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- [00:07]
A
Welcome to Talking Feds. One on one deep dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives. I'm your host, Harry Littman. I'm really pleased to welcome back Steve Levitsky for a discussion that will by definition be too short and however long it is, but will be full of insight about the grave challenges to our democracy and how they compare to those of other countries that have succumbed to autocratic takeovers. Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and the Director of the David Rockefeller center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He's also a Senior Fellow at the Kettering foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at, at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization, authoritarianism and political parties with a focus on Latin America. And he came, I think, to national prominence with the book he co wrote In, I think 2018, How Democracies Die, which he followed up in 2023 with Tyranny of the why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. His commentary is widely published and in many ways he's the man of the day. I think of Steve as the sort of prophet of democratic decline in both senses of the term teacher and predictor. Steve, thanks so much for returning to Talking Feds.
- [01:45]
B
Good to see you. Thanks for having me here.
- [01:47]
A
So you've been a scholar of democratic decline as well as a chronicler of what's happening here. Your 2023 book chronicled the crisis to democracy in Trump's first term, 10 months into the second term. In broad strokes, how would you compare the scope and the success of the assault on democracy this time around with the first time around.
- [02:11]
B
Oh, night and day. I mean, Trump, I mean, first of all, Trump didn't expect to win the 2016 election. He had no, he had, you know, he had good authoritarian instincts, but he had no authoritarian plan and he had no authoritarian team. He really had no, no team at all. So he governed mostly with, you know, conservative technocrats and, and more or less mainstream Republicans. And, and they, they constrained him. They talked him out of a lot of stuff. They refused to implement a lot of stuff. And they didn't feed his authoritarian instincts. They mostly kind of channeled them into safer territory. And, you know, we should. Several really important changes have happened since then. Maybe most important of all is that Trump has gained full control over the Republican Party. When we wrote How Democracies Die, there was still a big and significant non Trump, even anti Trump faction within the Republican Party. John McCain was still alive. And, you know, it was possible to envision the Republican Party constraining Trump to a degree. Now that is completely changed. The Republican Party is, is, this is the most personalistic party I've ever seen in the United States. It's very rare that you see a single leader gain this kind of control over a party. FDR didn't have remotely this sort of control over the Democratic Party. And so this is new. But also, I mean, my co author, Daniel Ziblot likes to, likes to refer to this as year nine in the Trumpist project because the people, Trump came to power this time with a team, with a plan, with either loyalists who will do whatever, whatever he says will compete among themselves to see who could be more Trumpist, but also a set of ideologues. And here I think of people like Russ Vaught and Stephen Miller who really do have a plan and a project. And so these guys were in the first administration, they learned a bit about how the government works, what they can do, what they can't do, what where the levers of power are. And they spent four years planning, learning, studying, and plotting this out. And so they hit the ground running this time. They knew what they were doing. They had a project and they are carrying it out. And that is why this is a much, much more effective authoritarian project than the first time around.
- [05:04]
A
Yeah, emphasis on running. It's been kind of a breathtaking speed. And on project, I do think, even though Trump at first disclaimed it, he seems to embrace the so called Project 2025. But he obviously doesn't seem capable of the kind of strategic calculations that have been brought to bear through him. Okay. You know, you've pointed out, I want to mainly focus on people other than Trump. Take a figure like Trump as a sort, given. Let's, let's start a little bit with the sort of feeling within the country. So you've pointed out. Look, we shouldn't be under the illusion that 250 million citizens are going to feel the effects of authoritarianism. Many are going to be largely unaffected. I've heard a sort of similar comment. Authoritarianism is kind of boring. People are still getting up, having coffee, going to, you know, jobs and birthday parties. So do you see in general a kind of shoulder shrug or even mild support for Trump for now anyway, among the majority of the American people?
