 Good morning. I'm Thomas Carruthers, vice president for studies here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and also director of the Democracy and Rule of Law program that's sponsoring this event today. Not since the 1970s and the Watergate scandal has the United States been caught up in such a period of scrutiny and doubt with respect to the basic health of U.S. democracy. Serious problems have been accumulating for years, fights over legislative gridlock, electoral integrity, voter access, and many other issues. But a presidential election in 2016 in which not just one but both major parties experienced populist rebellions within the parties and in which a president was elected who openly flouts basic democratic norms and practices has brought the sense of crisis to a sharp peak. Many of the elements of this very troubled state are very particularly American. For many Europeans or others abroad looking at the United States, our president is a quintessentially American figure who is almost unimaginable in the political culture of many other societies. But even though many elements of the scene here are very distinctly American, there's also a strong sense that they hark to problems that we've been witnessing in other democracies and other countries for a long time. Societies degenerating into a kind of polarization that leads to open conflict, fights over elections, and now a leader of dubious democratic fidelity. Thus, for the first time in memory, people are starting to look more seriously abroad for comparative understanding that can help us make sense of where we are and where the country is going. I think there are numerous efforts to develop such comparative understanding underway. But just on the anniversary of the inauguration of Donald Trump comes a book that is going to be, I'm sure, this year one of the most serious in penetrating such undertakings. And that, of course, is the book How Democracies Die by Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The book is a happy marriage of two areas of comparative political expertise. First, Stephen Levitsky is one of America's top experts on Latin American politics with an immense knowledge of regional and national dynamics in Latin America stretching back over many years. Daniel Ziblatt, in similar fashion, brings to bear tremendous expertise on European politics across the 20th century and into the present day. And these are the two natural regions for a strong comparative analysis, Latin America because of its presidential systems and its history of problems of presidential abuse and hyper-presidentialism, and Europe because of its similarity to the United States in many sociocultural and sociopolitical ways. The book is a tour de force, but fortunately, unlike many tours de force, it's also lively, engaging, and I'm sure anybody who reads it will take away a lot of learning and a lot of serious reflection and thinking. So it's really a great pleasure for me to welcome Daniel and Stephen here and give them a chance to present their work and talk about it with me and with all of us. Before I turn the floor over to them, I'd like to note that here in the Democracy and Rule of Law program at Carnegie, over the years we've focused mostly farther out in the world, on the state of democracy and the developing world, and in post-communist countries, but because of recent developments here in the United States and in Europe, we're turning our attention now closer to home as well, and we're going to be doing a number of both writings and events over the next year or two that bring our comparative experience to bear on questions in Europe and the United States. We're doing that with some new support from the Hewlett Foundation, which we're thankful for, and also some ongoing support from the Ford Foundation, so I'd like to thank both of those foundations as well. But I can't think of a better way to kick off this work than having Daniel and Stephen here with us today for a discussion of this book. So, Daniel, without further ado, please come up. Great. Thank you very much for the nice introduction, and thank you everyone for coming this morning, and thank you for the invitations. It's really great to be here to have an opportunity to talk about our book. The book just came out last week, and so it's nice to have a chance to kind of give you a bird's eye overview of it. The way we're going to proceed today, it's sort of tag team. I'm going to first talk for about half the time and then hand things over to Steve. So I wanted to say a couple of words about the motivation of the book, why we wrote this book. Steve and I teach together in the Harvard Government Department, and as mentioned, we have spent a lot of time studying other parts of the world. And we, over the last 15 years, 20 years, and we've taught together courses on democratization, democratic crisis, and other parts of the world. But we were motivated to write this book because we saw some uncanny resemblances between really during the, it began during the primary season, between the rhetoric being used in the American presidential election, as many of you also saw, and other instances of democratic crisis around the world in the past and in the present. So this book was really born literally in the halls of our department as we sort of talked about these things in between classes and our own other research. So many of you were probably also kind of shocked and felt uneasy at the tenor of public debate. We were too, but again, we were particularly worried because we had spent much of our career studying me, Europe, Steve, Latin America. And we saw during the campaign rhetoric from the Republican nominee that really had this uncanny resemblance to a set of criteria or kind of set of warning signs, first identified by Juan Lin's, the great political scientist, as kind of warning signs of anti-democrats that come to power before democratic breakdowns. And in particular, there was kind of four key things that we saw. One, the attack on the media, so accusing the media of being the enemy of the people. This is kind of a classic hallmark that Lin's identified. Questioning the legitimacy of elections by saying, you know, may or may not accept the results of an election, threatening to lock up a rival. And this is clearly a classic hallmark of what people who later will come to power may not abide by democratic rules. And then also encouraging violence or at least, you know, not criticizing violence and actually condoning violence in political rallies. So these were kind of four key warning signs we thought, and many people thought these were just words. And of course, these were just words on the campaign trail. But again, it wasn't just talk. I mean, these were clear hallmarks from our view, again, following Lin's of an authoritarian. And what made it so striking, of course, was in the United States, no major presidential party candidate in American history had ever behaved this way. And of course, we had seen leaders behave this way in other parts of the world. So we felt we had seen this movie before, and we knew the movie usually didn't end well. So we decided we really had to write this book, and we wanted to draw upon our knowledge to try to understand, to draw upon countries and experiences of other countries that had faced democratic crises and overcome those crises, or averted crisis, and other countries that had not averted crisis and try to draw comparative lessons for these to help us understand the American predicament. So while writing this book, though, we came to some conclusions, I think, that depart from how many people today think about the Trump presidency. We came to the conclusion that the problem facing our political system today is not just Donald Trump. It's not his outrageous comments, not his psychology. I mean, it's tempted to be kind of focused on the latest outrage or political gossip. But at some level, we argued in the book, and we think this is right, that this is a distraction. We have to keep our eye on the ball. At the end of the day, we came to realize that Donald Trump was, in fact, not just a cause of America's current crisis, but in many ways a symptom. There's a symptom of deeper and worrying ills in the American political system. So in short, we realized the problem was deeper than Trump. So the