Daniel Ziblatt Quotes

Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.

when societies grow so deeply divided that parties become wedded to incompatible worldviews, and especially when their members are so socially segregated that they rarely interact, stable partisan rivalries eventually give way to perceptions of mutual threat. As mutual toleration disappears, politicians grow tempted to abandon forbearance and try to win at all costs. This may encourage the rise of antisystem groups that reject democracy's rules altogether. When that happens, democracy is in trouble.

No single political leader can end a democracy; no single leader can rescue one, either. Democracy is a shared enterprise. Its fate depends on all of us.

Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized; George Packer’s Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal; Evan Osnos’s Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury; Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure; Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman’s Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die; Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart; and Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. I also suggest you read the January/February 2022 issue of the Atlantic. For contrast, and decidedly more upbeat, is Robert Putnam’s The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. The public hearings held by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol should be required viewing and are readily available online.

Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy—making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process. Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy.