Thank you to everyone for joining us for today's webinar. Welcome to the discussion, the eighth 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 US 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, a few brief announcements. The ASH Center acknowledges the land on which Harvard University sits is the traditional territory of the Massachusetts people. We also recognize the continuing presence of the neighboring Wampanoag and Nipmuc nations.
A couple of logistics. Today's discussion is being recorded, and you'll receive a link to the recording afterward. The video will also be available on the Ash Center's YouTube channel, and we encourage your participation. Please submit your questions at any time via the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. We'll make sure there's ample time for audience questions.
Before we go any further, let me introduce Steve Levitsky, who is 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, especially 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.
Steve, what many of our listeners ask in advance of our conversations is what they need to be paying attention to as the most consequential things that could happen for democracy. This is the last of our academic year 2025-'26 conversations on The Breakdown, and I thought it would be useful for us to reflect a little bit perspectively about this summer. So what are the things that you think are the most consequential for people to pay attention to over the next few months when it comes to potential indicators of democratic backsliding? And what are some things that you see as potential hopeful or positive signs of democratic resilience as well?
Okay, a lot there. Thanks again for organizing this and having me. I can't believe this is the eighth session. Shall we go in that order and start with things to look for?
I would say first off, and we were discussing before we came on air that in the Trump administration, it's extraordinarily difficult sometimes to distinguish the signal from the noise because there's a lot of noise and there's always a lot going on. The Trump administration declares its intention to throw a lot of punches. And then it throws a lot of punches, but fewer punches than it says it will throw. A lot of those punches either stop midair or don't land, but some of them do land, and it's a lot of work distinguishing the most important lines of offense. I guess what I am focusing on this summer, I'm going to say two things. One is, I think they're both deeply consequential. One is going to get a lot more attention than the other. The first is the election.
Donald Trump politically is weakening, electorally is weakening. It's been a gradual, but significant weakening over time. The Republican Party is in... It's an uphill battle to maintain control of one or both houses of the legislature. It's unclear how desperate the Trump administration is going to feel and the degree to which it's going to act on that. But this is a group of people that has never accepted the results of an election that continue to develop and put forth a narrative of fraud. They've been doing it around the California election, and it's not just Trump. Mike Johnson is the Speaker of the House and was very explicit in claiming that elections are fraudulent in California.
So we've already seen a national gerrymandering scheme that in the worst outcome could have led and still could lead the Republicans to lose the popular vote for the House and yet retain control of the House. We've seen a lot of talk about seizing ballot boxes, about centralizing control over voter lists, that's probably illegal, and also talk or fears of intimidation at the polls and the like. I don't know how serious the administration is about this. I think there's certainly a chance based on prior precedent that they do a sort of half-assed job of it, and there hasn't been much reporting or evidence coming out of a really systematic campaign. But given the level of corruption and abuse in this administration, this administration is likely to fear oversight.
So an effort to, at minimum, tilt the playing field in this election, if not worse, is... Again, I don't think it's the most likely outcome, but it's clearly possible. This is the moment, in the months coming up, where we will see... If there is a campaign to manipulate in some way the election, I think we will start to see evidence of it this summer. And I worry looking at the rhetoric around the California election this last week. So that is the kind of headline thing that I'm paying most attention to. Another thing I'm paying a lot of attention to that gets a lot less attention is the campaign against multiracial democracy.
Not just democracy, but multiracial democracy. Sometimes it's symbolic, sometimes it's more than symbolic, but the systematic rollback in the Defense Department, in government agencies across the country, in the education department of progress that this country has made towards a more diverse elite, a more balanced national history, and towards a multiracial national identity are being systematically combated by this administration. This is an administration that is trying to roll back, again, not only our democracy, but 50 years of progress towards multiracial democracy.
The kinds of purges that are happening in the military and efforts to pack the military, but also university leaderships and boardrooms across the country, it's setting us back, not to Jim Crow, thank God, but to the late 20th century, the era in which we grew up, which was a different country from where we were in 2020.
