Steven Levitsky [00:00:00] There’s a sector of the U.S. electorate, relatively small, but decisive, that doesn’t pay much attention to politics, doesn’t have a real partisan attachment, doesn’t have really clear ideological views, doesn’t follow politics very closely, may or may not vote, but if they vote, and many of them will, they will likely pull the lever for the opposition because they are unhappy with the status quo.

Alex Lovit [00:00:28] Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present, and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. My name is Alex Lovit. I’m a senior program officer and historian with the Foundation. Since this is our first episode, I’ll say a word about who we are and what we hope to accomplish on this podcast. The Kettering Foundation is a nonpartisan, nonprofit operating foundation. Our mission is to advance inclusive democracies by fostering citizen engagement, promoting government accountability, and countering authoritarianism. Democracy is our thing, and that’s what this show is about. On each episode, I’ll interview a guest who can shed light not just on the day-to-day events in the news, but also the big picture of trends affecting our democracy. That’s why the show is called The Context.

We hope to keep you informed about the major issues affecting democracy in the U.S. and around the world. That’s a serious topic and one that deserves every citizen’s attention, especially given the threats we’ve seen to democracy in the last few years. But we’ll also do our best to make this podcast easy to listen to, and hopefully even a little fun. My guest today is Steven Levitsky, a professor of political science at Harvard University and author of several acclaimed books, most famously two bestsellers which he wrote with Daniel Ziblatt: 2018’s How Democracies Die and 2023’s Tyranny of the Minority.

Levitsky recently agreed to serve as a senior fellow for the Kettering Foundation, and there’s a reason he was tapped for this role. He’s a leading academic expert on democracy, and in recent years, he’s devoted a lot of thought to the problems of American democracy and how to communicate about these issues to the public. Levitsky has spent his career studying various forms of government: democracies, autocracies, and regimes in between. And what he’s really an expert on is the durability of governments. He’s written books on why some dictatorships last for decades, while others fall to coups or infighting, and about why some democracies maintain public trust while others backslide towards autocracy. When an expert as experienced and acclaimed as Steven Levitsky says that American democracy is in trouble, it’s time to sit up and pay attention.

Levitsky points out that from the very beginning of the Republic, the U.S. Constitution included an unusual number of counter majoritarian elements, which bring with them the risk that a minority of the country’s population can control the government or block the majority from passing its preferred laws. That’s why his latest book is called Tyranny of the Minority. But he argues that shifts in the coalitions of the United States’ two major parties have increased the impact and risk of these counter majoritarian institutions within the last few decades. So, what he’s really saying is that even though he sees some immediate threats to democracy in 2024, if we really want to understand what’s gone wrong, we need to understand institutions and trends that have existed for decades. And if we want to revitalize our democracy, we’ll need to be thinking about structural reforms long after this year’s election. One quick verbal footnote: During this conversation, Levitsky and I toss around the word “malapportioned,” and it belatedly occurred to me that a definition might be helpful. Malapportionment is a political science term for elected bodies where districts have different numbers of people. For example, for most of American history, it was common for state legislators to represent different numbers of constituents.

In Alabama in the early 1960s, the largest state senate district had 14 times as many people as the smallest, and the majority in the state Senate was elected by only about a quarter of the state’s population. Alabama voters sued, claiming that their diluted voting power violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and in 1964, the United States Supreme Court ruled that state legislative districts should contain roughly equivalent populations. Most Americans today have never heard of this, but it was a major step towards making state governments more representative and more small-d democratic.

Today, the malapportionment in the federal Senate is even more severe. The largest state, California, has nearly 70 times as many residents as the smallest, Wyoming, but both states are represented by two senators. And the smallest 25 states, which collectively elect a majority of senators, contain only about 16% of the nation’s population. That’s not going to be as easy a problem to solve as the issue of malapportionment at the state level because it’s baked into the fundamental structure of the U.S. Constitution. And not everyone would agree that it’s a problem at all. But what I take away from Levitsky’s latest book and the conversation you’re about to listen to, is that people concerned about American democracy need to be thinking about these basic structural questions. Just how democratic is the United States? And what reforms might be necessary to ensure that our government is controlled by democratic majorities?

Dr. Steven Levitsky, welcome to the Context.

Steven Levitsky [00:05:43] Thanks for having me, Alex.

Alex Lovit [00:05:44] You’re an award-winning tenured Harvard professor. You’re also a bestselling author. You’re about as accomplished as it’s possible for a political scientist to be. When did you first decide to pursue a career in political science?

Steven Levitsky [00:05:57] I have always been passionate about politics since I was very, very young. I had an uncle who used to talk to me back in the mid 1970s about the politics of the Middle East, and I have just always been fascinated by politics, particularly international politics. And, um, growing up I had two consistent loves: baseball and politics. And it was clear pretty early on that I didn’t have much of a future in baseball. So, politics.

Alex Lovit [00:06:27] Your 2018 book, How Democracies Die, co-written with Daniel Ziblatt, another Harvard professor, represented something of a career shift from you. Uh, you long been a respected academic, but then you became a bestselling author and something of a public intellectual. Why was it important for you to reach a broader audience?

Steven Levitsky [00:06:45] Well, I should say it was a little bit of an accident in its origins. Daniel is an expert on European politics who spent a lot of time studying the breakdown of democracy in Europe in the 1920s and 30s. I’m an expert on Latin America and spent many years studying democracies and often democratic failure in Latin America. And when Trump first emerged on the scene in 2015-2016, Daniel and I had a series of conversations literally in the line for coffee about how we felt like we’d seen this movie before. We’d seen some of the discourse, some of the language, some of the dynamics that were emerging in American politics. We’d seen it in the regions that we studied, and it trolled us. We felt like we’d seen this movie before. We didn’t like the way it ended. So, we decided to write an op ed on whether Donald Trump was a threat to U.S. democracy, which was the result of many months of conversation, but a book agent read that op ed and contacted us and said, you guys have to make a book out of this. We obviously were engaging the public through our op ed, but we’d never thought about writing a book until this agent raised the idea, and she coached us through a book proposal. We’d never done a popular press book and helped us get a contract, and then we had to get a lot of training, a lot of editorial assistance in writing a book for a popular audience, because I don’t know how many political science books you’ve read, but they’re pretty dull, and you have to write in a very different way to reach a broader audience. So, it was a really educational experience for me, a very rewarding one, but it wasn’t something that I anticipated doing. I kind of backed into by accident. And then with the success of How Democracies Die, we were able to speak to a broader audience, which, again, is not something I ever planned on or expected. But given how serious a set of problems we face today, given how potentially threatened our democracy is, I’m very grateful to have this opportunity to engage in the public debate, to tell people what I know, and to warn Americans of some of the threats that we face.

Alex Lovit [00:08:53] So if you’re saying that first popular press book, How Democracies Die, was a little bit of an accident, this second one, 2023’s Tyranny of the Minority, also written with Daniel Ziblatt, must have been a little bit more intentional. You knew what you were getting into this time. Yes. How did you think about the impact you wanted to have?

Steven Levitsky [00:09:09] How Democracies Die was mostly an effort to draw on our experience, Daniel’s in Europe, mine’s in Latin America, of democratic crisis and democratic breakdown in other countries to kind of describe the process and to warn Americans, to sort of give Americans a sense of the warning signs of what could happen here. After publication of the book, we got a lot of questions when we would give public talks from journalists in a couple of different directions. One of them is, what do we do? And so, we decided to write this second book because we wanted to dig deeper into the question of how we got into this mess. And secondly, really grapple with this question of what do we do? How do we get out of it? So yes, it was a much more purposeful project. It was harder for us, though, because this one focuses much more on the United States and areas that are really quite far from my area of expertise—the U.S. Constitution, the origins of the U.S. Constitution, the possible reforms to the U.S. Constitution. That, for us, that felt like it was skating pretty far from our comfort zone and took a lot of work.

Alex Lovit [00:10:17] In Tyranny of the Minority, you write “The U.S. contains an unusually large number of counter majoritarian institutions, which include a malapportioned Senate, an electoral college where small states are overrepresented, a Senate filibuster that can require a supermajority to pass legislation, and one of the most difficult-to-amend constitutions in the democratic world. Can you walk us through how these factors, these counter majoritarian aspects of the American system contribute to democratic breakdown.

