A Whimper, Not a Bang
ALAN Z. ROZENSHTEIN
Review of Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die
(Crown, 2018)
I

destination.
What
makes
“How
Democracies
Die”
so
relevant
to
understanding what’s happening in
America today is that it applies its analysis
of democratic deconsolidation to American
politics itself. The book concludes that,
though one cannot predict where America’s
democratic institutions will wind up
through the Trump era and beyond,
America is not exempt from the possibility
of rising authoritarianism and democratic
decline.

What does the twilight of modern
democracy look like? That’s the question
two Harvard political scientists, Steven
Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, set out to
answer in their new book, “How
Democracies Die.” It’s a terrific entry in
today’s erupting debate over the future of
American democracy—including whether
it has one.
Their
answer?
In
today’s
world,
democracies die more often with a whimper
than a bang. Levitsky and Ziblatt have
looked at examples over the last century of
democratic “deconsolidation” around the
world, and they’ve concluded that the
primary
danger
to
contemporary
democracies is not from military coups or
paramilitary
brown-shirt-and-jackboot
takeovers.
Rather,
would-be
authoritarians prefer to undermine
democracy from within, scoring legitimate
electoral wins on populist platforms and
then slowly (and, in a perverse irony, often
in the name of preserving or reforming
democracy)
undermining
liberal
democratic institutions like the separation
of powers, the rule of law and civil liberties.

One of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s key
observations is that the authoritarian
tendencies of populist demagogues are
often clear from the very beginning, at least
to those who can stomach the truth.
Despite the common post-election surprise
at the would-be authoritarian’s behavior,
demagogues are easy to spot. The tell-tale
clue is the willingness to engage in any of
the following political behaviors: (1)
rejecting democratic rules; (2) denying the
political opposition’s legitimacy, (3)
tolerating or even encouraging violence;
and (4) being willing to curtail civil
liberties, including press freedoms.
Levitsy
and
Ziblatt
convincingly
demonstrate that Trump is a classic wouldbe authoritarian (albeit one whose
psychological flaws luckily temper his
malevolence with incompetence). During

Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” in
Hungary is what the path looks like, and
Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism in
Russia is what the journey offers by way of

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the campaign, Trump repeatedly exhibited
each of these four signs of political
authoritarianism: He questioned the
legitimacy of the election and was
unwilling to say that he would abide by its
results if he lost (1). He called for Hillary
Clinton’s prosecution and explicitly invited
Russia, a hostile power, to hack and leak
her emails (2). He tolerated, and at times
even seemed to encourage, violence at his
rallies and at Clinton herself (including
with his infamous “Second Amendment
people” comment) (3). And he threatened to
“open up our libel laws” to go after critical
media outlets (4).

breaking itself violates key democratic
norms.
Thus, Levitsky and Ziblatt point out that
many
ultimately
successful
authoritarians— including Putin, Turkey’s
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Peru’s Alberto
Fujimori—succeeded in doing only limited
democratic damage in their first year,
before
ultimately
consolidating
authoritarian power. The U.S. corollary is
that even if our political system ultimately
rejects Trump, some of the norm-breaking
at the heart of the distinctive “Trumpist”
style of politics will undoubtedly continue.
(And God help us if Trump wins reelection
in 2020.) If nothing else, Trump will have
normalized a level of bald-faced public
lying
and
attacks
on
democratic
institutions, particularly the media, that
previous American presidents had only
flirted with.

All these examples took place just during
the campaign. But they didn’t stop with the
election and Trump’s inauguration. In his
first year as president—the period covered
by “How Democracies Die”—Trump has
continued to attack American democracy.
He has, for example, tried to “capture the
referees” (for example, institutions of
justice,
including
law
enforcement
agencies). He has tried to sideline key
institutions outside of government that
serve to support democracy and a
democratic society, most importantly the
independent news media, which he
routinely calls the “enemy of the people.”
And he has taken first steps toward
rewriting the underlying rules of the
democratic process (for example, through
the infamous and fortunately short-lived
voter-fraud commission).

