And here we go again. President-elect Donald Trump wasted little time in signaling to Americans, through his Cabinet nominations and White House appointments, that he plans to move quickly to act on his most extreme promises. What kind of United States will we have in a year, or in four? How will the country and its democratic institutions change? What are the chances he doesn’t succeed? And what if he does—and an apathetic, exhausted, and inward-looking populace shrugs? We could think of no one better to ask these questions than Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard scholars who were co-authors of the 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die. They spoke with editor Michael Tomasky on November 25. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
MICHAEL TOMASKY: I want to start with this question. I was struck by this passage in the last chapter of How Democracies Die, where you posit three possible futures of a post-Trump America. One was the optimistic one. One was kind of a wash. Then another, which was numbered your second, a much darker future, was “one in which President Trump and the Republicans continue to win with a white nationalist appeal. Under this scenario, a pro-Trump GOP would retain the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the vast majority of statehouses, and it would eventually gain a solid majority in the Supreme Court.”
Well … I’m not sure when you wrote that whether you thought that would come true, but here we are. And you say that this scenario could lead to confrontation, even violent conflict, which in turn could lead to heightened police repression. Daniel, now that this scenario is about to be reality, what’s your assessment of our situation in this country?
DANIEL ZIBLATT: When we wrote that, we didn’t think it was the most likely scenario. But as you say, here we are, and I think there are serious reasons to have concerns. There continue to be sources of resilience that we’re happy to talk about. One point I would make at the outset is that the need to rewrite the Constitution, say à la Viktor Orbán, is probably not the thing that’s concerning at this moment, because our Constitution works pretty well for the party that’s in control of all branches of government, and really the more serious concern is the risk of those in power going after the democratic opposition in ways that undermine competition. So it’s not about changing the rules, but really attacking civil society, attacking the opposition. That’s something that we really didn’t spell out in that scenario back in 2018, but it’s something that is top of mind for me right now.
STEVEN LEVITSKY: This is really classic authoritarian stuff. We don’t know how stable the majorities that the Republicans just won will be. I could not have imagined in 2017 a future in which Trump would govern as he governed and then win the popular vote in 2024. We don’t know whether they will have any success in locking these majorities in. We could still very much be in a scenario closer to regime instability than stable authoritarianism. In either case, we’re going to see really classic authoritarian behavior. Many of us tend to think that—particularly given that most of us haven’t experienced authoritarianism in the United States—we tend to think of authoritarianism as dissolving the Constitution, locking up opponents, and eliminating electoral competition. And that’s highly unlikely. It’s very, very unlikely that we see a move toward sort of Putin-style authoritarianism.
But what I think has gotten insufficient attention among Americans is the centrality of simply politicizing the state and deploying it in ways not only to punish rivals, but also to change the cost-benefit calculation of actors across the political spectrum and throughout civil society so that they have an incentive to sort of step to the sidelines. And so, you know, first and foremost, we’ve been told to expect that the Department of Justice will be wielded to punish those who have tried to hold the Trump administration accountable. I think we’ll see it wielded against some politicians. We’ll see it wielded against some businesspeople. We’ll see it wielded against some civil society leaders. We may see it wielded against Harvard and other elite universities.
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