How Democracies Die Kindle Edition

I write in the aftermath of the brash storming of the Capitol by a mob of domestic terrorists incited by President Donald (“Tweety”) Trump -- who watched the deadly assault in which five people died, including a Capitol police officer, on television in the White House. The Trump terrorists’ objective was to stop Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States. To be sure, the Trump terrorists delayed the process. However, in the end, The United States Congress officially certified Biden to be the next president of the United States. His inauguration is scheduled for January 20, 2021.Nevertheless, we are not yet safe from the dangers that Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two political scientists at Harvard University, alerted us to in their 2018 book How Democracies Die (New York: Crown/ Penguin Random House), in which they critique certain aspects of Tweety Trump’s so-called populism as potential threats to what they refer to as the democracy game (pages 107 and 109). In their view, Tweety Trump threatens to overthrow the democracy game so that he can replace it with his authoritarian rule.However, despite the fact that Levitsky and Ziblatt explicitly refer to the democracy game, they do not happen to advert explicitly to Johan Huizinga’s classic book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1950; German orig. ed., 1944 in Switzerland, a theme found in Huizinga’s writings going back to 1903).Now, my favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). In effect, his explicit interest in the theme of what Huizinga refers to the play element in culture goes back at least to 1959.In effect, Ong’s first sustained study of what Huizinga refers to as the play element in culture can be found in his discussion of polemic (from the Greek polemos, war, struggle) in his seminal 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press; see the index for Polemic for specific page references), the expanded version of Ong’s 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.However, under the influence of Huizinga’s classic book Homo Ludens: The Play Element in Culture, Ong himself subsequently switched to using the term agonistic (from the Greek agon, contest, struggle) in his streamlined 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press), the published version of Ong’s 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.Now, you have heard of good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. In effect, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s basic argument about the democracy game can be likened to good cholesterol (agonistic behavior in Ong’s terminology in his 1981 book) and bad cholesterol (polemical behavior in Ong’s terminology in his 1967 book). In short, too much bad cholesterol can kill the democracy game – that’s how democracies die. Consequently, as we have seen from the storming of the Capitol incited by Tweety Trump, our American experiment in democratic governance is existentially threatened by his endless oppositional (agonistic, contesting) behavior in favor of his own authoritarian rule.However, the end of Tweety Trump’s term in office as president will not bring to an end the polemical oppositional behavior in him or in his most gullible followers. Let me explain why not using Ong’s larger conceptual framework.Briefly, according to Ong’s account of our contemporary secondary oral culture, our contemporary secondary oral culture is culturally conditioning us psychologically to be deeply attuned to the polemical orientation of primary oral culture in our collective unconscious (in Jung’s terminology) – and this cultural conditioning is not going to change appreciably in the near future.Now, in Ong’s “Preface” to his book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1977, pages 9-13), he says the following: “The present volume carries forward work in two earlier volume by the same author, The Presence of the Word (1967) and Rhetoric Romance, and Technology (1971)” (page 9). He then discusses these two earlier volumes.Then Ong says, “The thesis of these two earlier works is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: the works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explain everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, the thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish” (page 9-10).Thus Ong himself claims (1) that his thesis is “sweeping” but (2) that the shifts do not “cause or explain everything in human culture and consciousness” and (3) that the shifts are related to “major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness.”Major cultural developments include the rise of modern science, the rise of modern capitalism, the rise of representative democracy, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts.In my estimate, Ong, in effect, implicitly works with this thesis in his massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958) – his major exploration of the influence of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in the mid-1450s. Taking a hint from Ong’s massively researched 1958 book, the Canadian Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) worked up some examples of his own in his sweeping 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press).Next, in Ong’s 1977 “Preface,” he explains certain lines of investigation that he further develops in Interfaces of the Word. Then he says, “At a few points, I refer in passing to the work of French and other European structuralists – variously psychoanalytic, phenomenological, linguistic, or anthropological in cast” (page 10). Ong liked to characterize his own philosophical thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast.Now, consider Ong’s own modesty in the subtitle of his 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History, mentioned above. His wording “Some Prolegomena” clearly acknowledges that he does not explicitly claim that his thesis as he formulated it in his 1977 “Preface” does not “cause or explain everything in human culture and consciousness” but that the shifts he points out are “sweeping.”Now, to the extent that Ong’s philosophical thought is your cup of tea, figuratively speaking, and you decide to publish your own studies along lines that he points out in his publications, you will need to add to his points by supplying points of your own, as Marshall McLuhan does in his sweeping 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy – and as Thomas D. Zlatic does in his essay “Faith in Pretext: An Ongian Context for [Melville’s Novel] The Confidence-Man” in the ambitious anthology Of Ong and Media Ecology (Hampton Press, 2012, pages 241-280).However, if Ong’s philosophical thought is not your cup of tea, figuratively speaking, then you can disregard him and his thought and proceed to say whatever you want to say without reference to anything he says in his publications.But if you do proceed this way, then Ong would claim that he has a permanent edge on you and your thought.Next, I would call attention to the subtitle of the 600-page anthology An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Hampton Press, 2002). In the spirit of what Ong himself refers to as “Some Prolegomena,” I tend to see Ong’s thought as pointing out certain challenges for further inquiry. But if Ong is not your cup of tea, figuratively speaking, then you will not be inclined to take up those challenges.However, Ong is a tough act to follow, and for this reason, taking up the challenges of his philosophical thought may not appeal to many people. I can understand this.Now, because Ong is my cup of tea, I want to suggest here that we Americans are not likely to see the demise of sharply polarized rhetoric on the right (in Trump and his most ardent followers) and on the left (e.g., in so-called cancel culture) in the near future. But will our American experiment in democratic governance die or survive? I have no crystal ball. I don’t know.Nevertheless, I think that polarizing tendencies on both the right and the left need to be sharply curbed – roughly along the lines that Levitsky and Ziblatt indicate by abandoning wording and imagery characterizing one’s opponent(s) as the enemy, as in warfare (the Greek term polemos, meaning war, struggle).