The authors’ careful, sober description of
Trump’s
authoritarian
record
is
particularly valuable because it clarifies
what precisely about Trump’s behavior is
uniquely troubling. Levitsky and Ziblatt
provide a useful corrective to those who try
to conflate Trump’s platform with his
authoritarianism. Those parts of Trump’s
agenda that are standard GOP fare—tax
cuts, environmental deregulation, attacks
on Obamacare and conservative judicial
nominations—are not, contrary to some
views on the progressive left, evidence of
authoritarianism. If you’re trying to
answer the question, “Is Trump policy X
evidence of authoritarianism?” and you can
imagine a moderate President Rubio or
even a hard-conservative President Cruz
supporting it, the answer is no. Even some
of Trump’s policies that are obviously
inspired by white-nationalist anxieties—
the push to limit legal immigration, the
undermining of international alliances, the
obsession with divisive culture-war
issues—are
not,
strictly
speaking,
authoritarian, even if they are noxious.

II
Although Trump has so far been checked in
his attempts to remake democratic, there’s
no reason to get too comfortable. A central
point of “How Democracies Die” is that
democratic deconsolidation is a process—a
creeping,
sometimes
imperceptible,
institutional decline, not a sudden collapse.
Authoritarian attacks on democracy might
be blunted by political or institutional
opposition, but such victories can be
pyrrhic, leaving democratic institutions
permanently weakened, especially if the
response to the authoritarian’s norm-

This distinction is important because
reserving the label of authoritarianism for
only those instances where it clearly fits is

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critical for any pro-democracy strategy. A
successful “coalition of all democratic
forces” relies on its members being willing
to work with groups on the other side of the
policy spectrum. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s
authoritarian litmus tests are therefore
useful in clarifying not only what’s wrong
with Trump, but also what’s right with
potential allies: No matter what a potential
ally’s views are on a policy issue, if they’re
on the right side of the authoritarianism
test, they deserve a spot on the team.

Ziblatt convincingly argue that strong,
moderate conservative parties—they offer
Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic
Union as a model for the GOP—are crucial
to checking the present wave of
authoritarian demagoguery, which today
comes primarily from the right.
Unfortunately, America has seen its
parties steadily weaken. Levitsky and
Ziblatt explain how the Republican party
became so weak that it managed to get
itself captured by someone who wasn’t even
a Republican until a few years ago.
(Despite
supporting
whatever
establishment GOP priorities come out of
Congress, Trump’s views are hardly in line
with Republican orthodoxy; he’s always
struck me as essentially a Dixiecrat, just
from Queens.) Here the authors tell a
compelling story of how, since 1968, both
parties have become simultaneously too
democratic and not democratic enough.
They’re insufficiently democratic in that
the views of ordinary Americans have scant
impact on what policymakers do. The left’s
version of this critique is that legislators
and party elites are captured by big-money
donors, while the right’s version is that a
sprawling
and
unaccountable
administrative state has taken sovereignty
away from the people and their elected
representatives.

But where is this coalition in America
today?
Why
didn’t
establishment
Republicans, many of whom clearly saw
Trump as manifestly unfit for office, oppose
him more vigorously during the campaign?
Demagogues, Levitsky and Ziblatt observe,
are constantly floating around democratic
political processes, including in the United
States. Trump’s forerunners include such
figures as Charles Coughlin, the antiSemitic, fascism-supporting priest and
1930s radio host; the populist Louisiana
governor and senator Huey Long; the redbaiting Joseph McCarthy; and the
segregationist Alabama governor and later
third-party presidential candidate George
Wallace. But why do such figures, whether
in the United States or other democracies,
rarely get close to the highest levels of
power?
The
reason,
according
to
“How
Democracies Die,” is political parties.
Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that parties
play
a
critical
and
largely
underappreciated
role
in
keeping
authoritarians out of democratic politics—
or at least banishing them to the margins.
“Peer review” by party elites plays a vital
“filtration role” that keeps extremists from
capturing party nominations.

