SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
During this year of global elections, we have seen challenges to democracy, a rise in populism and political violence, incumbent parties ousted and surprising wins and defeats around the world. All of these changes and trends can seem overwhelming and unprecedented, but history can offer us insight to better understand the current moment. To help us close this special episode on global elections, we have invited two academics to help us make sense of the moment. Margaret MacMillan is emeritus professor of international history at Oxford University, and Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton professor of government at Harvard University. Margaret, Daniel, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
DANIEL ZIBLATT: Great to be with you.
MARGARET MACMILLAN: Thank you.
DETROW: So, Daniel, I want to start with you. You co-wrote "How Democracies Die," and a big part of that book is the idea that guardrails keep it in place. You and I did an interview this summer, and in it, you and your co-author, Steven Levitsky, were really blunt and bleak, saying that many of those guardrails are long gone. Can you give us a few specific examples of these guardrails and why they matter so much?
ZIBLATT: Yeah, well, you know, there's two different kinds of guardrails. There's the institutions, the formal constitutional structures that constrain power of a politician who comes into power, the kind of famous checks and balances in the United States and similar kinds of institutions and other democracies. And those constrain political actors because when political leaders come into power, they sometimes want to concentrate power.
But there's another kind of guardrail that we write about, which we call the soft guardrails of democracy, which are the unwritten rules, the norms that have often guided our democracies. And there's a lot of norms. There's a lot of unwritten rules. But just I'll mention one that's been particularly important throughout history, and that's the norm or unwritten rule of mutual toleration. Now, that's what we call it, anyway. And basically what that means is that you treat your rivals as legitimate contenders for power. You don't treat them as enemies. You don't treat them as criminals. And what we've seen in the United States and other parts of the world as well - that over time, that norm has eroded, and so increasingly, politicians talk about each other as existential threats.
Now, what's tricky about this is, sometimes, they may be existential threats. But in many instances, they are not. And when you talk about your rivals in those ways, then it means that once you get into power, you will do anything you can to keep your opponents from ever gaining power again because if somebody's really an existential threat, you'll go to extreme measures to keep them out of power. And those extreme measures - violence, stolen elections - are really incompatible with democracy.
DETROW: And I guess it's hard to justify crossing the aisle and cutting some sort of basic - even the most basic possible deal with somebody if you're framing them as a total existential threat.
ZIBLATT: Yeah, absolutely.
DETROW: Margaret, question for you about another big-picture trend that we've been hearing a lot about - you know, since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been at the center of leading the Democratic world. A lot of signs in the stories we heard today point to the fact that that is just not as true these days. Why does that matter, and who do you think is filling that gap at this point in time?
MACMILLAN: Well, I think the international order depends on the willing participation of the great powers, and I think we're seeing it more and more fragmented in great powers, well, such as Russia, which would like to be a great power but actually acting in a very destructive way. And I think the Chinese are not prepared to take on the burden of maintaining world order. The United States, in a way, is being the world's policeman.
But I think what we're seeing is two things, perhaps. One is that the United States no longer wants to pay the price of that burden. It's expensive to keep the world in order and to look after the rest of the world, and I think a lot of Americans just don't understand why they should be doing it.
But I think the other thing that's happened is that the United States has lost part of its moral authority. I think what happened in Iraq has been very bad for the United States and for the - for Britain as well because what - they went in, they created a mess, and things just seemed to be getting worse. And Afghanistan, as well, I think, was a time when the West looked like it didn't know what it was doing, it was incompetent, and it's left a mess behind it.
DETROW: You mentioned the Iraq War. Do you think, at this point in time, we can really say, that did have a decadeslong tail in terms of the trends that we're talking about?
MACMILLAN: I think it did because I think a lot of countries, particularly in the non-European non-Western world - we call it now the Global South. But a lot of countries, I think, lost faith in the democracies, that they were acting for the best. And I think that's very difficult to repair. And I think it's shown in the reaction of many countries in the Global South to what's going on in Ukraine, they simply don't see it as a cause, and they don't see why they should get involved.
DETROW: I want to ask this to both of you. You know, when you talk about the state of democracy and democratic backsliding and liberal democracy feeling much more fragile, I think at times, to a lot of people, it can feel like you're just continually saying the sky is falling, but I'm curious how both of you would frame this.
When it comes to day-to-day life - you know, people buying groceries, people living their lives, people going to their jobs and coming back - you're seeing skepticism from large pockets of voters that big, weighty ideas like that just don't matter as much. I'm curious, and Daniel I'll start with you. Why do you think people should care about the state of democracy, even if they feel like, that's not a top-level issue for me?
