I probably shouldn’t admit this, but the first time I finished editing a piece in what became Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s series of essays on the state of our democracy, I was in the hospital. This was in December 2016, and the question Levitsky and Ziblatt were asking was, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” I work too much, but I don’t routinely work when I am hospitalized. I made an exception for this story because I was so worried by what they were saying. Levitsky and Ziblatt had spent decades studying the breakdown of democracies in Latin America and Europe, and they did not like what they were seeing here in the United States. “The risk we face,” they wrote, “is not merely a president with illiberal proclivities. It is the election of such a president when the guardrails protecting American democracy are no longer as secure.” Eight-and-a-half years later, I think we can safely say that these guardrails are even less secure than they were in 2016. So Levitsky, Ziblatt and a third expert on how democracies morph into autocracies, Lucan Way, set out to help our readers answer the question, “How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?” It’s not an easy one. “Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be,” Levitsky, Way and Ziblatt write. Many voters in Venezuela, they note, continued to believe they were living in a democracy more than a decade into the dictatorial rule of President Hugo Chávez. Levitsky, Way and Ziblatt propose what they call “a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government.” By this measure, the United States is in real trouble. As they put it, “When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.” Note that word full. The battle is not over — far from it. “American society’s response to this authoritarian offensive has been underwhelming,” they write, but “pro-democracy forces have successfully resisted or reversed backsliding in recent years in Brazil, Poland, Slovakia, South Korea and elsewhere.” To get there, it will mean privileging collective action over individual compromise, opposition over appeasement. If civil society can get its act together, they argue, then “America’s slide into authoritarianism is reversible. But no one has ever defeated autocracy from the sidelines.” Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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