It took a few weeks to arrange this remote conversation with Daniel Ziblatt, professor of government at Harvard University and resident faculty associate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.
Ziblatt, who co-authored the widely read and prophetic “How Democracies Die” (2018) with Steven Levitsky, director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, was too busy documenting the United States’ rapid slide into authoritarianism. Then, the university where he teaches became the unofficial leader of the resistance to the nascent Trump regime – and “that has come at a cost,” he says at the beginning of the conversation.
The two professors, along with Lucan Way, professor of political science at the University of Toronto, wrote an essay in early May in the New York Times attempting to define when a system of government transitions from democracy to authoritarianism. The columnists proposed a simple metric, the cost of opposing the government. Based on that, they argued that the US has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism. How porous is that line?
“It’s one of the things that we’ve learned by looking at the evolution of democracies around the world, that there can be authoritarian ambitions of a leader, they try to institute a new regime, people change their behavior in response to this. But it’s always reversible, and the real question is, ‘Will this regime really take root? [Will it] endure?” Ziblatt tells Kathimerini.
Is this what US President Donald Trump is trying to do? “I think so. I mean, maybe not intentionally, but the effect is that.” One aspect is the attempt to circumvent the normal legislative process by issuing multiple executive orders (“the highest number of executive orders since the Franklin Roosevelt administration,” he says) with the smallest amount of actual legislation being signed through the normal legislative process in over 50 years.
This is despite the fact that Republicans have a majority in the House, the Senate, and the presidency, while the Supreme Court is dominated by Republican appointed judges.
A second dimension, he continues, is freedom of speech and freedom of association. “Right now, in the US, if you are not a US citizen, the normal rights that we have expected around freedom of speech seem to be altered…That’s a major change.”
Has there ever been in the history of America a more wide-ranging assault on democratic governance? “There is a long history of authoritarianism in the US. We don’t even have to go back to the 19th century. In the 20th century, we’ve had the so-called Palmer raids of the 1920s, where socialists’ and anarchists’ rights were violated and people were deported; the McCarthy era; and just the existence of Jim Crow in the Sout,h where voting rights were dramatically repressed for African American voters. I mean, there’s a strong authoritarian tradition in the United States, running all the way up to Richard Nixon. Nixon’s effort to surveil all the Democratic Party leadership was also a clear kind of authoritarian movement. I think what’s different about this, is how wide-ranging it is…which includes some of the core mainstream establishment institutions in the United States,” Ziblatt says.
