The Tyranny of the Minority with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2023
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Democratic backsliding, a term that American political scientists usually use to describe the process by which other countries transition to autocracy, has come home. Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index, which attempts to track the health of democracies around the world, recently demoted the United States from a score of 90 in 2015 to 83 in 2021, lower than every established democracy in Western Europe.
How did American democracy fall so far behind, and more importantly, what can we do about it? Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien spoke with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of the new book, “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,” to answer these questions about our ailing democracy. They discussed the diagnoses and prescriptions of this breaking point, the most damaging counter-majoritarian features of the U.S. Constitution, and why constitutional and electoral reform is so damn difficult in the U.S.—but not impossible. They also got into how the Republican Party went off the rails.
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Transcript
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| 0:56.6 | From the filibuster, light times of tenure and supreme court and the electoral college, the United |
| 1:08.8 | States is virtually alone among established democracies. One because it's harder to reform |
| 1:16.9 | the Constitution than it is in other democracies. Among democracies, the United States has |
| 1:21.0 | easily the most difficult to reform, but also because of the last half century or so, |
| 1:28.1 | we have sort of developed a political culture in this country of institutional stasis. We're |
| 1:34.4 | still struggling to figure out exactly why, but whereas in most of US history, there have |
| 1:40.0 | been efforts of an constant public discussion and movements to make our political system |
| 1:46.1 | more democratic. |
| 1:48.1 | I'm Tyler McBride, Managing Editor of Lawfare, and this is the Lawfare Podcast, September |
| 1:53.3 | 21st, 2023. |
| 1:56.3 | Democratic backsliding, a term that American political scientists usually use to describe |
| 2:00.4 | the process by which other countries transition to autocracy has come home. Freedom House |
| 2:05.7 | is Global Freedom Index, which attempts to track the health of democracies around the |
| 2:09.2 | world, recently devoted the United States from a swore of 90 in 2015 to 83 in 2021, lower |
... |
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