way we're going to proceed is I'll talk about, there's sort of three discoveries we made in the process of researching and writing this book. I'm going to talk about the first discovery, and Steve will talk about the other two. So the first discovery is this. The best way to stop authoritarians is to prevent them from coming into power in the first place. So what does this mean? Well, in the context of the United States, this means we have to pay attention to not just why President Trump was elected, but also why he ever became the nominee of a major political party in the first place. So as all of you know, in the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns came around the world in the form of coups. Three-quarters of democratic breakdowns during the Cold War came in the form of coups, the hands of men with guns. Since the collapse of communism, most democratic breakdowns arrive at the ballot box through elections. So demagogues come to power in elections, and once in power, they chip away at democratic institutions and inflict damage on democratic institutions. So grave paradox, really, facing democracies is how does a democracy prevent an autocratic-minded demagogue from getting elected in the first place? Now, through most of American history, the U.S. has happily avoided this paradox. But it was not because there were not potential demagogues, and it was not because voters wouldn't have supported these demagogues. We have a tendency, I think, to whitewash our own history and to forget that, and we make this case in the book, that there's really a continuous strand of would-be authoritarians who generally gain around 30% of support and opinion surveys, going back at least through the 20th century. So this strand runs from Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company in the extremely popular anti-Semite in the 1920s, who considered running for president in the mid-20s, who was quoted in Mein Kampf, glowingly. Huey Long in the 1930s, Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, George Wallace in the 1960s. So Gallup poll data exists going back to the 1930s, and Gallup poll data generally shows that these types of figures had about a 30% approval rating, 30-35% approval ratings going back to the 1930s, which is consistent with the same figures of support that Donald Trump has today. So I don't think it's actually too much to say that there's a continuous strand of authoritarianism running as a subcurrent in American politics, as in most countries, or as in many countries. The United States is not unique in this way. But here's the point. In American history, none of these figures ever made it close to the presidency. They were popular, but they were kept far from power. So how and what changed in 2016? We emphasize two contributing factors in the book, and we describe this much more in detail, but I'll just present these very schematically to you this morning. The first thing, so what changed in 2016? The first thing that changed is the way we picked our presidents. Until 1972 in America, and for really the first three-quarters of the 20th century, presidential candidates were selected by party leaders in what some political scientists and a process that described as peer review, in which party leaders who worked up close with politicians saw politicians, potential presidential candidates in their moments of crisis and their moments of triumph, worked closely with them, could evaluate them, would get together, and decide who the candidates were. Now this is the system the critics call, for good reason, the smoke-filled backrooms, where party leaders would get together and select candidates. Voters had very little say, primaries were not binding, not all states had primaries, and so of course voters picked presidents in general election, but voters were irrelevant in picking candidates during the pre-general election period. So again, this system, the smoke-filled backroom, certainly had downsides. It was exclusive, it wasn't very democratic, and sometimes some pretty mediocre candidates emerged out of this process. We can think of Warren G. Harding as kind of often held up as an example of this kind of figure. But all systems have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of this system was that it worked well in keeping extremists from ever becoming viable candidates in the first place. It was a screening system, a kind of filtration system that effectively kept these types of figures out. Now we know American history changed in many profound ways in 1968, the tragic year of 1968, and one thing that also changed after 1968 was the way we select our presidential candidates. Presidential selection system was opened up, the smoke-filled rooms were open, primaries were made binding, and voters could now select their candidates. The general election was now proceeded with what we've all experienced with the long continuous primary season where voters now had a say. Now this system was certainly more open, but at the time that this reform was introduced in the 1972, in time for the 1972 election, two political scientists warned at that time that the fall of the filtration system could also open the door to demagogues. Now to be sure we don't in the book make the case for going back to the old system, to the old smoke-filled room, but at the same time we have to recognize that the current system is also double edged. It was more open, but if a demagogue ever decided to run for the candidacy, the road was much clearer. Now it's true that Democrats in the 1980s introduced a system of superdelegates, elected officials who carried extra weight in this process, and they, you know, this in some ways contained some of the elements of the old system, creating more obstacles on the road to the nomination. But Republicans never adopted a system of superdelegates, so the door was left completely open. This meant that if a demagogue ever decided to run for president, or run for nomination, especially in the Republican Party without superdelegates, there was a much more open road for him to gain the nomination. And this is exactly what happened in 2016. Donald Trump, a modern-day demagogue, became the nominee of the Republican Party. Okay, so that's the first factor that we emphasize in trying to understand what changed. Second factor that we emphasize, and in some way, and we elaborate in this more detail, that allowed some more clear authoritarian tendencies into office, and really I think this is the most crucial point for this part of the story, is that even after Donald Trump won the nomination, of course it wasn't inevitable he would be president. He could have been defeated by Hillary Clinton, but actually, almost as importantly, there was an absolutely imperative role to be played by his Republican Party allies. And this is something we also, a lesson we also draw from other countries. But here's really the central pivot of the story. Authoritarians, elected authoritarians, come to power not on their own, but with the enabling aid of political allies from the political establishment. Throughout history this repeats itself in different countries. Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 1930s, Venezuela in the 1990s. So this is really a crucial test. When demagogues who clearly violate democratic rules and norms get close to power, one of the last off-ramps is whether or not establishment politicians, party allies finally break with the autocrat in the making, draw a line in the sand and say, beyond this we will not go. Or, do they abdicate, overlook the democratic violations, let party trump their commitment to democratic norms, and in effect form a kind of Faustian bargain, allowing their ideological ally, but a potential autocrat in the making, into power. Do they enable the authoritarian? Because when elected autocrats get into power at this last stage, it's nearly always because mainstream politicians out of miscalculation or opportunism let them in the door. The enabling role of the Republican Party in 2016 is not unique. This happens remarkably often. On this particular kind of electoral route to authoritarianism. In Venezuela in the 1990s Hugo Chavez got his political start by being given a big boost from long-time mainstream fixture of Venezuelan politics, President Rafael Caderra, who freed Chavez from jail in 1994, giving him a boost in legitimacy, encouraging him to run for president. President Caderra's career was on the wane, and he hoped this would help him. But it turned out Caderra had miscalculated. Caderra's career was finished, and Chavez was soon elected president. Similar story can be told in Italy in the 1920s, and we will recount this in more detail in the book. Benito Mussolini was an outcast of the mainstream, but a long-standing prominent liberal politician Giovanni Gialetti thought he could tap into Mussolini's apparent mass appeal with some segments of the population, and that he could appeal and co-opt him. So he included Mussolini. Gialetti included Mussolini on a party listed for a parliamentary election, liberal party list, right party list, anti-socialist party list, which boosted Mussolini's legitimacy. Within a year Mussolini, long story short, within a year Mussolini was in power, Gialetti was long gone. Similar story happened in Weimar, Germany. The leader of the German conservative party, Alfred Hugenberg, allied himself with Hitler in the late 1920s, trying to bolster this aristocratic conservative party tapped into this enthusiasm that Hitler was generating with certain segments on the far, far right. They issued joint policy programs. They held rallies together, began to try to shore up a base for this elitist party, the German conservative party, but this backfired. The conservative party eventually disintegrated. Hitler famously came to power in January 1933. In every instance, mainstream or establishment politicians opened the door, abdicated, failed in their gatekeeping functions out of miscalculation or opportunism and let extremists in the door. In every instance, the mainstream politicians make the same mistake. They're kind of fausty and bargain. They're the non-enthusiasm of an outsider and they think they can control the outsider. But in every instance, the fausty and bargain backfires. Establishment politicians lose control. The same thing happened in the United States in 2016. Republicans enabled Donald Trump. Many leading Republicans, even after candidate Trump won the nomination, openly despised and were offended by Donald Trump. This is a similar dynamic that we see in the other countries. These Republicans could have crossed party lines. They could have but didn't endorse Hillary Clinton. This could have made a difference. Not a single leading elected official in the Republican Party endorsed Hillary Clinton. You might think, come on, that's sort of naive to think people are going to cross party lines. Well, it turns out, I think this is again why a comparative perspective is useful. You look at the French presidential election in 2017. The conservative Republican Party candidate in France, François Fouillon, didn't make it. There's a two-round election system. Didn't make it to the second round. The question was who was he going to endorse in the second round? Le Pen. I mean Le Pen or Macron, former minister and a socialist government. Many ways Le Pen was ideologically closer to Fion. Fion endorsed Macron. Many of his voters went to Macron making a significant difference. In the United States, this did not happen. Republicans did not do this. They'd let our Le Pen in the door. Donald Trump was elected president. And once an authoritarian is in the door, it's a changed game. Apparently I'm responsible for discoveries number two and three. The truth is that I think Daniel made all the discoveries. All I did was think of the title of the book. Do I need this? You don't know. Okay. So the second discovery was that the our constitution by itself may not be enough to save us. Americans, as you know, have a lot of faith in our constitutional system checks and vows. We have the oldest. We have the most successful constitution in the history of the world. And it has in fact contained constrained, powerful, ambitious, even abusive presidents in the past. But as many of you who know, who have worked or are working on failed or failing democracies elsewhere in the world, as you know quite well, constitutions don't work automatically. And one of the central arguments of this book is that constitutions work best when they're reinforced by two key democratic norms, unwritten rules. One is what we call mutual toleration or accepting the basic legitimacy of our partisan opponents. That means that no matter how much we disagree with our rivals and no matter how much we may dislike our partisan rivals, we recognize both privately and publicly that they're loyal citizens who love the country, who love the constitution, and who have an equal and legitimate right to govern. In other words, we do not treat our rivals as enemies. The second norm, which is a little trickier, is what we call institutional forbearance. Forbearance means refraining from exercising one's legal right. It is an act of political self-restraint. It is an underutilization of political power. We don't often think that much about forbearance in politics, but it is absolutely central. Think about what the President of the United States constitutionally can do, is able to do the President, can pardon whoever she wants, whenever she wants. Any President with a congressional majority can pack the Supreme Court. You have a majority in Congress, you don't like the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court, you don't like the law of spending it to 11 to 13, fill those seats with partisan allies. Perfectly legal. Or if a President's agenda is stalled in Congress, he or she can circumvent the legislative process through a variety of executive orders, presidential proclamations, et cetera. Again, the Constitution does not explicitly prohibit such actions. Or think about what Congress can do. The Senate can use its right of advice and consent to block all the President's cabinet picks, to deny the President the ability to fill vacancies in the Supreme Court. Congress, as we know now, can, as we know well, can refuse to fund the government, can shut down the government, and of course it can impeach the President on virtually any grounds that it chooses. My point here is that politicians can exploit the very letter of the Constitution in ways that can throw a democracy into crisis. Legal scholar Mark Tushnet calls this sort of behavior constitutional hardball. We use that term a lot in the book. Look at, and I'm sure all of you have experienced this a lot, look at any failing democracy, and you will find an abundance of constitutional hardball, whether it's Argentina under Perón, Spain and Germany in the 30s, contemporary Venezuela, Ecuador, Turkey, Hungary. What prevents or has prevented our constitutional system checks and balances from descending into deadlock, into dysfunction, maybe even constitutional crisis is forbearance. It's a shared understanding among politicians that neither side will deploy its institutional prerogatives to the Hill, that the spirit of the law will prevail over the letter of the law. We view Daniel and I, norms of mutual toleration and of forbearance as kind of the soft guardrails of democracy. They help to prevent what is often healthy political competition from spiraling into the kind of partisan fight to the death that wrecked democracies in Europe in the 1930s and in my part of the world in South America in the 1960s and 70s. American democracy has not always had these soft guardrails, didn't have them in the 1790s when partisan intolerance and pretty extreme acts of constitutional hardball nearly destroyed our new republic, and it lost those norms in the run-up to the Civil War and didn't have them really for a generation after the Civil War. But beginning in the late 19th century, Democrats and Republicans mostly accepted one another as legitimate rivals and largely avoided destabilizing acts of constitutional hardball. There were no impeachments, no partisan impeachments, no successful court packings. Senators were pretty judicious in their use of filibusters in their right to advice and consent on presidential appointments, largely deferring to the president. And outside of wartime, presidents largely refrained from acting unilaterally to circumvent Congress. So for more than a century, for most of the 20th century, checks and balances worked. But again, they worked because they were reinforced by norms of mutual