Trump's Trials - Two experts on why U.S. democracy is no longer on "sure footing"

Episode Date: July 13, 2024

For this episode of Trump's Trials, host Scott Detrow speaks with Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, the authors of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority.The Supreme Court's landmark decision ruling that president's enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution stunned many constitutional experts. Ziblatt and Levitsky see it as the latest move that has put America's democracy in danger of "collapse." In this episode we dive into the state of America's democracy and what can be done to save it. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify for new episodes each Saturday.Sign up for sponsor-free episodes and support NPR's political journalism at plus.npr.org/trumpstrials.Email the show at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From NPR, this is Trump's Trials. I'm Scott Detro. We love Trump! This is a persecution. He actually just stormed out of the courtroom. This is a persecution. Innocent till proven guilty in a court of law. It's an interesting moment in all of the storylines we have been following this year tied to former President Donald Trump.

On the eve of the Republican National Convention, Trump seems as likely as he's ever been to return to the White House next year. That's after President Biden's disastrous debate performance and the Democratic infighting over whether Biden should step aside. As that has played out, Trump has been remarkably disciplined compared to how he's handled himself on the political stage for the past decade. And on the legal front, the U.S. Supreme Court's remarkable ruling on presidential immunity has frozen all three remaining criminal cases Trump is facing for the time being.

His legal team is also asking a judge to toss his criminal conviction in New York based on that ruling. And remember, he had been set to face sentencing this week, but that was also delayed. So at this moment, we are going to do something a little bit different. We are going to take a big step back and talk to two experts on democracy about what this

all means for the country. What does it mean that somebody openly running on ending criminal investigations into himself, pardoning people who took part in January 6th, and promising to target his political opponents with the Department of Justice has a good chance of returning to the White House. What has happened to America's democratic norms since Trump first started running for president in 2015? How strong or weak is American democracy at this very moment? We'll talk about it with the authors of the influential book, How Democracies Die, in

a moment. On this week's episode of Wild Card, poet Nikki Giovanni says you can choose your family. I recommend dogs. For their faithful, they're intelligent, and they always love you. I'm Rachel Martin. Join us for NPR's Wild Card Podcast, the game where cards control the conversation. Waylon, how much do you think it would cost to buy one of those big digital billboards in Times Square to promote our show, the indicator from Planet Money and Big Lights? In this economy?

I mean, you're probably right. But this question is the exact kind of thing that we find answers to on our show. We take one big economic idea, make it understandable, and you know, even fun. That's the indicator from Planet Money and NPR. The Bear is still one of the most interesting and stressful shows on TV.

And yes, chef, we're recapping the new season. What do we make of Carmy, Sid, and the rest of the kitchen staff? What do we think of all the celebrity cameos? And how does this all compare to the first two seasons? We've got thoughts on thoughts. So listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. And we are back with Daniel Ziblatt and Stephen Lewicki, the authors of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having us. And I want to mostly talk broadly here, but I do want to start with your response to the recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity and broadly what you think that means for American democracy and norms, especially at this moment where former President Donald Trump has a good chance of returning to the White House. Daniel, let's start with you. Yeah, I guess I would make two points.

One, it's clearly an effort to insulate the president and I think, in fact, reduce the possibility of political accountability. I mean, the idea that a president can operate in a really unconstrained way, which is what the outcome of the decision was and commit crimes and potentially get away with it is clearly just by definition a threat to democracy. The second point though I would make is that we have to stop and ask, how did we end up in this situation where a court is making a decision like that? And one of the things that's important to remember is that this Supreme Court that we

have today, the conservative majority, was created when a president who didn't win a majority of the vote, namely Donald Trump, was elected and appointed three judges. And those judges were confirmed by a Senate that actually didn't represent a majority of Americans. So in our book Tier in the Minority, we point out the threats of minority rule. This is really what minority rule has wrought on our political system today. Stephen, anything to add? Yeah, I mean, it was shocking in two additional senses.

