How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

This was recommended to us a couple of months ago, as a way to understand how this person saw the state of the nation and what this person most feared.

I put off finishing it. But to ship things back to the library and help declutter the house:

On pages 24 and 25 you find their key indicators of authoritarian behavior.

1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game.
   • Reject Constitution or willing to violate it
   • Imply need for antidemocratic measures (e.g. cancelling elections)
   • Endorse using force, mass protests, etc to change government
   • Attempt to undermine election legitimacy
2. Deny legitimacy of policital opponents.
   • Describe rivals as subversive
   • Claim rivals are existential threat
   • Baselessly describe rivals as criminal
   • Baselessly describe rivals as foreign agents
3. Toleration or encouragement of violence.
   • Ties to armed gangs, etc
   • Encourage mob attacks on opponents?
   • Refused to condemn violence
   • Praised violence in past or elsewhere
4. Ready to curtail civil liberties of opponents.
   • Supported laws or policies that restrict civil liberties
   • Threatened legal or other punative action against critics
   • Praised repression elsewhere

The main villain of the book is Trump, of course, with his "erosion of norms," which sounds a little like the classic "The fight started when he hit me back."

The book starts with Nixon, and then jumps to Garland (what happened to Bork, hmmm?) "Why was most of the norm breaking being done by the Republican Party? ... Republican voters rely more heavily on partisan news outlets than Democrates do. ... Rush Limbaugh, ... all of whom have helped to legitimate the use of uncivil discourse, have few counterparts among liberals." It goes on to describe the tit for tat escalations.

The lack of self-awareness is staggering. Occupy, Antifa, the violent wing of BLM: The violent mob attacks are leftist. The rejection of the democratic rules of the game is (for the moment) from the Democrats. The curtailing of free speech is leftist and Democrat. Threatening the media was something Trump did (to his shame), but he did not and could not follow through. Threatening and silencing individuals and groups is commonplace--from the left.

And it isn't undermining an election's legitimacy to notice that there's been fraud. We've all known about Chicago, and Minneapolis, and several other hot-spots, for years. No doubt it's a shock to the patient when the doctor says there's a tumor, but that's not a good reason to conceal the diagnosis.

They have a valid observation in the "Saving Democracy" chapter: "if President Trump were impeached without a strong bipartisan consensus, the effect would be to reinforce--and perhaps hasten--the dynamics of partisan antipathy and norm erosion that helped bring Trump to power to begin with. As much as a third of the country would view Trump's impeachment as the machinations of a vast left-wing conspiracy--maybe even as a coup." Got it in one, there.

They hope for a broad coalition against Trump that includes (e.g.) "evangelicals and secular feminists." At this point (as they noted but I didn't see them analyze) we have a religious divide, not just a political one, and that kind of coalition just isn't going to appear unless one or both sides give up their religion.

They don't want the Democrats to abandon "identity politics."

They recognize that their goal of "a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economies that empower all" has never been achieved, but they consider it "America's great challenge." With the current definition of "social equality" (i.e. interchangeablity, every group/sex equally represented everywhere), I don't see how it is possible. And I notice that liberty doesn't appear in their list of desiderata.