But American parties have become too
democratic as well, in that too much power
has flowed from party elites to the
grassroots. Part of this is due to structural
factors like primary-process reforms that
deprive party elites of the ability to
override the results of primaries and
caucuses, or state-level rules that allow
voting in primaries regardless of party
membership. (These post-60s party
reforms explain why there was never a
realistic
chance
that
the
GOP
establishment would be able, at the
convention, to wrest Trump of his
legitimately won nomination. It’s also why
Democrats might want to reconsider their
rush to weaken the role of their
“superdelegates,” the large chunk of

This observation may be to the chagrin of
many readers, given that citizens of
democracies often think poorly of political
parties and of career politicians in general.
The phenomenon is acute in the United
States, where the bulk of Americans lack
confidence in the parties and hold Congress
in particular contempt. But Levitsky and

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convention delegates chosen by party elites
rather than primary voters.) Levitsky and
Ziblatt focus on party elites as gatekeepers
and do a good job reminding us why smokefilled rooms have their merits: They may
have given us mediocrities like Chester
Arthur and Rutherford B. Hayes, but they
also kept out demagogues like George
Wallace. Levitsky and Ziblatt remind us of
the critical role of the now-defunct
“invisible primary”—the gauntlet of partyelite-support gathering that served as the
modern-day equivalent of smoke-filled
rooms. In doing so, they provide a useful
corrective to the naive view, initially made
popular by progressive reformers but today
the rallying cry of grassroots forces on both
the right and left, that “The cure for the ills
of democracy is more democracy.”

millions—recognizing
his
obvious
incompetence and lack of fitness for high
office—cast only clothespin votes for him.
So why couldn’t Republican elites have
convinced their voters to cross party lines
and reject him?
Here Levitsky and Ziblatt point the finger
at polarization. Some polarization comes
from background social conditions: for
example, ethnic, religious, regional or
linguistic divisions, especially when such
divisions
all
align
behind
party
identification. (Thus, at the end of the book,
Levitsky and Ziblatt urge policies that
would decrease economic inequality as a
way to reduce polarization; all else being
equal, countries with robust, broadly
shared economic growth metabolize the
social strains of diversity better than ones
with sputtering economies or where
economic gains accrue mostly to the rich.)
Other forms of polarization come from the
modern
media
environment,
which
amplifies and rewards each side’s extreme
views.

When Trump secured the Republican
nomination—saddling one of America’s
major parties with a candidate with only
the most tenuous connection to the “party”
as an institution—he confirmed the death
of the old “the party decides” tradition of
presidential nominations. The most
remarkable feature of the 2016 campaign
was thus not the general election, which
looked pretty much like what you would
expect given the fundamentals: among
other things, sluggish economic growth, a
two-term
president
(Obama)
with
relatively low approval ratings and the
historical rarity of a party winning three
consecutive presidential elections. Rather,
the critical moment in the 2016 election
was when Trump became the Republican
nominee. As political scientist Julia Azari
has explained, if “parties are weak while
partisanship is strong,” if there are only
two major ones, and if true independents
don’t exist (regardless of what those
“independents” say to pollsters), then most
general elections come down to a coin toss,
no matter who’s at the top of the tickets.

But whatever the causes, polarization
made it impossible for Republican elites to
convince their voters to vote against their
party, hand the election to Clinton and wait
four years to put forward a candidate who
would advocate for traditional Republican
policies. Instead, Republican elites fooled
themselves into thinking that they could
take advantage of Trump’s political
inexperience and naivete and control him
once in office. This is a common delusion of
parties seeking to accommodate popular
demagogues: as the historical record
shows, from Hitler’s rise to power in
Germany to Hugo Chávez’s ascendance in
Venezuela, the demagogue frequently
outsmarts and then marginalizes his
would-be handlers.
Having assumed power, Trump has not, to
his chagrin, been able to run the country
after the fashion of strongmen leaders like
Putin and China’s Xi Jinping whom he so
clearly admires. Yet despite periodic
pushback from the courts and the
bureaucracy, Trump has largely been

III
But
what
explains
this
strong
partisanship? After all, Trump’s hard-core
base of support was limited to at most a
third of the electorate, and tens of

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protected by congressional Republicans.
(The fiasco that was the HPSCI
investigation into Russian interference in
the 2016 election is only the most obvious
example.) The first question that ought to
weigh on the minds of the coalition of all
democratic forces is what will happen if
Trump crosses some obvious authoritarian
“red line,” like firing Special Counsel
Robert Mueller. Specifically, will Congress,
other governmental institutions and nongovernmental democratic actors try to
push back, and, if so, how?

