For many across the globe, the US’ ‘beacon’ of democracy dims

Steven Levitsky:The rest of the world is somewhat shocked, I think, to see a political system that is descending into violent dysfunction and a regime that is increasingly unstable, in which democracy is increasingly precarious. Now, it’s not because of the assassination attempt. The world’s concern has been focused on the United States since 2016, and I think two events are even more shocking than the assassination attempt. One is Jan. 6, and the refusal of Donald Trump to accept the results of a presidential election — just the cardinal rule of democracy. And then I think the recent fact that it looks like Donald Trump will not be held legally accountable for any of the crimes that he committed, including crimes against American democracy. That’s also shocking. So, the assassination attempt is occurring in a much broader context, in which US democracy has fallen into this serious crisis.

It has. I don’t think the US democracy ever was quite the shining city on a hill that Americans perceive it to be. I don’t think the world ever had that view. But there’s no question that after World War II, and especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States, for decades, was a model to many aspiring Democrats and many democratic activists across the world. And this is not only disheartening to them but is also frighteningly kind of a negative model for aspiring autocrats. After Donald Trump refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election, a number of right-wing copycats emerged. Right-wing candidates in Peru and Brazil also refused to accept the results of the election. And this is in countries where nobody’s done that for decades.

Well, there’ve been a lot of parallels between the United States and Brazil. [Former Brazilian President Jair] Bolsonaro is a far-right figure — has a very similar worldview as Trump, friendly with Trump and Trump’s advisers, in many ways replicated Trump. And then, amazingly, two years after our 2020 election, Bolsonaro narrowly lost reelection. And, like Donald Trump, tried to orchestrate effectively a coup to overturn the results of the election. And when that failed, there was a Jan. 6-like event in Brazil in which protesters stormed the presidential palace, the parliament and the Supreme Court building. The difference is that in Brazil, Bolsonaro is being held accountable. He’s been banned from politics for eight years, and he’s very likely to end up in prison for trying to organize a coup. And it looks to me like this legal accountability is helping to calm the democratic waters in Brazil in a way that hasn’t happened in the United States.

There’s no question that we’re no longer a model for how democracy should work. And again, the cardinal rule of democracy, any in any stable democracy: All the major parties have to unambiguously accept the results of elections, no matter what. Win or lose. And when parties stop doing that — and the Republican Party has stopped doing that — democracy is in trouble. The other really critical rule in the democracy is that all politicians have to reject political violence under all circumstances, unambiguously reject it. And so how politicians respond to this assassination attempt is really, really important.

Sure. I mean, Bolsonaro in Brazil suffered an even more serious assassination attempt than Trump. His life was in danger for several days. He was hospitalized for quite a while, and Brazilian democracy survived that. There have been, unfortunately, many assassination attempts in democracies across the world. And in many, many cases — I think of Japan in 2022 or even Sweden in 1986, Mexico in 1994, where it’s extremely unfortunate that a leader, former leader, candidate, is assassinated — but politicians sort of did the right thing and were able to calm the waters in the aftermath. And democracy, or in the case of Mexico, democratization continued. There have only been a few cases in history where an assassination really threw the country sort of over a cliff. And the one the case that really stands out to me is Spain in 1936. When José Calvo Sotelo, a right-wing political leader, was assassinated weeks prior to the descent of Spain into civil war. So if you combine a political assassination with a rising tide of violence in a climate, a broader climate of political violence, and if politicians do not respond to an assassination by immediately sort of stepping in, unambiguously denouncing it and saying, ‘This is not how we do politics,’ then an assassination can sort of accelerate a downward spiral.

Many, many of the democratic breakdowns that we’ve seen in the world, the most traumatic democratic breakdowns — Germany in the ’30s, Italy in the ’20s, South America in the 1960s and ’70s — in all of those cases, you had rising levels of political violence, paramilitary groups, assassination attempts, terrorist attacks, street violence. All of that was taking up. And in all of those cases, you find mainstream politicians kind of winking at it, downplaying it, ignoring it, refusing to denounce it because maybe part of the base supports it, just being unwilling to very publicly and very forcefully denounce the use of political violence. When politicians do do that, when they stand up and when politicians from across the political spectrum forcefully, publicly, unambiguously denounce violence, it’s possible to sort of turn back the tide and keep violence under wraps.