And then we'll get started. Welcome to today's discussion, the sixth session of The Breakdown, where Steve Levitsky and I talk about the struggle for democracy in the United States, reflect on historical precedents in the U.S. and abroad, and offer evidence-based reflections on the path forward. My name is Erica Chenoweth. I'm the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, and I'm speaking in my individual capacity as a scholar. Before we begin, I have a few brief announcements.
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Before we go further, let me introduce Steven Levitsky, who's the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies, Professor of Government, and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. He's also a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a senior democracy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Steve's research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, particularly in Latin America. He's co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times bestseller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. So Steve, we get together on this call once a month, and it seems like from one month to the next, there are about three dozen things that we could focus on in our conversation. But what I want to start us off with today is just a conversation about what we saw happen in Hungary a couple of weeks ago. I've been dying to hear your reactions to that.
We haven't gotten a chance to talk before now, so might as well talk about it in front of everyone. So just to remind the audience, in case you didn't know, Viktor Orban, who'd been basically in power in Hungary for well over a decade, almost I think 16 years, was running against a new opponent, a relative newcomer in terms of identifying as an opponent. He came from within the ruling party and defected from it and started a new formation and ran kind of a center-right campaign, but also a strong kind of anti-corruption and anti-establishment campaign, in this sense viewing Orban's government as the establishment.
And there were a number of other things too, claims that the opposition party put forward, but the main bottom line is that they had a decisive victory at the polls and Peter Magyar, the head of the party, will be the new leader of Hungary for all intents and purposes. There's definitely a lot to say, a lot to learn about this case. What do you think of it, Steve, given that Hungary has been one of the sort of focal examples of illiberal democracy in Orban's own words and a good case of what you've described as competitive authoritarianism?
Yeah, I think competitive authoritarianism is a better term than illiberal democracy. I don't think there is such a thing as an illiberal democracy. Without liberalism, you certainly can't sustain and probably can't have democracy. But I think this is very, very good news. I think it reminds us that global democracy is not in as, I guess, one-way retreat as we sometimes tend to think and to hear. There are important cases of backsliding in the world, but there have across the world, not only in Hungary, but across the world, been a number of cases of pushing back and rolling back authoritarianism. So there are challenges and crises in democracies across the world, but we're not in a moment of dramatic authoritarian expansion.
Democracies and democrats, small D democrats, continue to put up a fight all over the world. And this was a really momentous and important case. Another really important lesson that we sometimes forget is oppositions can win unfair elections. The election in Hungary was not fair. The electoral system was heavily gerrymandered to favor the incumbent party. And Orban had established over the course of the last 15 years an almost total monopoly over the traditional media, over television and the main newspapers and radio stations. Magyar got almost no access to television whatsoever during the campaign. So this was a classic uneven playing field, a tilted playing field against the opposition, and Magyar won.
And so not only is that a testament to Magyar's political strength, but it should remind us that even when incumbents abuse power, even when they stack the deck, even when they cheat, they still sometimes lose. And we shouldn't wish for such a situation anywhere, but I think it's important for oppositions to not give up just because the other side is abusing power. And that's been part of our conversation in all of our sessions. So in that sense, I think American citizens should take note and should take heart. I think it's important to also, just to close, to remember there are ways in which the U.S. and Hungary are quite different. And shocking as this may sound to some, Orban actually played by the rules and obeyed the law in a much more consistent fashion than Trump.
So it's great news that Orban stacked the deck, still lost and gave up power, but that doesn't mean that the Republicans in the United States will give up power as easily and not resort to measures that Orban did not resort to. I worry a little bit about complacency looking at what happened in Hungary and thinking, well, it can be relatively easy for the Democrats, in this case, the big D Democrats, to return to power in the United States. They might, but Trump's shown a willingness to just flat out break the law and to engage in violence that Orban never did. And so we still have to be really vigilant.
Yeah, that's really useful as a reminder that in many of the breakthrough cases that we've seen of democratic transitions around the world over the past 40 years, it's happened precisely through the mechanism of elections that were happening in places where elections were deliberately designed to reinforce the incumbent's power and authority. And somehow the opposition was able to effectively unite into a very broad, honestly, anti-incumbent coalition, right? And that can take many different stripes. There are different ideologies that can be represented under such a broad-based coalition, but the basic formation is an anti-incumbent one, not necessarily agreeing about everything else, right?
