#Steven Levitsky

[imkeepinit]

[ravioliraz]

Really good article contextualizing how the republican administration is able to weaponize existing institutions to undermine democracy leading to an “competitive autocracy.”

Give it a read, we need to understand their playbook in order to resist effectively.

[garyconkling]

Defending Democracy Under Assault

U.S. elections are under assault. The Russians circulate fake videos. Elon Musk stokes conspiracy theories on X. Donald Trump hurls insults and lies in rallies and interviews. Right-wing groups file legal actions to challenge election results before votes are counted. According to Trumpian logic – the only way there isn’t election fraud is if I win. Eventually, the smoke will disappear,…

[thatstormygeek]

This is a thought-provoking interview and definitely worth the read, but the whole piece - and especially this part - made me feel like I was watching the conversation from the other side of a soundproof window, just banging away with my fists.

I don’t understand how you approach a conversation about encroaching fascism in the US in 2024 (or 2023 or 2022) without even mentioning the LGBT community given that every one of those years has seen a record number of bills introduced in state legislatures to curtail the rights of queer - and especially trans - people.

It’s not even ahistorical - queer and trans people were also specifically targeted by the Nazis.

We really are that invisible.

[davidpotash]

Tune-up or Rebuild the Machinery of Government

A few years into the Trump presidency, two Harvard University professors of government, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote How Democracies Die. The book was a best-seller, calling out the decline in tolerance and respect across political party divides. The pair followed that effort in 2023 with Tyranny of the Minority. Equally popular, this volume highlights historical crises to make…

[sinoeurovoices]

美國學術界和商界對川普保持「靜默綏靖」　終將自食其果

這正是集體行動的悲劇，當我們拒絕冒險挺身而出時，所有人都將成為輸家。 ～國際經濟學會主席　羅德瑞克（Dani…

[mariacallous]

The recent weeks have obliged me to unearth some research I had hoped could stay on the backburner. In 2023, I wrote about the major forms of democratic erosion facing the United States: election subversion and executive aggrandizement. “Even a legitimately elected leader can undermine democracy,” I noted, “if they eliminate governmental ‘checks and balances’ or consolidate power in unaccountable institutions.” In 2022, I suggested that, if weaknesses in the formal institutions of American politics made it difficult to forestall additional assaults on the Constitution, the final backstop of democracy is civil society.

Historically, the United States has been fortunate to have a strong civil society. Many of these institutions have weakened. In this article, I quickly review how some sectors—the media, the academy, business, and mass voluntary organizations—are responding to “the most serious examples of executive branch malfeasance in American history.”

American civil society has essential nodes of power that must be energized in the coming days and for the foreseeable future. Not merely the individuals in these institutions, but the institutions themselves must coordinate to provide a public counterweight to the sharp lurch toward personalist rule. That work is not easy. Any more time lost to disbelief, silence, and acquiescence will make it much harder.

Some major media institutions have been slow off the mark. Major scoops have come from unexpected outlets, including independent journalists and the technology magazine WIRED, which was the first to reveal that Elon Musk’s young staff had the power to alter the $6 trillion Treasury payment system, a fact that Treasury officials had denied. (A federal judge has since blocked access. An earlier ruling had limited access to read-only, a problematic ruling given Musk’s conflicts of interest and the security threats posed by his unvetted and secretive young staff. It is unclear if either order is being followed.)

DC’s hometown paper, the Washington Post, should by rights have the best sources in the federal government, but the interference of the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, in the planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, and his prominent place at the Trump inauguration, may well be keeping whistleblowers away. The paper nonetheless has provided some important reporting, including this round-up of Elon Musk’s interference in government operations. The New York Times has buried several excellent, insightful analyses and essays deep in the paper, and adopted tortured euphemisms and vague, small-print headlines that leave their readers uninformed of the gravity of the news.

Academic institutions are largely silent, but that may be changing. Academics have for years been sounding the alarm about America’s democratic erosion, and many continue to provide vital analysis and context. See, for example, these analyses from Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Kim Lane Scheppele, and Don Moynihan. But academia has been outspoken as individuals. Institutions have mostly remained silent—though they may be shaken loose from their apathy by the executive orders interfering with billions in congressionally appropriated funds for scientific research.

Coordinated public pronouncements from university leadership, especially from law and medical schools, would assist citizens in understanding the scope of the dangers confronting the country. Top hospital administrators and medical associations that have been quiescent in recent weeks need to make clear the immense public health costs of ill-considered, arbitrary, and unlawful interference with government-funded science. In addition, professional associations have the power to sanction their members, a power they should exercise in defense of the public sphere, as my colleague Quinta Jurecic has argued.

Business concerns are not yet being channeled into political action. Autocratic populist leaders damage the economy; their countries see their GDPs drop due to erratic policymaking, cronyism, and underinvestment in public goods. But, as I wrote last year, business leaders have a tragic history of misjudging these dangers. American business influence, moreover, has grown increasingly ideologically conservative and focused on narrow benefits like tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

Since the election, business leaders have truckled to the new administration—a trend many, including President Trump, have suggested is driven by fear of official reprisals. That fear is, of course, one of the common ways in which opposition to populist authoritarian leaders is eliminated.

It may be, however, that business will awake to the massive economic dangers posed by executive overreach. Opaque and unpredictable stoppages of congressionally mandated spending by federal agencies will ramify throughout the economy. An unvetted young individual meddling with the code that underwrites the Treasury payment system is, as one Treasury contractor wrote, an “unprecedented insider threat risk.” (That contractor has since been “removed” by their employer, Booz Allen, a consulting firm heavily reliant on government contracts.)

Mass mobilization is underway, but those efforts will struggle if elites continue to underplay the magnitude of the moment. Congressional offices have been flooded with phone calls. As the volume went from the usual dozens to more than 1,500 calls per minute, the phone system buckled under the strain. Advocacy organizations appear to have been caught flat-footed by the speed of Musk’s incursions. Small protests have occurred at government agencies and congressional offices, with union organizations often playing a key role.

Religious organizations have not yet been prominent in most public protests, but they have an essential role to play. As my colleague Jonathan Rauch has written in a new book, churches must combat the rise of what has been termed Christian nationalism.

More broadly, public opposition to the second Trump administration remains far smaller than it was the last time around, even though recent actions represent a far more aggressive assault on American governance. This is perhaps in part because Trump’s loss of the popular vote in 2016 provided an impetus for organizing before the administration even began. Whether the organizing gap will close is a critical question in the weeks and months to come.

Across all of sectors of civil society, coordination is key. Individual objections do not carry the weight of joint action. It is worth noting that censorship in authoritarian China does not focus on “negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state,” it silences “comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization.” Resistance to authoritarianism, like democracy itself, is a collective endeavor.

[shrinkrants]

President Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power.

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”

“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”

There are many examples of autocratic leaders constraining the power of the judiciary by packing courts with compliant judges, or by changing the laws that give them authority, he said. But it is extremely rare for leaders to simply claim the power to disregard or override court orders directly, especially so immediately after taking office.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson

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POKING AROUND ON FUCKED UP FRIDAY

There are 606 days to the mid terms and the GOP will drive us off the cliff a week from today - don’t bet against that happening. Yesterday, Elmo announced that he had terminated the lease for the Obama Presidential Library site, because of course. Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, who has been outspoken in his criticism of Maladministration II, was recently quoted in the NYT: “This is the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era. I think it’ll be seen in the future, as that time was seen, as a time when people either stood up for their values or ran in fear of the federal government.” As someone old enough to have been young enough to be there and see first-hand what Dr. Roth speaks of, I have to agree.

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From the Department of Kudos to Steve Schmidt: You gotta love an epic takedown like this, particularly when it’s done so beautifully using so few words: “The 27-year-old White House press secretary often dons a conspicuous cross, while lying to the American people on behalf of Donald Trump. Married to a 60-year-old MAGA-loving real estate developer, the strident Karoline Leavitt has disgraced herself from her very first utterance behind a podium, where she speaks without credibility, tact or grace on all things, all the time.”

From the Department of Things Really Are This Bad: The NYT article about the increasing silence of Trump critics quotes Harvard Professor Steven Levitsky, author of How Democracies Die: "When you see important societal actors—be it university presidents, media outlets, CEOs, mayors, governors—changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism.”

[TCinLA]

[vampiremotif]

part 1 of a series I’m going to call

books to get through This*

this* being Current Times (unfortunately more precedented than you might think!)

1. how democracies die (2018)

author(s): Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

synopsis

The first one-third of the book essentially takes a comparative history approach, comparing different democracies that have failed across the world and identifying their shared characteristics. From this, developing a framework to identify when democracy is descending into authoritarianism. The next two-thirds of the book goes into how this relates to the United States and, what I would say, are fragile, barely-there guard rails in American society to protect against authoritarian rulers. (God, so much of American government is a bunch of norms in a trench coat.) It’s written incredibly accessibly and I was honestly riveted the whole time. I couldn’t put it down. It lends itself to really understanding all of the ways the foundations of the American government has led us to this moment.

scope & limitations

Authors are both American political scientists. Both are professors of government at Harvard University. Levitsky is a senior fellow for democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Since it was published in 2018, the authors are writing from the perspective of the midst of Trump's first term. Because of this, they obviously don't have the context of the pandemic (and the massive fail in government response), impeachment, or of the January 6th insurrection. (Frankly, I believe this makes their warnings all the more potent.)

“Building on Linz's work, we have developed a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media. Table 1 shows how to assess politicians in terms of these four factors. A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mike Damiano and Hilary Burns at Boston Globe:

Throughout the presidential campaign, Donald Trump and his allies have lambasted universities as “woke” indoctrination mills that radicalize youths against America and rip off students with inflated tuition.

Trump has said that, if elected, he will “reclaim” universities from the “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” who currently control them. His running mate, JD Vance, who once exhorted supporters to “attack the universities,” has praised the authoritarian leader of Hungary for seizing control of that country’s institutions of higher education. Such remarks could be dismissed as Trumpian bombast. But a Globe review of a year’s worth of campaign videos, policy statements, and recent remarks by top Republicans suggests something else: that behind his incendiary words lies a set of specific policies that a second Trump administration could pursue to exert wide-ranging influence over American universities. “There’s a lot of levers and tools that will get their attention day one,” Steve Scalise, the second-highest-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, said at a meeting with a lobbying group early this month while discussing ways to punish universities for alleged civil rights violations.

Trump and his allies have said a second Trump administration would replace universities’ existing oversight agencies —which wield clout over funding and fair practices —with new ones that would defend “the American tradition and Western civilization.” Trump says he would ramp up civil rights investigations into antisemitism and racial discrimination, a term conservatives have inverted from familiar usage to refer to affirmative action and campus diversity initiatives. And, crucially, he would cut off federal funding to universities deemed to be in violation of federal rules.

The plans are aggressive but feasible, higher education experts said, because they call for using existing federal powers that are under the control of the president. If Trump wins the election, he could follow through on these and other proposals through regulation and executive actions even if the Republican Party does not control Congress. “You have a lot of jurisdiction as president with all of these different [executive branch] agencies,” Scalise said at the Washington meeting held by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The Guardian first published video of the remarks. To his campaign and its supporters, Trump’s promise to crack down on higher education represents an overdue reckoning for institutions that have become, in their view, excessively left-leaning and have strayed from their founding missions.

