How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
This important book taking as its task the defense of our democracy will please opponents of President Trump-until the final chapter. I'll get to that. First, I need to tell you that the authors-both professors of political science at Harvard whose specialty is the lives and deaths of democracies-identify President Trump as a danger to the survival of democracy in the US.
On the basis of their knowledge of history, Levitsky and Ziblatt identify four characteristics of authoritarianism: "rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game, denial of the political legitimacy of political opponents, toleration or encouragement of violence, readiness to curtail liberties of opponents, including media." They find that President Trump scores on all four categories.
They identify several shifts from democracy to authoritarian regimes through democratic process: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Philippines under Marcos, Turkey under Erdogan, and others. The possibility of such a shift, they say, is greatly enhanced by political polarization, instancing especially Hitler's rise to power when the political right and left could not form a coalition government, leaving President Paul Hindenburg at a loss for naming a chancellor who could form a government and finally turning to Hitler, whom the right and left politicians were confident they could control. The rest is history.
Of course they note our current political polarization. But they do not despair. They instance several times when political opponents moderated their actions to avoid polarization and promoted democracy. For me, their most powerful example is Germany after World War II, with the result that Germany is a bastion of democracy and of the European Union.
The moral and political lesson Levitsky and Ziblatt draw in their final chapter is that we must begin the arduous labor of healing our polarization. If we are loathe to speak with people whose politics we abhor, that's the sign of how imperative this labor is.