Summary of Tyranny of the Minority By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt : Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Tyranny of the Minority By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt : Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

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Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die, urge the US to reform its antiquated political institutions before it's too late. They argue that the US Constitution is a vulnerability to attacks from within, allowing minority rule. They argue that the US is at a crossroads, either becoming a multiracial democracy or ceasing to be a democracy at all. They use examples from various countries to explain why political parties turn against democracy and suggest what can be done to save it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223604471

Willie M. Joseph

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INTRODUCTION

On January 5, 2021, Georgia elected its first African American and Jewish American senator, marking a brighter, more democratic future. This event was a precursor to the democratic future that generations of civil rights activists had been working to build. However, the next day, January 6, 2021, saw a violent insurrection incited by the president, highlighting the decline of democratic institutions. Multiracial democracy is hard to achieve, as it requires equal protection of democratic and civil rights under the law. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act established a legal foundation for multiracial democracy in America, but it has not fully achieved it.

Access to the ballot remains unequal, with African American and Latino citizens being three times as likely to be told they lacked proper identification to vote and twice as likely to be wrongly listed on voter rolls. Nonwhite citizens still do not receive equal protection under the law, with Black men more likely to be killed by police, stopped and searched, and arrested for similar crimes. However, America is becoming a truly multiracial democracy, with a majority of Americans now embracing ethnic diversity and racial equality. By 2016, America was on the brink of a genuinely multiracial democracy, serving as a model for diverse societies across the world.

The assault on American democracy was worse than anticipated in 2017, and it was worse than anticipated in 2017, when the country was beginning to take root. The scale of America's democratic retreat was sobering, as Freedom House's Global Freedom Index gave countries a score between 0 and 100 each year, with 100 being the most democratic. In 2015, the United States received a score of 90, which was roughly in line with countries like Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, and the U.K. However, after that, America's score declined steadily, reaching 83 in 2021.

American democracy should have been immune to backsliding, as scholars have discovered two virtually law-like patterns regarding modern political systems: rich democracies never die, and old democracies never die. However, America stands apart in two ways: first, the reaction to growing diversity has been unusually authoritarian. Rarely in western Europe has the rise of xenophobic and antiestablishment parties taken on the overtly antidemocratic form that we have seen in the United States.

America also differs in that extremist forces actually ascended to national power, whereas in Europe they have been largely confined to the opposition or, in a few cases, coalition governments. Societal diversity, cultural backlash, and extreme right parties are ubiquitous across established Western democracies, but only in America did such extremists actually win control of the national government and assault democratic institutions.

The Trump era has been criticized for its failure to address the threat to American democracy, but the problem is more endemic and deeply rooted in our politics. To reverse America's democratic retreat, we must understand the causes of it, draw lessons from other countries' experiences, and understand why America is prone to backsliding. Reactionary voters are a minority in the United States, and the Trump-led Republican Party has always represented a political minority. The core institutions of our democracy are also a problem. The Constitution, designed in a pre-democratic era, allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities and sometimes govern them.

Institutions that empower partisan minorities can become instruments of minority rule, especially when they are in the hands of extremist or antidemocratic partisan minorities. The more imminent threat facing American democracy today is minority rule. By steering the republic away from majority tyranny, America's founders left it vulnerable to minority rule. Understanding how we got here is a principal task of this book. The more urgent question is how to get out.

FEAR OF LOSING

On October 30, 1983, Argentina's first democratic election in a decade