ZIBLATT: Yeah. I agree with you that sometimes it can feel like an abstract, very academic debate. But we have to remember that democracies have two advantages that no other political systems in the world have. No. 1, they protect the basic civil liberties and freedoms - the freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion - that people value so much. They protect these kinds of rights better than any other system on Earth. And so, you know, if you cherish your freedoms to live the life that you want to live, you need to do this in a democracy, or you can do this more easily in a democracy, at least.
A second thing that democracies do, which, again, may seem abstract, but if you put it really concretely, is pretty striking - democracies are the only system in the world where we can get rid of bad leaders peacefully. If you have a leader who's in power who's doing a terrible job, how do you get rid of this kind of leader? In a democracy, you can do this peacefully, and that's an incredible power that citizens have in democracies.
DETROW: Margaret, same question to you. In this past election in the U.S., we heard so much analysis after the fact of concern about big-picture ideas like democracy is an elite concern. It's not something that day-to-day voters care that much about. Why should they?
MACMILLAN: Well, they should care about it because it will affect their lives if democracies fail. And I think Daniel is absolutely right. It - for all its faults, democracy has a self-correcting mechanism. You can throw out the people who have been elected. You can try another government. You have rules. You have laws, rule of law. If that all works, and even if it doesn't work perfectly, it is so much better than dictatorship.
So I mean, history is full of examples of people who assumed great power. I mean, you can think of, you know, the - some of the Roman emperors who were quite frankly crazy. And you can think of what happened with Napoleon, for example, with Hitler, with Stalin, with Mao. Dictators have no checks on them, and they tend to come to believe in their own infallibility and their own wisdom. And they create much greater catastrophes, including leading their countries into war or terribly destructive policies which kill a lot of their citizens than democracies do.
DETROW: With that in mind, I'd love to ask both of you - I mean, you've both touched on specific periods of time, specific figures as we've talked. But is there one moment in history, one point in time, that you've thought a lot about as you try to make sense of these current global trends that we're talking about?
MACMILLAN: I'm unfortunately thinking of two times. I'm thinking of the period before the First World War, when you had great change happening. And a lot of people were very unhappy with the change and looking for people to blame on things that were going wrong, and you had heightened nationalism and tension between countries.
And although I've resisted thinking like this, I'm thinking of the late 1930s, when you had Germany, for example, going down the road of Nazi dictatorship, when you had Japan falling into the hands of the militarists. And this, I think is very dangerous.
And I think this cynicism and this feeling that democracy doesn't deliver is very corrosive. And I agree with Daniel. I mean, I think it's necessary to keep reminding people just how bad things can be under dictators. They don't solve the problems. They make them much, much worse.
ZIBLATT: Yeah, and I think of those periods as well - the 1920s, 1930s. One other parallel that I would point to just within the United States is in the late-19th century, the - after the U.S. Civil War, this incredible experiment in multiracial democracy that took place in the U.S. South where you had universal male suffrage across the U.S. South for about 10, 15 years and then this great unwinding of that in the 1880s, 1890s, into the beginning of the 20th century, where, through violence and active disenfranchisement, our democracy was weakened in large segments of the country.
And so although the U.S. - it's very different today. I mean, I don't want to push the analogy too far. There's a way in which one could easily imagine democracy decaying across U.S. states in certain places but not in others. And most Americans may be turning a blind eye to it because that's really how democracy decayed where Jim Crow South, single-party rule of the Democratic Party, the exclusion of African Americans, took place, and people in many northern states kind of turned a blind eye to it. And I could very well imagine a kind of similar process unfolding in the United States in the next 15 years.
DETROW: That's historians Daniel Ziblatt and Margaret MacMillan. Thanks so much to both of you for talking to us.
ZIBLATT: Thank you.
MACMILLAN: Thank you.
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DETROW: If you'd like to look back at all of these elections that took place around the world this year, you can type in year of global elections, NPR, in your search engine, and you'll find more insights from NPR's international correspondents as well as perspectives from experts.
Building a democracy is hard, and so is producing a radio special on one. Today's special was produced by Avery Keatley, Gabriel J. Sanchez, Jordan-Marie Smith and Matt Ozug. It was edited by Adam Raney, Vincent Ni, Nick Spicer, Roberta Rampton, Brett Neely, and Tinbete Ermyas. The show was directed by Marc Rivers, and our executive producer is Sami Yenigun. That is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED for this Saturday. I'm Scott Detrow. Thanks so much for joining us, and we'll talk to you again tomorrow.
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