So again, this gets less attention and some of it is symbolic, it's not clear. It may be reversible, but I've been struck by how systematic a campaign it has been to restructure our elite and push us backward. At the least, I view it as backward. And I've been struck maybe even more, to be honest, by the lack of societal conversation about that, the lack of societal pushback against it. Do you want me to go on and talk about what makes you hopeful?
No, I mean I might react to a couple of the things you said there.
I mean, just on the last point that you said, the Voting Rights Act was effectively gutted a month ago. And when it was, for many Black activists and Black voters in the South, it felt like an elimination of the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. Voters who were interviewed by journalists were saying that it felt like being kicked down a flight of stairs back to a history that they thought was effectively closed as a chapter of American history, and that it was such an incredibly demoralizing event. It also is potentially quite politically consequential for all of the reasons that you alluded to with regard to gerrymandering.
There was a large mobilization in Selma three weeks ago to repudiate the ruling and basically say the people who struggled for the vision of a multiracial democracy are still going to struggle for that, but the terrain has changed. The Supreme Court is no longer a forum through which that goal can be achieved. And that's a different thing from what many who were struggling for civil rights and racial justice over the last many decades have had to reckon with. So the lack of the public conversation about it, but also the changing political landscape and the levers of power that are at least immediately accessible to pursue those goals are different. That has been felt I think very acutely in many parts of the country and then not in others, and that's what I think you were speaking to.
On the difficulty with distinguishing the signal from the noise, I think you're right that a huge part of it is related to the volume that is constantly coming toward the public. But I think part of it too is just this general problem with backsliding democracies, particularly today, which the problem is there's no bright lines. So as you've written about and others have observed, we're not in a particular era of backsliding or democratic recession, et cetera, where the primary mechanism for the transition is a military coup or a revolutionary movement that seizes control and imposes a new order within weeks. We're in a period that's characterized more by elected authoritarians than dismantling really the constraints on themselves once they're already in the house, so to speak.
So the primary threat to democracy is not coming from outside of the institutions, it's coming from inside the institutions. And that makes it very challenging because when legal jawboning happens, it looks like the government doing what it's supposed to do on paper and it looks like it has a veneer of legitimacy when really what it's doing is dismantling decades or centuries of jurisprudence to try to reestablish a particular political project. That just makes it so hard to understand, what should we be paying attention to as the moments where democracy is most threatened?
Obviously, I agree with what you just said. There are still maybe not quite as bright lines, but pretty bright lines or lines that ought to be bright. Just to mention two or three, the most obvious one, and for me, what has been maybe most demoralizing, is accepting defeat in election is the cardinal rule of democracy. When a sitting government, a sitting president tries to overturn the results of an election, that's about as bright a line as you can get, at least in an electoral authoritarian context, short of bringing out the tanks. And that was not enough to move Republican Party leaders. It was not enough to shake the Supreme Court majority into thinking, 'Wow, this is an emergency situation.' The other one, which I think at least citizens did respond to, is executing citizens, peaceful protesters on the streets. Again, that's a pretty bright line, and we can try to talk about that. I do think that that was a bit or might be too early to say was a turning point, but Americans did pay attention to that, thank God.
Totally. Yeah, it's interesting. It feels like there are inflection points more than turning points. At the inflection points, it's important not to miss it. And elections are certainly some of those moments of not to miss inflection points in the process of democracy making and democracy taking. So those who are for democracy really have to show up in those moments and defend those bright lines. I think that's right. I think others might be related more to very clear rule of law type violations where, say, there's a suspension of the Constitution, or the invocation of a particular article or statute that's super obscure, but is weaponized against a particular set of people or whatever, and those would be pretty clear red lines too. Maybe we can talk a little bit about your reaction to what you see as potential signs of democratic resilience coming this summer or on the horizon, or that if they happen this summer, you would feel encouraged, shall we say.
