Harvard professor of government Steven Levitsky studies how healthy democracies can slip into authoritarianism. He says the Trump administration has already done grave damage: "We are no longer living in a democratic regime." David Bianculli reviews season 2 of Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats' warnings that American democracy was in jeopardy if Donald Trump was elected failed to persuade a majority of voters. Our guest, Stephen Levitsky, says there's plenty of reason to worry about our democracy now. Levitsky isn't a politician or political pundit.
He's a Harvard professor of government who spent much of his career studying democracy and dictatorship and and how healthy democracies can slide into authoritarianism. He was last on Fresh Air to talk about the book he co-authored with Daniel Ziblatt titled How Democracies Die. In a new article for the journal Foreign Affairs, Levitsky and co-author Lucan A. Way write, "...U.S.
democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration." in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for a liberal democracy, full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties, unquote.
We've invited Levitsky here to explain the threats he sees to democracy and to talk about dramatic developments in the Trump administration's confrontation with Harvard University. Stephen Levitsky is director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He's also senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a senior democracy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Besides the book How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt co-authored the 2023 book Tyranny of the Minority. We recorded our interview yesterday. Well, Stephen Levitsky, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me.
You note in this article that Freedom House, which is a nonprofit that's been around for a long time, which produces an annual global freedom index, has reduced the United States rating. It has slipped from 2014 to 2021. How much? Where are we now and where did we used to be?
Freedom Hustle scores range from zero, which is the most authoritarian, to 100, which is the most democratic. I think a couple of Scandinavian countries get scores of 99 or 100. The U.S. for many years was in the low 90s, which put it broadly on par with other Western democracies like the U.K. and Italy and Canada and Japan.
But it slipped in the last decade from Trump's first victory to Trump's second victory from the low 90s to 83, which placed us below Argentina and in a tie with Romania and Panama. So we're still above what scholars would consider a democracy, but now in the very low quality democracy range comparable, again, to Panama, Romania and Argentina.
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