president’s nominees, or a president that
uses the pardon power to undermine the
ability of courts or Congress to hold him or
his associates accountable.)
When parties—and the underlying body
politic—become sufficiently polarized, they
stop viewing their political opponents as
legitimate opposition and see them instead
as a dangerous “enemy of the people” that
threatens democracy itself. Levitsky and
Ziblatt characterize democracy as “a game
that we want to keep playing indefinitely,”
with mutual toleration and forbearance as
the key norms that make the game’s repeat
nature possible. But when one thinks that
the opposition is a danger to the game
itself, the rational strategy is to
preemptively strike; if the game is to end,
better on your terms than on your
opponent’s. And as mutual toleration and
forbearance give way to partisan
bloodsport
and
political
gridlock,
polarization naturally increases.

Here the book takes a depressing turn,
focusing on the breakdown of democratic
norms in American constitutional politics.
Levitsky and Ziblatt define norms as
“shared codes of conduct that become
common knowledge within a particular
community or society—accepted, respected
and enforced by its members.” In the
American political context, this means the
principles that govern how political elites
behave irrespective of the formal rules
outlined in the Constitution. One of
Levitsky and Ziblatt’s key contributions is
to highlight the importance of norms in
constitutional analysis. They explain why
both scholars and the public tend to
overlook norms when accounting for the
stability of a political system: “Because
[norms] are unwritten, they are often hard
to see, especially when they’re functioning
well. This can lull us into thinking they are
unnecessary . . . . [But l]ike oxygen or clean
water, a norm’s importance is quickly
revealed by its absence.”

IV
Thus at the core of the book’s account is a
dangerous
feedback
loop
between
polarization and the decline of democratic
norms. Once that loop sets in, it is hard to
keep it from spiraling out of control, let
alone reverse it. Even apparently stable
democracies can fall apart relatively
quickly, as has occurred repeatedly in
Latin America and Europe, the two
geographical regions in which Levitsky and
Ziblatt built their comparativist expertise.
The authors put most of the blame for the
decline of forbearance and mutual
toleration on the Republican party.
Starting with the Gingrich Revolution that
swept hardline conservatives into power in
the House of Representatives in 1994,
Republicans have systematically engaged
in increasing levels of constitutional
hardball and partisan obstruction, a high
point being the Clinton impeachment.
Democrats, of course, have responded in
turn, leading to the judicial-confirmation
standoffs of George W. Bush’s second term.
And that, of course, generated a predictable

Levitsky and Ziblatt emphasize two norms
that contribute to democratic stability:
mutual toleration and forbearance. Mutual
toleration means viewing one’s opponent as
a legitimate participant in politics rather
than a mortal enemy who must be crushed.
Forbearance means using one’s formal
legal authority judiciously, rather than
engaging in “constitutional hardball” and
using power to the legal hilt. (In the
American context, an example of
constitutional hardball would be a Senate
that flatly refuses to confirm any of the

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response
during
the
Obama
administration: as Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell infamously remarked in
2010, “The single most important thing we
want to achieve is for President Obama to
be a one-term president.”

level of congressional investigations meant
to overwhelm and paralyze the White
House (even beyond the legitimate
investigations into Russian electoral
interference
and
the
Trump
administration’s impressive series of
ethical lapses). A Democratic House would
also raise the specter of impeachment. If
Democrats manage to win the Senate, it’s
quite possible that they’ll refuse to confirm
a single additional Trump judicial
appointee at any level of the judiciary. And,
of course, the chance that Democrats will
work with Trump to pass bipartisan
legislation is close to zero, and not just
because Trump is such a feckless leader;
Democrats have learned from the GOP’s
tactics during the Obama years that
intransigence is the best way to a weaken
a sitting president, who inevitably gets
blamed when nothing gets done.

This take-no-prisoners sentiment was
manifest in high-risk maneuvers by the
GOP like risking a breach of the debt
ceiling (which would have led to a U.S.
default on its obligations and a potential
global financial crisis). It culminated, near
the end of Obama’s term, in the Senate’s
refusal to even consider Merrick Garland to
fill Antonin Scalia’s seat. As Levitsky and
Ziblatt note, never in the 150 years since
Reconstruction had the Senate denied a
president the opportunity to fill a Supreme
Court vacancy.
The Republicans’ behavior during the
Obama administration led to some normbreaking on the part of Democrats, too.
Particularly visible was the (thenDemocrat controlled) Senate’s elimination
of the filibuster for lower-court judges.
Likewise, Obama’s increased use of
executive orders—most notably his
sweeping DACA program that deferred
deportation for certain categories of young
undocumented immigrants—represented a
muscular assertion of executive power visà-vis Congress.

