Squarely in the heart of the Trump administration, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published a book titled How Democracies Die which proved enormously popular. Celebrities read it. Obama read it. Most people you know probably pretended to have read it. Five years later, Levitsky and Ziblatt are back with a sequel of sorts, arguing that in the United States, democracy might never have been fully alive in the first place, strangled in the cradle by our very own constitution. To explain how their thinking has changed since How Democracies Die and discuss the new book, Tyranny of the Minority, we’re thrilled to have on today’s podcast Daniel Ziblatt, Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the Transformations of Democracy group at Berlin's Social Science Center.
In this episode, we poke around into all of the different ways the United States privileges minoritarian politics. Ziblatt explains that a major contribution of Tyranny of the Minority is showing how regular politics interact with our constitution’s minoritarianism to create a particularly potent anti-democratic danger for the United States. We discuss the legislative advantage minorities have in the U.S. thanks to our love of holding onto grand old traditions like the filibuster and what that means for statutory interpretation. Democratic backsliding, the advantages of party politics, papal smoke and mirrors–it’s all in there. We hope you enjoy.
This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.
Referenced Readings
How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment by Brad Snyder
“Inside or Outside the System?” by Eric Posner and Adrian Vermuele
After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It by Julie Suk
The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy by Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath
“The Insulation of Local Governance from Black Electoral Power: Northern Cities and the Great Migration” by Jacob Grumbach, Robert Mickey, and Daniel Ziblatt
What is David reading?
David is reading Zach Lowe’s League Pass Rankings, although he’s deeply confused how it wasn’t all about getting the chance to watch Victor Wembanayama.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] David: This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review. For more information about Themis, check out themisbar.com. Thank you very much, and now back to the show.
[00:00:35] David: All right, all right, all right. Welcome to another episode of Digging a Hole: The Legal Theory Podcast. On this podcast, my co-host, Sam Moyn, and I, David Schleicher, like to talk about legal theory and whatever else is on our minds. But today is a special episode because Sam isn't here. So you'll get to hear much more of my dulcet tones today, as I talk--we have a really interesting conversation with Daniel Ziblatt, who is a, obviously a very well known political scientist. He's the author of How Democracies Die, along with Steve Levitsky, which The Economist describes as the most important book of the Trump era. Really big deal. He's got a new book out also with Levitsky called the Tyranny of the Minority, which we really get into in a really wide ranging conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks.
[00:01:35] David: Welcome to Digging a Hole. I'm really excited to have Daniel Ziblatt with us here today. Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and the director of the Transformations of Democracy Group at Berlin's Social Science Center. As I'm sure most of our listeners will know, he's the co-author of the book How Democracies Die with Steve Levitsky, which The Economist magazine described as the most important book of the Trump era. Today, we're going to be talking about his new book, also written with Steve Levitsky, the Tyranny of the Minority. Welcome.
[00:02:05] Daniel Ziblatt: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:02:08] David: Great, yeah. So let's start with that question, which is that, like most thinking Americans, I read How Democracies Die, and I think many of our listeners will have well, will as well. How is this book different?
[00:02:21] Daniel Ziblatt: Well, so How Democracies Die, which we wrote in 2017 and appeared in 2018, was really written with the idea that we saw a democratic crisis coming or unfolding. And we had studied democratic crises in other parts of the world, democratic breakdowns in other parts of the world and other periods. And so really what that book was, was an attempt to kind of describe the process of democratic breakdown, to describe, to warn Americans, you know, that it could happen in the United States. And so as we went around talking about the book, we, you know, to academics, to public audiences and so on, we always got the question over and over, what can we do about it? What can we do about this? What can we do to save our democracy? So in some sense, this book is an effort to answer that question. But really as a first step, and sort of the bulk of the book, is really a deeper diagnosis of how the U.S. got into this mess in a way that I think How Democracies Die really was not trying to do. That was much more describing, kind of a warning, whereas this is truly trying to wrestle with how, how the U.S. ended up in the situation that it's in today and then also how to get out.
[00:03:21] David: Yeah. So the book seems to me to have two proto-elements. One is about how political actors act, and that's much more in line with the last book. And then another one, which we're going to spend probably most of our time talking about is about legal institutions and how they structure it. But maybe we start on the first part, which is you draw, you spend a lot of the book drawing this extremely powerful parallel between February 6th in France in 1934 and January 6th in the United States. So maybe you could just tell us a little bit about what the relevance of this comparison is and what happened.
[00:03:54] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah. So in France, in the 1930s, France was at that point arguably Europe's oldest democracy, most stable democracy. I think many people regarded France as a model for the rest of the free Europe and possibly the rest of the world at that point. But in the early thirties as elsewhere in Europe, deep economic crisis, growing disaffection with politics meant that there was a lot of dissatisfaction. February 6th, 1934, as a vote was taking place inside the French Parliament on a new prime minister, there was a gathering out in front of the French parliament right along the River Seine in Paris of militia members of various right-wing groups, disparate groups, some in uniform, some not, gather outside with with weapons of different types. And there'd been a couple of days of this happening. The police showed up and there was a big confrontation. And there was a kind of effort to break into the parliament building by these groups and these guys were armed with, in some cases, like with long wooden sticks with razor blades at the end. So when the police showed up on horseback, they were cutting many--
[00:04:53] David: Were any of them wearing hats with the horns or--
[00:04:57] Daniel Ziblatt: Not, not quite. I mean, I've seen pictures of it, but not quite. And, you know, so William Shirer, the great journalist, actually was present at that moment as this was unfolding, was sitting in a hotel looking, over in a lobby, or a balcony, over the plaza watching the thing unfold. So he describes this in great detail. So they tried to break in. They were blocked, you know, they didn't enter, but the parliamentarians fled the building. And you know what was crucial, though? And then, you know, that there was a change of power. A new parliament, prime minister came in, a more right-leaning prime minister came in. So in some sense, France survived the assault. The French, French democracy survived the assault. But was so interesting to us as we dug into this was that it was really clear that there were members of the French right, the Republican Federation, inside the parliament building that day who knew what was happening, were actually in communication with these guys. And so an investigation was opened by the parliament. Socialists and Republicans of the left really condemned it as an assault on the republic. Members of the right engaged in the kind of very familiar stuff to us today said, well, this wasn't that big of a deal, or actually the communists were in the streets and kind of riling people up, or actually they were heroes. These guys were heroes trying to defend the republic against corrupt politicians. Investigation was blocked. And the kind of bigger point is how do mainstream politicians respond to these kinds of things? That's the lesson--there's lots of lessons one could draw from this--the lesson we draw is how do mainstream politicians respond? And the mainstream center-right in France didn't respond well. They tried to block the investigation. They thwarted the investigation. And many of the leading figures that were in the streets that day, who are really terrible guys, went scot-free and in fact, kind of formed, one of the things we describe, is they formed this organization, victims of February 6th. These were the guys attacking the building, and they use this organization as a kind of channel to promote people once the Vichy government came into place in 1940, to man the state. I mean, a lot of the leading figures who were part of that protest were never held to account, went on to, you know, to oversee propaganda, to oversee the Jewish department that oversaw the transportation of Jews to concentration camps. So the point that we draw is that by not holding these guys to account in 1934, certainly didn't lead directly to the collapse of French democracy, but weakened French democracy. And it's a lesson that, you know, mainstream politicians need to condemn people who engage in violent behavior that's under--it's attacking democracy. And if they don't do that, that democracy is weakened.