And so that also suggests vulnerabilities for consolidating the democratic victory after such an election. And that's been a challenge for many countries around the world over the past really 40 years, which is that a strong anti-authoritarian movement is often necessary to have the breakthrough. But then after the breakthrough, these movements can be very vulnerable to a resurgent kind of authoritarian election afterward. And so without being able to put forward a program, a political program that's very appealing and follow through and deliver on the things they said they would do, it can be quite vulnerable to counter-mobilization.
Yeah, I think there are two challenges there that are worth highlighting. One is keeping pro-democratic forces united to clean up and reform the system because you have almost inevitably a state bureaucracy and institutions that have been packed and corrupted and in many cases weakened by the previous government. This has been a real challenge in Poland where liberal democratic forces have now been in power for three years, but they've had a really difficult time rooting out corrupt and authoritarian elements within the state. I think the Magyar government is going to be much more aggressive and luckily has a massive parliamentary majority to be able to do it. I think they're going to be much more aggressive in purging the state of authoritarian and corrupt elements. And that's double-edged. There are a whole series of debates about that, but I think Americans should be watching both Poland and Hungary.
The other challenge, in addition to just simply cleaning up the state after an authoritarian episode, is the one you pointed to, which I think is even more difficult, which is actually coming up with an alternative programmatic agenda that appeals to a majority of citizens over time. Magyar is going to try a fairly center-right approach, a fairly liberal conservative approach. In the United States, I think the alternative will almost certainly be more center-left, but that just is a remaining challenge for democratic forces. There's not yet a program or an ideology that can excite people the way that the far right does in the 21st century West.
Yeah. Maybe Brazil is another example that's sort of in progress in this regard, which is to say that there was an election that ousted Bolsonaro from power and brought Lula back. And the fragility of that coalition is on display all the time. At the same time, Bolsonaro has been held accountable for the coup attempt in ways that hasn't been possible in the U.S. But what do you make of Lula's trajectory going forward?
Well, I mean the Brazilians have done better, certainly better than the Biden administration did in cleaning up and holding accountable those who assaulted democratic institutions. The guy who tried to undermine Brazilian elections is in prison today, which is a far cry from the guy who tried to undermine our elections in the United States is in the White House today. So in that sense, the Brazilians did much better. But politics is hard and incumbents are not popular these days and Lula's old and Lula is in a statistical tie with Bolsonaro's son in this year's presidential elections.
And so politics is really hard. It's not always as we would like. It is not clear whether Lula will win reelection. I think Brazilian democratic institutions have proven Brazilian enough that even if Bolsonaro's son wins the presidency, I don't expect a lot of backsliding, but you always want to keep authoritarians out of power.
Right. So maybe we can return stateside and talk a little bit about what's been going on in the U.S. There's a lot. Last week or the week prior, there was an indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, that is a federal indictment from a grand jury bringing charges about wire fraud and things like that. And the main claim is that the Southern Poverty Law Center misused donor funds. And the context is that the SPLC had provided remuneration to informants to try to share information then with federal law enforcement authorities prior to major far right neo-Nazi or Klan actions and are now being charged with federal crimes.
One of the things that has been interesting and perhaps somewhat distinct from what we might've seen a year ago in this context is that there's been an overwhelming response condemning this indictment and the targeting of the SPLC by many hundreds or even thousands of nonprofit organizations and civil rights organizations and legal organizations really trying to rally to stand up for the ability of civil society to be autonomous and to not be singled out for targeting and punishment by the government. And yet the potential impacts of this could be very far reaching, not just for the SPLC, but for the broader ecosystem of civil rights organizations. What do you think of when you heard the news about the federal charges being brought against the SPLC?
Well, this is classic authoritarian behavior. Authoritarians, it is what in Latin America we call lawfare, the use of prosecutors, the use of the law in a selective targeted way to go after critics and political opponents. Orban didn't do it quite so much, but it's something that Chavez did in Venezuela, that Rafael Correa did in Ecuador, that's been widespread in Turkey and obviously in Putin's Russia. And the Trump administration has been seeking to prosecute critics really across the board. It has failed miserably in many cases of really prominent national political critics. People like Jim Comey and some sitting elected officials, senators. Those efforts have been sort of bumbling and failed.