Steven Levitsky [00:10:46] Well, I don’t think we know if it will contribute to democratic breakdown, although it might. Mostly it just makes the United States less democratic than other established democracies in the world. So think about the 2016 election. In 2016, the guy who won fewer votes for the presidency became president, and the party that won fewer votes for the Senate won control of the Senate. That president and that Senate went on to nominate and confirm three Supreme Court justices, dramatically transforming the character of the Supreme Court. Had we had basic majority rule, in which the winner of the most votes wins, had we had basic majority rule for the presidency and for the Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court would most likely have a 6-3 liberal majority today. That’s really distortionary. That is, in effect, minority rule. A minority party is able to systematically thwart and sometimes govern over electoral majorities. And that not only shouldn’t happen, in our view, but it doesn’t happen in most other established democracies. The U.S. is an outlier. It’s the only presidential democracy with an electoral college, every other one directly elects presidents. It has one of the most malapportioned senates in the world, Argentina and Brazil are a tiny bit worse. We’re the only established democracy that routinely uses a filibuster to create, basically, a supermajority rule for the passage of regular legislation. As you noted, we’ve the hardest constitution in the democratic world to change, and we are the only established democracy in which there are no term limits or retirement age for Supreme Court justices, so Supreme Court justices can rule against majorities for generations after their appointment. So, we have an unusually counter majoritarian system, which in and of itself, I think is inherently undemocratic. The way in which it may, may contribute to the weakening or collapse of our democracy is right now, it is protecting and empowering an authoritarian party. This was not always the case. These institutions have existed for as long as the republic has existed. It was never a partisan issue because at least what the Senate and the Electoral College do is they have a bias towards sparsely populated territories. It is a rural bias. That’s always been beneficial to states like Vermont and Wyoming. It’s always been unfair to states like Texas and California, but it never had a partisan effect until the 21st century. It’s only in the 21st century that our parties have been divided along urban-rural lines. In the 20th century, both parties had urban and rural wings, so it didn’t have a partisan effect. Now, for the first time, we have a predominantly urban party, the Democrats, and a more rural, small-town party, the Republicans, and that, through no fault of the Republicans, favors the Republicans. It gives them a leg up in the Senate and the Electoral College and therefore the Supreme Court. So, the Republicans don’t have to win national majorities to wield power. Usually in a democracy, parties are kind of like firms in a market. If you lose, you’ve got to change leadership, change your message, find a way to appeal to a broader electorate. The Republicans don’t have to do that. They don’t have to sit back and say, whoa, we need to figure out a way to regain a national majority in the United States because they can win with less than a majority. And I think that is a disincentive for a party that is radicalized. It’s a disincentive to moderate and to broaden its appeal. And that, I think, may be harmful for democracy. A party that doubles down on a candidate who tried to overturn an election is problematic for democracy. If the Republicans had to win more than 50% of the vote to win control of the Senate and the presidency, they would be under greater pressure to find a different candidate and a different strategy.

Alex Lovit [00:15:07] Well, so you’ve just said something that I think is really important, which is that, you know, although the structures that we’ve just been talking about—the malapportioned Senate, the filibuster, the lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices— these aren’t new, but something that is new is the political alignment that makes those older structures increasingly dangerous, in your argument. And I guess you’ve talked a little bit about the urban rural divide and how that increasing political division is risky for this political structure that we’ve long had in the United States. I wonder if you could also talk a little bit about the racial coalitions of the parties and how that plays into the dangers of this minoritarian politics right now?

Steven Levitsky [00:15:46] Sure. We spend, uh, a full chapter on this in Tyranny of the Minority and it’s a complicated issue. But maybe the central problem facing the country today is that the Republican Party entered the 21st century unambiguously as America’s white Christian party, as the party that was a home for self-identified white Christians. And they did so at a time that the United States was becoming much, much more diverse and more racially egalitarian. The story goes back half a century. Back in the 1960s, when the United States first became a multi-racial democracy with passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965. When that happened, at the time of that passage, the Republican Party was the country’s minority party. Ever since the New Deal, the Democrats have been the largest party in the country and the Republicans have been the minority party. And like good political parties everywhere, they looked around for ways to put an end to that, to expand their base and become a more successful national political party. The civil rights revolution gave them that opportunity because southern whites were overwhelmingly Democrats, overwhelmingly Democrats. Had been since the Civil War, and southern whites didn’t like the civil rights revolution, were pretty uncomfortable with the civil rights revolution, and particularly with government policies aimed at ending racial inequality. Whether it is desegregation, bussing, affirmative action, fair housing policies, all these government efforts to reduce or combat racial inequality generated a fair amount of resistance. Not among all whites, of course, but among a fair number of whites, particularly racially conservative whites. Because the Democratic Party, nationally, was associated with civil rights, and this became more and more the case in the late 60s, early 70s, the Republicans decided they had an opportunity to win over disgruntled southern white voters. And they were correct. And for 20 years, beginning with Barry Goldwater, continuing with Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, and continuing in a different way with Ronald Reagan, who appealed very explicitly to white evangelical Christians, the Republicans systematically sought what we might call racially conservative white voters, appealed to them, and succeeded. And by the 1980s and into the 1990s, Republicans really were, became, at least electorally, on par with the Democratic Party, if not the dominant party in the country. Between 1968 and 1988, for 20 years, the Republicans won every presidential election, except for the Watergate election in 1976, which is a little bit of a fluke. So, this appeal to southern whites and racially conservative whites in the wake of the civil rights revolution was very successful in making the Republicans a dominant party, an electorally successful party. But what it did was it established the Republicans as the home for racially conservative whites. They basically spent 20 years recruiting racially conservative whites into the Republican camp. What they didn’t anticipate, or I think what they couldn’t anticipate was how much America would change in the 21st century. Thanks in large part to a massive wave of immigration that began in the 1960s, but also major steps towards racial equality, slow, gradual, but ultimately very significant steps towards racial equality, America became a completely different society in the 21st century. One in which, first of all, racial hierarchies were being seriously challenged. And second of all, white Christians ceased to be an overwhelming electoral majority. So being America’s white Christian party and winning a majority of the white vote was a good deal electorally for the Republicans in the 20th century. It was not a good deal for the Republicans in the 21st century. For example, Reagan in 1980, won 55% of the white vote, translated that into a landslide election victory. Mitt Romney, 32 years later, 2012, won a whopping 59% of the white vote and lost the election. So, by the 21st century, the Republicans are winning the white vote, but losing the American vote. And that led to panic on a couple of levels. First of all, the Republicans began to have great difficulty winning national majorities, winning elections. They only won the popular vote for the presidency once in the 21st century. But secondly, and I think more fundamentally, a good chunk of the Republican base began to feel threatened. The change in this country’s racial hierarchies over the last 50 years, but particularly the last 20-25 years, has been dramatic. The number of nonwhite members of Congress has quadrupled since the 1980s. For the first time ever, the percentage of congresspeople who are African American mirrors the percentage of the population that’s African American. There’s been a huge change. The Supreme Court, back in the mid 1960s, 9 out of 9 were white men. Now 4 out of 9 are white men and only 6 are even white. So major, major change in our political institutions and also in our society. The era in which our social hierarchies, our economic hierarchies, our cultural hierarchies are overwhelmingly dominated by white men has ended and ended pretty rapidly. And that’s been threatening to the status of a certain number of white Americans. Many, many Trump voters, not all of them, obviously, many of them feel like the country they grew up in in the 20th century is being taken away from them in the 21st, and there’s pretty good evidence that that’s had a radicalizing impact on a number of Republicans. So, Republicans kind of herded racial conservatives into their camp in the late 20th century, and that base has radicalized underneath them in the early 21st century.

Alex Lovit [00:22:19] So is what you’re saying that the racial motivations give the motivation to seek, uh, minoritarian rule, and then the counter majoritarian aspects of the American system provide the opportunity?

Steven Levitsky [00:22:32] Certainly an opportunity. I don’t think it’s intentional. Again, these institutions have been there forever. The institutions haven’t changed. And in fact, there’s a debate within the Republican Party between sort of traditional conservatives and more radicals about the status quo. There are, more mainstream Republicans say, look, we actually have a pretty good deal with this system as it is. The Electoral College benefits us. The Senate benefits us. Let’s not blow the place up. Whereas the more radical wing of the party is not really thinking about using institutions to preserve their power, but rather represents a more anti-system sentiment. I think what our institutions do is weaken the incentive for national Republican leaders to rethink their strategy, and sort of allows them to double down on a radical strategy at relatively low electoral cost. I think it’s a coincidence, an unfortunate coincidence, that these institutions and the transformation of the Republican Party into a less than fully Democratic minority party, that’s sort of an unfortunate coincidence.

Alex Lovit [00:23:44] In Tyranny of the Minority, you put a lot of emphasis on the policies and procedures that thwart democratic majorities from controlling federal policy. So that’s basically a structural argument. In How Democracies Die, you put a lot of emphasis on the need for politicians to exercise tolerance and forbearance, which is kind of a cultural argument. How do you see the relationship between the structural piece and the cultural piece. Are the counter majoritarian structures driving the political culture of intolerance? Or how do you see that?

