A Review of Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Crown, 2023, 349 pages)

With this important new volume, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are following up on their outstanding bestseller, How Democracies Die (2018). The earlier book constituted a clarion call to defend liberal democracy from the risks arising from the global wave of populism, which culminated in the shocking election of domineering, belligerent outsider Donald Trump. In Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point, our authors examine mainly the United States, but their provocative arguments have broader implications, as this essay will discuss with a focus on Latin America.

The 2018 volume used the United States as a “least likely case:” If a demagogue with autocratic leanings can win executive office even in the global paragon of democratic liberalism, how much greater is the risk facing all the other countries where populists have taken power? Conversely, the troubling question arose: If populist chief executives have dismantled democracy in several other nations, could Trump manage to undermine it in the United States as well? By probing these important questions systematically and developing many penetrating insights, Levitsky and Ziblatt provided the most prominent and best warning call about the principal threat to political freedom in the third millennium.

By contrast to the broad perspective of How Democracies Die, the new book concentrates mostly on the United States, using comparisons with other countries, especially from the Global North, to highlight American exceptionalism. In a nutshell, Levitsky and Ziblatt advance two main arguments and support them with a great deal of insightful reasoning and relevant evidence.

First, the Republican Party (GOP) has turned into the refuge of whites who fear status loss due to the U.S. advance toward multiracial diversity. But because this societal transformation has firm demographic roots and is therefore bound to continue, the GOP is confining itself to an electoral minority. In reaction, good parts of the party have become undemocratic and try with illiberal means to thwart the emerging multi-racial majority, they assert.

Second, the U.S. institutional framework has an exceptional set of counter-majoritarian features, designed to forestall the unfettered domination of the current majority and to give political minorities institutional mechanisms for defending their basic interests and rights. The Electoral College in presidential elections, the Senate with its disproportionate representation of small states and its filibuster, and the Supreme Court with its judicial review and its lifetime judges all fulfill this function. Yet in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s view, the effort to prevent a “tyranny of the majority” through this globally unique institutional set-up has gone too far: It has allowed the nationally ever less competitive GOP to establish its tyranny of the minority—while also enabling its continued focus on racially resentful whites and its refusal to adjust to multiracial diversity.

Considering the readership of ReVista, what are the implications of these powerful and thought-provoking claims for Latin America? From this comparative perspective, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s emphasis on the United States’ counter-majoritarian institutions is surprising. After all, the biggest threat to contemporary democracy arises precisely from the majoritarian thrust of populism; thus, counter-majoritarian institutions are important safeguards against this problem.

As I explain in my forthcoming book, Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat: Countering Global Alarmism (Cambridge, January 2024), populism’s domineering, power-hungry leaders eagerly marshal their plebiscitarian mass support to undermine and dismantle liberal checks and balances to executive authority. Wherever they can bend or break such counter-majoritarian institutions, they advance toward stifling political hegemony and strangle democratic liberalism.

Whereas U.S. democracy may suffer from excessively strong counter-majoritarianism, Latin America has been particularly exposed to the perils of populism because its counter-majoritarian institutions are relatively weak, both in their formal design and in actual political practice—as Levitsky’s ample earlier work on the region has helped to document. Many Latin American presidents command much greater legislative and decree powers than their counterpart in Washington, and they can often extend their formal attributions: They can bend the rules and arrogate even more power, for instance by using any slight problem as a pretext for passing “emergency” decrees. Once they win elections, populist leaders eagerly exploit these weaknesses and abridge democracy.

Because Latin America’s institutional frameworks are much weaker and less counter-majoritarian than in the United States, the maintenance of the existing checks and balances is essential for democracy’s defense against the perils of populism. Due to this different status quo, the recommendations of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s new, U.S.-specific book are not directly applicable to the region; in fact, they would aggravate the risk.

The evidence: Recent populists who asphyxiated democracy busily eliminated or subjugated one counter-majoritarian institution after the other. In their systematic assault on political liberalism, both neoliberal Alberto Fujimori of Peru and anti-neoliberal Hugo Chávez of Venezuela forced profound transformations of their countries’ constitutions. To impose their hegemony, they boosted presidential powers and lifted prohibitions on reelection, under the majoritarian pretext of promoting “the will of the people.”