- [06:14]
B
No, polls don't. Not a majority of the American people. Polls show that a solid majority and in fact a growing majority of Americans oppose virtually all of what this government is doing. Obviously, there are Still a significant chunk of the population that supports them and that is indifferent to it. I think in addition to the fact that you're absolutely right, most authoritarian regimes, because they don't touch most people's daily lives, most of the time people are not fixated on, well, this is authoritarianism we have to resist. That's absolutely true. I think it's worsened by the new media landscape. I just read data today that 17% of Americans pay for their news, which means that 83% of Americans aren't getting very good news. And 30 something percent of Americans say that they actively seek out news each day, which means that 60 something percent of Americans are not seeking out news of any form each day. So the degree, I mean, some of us who follow this, whose job it is to follow this, obsessively get outraged multiple times a day. But many people are not even getting exposed to some of the things that we get obsessed about. That said, that said, Trump is, this is a somewhat unusual authoritarian government. It's pretty ideological and it's quite performative. Right. Most authoritarian regimes, there are some very repressive authoritarian regimes out there. The regimes that I've studied in South America that kill a lot of people, that disappear, people that torture people, but they, they hide it. They don't want to give off the, they, they may, you know, say, this is an emergency, we have to do this. This is terrible. We're worried about communists, but they don't advertise that they are repressive. This government is almost the opposite of that, you know, you know, thank, thank God they're not, they're not killing people yet outside of the Caribbean. But they, they are performing a degree of thuggishness and authoritarian, outsized degree of thuggishness and, and, you know, with, with masked men on the streets and bullying people and terrorizing people in cities almost needlessly. Right? There's, there's, it's not even clear what the political aim of that is other than performative authoritarianism. So these guys are, rather than hiding their authoritarianism and letting people get on with their lives, they're actually doing stuff on an almost daily basis that's, that's in people's faces needlessly. And I don't, still, I don't fully understand why that's the case. I've not seen, I don't overstate this, but I haven't seen an openly kind of performatively authoritarian government like this since the 1930s. I mean, you have to go back to the 30s to find this Kind of open, open authoritarianism. But it's pissing people off. But it is pissing people off needlessly. If Trump, if these guys, if Trump were Orban or Erdogan or Hugo Chavez, he could have an approval rating much closer to 50%. But the constant and very public attacks on individuals, on critics, on media and universities, on cities, it's pissing people off.
- [09:42]
A
You know, let's go quickly to universities. You're at, you're at Harvard, and that's been a. Something I hadn't anticipated anyway, is the whole series of attacks on civil society where and, and the success of them, universities, media, law firms, you know, and the like. And you've pointed out this has nothing to do with the reasons they proffered, for example, anti Semitism. How do you see those series of attacks as sort of fitting into the overall agenda? And I just want to say one more thing, which is you pointed out it's both sinister and there's an element of ineptitude here as well from the administration that isn't necessarily working to their disadvantage. But we have to think of kind of both features. Sometimes the answer is just nobody really knows what they're doing. But what you're feeling about the university.
- [10:33]
B
Situation, I think it's a combination of two things. I mean, it is not at all uncommon for authoritarians of all political stripes to go after universities. Universities are centers of dissent. Dissenting. His left wing governments descend against right wing governments. They are almost always centers of dissent. And usually they're culturally influential centers of dissent. And so autocrats don't like dissent. And so they don't like culturally influential centers of dissent. So their instinct in almost every case is to one way or another go after universities. I think that's part of the story. I think the principal part, though, is the ideological wing of this government. Trump himself is clearly not ideological. There are many people in his government who are personal loyalists who are not particularly ideological. But there are, there are those who are, who do really buy into and share this kind of far right ideology that both public institutions, the government and private societal institutions, culture, Hollywood, universities, business, private sector, have been penetrated and corroded by, call it what you want, you know, woke communists or woke Marxists or leftists. But there's this belief that this country's institutions have been captured by the left and that are both public and private institutions need to be purged and packed. You know, this is, this is what the far right in this country learned from Viktor Orban and from others who've done this. And so this is a serious effort. And you know, Chris Rufo, I think is, is the mastermind behind this, a serious effort to as much as possible purge universities of their leftism or beat them or weaken them. And so this is a real ideological project.
- [12:39]
A
All right, I'd like to kind of COVID I know we don't have much time in the sort of spectrum from, you know, terrible to, to sort of escaping the noose. And so you've, your work on other regimes teaches, I think, Steve, that if things really, if we're really living in the last days in the American experiment, we shouldn't be looking for boots on the ground, certainly, or even what you've called a classic authoritarian regime. Elections canceled and opposition disappeared. Instead, your concern and that of Professor Zischke is more with a gradual slide into what you call competitive authoritarianism. Can you just explain that term and why that's your lookout in today's U.S. sure.
- [13:30]
B
Luke and Wei and I coined the term nearly a quarter of a century ago during the initial post Cold War era after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when elections were spreading around the globe and it became very difficult politically for any country to just completely eliminate democratic institutions. Military rule after the end of the Cold War became difficult to pull off in most of the world and outright single party rule became impossible. So you saw the proliferation in Africa, in the former Soviet Union, in parts of Asia and Latin America, of what we call competitive authoritarian regimes, which are regimes that from a distance, if you squint, look like democracies. There are elections, regular elections. There's a legislature, there's a court. Opposition is legal, opposition is above board, but the playing field is tilted to varying degrees. The government the incumbent abuses, weaponizes. The state abuses power to punish rivals, to punish critics, to weaken opposition, and in various ways, from gerrymandering to co opting the media to bullying civil society in the private sector tilts the playing field against the opposition and mainly because of the strength of U.S. institutions. I think it's unlikely, not impossible, but unlikely that any government is going to be able to completely shunt aside the constitutional order and that therefore you're going to see behavior like that. The weaponization of the US government and its pretty systematic deployment again to punish critics, to weaken opponents, and to bully the media, the private sector and civil society onto the political sidelines, tilting the playing field against the opposition. That it is authoritarianism. It's more of a hybrid regime. It's not Stalinism, it's not Nazism, it's not fascism. But I think that's the authoritarianism we're going to get. In fact, I think we're there.