Steven Levitsky [00:24:15] Our shift from a focus on preserving preexisting norms to a focus on the underlying, actual formal institutional rules of the game reflects an evolution of our thinking, but also a change in American politics. Unfortunately, the norms of mutual toleration and forbearance that we highlighted in How Democracies Die, which were clearly already frayed when we wrote the book, they’ve been largely blown up. We really are operating in a very different polity now, in which, there are certainly places at the local level, at the state level, some politicians who continue to work by those norms, but those norms are no longer predominant, I think, in American politics. We’ve kind of blown through them such that it made less sense to us in 2023 to sort of focus on preserving norms that had really largely broken down. And so, we looked at this deeper problem, the deeper problem of Republican radicalization and the way that interacts with our constitution and our institutions.

Alex Lovit [00:25:21] You clearly see Donald Trump and a Republican Party that enables Donald Trump as a serious threat to American democracy. Given the current state of polling, it seems almost certain that he will be the Republican nominee in the upcoming election, and also that the election will be close. It’s quite plausible that Trump might win in 2024, a similar victory that he won in 2016, that he might lose the popular vote, but win the Electoral College. And if that happens, you can say, see, I told you so. The U.S.’s anti-majoritarian structures are enabling this, uh, you know, threat to democracy. But based on current polling, it’s also plausible that Trump might win an outright majority of the popular vote.

Steven Levitsky [00:25:59] It is.

Alex Lovit [00:25:59] If that happens, do you still think that there’s an argument that these counter majoritarian structures are part of the problem? That is, does the counter majoritarian nature of the American political system help to explain the popularity of Trump’s brand of anti-democratic populism?

Steven Levitsky [00:26:13] For sure. So, you’re right. It is entirely possible that Donald Trump will win the popular vote in 2024. I think it’s slightly more likely that he wins the Electoral College. But there is a phenomenon that is really evident across the democratic world today. There is a very, very high level of public discontent with the status quo and public discontent with incumbents. Joe Biden, if you can imagine, is actually more popular than most of his peers governing Western democracies. If you compare Biden to the prime minister of the U.K. or Trudeau in Canada, or Macron in France, or the prime minister of Germany, all of them are in worse shape politically than Joe Biden. In Latin America, in democracies in Latin America, and Latin America is mostly democratic, 19 of the last 19 presidential elections have gone to the opposition. In no election since 2018 has an incumbent won a democratic election in Latin America. We are in a very intense anti-incumbent mood across the democratic world, for reasons—partially have to do with Covid, they partially have to do with economic insecurity since 2008-2009, probably exacerbated by social media, certainly there’s a lot of research showing that. I don’t think we have a full handle on it, but one thing is clear, people are in an anti-incumbent mood just about everywhere. That will hurt Biden and will help Trump in the 2024 election. Most Americans have chosen a side, they have a party, it’s clear who they’re going to vote for. But there’s a sector of the U.S. electorate, relatively small, but decisive, that doesn’t pay much attention to politics, doesn’t have a real partisan attachment, doesn’t have really clear ideological views, doesn’t follow politics very closely, may or may not vote, but if they vote, and many of them will, they will likely pull the lever for the opposition because they are unhappy with the status quo. And that’s going to benefit Donald Trump. So, if Trump wins the popular vote, it will not be because a majority of Americans are authoritarian. It will mean that a majority of Americans are unhappy with the status quo, which is clear. So, what does that mean for our argument? I think that since the very beginning, the Electoral College has been a flawed institution and a potentially undemocratic institution. There are many elections in U.S. history where it’s been irrelevant because the outcome of the Electoral College has been the same as the outcome of the popular vote, but that’s not an argument for keeping the institution. The institution is unfair. Sometimes it has benefited Republicans, sometimes it has benefited Democrats. But any institution that allows the loser of the popular vote to win the presidency is potentially undemocratic and ought to be gotten rid of. So, our argument, even if Trump wins the popular vote, our argument for eliminating the Electoral College doesn’t change.

Alex Lovit [00:29:18] As you point out in this book, the United States’ system is already something short of fully democratic or fully majoritarian. And back in 2002, you wrote a book, Competitive Authoritarianism, about how some regimes can be called authoritarian, but nevertheless hold elections and hold elections that might be, to some degree, actually competitive. Should we be thinking of democracy and authoritarianism as less of a binary and more of a spectrum? And what kind of warning signs should we be looking for that we’re losing our democracy?

Steven Levitsky [00:29:53] Ha. Good question. So, we definitely should see democracy and authoritarianism as a continuum rather than a binary. And that’s always been the case. I mean, the United States, even by standard political science definitions of democracy, by which I mean free elections, all adults can vote, and there’s a broad protection of civil liberties. When political scientists talk about democracy, that’s what we mean. By that definition alone, the United States wasn’t a full democracy till 1965. We were a hybrid regime for most of our history. And especially since the end of the Cold War, many, many, many countries in the world, the former Soviet Union and Africa, some in Latin America, have been hybrids. They hold elections, but the elections may not be entirely free or maybe the playing field is tilted—incumbents are able to kind of bully the media and buy off the private sector and intimidate the opposition so that there are elections, and they may even be competitive elections, but they’re not fair elections. This phenomenon of hybrid regimes that have real elements of democracy, but also elements of authoritarianism, they’ve always existed, but they’ve been very, very common since the end of the Cold War in much of the world. That’s why we wrote the book Competitive Authoritarianism. The United States has, despite the limitations that we point to and despite real backsliding, I think since 2016, continues to be above the bar. I would consider the United States a democracy today. It’s less democratic than many of our counterparts in Western Europe, but it still sort of meets the minimum criteria for democracy. But why have we backslid? So, Freedom House, for example, which is one of the many global indexes that measures the level of democracy across the world, has a global freedom index that scores all countries every year from 0 to 100. The United States ten years ago got a score of, I believe, 93, it was in the low 90s, which put us broadly on par with Canada and Germany, Japan, U.K. Today it gets a score of 83, which is still considered democratic, but it’s below Argentina and it’s tied with Panama and tied with Romania. Not where we ideally would like to be. Why have we experienced this backsliding? Well, we had an effort by an incumbent president to violently overturn the election. We have efforts at the state level to restrict access to the vote, to make it harder for citizens to vote. You don’t actually see that in most democracies. In most democracies, the government makes it easy for people to vote, that’s not really an issue. And maybe most importantly of all, we have had increasingly violent threats against election workers, election officials, violent threats against public prosecutors, violent threats against elected officials. One of the things that’s come out in the recent biography of Mitt Romney, and also the forthcoming book by Liz Cheney, is how many Republican politicians are making decisions, like the decision on whether to impeach or not or convict or not Donald Trump, big decisions that affect our democracy, they’re making these decisions, in part, out of fear of what will happen to them if they vote otherwise. So many Republican politicians say and some have told me in interviews, retired Republicans, that their colleagues are fearful of what could happen to them or their families if they vote against Trump. You ask for signs that democracy is in trouble or that democracy is backsliding? That’s a sign. Violence is a sign. Political parties or politicians who do not systematically, unambiguously, and publicly denounce violence. That’s a sign that democracy is in trouble. And, of course, the cardinal rule of democracy is accepting the results of elections. So, when politicians or parties begin to question election results or are not unambiguous in accepting election results, that is another sign that democracy is in trouble.

Alex Lovit [00:34:12] Well, now that you’ve scared everybody, let’s talk about what we can do about it. In Tyranny of the Minority, you proposed 15 reforms, all of which are basically policy proposals. These are reforms that would increase access to voting, for example, automatic voting, registration reforms that would make elections more directly majoritarian, for example, replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote for president, and reforms that would make governing bodies more responsive, for example, abolishing the Senate filibuster. Explain the strategy here. How would these reforms help to protect and strengthen American democracy?