This book is better than I expected. I teach in Japan about comparative constitutional law and politics, and bought this out of a sense of professional duty: I figured it would just be some Ivy League liberal professors using a few historical examples to explain (again) why Trump is dangerous. There already are a number of books with that message, such as Jan Werner Müller's excellent "What is Populism?" (2016). Yes, this book does have that message too, and it uses some of the same examples as Müller, including Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. But it also goes beyond partisan diatribe in a couple of valuable ways.The first is to illuminate the role of "norms" in a constitutional system. In this context, a "norm" is an unwritten standard of behavior that is followed for an extended period of time -- you might think of it as describing some type of behavior that's "normal." US law school profs are prone to point out several such norms, none of which are in the US Constitution as written: such as that US Supreme Court justices are lawyers, that members of the military retire from active duty before joining the Cabinet, and, prior to FDR in 1940, that Presidents not run for a third term. (These sorts of norm are often called "constitutional conventions" by political scientists -- not to be confused with the event in Philadelphia mentioned in the musical "Hamilton.") Individually, though, the loss of any of these highly specific norms wouldn't necessarily have a huge impact on the functioning of the government.Levitsky & Ziblatt (L&Z) instead focus on some norms that are more abstract, but also more vital to the fabric of democracy. The norms of interest to them are "shared codes of conduct that become common knowledge within a particular community or society -- accepted, respected and enforced by its members" (@101). Two of the most important are (i) mutual toleration, i.e. the belief that political opponents are not enemies, and (ii) institutional forbearance, i.e. "avoiding actions that, while respecting the letter of the law, obviously violate its spirit" (@106). In more specific contexts several other such norms also come up, e.g. that presidents shouldn't undermine another coequal branch (such as the court system). Calling such norms the "guardrails of democracy," L&Z provide one of the clearest and most convincing expositions of them that I've read. Many presidents challenge norms -- such as when Teddy Roosevelt had dinner in the White House with a black man (Booker T. Washington), or Jimmy Carter and his wife walked part of the route to his inauguration -- but Pres. Trump stands out, they say, stands out "in his willingness to challenge unwritten rules of greater consequence" (@195). So far, some of his assaults on mutual toleration and institutional forbearance have been more rhetorical than actual: as I write this, he continues to revile Hilary Clinton but hasn't actually "locked her up." Unfortunately, the fact that in his first year Pres. Trump has only bumped into, but not yet broken through, such "guardrails" doesn't necessarily signify much about the future: see Table 3 @108, which shows that the now-authoritarian Erdoğan was at about the same place as Trump at the end of his first year.But it's not only the president who is capable of breaking the norms -- Congress can as well. L&Z point out how the era of "constitutional hardball," emphasizing the letter over the spirit of the document, has roots as early as in the 1970s, when Newt Gingrich was a Congressional aspirant. It really came into its own after the 1994 mid-term elections, when Gingrich was elected Speaker. Although the Republicans seem to have begun this cycle of escalation, Democrats also participated, such as in removing the ability to filibuster most judicial nominations. L&Z use historical narratives to show how the disappearance (or nonexistence) of such norms in other countries allowed society to slide down the slope into authoritarianism.The second and more surprising point of L&Z's historical study is that in the US the erosion of these two central norms is linked to matters of race. During most of the 20th Century conservative Republicans could cooperate with conservative Democrats, and liberal Democrats could cooperate with liberal Republicans. The stability of this bipartisanship rested to a great degree on the fact that political participation of racial minorities could be limited in a variety of ways, such as via a poll tax. As the civil rights movement picked up steam, and as the Hispanic population started to increase, it became clear that the Democratic party was minorities' preference. Around the first Reagan election in 1980 the previously traditional party alignments started to break down, and polarization set in. White voters in Southern states shifted to the Republican party. Concurrently, the divisiveness of the abortion issue following the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was driving many religious voters toward the Republicans as well.This is actually the most depressing aspect of the book. Unless he perpetrates a coup, Trump will pass; but the racial and religious source of hardball attitudes augurs ill for American politics into the indefinite future. The US is a multi-ethnic society in which no ethnicity is in the majority. L&Z point out that to date they haven't been able to identify any society like that which is both (i) a democracy and (ii) a society where all ethnicities are empowered politically, socially and economically.In short, this isn't a "Chicken Little" book screaming hysterically to the already-persuaded about how terrible Donald Trump is. Rather, while pointing out some of the dangers posed acutely by Trump's handling of the presidency, it also identifies some much more long-term problems. The solutions proposed by L&Z, such as that Democrats shouldn't behave like the hardball Republican politicians, may strike some readers as weak and overly optimistic. But no solutions will eventuate if people aren't aware of how deep the problem really is, and for that reason this book deserves to be read widely.

