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1 An outside spending
group started by a band
of prominent Trump-
dissenting Republican
activists during
the lead-up to Trump’s
first impeachment,
Republicans for the Rule
of Law aired ads urging
congressional Republicans
to ‘‘demand the facts’’
about Trump’s efforts
to pressure President
Volodymyr Zelensky of
Ukraine to investigate Joe
Biden’s son Hunter.2 Scott, a Republican
senator from South
Carolina, was asked by
Fox News in February if
he would consider joining
Trump’s 2024 ticket.
‘‘Everybody wants to be
on President Trump’s
bandwagon, without any
question,’’ he replied.3 During the Obama
presidency, the N.A.A.C.P.
and other organizations
sued to block new
voter-ID laws in Texas and
Alabama on the grounds
that they deliberately
discriminated against
Black and Latino voters.
The Alabama law
was upheld, but in Texas
a federal court sided
with the N.A.A.C.P.,
and the state wrote a
replacement bill.4 ‘‘Preclearance’’ required
states with documented
histories of discriminatory
voting procedures —
most of them former
Jim Crow states in
the South — to submit
any proposed
changes to their election
procedures to the
Department of Justice.Early last year, Freedom House, an American organization
that since World War II has warned against autocracy and
repression on the march around the world, issued a special
report on a country that had not usually warranted such atten-
tion: its own. Noting that the United States had slid down its
ranking of countries by political rights and civil liberties — it
is now 59th on Freedom House’s list, slightly below Argentina
and Mongolia — the report warned that the country faced ‘‘an
acute crisis for democracy.’’ In November, the International
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an infl uential
Stockholm-based think tank, followed suit, adding the United
States to its list of ‘‘backsliding democracies’’ for the fi rst time.
The impetus for these reassessments was Donald Trump’s
attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6
attack on the Capitol that followed. But as the reassessments
themselves noted, those shocks to the system hardly came out
of nowhere; like the Trump presidency itself, they were both
products and accelerants of a process of American democrat-
ic erosion and disunion that had been underway for years and
has continued since. In states across the country, Republican
candidates are running for offi ce on the platform that the 2020
election was stolen — a view held by about three-quarters of
Republican voters. Since the beginning of 2021, Republicans
in at least 25 state legislatures have tried, albeit mostly unsuc-
cessfully, to pass legislation directly targeting the election
system: bills that would place election oversight or certifi ca-
tion in the hands of partisan legislatures, for instance, and
in some cases even bills specifi cally punishing offi cials who
blocked attempts to overturn the 2020 election outcome in
Trump’s favor. And those are just the new developments,
happening against a backdrop of a decade-long erosion of
voting rights and a steady resurgence of political extremism
and violence, and of course a world newly at war over the
principles of self- determination and democracy.
How bad is it, really? We convened a panel of experts in an
attempt to answer that question: political scientists who have
studied the lurching advances and retreats of democracy in
other countries and the dynamics of American partisanship;
a historian of and activist for civil rights in the United States;
and Republican legal and political operatives who guided the
party to victories in the past and are now trying to understand
its current state.Charles Homans: Steven, when you and Daniel Ziblatt pub-
lished ‘‘How Democracies Die’’ in 2018, you considered the
possible futures ahead of us as a country after Donald Trump’s
presidency. And you concluded that the likeliest scenario was
maybe not the worst outcome — full-blown authoritarianism
— but a moderately grim one: an era ‘‘marked by polariza-
tion, more departures from unwritten political conventions
and increasing institutional warfare.’’ How do you think that
prediction holds up?
Steven Levitsky: I think it was broadly right. Trump didn’t
consolidate an autocracy. But things got a lot worse more
quickly than we expected. Even though our book was con-
sidered a little on the alarmist side when it was published, I
think we were insuffi ciently alarmed.
We did not anticipate the rapid and thoroughgoing
Trumpization of the Republican Party. We did not consider
the Republican Party to be an antidemocratic force when
we wrote the book in 2017. Today I consider the Republican
Party to be an antidemocratic force. That’s a big change. We
thought that there were elements in the party capable ofTHE PANELISTS
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard
Candler Professor of African American
Studies at Emory University. She
is the author of ‘‘One Person, No Vote:
How Voter Suppression Is Destroying
Our Democracy.’’
Benjamin Ginsberg practiced election
law for 38 years, representing
Republican candidates, elected officials
and party committees. He is co-chair
of the Election Officials Legal Defense
Network, a distinguished visiting
fellow at the Hoover Institution and a
lecturer at Stanford Law School.
Sherrilyn Ifill will step down this
month after nearly a decade as
president and director-counsel of the
N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund.
Steven Levitsky is professor of
government and director of the David
Rockefeller Center for Latin American
Studies at Harvard University. He
is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of
‘‘How Democracies Die.’’
Sarah Longwell is a founder of
Defending Democracy Together and
executive director of the Republican
Accountability Project. She is
also the publisher of The Bulwark.
Lilliana Mason is an associate professor
of political science at Johns Hopkins
University and the SNF Agora Institute.
She is the author of ‘‘Uncivil Agreement:
How Politics Became Our Identity.’’
This discussion has been edited
and condensed for clarity, with material
added from follow-up interviews.
30 3.20.22