[00:07:16] David: Yeah. So I want to come back to that because I've got some questions about what the political implications are for different parties. But the rest of the book, or much of the book, is about Americans' legal, Americans' political institutions. And I was a little bit unclear in how the two pieces fit together. The central argument is that America's constitution, as is well known, is extremely minoritarian in lots of ways. It is. It is not, or more accurately, is substantially not as majoritarian as most constitutions around the world. It's hard for majorities to achieve what they want. What is the connection between anti-democratic attitudes and minoritarianism in the U.S. constitution? Why do they interact in ways that are politically troublesome?
[00:07:53] Daniel Ziblatt: Yes, so it's actually less anti-democratic attitudes. I mean, we begin with the observation that anti-democratic groups, reflecting maybe anti-democratic attitudes, are, you know, seem to be on the rise or it's a common kind of narrative that there's, you know, the AfD in Germany, the Meloni's party in Italy, you know, far right parties all around the world, and especially Western Europe and in the United States. And there's sometimes this kind of narrative that this is a kind of majoritarian movement that, you know, these are the people speaking on behalf of the people, the regular people. But we kind of come to the observation that really, this segment of the electorate is pretty, there's a kind of sociological regularity, which is usually they represent about 20 to 30% of voters in most democracies. I mean, sometimes that number is higher, sometimes it's lower. But on average, it's around that number. There's a kind of 30% constant set of the population that's vulnerable to these kinds of appeals. Now, what's striking is that you would think like, well, that shouldn't really matter that much in some sense if we live in a system that's dominated by majorities because that's what the very simple version of what democracy is. But in the United States, we make the case that this group, this segment of the electorate, plays an outsized role because our institutions exaggerate the importance of political minorities. And so whereas it's, you know, all democracies struggle with this, but it's easier to either dilute these forces in, you know, by putting them, pushing them to the side of politics or, you know, at worse, including them in coalitions. In the United States it's possible for 30% of the electorate to dominate the entire political system.
[00:09:22] David: Yeah so this is where I may jump off the train here a little bit. And so I want to first start by asking, when people talk about the U.S. constitution and its fragility, they don't normally point to the minoritarian--I mean, everyone I think most people will acknowledge, I mean, most people who are not in politics and are at some removed--the U.S. constitution is a bad constitution across a lot of dimensions. You know, and one of those dimensions-- I mean. Global standards. Sandy Levinson, we can have him on, he'll talk all about it. The U.S. constitution has some problems. But the ways in which it is minoritarian are not generally seen to be the ways in which it is subject to failure. If you want to see like the normal story of the U.S. constitution and democratic failure, it would be the Juan Linz story that by locating democratic authority, potential majority authority, in separate institutions, both of which can claim majority status, you set up the potential for democratic failure. And that's true because we have a president and a Congress that are politically separate and both could be fully majoritarian with no Senate, and that problem would exist. So why is this problem more dramatic than that one, or why not focus on the classic Linzian problem?
[00:10:34] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah, well, the classic Linzian problem is a real problem and it's been well written about. And so, you know, there's no need to write that book again. That's one thing. But a second thing is I think we do have a kind of different perspective here on this slightly. I mean, then the Linzian perspective--I mean, Linz looms large. I mean, it's sort of, you know, our kind of foundational source, we are often saying, well, as Linz says, so we are dramatically influenced by Linz. But in this dimension, we're not. So I think the point here, there's two points. There's two problems why a kind of minoritarian constitution is a problem. Number one, and this is maybe a more familiar argument, which is that it thwarts majorities and so public opinion, you know, public sentiments often get thwarted. You know, gun control legislation, minimum wage laws, climate change legislation. And this generates disaffection in a sense that our political system doesn't work. So it's partly an explanation for why people are disaffected and maybe tempted to vote for parties that want to blow up the whole system. And so kind of a not--and so that is actually a Linzian argument where he makes the case that ineffective government is often the precursor to democratic breakdown. But that's only one part of the story. I think the more--there's sort of a couple other interesting parts of the story. One is that if we have a political system that doesn't require majorities, popular majorities, the building of popular majorities to govern. You know, in any other democracy, this is the case in proportional systems. You maybe only have 25% of the electorate, but you have to form coalition, majority coalitions, to get legislation through parliaments. And even if you don't, even if you have a minority government in most parliamentary democracies, to get bills through legislatures, you have to have, you kind of have a rotating cast of supporters, you still have to build majorities. In the U.S. you can both get elected president without winning majorities and you can legislate without having, you know, you have to have super majorities, in fact. So with minority, you can, with a minority, you can block legislation. So why does this matter? Well, this matters, I guess, in two ways. I mean, one, it's sort of, there's a kind of Madisonian point, I would say. That kind of Madison's sort of view of how to solve the problems of faction, which we could kind of put in modern day terms as polarization and even the kind of a dangerous authoritarian faction, is that you have this great temptation to forge broader coalitions in order to gain power. And so you buy off the other side. And there are these rotating coalitions. And this is the kind of magic by which democracy remains stable. And if you don't need to do that in order to form governments, then you're blocked. And, you know, I mean, there's kind of no temptation. Just a final point, I would say, and this is kind of the clincher for us in a way, and I think this is partly a sort of a novel argument, that this has feedback effects on the players. So the people who don't, the parties that don't need to form majorities, don't need to expand. And so when you lose an election, rather than say, okay, what--you know, acting as, so Bill Clinton did in the 1980s and 1990s, and I'll talk about why this affects the Republicans more than the Democrats, or even a better example, maybe the British Labour Party after the 1980s, you know, they have to revamp. They have to come up with a new face. They have to come up with a new strategy to reach into broader segments of the electorate. And that serves as a moderating influence. The Republican Party in particular, has the, you know, enjoys the benefits of this kind of constitutional protectionism where it doesn't need to form majorities. And so under great pressure from its base, just doubles down on its radicalizing strategy. So just like a one line summary of everything I've just said is that our Constitution radicalizes the Republican Party in particular.
