The authors of How Democracies Die have a new book coming out called Tyranny of the Minority. Zack Beauchamp of Vox has a review that’s worth reading in full. These are selections:

In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew are forced to navigate a strait bounded by two equally dangerous obstacles: Scylla, a six-headed sea serpent, and Charybdis, an underwater horror that sucks down ships through a massive whirlpool. Judging Charybdis to be a greater danger to the crew as a whole, Odysseus orders his crew to try and pass through on Scylla’s side. They make it, but six sailors are eaten in the crossing.

In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced an analogous problem: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.

The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side of the strait: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.

“By steering the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule,” they write.

This is not a hypothetical fear. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, today’s America is currently being sucked down the anti-democratic whirlpool.

The Republican Party, they argue, has become an anti-democratic institution, its traditional leadership cowed by Trump and a racially reactionary base. As such, it is increasingly willing to twist legal tools designed to check oppressive majorities into tools for imposing its policy preferences on an unwilling majority. The best way out of this dilemma, in their view, is radical legal constitutional reform that brings the American system more in line with other advanced democracies.

Tyranny of the Minority is an exceptionally persuasive book. I think it is almost inarguably correct about both the nature of the modern Republican Party and the ways in which it exploits America’s rickety Constitution to subvert its democracy.  I come to some similar conclusions in my own forthcoming book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit ….

In the US, Levitsky and Ziblatt see a democracy made vulnerable by its own Constitution.

The Constitution’s framers were the first to take Enlightenment ideas about freedom and translate them to an actual political system. The only historical democratic experiences they looked at were from antiquity, in places like Athens and Rome. Classical sources repeatedly chronicled threats to democracy, even outright collapse, emanating from mob rule.

Though the founders knew that democracy was at heart about majority rule, they took the Greco-Roman experience seriously and designed a system where majorities were severely constrained. The tripartite separation of powers, bicameral legislature, indirect election of the president and senators, lifetime Supreme Court tenure, the laborious process for amending the Constitution: all of these were built, in whole or in part, as limitations on the ability of majorities to impose their will on minorities.

Some American counter-majoritarian institutions emerged not from well-intentioned design but political necessity. Leading founders like James Madison bitterly resented the basic structure of the Senate, where each state gets two seats regardless of size; Alexander Hamilton called it “preposterous” during a constitutional convention debate. It was included purely to mollify small states like Delaware and Rhode Island, who were refusing to join the Union absent sufficient protections for their interests.

Over time, the US shed some of these minoritarian trappings — senators are now directly elected, thanks to the 17th Amendment — but deepened others. In 1803’s Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court gave itself expansive power to strike down legislation that was not explicitly granted in the Constitution. More recently, the filibuster emerged as a de facto 60-vote requirement for passing legislation in the Senate — a practice similar to the supermajority vote that the founders explicitly rejected early on.

Levitsky and Ziblatt show that almost every other peer democracy went in the opposite direction.

The United States is “the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College,” “one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber,” and “the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.” Moreover, they note, “the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change” — making it extremely difficult for reformers to do anything about America’s minority-empowering institutions.

These institutions allow the Republican Party to rule despite being a distinctly minority faction — one that holds extreme positions on issues like taxes and abortion, and has lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.

So long as the party retains appeal among a hard core of racially resentful supporters, efficiently distributed around the country to take advantage of the Senate and Electoral College’s biases, it can remain nationally competitive. The right’s control over the Supreme Court will likely last decades, thanks to lifetime tenure, allowing it to remake American policy and institutions with impunity. The GOP’s disproportionate national power enables its cadres at the state and local level to pursue explicitly undemocratic policies for holding power, like felon disenfranchisement and extreme gerrymandering, without fear of federal intervention.

Hence the titular “tyranny of the minority”: The Republican Party, having broken with its core commitment to democracy, has now embraced a peculiarly American strategy for taking and wielding power undemocratically.

“America’s countermajoritarian institutions can manufacture authoritarian minorities into governing majorities,” they write. “Far from checking authoritarian power, our institutions have begun to augment it.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt are absolutely right that its outdated constitution makes it easier for the GOP to travel down an authoritarian path.

But “easier” doesn’t mean “necessary.” While Levitsky and Ziblatt ultimately take an institutions-first approach, seeing their reform as our way out of America’s crisis, I take a more society-first view: that America’s problems are primarily the result of deep social fissures exacerbated by outdated and poorly designed institutions. Even if the United States had a more authentically democratic institution, we’d still be riven by divides over race and identity that have unerringly produced the worst political conflicts in the country’s history.

It follows from this that institutional reforms are not enough: In addition to policies for political reform, we also need to think about ways to reduce the social demand for extreme politics. More bluntly: If widespread hostility to social change enables the Republicans’ far-right authoritarian lurch, we need to figure out ways to shift Americans’ beliefs in a more egalitarian direction.

But such a proposal should be considered in addition to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s proposals, not in replacement of them …

Unquote.

Fundamental changes to the Constitution are unlikely, but the success of Democrats in recent special elections justifies some optimism regarding 2024. The Republican tendency to overreach (e.g. by trying to legislate forced birth) is also a positive factor.

Today’s oldest voters are more conservative than the Baby Boomers who will soon replace them. Young voters are more motivated than they’ve been in years. There may come a time when there are enough sensible Democratic senators to change the Senate’s various anti-democratic procedures. Two more Democrats on the Supreme Court would make it a very different institution (the two oldest Supreme Court justices, Thomas and Alito, are especially evil Republicans).

But our antiquated Constituion is a major stumbling block. So is the corporate news media: