:38.6	society. The media was going to be controlled by the state, that there would be no independent
1:43.4	demonstrations,
1:44.5	the right to protest, the right to peacefully assemble, free speech was curtailed, no strikes,
1:49.1	all the sort of basic mechanisms of civil society were suspended. And what the Koreans did was
1:53.9	they took the streets immediately in the wee hours in the morning, in their parkas in the very
1:58.2	cold, cold, soul winter, and defied the orders. They rallied to the
2:04.5	national, the parliament building, which have been blocked off by troops. And parliament members
2:10.5	climbed into the building against the sort of stated wishes and orders of the military, of the
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