[00:14:00] David: So the one thing I'd say about that, is that we--there have been periods where we've told the, like a basically inverse story about parliamentary systems, in which radical groups can't form coalitions with anyone, like they are too radical to form coalitions, and that if they're big enough as like 20 to 30%, they force the right and left into grand coalition. It's like these are the stories people told about Austria and the rise of Jörg Haider, which was, the existence of radicalism forced, which then meant that every mainstream politician was on the hook for anything bad that happened and left the far right to be free from responsibility. And so is, is this a bigger problem? I mean, again, that's inside a much more majoritarian system, differently majoritarian system than ours. But it's, these dynamics exist across governmental system, just in different flavors.
[00:14:53] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah, no, that's true. That there is a problem where, when you, anytime you get the rise of a kind of party that's getting like 20 to 30% of the vote that's anti-system, anti-democratic, you may have a right wing party that may not be necessarily anti-system.
[00:15:06] David: Or just weird, like Five Star in Italy.
[00:15:08] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah or something like this, that then, you know the response, there's a couple of possible responses to this. And we kind of describe this actually, I think in the last chapter of the book where we say, you know, one response is the kind of militant democracy response where you just ban them, you know, and then go about. And that has its sort of appeals and attractions but it's problematic also. The second kind of solution is a kind of broad coalition solution, which is what you described in Austria, where, you know, you kind of form a grand coalition. In some sense, it's a little bit of the energy behind the kind of Never Trump movement to, you know, to support Biden, that there's a way in which you, you know, all the respectable parties join together. And that is a, that's a viable solution in the short run. And so that takes place both in proportional systems as well as in the American system. And I think that's sort of what, you know, we, you know, people who don't want Trump to be reelected in 2024, sort of hope for, in fact. Right? And so it's a viable short run solution. But it's, as the Austrian case shows exactly as you described it, it's not very good as a long term solution because over time, it just reinforces the narrative that there are groups being excluded and so on. And so then, you know, so, you know, I think the third option, so, you know, militant democracy, kind of a broad coalition, the third option is to kind of have genuine competition and to try to win and to forge and, you know, attract the voter. Let's say you're a Christian Democrat in Austria or Germany, you try to attract the voters of the far right without playing too much into their demagogic hands. And you try, and if there's a temptation to form majorities, you know, you sort of jettison the Social Democrats and try to win over those voters and try to win without them and try to find other coalition partners. So I think that's the preferred solution. But I think the problem, I mean, in terms of your question, this problem or these strategies are all attempted in all systems, and it's just it's in our system, I think that the temptation that, because of this minoritarian bias, at least for one party, the temptation to actually reach out to new voters is much less.
[00:17:00] David: So I want to offer maybe another story, which is, this is actually a pet theory of mine, which I've written up. So I will just, this is in my, which is about the role of subconstitutional election law rules and playing, and particularly the openness of American political parties. So if you look around the world, like Duverger's law, which is the tendency of first past the post systems to go to two parties is not a real thing. Anywhere around the world, we have almost all, two party systems, have at least three parties, sometimes many more than that. Sometimes they're regional parties but sometimes there are completely national parties, like in Canada. And the question is like, well, why is the U.S. so unique? And one story you could tell is about our minoritarian constitutional institutions. We're going to get back to, really, really big, really big problems. But another story you could tell is that if you are an anti-system candidate in other countries, you literally can't run as a candidate of a major party, whereas in the U.S. you totally can. And so that's the existence of primaries, that's our open system of campaign finance. It's a whole variety of things that drive this, the ability, party control over nominations. And that could change without anything about the Constitution changing. We have big and small versions of this debate, superdelegates in the Democratic Party. Who gets on the stage in Republican debates. Like we do this all the time in politics, and the question is like is what explains the America's unique vulnerability--and again, I want to bracket that also-- a subject of the fact that we have Wyoming is a thing or Vermont is a thing, and that's bad. Or is it that we have the kind of post-1968 party reforms that opened up their parties.
[00:18:40] Daniel Ziblatt: Well, you know, so you referred to How Democracies Die and How Democracies Die, we have a whole chapter on that. And that's, that was always sort of the least popular part of the book where we sort of were regarded as kind of glorifying the days of the old smoke-filled backrooms where, you know, somebody like Trump would have never been the nominee. We recount stories of Henry Ford being kept out and so on. So, I mean, I agree with that, that that is that and you're right, that that is something that, you know, remains a kind of unsolvable, apparently unsolvable problem, because nobody sort of knows how to deal with this. I mean, without going back to the old, I mean, you know, I'm, I was a fan of the superdelegates, to be honest.
[00:19:15] David: I'm a smoke-filled room guy myself. Yes.
[00:19:17] Daniel Ziblatt: I mean, it does, it does create problems of democratic legitimacy and so on. So, I mean, it just, but it's--
[00:19:22] David: Not a general election, so, yeah, whatever.
[00:19:23] Daniel Ziblatt: Right. No, I totally agree. And I'm, you know, I'm always making the case that the kind of basic democratic principles apply to general elections, not necessarily to primaries. I mean, the question of the all-white primary kind of makes this a lot more complicated. But. So I agree now, but I would.
[00:19:39] David: Of course, we banned that. So, I mean we have, we did, the Supreme Court, you know, in an extremely strange opinion, by the way. You know, like--
[00:19:45] Daniel Ziblatt: I've always wondered about that--
[00:19:47] David: Yeah, I mean it required a very aggressive interpretive set of interpretations. But it was in an era when the Supreme Court was doing lots of very aggressive things that were basically to deal with the particular problems created by the kind of ability of sub-state institutions to approximate state things, so like racial covenants being another one.
