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Guest Essay
By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Mr. Levitsky and Mr. Ziblatt are professors of government at Harvard and the authors of “Tyranny of the Minority.”
Democratic self-rule contains a paradox. It is a system premised on openness and competition. Any ambitious party or politician should have a shot at running for office and winning. But what if a major candidate seeks to dismantle that very system?
America confronts this problem today. Donald Trump poses a clear threat to American democracy. He was the first president in U.S. history to refuse to accept defeat, and he illegally attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, on the brink of returning to the White House, Mr. Trump is forthrightly telling Americans that if he wins, he plans to bend, if not break, our democracy.
Mr. Trump tells us he plans to prosecute his political rivals, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney and other members of the Jan. 6 Select Committee; deploy the army to repress protest; and order the deportation of 15 to 20 million people, including some legal immigrants.
We have been studying democratic crisis and authoritarianism for 30 years. Between the two of us, we have written five books on those subjects. We can think of few major national candidates for office in any democracy since World War II who have been this openly authoritarian.
The view that Mr. Trump poses a grave threat to democracy is shared by his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, who called him “fascist to the core,” and by his former chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, who described him as a fascist who prefers dictatorship to democracy.
How could such an openly authoritarian figure have a coin flip’s chance of returning to the presidency? Why have so many of our democracy’s defenses seemingly broken down, and which, if any, remain?
We spent the last year researching how democracies can protect themselves from authoritarian threats from within. We have found five strategies that pro-democratic forces around the world have employed. None offer foolproof protection (no democracy could enjoy foolproof protection and remain a democracy), and some of them come with important drawbacks. But our research suggests that in the face of imminent extremist threats, these strategies are the best available.
The traditional American response to extremism is laissez-faire which makes it almost odd to call it a strategy. We rely on the self-correcting power of electoral competition. The belief is that all opinions should compete freely, allowing the marketplace of ideas, or what John Stuart Mill called “the collision of adverse opinions,” to play out. If we let all candidates compete, the thinking goes, good ideas and candidates will ultimately beat out the bad ones.
Electoral competition is, of course, essential to democracy. But a laissez-faire approach has two important limitations. First, in the United States, competition is distorted by an 18th-century institution, the Electoral College, that allows election losers to win power. In one sense, the electoral marketplace worked in 2016 the way it is theoretically supposed to: More Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Mr. Trump. But the Electoral College permitted an authoritarian figure who won fewer votes to become president.
In addition, history shows us that electoral competition alone is insufficient to fend off extremist threats. Good ideas don’t always win out. And candidates seeking to subvert democracy don’t always lose. In the past quarter-century alone, leaders like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Kais Saied in Tunisia and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador have won decisive electoral majorities — and then used their elected offices to undermine fair competition, making it nearly impossible to remove them from office democratically.
Yet democracies are not helpless. There are four other strategies for fending off authoritarian threats from within. One of these is a far more muscular approach, known as militant or defensive democracy. Born in West Germany as a response to Europe’s democratic failures in the 1930s, the militant democracy approach empowers public authorities to wield the rule of law against antidemocratic forces. Haunted by the experience of Hitler’s rise to power via the ballot box, West German constitutional designers created legal and administrative procedures that allowed the state to restrict and even outlaw “anti-constitutional” speech, groups and parties. In the 1950s, these tools were used to ban both a Nazi successor party and the Communist Party. Today, German authorities are investigating the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
Obviously, there are significant drawbacks and risks to empowering public officials to bar candidates or parties from elections. Candidate disqualification distorts electoral competition and restricts voter choice. Worse, the tools of militant democracy are easily abused by politicians seeking to sideline their rivals, as has occurred with some frequency in Latin America.
Nevertheless, most contemporary democracies employ elements of militant........