V
Levitsky and Ziblatt’s discussion of norms
is the most conceptually rich part of the
book, and, for legal scholars, it is likely to
be most applicable to their own work. But
it is also where the authors’ account
encounters difficulties.
First, the discussion of norms is incomplete
because it does not include an account of
how norms come to be. Levitsky and Ziblatt
are good at explaining the role that certain
norms play in sustaining constitutional
law, but that does not explain why and how
those norms arise. (To rely solely on norms’
salutatory effects would be to commit the
fallacy of functional explanation.) The
literature on norm creation is vast,
including sophisticated accounts grounded
in both game theory (specifically repeated
games in which reputation plays a key role)
and evolutionary psychology. Given the
book’s short length and its (quite
admirable) pitch to a general audience, it’s
understandable why the authors did not
spend a substantial amount of time
exploring this literature. But the lack of
any discussion of how norms arise becomes
a problem when, at the end of the book,
Levitsky and Ziblatt offer their main

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s focus on the
Republican party has led to protest from
conservatives,
who
emphasize
that
Democrats act just as poorly. But the
authors
are
far
from
alone
in
characterizing Republican tactics as
different in kind; others have been making
this argument for years. More to the point,
it doesn’t matter who started it if what
you’re worried about is how to undo the
damage. Democrats, especially as the party
moves to the left, are preparing to make up
for lost time; if one’s concern is
institutional stability, it’s far from clear
how to engineer a de-escalation.
If Democrats win the House in 2018 (as
seems increasingly likely), we can expect a

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prescriptions
for
fixing
American
democracy: rebuild norms of forbearance
and mutual toleration, especially by fixing
income inequality, which Levitsky and
Ziblatt argue is a key driver of norm
dissolution. But is this enough to
reinvigorate American democratic norms?
Without an account of how norms come to
be, there’s no way to know.

of strengthening liberal democracy. But
Levitsky and Ziblatt seem to foreclose this
reply when they explicitly argue against a
tit-for-tat approach that meets norm
violations in kind. The authors’ objection is
practical, not ideological. Quoting the
political scientist Eric Nelson, they argue
that this will lead to a “cycle of escalating
constitutional brinksmanship” that will
likely only further harm democratic norms
and institutions. Comparing the example of
Venezuela to Colombia, Levitsky and
Ziblatt note that when the opposition uses
its own hardball tactics—as Venezuela’s
anti-Chávez opposition did through
military coups, general strikes and
electoral boycotts—such tactics often
simply scare and further radicalize the
existing authoritarian forces. By contrast,
if the opposition can start winning
elections, as Álvaro Uribe’s opponents did
in Colombia, it can help resist
authoritarianism by democratic means. It’s
hard to argue with Levitsky and Ziblatt’s
advice that where “institutional channels
exist, opposition groups should use them.”
(This is a particularly important lesson for
Democrats
to
internalize;
winning
elections is a far better way of defeating
Trump than paralyzing the government or
impeaching him.)

To be sure, Levitsky and Ziblatt do a good
job of showing how low levels of
polarization after the Civil War led to
strong norms of mutual toleration and
forbearance—as exemplified, for instance,
in a Senate culture of courtesy and
consensus—that underpinned a century of
political stability. But here the authors run
into the most serious challenge to their
account: how to distinguish between
legitimate
and
illegitimate
norm
violations? As the book’s critics on the left
have noted, Levitsky and Ziblatt use the
polarization over slavery that led to the
Civil War as a key example of norm
erosion. But it was the abolitionists, not the
slaveholders, who were engaged in the
most serious norm erosion; after all,
slavery was not just a norm, but—through
the Three-Fifths and Fugitive Slave
Clauses—a constitutionally recognized
institution.
Of course Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t argue
that slavery should have been allowed to
continue in the name of democratic norms.
So clearly some norm erosion is acceptable,
but what kind? Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t
say. This omission also makes the authors
vulnerable to criticism from the right that
asks why, if it’s illegitimate for Trump to
deny the legitimacy of his political
opponents, should it be legitimate for large
swaths of the American electorate,
including many political, social and
intellectual elites, to challenge Trump’s
own legitimacy as president.

The (much) harder case is where no such
institutional channels exist and seemingly
the only recourse for the anti-authoritarian
side is to commit its own norm violations.
Then one needs to decide whether the
benefits of pro-democratic norm violations
outweigh their costs. Critically, for this one
needs a substantive account of what sort of
society we should have, and under what
conditions the imperatives of having that
sort of society outweigh those of political
stability. I suspect that Levitsky and
Ziblatt would, if pressed, admit that the
radical,
norm-breaking
antebellum
abolitionism was such a case.

The strongest answer to both of those
arguments, I think, is that norm violations
are legitimate if they are used to combat
even greater norm violations—for example,
real authoritarianism—and in the service

Put another way, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s
account is most defensible if you think that
the underlying socio-political-economic
system is fundamentally solid (even if in

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need of reform). But if you’re a skeptic of
the current order, you might agree with
political scientist Corey Robin:

Perhaps the best that can be done is to play
for time. It’s a strategy that the authors do
not mention, but it ought to be of particular
interest to those in the national-security
field. The idea is to let Trump’s political
and administrative incompetence catch up
with him while at the same time depriving
him of the opportunity for authoritarian
power grabbing. For Levitsky and Ziblatt,
the “greatest dangers facing American
democracy today” are war or a major
terrorist
attack.
The
government’s
necessary response would most likely boost
Trump’s approval rating—and give him a
pretext to “attack political opponents and
restrict freedoms Americans take for
granted.” (Security crises helped both
Putin and Erdoğan consolidate power.)

If your highest value is the
preservation
of
American
institutions, the avoidance of
“dysfunction,” the discourse of
norm erosion makes sense. If it’s
democracy,
not
so
much.
Sometimes democracy requires the
shattering
of
norms
and
institutions. . . . Democracy, we
might even say, is a permanent
project of norm erosion, forever
shattering the norms of hierarchy
and domination and the political
forms that aid and abet them.
I happen to be on Levitsky and Ziblatt’s
side in this debate, but the underlying
principle upon which they rely needs to be
defended, not just assumed. The book’s
purely procedural account of legitimate
government cannot supply such a defense.

To the chagrin of those who rightly worry
about the sorts of abuses Trump could
commit through our foreign-intelligence
apparatus, the need to protect American
democracy
from
Trump
may
(paradoxically) present the strongest
argument yet for continuing to support
broad
surveillance
authorities.
For
example, we know, based on the PCLOB
report and other sources, that information
from the FISA § 702 surveillance program
has been instrumental in foiling terrorist
attacks. As long as the intelligence
community and law-enforcement agencies
maintain sufficient independence from the
White House (and I fully concede that this
is a pretty big “if”), we may be better off
with a strong security apparatus than a
weak one, even factoring in the risk of
abuse. (This raises the question, which
“How Democracies Die” does not address
but seems promising as an avenue of
research, of the extent to which we can and
should rely on the bureaucracy to preserve
democratic norms without getting into an
actual “deep state” situation of the sort
that, for example, categorized Turkish
politics in the years before Erdoğan’s
authoritarian consolidation.)

VI
Given their grim diagnosis of the health of
American democracy, Levitsky and Ziblatt
end their book on a surprisingly—perhaps,
one ought to say, unjustifiably—optimistic
note. They urge political elites to come
together and rebuild democratic norms,
but, especially after reading 200 pages
about the fecklessness of our politicians,
it’s hard to have put any faith in their
ability to suddenly transcend political
small-mindedness. Similarly, although the
authors’ prescription for policies that
would decrease socioeconomic inequality is
sound (and is in line with the recent
emphasis among legal scholars that
constitutional democracy relies on a broad
middle class), such policies would entail
massive legislative action of the sort that
requires precisely those same norms of
mutual toleration and forbearance that are
currently in such short supply. And more
generally, as noted above, the lack of an
account of how norms arise makes it
difficult for Levitsky and Ziblatt to produce
any concrete policy proposals.