[00:20:07] Daniel Ziblatt: Right. Yeah. So, you know, so I think that is, that's an important moving part and I'm all for thinking about how to address it. But I would also add to it, though, that our primary system is in part a function of our electoral system that is, you know, and so one of the, in our last chapter, we propose 15 different reforms, some of which are constitutional, some of which are non-constitutional, I guess what you would call subconstitutional, and including the electoral system. I mean, you know, our electoral--having a proportional system is not, or not having a proportional system is not embedded in our Constitution, of course. But, you know, if one had a proportional electoral system, what this does is it gives--the reason party leaders have more power in proportional systems is that you have a party list, the party leaders set who's on the party list and the ranking of the party list. And if you know, if you act in a way that doesn't, you know, that displeases the party leaders, you're going to be put at the bottom of the list. And so this gives power to that center that our president, a combination of our presidential system and our first past the post system don't allow--.
[00:21:07] David: And as you know, federalism.
[00:21:09] Daniel Ziblatt: And federalism. Right. Exactly. So all of these together, you know, make this problem worse. But I think, you know, if we had a proportional system, it would go some way to beginning to, it would compel kind of changes in the way that we select our candidates.
[00:21:23] David: So I want to ask now, I promised Sam, who's not here, that I would channel him a little bit. There's one you talk about a lot, a variety of America's minoritarian institutions. So like the Senate, the Electoral College, the whole variety of things, lack of term, all sorts of things that are multiple veto points. But you kind of barely talk about the Supreme Court. And you talk about it a little and sometimes in, and one of things that makes the Supreme Court really different from these other ones that no other country in the world has adopted the particular form of the U.S. Senate. Like, that's not it. But apex constitutional courts have taken over the world. Like they've gone, they're everywhere. Why is the minoritarianism associated with, or lag democratic, however you want to think about it, of the Supreme Court not as big a problem for majoritarianism as the U.S. Senate?
[00:22:19] Daniel Ziblatt: Well, we do make the--first we show historically where it has been a devastating problem for, you know, reinforcing Jim Crow and allowing for voting rights suppression in the late 19th century or early 20th century and the mistakes that the court made in making really bad decisions. And so, and so we provide lots of evidence that the court historically has not served the role that people could praise, you know, imagine for it as a kind of defender of civil liberties and so on, is in fact very much the opposite. But I do think there is a case for independent judiciary for the following reasons. I mean, we make the case and so, I mean, the alternative to independent judiciary is kind of legislative, I guess, I mean, Sam were here maybe you could say kind of parliamentary supremacy. Yeah, right, exactly. So now, you know, I think actually, and so I've been reading Brad Snyder's book on Felix Frankfurter--
[00:23:07] David: Oh, it's such a good book. I love that book.
[00:23:08] Daniel Ziblatt: What he's, you know, and it's, and that--it's a kind of nice case that reveals a vulnerability of this, you know, that there can be too much majority rule, just as much as there can be too much, too little majority rule. So, you know, so it's certainly, you know, Frankfurter, you know, came out of this Lochner era where he was rightly annoyed at the Court's interventions and blocking kind of basic legislation to protect workers' rights. And so, you know, made the case for, very famously, for more legislative autonomy in a sense.
[00:23:38] David: Including partisan gerrymandering. Which is--
[00:23:39] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah, yeah, that's right and and in a diminished [crosstalk] Court. Yeah, yeah. And, but, you know, by the time we get to, you know, so, so both the two cases and Jehovah's Witnesses, early in the 1940s where there were Jehovah's Witness children who were, didn't want to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The two cases, 1940, 1943. By 1943, the Court, you know, famously says there are certain things that are beyond the reach of majorities. These children should have the right to not, you know, because of religious liberty. You should have the right not to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Or the Korematsu case with the internment of Japanese Americans. You know, Frankfurter comes down on the wrong side of this. He defers too much to majority rule. And so, you know, and so the point here is that the trick is to find a kind of balance line, I would say, between, you know, certain things have to be beyond the reach of majorities and certain things have to be within the reach of majorities. And so that, what we try to do in the book is lay, come up with a framework for understanding that, and so the Court has an important role to play in that process. Certainly, you know, as it exists today, it's a counter, and we could talk more about that, but to deal directly with the Court, the Court certainly has a kind of major, is a countermajoritarian institution, but countermajoritarian institutions to defend civil liberties and to assure free and fair competition between political rivals and incumbents and oppositions? That seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate thing. The Court obviously hasn't always played that role, but in principle it can play that role and it often does. And in fact, if you look, another kind of case thing I would sort of point to is, you know, Hungary today, Israel today, cases where too much majority rule is a problem. And what the first thing that every one of these political leaders do, who are assaulting democracy, is to take control of the court. And so which is not to say that courts shouldn't be accountable or should be totally unaccountable, but there can be too much of a, too much majority rule.
[00:25:31] David: Yeah. And I mean, this is a, it leaves you in a difficult spot, though, because it's, you're, it's like arguing for like balance in a middle ground between two difficult alternatives. It kind of ends up, like this is a same problem people made of the Daron Acemoglu books, which are wonderful in a lot of ways and I'm a big fan, but the, that it needs to be a narrow path leads you to kind of, ends up, a lot of things end up being like just so stories. Right, so it's like, it's like not too much of this, not too much of that, and then we end up with a problem with it's like, and maybe that's just the problem of political judgment, right? Like, we don't know.
[00:26:04] Daniel Ziblatt: But I think I do more than that because I think, you know, I can specify where the line should be. I mean, and that's really the challenge. You're right that if you just say, so sort of Goldilocks story, like it's not too hot, not too cold, defining something by what it's not. But I would go kind of beyond that and say, and we make the case in the book, that there are two arenas in particular where majorities should be able to rule untrammeled. Number one, in elections, the person with the most votes should govern. There's no theory of democracy that allot--that justifies any other outcome. You know, there's no, you know, so, the Electoral College violates that basic test. So, you know, there's you know, so that's one arena, elections. The other arena where majority should rule untrammeled is in the legislative arena, where if you have a majority in a parliament, you should be able to pass regular laws. Now, here's where it gets tricky, of course, there's the caveat that you can't pass legislative laws with a simple majority that violate two basic principles. One, basic civil liberties, and we could fight what counts as a basic civil liberty and that's where the sort of fight over politics takes place, but freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, you know those are areas where a majority, a temporary majority, can't limit those. Then the second area, and kind of even, I think, more precise, is that a majority can't, a temporary majority can't, legislate in a way that tilts the electoral playing field to make electoral competition unfair.