[...] But some critics hear Trump’s pronouncements about higher education as the rhetoric of a man who revels in executive power and wants to move against his political enemies and quash dissent. “This is what authoritarians do,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor who studies democracy and authoritarianism. “Authoritarians of the left, of the center, of the right go after universities.” Trump himself has praised the authoritarian leaders of China, Russia, and Hungary. Vance said in a CBS interview reflecting on Viktor Orbán’s takeover of his country’s universities that the Hungarian president “has made some smart decisions there that we could learn from.”

In some ways, the Trump plans for federal higher education policy are an extension of Republican ideas that have already been implemented in some states. In recent years, Republican governors and state legislatures have banned diversity and inclusion offices, replaced public university leaders with ideological allies, and cut back on courses viewed as having a liberal slant. So far, those efforts have mostly been confined to red states, but higher education insiders fear that Trump could implement similar policies nationally. “We already see the way that state governments have been politicizing higher education, and to do that at a federal level would be devastating,” said Natasha Warikoo, a Tufts University sociology professor.

[...] The plan’s primary target is the federal funding — in the form of student financial aid and research grants — that most colleges and universities depend on to stay in business. In total, it amounts to tens of billions of dollars a year. To receive that crucial funding, institutions must be in compliance with federal rules, including civil rights laws. And to benefit from student financial aid they must have the stamp of approval of an accrediting agency recognized by the federal government.

[...] Another lever Trump and allies say they plan to use is federal civil rights law. “I will direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination and schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity,” Trump said in the campaign video. [...]

In practice, the more typical outcome has been an agreement with the federal government in which the university promises to change its behavior or policies.

In addition to using the Justice Department, a second Trump administration could investigate alleged civil rights violations through the Department of Education. In the last year, the department has fielded dozens of official complaints alleging that universities are violating civil rights laws by allowing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate to fester. Republican congressional leaders have summoned university presidents to Washington for hearings on campus antisemitism, which contributed to the resignations of three Ivy League presidents, including Harvard’s Claudine Gay. “We’ve had the hearings. We’ve got it teed up,” Scalise said at the meeting held by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. If Trump wins, it may be possible to withhold billions of dollars of federal funding from schools that the federal government decides are violating students’ civil rights, he said.

Coward, the free speech advocate, said there was nothing inherently concerning about vows to enforce civil rights laws. In the past year, since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, there have been assaults on Jewish students and instances of protesters blocking students from accessing parts of college campuses, which could amount to civil rights violations, he said. But he also warned that civil rights enforcement can go too far, imperiling free expression. Even under the Biden administration, he said, the Department of Education has urged universities to clamp down on pro-Palestinian speech protected by the First Amendment. Some of the policies proposed by Trump and his allies could further increase the pressure on universities and lead to more suppression of speech, he said. “When the institutions are choosing between their students’ First Amendment rights or losing their federal funding, almost all of them are going to choose censorship over loss of federal funding,” Coward said.

Wood, the former Boston University administrator who is now the president of the right-leaning National Association of Scholars, said some of Trump’s plans struck him as reasonable, including the prospect of accreditation reform. He and other conservative critics of higher education say the accreditors have strayed from their original mission of merely ensuring that schools are financially sound and providing an adequate education. Now, Wood says, they are overtly political and push DEI priorities. But critics of Trump’s plans see a power grab that could undermine universities’ independence.

If Donald Trump gets re-elected, he will follow the Viktor Orbán model of suppressing higher education and remaking it in his image to a tool of fascism.

Vote for Kamala Harris to keep academic freedom in universities.

[anniekoh]

elsewhere on the internet, the american shitshow

Feckless Dems need ‘a Navalny, not a Newsom by Will Bunch (Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar 11, 2025)

The California governor, in the first episode of his new podcast, asserted that he agrees with the political far right that transgender women competing in women’s school sports is “deeply unfair.” It was arguably as problematic, maybe more so, just who Newsom welcomed to his first podcast — in what felt like a clear effort to reveal the governor’s inner Joe Rogan to young white dude-bros who voted for Donald Trump in 2024. That guest was Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder who never met a conspiracy theory about COVID-19 or stolen elections that he didn’t like, who believes our universities are “islands of totalitarianism” and recently called the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “not a good person,” tied to the “big mistake” of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Newsom even released a picture of him smiling with Kirk, like the two men had just shot an endangered rhino or something.