toleration and forbearance. We argue in the book that these democratic norms have been unraveling in the United States for about a quarter of a century. We saw early signs of this in the 1990s with the Gingrich era government shutdowns, with the partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton. But the process really took off in the 2000s. When Barack Obama ran for president, as all of you know, Republicans called him a Marxist, a pro-terrorist, as anti-American. Major Republican leaders from Giuliani to Gingrich to Huckabee to Palin said President Obama did not love America, that Obama and the Democrats were not real Americans. The grocery movement, of course, went a step further denying the very legitimate, or questioning the very legitimacy of Barack Obama as president. Now, America, as Daniel pointed out, has always had, always had an extremist fringe. But this wasn't fringe politics. These were national Republican leaders. This was a vice presidential candidate. The Republicans nominated in 2016 as their presidential candidate a prominent birther. And that candidate accused his rival of being a criminal belonging in jail. So by the 2000s, Republicans had begun to deny the legitimacy of their partisan rival. They'd begun to cast Democrats as the enemy. The decline of mutual toleration, we see this in many other parts of the world, the decline of mutual toleration encourages politicians to abandon forbearance. When we view our partisan rivals as the enemy, when we view partisan rivals as an existential threat, we grow tempted to use any means necessary to stop them, to beat them. And that exactly we argue is what's happening in the last couple of decades in the United States. Politicians are throwing forbearance to the wind. Filibusters are obviously now routine. Politicians shut down the government, refuse to raise the debt limit. And we see extraordinary acts of constitutional hardball, like North Carolina's 2016 legislative coup and the Senate's refusal in 2016 to allow the president of the United States to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. That was a movie that was unprecedented since the 1860s. So the problem is not just that Americans elected a demagogue in 2016. That is a problem. But the real problem is that we elected a demagogue at a time when the soft guard rails protecting our democracy were coming unmoored. But why is that happening? We argue, and this is our third discovery, that was driving normal erosion polarization. Republicans and Democrats, as all of you know, have grown so far apart that they now literally fear and loathe one another. In 1960, 5% of Democrats and Republicans said in surveys that they would be displeased if their child married someone from the other party. Today, that number, at least among Republicans, is close to 50%. I think it's 49%. So one out of two Republicans say they would be displeased if their child married a Democrat. Last year, a Pew survey found that 49% of Republicans and 55% of Democrats said the other party makes them afraid. We have not seen this level of partisan hatred since the end of Reconstruction. And this is not just traditional liberal conservative polarization. People do not fear and loathe one another over taxes and healthcare. They don't. Today's partisan differences run much deeper. They're about race, religion, and our way of life. Our parties have changed dramatically over our lifetime, over the last 50 years. If you go back to, say, the 1960s, the two parties were demographically and culturally very, very similar. Both parties overwhelmingly white and Christian. So parties differed on taxes. They differed on government spending. They differed on foreign policy. But culturally and demographically, they overlapped a lot. They were very, very similar. Three things very quickly changed over the last 50 years. First, the civil rights movement led to a massive migration of Southern whites from the Democratic to Republican parties and, of course, in franchisement of African-Americans led to African-Americans overwhelmingly becoming Democrats. Secondly, a massive wave of immigration, mostly from Latin America and Asia. The vast majority of immigrants and their children ended up being Democrats. And third, beginning under Reagan, evangelical Christians, which had been distributed quite evenly between the two parties. In fact, they were mostly Democrats concentrated in the Republican party, starting in the early 1980s. So by the 2000s, Democrats and Republicans were demographically and culturally very different. Democrats were a rainbow coalition of urban-educated whites and a range of ethnic minorities. And Republicans remained overwhelmingly white and Christian. We think this is important because white Christians are not just any group. They were once the majority, and they used to sit unchallenged atop the country's social, cultural, economic, and political hierarchies. They filled the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, the governor's mansions. There were the pillars of local communities. They were the CEOs. They were the newscasters, the movie stars, the sports heroes, the college professors. And crucially, they were the face of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Those days are long over. But losing one's majority, losing one's majority status can be deeply threatened. Many Republican voters, obviously not all, many Republican voters feel like the country that they grew up in is being taken away from them. And we think ultimately that is what's fueling polarization. The problem is that polarization can kill democracies. This is a major lesson, at least for us, of the failure of democracy in Europe in the 1930s and in South America in the 60s and 70s. Now, politics is so deeply polarized that each side views a victory by the other side as intolerable as beyond the pale democracies in trouble. When an opposition victory is viewed as intolerable, you start to justify using extraordinary means to stop it. Things like violence, electoral fraud, coups. Now, Americans have not reached that point, obviously. But we have reached a point. We have reached a point where according to 2016 exit polls, one out of four Trump voters believed that he was not fit for the presidency of the United States. He was not fit for the office of the presidency, and yet they still preferred him to the Democrat. We've reached a point where, according consistently now to Gallup polls, Republicans may be much more favorable view of Vladimir Putin than they do of Hillary Clinton. Those are dangerous levels of polarization. So Donald Trump is a challenge. But the most fundamental challenge we face today is extreme partisan polarization driven mostly by a radicalized Republican Party that represents a declining white Christian majority, many of whose members perceive themselves to face an existential threat. Trump is a symptom of that polarization, he's not a cause of it, and his departure is unlikely to end it. So very quickly, what can be done? For one, it is pretty clear at least to us that the Republican Party has to change. It has to become a more diverse political party. As long as the Republicans remain overwhelmingly white and Christian in a society as diverse as ours is today, it will be prone to extremism. But what can Democrats do? We talk about this a fair amount in the book, I just want to mention one thing and end on an incredibly depressing note. There's been a lot of talk in progressive Democratic circles about learning how to fight like Republicans. If Republicans are going to play constitutional hardball, Democrats need to play tit for tat. If they don't, they'll be victims of an endless series of sucker punches stolen from Supreme Court seats and the like. And Democrats are in fact learning how to fight like Republicans, right? They just used a filibuster to trigger their first very own major government shutdown. That is a page right out of the Gingrich playbook. Many Democrats will run on a platform of impeachment this year in the elections. And as Democrats win control of the Senate, there is talk of denying President Trump the ability to fill a Supreme Court vacancy just like the Republicans did to Obama. We worry a lot about this response. Fighting like Republicans, as understandable as it is, will inevitably reinforce and probably accelerate