But there have been a series of attacks on media outlets and civil society organizations. Media Matters is one, ActBlue is another, and most recently the Southern Poverty Law Center that I think have been effective in several ways. First of all, you don't have to achieve a conviction to seriously punish civil society organizations. Many of these civil society organizations, they're not super well-funded. And going to court, defending themselves in court is a really, really costly endeavor. It is taxing. It generates a ton of anxiety. It drains resources tremendously. Very often leads civil society organizations to lay people off, to cease doing the work that they want to be doing because they're defending themselves and in some cases to have to shutter entirely.
And it also sends a powerful message to other civil society organizations who are to know that just being brought up on charge, just having to go to court, just having to lawyer up can be crippling. And so this seems like just another example of that. Without getting into the details of the case, I think this is clearly an episode of trying to use the law to bully, intimidate, harass, and weaken civic opposition. Again, the Trump administration has had a mixed record at best in actually securing prosecution. I would say less than that. It's been pretty unsuccessful. But as an intimidating device and weakening civil society organizations and sometimes draining them resources and costing them access to funding, it's been somewhat successful.
Yeah. I mean what really strikes me about this case so far is the reaction of others across the civil society and business ecosystem to this. To be clear, the SPLC has been accused of a crime, but not convicted of one, right? And yet there was news that came out yesterday that both Fidelity and Vanguard were preventing donor-advised funds in their control from being used to support the SPLC. And this is an organization that has not been convicted of a crime, right? And yet the signal that the government's actions about it and its sort of acceptability as an autonomous organization does damage anyway, right? So I think everything that you said really aligns with my take as well. I would say a couple of other interesting international examples are related to claims about say foreign agents, right?
So the law that Putin passed that was one of the most damaging laws was this sort of foreign agents law that then we saw proliferate across different backsliding contexts, including India, that shut down the operations of many nonprofits and civil society groups in those countries because they received any funding, for example, from a U.S. foundation or a U.S. quasi-governmental or governmental agency for civil society and rule of law support. And so the word lawfare I think is right, which is to say there's a plausible reason why that they can justify on security grounds or something the restriction of a sector, but then the way that it's applied or enforced is clearly to try to either bully or put out of business autonomous civil society in general.
So let's talk a little bit about the other big news that's just breaking yesterday about the Callais decision in the Supreme Court and its implications for the Voting Rights Act. You and Dan in your book, How Democracies Die, talk a little bit about the Voting Rights Act and its implications for helping the United States to finally realize, at least on paper, its potential as a multiracial democracy and the necessity of legal and enforceable instruments to ensure a multiracial democracy in the U.S. So what was your reaction to the news that the court had dramatically restricted the way that section two of the Voting Rights Act can be applied going forward and effectively eliminating the sort of element that required or that protected anyway race-conscious districts in the U.S.?
Yeah, I guess I have two answers to that question. I mean, at the end of the day, I found it pretty devastating. This has been coming for a while and really it predates Trump. There has been a movement among conservatives and within the court to gut or dismantle the Voting Rights Act for a long time. Reporting suggests this has been a mission of John Roberts since his days in the Reagan administration in the 1980s. So this has been a long-term project to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, which I think as you noted, that's what made the United States a modern democracy. That's what allowed us to call ourselves a modern democracy was when we passed the Civil and Voting Rights Act, which extended and protected civil and voting rights for all of our citizens.
And I tend to share Ruth Bader Ginsburg's statement a few years ago that eliminating the Voting Rights Act because there aren't cases of egregious denial of African American right to vote is like throwing away an umbrella in the rain because you're not getting wet. The Voting Rights Act was working. And I think it's impossible for me to say with any certainty what will happen, but I think we have dismantled a critical protection in an area that is always, always from the day that this republic was created, always been a threat to democracy, to equality, to freedom in this country, right? Racial injustice has always been a looming threat. And we finally built up a set of very important legal legislative protections and now we're dismantling them.