- [15:41]
A
Yeah. That we've already gotten. And I would just want to underscore one word you use which is varying. I think we're seeing a lot of different strategies here and there with an eye toward when the midterms come. There will be different things in place and will and he'll have different strings to try to pull.
- [16:01]
B
It's a lot of experimentation. It's a lot of trial and error and there is a lot of ineptitude. I mean, this is not a brilliant team in power. They, they are screwing up. They're trying things. Some things are working, some things are not working. They're experimenting. We're in real time.
- [16:20]
A
And including in the courts. Let me just ask you, because it's my persistent focus about the Department of Justice. I'm going to just ask you to assume, but you probably are already of the view that the indictments of Trump's enemies, like Comey and Letitia James, are for reasons of reprisal. You've talked about the Democratic norm of mutual toleration, and this would seem to be inconceivable in another day and era. How do you think it fits in? How serious, if you're listing the kind of benchmarks or signposts of emerging authoritarianism, is the, are these reprisal prosecutions?
- [17:00]
B
Well, it's interesting because the reprisals in and of themselves, I mean, the targets that have been chosen, this is per, this is not the ideological project of the government so much as it is the personalism of Trump. You know, Trump wants to go after Comey and Jack Smith and Letitia James. If you were, if you were a, a cool headed dictator targeting opponents for the, for the future to try to advantage yourself in the, in future elections, you know, Jim Comey is probably not the first guy you're going to go after. Right. He's right.
- [17:38]
A
Right.
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B
And so old news. This isn't really these indictments in of themselves. The, the revenge indictments, I don't think help Trump very much. They may make him happy and they're clearly authoritarian. I don't think they help Trump or the authoritarian project all that much. What worries me much more, and it hasn't been fully implemented yet, is this ever to investigate and prosecute those who finance civil society in the opposition, whether it's Act Blue or Open Society foundation or Democratic Party donors, if they start to credibly go after the folks who finance not only the Democratic Party, but independent media, civil society, Democratic Party candidates, that tilts the playing field. That's really dangerous. And that really sort of ramped up after the Charlie Kirk assassination. And, you know, we're kind of in wait and see about how serious they are and how far they can push that. But that worries me a lot.
- [18:47]
A
Understood. Okay, one, just one sort of comparison that's in your total strike zone. Well, you have a very large strike zone, Professor Levitsky, but the real down the middle of Latin America, you emphasized earlier this year in an op ed in the Times how authoritarian tendencies are often enabled by political parties. My question is how the Republican Party's behavior under Trump compare to Bolsonaro's support base in Brazil, which is something you're maybe the national expert on. And if you see it as largely similar or largely dissimilar, pretty different.
- [19:29]
B
Because the nature of the party system in Brazil could not be more different. Brazil has a very, has weak political parties and a very fragmented system. This is, it's probably difficult for at least some Americans even kind of conceive of there are 20 something parties sitting in Congress in Brazil. There are six or seven or eight different far right parties. Parties are all kind of weak. Politicians change parties. And so there are just a lot of parties that have somewhere between 4 and 12% of the vote and they're all kind of weak. And what that means is that in a presidential system, it's pretty easy for presidents to dominate their party. And that has been very consequential in the United States because we only have two parties. And when Trump was able to fully gain control of his party, that put US Democracy in terrible danger because one of two parties was no longer was committed to an autocrat. And that's where we are today in Brazil. There are multiple right wing parties. And so, as you know, as we've all observed over the last eight years, Republican politicians have learned that they can't cross Donald Trump and live to tell about it. Politically, they can't continue a career in the Republican Party having crossed Donald Trump. In Brazil, it's a little more complicated because there are lots of right wing politicians in different parties. They're right wing parties, but they're not Bolsonaro's party. And so politicians on the right can continue their political careers even if Bolsonaro ends up in prison. They don't. Right wing politicians, with the exception of Bolsonaro's inner circle, right wing politicians don't have the same stake in Bolsonaro that Republican politicians have in Trump. They have More room to maneuver. You can be a sort of a Mitt Romney type or a Liz Cheney in dissent and still live to tell about it. And that's a huge difference. That's what's allowed the Brazilian political system to sideline Bolsonaro in a way that proved impossible here.