[00:27:32] David: Yeah. So this, there you run into like 18 different problems. But I mean, and this isn't to say that you're wrong, but like all laws have an effect on future elections. That's one of the reasons legislatures pass them. And so if you think about self-entrenching, like they believe, like Roosevelt's belief about Social Security, which is that it builds a political coalition for Social Security, that kind of thing and like that. But the second thing is like, the normal, another normal condition you would attach to this is you can't bind future legislators with just majority votes. That's why we have super--but we should, like-- all laws bind future legislature. If you spend money today or borrow money today, it binds future legislators. And legislatures have a supermajority, at the U.S. states we very frequently have supermajority rules for debt rule, you know, and so it's like, it's to say, like, that's a simple rule. It devolves into being remarkably complicated in two seconds.
[00:28:21] Daniel Ziblatt: I don't think it's, I mean, it's clear that passing Social Security has a less direct effect on elections than on banning a political party from participating in the next elections. So I think one can, in fact, distinguish I mean, you know, it's true that there are going to be areas where difficult, but it's also very, there's going to be areas where it's very clear. You know, naming a new national park or, you know, passing, you know, climate legislation or passing, you know, these kinds of things are not immediately clear that you're hampered, you know, maybe indirectly over multiple generations, you're affecting the opposition, but banning a political party, closing down opposition newspapers. That's pretty obvious stuff. And, you know [crosstalk] very simple. But the reality is in many democracies under threat, these this is the kind of stuff that happens. This is not an abstract debate.
[00:29:07] David: But it's not just, not just there. Here, so like question of like, what about right to work laws that harm labor unions, that have a clear effect, electoral effect. Right. Like, is that, which camp that fall in. I mean you could tell it either way. It's economic policy which is normal; it's democratic policy, which is, you know, you see the problem.
[00:29:27] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah, freedom of association. But I think the point though, with my framework I think, is that one can now go through and make these, have these discussions and so provide some kind of criteria rather than just saying, you know.
[00:29:39] David: We should be more democratic or we should be less democratic. I'm with you, broadly speaking. It just, whether it or how it applies in cases seems challenging to me. So I want to go back quickly to the demands that you put on minority parties. Right, so one part of this--we're going to be bouncing around a little bit, that's the way it goes. But it's the, is about legal institutions. Another part is like Republicans really should do more to try to win over support without, like, if the problem of February 6th in France was that they were they were soft on, and I'm curious like what you think Republicans should do now in a couple of kind of, or American institutions should do now. You talk in the book about the difficulties of militant democracy, but like we're facing a lot of these question, and then I want to ask the symmetrical question about Democrats, but like should--is it the case that we think that you think that the right answer is for Republicans to support, you know, Trump getting indicted?
[00:30:42] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah. So, I mean, it's sort of two different questions here. One is what should have they done? Yes. And two, what should they do now? And I think it is worth pointing out that the reason that we're in the bind that we are in now, I mean, the political leadership, making demands on courageous political leadership is more relevant in certain periods than in other periods. In other words, leadership matters more in some times than in other times. And I think, you know, take the example immediately after the election of November 2020 through January 6. This is a point where, I think decisive political leadership on the part of Republican political leaders could have made a big difference. So, in other words, you know, if you'll remember, you know, there was this discussion, well, Trump's talking about not, you know, that the election was rigged, but, you know, we're just letting him vent because, you know, this will, he'll let off some steam and then it'll pass. So it turns out that was a terrible miscalculation. Similarly, after January 6, I mean, leading up to January 6, all of this unfold in the way that did. But similarly, after January 6th, you know, in the impeachment and, you know, when it came to the Senate, you know, when Mitch McConnell said that Trump was practically and, morally and practically responsible for January 6, I mean, seems like those two adverbs just cover all the terrain. I mean, there's no way in which he's not responsible, so why not vote for, and there was essentially a political calculation. Well, you know, he's going to be gone and this is the end of it. Again, terrible miscalculation. And my hypothesis, you can't really demonstrate this, but my hypothesis is that in this kind of unsettled moment when Americans were still trying to figure out what they thought about what was happening, that had they done the right thing, that public opinion would look very different today. And so, you know, now rush forward to today, I think it's much harder for anybody to come up and, you know--had there been consensus, in other words, in that period, I mean, not any individual leader, but had there been consensus across the board among Republicans, important Republican leaders, this would have made a difference. Today, it's much harder because in some sense the cows have left the barn or, you know, the genie is out of the bottle and public opinion has now been formed. And for Republican leaders to now come out and sort of, you know, condemn Trump, you know, they're going to damage their career. I mean, we see sort of what's happened to Kevin McCarthy, who even, you know, even Kevin McCarthy is kind of consumed by the crocodile that he's been appeasing. So what you know, what should he do, what should they do now? You know, I think they should be, I mean, you know, they should be, under no conditions does it ever make sense to support a candidate who violates basic democratic, is an anti-democrat, and I think Trump is that. And so Republican leaders certainly, you asked me, what should Republicans do? I'm assuming you mean leaders, but I don't know, maybe voters as well--
[00:33:16] David: I mean, I assume what you're going to say is they shouldn't vote for him, right?
[00:33:19] Daniel Ziblatt: Right, exactly. So, you know, but obviously, people can vote for who they want to vote for. But I think Republican leaders have a particular responsibility. I mean, that's sort of one of the points of our book, to try to kind of clarify what's happening. And I think they've sort of missed the boat in the sense. And so that's why we're in such a bind now.
[00:33:34] David: Yeah, so. But the, here's what I want to say, if we believe the empirical regularity that you say, that there is like, currently there's 25 to 30% of anti-democrats in, across Western democracies. I mean, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. And that this puts real pressure on both parts of the political equation. It puts pressure on conservative, on the part of the equation on which they are a part because it's like, they're part of their base. But it also, I'm curious a little bit about what you think this tells us, particularly in the American constitution, about what the other party should do. So that if the, if Democrats know that they need supermajorities and that seems super unfair but, you know, the rules of the road are the rules of the road. And they know that there is a--what, like, so this is something, it's maybe more a question that's going back to the first book rather than the second book, but which is like what are the moral responsibilities on them to, or political responsibilities or whatever you want to think about it, to address the structural inequities of the U.S. constitution? So like one story that people tell is like it puts real pressure on you to like, trim your policy sails to try to--this is like the, say, Never Trumper columnist answer, which is Democrats need to just like, tell the left wing to go shove it. And in other stories like, well we can win elections anyway, so lets, you know, and I just, your attitudes here are like kind of not super clear.
