How Democracies Die was all about checks and balances, constitution norms, and political guardrails, the kinds of things that good liberals believe are necessary to keep democratic politics within proper bounds.  It was a hit – none other than Barack Obama called it one of the best books of the year – because it told good people what they wanted to hear, which is that they’re right, the system is sound, and everything was fine until a human wrecking ball showed up in the form of Donald Trump.  To be sure, How Democracies Die acknowledged that partisanship was over the top on both sides of the aisle.  Just weeks before Trump took office, it noted that the New York Times ran an op-ed arguing that Democrats “should be fighting tooth and nail” to prevent him from entering the White House.  They should push for recounts and fraud investigations in crucial states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, they should seek to sway the Electoral College, and they should challenge the election results in court.  These were tricks that would lead to howls of protest when Trump tried them four years later.  But since they were Democrats, the op-ed said it was A-OK.

Still, Levitsky and Ziblatt put the onus squarely on Trump.  If “Americans have retained great faith in their Constitution, as the centerpiece of a belief that the United States was a chosen nation, providentially guided, a beacon of hope and possibility to the world,” they wrote, it’s only because they had developed “strong democratic norms” to go along with it. These are things like patience, forbearance, and the mutual respect needed to make checks and balances work.  What made Trump so dangerous is that he ignored such norms from the get-go.  In 2011, he emerged as “America’s most prominent birther,” arguing that Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim and therefore not a “natural-born citizen” as required by Article II, section one.  When Obama made his birth certificate public, Trump then charged that it was a forgery.  “Intolerance was politically useful,” Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote, because it won him “media attention and endeared him to the Republicans’ Tea Party base.”  Once he entered the Oval Office, Trump sought to “derail independent investigations” in a way that reminds the authors of “the kind of assaults on the referees routinely seen in less democratic countries.”  He repeatedly accused major outlets like the New York Times and CNN of dispensing “fake news” in a way that would also “look familiar to any student of authoritarianism.” 

Trump was an unconstitutional strongman who slipped into the White House by slipping past the controls.  He was messing things up because he refused to play by long-established rules that are necessary for democracy to function.  The solution was to re-establish the old norms that had held the system together for centuries on end and put them back in working order.  “Our constitutional system, while older and more robust than any in history, is vulnerable to the same pathologies that have killed democracy elsewhere,” Levitsky and Ziblatt declared.  “Ultimately, then, American democracy depends on us – the citizens of the United States.  No single political leader can end a democracy; no single leader can rescue one, either.  Democracy is a shared enterprise.  Its fate depends on all of us.”  

If things were going awry, in other words, it wasn’t the Constitution’s fault but our own.  We weren’t living up to the founders’ ideals.  We should try harder to be worthy of the glorious system they bequeathed.

This is basically the lesson of the Old Testament updated by 2,500 years or so.  Where Yahweh repeatedly accuses the Israelites of failing to follow his laws and commandments, Levitsky and Ziblatt accused Americans of failing to follow those of the founders.  They’re “a stiff-necked people,” it seems, and Trump was their divine comeuppance.

But that was so last decade.  Five years later, the message has changed.  Rather than “a strongman with a cultlike following,” the problem now “lies in something many of us venerate: our Constitution.”  In its efforts to steer clear of “the Scylla of majority tyranny,” the document has left us “vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule.”  

It’s not our fault after all.  Tyranny of the Minority rounds up the usual suspects in order to show why the US constitutional structure is increasingly undemocratic.  There’s the Electoral College, which, by doubling or tripling the weight of underpopulated rural states, allows a president to slip into office despite trailing at the polls.  There’s a bicameral legislature whose upper chamber is both powerful and “severely malapportioned.”  There’s the filibuster, which allows 41 senators representing as little as 11 percent of the population to veto any measure sought by the other 89.  There’s a first-past-the-post electoral system that locks in a two-party system despised by a growing majority, there’s lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices, which shields them from accountability, and there’s the sheer impossibility of constitutional reform due to an amending clause that requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress plus approval by three-fourths of the states to change so much as a comma.

We all know the thinking behind such features.  The idea is to rein in an anarchic majority that is forever straining at the bit.  But as Levitsky and Ziblatt point out — the new Levitsky and Ziblatt, that is — it’s at the cost of empowering minorities that are fundamentally irresponsible.  As their latest book notes:

“America’s excessively counter-majoritarian institutions reinforce extremism, empower authoritarian minorities, and threaten [to impose] minority rule.  To overcome these problems, we must double down on democracy.  This means dismantling spheres of undue minority protection and empowering majorities at all levels of government; it means ending constitutional protectionism and unleashing real political competition; it means bringing the balance of political power more closely in line with the balance of voter preferences; and it means forcing our politicians to be more responsive and accountable to majorities of American.  In short, we must democratize our democracy, undertaking long overdue constitutional and electoral reforms that would, at minimum, bring America in line with other established democracies.”  