Steven Levitsky [00:34:46] I think ultimately it would help to strengthen American democracy more than protect it. These are a set of important reforms. Some of them are constitutional, like abolition of the Electoral College. Others are not—eliminating the filibuster, automatic voter registration—these are not constitutional reforms. But they’re not reforms that are going to happen before 2024. And some of them aren’t going to happen any time soon. So, the reforms that we propose in chapter eight, though very important, are not going to save our democracy in the short term. We need to take other steps to save our democracy in the short term. One of the things that we propose and that I advocate is the forging of a much broader coalition in defense of democracy than we have now. We need to bring together politicians, religious leaders, business leaders from across the political spectrum, from AOC to Liz Cheney, everybody in between, including Bush Republicans, including center right business and religious figures. They need to be brought together in a single coalition that very publicly seeks to isolate and defeat MAGA. That is the only way we can ensure that we keep Donald Trump out of the presidency, which is the most imminent threat to our democracy. So, our institutions and the institutional reforms that we call for are not going to save us in 2024. What we do think, though, is it will help to create a more majoritarian democracy in the sense that at the same time that we, of course, protect basic minority rights and civil rights, we have a system in which electoral majorities can win and electoral majorities can govern, which is something that exists in most democracies in the world, but doesn’t exist in the United States. And that will do a number of things. One, it will force parties to win national majorities to win. You won’t be able to sort of preserve a lot of national power with 47-48% of the vote. And secondly, it will reduce the gap between public preferences with respect to policy and outcomes. Today, particularly for young people, there is a sense that our institutions and that our political system doesn’t represent them. Take gun control. Vast majorities of Americans support different forms of legislation to control firearms and yet it’s been almost impossible to get gun control legislation through. Voting rights legislation, a few years ago, had pretty broad majority support, couldn’t get through the filibuster. Abortion legislation, climate change, let’s see, there is a lot of legislation that majorities of Americans, particularly younger Americans, support and that are not getting through the legislature. And so, a more majoritarian system, where electoral majorities are translated into governing majorities and where governing majorities are able to govern would I think, hopefully, increase the legitimacy of our system. We’ve seen a troubling decline among Americans, but especially among younger Americans, in not only satisfaction with democracy, but belief that our system is truly democratic. Young people, and it’s not surprising, given that the loser of the popular vote has won the presidency twice in the 21st century. Young people are growing up thinking that the system they grow up in isn’t really very democratic. So a system that translates electoral majorities more directly and more consistently into legislative majorities and policy majorities, I think, would be a positive step in the medium term.

Alex Lovit [00:38:24] So you’re drawing a distinction there between the short term and the long term, and I want to try to ask about both of those. Thinking about the longer-term proposals, you’re obviously seeing a moment of crisis right now with this upcoming election being a moment of potential crisis for American democracy. And yet, at the same time, you’re also keeping one eye on the long game and proposing several proposals that are, frankly, would be quite difficult to implement, including some that would require amending, as you point out, the most difficult constitution to amend in the world. Why do you think it’s important to continue to talk about those longer-term solutions, even in this moment of immediate crisis?

Steven Levitsky [00:39:07] That’s a great question. You know, the U.S. Constitution is difficult to reform, but the United States has a long tradition of reform. Americans have a long tradition of working to make our system more democratic. George Washington wrote a letter to his nephew the year that we wrote the Constitution, 1787, describing the new constitution as an imperfect document and stating that it would be up to future generations to improve upon, to improve the Constitution. And we’ve done just that from the passage of the Bill of Rights two years after the Constitution was written, to the gradual extension of suffrage, to the very important Reconstruction reforms, to the reforms of the Progressive Era, to the civil rights legislation, which wasn’t constitutional but were important legal reforms. For most of our history, Americans have worked to make the system more democratic, and we’ve kind of just stopped doing that in the last 50 years. Since about 1970, which is the last time that we made a serious effort to abolish the Electoral College, came very, very close to abolishing the Electoral College in 1969-70. Since then and then since particularly the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, there have not, over the last roughly half century, been serious efforts to improve our democratic system. And there really hasn’t even been public debate about it. So, for most of us who are adults today, we grew up in a world where institutional reform wasn’t really on the agenda. It became even something that was virtually unthinkable. It wasn’t part of our day-to-day thinking. And that’s unique in American history. There have been movements to make the system more democratic. So, we think, first of all, it’s important to get back to that tradition of striving to make our system more democratic. And we think it’s very important to begin a public conversation because as long as people are not even thinking about change, as long as there’s no public conversation, no public debate, no public discussion of change, change can never happen. So, these are long-term changes, and we believe very strongly that the first step, a necessary step towards any kind of institutional change or reform, is beginning a public conversation and a public debate. That’s what we hope to do. So yes, we absolutely need to take steps to preserve our democracy in the next 12 months, but the crisis of recent years has revealed a number of flaws in our system that maybe we didn’t grow up thinking much about, but they became increasingly clear. And so, we need to also be thinking about, again, getting back to this tradition of a more reformist America and creating a more democratic system.

