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Book: How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future
Quotes of Book: How Democracies Die: What
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  1. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    Uma coisa que distingue autocratas de líderes democráticos contemporâneos é sua intolerância à crítica e a disposição de usar seu poder para punir aqueles que - na oposição, na mídia ou na sociedade civil - venham a criticá-los.
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  2. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    The strength of the American political system, it has often been said, rests on what Swedish Nobel Prize-winning economist Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed: the principles of individual freedom and egalitarianism. Written into our founding documents and repeated in classrooms, speeches, and editorial pages, freedom and equality are self-justifying values. But they are not self-executing. Mutual toleration and institutional forbearance are procedural principles - they tell politicians how to behave, beyond the bounds of law, to make our institutions function. We should regard these procedural values as also sitting at the center of the American Creed - for without them, our democracy would not work.
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  3. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    Polarization can destroy democratic norms. When socioeconomic, racial, or religious differences give rise to extreme partisanship, in which societies sort themselves into political camps whose worldviews are not just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain. Some polarization is healthy - even necessary - for democracy. And indeed, the historical experience of democracies in Western Europe shows us that norms can be sustained even where parties are separated by considerable ideological differences. But when societies grow so deeply divided that parties become wedded to incompatible worldviews, and especially when their members are so socially segregated that they rarely interact, stable partisan rivalries eventually give way to perceptions of mutual threat. As mutual toleration disappears, politicians grow tempted to abandon forbearance and try to win at all costs. This may encourage the rise of antisystem groups that reject democracy's rules altogether. When that happens, democracy is in trouble.
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  4. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    If, twenty-five years ago, someone had described to you a country in which candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the government of stealing the election or establishing a dictatorship, and parties used their legislative majorities to impeach presidents and steal supreme court seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania. You probably would not have thought of the United States.
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  5. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    Even well-designed constitutions cannot, by themselves, guarantee democracy. For one, constitutions are always incomplete. Like any set of rules, they have countless gaps and ambiguities. No operating manual, no matter how detailed, can anticipate all possible contingencies or prescribe how to behave under all possible circumstances.
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  6. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    Democracies do have written rules {constitutions} and referees {the courts}. But these work best, and survive longest, in countries where written constitutions are reinforced by their own unwritten rules of the game. These rules or norms serve as the soft guardrails of democracy, preventing day-to-day political competition from devolving into a no-holds-barred conflict.
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  7. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    Huq and Ginsburg recently warned that "the constitutional and legal safeguards of {American} democracy…would prove to be fairly easy to manipulate in the face of a truly antidemocratic leader.
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  8. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    Collective abdication-the transfer of authority to a leader who threatens democracy-usually flows from one of two sources. The first is the misguided belief that an authoritarian can be controlled or tamed. The second is what sociologist Ivan Ermakoff calls "ideological collusion," in which the authoritarian's agenda overlaps sufficiently with that of mainstream politicians that abdication is desirable, or at least preferable to the alternatives.
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  9. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    When gatekeeping institutions fail, mainstream politicians must do everything possible to keep dangerous figures away from the centers of power.
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  10. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    Blatant dictatorships - in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule - has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means. Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Chavez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.
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  11. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place - by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common sense cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.
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  12. Steven Levitsky _ How Democracies Die: What

    Many Americans are justifiably frightened by what is happening to our country. But protecting our democracy requires more than just fright or outrage. We must be humble and bold. We must learn from other countries to see the warning signs - and recognize the false alarms. We must be aware of the fateful missteps that have wrecked other democracies. And we must see how citizens have risen to meet the great democratic crises of the past, overcoming their own deep-seated divisions to avert breakdown. History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes. The promise of history, and the hope of this book, is that we can find the rhymes before it is too late.
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