the process of norm erosion. It will further weaken our democracy's soft guard rails. So in our view, opposition to Trump resistance to abuses of this government should be vigorous, should be muscular, but they should be norm-defending rather than norm-breaking. And as much as possible, they should be based on broad coalitions. At least on efforts to build multi-party coalitions. They should reach out beyond the Blue State Democrats. Just a final note, forbearance today in these days is seen as a sign of weakness, particularly among Democrats. It's seen understandably as giving in to the other side, as giving in to the bully. But in reality, forbearance, restraint in the exercise of power takes a lot of political courage and a lot of political strength. It means standing up to an angry base and saying you're not going to do what they want to do. You're going to do what's good for the country's institutions, what's good for the country. Republicans have failed systematically to show that kind of leadership over the last decade. And I think it would be deeply, deeply problematic if Democrats follow in their footsteps. Let me stop there. Thanks. So I'm going to take advantage of the prerogative of the chair here and ask them a few questions and engage in a bit of discussion. But I know a lot of you have questions and comments and would like to come in, so I won't go for too long. But what I'd like to do is try to take us through some parts of your argument, go a bit more into detail and explore a few points that I suspect are on people's mind. We can get through some of the, I suspect the initial reactions you're often getting from audiences when you present your argument. So let's see if we can do that and then turn to other questions and comments. The first concerns President Trump himself, you very importantly positioned him in a much wider framework. So you're saying this book isn't about President Trump. This book is about American democracy in a much wider sense. Nevertheless, President Trump plays a role, an important role in your story. And I want to read one excerpt from a quote. It's in the review and the weekly standard by Yuval Levin of your book a couple of weeks or last week actually. It's a useful review and I recommend it. But it focuses on one point here, which also rossed through to Ottoman New York Times last Sunday, had an op-ed in which he talked about Trump more as farce than his tragedy and sort of encapsulated in that way. Let me read this quote. It says, at the core of each of their stories, as Ziblatt and Levitsky's, of democracy undone abroad is a focused ambitious ruthless leader intent on seizing control. There is no such person at the core of the Trump presidency. The causes for worry before us are different. The president certainly lacks a moral compass, is blinded by mind-boggling narcissism, has a weak spot for despots, and is unfit for his job. But he is almost comically unfocused and pathetic. Does it make sense even to call him, call such an obviously weak leader a strong man? So I'm curious how you respond when people say you're inflating Donald Trump too much. He's farce rather than tragedy. You're sounding the alarm. You're crying wolf at a time when the wolf of the door is in fact some kind of strange cat or some other animal. Could you respond to that? Yeah, let me quickly make three points. First of all, we don't call Donald Trump a strong man. That's not accurate. Three effects. And we agree that Trump is a weak and inept leader and we argue in the book that in the first year of his presidency he did not seriously damage American democracy. American democracy remains fully intact. Three points. First of all, three points in response to the sort of it's all talk, it's all bluster argument. One important effect of talk and bluster is the reaction it provokes on the other side, particularly in a polarized context. And there are numerous cases of this. I think Google Chavez is an important case to look at. Alberto Fujimori in Peru is another. An outsider comes to power. A populist outsider comes to office with really antagonistic attacks on the establishment, scares the bejesus out of the establishment and the establishment pushes back. The press really gets on its A game. The opposition gets very tough. And it triggers an escalation because then when the Washington Post gets really active and the New York Times gets really active and the Democrats are saying really mean things the president starts to feel besieged and then may push back more. And we saw this very clearly. Alberto Fujimori didn't come to office in 1990 with a grand plan to be a dictator. He, like Trump, was an accidental president. He had no plans of being president a year earlier. He came in with very populist language that antagonized the establishment, the establishment pushed back and within less than two years democracy was breaking down. A lot of difference between Peru and the United States. But one has to think about the consequences of this kind of bluster. Secondly, there are some areas where, although Trump's language and bluster is not directly damaging our institutions, there are really troubling consequences. So one of the things that Donald Trump does with his bluster is call into question the integrity of core democratic institutions, two of them in particular, our election process, our electoral process and our free press. It's very, very difficult to sustain a democracy if citizens do not trust elections and the prepress. What Donald Trump is telling Americans and his followers is that our elections are not free and fair. They're rigged, they're fraudulent, and that our press is actively making stuff up to bring down his government. And if you look at survey evidence, this did not begin with Trump. But if you look at public opinion surveys, a growing number of Americans, particularly Republicans, do not believe in the integrity of our electoral process and do not believe that we have an independent and free press. That does not in itself destroy democracy, but it's not good news. Like, should stop. Do you want to add anything? Yeah, also, yeah. No, I think those are the two main points. I mean, and this is, you know, it's been a year, right? So, I mean, and one of the things we learned from other countries looking around the world is that, you know, President Erdogan, I mean, when he first came into power in the early 2000s, I mean, it took several years for damage to kind of manifest itself. So I think in many ways, you know, again, not to suggest that, you know, if we wait another year, President Trump will turn into President Erdogan. But the point is that these problems are slow-moving problems and to continue to deny that there are problems until they are incredibly acute is as a mistaken way to go. So we need to, you know, be alert to the slow-moving nature of these problems. Another point, looked at it from a different angle. In your comparative analysis, you very usefully highlight, for example, you highlight four, you know, key characteristics of an autocratic tendency, as you mentioned here in your presentation. And you also go through a list of the kinds of actions that such leaders take to undermine institutions. What you don't do, and I was curious, maybe, or maybe I didn't read it closely enough, but maybe you do it and just might be more developed, is what you don't do is look at the strength of resilience of those institutions that would resist that on a comparative basis. So, for example, you know, when you pose cases of an autocratic leader who goes after a free press that compromises an independent judiciary, et cetera, what you don't do is say, well, compared to Turkey or Hungary or whatever the comparative case is, the United States, the United States's institutions in these regards seems to be quite strong or different. The independent judiciary in the United States is more deeply rooted than that was in Hungary. The free press has greater, you know, financial basis and independence than the free press did in Turkey or whatever the comparisons would be. So, in a sense, I didn't see so much comparative analysis of the defenses. I saw a lot of comparative analysis of the attack or of the decay, but not so much of the defenses. Is that an accurate portrayal, or is it that you think that in a sense the defenses, it's