So I think it is potentially very, very risky for our democracy going forward. I'm a bit more mixed about racial gerrymanders. I don't think they're necessary for democracy. So that particular part of the Voting Rights Act I don't think is necessarily devastating. I think the problem is this dismantling of the whole... In fact, the prior ruling was worse in the sense that it really began to gut and dismantle the system of oversight and protection against efforts to deny our citizens access to the vote.
Yeah, I think a decision like this has a lot of really unpredictable effects in part because of the way that states then will adjust how they approach districting and elections going forward. And it can also give rise to some very anti-democratic moves right away. One of the things that we have seen today is Louisiana officials announcing that they're canceling their May 16th primary in which some people have already voted apparently to redraw maps based on the ruling. And this is perhaps, in a very strict way, legally justified based on the Supreme Court decision, but in a normative, the small D democratic way is deeply concerning.
And so it can give rise to these other anti-democratic moves and interfere with elections or create uncertainty and chaos around the elections that can be deeply damaging to their security, to people's trust in the elections process and the overall outlook of how they break down in the end. The other thing that I thought and I haven't actually read the decision carefully, but I've read some commentary about it, is the implication that it's just much harder to demonstrate or bring claims that can stand around racial discrimination. And that one of the pieces of evidence that can't be admitted or that won't be considered is the impacts on people, right?
So for example, if Black voter participation declines, if turnout goes down, that that might not necessarily be valid evidence unless there's proof that the intention was to drive it down, right? And I just think that part of the jurisprudence changing in that way will have implications for lots of different types of claims of discrimination going forward. So yes, I think it's a very far-reaching decision and the immediate aftermath of it in impacting the elections and the primary season itself already is very striking.
Yeah. I mean, I am deeply disturbed by this move to establish as the official line in this country is now that racism is no longer a problem and that we don't need any kinds of public policies that are sensitive to or provide any oversight in terms of racial discrimination. We are told by the state, we're told officially that racism is not a problem and we're not allowed to try to combat it. And I think we know very well what the consequences of that are. Yeah. The other concern which you alluded to is this is just going to accelerate a wave of win at any cost gerrymandering, which is a deeply, deeply... I mean gerrymanders always existed in the United States and it's always been a very undemocratic process, but it is becoming more open.
Partisan gerrymandering has been not only blessed, but even embraced by the Supreme Court. So it's got full legitimacy. The wind is back and is now I think likely to be carried out repeatedly all the time wherever a party's able to do it. And the degree to which it distorts the vote, the degree to which you get a massive distortion between how people vote and the representatives that they get is extraordinary. And I think it's important to remember that there are few, if any, democracies in the world that allow gerrymandering. It existed in Hungary. Hungary was not a democratic regime, but it's hard to find a democracy where you get this kind of gerrymandering. It is an extraordinary undemocratic process and the Supreme Court has just allowed it to accelerate.
You mentioned that you didn't think that racial gerrymanders were really required for a multiracial democracy. Can you talk about in the absence of it what other electoral institutions or systems are available as alternatives to ensure multiracial democratic power sharing?
I mean, the argument for racial gerrymandering would be the inability in electorates in a constituency in which say African Americans were a minority, let's say 15, 20, 25% of a district or of a state. If they were systematically unable in our plurality electoral system, our first-past-the-post electoral system to elect representatives because white candidates always won, that would be an argument for, I mean, there'd still be a debate, but there'd be an argument for racial gerrymandering. If African American candidates are routinely able to win elections in multiracial constituencies in which African Americans are a minority, as Barack Obama was at the national level in 2008, then I think the argument, the need for racial gerrymandering is lesser.
When racial gerrymanders began back in the late 20th century, there were far fewer African Americans getting elected in majority white districts. It was rare. It's less rare today. It's much more common today for African American or Latino or Asian American candidates to be elected in majority white districts. And to me, I mean, that's the idea on a multiracial democracy, right? People of all racial backgrounds should be able to get elected in a multiracial electorate. And we're a hell of a lot closer to that in the 2020s than we were in the 1980s. Obviously it's debatable whether the willingness of majority white electorates to elect African Americans is sufficient that we can let go of racial gerrymanders. I don't know if that makes sense.
Not my area of expertise.
Yeah. I mean, I think multi-member districts is another way of dealing with this, right?
Part of the problem is plurality electoral systems. Yes.