That's a little harder to speculate on, but... I mean, I do think that defending democracy is a long slog and this is going to be a long four years in which we're facing serious threats. In fact, the threats will continue undoubtedly even after Trump leaves office. But I think we're in a better place right now than we were a year ago. That's a hopeful sign. I mean, one of the measures of slides into authoritarianism that I'm sure we discussed in a previous session was, how much fear do citizens feel in exercising their constitutional rights of dissent or opposition? Are citizens thinking twice about taking normal constitutional legal action to oppose the government? I argued a year ago that a lot of US citizens across many spaces in US society were having to think twice, and they still are. But I think that the level of fear of government retribution... I know this is an evidence-based session and I'm speaking primarily of vibes here because I don't have data, but the level of fear seems a little less.
I talk to fewer people who are obsessed with cleaning their phones when they go through the airport and making sure all their conversations are on Signal than a year ago. So I think that the sort of repressive offensive of the first half of 2025 has certainly not gone away, but it's eased somewhat. The other thing that doesn't exactly... I mean, the Iran war is devastating in so many ways for human beings, for the economies, for the US position in the world, for the international order. It is though a huge mistake, a huge own goal by the Trump administration that is and will almost certainly continue to weaken the administration politically. And in that sense, although it's doing a lot of harm to the United States and the world, it probably will, I think, benefit democracy in the medium run because Trump has put himself in a position where he really can't win and he's going to continue to inflict political damage on himself.
So the effort to get out of this war and to begin to repair the economic damage that the administration has inflicted on Americans is going to be a key issue this summer. I think Trump is really in a terrible corner and will almost certainly continue to weaken as a result. So the continued decline of Trump's public support I think is a really important variable, very, very important. Again, as I've said before, presidents with 60, 70% approval ratings do a lot more damage than presidents with 35% approval ratings. The other thing that gives me hope, again, I'm sorry, this is looking backward and not forward is... I think, and perhaps I said this before, but I want to emphasize, what happened in Minneapolis was incredibly important. I mean, that is as close as we've... I don't like to use the F word much, but that's as close as we got to a sort of fascist or fascist-adjacent offensive when they were just sort of all out.
Maybe it was more performative fascism than real fascism, but they were beginning to deploy paramilitary forces against citizens and with great violence. And Minneapolis slowed that down at least, if not stopped it. History will tell us much more about just how important that was, but to me, it feels extraordinarily important.
Yeah, totally agree. I think looking back on the last couple of years, it feels like what happened in Minneapolis from the community's response side of the equation is probably the most consequential, at least civic, engagement with what's been going on and served as a key inflection point. And what's really interesting is, looking back on that time, it actually happened about a week after the US kidnapped Nicolas Maduro and brought him to the United States, and that was the story. And the debate that was created around that and whether it was a good idea, whether it was a major win for the Trump administration, for democracy, et cetera, was dominating. And then it became completely overtaken by how US citizens were defending democracy and their neighbors in Minneapolis.
So it just feels like that was a key moment where they could not actually dominate and control the information environment, they could not make a winning story out of that in the manner in which they were able to do so around so many other contentious things. And it showed a playbook to other communities for what to do. That was based in literally neighbor-to-neighbor type building/organizing into a resilient and powerful community response. I think the things that I am really paying attention to right now are a set of things that seem to be in motion that have some pretty uncertain outcomes. If the administration succeeds in them, it could be very consequential, and if they didn't, that could also be consequential. One of them is this $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6th insurrectionists and others that the Trump administration thinks the government has been unfair to.
The fate of that idea of whether or not the administration is able to, not just pass as a law, but fund, and then pay materially people who have been not just accused of federal crimes, but convicted of federal crimes, is a very important part of the story of how institutionally and legally resilient our democracy is to creating patronage for a loyal paramilitary organization to the president. And that feels really important to head off at the pass. Now, it's been so politically toxic that the GOP wasn't able to keep it in the set of reconciliation bills that they wanted to pass to fund ICE, which they did get through, but this measure was taken out because it proved too politically radioactive even for Republicans to get behind. So the question is whether there will be another way to make it happen without congressional approval/oversight or whether it will happen down the line when it's less prominent in the news and basically what can be gotten away with here through our institutions. I think that's a really key and important development.