[00:35:00] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah. So I mean, I think first of all, the the kind of Never Trump columnists view of things is just not empirically correct. So in some ways, it's, you know, I think that there's an overstatement. You know, there's you know, there's sort of this idea that there are, that the Democrats--I mean, certainly Democrats need to figure out how to win elections in the short run, because that's the only way we can kind of sort of get through the current moment. And so I kind of leave it up to political operatives to figure out how to do that. But I think, you know, they don't you know, so, you know, like Democrats need to figure out how to win in Ohio and, you know, places where they've had trouble winning. But I some, you know, I kind of resent the whole framing of the question in some way, because the reality is Democrats represent a majority of the population. And so, you know, the rules are what they are. But, you know, it's not a political failing to not, you know, so the Democrats have to win 54% of the electorate. And when they only win 52% of the electorate, then people say, oh, my God, Democrats are failing. You know, you know, I mean, the issue is that we have a system in which Democrats have to perform extraordinarily well for our democracy not to essentially collapse. And so, you know, so the point of our book is to kind of step back. You know, there's plenty of people saying like, you know, talk about race, not talk about race, whatever. I mean--
[00:36:08] David: You're not political consultants. I get it. Yeah.
[00:36:10] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah. Point here is that no, let's stop back,, step back and let's not accept the terms of contestation as they are and recognize that, you know, this is, no other democracy in the world is like this. It doesn't, you know, doesn't kind of align with any kind of basic, you know, basic democratic principles. And so that's why at the end of the day, I think, you know, we need to change, we need to change the rules of the game to kind of facilitate this. And of course, I'm not naive. I understand, you know, that political operatives need to figure out how to win elections. I tend to, I mean, asking my opinion as a kind of amateur political operative, I would say that, you know, majorities of you know, you know, there's this kind of discourse about the working class, which is a euphemism for the white working class, you know, and the non-white working class is often overlooked and so on. So I think that there's a way in which these, this kind of view that you're describing, you know, with the Never Trump columnists sort of underestimates to the degree to which you can actually win majorities as a multiracial, multi-class coalition. And that's what the Democratic Party is. And that's when it's successful, that's what it, that's how it behaves.
[00:37:16] David: Interesting. I'll put that to the side for a second. I have a couple of other types of questions. One is about the proposals. So Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule have a well-known paper called "Inside or Outside the System?" and it's like in what law professors call the section four of their paper. So you analyze a problem, you describe. And then section four is solutions. And one of their points, the point in their piece is that those solutions are very frequently assume away the problems they've just analyzed. That is to say, the system, in your case, the system is unbearably minoritarian, and then four, your answer is, well, parties should make it more majoritarian, as if that was a straightforward thing to do given that they are getting elected out of a system that has these minoritarian elements. So is your book self-refuting in this way? I mean, I think there are answers to their critique which are basically taking advantage of stochasticity in elections. Like sometimes you win by a lot and then you can change the system. But like, what is your answer to that? To the critique that your variety of proposals, your 15 proposals to make America more democratic are completely implausible, given that they have to be enacted by the American political system?
[00:38:29] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah. So I think that kind of diagnosis is actually sort of naive about how the political system actually operates, that, you know, it's not as if they're sitting around forming their views and then kind of consensus builds and then they kind of, you know, sort of write letters to their congressmen who then pass a law. And so if you get enough consensus, then you can get a constitutional change. That's not how, that's not how things happen. I mean politics is much more about agenda setting, kind of, as you say, moments of opportunity, moments of crisis. And, you know, so, you know, we have this line where we quote Ralf Dahrendorf in the last chapter, where he was interviewed, I think it was in the 1980s or something, looking back at the kind of postwar construction of the United Nations, the IMF. And he said, he was asked, you know, how did you build all these institutions? How did the world build all these institutions after 1945? And he said, you know, all of these ideas were worked out during the war years. And, you know, it's really important when you're building institutions to be ready so that when the moment arrives that you have the ideas on hand. So, you know, that's sort of how politics actually works. And so, you know, so if we, you know, if we don't discuss the ideas until the moment that they're viable, the moment will never come. And if a moment comes and passes, we'll have missed that opportunity because we'll sort of say, well, how do we do this? You know? So that's part of the purpose of the book is to kind of provide material for the moment when it comes, but also to understand that work, that it's, you know, that it's to recognize and deal a little bit with, you know, how do these moments come. And they don't just sort of happen accidentally. And so, you know, we look at American history and there have, of course, been moments where the Constitution has been changed. The Progressive Era, you know, the passage of women's enfranchisement, the direct election of U.S. senators. You know, my read of that is that it's really, these come through kind of social pressure, mass mobilization. It also, they also come through, there's a particular tactic in the American setting, which is it comes through the state level, where you make things change at the state level, sort of facts on the ground change to such a degree that then it's sort of knocking down a rotten door by the time the constitutional amendment passes, you could sort of imagine something happening like that with the Electoral College. And so that's another point. And then a kind of third point I would make is that there are actually more low-hanging fruit. And, you know, the filibuster is something that, you know, nearly was, you know, has been changed a lot over its history. And, you know, one can imagine additional carveouts. You know, we call for its abolishment but, you know, very realistically, I could imagine carveouts for voting rights or, you know, other areas or reducing the threshold even a little more as it was in the 1970s. So this is nothing fixed in stone. And if one, and why that kind of finding the workarounds and the kind of low-hanging fruit and let's say passing automatic voter registration, this is also one of the, you know, which is happening as we speak, you know, in states. So passing these kind of more low-hanging fruit is important. And this I kind of get from Julie Suk's book on, I think you guys had her on your--
[00:41:29] David: Yeah we did, yep.
[00:41:30] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah she, her great book After Misogyny, where she kind of, you know, she actually draws on a Swedish case which we kind of, we look at Norway and so where there's sort of a clustering or there are waves of reforms. I mean the, you know, win one. So you know, when the upper chamber was eliminated in Sweden, after it really became like an appendix-like of an institution that had no use anymore. Then suddenly you've got all sorts of other reforms, you know, equal pay for women, you know, guarantees of child care. So you get these clusters of reforms, so you get kind of, you know, so and, you know, we look at American history, you get similar thing. So that's sort of the idea is that you could begin to push for these things and our broader point is simply to say that, you know, instead of thinking that this is a kind of an impossible thing, and also in some, you know, I only recently began to read the Fishkin and Forbath book, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution--
[00:42:21] David: Also had them on.
