‘Completely uncharted territory’: The threat to US democracy in 2024

Steven Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard University who studies democratization and authoritarianism, with a focus on Latin America. In 2018, he and Daniel Ziblatt, a fellow Harvard government professor, published “How Democracies Die,” which examined the problems in American politics in the context of other democracies’ backsliding into authoritarianism.

One of the book’s conclusions was that, in the modern era, democracies generally do not end in sudden coups. Rather, they decline gradually as polarization divides a nation and key institutions such as the judiciary and the media weaken.

Over centuries, two unwritten norms have helped preserve the American system, according to Professors Levitsky and Ziblatt. They are mutual toleration, in which parties accept each other as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, in which politicians exercise restraint in using their institutional powers.

“Today, however, the guardrails of American democracy are weakening,” the book concludes. 

The slim, wonky