VII
Whatever the book’s minor shortcomings, it
remains
a
vital
and
important

8

 A Whimper, Not A Bang   A. Rozenshtein

contribution. Beyond the details of its
diagnosis
of
America’s
democratic
dysfunction (which are generally correct) or
its recommended course of treatment
(which is more contestable), “How
Democracies Die” substantially advances
our
understanding
of
American
constitutional democracy. For American
lawyers and legal scholars, in particular,
two general lessons stand out.

Madison’s and Hamilton’s often cryptic and
frequently outdated observations about an
eighteenth-century, suffrage-limited, preindustrial agricultural republic whose
political institutions were just taking
shape and whose most important
features—the rise and decline of parties
and the growth of both the administrative
state and presidential power—lay in the
future.

The first is that constitutional norms are at
least as important as constitutional
provisions. Norms have long played an
important explanatory role in law—both in
the way that law can shape norms and how
norms can ensure order when there is no
law. But norms have not traditionally been
a prominent explanatory feature in publiclaw scholarship. Fortunately this is
changing. But the study of norms is not
something that can be done solely with the
traditional tools of the legal academy.
Lawyers (and law professors) are first and
foremost readers and interpreters of
texts—specifically legal ones. But norms
are by definition unwritten (which is
perhaps why legal scholars have struggled
for so long to give them their explanatory
pride of place). To understand norms in
their full complexity, we need to use tools
from a variety of disciplines, including
history (to understand their evolution),
sociology and anthropology (to understand
how they operate in specific settings and
how individuals understand them),
psychology (to understand how norms
affect both emotional and logical behavior),
and economics and political science (to
understand their rational, game-theoretic
structure).

To be sure, the comparative method is not
without its dangers. The key to useful
comparativist analysis is that the data set
consist of examples that are similarly
situated to what one is trying to explain.
Thus, some political scientists have
complained that Levitsky and Ziblatt rely
too much on case studies like Russia,
Hungary and Venezuela—countries that,
unlike the United States, did not have a
long history of consolidated democracy
before slipping into authoritarianism. (On
this view, the danger to the United States
is not Venezuelan-style authoritarianism,
but imperial collapse, in the fashion of the
British Empire, at the hands of resurgent
powers like Russia or China.) That being
said, one does have to use some data set;
other options, such as comparing the
United States to past global superpowers
like the British Empire or Ancient Rome,
have their own obvious dissimilarities. An
imperfect empirical comparison would
seem preferable to none at all.
The comparative historical record gives
warning but also comfort. For every
seemingly stable democracy that suffered
catastrophic democratic deconsolidation,
one can point to another that, despite
immense challenges, came through with its
democratic institutions not just intact but
stronger for being tested. What is perhaps
different today is the global, interconnected
nature of both democratic health and
democratic threat. It is no coincidence that
the latest round of authoritarianism has
hit Europe and America at the same time,
given the challenges that globalization,
migration and the global financial crisis

The second lesson of “How Democracies
Die” is that America is “not so different
than other nations,” especially with regard
to the fragility of its democratic
institutions. This comparativist approach
is a vital corrective to the parochialism that
characterizes so much of constitutional
legal analysis: an endless, obsessive rereading of the Federalist Papers in the
hopes of finding something new in

9

 A Whimper, Not A Bang   A. Rozenshtein

have posed to the post-WWII consensus of
middle-class social democracy.

Alan Z. Rozenshtein is a Visiting Assistant
Professor of Law at the University of
Minnesota Law School. Previously, he
taught law at the Georgetown University
Law Center and served as an Attorney
Advisor with the Office of Law and Policy
in the National Security Division of the
U.S. Department of Justice and a Special
Assistant United States Attorney in the
U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of
Maryland.

But just as democratic deconsolidation can
be infectious, so too might be democratic
reconsolidation.
Perhaps
the
interconnections, political and economic,
that constitute globalization need not
simply threaten democratic institutions.
Perhaps instead they can offer a way by
which democracies can help each other
fend off the common foe of creeping
authoritarianism. Just as each democracy
needs its coalition of all democratic forces,
the world may need its coalition of all
democratic nations.

Cite as: Alan Rozenshtein, A Whimper, Not
a
Bang,
(Sept.
13,
2018)
http://lawfareblog.com/whimper-not-bang/.

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