The other one is around some of the confirmations of some of the acting appointees or prospective appointees that Trump wants to make in office. Right now, Todd Blanche, his former personal attorney is the acting attorney general. And yesterday, he just put up his nomination to be the attorney general. Bill Pulte, who is now infamous for his willingness to use his position in the housing authority to potentially persecute people over mortgage fraud claims, now being appointed to the Director of National Intelligence position that's going to be vacated by Tulsi Gabbard. These seem like appointments that are just total loyalist appointments in some of the most important and powerful offices, high offices in the government, and there's a key question about whether those get blocked or whether they go through.
One of the areas that I'm really paying attention to is whether some of the Republicans who were primaried from the right, with challengers who were backed by Trump during their primaries and who lost their seats, Thomas Massie, Bill Cassidy, now John Cornyn, whether they will now act more independently with their votes because they don't have to worry about reelection, they don't have to have the president's approval in favor. They have opportunities now to vote in a way that's more protective of our democratic institutions. I'm curious about the pressure on them to do so, and whether the public can apply more pressure for them to represent that way.
Those are some of the things, in addition to everything that we've already talked about, that I think are really important because they set the stage for the other things down the road, what happens around the elections, whether Trump has in power his closest allies in positions overseeing the 17 intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice or whether he doesn't, whether he doesn't have people in that position of authority. So I think it's worth paying attention to who is where and how much friction they will encounter in trying to maneuver in various ways.
I think those are great things to focus on. We've been waiting for many years for at least a faction of the Republican Party to reach a point where a group collectively declares enough. You're right to point out that there are now a really consequential handful of senators who perhaps have nothing left to lose. I'm still skeptical that they will block. And I think you're right that this Attorney General nomination, Trump didn't have to do this. Trump could have kept him on as acting. This is a real test, and I don't think that...
The costs to opposing Trump, from what I have been told, talking mostly to retired Republicans, are so much more than just electoral. It's not just being primary, it's not just losing your job. There's online harassment, there are death threats, there are future professional opportunities. The way that things have polarized often, one's entire social, familial, and professional circles are either Trumpist or people who need to continue to work with Trump in the administration. The cost of being a pariah in those circles are very high. And unless you're willing to totally cross the river to the other side and become a Never Trumper or you're a pretty eccentric personality like Tom Massie, it's tough. So my guess, sadly, is that they still won't reject this nomination.
I want to go back to something you said about the fear, the change in how afraid people are. I think it is interesting, qualitatively and not systematically at all, that I've noticed that people are maybe more in going-about-their-lives mode than in I'm-seized-by-fear-and-anxiety mode and experiencing major cortisol rises on a daily basis, and things like that when they think about what could happen. This is certainly not evenly felt across the country, there are some people for whom the anxiety and the fear is still very present, but I think you're right more generally that there's been almost kind of a normalization of life under Trump 2.0 in much of the country. There's sort of an interesting question as to why that's happened. Is it because people, they're not afraid because they don't think that we're in a kind of national emergency anymore or is it that there are just periods in people's lives when they want to check out from the national emergency and just live their lives?
Masha Gessen had a piece about it maybe a year or a year and a half ago in the New York Times where they were talking about the concept of internal immigration, which was something that Soviet dissidents talked about. It referred to just a process of basically trying to just check out of politics or at least not take it on and instead go and have quality time with the family, create an amazing garden, do a lot of social and cultural activities, and try to stay below the radar as a way of basically coping and dealing. This was offered as a social phenomenon without judgment, but more an observation about how normal life can be under an authoritarian system or a national emergency. I was similarly reading a book a couple of... maybe a year ago now.