The authors seem to be extraordinarily knowledge about democracy--both here and abroad. The book is extremely well written and very readable.My only concern is that some readers might feel that the authors are biased: Republicans receive most of the blame when evaluating the threats to our democracy. This is par for the course with books written by academicians. The vast majority of informed readers would agree with the academicians.The endnotes are fairly detailed, and they contain helpful information. There isn't a bibliography.

The work is well informed and it makes a good read. It is specially interesting in all that concerns American constitutionalism, past and present. The argumentation is focused on the fail-safe procedures and pitfalls of what we currently take for the democratic system, but surprisingly ignores the factor which, in the last instance, is the most important for the preservation of democracy: the people, the voters themselves. You can build all the fail-safes you want into the democratic system to assure its undefeated continuity, but if you have a manipulable pool of voters, a population of mostly simple-minded, uninstructed, reactive people, incapable of thinking by themselves, receptive to the typical lies forged into all-day-long-sounding slogans by crooked politicians —if you have that, your democracy is doomed no matter what. There is no democracy without an enlightened “demos”. Without it, all you have is a “demofallacy”. Not taking into account this factor, makes the argumentation of the work very academic, yes, but also very weak, specially in what it has as a warning against the future that awaits us.A second weakness has this work too: it takes the democratic system as something good in itself without a critical assessment of its failures and shortcomings, particularly in a time like the present, when there is a price to pay (normally high) for the slow-motion consensus-buildups and decision-making processes typical of the complex system Western democracies are. When rapid and decisive action is required you can’t allow yourself to be stopped into inactivity, which is why the Romans substituted dictatorship for the Republic in times of national crises.

This book reflects the ideological clampdown that the globalists have imposed on almost all the western media. The book doesn't say a word about the Deep State driven Russia Hoax, which has been described in detail by Fox New legal analyst Gregg Jarrett. The hoax is an excellent example of an attempt to kill US democracy. I'm no fan of Trump's, but the Russia hoax may well be the biggest scandal in US political history. However the authors say not a word about it. That sort of self censorship in academia is alien to American democracy. Don't waste your time with this book. Read Greg Jarrett.

This book is certainly a good tool to understand ongoing dynamics in the US and elsewhere, with lots of valuable insights and historically and scientifically grounded considerations. However, personal opinions of the two authors overly shines through the lines - to the potential detriment of their argument.The problem lies with the confusing nature of the book: is it a scientific text or a political manifesto? It is clear the aim leans to the former, but the contrast between the layout of a political science essay and the recurring stimgatising language against the Trump administration and other US politicians is rather striking and seriously risks undermining the underlying scientific validity.I would certainly recommend this book, but with the caveat of being aware of the fact the book is not entrely scientific.

Excellent! It's very easy to read and as someone who is quite slow at reading, nicely broken down. The book focuses mainly on the breakdown of modern American politics, primarily starting in the 1990s, with the arrival of Gingrich. It talks more about the Republican Party than just Trump. Throughout it is laced with examples of broken democracies from the 20th and 21st Centuries. Great read. I especially liked the discussion on the importance of political norms and the 'guardrails' of democracy. Interesting stuff.

The authors are well-respected, but this book has lots of spin. The authors are desperate to highlight the clear and present danger that Trump poses to the American nation, to such a degree that some of their potted history is almost surreal (for instance the bit about the collapse of democracy in Chile, which they lay at the feet of the populist Allende -- setting aside the point that Pinochet killed thousands without trial in order to maintain millitary rule). Worth a read, and easy to skim, but it's social science re-purposed as a political weapon.