[00:42:22] Daniel Ziblatt: You have? Oh, I just have to listen to that. Yeah, they're very good and, you know, and they make this case, which we don't quite make. I mean, I think our, in some ways, I mean they talk much more about, they're much more concerned about economic oligarchy than we are explicitly, but I think the messages are very similar. And I very much agree with their idea that, you know, and it's partly a political argument, but it's, there's something to it, that there's a great American tradition of making our Constitution more democratic. It's not antithetical to the Constitution. What makes the Constitution so great is not as it was in 1787, it was it's, you know, all of the amendments and everything that's improved upon since then. And so, you know, we need to re-embrace that tradition. And so that's, that's sort of the purpose of--
[00:43:01] David: Yeah, no, I mean, there are a lot, there's a lot there. And it's like a, I mean, there's a question of like the relative value of constitutional versus, again, subconstitutional or ordinary politics in these areas. And then there's the questions about the things that are actually in the way. And so for a lot of the things here, like federalism is a really huge problem for. And like, for instance, take away, one of the reasons I'm not a supporter of the National Popular Vote Compact, because it relies on states to count votes, and it seems to me deeply unstable. Right, which is that like, okay, Texas said that every person in Texas voted for Trump. Obviously not true, but like is Massachusetts still, how are they supposed to react to that? And like it is a thorny but I'll leave it there, which is the--
[00:43:43] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah I agree. I mean one of the points, and I guess we haven't really said much about this, is that, you know, all of these institutional reforms are things that other democracies, including federal democracies, have done. You know, so, you know, you know, I don't think we're going to get rid of the two senator per state rule but it's just worth pointing out that in Germany, a federal system very much, you know, with American soldiers standing outside the doors as the German, West German constitutional writers design their constitution, decided that it should be a little bit more proportional. So big states get a little bit more representation. So, you know, we're incredible outliers in this. And I think pointing to the fact that other democracies have done this and gotten rid of their electoral colleges, every other democracy in the world has eliminated its electoral college, except for us. Every other democracy that had some kind of filibuster has gotten, has gotten rid of it. Every other democracy that had term limits or, and when we talk about the courts, I didn't mention that, big big supporter of the idea of term limits. Every other democracy in the world has either retirement age or term limits. I mean, only professors should have lifetime tenure, not judges. And so, you know, I think it's something that we, the fact that this has happened in other places is not [crosstalk]
[00:44:48] David: For what it's worth I just want to say that like, I'm all in on like making the case to people that the U.S. constitution, as it's currently understood and its structural demands, is deeply problematic in a lot of different ways. But I actually want to ask a question about this, which is that, the a lot of the argument takes the form of, boy isn't America terrible relative to other places or uniquely susceptible. And it's really hard to look at the world at the moment. Just, like, you wrote the book a while ago, it's long term trends, and not look at the story of being one of unbelievably broad American success. And I don't just mean over a long period of time, I mean over short periods of time. So like in our response to COVID, the U.S. economy bounced back way better than either China or Europe did. And our main military rivals, Russia and China, are in disarray of one sort or another, with Russia obviously in bigger disarray than another. Europe up having extraordinarily hard coordination problems that are not entirely un-akin to the, I mean the EU's democratic deficit stuff is obviously well, well, well discussed, but like having instances, just as America has some--Jacob Grumbach, the last question's going to be about your paper with him in a second--but it's, have states have democratic backsliding. Well, you know, Hungary has, right? And so the question is like, how does the relative success of the U.S. in both economic and international relations, military power stuff, how does it relate to your critique of the fragility of the U.S. constitution? Is it just happenstance? Is it, is it, are they causal? Like, what's your story?
[00:46:32] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah. So, you know, it's true. I mean, and you didn't quite say this, but I mean implied in what you're saying is the U.S. economy's rebounded better than Europe, Western Europe economically since COVID. That's certainly the case.
[00:46:42] David: Wildly better.
[00:46:43] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah, right. Yes, certainly. And you know, and I think a lot of that is due to the degree to which kind of incredible stimulus has gone through the American political system under and, you know, under united government of.
[00:46:55] David: Well, under, but actually first under non-united government, right.? So, I mean, the U.S. passed more stimulus when Trump was president than other countries did, right?
[00:47:05] Daniel Ziblatt: Oh, in the early, in the early days of COVID.
[00:47:06] David: Yeah.
[00:47:06] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah that's right. Yeah. So I mean, so the thing I would point to, I mean I'll come back to the kind of positive points, but the thing I would point to is that between 2016 to 2020, the U.S. experience according to Freedom House, and if you believe these organizations and their codings of democracy, a genuine episode of democratic backsliding, which is something that didn't happen to any other West European democracy despite their economic troubles, you know, and in fact, you know, the fact that Greece survived the financial crisis with its democracy basically intact is a remarkable feat and said something very remarkable about the resilience, surprising, I would say, resilience, let's say both Spanish, Portuguese and Greek democracy. Now, it's true that our economically, we're you know, we've done better. You know, maybe you need to invite Acemoglu on and ask him what the answer to that question is. Political scientists would like to be able to show and lots of articles have been written trying to show the negative impact of democratic backsliding on economic growth. Some people show that there is a relationship. Other people can't really show a relationship. It's, unfortunately for advocates of democracy, it's not as clear cut as one might think. I mean, there's time lags, there's all sorts of complicating things. You know, take the case of Hungary, a relatively thriving economy, despite the kind of emergence of a non-democratic government. So I think the, I don't really have a clear theory on the relationship of democratic backsliding to the economy. I mean, what I would, you know, I meet sometimes with business leaders and try to make the case for democracy. And what I'll say to them is, you know, the kind of capitalist system you live in, under a kind of case of democratic backsliding, is a kind of, crony capitalist system where you're going to have to, you know, curry favor with the political leaders. But it's not clear that people or business leaders are necessarily worse off under non-democratic systems, at least in the short run, unfortunately. So I don't have a clear theory about that. But it is true that our democracy did experience this backsliding. So I think ultimately that's--but I just maybe I'll, because maybe I'm coming off as too negative. I mean, we do really make the case, and this is something that's certainly true of my co-author, Steve Levitsky, that, you know, the U.S. is incredibly resilient democracy. I mean, with you, I have very little fear that the U.S. is going to look like Putin's Russia, let alone, you know, or Viktor Orban's Hungary anytime soon. We have a robust opposition, a pluralistic society, great pockets of wealth, you know, on the coasts, you know, a robust media landscape. And so these are incredible sources of resilience that mean that it's very hard to kill American democracy. And I think these are things that ought to be applauded and reinforced. But nonetheless, the fact that we have a lower Freedom House score today than Argentina should sort of surprise us.