One is in democracies around the world, we're really seeing in many places the opposite movement and whether it's in Brazil or in South Korea or many other new and old democracies in the world, Supreme Courts and Constitutional Courts are taking steps to ensure that they check potentially powerful, potentially authoritarian governments against abuse. And to see the US Supreme Court just sort of walk away from that was stunning. But it was especially stunning because these guys are not stupid. They know the state of the US election. They know that Donald Trump attempted to overturn an election and

fomented a violent insurrection. They know he's an openly authoritarian figure and so to open the door in this way at that moment to authoritarianism was just shocking. Why specifically would you frame that as opening the door at this moment to authoritarianism was just was shocking. Why specifically would you frame that as opening the door at this moment to authoritarianism? Donald Trump has been telling us for the last year in a way that stands out even among elected authoritarians in the 21st century that he plans to govern in an authoritarian manner. He tells us he plans to use the Justice Department to go after his rivals. He tells us he plans to use the Army to repress protests under his interpretation of the Insurrection Act. He tells us he plans to mobilize security forces to deport 15 to 20 million people from

the United States. This is potentially involves or will bring about massive violations of civil and possibly human rights. And what the Supreme Court is telling us is that he doesn't have to worry about prosecution for his authoritarian behavior. You know, we've in this space been focused particularly on the criminal cases against the former and possible future president. And I wanted to ask you about that because you write so much in your work about guardrails and norms and institutions and

how the problems are long-term erosions, not some big dramatic moment where everything changes, right? So when it comes to Trump and norms and both the felonies he's been convicted of and the felonies he's been accused of and throw two impeachment trials in there as well where he was acquitted. Do you think if you look at the story, have America's institutions worked or failed? Daniel? Well, you know, they have worked, but they are dramatically weakened and I don't think we should take them for granted.

You know, there was ultimately a transfer of power back in 2021, but you know, some people interpret that as saying, well, okay, we can go home and rest and take it easy, but these things don't work by themselves. Democracy is not a machine that runs on its own. It required in fact, kind of heroic action by people and the institutions themselves are

not the thing that sustained us. I think actually heroic action of, of individual people on the day of January 6th really made a big difference. So I do not rest easy. When you have near crisis like this, you have to stop and ask how did we end up in this situation? Because it could very well happen again. And each time you put your democracy to test like this, it increases the likelihood that the next time it will fully break. And I would also make the point

that since 2016, our democracy has experienced democratic backsliding. It's not a theoretical question. It's not a matter of like this might happen in the future. It's happened. The organization Freedom House, which ranks democracies on a score from zero to 100, the US back in 2016 had a score in the 90s, which put it on par with Germany and Great Britain. Today, Freedom House ranks the US as a score of 83, which puts it on par with Romania and Argentina. And so, the world has witnessed democratic backsling. Our democracy doesn't work as well

today as it did back in 2016. And just to make that very concrete, I mean, this is not just a matter of arbitrary numbers. When you have a political system where violent threats take place against election workers, when you have an effort to block transfer of power, when you have efforts to restrict the vote, then Freedom House gives you a lower score. So our democracy is weaker today than it was in 2016. I want to ask a couple questions that I'm sure you've both had a lot of time to think about. One is this, like this, you've worked on this, you are experts in this field. Your writing has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. What do you make of the fact that many people view your book, How Democracies Die, the warnings

that you're giving, honestly, probably this conversation, these are things that are viewed as partisan and anti-Republican. What do you make of that? You know, these days there's a tendency in many different fora to sort of place everything in sort of left, right partisan lines. And if you take a position, then you must be associated with one camp or another. And that's understandable, I guess, in today's climate. But I think it's pretty good evidence that our position is analytically sound and is not just driven by partisanship. We lay out in both of our books different criteria, which we just didn't invent out

of thin air that draws on decades of political science scholarship, we lay out criteria for democratic and non-democratic behavior. For example, you will be hard pressed to find a scholar of democracy who disagrees with the definition of democratic behavior for political parties being accepting the results of elections were to lose and eschewing violence under all circumstances. If you apply those criteria to the two parties, I think one party scores better than the other. I would just add to this. I mean, one way to think about this is that there are a very

clear set of criteria that apply to parties of the left and the right. And in a sense, it's like calling balls and strikes. If there's parties on the left and the right. And in a sense, it's like calling balls and strikes. If there's parties on the left, Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, that violate these basic principles, then we say they're authoritarian. If there's parties of the right that violate these basic criteria, then we say they're authoritarian. And so accepting elections and not engaging in violence are just two core principles. And so one can, for instance, look at parties of the radical right in Western Europe. In many ways, these are parties that I personally