It's Sebastian Haffner's diary, basically, about the changes that happened in the Weimar era. He was a German civil servant and he's sort of documenting what was happening in the country between, say, 1933 and '38. He talks about the first day in which there was the boycott of Jewish-owned businesses in what was then Nazi Germany and how... He sort of went to work that day and it was a mostly normal day, but he came home at night and realized that his Jewish girlfriend hadn't called him at the time he was expecting to hear from her, and then he began to be very worried. She ultimately called him and was just held up, and said, 'I'm sorry I was late, but I'm fine.' They talked about where to go, to the cabaret, that night. They went out on a date and had their night at the cabaret. He sort of talks about how he got very into going to the gym at the time and was very into tennis, and had all these tennis tournaments with his friends, and that that was a big part of his life.
That was a way of dealing with and checking out of what was going on in the country that he felt like he had no power over and no ability to influence. So I only mention this because I think there are probably people who are feeling genuinely empowered in this moment and therefore unafraid. There are probably other people who are feeling not necessarily empowered, but just distracted with other things and therefore feeling unafraid. Then, there are probably people who are still feeling very afraid. I don't know what they're... they could be doing a range of things, but I only mention it because I think sometimes the lack of fear could be a sense of normalcy or complacency. Other times the lack of fear can be because genuinely people see a way out and they feel active and engaged, and they understand their own agency and empowerment to influence the outcome.
Yeah. Clearly, all of those things are going on. It's important to... Also, clearly, some things are being normalized. I think it is fair to say we're sort of becoming complacent around them. Trump's corruption is one. The kind of language that the president uses to treat journalists and opponents and other citizens. I mean, the way he spoke in the interview, this was Sunday, to a journalist was just unthinkable in any democracy or any other era in this country. And I'm still blown away by the fact that he's not really called out for that. On the other hand, some things have not been normalized. Masked heavily-armed security agents bullying citizens in the streets of our cities, not to say ICE isn't out there doing a lot of harm, but that wasn't normalized, that was not accepted by citizens.
It's not right to call it a stalemate, but we've not seen, I don't think, you can correct me if you disagree, the triggering of a large-scale mobilization against this authoritarian offensive. Some have retreated, for sure. I don't think we've seen the kind of collective or societal retreat that I feared a year ago. I think now we do see at least a medium level of energy, increasingly, for better or worse, I think both, channeled towards elections. I think citizens are focusing on... I think most citizens who oppose the government, who are a pretty large majority of Americans at this point, continue to see the ballot box as a pretty effective tool to begin to put an end to this government. And that's good. I mean, a much worse scenario would be one in which we didn't think we could change the government via the ballot box.
Although I take your point that many, many people are still fearful, others are distracted, others have moved away from this very, very high pressure, very intense political moment, collectively, Americans are still out there pushing back and ready for an important election. So I see that, on balance, as positive.
I totally agree with you. I would say one of the things that I really noticed about this Haffner book, when I was reading it, is that he didn't describe any public shows of resistance at all to what was going on. I think that was one of the key differences in what was happening under the Nazi regime in Weimar, which is public acts of resistance went away very quickly, particularly when it came to defending against deportations of Jews and other people in the country, and we don't have that happening in the United States. We have probably historical levels of mobilization happening in the United States. Really anytime something happens, it seems to overstep the boundaries of multiracial democracy and rights. So I think we can feel much more encouraged by the fact of that resistance, and the fact that it's been so disciplined and persistent.
We have a few audience questions that are coming. The first is the question about, 'What now after the Voting Rights Act?' I think you and I touched on this a little bit last time, but maybe it's worth revisiting a bit. We have a few of these questions and they come together to say, 'What happens next after the Voting Rights Act? Can Congress ban gerrymandering? Are there actions that can be taken in light of the Callais decision that will support the rights and representation of Black voters?' What are your thoughts about that, Steve?