In their constitutional overhauls, both Fujimori and Chávez took special aim at a counter-majoritarian institution whose frequent elimination in the Global North Levitsky and Ziblatt praise (p. 208): They abolished the upper chamber of Congress to facilitate their own control over the legislative branch. Colombia’s right-wing populist Álvaro Uribe also sought to get rid of this safeguard; but his referendum proposal failed—a crucial defeat of his undemocratic project of power concentration.

Similarly, both Fujimori and Chavez closed, packed, or emasculated their countries’ high courts, which allowed them to harass the political opposition, put heavy pressure on the media and restrict civil society. By contrast, powerful, independent and activist courts were decisive in containing Brazil’s hard-right populist Jair Bolsonaro and in blocking the continued reelection of immensely popular Uribe—a starkly counter-majoritarian move.

Current experiences corroborate the importance of counter-majoritarian institutions in the struggle against undemocratic populism in Latin America. While El Salvador’s unicameral legislature facilitated democracy’s quick suffocation by autocratic populist Nayib Bukele, his counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has seen his power limited by Mexico’s bicameral Congress, where senators have shown some independence from their own president.

These arguments apply to other regions as well. For instance, Viktor Orbán easily strangled Hungarian democracy because the country has a unicameral legislature and, more broadly, an institutional framework with pronounced majoritarian features. By contrast, the power-concentration efforts of Poland’s right-wing populists, who have tried hard to emulate their Budapest colleague, have been hindered by the bicameral legislature, especially after opposition forces won a senate majority in 2019.

In sum, whereas Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the United States has retained excessively counter-majoritarian institutions, Latin American countries with their much weaker checks and balances are well-advised to defend their counter-majoritarian institutions, which provide much-needed protection against the temptations and risks of majoritarian populism.

Indeed, even in the United States, counter-majoritarian institutions significantly helped rein in populist Trump, and they may become even more important after the vengeful populist’s ever more likely reelection. From 2017 to 2021, independent courts prohibited many illiberal initiatives. Federalism also proved decisive as state and local governments run by Democrats systematically opposed the president. More basically, the administration of presidential elections by the states prevented the power-hungry populist from directly controlling voting procedures. If the federal government had been in charge, Trump may have engineered his reelection by “finding” the requisite number of votes wherever he was falling short in late 2020.

In regards to the United States, Levitsky and Ziblatt may also go too far in some of their other claims. While whites’ “racial resentment” certainly was important for Trump’s surprising rise, this was not the only appeal with which the billionaire tycoon beat his primary opponents in 2016, captured the presidency that year and almost repeated this feat in 2020. Instead, he also enlisted cultural and religious conservatism, economic nationalism, nostalgic patriotism and—in 2020—law-and-order slogans.

Recognizing these broader appeals is significant because they enable Trump in particular, and the GOP in general, to reach out beyond the shrinking demographic base of non-Hispanic whites that Levitsky and Ziblatt emphasize. Indeed, to the surprise of many observers, Trump in 2020 won higher vote shares among African-Americans and especially Latinos than in 2016— after four long years of inflammatory rhetoric tinged with racism, xenophobia and sexism. For instance, the populist’s espousal of cultural conservatism and patriotism and his defense of gun rights were quite popular among Latinos in South Texas, as my Americanist colleague Daron Shaw has found.

For these reasons, the Republican Party may not inevitably head into the demographic cul-de-sac that Levitsky and Ziblatt foresee. Consequently, the party may not depend as much on the US’ counter-majoritarian institutions either. More basically, the GOP may not be as disproportionately “authoritarian” as our authors claim. Instead, the Democratic Party has its radical fringes as well; when polled, its members and sympathizers endorse political violence and hold other illiberal views about as much as their Republican counterparts, as Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason documented in their 2022 book on Radical American Partisanship (pp. 46-49, 64-69, 123-26). Fortunately, however, attitudes are often far from driving actual behavior; thus, despite the unusual turbulence of the Trump era, political violence in the US has remained at low levels, compared for instance to the troubles and travails of the late 1960s.

In conclusion, while Tyranny of the Minority insightfully highlights several important problems plaguing the contemporary United States, the prospects of American democracy may not be quite as dire as Levitsky and Ziblatt claim.

Kurt Weyland is Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin and author, most recently, of Assault on Democracy: Communism, Fascism and Authoritarianism during the Interwar Years (Cambridge 2021).