wouldn't want to vote for, but in some instances, they don't engage in the same kind of violent rhetoric and they accept election losses. And so I think in some instances, it's not as clear cut that they are threats to democracy. The American Republican Party departs company even from parties of the radical right in Western Europe and the degree to which they don't accept election losses and they engage in violent rhetoric Republican Party departs company even from parties of the radical right in Western Europe

and the degree to which they don't accept election losses and they engage in violent rhetoric and threats of violence. You know, so much of your work comes back to these ideas of guardrails and unwritten rules as key things in protecting democracy, not necessarily something that's written in law that you cannot do, but something that is just generally accepted that this is a thing that we do not do in the society. You talked before about the ways that Trump is campaigning very clearly about all these things that he wants to do.

This is somebody who has begun many rallies with videos glorifying the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th and says that he would pardon many, if not all of them. This is somebody who says that one way or another, he will end the criminal investigations into himself if he takes office and he will turn the Justice Department on his political opponents. Being so straightforward about that and having your party, by and large, support it ahead of time, how much does that do to the guardrails and the unwritten rules in this country?

A couple of things. First of all, I don't find myself talking about norms and soft guardrails today or over the last five years as much as I did when Dale and I wrote How Democracies Die. And I think that is because we have, as a society and as polity basically busted through those guardrails those 20th century norms that we described and how democracies die as threatened have basically been shattered nobody expects politicians to underutilize power nobody expects politicians to use forbearance we all expect the other side to use any means necessary to win.

And so I think we're at another stage of defending our democracy, which is defending the hard guardrails, the Constitution, the rule of law, free elections, as opposed to norms. I think that, unfortunately, that's in the rear view mirror. In your book, you said that a country is in very deep trouble when those things are in the rearview mirror. In your book you said that a country is in very deep trouble when those things are in the rearview mirror. Yeah, our democracy is what political scientists used to call an unconsolidated democracy. It's no longer a democracy that is on sure footing. It's a democracy that's in danger of rupture, collapse. Now in terms of Trump's open authoritarianism, I'm not sure what to make of it frankly, but it calls out my attention because even other elected autocrats, some of the most

notorious elected autocrats in the 21st century, Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa, Erdogan in Turkey, Orban, many others, none of them were even remotely this openly authoritarian in their campaign. They didn't talk about locking up their opponents. Even Putin, when he first ran for office, didn't before coming to power, didn't talk about locking up his opponents. They didn't talk about openly violating basic democratic rules before coming to power. So this is one of the most-

You mean at first, right? Early on. At first, right. Nobody has ever, very few 21st century autocrats have campaigned as openly authoritarian in manner as Donald Trump in 2024. I don't know exactly what the implications of that are, but I find it striking. Well, you know, he is campaigning though. So I guess I do wonder what you both think about this.

If somebody is campaigning that way and is a convicted felon who tried to overturn an election and that person wins in a free and fair election, if that is what happens, isn't that in itself a democratic choice that Americans would be making in November? Yeah, I mean, I guess two things. One, to date, Trump has never won a majority of the vote. You know, it's possible. I mean, the way I think I have thought about this over the last several years is that if Trump were to come back into office, he would come into power through the Electoral College. I mean, what's striking is that there's around 30% of voters in most of our democracies that support candidates kind of like Trump. Now, what's distinctive

about the US is that it's much easier to turn that 30% into a governing majority because of our electoral college. So if that happens, that's the process, that's the system, it's fair. Now, but it is possible, and I think this has become increasingly plausible in the last several weeks even, that Trump could win more votes than the Democrats. This would be the first time the Republicans have done this since 2004. Now if this were to happen, again, it's democratically legitimate. He's coming to power. But just because you're democratically elected doesn't mean that everything you do once

in power is democratic. We still have a set of principles that we can use to evaluate whether the behavior of a politician, even if democratically elected, are authoritarian or not. What we've pointed out in our work is that once these guys get elected into power in other countries, they follow a kind of very common playbook. We use the metaphor of a football game or a soccer game. You go after the referees. You try to capture the courts, the intelligence services, investigative bodies to go after your opponents and to protect yourself.