hard to in a sense assess their solidity because they haven't really been attacked like this before, or did you just not think that that was worth a useful approach to the comparative analysis? Yeah, I mean, I think it is a useful approach. I mean, you're right, we don't have a table kind of laying out how the U.S. has performed against other countries. I mean, we can talk about this a bit now. I mean, I think one of the things, because it's only been a year and as we are writing the book as events were unfolding, you know, at each state for month to month, things are changing. So this is sort of a first draft of history of the first year of the Trump administration. But I think there are concrete things we can say and we do say about the checks and balances. So, you know, in many ways I think, as you say, the judiciary and the media I think have performed very well in the U.S. Congress has not as much. And, you know, that's really where we see kind of the decline of forbearance. And so we talk about this idea that Congress is supposed to be a guard dog. That's its constitutional overreaching executive. But when forbearance declines, one of the things that happens is that when the presidents in office is the same party as Congress, the majority in Congress, the guard dog turns into a lap dog and doesn't investigate potential crimes and so on. And when the other party is empowered, the guard dog turns into an attack dog. And so this kind of oscillation between being an attack dog and being a lap dog is in part driven by polarization and partisan animosities. So in this sense, I think this is in our current American context, the weak link is in some sense Congress. I mean, to put it in a comparative perspective, one reason I think we tend to be more optimistic in our moments of optimism, they come from the fact that there are midterm elections coming up and so if you think about Hungary, once Viktor Orbán had a majority, he had his majority and he had control of the political system, was able to alter the judiciary, alter media laws and alter the electoral system. In the U.S., because of federalism, because of midterm elections and this divided government, there is something to this, the checks and balances is working very effectively. Let me just say one thing quickly. I think your point is well taken. This is actually a point of tension that we had with our publisher because it's very sexy to compare. It's always the publisher's fault. I'm going to say more. But it's very sexy to make sort of fast style comparisons between Trump and Erdogan and Putin and Chavez and we didn't want to do that because we had a pretty good sense that American democratic institutions were much stronger and the problem that we faced in making these comparisons is that there's no democracy in the history of the world even as remotely as stable as ours that is broken down. There are very few good comparative cases. I would say the best comparative case when we talk a fair amount about it is Chile which was not only a stable democracy, but a stable democracy that was reinforced by pretty effective, pretty robust democratic norms. So there was no great comparison case in terms of going up against strong democratic institutions. So that's why we jumped into basically three chapters on US checks and balances and the more that we studied them and the more we went back and looked for example at the 1790s and looked at the period of the Civil War and the aftermath of the Civil War we realized there's actually a lot of variation within the US case in terms of the strength of democratic institutions and that things like partisan polarization matter a lot and there we drew a lot from Chile. But the fact that there isn't a comparative case that was actually the next point I was going to ask you about is, is I read it because I stopped and thought about the troubling cases of democratic decay or collapse that you go through which are mostly in Latin America or in central Europe or further east Turkey and so forth. What's striking actually is there hasn't been an established western democracy that's collapsed and you look at Italy for example in the 1990s and think okay, Berlusconi pretty strong assault on the democratic institutions. Italian sort of institutions of defense like the free press and the judiciary not as strong as ours yet Italian democracy survived. Could one flip it around and say the comparative analysis actually gives one, should give one quite of a sense of reassurance that actually there isn't a comparator case because that doesn't seem to be where we're headed. Or is it that you found as you looked at the strain, the forbearance, the restraint, the polarization you felt, no the United States is in a direction that's different from Europe isn't as polarized generally as the United States is. So are you saying that there isn't a comparator case but nevertheless a comparator case among countries of similar socioeconomic or socio-political traditions in the last half century but that's still a lot of cause for concern. I mean it's just to... Yeah, I mean on Italy, I mean I think Berlusconi as much of as a threat he was I mean he wasn't, that litmus test the wands lens litmus test he didn't quite fail it as dramatically I think so I think given the language that Trump used during the campaign he represented more of it. I mean people have drawn parallels I think that are quite useful though to Italy. Yeah, I guess the two things, the social scientific research as many people here know two kind of regular findings, one of the few generalizations we can rely upon is the wealthier a country is the more likely democracies to survive, the older a democracy is the more likely it is to survive. So on both terms the US is in pretty good shape. A second point though so looking to kind of follow up on Steve's point of looking within the US, I guess when we look within the US and look at moments of crisis and we look at how those crises have been overcome that's what makes us a bit worried. So if you think of Franklin Roosevelt's court packing effort and the late-nation... Maybe this wasn't going to bring the regime down but this was a moment of in the effort to get the New Deal path to expand the Supreme Court in a proposed legislation this would have turned the Supreme Court to politicize the Supreme Court. Had I been alive at the time maybe I would have been in favor of it but I also can recognize at a distance the damage that this would have done on the political system. He was contained and the reason he was contained was not just because of Republicans, it's because many Democrats including real genuine New Deal Democrats. There was one senator who was at the inauguration the month before sat next to Eleanor Roosevelt and nonetheless came out vigorously opposed to this and so it's this kind of constraint of party allies that has prevented this from happening in the past and so that's what we're looking for in the US and so that's the thing that makes us nervous is you look back to these comparative cases and look at the moments of success and think are those same conditions present today? Same thing goes for the Nixon case ultimately important number, important group of Republicans came around and you had bipartisan consensus in favor of removing Nixon. Would that happen today? One more question then I'm going to turn to the audience you mentioned it here and you discuss it in the book you talk about the Republican Party and in the book you describe you use the term re-found you say that you wonder if the Republican Party could be re-founded in a way that would take it away from some of it and consider disturbing tendencies of it it reminded a little as I was reading it a couple of days after the November 2016 election here I was at a meeting with some people active in political circles and somebody was there from the sort of Democratic side and he was saying oh my gosh the Republican Party is you know Trump has just thrown the party into disarray the party is in total disarray and I said wow let's see they just won the presidency they control the Senate they control the House they control the majority of Governorships they're doing well in state legislatures if that's disarray the Democratic Party ought to give it a try and so in a sense what's the incentive given that landscape they're doing pretty well no they're not doing well they're cleaning up why should they re-found why should they do something different where would the incentive come from? The cases of re-founding that we look at in the book include this is also depressing news I mean the German conservative study we look at Germany and the founding of the German CPU after World War II and so German conservatism is flawed fractured organization throughout the 19th and through the 1920s and 30s as I mentioned and this is in many ways would open the door I would argue for the rise of Nazism so Germany had to suffer this major catastrophe and it was only after the catastrophe of Nazism and World War II I mean that's you know you can't get much worse than that Protestants and Catholics who had been despised each other in many ways polarization similar to what Steve has described in the United States got together and did the hard work of trying to convince voters to join together in this cross-confessional party that was a broad center-right party that overcame many of the cleanages in society now you know I've done interviews with some of the people who were alive and participating in this and it's clear that the question is could this happen you know so when you look at the story it's a bad news story because you know does it require catastrophe in order to have refounding and you know hopefully not so the incentives aren't great and so in that sense there is I mean there's cause for concern but I don't know Steve maybe you have a more positive spin that you could offer on this? Nope not really you know I don't think it's quite as you say though I think in some ways it's worse for the majority in decline they're not quite cleaning up in the way that you say right two of the presidential elections that they won in the last generation they lost the popular vote it may well be the case that they clean up in the 2018 election retaining both the House and the Senate while losing the popular vote by 5, 6, 7 percentage points they know that the behavior that we saw for example in North Carolina in 2016 or efforts to make it harder to vote for low income and minority voters very aware of who those voters are when it's harder to register to vote these are efforts to retain power when you know you're in decline so they're not exactly cleaning up there's a short term medium to long term disjunction they've done well in some immediate things but the handwriting on the wall in terms of the change that might be I'm going to blame the publisher again we had to write a chapter about what to do we don't know what to do we'll take it and let it disbarred out of the video the point is there are no easy ways out we can propose solutions where they would have been settled and so you're right the Republicans have no incentive right now at the very least until they take an electoral spanking more than spanking it has to be something of what Daniel's describing hopefully not there's more to say about that but I want to give others a chance and I know there's a lot I'm going to start over on this side I'm probably not going to be able to do it I'm going to take these two here and then right behind you please identify yourself hi my name is Alana I work with USAID I'm wondering if you can comment about the electoral college and your thoughts on it I don't know if that's in the book but also to your last point I think polling with millennials shows if you could talk about that I think that'll have an impact on the GOP as well and there is an article in the Washington Post this morning that talks about whether the GOP believes in democracy speaking to your point I think one third of the GOP prefers authoritarian I guess tendencies so it's timely let me take one more if you can take a note of that actually right behind sorry I'll come to you Ben Raderstorf with the Inter-American Dialogue a proud former student of Steve's my question is on the role of trust in institutions we're living in a moment of historic lows of trust in pretty much every institution do you see this as a product or a factor in this process that you describe in the book go ahead and go over those a little bit that's what students are like though come back and why are you glad they're former students well maybe I'll say something about the Electoral College there's lots of reasons to think the Electoral College has outlived its usefulness probably from the very beginning at some level in principle I would be happy to get rid of it and I think there's many ways in which as Steve has mentioned it's distorting election outcomes with increasing frequency there's a disjuncture between electoral geography and the actual vote and what we're actually getting as a result of electoral geography there's a disjuncture between votes and actually who gets into power that said I think the odds of changing the Electoral College are not great and I think second the underlying problems of with any institutional reform the underlying problems of polarization it's not clear that these would immediately address these so I think there is a risk I mean this is kind of the flip side of what Steve just said about this declining majority there is a risk of with the fall 2018 elections let's say you have a situation in which the electoral, the actual population votes in the Congress doesn't actually reflect the actual majorities you then would have a president who is in power without an electoral majority you would have both houses of Congress without an electoral majority with a potential of a crisis of legitimacy from the left you know and so at some point people will grow increasingly disaffected and so institutions will become targets but I think in the meantime the Constitution is very things are hard to change Americans are very conservative in this sense but it's much just hard to change Americans are very conservative isn't it the same polarization strangles the possibility of reform I mean we know that from Pliny 1 Peru tried to revamp its political party law 10 years ago the parties have to see the interest for this and the electoral college clearly their incentives on one side but not on the other so it isn't just right that's right and I think in general we spent a lot of time thinking about different institutional reforms and in general we kind of de-emphasized that because we think exactly this dilemma that's what we kind of want to think about ways of addressing polarization I think this is really the issue rather than institutional fixes which is kind of rearranging the chairs on the sinking the good thing to do is not going to solve the underlying problem of polarization very quickly I think millennials will be a challenge for the Republican party and so I mean we're actually not in the camp of the hyper-pessimists I'm actually fairly optimistic that American democracy will muddle through this and I think I'm fairly optimistic that in the medium term the Republicans will reconfigure their electoral coalition and that polarization stands a good chance of declining after that I'm quite worried about the damage that will be done in the meantime but I think there are reasons for optimism in the medium term tough question Ben I uh yeah let me take one narrow cut I mean trust in institutions I don't think we we see this across very different societies declining trust in institutions we see it across different countries countries that are doing well economically countries that are not doing well economically countries that are experiencing increased inequality other countries that not so much countries with growing ethnic diversity others not it's been hard for social scientists to identify what's underlying this declining trust to get much more specific to me and I guess what I worry about a bit is I think it was primarily declining trust in institutions among call them Trump voters that helped to create the immediate problem that we're facing but for the reasons we were just talking about the Trump presidency itself and the inability or failure to carry out reforms and this disjuncture growing disjuncture between the popular vote and institutional outcome the makeup of the senate the presidential election I think that there's a good chance that that's going to wreck I mean millennial trust in institutions is already weak but I think that the Trump presidency