[00:49:43] David: Yeah. So I want to pivot for one second because I'm a, I would be remiss if I didn't. I'm a, I study state and local government is my field and land use specifically and you've a piece out about state and local government, which I, particularly about local government, that I wanted to ask you about. So Jake Grumbach, another former guest on the pod on and you, have a piece that shows that the rise of city managers, that is to say, removing executive authority from an elected mayor and giving it to a unelected civil servant is directly related to black migration to cities. So can you tell the story of the piece?
[00:50:19] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah. So we, so it's with Rob Mickey, a political scientist, University of Michigan; Grumbach, who as you know, is, you know, works on local government and state governments in particular, actually. So we have a project funded by the Russell Sage Foundation to look at policing and the kind of thing that brought us together, you know, we didn't, we hadn't worked together, but was a kind of sense that democratization, a kind of late democratization in the U.S., meaning like 1960s, has had some kind of impact potentially on policing in the United States. You know, is there some way in which the late, the there's a kind of, because of how democratization has unfolded in comparison to other countries, that this has given rise to a particularly oppressive or a police kind of coercive apparatus that is, that doesn't treat all citizens equally. And so one of the kind of points that we make is that the fed--that, you know, drawing on theories of democratization, that democratization often generates pushback. I mean, reaction. Efforts to limit the impact. As polities are made more inclusive, then those losing out pushback to try to make it more exclusive. And so the way that this happened in the United States is sort of our beginning point, is to say that it happened, although democratization happened at the national level. I mean, this will be not an unfamiliar story to some folks here, that that the kind of pushback or the lack of progress really took place at the state and local level. And so that's where we focus our attention. And so kind of one initial case study, so we sort of thought about where would one see pushback or one would see kind of limits on democracy, and our idea some sense was that although, you know, there's this big literature, of course, on the move to city managers in the early part of the 20th century, but there was also a kind of second wave in the middle part of the 20th century. And our thought was that maybe as America became more democratic nationally and more diverse, that there was an effort to kind of claw back power out of the hands of directly elected mayors and city councils and to kind of put it in the hands, in a similar way that kind of power is transferred over to other kind of independent judiciaries or under, to the central banks or something like that, and so this is sort of what we, so this is our first kind of test of that hypothesis and so there seems to be some support for it. The basic idea that the places where more African Americans migrated to is, measured with this very fancy instrument that Jake is the one who works with--
[00:52:46] David: Leah Boustan's stuff. Another former guest.
[00:52:48] Daniel Ziblatt: Yes, exactly. Drawing on, yeah, that's right. Drawing on her, on her data and so on. So and we see this kind of pushback. So the main empirical work that we did was to collect all this data on the transfers to city managers. And we hope to kind of look at other areas, and then eventually to look at that, I mean, really our goal is to look at downstream effects of this on policing. What impact did this shift have on policing and various policing--
[00:53:09] David: Two quick follow up on this, because this is something I'm really interested in. One is that you normally tell the story about city managers in relation to race, but it's not black, it's Irish, right? So it's, the progressives were understood as attempting to transform local democracy and people generally think of them as anti-democratic for a reason I'm going to get to. But they think of them as trying to destroy party democracy specifically. And it was a particular, because at the same time as their anti-party democracy, they're very in favor of things like the initiative and referendum. And notably they're in favor of all the constitutional amendments that you talked about, they're very much the drive--you know, direct election of senators. And so, I wonder a little bit about your, the, how this kind of like fits in because the story of city managers is generally not understood to just be anti-democratic in the like, as we might think of the Federal Reserve. But it's to be towards a particular democratic form that is mass democratic but not through parties. So--
[00:54:14] Daniel Ziblatt: That's a, that's a fair point. I mean, yeah, so you--I was recently reading the very long 1912 Progressive Party platform for, Theodore Roosevelt's platform for president. And it includes a lot of the stuff that we think, you know, and you include some of this language of, you know, our constitution is the people's constitution. We need to make it more democratic.
[00:54:30] David: And specifically, Roosevelt was the police commissioner of when the police was removed from the power of the city of New York and given to a statewide commission.
[00:54:39] Daniel Ziblatt: Right? Yeah so--
[00:54:40] David: That's his first job. Major, important job in politics.
[00:54:42] Daniel Ziblatt Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, he's, you know, so I mean, one thing is I would say that we, you know, we can develop criteria beyond the progressives of over 100 years ago. And just because they like some things doesn't mean that everything they like, just because they like some things that we like today doesn't mean we have to like everything that they liked back then. Right? So--
[00:54:59] David: The past is a foreign country, I'm with you. Yeah.
[00:55:01] Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah. So but, you know, I take your point that, maybe to call it anti-democratic may be an overstatement, and I'm not sure if we quite do that in the paper. The point, though, the reason that it has an implication for democracy is that it severs to some degree, or weakens the direct accountability, of potentially the coercive apparatus to the populace. And so that's kind, that's essentially what we're trying to do.
[00:55:25] David: First with that, I think it's anti-democratic because party democracy is better than mass democracy. Like it is more democratic to do things through institutions that shepherd people's votes, that provide heuristics, that center politics, rather than making it issue by issue. So I think like I'm a hundred percent with you, normatively, but it does have some implication for what we call democratic in the book, which is that like, the things that like, strong parties become really, really, really important in that story, which may push you in different directions about what you think about, like the--you're going to have to, we'll wrap up.
[00:56:00] Daniel Ziblatt: One final thing here is that, I mean, it is a separate project, but the connection I mean, I'm just, I'm one of the authors on both. Connection is that, you know, we, I mean, something we didn't really talk about that is in our book is this notion of a multiracial democracy, which we try to come up with a definition of. And what we say, and it's a very simple definition, kind of a Dahlian definition, which is that it's just essentially political equality and a system that guarantees political equality for all individuals of all backgrounds. And so if we think of the rule of law and the police apparatus as being one dimension of that, the notion is that if police don't treat all citizens equally, the degree to which the police does not treat the coercive apparatus of the state doesn't treat all citizens equally, then this is deviating from democracy. So in a sense, the kind of really anti-democratic features of our story will, will like soon to be seen in the next stages of this project, the kind of downstream effects of this shift to the city manager system.
[00:56:57] David: Well, I can't wait for it. And all readers should go out and buy the Tyranny of the Minority. It's a fast and super fun--I mean, fun may not be right, but, you know, super interesting read. I, I enjoyed it a huge amount, as I did Daniel's previous books and work. So I just want to thank you so much for coming on the pod.
[00:57:15] Daniel Ziblatt: Thanks for the great conversation.