And then the third thing that these sorts of figures do is they try to change the rules of the game, electoral rules, gerrymandering, et cetera, to make it harder and harder to vote them out of office. Now, again, you say the person was democratically elected, so in what sense are they not democratic? The way in which that's not democratic is a core principle of democracy is free and fair competition. And if you're an incumbent who's tilted the rules of the game to such a degree that it basically becomes almost impossible or really difficult to eject somebody from power, then you've behaved in a non-democratic way. And that's the great tragedy and paradox of our era and is which, you know, you can do all of this stuff legally. You can change the rules in a way that's legal, but not democratic. And so a kind of core principle of democracy is that you can throw

the incumbent out of power if you don't like them peacefully. And so if you look at somebody like Viktor Orban, he's been in power since 2010, he's rigged the rules in such a way that's incredibly difficult to eject him from power. It's not impossible, but the degree to which the playing field's uneven means that it's not democratic. You've both in recent years focused a lot more on kind of the big structural changes that as you mentioned earlier in this conversation, the United States just has not addressed compared to a lot of other countries. Given everything you've said about the backsliding of the past decade or so, curious each of you, what is the most important structural change that you would push for if possible at this moment? Stephen? It's always hard to make these choices of single changes.

But I think that- I mean, it sounds like a situation in which someone would be employing triage. So what would your triage, Lispy? Again, I'm not sure I would conflate the two. I mean, we have two different crises. There's a short-term crisis in which an authoritarian candidate

is now a front-runner for the presidency. There are a whole set of steps, not institutional. We're not going to make any institutional changes before November. We need to mobilize as a society and build a very broad coalition against an authoritarian candidate. That's the triage. Until we ensure that our democracy is on minimally secure ground I don't think it's particularly reasonable to be thinking about about institutional reform once we get there. I hope we get there soon

Let me give you two reforms and they're relatively easy ones They're not constitutional reforms one is a whole set of steps to make it easier to vote The United States is one of the only democracies in the world. One, we don't have a constitutional right to vote. And two, where the government doesn't take a series of steps to make it as easy as possible to vote. So automatic registration and voting on a Sunday or a holiday, there are a whole series of steps that we could take to ensure the voter turnout is much higher than it is today. The other step I would take, and not all Democrats agree with me on this, is eliminate the filibuster,

because we are not going to pass other critical reforms, including voting rights, as we saw in 2021, 2022, until we eliminate the filibuster, until we eliminate what has become a super majority rule for passing regular legislation in the United States. Daniel? Yeah, so it is important to remember the reason these institutional reforms are so critical

is that part of the reason we are in the crisis that we're in is not just about Trump, it's not just about the Republican Party, but our entire political system as it has developed over the last several centuries. We've stopped reforming our democracy. And as we've stopped reforming our democracy, it's made it vulnerable to the kind of attacks

that we've experienced over the last several years. And so two things that really make us an outlier in the world are number one, we're the only presidential democracy in the world with an electoral college. Other democracies had them, got rid of them, and we're the only democracy in the world that has lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. And I think these two institutional features as evidenced by the question from the outset about the immunity, when you have justices who are entirely unaccountable, of course justices need to be independent. We don't want them kind of following the whims of democratic publics. But other democracies have figured out a way to deal with this, which they have long terms in office or they have retirement ages. So they're independent,

but there's some limit to their power. In the United States, we suffer from the fact that we have these justices who are in power for their lives. They're not accountable in any way, and they can depart wildly from where majorities are. And so I think eliminating the electoral college and imposing term limits for justice would be at the top of my list. Now I understand, unlike the two suggestions that Steve made, these are much steeper climbs because certainly the first requires constitutional amendment, term limits for judges probably does as well. And so this is hard work, but we've done it before in American history and we need to

be talking about this if we don't want to end up in the situation where again at some point in the near future. That's Daniel Ziblatt and Stephen Lewicki, the authors of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. Thanks to both of you. Thank you. We'll be back next week with another episode of Trump's Trials. Thanks to our supporters who hear the show sponsor free.

If that is not you, still could be. You could sign up at plus.npr.org or subscribe on our show page and Apple Podcasts. This show is produced by Tyler Bartleman, edited by Adam Rainey, Krishnadev Kalamar, and Steve Drummond. Our executive producers are Beth Donovan and Sammy Yenigan. Eric Maripotti is NPR's vice president of news programming. I'm Scott Detro. Thanks for and this summer we are bringing you the entire history of the world. At least the economics part.

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