and the failure to reform could really undermine uh the trust of that group call them proto-sanders voters um and that could accelerate the Democratic Party's push in a more anti-establishment direction which hasn't really happened yet I come to this gentleman right here and then for the background I'll come to this side yeah right here actually my question hi my name is Ahmet Kududa and I'm a GW Ph.D. student political science my question was going to be actually very similar to this one but in particular what do you think about the role of the citizenry in particular the growing disillusionment about democracy itself as an institution um and then you kind of touched on this but is there a silver lining at all can take a couple more since you did already touched on this back here I saw there was okay this right down here I'll come over here right here hi my name is Wes Noles and I work at Meridian International Center I'm curious in your comparative studies have you seen anything about a decline in optimism amongst democracies before they fall because it seems like as someone who comes from the deep south in Alabama that there's really been a distinct decline in optimism about the future that wasn't present when my parents were growing up and so is that something that you've also seen in your comparative studies let me take one more let me come over to this right here yes Albrad Kesic and I have three questions for you but they're all linked and I came here expecting a broad examination of kind of fundamental problems that affect the question of democracy and I found I'm a little bit disappointed because I see that you've addressed partially what I'm concerned about and that is is that you focus on the Republican side but I'm a lifelong Democrat but I think much of what you say relates to the Democratic side as well especially when you lay out the four principles that you do for why you even did the book which and what defines Trump as a demagogue the attack on the media we have Democrats who accept that it's legitimate to discredit journalists and it's it's a mainstream position on the basis of either being foreign puppets agents or propagandists we have problems with the issue of legitimacy from day one in terms of accepting the legitimacy of this election in fact that's what we're discussing right now in this country in a big way whether it's his mental competency or whether he was put in place through foreign intervention we're questioning fundamental legitimacy and it seems to me that your kind of reluctance to come out and say that you prefer kind of the establishment to decide the candidates lacks an understanding of the deep deep dissatisfaction even amongst Democratic voters with the candidate that was put before them and I think that you have to have this all-encompassing picture that there was a flawed candidate and many people in the party thought that she was a flawed candidate but refused to address it because they thought it belonged to her but flawed candidates happen in democracies that happens in democracies but that's part of your story that you're trying to explain to us and it's left out completely and I'm disappointed by it because this comes across as a very partisan study and it's only partial have you read the book? I have but I've listened to your discussion of it several questions and that would you like to come back to you? Yeah I mean so there's sort of two questions about declining trust and increasing dissatisfaction so Yasha Monk who has a book coming out in March has analyzed some data and in the book he has this data it's been published in Journal of Democracy where he looks at growing dissatisfaction with democracy over time or tries to measure this kind of indirectly by looking at how different generations view democracy today and he tries to make the case that there is growing dissatisfaction that people are growing preference for different forms of governance you know the evidence is mixed I mean there's been a lot of debate about the empirics underlying this I mean the reason I kind of gave the examples of Huey Long and Henry Ford and so on is that I tend to think that we exaggerate the sense in which we are living in a new era where everything is different and now people are dissatisfied there's been periods throughout history where people are dissatisfied the question is how do we get through those periods and how do we address the concerns of citizens I mean it's in an effective way and so you know again the point is that there have always been dissatisfied people you know the Great Depression was no picnic there was certainly lots of dissatisfied people there are lots of demagogues on the scene so the question is how does the political system address these and I think in many ways the political parties did address this very effectively and somebody you know and you know it's in the case of you know I prefer the establishment I preferred Franklin Roosevelt was less of a threat to democracy than Huey Long would have been and so if the party nomination system kept Huey Long out that's a good thing for democracy so I think party gatekeeping is important to keep these underlying pressures and check I mean not to say that underlying trust and dissatisfaction and orientations towards the future don't matter I mean these things certainly matter but these are more constants and politics and the shifts the kind of subtle shifts the uptick doesn't explain the transformation in our politics I think that the kind of rupture in our politics does not match the kind of gradual trends that we're seeing a couple points I don't really like silver linings there's been a tendency of people who write this stuff to say well you know Americans have reacted and people are marching and joining organizations and that's true to a degree I don't think in fact I'm somewhat pessimistic that we'll see I haven't seen evidence that we're about to see a kind of vaccination and healthy response as we did to a significant degree after the Resonation of Nixon in the 1970s I think there was at least for a while a set of very positive and healthy reforms after Nixon I'm skeptical I haven't seen given the persistence of polarization I'm not sure that I haven't seen evidence of a silver lining that said I don't think all is lost I mean we're again we do not think American democracy is dead we do not think American democracy is dying we wrote the book because for the first time in our lives we saw some warning signs that made us think we should start to think about responding to some emerging problems before it's too late so no silver linings but also no necessary doom and gloom on this partisan question we studied this thing and we decided that we believe that the spiraling the wording the origin of our democratic norm is a political party now one can disagree with that and one can write up another analysis of that and that's fine but that's not the main problem the central problem is that both parties are now engaged in this tit for tat process and our democracy is suffering from an escalating erosion of democratic norm both parties are doing it both parties feel pressured to do it and I have no idea how to escape from that and you can call me partisan if you want I'm a lot less interested in who started it and much more interested in the problem it actually reminds me of Arturo Valenzuela's book on Chile people have different views who started the polarization in Chile but it reached a point in the late 60s or early 1970s that it was very difficult to find a way out perhaps because I read Arturo's book many times and I think it's a lot I think it's the bipartisan escalation of norm erosion that's centrally got us concerned and that's what the book is about centrally I think for a little past time I'm afraid we're going to have to stop here although we have a lot more questions and comments the book is for sale at a discounted price out there you don't give any credit to one figure in your book Donald Trump recently said that he's been very good for the mainstream media the New York Times and the Post and others for comparative politics he's turning mild mannered political scientists into media stars so you might want to rethink in your next edition it may not be a good thing that is not a silver line but let's thank Daniel and Steven for their work