Consistency

Where Levitsky, Ziblatt, and Chemerinsky have fallen short. By Luke Pickrell

I get chunks of news through Google Alerts. Each day, articles with keywords like “Senate,” “Supreme Court,” and “Constitution” land in my inbox. I’ve also flagged Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, co-authors of Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point, along with other writers talking about the Constitution. It’s no surprise that Levitsky and Ziblatt are frequently cited together — what is surprising is how rarely Tyranny of the Minority is mentioned. Most of the attention still goes to their 2018 bestseller, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future. Though both books won accolades and climbed the New York Times Best Seller list, their critique of the US political system is very different.

As Daniel Lazare put it in his review of Tyranny of the Minority, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s first work was well-recieived 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.” How Democracies Die critiques the filibuster, but says nothing about the Senate’s malapportionment and decades of Senate majorities that have represented — and continue to represent — less than half the population. It also lacks a critique of the lifetime tenure of Supreme Court justices, and says nothing about justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote.

Seven years ago, Levitsky and Ziblatt warned that “polarization, deeper than at any time since the end of Reconstruction, has triggered the epidemic of norm-breaking that now challenges our democracy.” They concluded that rather than examining the Constitution, Americans should focus on “mutual tolerance” and “institutional forbearance.”

Though not a full-throated critique of the Constitution, Tyranny of the Minority focuses far more on our rotten political framework. Levitsky and Ziblatt write that the Constitution “allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities — and sometimes even govern them.” The framers “[steered] the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny” that they left it vulnerable to “the Charybdis of minority rule.” Their newfound concern prompted Lazare to quip, “We all change our minds now and then, but [Levitsky Ziblatt] have done so with a vengeance.”

All of this to say that, while not absolute, the focus on How Democracies Die lets the Constitution off the hook by obscuring what’s noted in Tyranny of the Minority.

But Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t seem interested in doing their Constitution critique any favors either. A recent New York Times essay by Levitsky, Ziblatt, and Lucan Way asks how Americans will know when they have lost their democracy. That the three still treat the U.S. as a democracy, despite the evidence they themselves have compiled, is frustrating, if predictable. Most constitutional critics cling to the same illusion.

A little more irritating is the lack of analysis, or rather the simple honesty (you don’t have to be a Harvard professor to notice this stuff), that made Tyranny of the Minority worth reading at all. The Times piece is mum on the Senate, the Supreme Court, gerrymandering, presidential vetoes — all of it. In place of any constitutional analysis, we get a new (or recycled) academic buzzword: America has “crossed the line” into “competitive authoritarianism.”

Props to the authors for realizing that the judicial branch won’t save us and that “broader societal opposition is essential” — that’s something the Times editorial board can’t comprehend. But just two years ago, Levitsky and Ziblatt were talking about all the ways the framers’ creation entrenches minority rule. Having concluded that Trump’s America has “slid into authoritarianism,” their Constitutional critique is now entirely absent.

In life, it’s one thing to start and another to keep going. The gym, your diet, saving some money — what counts most is the follow-through. The world of ideas is no exception. As Levisky and Ziblatt prove, it’s one thing to critique the Constitution and another to keep going. And I won’t let Erwin Chemerinsky off the hook either; based on recent writing, you’d never know he recently called for a new constitution.

Ideas abound, but I can’t say for certain why most people don’t follow through. I’ll cut Levisky, Ziblatt, and Chemerinsky some slack and acknowledge that consistency is hard without outside encouragement. And right now, there’s no mass movement — let alone a democratic constitution political party — to push them forward.

But the fact remains: the democratic constitution movement needs propaganda outlets and reliable theoretical leaders. So far, Levitsky, Ziblatt, and Chemerinsky have fallen short.