- [21:56]
A
That's really interesting. And by the way, this is one of the miscalculations that the framers made. They assumed there would be factions, many of them. And so, for example, when it came to impeachment, of course the party of the president would stick with the president, but there'd be six others say that would constitute a majority or a super majority they didn't anticipate. The two party system that's really, along with electoral college and other things in the Constitution have really warped things. Okay, last. Yeah, last question for you, Professor. I always feel this, I'm sure you do as well. You know, what will happen, what is to be done. I don't want to ask you for your crystal ball predictions or the Vegas odds.
- [22:40]
B
We are really, really bad at that.
- [22:42]
A
I look, don't I know it. So. But let's assume that the Republicans stay as bad as ever, the Supreme Court stays solicitous, and Trump's base, you know, maintains its sort of cult like attachment. What does pulling back from the precipice in time look like? And in particular, what's the role of just, you know, maybe the last big piece on the board, the people, you know, what, what does dodging the big bullet look like, in your view?
- [23:15]
B
I mean, I think, I mean, I think, I still think we have a number of important advantages. As bad as it is, and it's worse than I anticipated when Trump got elected, and it continues to be worse. But as bad as it is, the US still has a number of exit ramps, elections. I mean, there will be efforts to manipulate the election process at every stage. We have to be ready for that. How much they'll get away with, difficult to imagine. But there will be elections and there will be competitive elections. And it's really hard, really hard to steal elections. Sometimes it happens, but it's very hard to steal elections. And so the electoral channel remains open, and the fact that Trump is not popular makes that electoral channel quite viable. The courts are still a, a viable channel. Is the Supreme Court the way I would like it to be? Not at all. Yeah, but it is not a packed court. It is not a Trumpist court. And it's, and it's, and it's an important avenue. And as you noted, the people themselves and, and protest in, in multiple forms. Not just sort of classic street protest, but citizen activism continues to be not only available, but really, really important. And I don't know exactly what the moment will be or the avenue will be. I mean, it could be as simple as an electoral channel. There's a world, it could be much worse than this. But there's a world in which the Democrats achieve a pretty significant victory in 2026, win control of at least the House, the Senate's harder, and that begins to sort of weaken the aura of inevitability for Trump, and you begin to see some version of a lame duck effect that weakens the Trumpist coalition. That's entirely possible. It's also possible that, that Trump goes for broke for a third term, and the Republican Party is so personalized that nobody resists him, and it goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court stops it, hopefully. So there's a world in which this is a little less likely, but there's a world in which Trump manages to really disrupt the 2026 election. I mean, really just prevent the popular will from expressing itself. And that triggers pretty significant protests that, that changes the game. So it's, it's really hard to know exactly which exit ramp we will follow and, and when. And it's not inevitable that we, that we get an exit ramp there. There are nightmare scenarios, to be sure. But my point is simply that given the strength of civil society, given Trump's lack of popularity, given the viability of elections, given the independence of the courts, there are still multiple exit ramps. And my guess is we probably will find one of them.
- [26:22]
A
It's so good to hear. It's for what it's worth, which is a lot less my view as well. And something I often point to is relative to, say, Hungary or Russia, we have such cultural ballast in favor of constitutional values, pledge of allegiance in first grade, and the like. So if it really comes home to people, the democracy is on the line. I think that really mobilizes the regular American people in a different way. Hope so. Stephen Levitsky, so great to be with you. Hope we can do it again. But thank you for your time and, of course, for your invaluable work on the biggest issue of the day.
- [27:03]
B
Harry, it's a great pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.
- [27:07]
A
Thank you for tuning in to One on One, a weekly conversation series from Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts, and please take a moment to rate and review the show. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube, where we are posting full episodes and daily updates on top legal stories. Check us out on substack harry littman.substack.com where we're posting two or three bulletins a week breaking down the various threats to constitutional norms and the rule of law, and Talking Fez has joined forces with the Contrarian. I'm a founding contributor to this new media venture committed to reviving the diversity of opinion that feels increasingly rare in today's news landscape, where legacy media seems to be tacking toward Trump for business reasons rather than editorial ones. Rest assured, we're still the same scrappy independent podcast you've come to know and trust just now linked up with an ambitious and vital project designed for this pivotal moment in our nation's legal and political discourse. Find out more at Contrarian Cat, thanks for tuning in. And don't worry, as long as you need answers, the Feds Will keep Talking Talking Feds is produced by Luke Cregan and Katie Upshaw, associate producer Becca Haveian sound Engineering by Matt McArdle, Rosie Dawn Griffin, David Lieberman, Hamsa Mahadrenathan, Emma Maynard and Hallie Necker are our contributing writers. Production assistants by Morgan Chisholm and Akshaysh Turbailu. Our editorial interns are Bridget Ryan and Troy Neville. Our music, as ever, is by the amazing Philip Glass. Talking Feds is a production of Deledo llc. I'm Harry Littman. Talk to you later. SA.