This is not to say that the authors no longer believe in checks and balances.  They do.  But they think that all those delicate balances have gotten out of hand and therefore need to be reset so as to favor political minorities less and allow the democratic majority greater room in which to operate.  Modest as this is, it’s a sign of how much thinking has changed since the Capitol Hill insurrection.  After all the tumult of the last four or five years, it’s beginning to dawn on Americans that the system is broken, that government is not working, and that politics are increasingly undemocratic as a consequence.  If “governments are instituted among men” in order to secure life, liberty, and the rest, then it’s plain that the present system is “becom[ing] destructive of these ends” and that it’s “the right of the people” to begin thinking about how to alter it.  This is not a right granted by the founders, but one that “we the people” created ourselves – or so the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution indicate.  So it’s high time that the people start thinking about such a right and how to put it to use.

The change of heart that Tyranny of the Minority represents is entirely welcome.  The crisis is so advanced that even a couple of Harvard professors have begun to notice.

That said, Tyranny of the Minority is not without its problems.  The author’s say nothing about how they changed their minds or why, which is not very helpful.  While they’re good on the question of constitutional rigidity, they fail to fully explore the special problem posed by an increasingly restrictive amending clause in Article V.  In 1790, four states representing as little as 9.8 percent of the population could block any constitutional change thanks to the two-thirds, three-fourths rule. Today, thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent can do the same, while in a few decades the magic number will be down to 4.2.  It’s this fundamental rigidity that is squeezing the life blood out of what little is left of American democracy.  What Levitsky and Ziblatt see as a problem, consequently, is a good deal worse, i.e. an emergency that can only intensify as time goes on.

The authors also make a mess of the question of majority rule versus minority rights.  Referring to a former member of the Supreme Court named Robert H. Jackson, they argue that “[a]lthough the scope of rights to be protected will always be a matter of some dispute (and will likely change over time), there clearly exist a broad range of individual liberties that, in the words of Justice Jackson, ‘may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.’”  Most Americans agree that things like free speech or a free press should be exempt from the vagaries of electoral politics.  But this doesn’t mean they’re right.  If rights are likely to change over time, how can we determine which ones are still valid without putting them to a vote?  “Most democrats agree that individual liberties and the opposition’s right to fair competition must be placed beyond the reach of majorities,” they add.  But how can we determine if most democrats indeed feel that way without doing so democratically via a free election?

Amazingly, Levitsky and Ziblatt cite the Bill of Rights as an example of something that “enshrines individual liberties” by “roping them of from the whims of temporary majorities.” But the Bill of Rights includes the Second Amendment whose apparently unqualified right to bear arms is in fact destructive of democracy.  Whether or not one agrees with the Supreme Court’s current interpretation, there’s no doubt that the text is unclear and that a clarification is in order.  But if the Bill of Rights as too sacred to be touched, then Levitsky and Ziblatt presumably oppose any attempt at clarification on the grounds that it’s outside of democratic purview.  This is not democracy, but the opposite.

This leads to the question of how to democratize an undemocratic constitution, an issue that Levitsky and Ziblatt bollix up as well.  “[W]e ask readers to momentarily set aside concerns about how to bring about change – we’ll get to that – and consider three broad areas of reform,” Tyranny of the Minority declares at one point.  But the authors never get to the issue at all. “What is needed today,” they write, “…is not only a democratic reform agenda but a democratic reform movement capable of mobilizing diverse citizens in a sustained nationwide campaign to ignite imaginations and change the terms of public debate.”  But what’s the point of a democratic reform movement if the law of the land says that democratic reform is out of order?  Given the unlikelihood of structural reform, shouldn’t “we the people” forget the Constitution and focus on the things they can change instead?  This is the conclusion that an increasingly conservative political structure all but dictates, and even though it’s wrong, it’s easy to see why people go along.

The problem has to do with the concept of limited government, something Levitsky and Ziblatt accept reflexively without thinking the problem through.  Limited government means limited democracy in which some issues are on the table as far as the demos is concerned and some are off.  But “we the people” need to have all issues on the table so they can refashion society as they see fit — not some of it, but all.  They need absolute, uncontrolled democracy to smash through the barriers to change.  The current structure is so outmoded, so antique, so at odds with the needs of modern society that tinkering around the edges will not do.  Instead, the entire problem of government, society, and political development must be re-thought from scratch.  Considering that the process is by definition extra-constitutional and would thus be at odds with the precepts set forth in Article V, it’s very much a leap into the void.

But given the hollowed-out nature of the US constitutional order, perhaps it’s a leap out of the void and back into history.