Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s research on authoritarianism and democratic breakdowns globally now seems relevant to the US as Donald Trump’s possible return and Project 2025’s ultra-conservative blueprint threaten to erode constitutional rights and undermine democracy
For years, Harvard University professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt researched forms of authoritarianism globally and how democracies die. They knew democracies were fragile but thought the United States (US) somehow managed to defy gravity. Levitsky and Ziblatt believed the American Constitution, the national creed of freedom and equality, the historically robust middle class, high levels of wealth and education, and the large, diversified private sector should inoculate the US from any democratic breakdown.
Is American democracy in danger was a question they felt they would never be asking. This changed when precursors of democratic crisis began emerging in the US—politicians increasingly treating rivals as enemies, intimidating the free press, threatening to reject the election result, and weakening the buffers of democracy such as the courts and intelligence services.
Levitsky and Ziblatt felt dread like many Americans but tried to reassure themselves that things could not be really that bad even as US states, whom jurist Louis Brandeis once praised as ‘laboratories of democracy, were in danger of becoming labs of authoritarianism’. Those in power sought to rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even rescind voting rights to ensure their victory. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s worst fears came true when Donald Trump was elected the president in 2016. Trump was the first person to be elected to the post without previously holding a public office in American history. He was not also known to have much commitment to constitutional rights and showed authoritarian tendencies.
Donald Trump’s likely reelection in the 2024 US presidential poll in November is an even scarier proposition going by what Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for a second Trump administration, appears to suggest. The blueprint proposes to completely overhaul the US executive branch and do away with the famed checks and balances. Conservative think tank Heritage Foundation has spearheaded the project with help from other conservative groups.
Project 2025 has been billed as a policy wish list for the next Republican president. It seeks to expand presidential powers and an ultra-conservative social vision for the US. It proposes to put the federal bureaucracy, and independent agencies under direct presidential control to allow the president to implement policies directly. The blueprint proposes eliminating job protections for government employees with the possibility of political appointees replacing them.
The blueprint seeks to slash money for research and investment in renewable energy. It wants the next president to stop the war on oil and natural gas and to replace carbon-reduction goals with efforts to increase energy production and security.
Trump rejected Project 2025 in July 2024, claiming he had nothing to do with it. He called some of its ideas ‘absolutely ridiculous and abysmal’. Trump’s campaign advisor Chris LaCivita slammed the conservative groups behind the blueprint calling their operation ‘a pain in the ass’ to them despite ties between the former president, his running mate JD Vance, and the Heritage Foundation.
In August 2024, the Centre for Climate Reporting, a not-for-profit investigative journalism organization, published secret footage purportedly showing two people posing as donors and speaking with Russell Vought, a former Trump administration staffer who authored a chapter of Project 2025. Vought was heard in the footage saying he was not worried about Trump distancing himself from Project 2025, claiming the former president blessed the project and was very supportive.
The Washington Post reported Trump flew on a private jet with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts before speaking at an event of the think tank where he praised Roberts for ‘doing an unbelievable job’. Trump lauded the Heritage Foundation’s policy work in 2022. He said that the think tank would lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what their movement will do when he gets a ‘colossal mandate’.
In April 2014, Roberts told the Washington Post about briefing Trump on Project 2025. Roberts told Politico in March that Vance was going to be one of the leaders—if not the leader—of their movement after the senator was named as Trump’s running mate. The Heritage Foundation was reported to have privately rooted for Vance to be the pick.
Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts’s book on a peaceful Second American Revolution for conservative voters. Vance praised the Heritage Foundation as the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Trump. CNN reported over 140 former members of the Trump administration were involved with Project 2025.
What does all this mean and are we living through the decline and fall of one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies? Levitsky and Ziblatt have addressed these questions in their international bestseller How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future (Crown, 2018). The book shows how democracies were no longer dying at the hands of men with guns. Coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns during the Cold War. This is how democracies in places such as Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay died.
During the last decade, military coups toppled President Mohamed Morsi’s government in Egypt (2013) and that of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in Thailand the following year through power and coercion. Levitsky and Ziblatt highlight how elected governments have caused most democratic breakdowns since the end of the Cold War through democratic backsliding. Constitutions and democratic institutions may remain in place, and people may vote. But elected autocrats undermine the substance of democracy while maintaining its veneer.
Levitsky and Ziblatt show how subversion of democracy may be made to appear legal as the legislature may sanction and the courts may accept it and even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy. Often this subversion is made in the name of making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process. Newspapers may still publish but be bought off or bullied into self-censorship.
Levitsky and Ziblatt write citizens continue to criticise the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. People often do not realise what is happening and may continue to believe they living under a democracy. The book is a must-read for those who seek to understand the warning signs and the fateful missteps that have wrecked democracies globally. It cites examples of citizens rising to avert democratic crises by overcoming divisions.
History, the authors underline, does not repeat itself; it rhymes. They say the promise of history, and this book hopes that they can find the rhymes before it is too late. It may not be too late in the case of the US but certainly via-a-vis India. The kind of democratic backsliding that kills democracy, which the book focuses on, appears similar to what India has faced over the last decade. The book should help one understand why the crisis in India may be irreversible as the foundation of Indian democracy may never have been strong enough.
Mutual toleration, the idea that political opponents accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, which relates to politicians exercising restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives, have secured American democracy. They have all but disappeared in the Indian context, highlighting how democracy may no longer have the basis it needs to survive in its truest sense.