Alex Lovit [00:41:53] Let’s talk about the shorter term for a minute. You mentioned the desire for a broad coalition, basically to oppose Trump in the 2024 election. And obviously, what you’re asking for there is for people to put aside their policy preferences and to focus on this threat to democracy, which is, you know, harder to do if you’re on the right. You know, you’re asking to give up some policy preferences. In the longer term, I imagine American democracy can only endure if we have two parties that represent distinct ideological or coalitions, but each are fully committed to democracy. How do we get to that?

Steven Levitsky [00:42:34] We absolutely need to have two democratic, small-d democratic parties in this country for our democracy to survive. This idea of a broad coalition is a short-term thing. We need to get to a point where the right wing and the left wing are not united together, but rather competing against one another. That’s what democracy is all about. Voters need to have a choice. That’s very, very important. But in the short term, when democracy is threatened, it’s really important that we do exactly what you said, and it’s very hard, which is set aside our short term policy ambitions for the good of preserving democracy with the understanding that none of us right, left or center, whatever our policy preferences, none of us are better off if we don’t have a democracy to pursue our goals in. You’re right that in 2024, this broad coalition is going to have to line up behind the Democratic Party candidate, which makes it in some sense harder, like more of a sacrifice for conservative politicians or, say, business leaders, people on the center right to get behind this project. But my own view is that this will only work if both sides sacrifice, which means that progressives are going to have to very publicly and willingly set aside some cherished policy goals to make room at the table for conservatives and Republicans who are committed small-d democrats. All of this sounds very easy, you know, when a professor is talking about it. It’s really hard in practice. And I don’t think we’re really even very close to that. I’m talking about much more than the Lincoln Project running some cute ads. We really need important figures on the right to be campaigning very publicly, arm in arm, in effect with Democratic Party figures. And that means there has to be a very explicit, very public sacrifice on both sides. And again, I don’t think we’re very close to that.

Alex Lovit [00:44:41] We’re about out of time here and I wanted to end with some advice for our listeners. So, for folks that might have been listening to this conversation and are thinking, oh boy, this is a pretty scary moment for American democracy, what’s one thing that every American could do right now to help support American democracy during or in the aftermath of the 2024 election?

Steven Levitsky [00:45:04] Well, there are lots of things. Let me start with the most obvious, which is vote and help people vote. Whether that means just ensuring that your friends and family vote or going out to register people to vote. But we are all better off as a country if most of us vote than if fewer do. The second thing that’s, I guess pretty obvious, is making sure that we hold our politicians accountable. When our politicians do things that are antithetical to democracy or condone violence or threaten their rivals, when they break the basic norms of democracy, they need to be held accountable, especially politicians, that we support, our own party’s politicians. So, liberals need to hold Democratic politicians accountable, and conservatives need to hold Republican politicians accountable. The third thing, maybe a little less obvious, and I’m sorry I don’t have anything sort of revolutionary to say here, but go out and join organizations. Democracy is much, much better off if we citizens are actually engaging in politics or more broadly in civic life. There’s a tendency in the, you know, the last 10 or 15 years, for us to do a lot of our political engagement online, but, you know, liking something on Facebook or retweeting something is not really engaging in politics, and it’s not engaging in a politics that’s proving very healthy for us. A lot is gained from actually leaving one’s house and going and joining or working within an organization, going to public meetings. One has to interact with other people. One has to keep sharp one’s skills of civility and tolerance and dialog and cooperation. And an organized society, one that is capable of organizing and doing things is much better able to resist authoritarianism or abuse than one that is not organized. So, we are much better off if all of us goes out every week, it does even matter too much what the organization is, but goes out and joins and participates in real civil society. Not online civil society, not fake civil society, but real on the ground, face-to-face interaction.

Alex Lovit [00:47:20] Well, true to your professorial roots, you have given us all some homework here, and I appreciate the advice and I appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us on the Context.

Steven Levitsky [00:47:30] Thanks so much for having me, Alex. It’s a pleasure.

Alex Lovit [00:47:36] The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The opinions expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the Kettering Foundation, its directors, or its officers. I’m Alex Lovit, a senior program officer and historian with the Foundation. Research assistance provided by Isabel Pergande. Episode production by George Drake Jr. Kettering’s Director of Communications is Melinda Gilmore. To connect with the show, please email thecontext@kettering.org. To subscribe to Kettering’s e-newsletter, visit Kettering.org. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review or tell a friend about the show. We’ll be back in this feed with more conversations about democracy in a couple of weeks.