Actually, my thoughts have evolved a little bit since last we spoke. The Callais ruling had just occurred in our last session. And I said something to the effect that I was less concerned about this round, although it was terrible than the last round of gutting. Because unlike the 1960s, African Americans and non-white candidates were getting elected across the country in all sorts of districts, including majority-white districts. In conversation with people and listening and reading to people's opinions, I've tempered that view a bit. I think Black-majority districts are obviously not the only way to represent ethnic minorities into democracy. It's actually somewhat debated and controversial. But in the US South, in a context of that much racial oppression and inequality and demonstrated racial abuse until the present, to create a situation where 30% of the population roughly has no federal representation in Congress, given its historically-demonstrated vulnerabilities as a minority, I think, is deeply problematic and a major step backward. So again, it is a somewhat illiberal measure that emerged in the 1980s, these Black-majority districts.
I'm skeptical that we'll get back to them, but there are steps that we can take certainly. So combating gerrymandering is not going to resolve that problem. I mean, it might in part. My guess is the level of collective disgust with gerrymandering is rising. And I think there's an opportunity, especially if the Democrats win control... If they win a trifecta nationally in 2028, there was a serious effort of electoral reform that failed under the Biden administration, there will be another effort. There will be an effort to eliminate gerrymandering. There may be a push to eliminate the law from the late 1960s that requires single-member districts and that allows for proportional representation. I think there's going to be a serious push to change our electoral rules, which are really vulnerable to manipulations we see. So I think at minimum, there's going to be serious debate about electoral reform and about eliminating gerrymandering. Again, any kind of reform in the US context is very, very difficult, but I think there's a chance that we will see actually a national effort to eliminate gerrymandering.
Yeah, I think that's right. I think that what you pointed out about the 30% of the population having no representation at all at the federal level is about a problem with the way we structure our voting, which are these single-member districts and the first-past-the-post rule, as opposed to... What it is, it's a proportion problem. So it speaks to multi-member districts, proportional representation, potentially other ways of voting that aren't just the first-past-the-post, majoritarian-winner-takes-all orientation. There are other ways we could do it. You mentioned the law that prevents that from happening, that can be reversed, an act of Congress could pull that back and allow it to happen, but I don't think that they can constitutionally order that states do this. Right?
States still have the ability to make their own electoral processes, and so it would lead to a sort of patchwork of experimentation around the country for sure. But in order to actually get it in motion in the places where it's the most important, that would require a mass movement that was making the demands for people to be represented fairly through the electoral process and in their elected officials.
Right, and that seems more viable in some parts of the South than in others.
So you're right, we cannot impose... There's no way to impose any particular electoral rules on states, but even the elimination of gerrymandering would increase the likelihood of African Americans getting elected, I think, in Alabama and Mississippi.
Mm-hmm, right. There's a question that came in about, 'How those working in higher ed can support efforts to stem the erosion of democracy in US?' I think you're probably the single best person to comment on this.
Wow. I don't think I've got any deep insights about this nor have I thought really broadly or strategically, so what I'm going to say is probably pretty dull and mundane. First of all, I think it's incredibly important that we do so. Most of us, not you, Erica, but me, are trained in a very disciplinary manner to speak to a really narrow set of scholars. We get rewarded by writing and publishing things that are not particularly intelligible to most Americans. And I think at a moment like this, it is incredibly important that we take advantage of whatever knowledge or insights that we have to speak to the broader public, speak to broader public debates. I think it is our responsibility, at least, as political scientists at a time when democracy's in crisis, just as public health experts did during the pandemic.
It's really important that we speak to the broader public, and that's hard. Actually, I think sometimes we underestimate how hard that is. You've been doing it for a long time, and I think it probably comes easier to you. But learning how to move off the jargon and speak in ways that people who are not trained political scientists and may not even care about political science can relate to and understand, and argue with and debate, and maybe even want to read further about, that takes a lot of work. And I think it's really important work. It's almost a work of translation. I mean, I can only speak for myself, but I've spent most of my precious research and writing time over the last decade writing stuff for a broader audience, writing stuff that I hope that national journalists and politicians will read and think about because I think that's the level of urgency right now.