...

One online comedian posted that when it comes to the fate of the republic, the Republicans might be the mass shooters but the Democrats are the hapless Uvalde cops, standing around and doing nothing. Democracy may or may not survive these next 46 months, but these sellouts on the left side of the aisle have no future, either way.

Defunded evangelical aid groups are reaping what the religious right sowed by Marci Hamilton (Religion News, Mar 10, 2025)

In a meeting at the White House on Wednesday (March 5), white evangelical Christians, who have for decades enjoyed billions in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development for their overseas missions, were told by Trump administration officials not to expect a reopening of the flow of funds, The Washington Post reported the following day. The Post said the administration officials passed the turn of events off as a positive for their faith. “’Do you want the country to get credit for foreign aid, or do you want the Creator to get the credit?’ asked Albert Gombis, a State Department political appointee,” according to the story. The leaders in the room were flabbergasted. “‘Some of us looked at each other in disbelief,’” the paper quoted one attendee saying. The fact that these groups got an audience to explain the cuts is testimony to their unflagging support for Trump in both his campaigns for the nation’s highest office.

...

The alliance with the GOP was not just about money. Yes, they wanted to allow taxpayer funds to pay for their Christian schools, but they also wanted to control the government’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people, women, and children. Unable to win the culture war by example or argument, they sought to do it by co-opting the government... Central to this campaign was destroying the U.S. Supreme Court’s establishment clause doctrine, which holds that taxpayer funds can’t be paid directly to religious institutions. This is nearly accomplished: This term, the court is set to decide whether a public charter school can be Catholic, a case that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago. 

Competitive authoritarianism: This Is Going Even Worse Than Steven Levitsky Expected by Benjamin Hart (NY Mag, Mar 3, 2025)

Earlier this year, Levitsky and Lucan A. Way published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “The Path to American Authoritarianism.” (They wrote almost all of the article before January 20.) Levitsky and Way focus on “competitive authoritarianism,” a concept they have explored for more than two decades. Under competitive authoritarianism, aspiring autocrats acquire power through legitimate elections, then stack the deck in their favor by rewarding corrupt allies, seeking revenge on their enemies through lawsuits and harassment, and cowing mass media. (Sound familiar?) ... When democracy is under threat, you don’t just say, “Well, the polls say … My focus groups say bread-and-butter issues are better.” You’ve got to defend the Constitution, man.

Louisiana Governor Flexes Power to Police New Orleans, Defying Local Preferences (Bolts Mag, Feb 2025) by Delaney Nolan

he heavy police presence was the result of an emergency declaration by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry in the wake of the New Year’s Day truck attack that killed 14.  The executive order authorized Landry to bulk up the presence of Louisiana State Police (LSP) within the city of New Orleans, and to “compel the evacuation of all or part of the population,” using whatever route, mode of transport, and destination he chooses. With a signature, Landry gave himself the authority to “control the movement of persons” within a certain area, making sure to note that he might need to set up “emergency temporary housing” for unhoused people camped near the stadium.  On January 15, Landry used those powers to send LSP officers out to forcibly displace unhoused residents of New Orleans’ downtown encampments, bussing over 100 people to a then-unheated warehouse miles away, under threat of arrest. By the time the Super Bowl rolled around, the encampments were empty. Instead, swarms of officers from the LSP and other agencies roamed the Quarter, walking in clumps of five or six down Bourbon Street. At each intersection, knots of camo-clad Louisiana National Guard soldiers toted semi-automatic rifles, becoming a spectacle of their own: Some tourists posed near the officers for pictures, while others hurried past under the floodlights, clutching their cocktails.

And a bonus from 2024

How does Trump embody Latter-day Saint values? (Dec 2024)

After some thought, here are some LDS principles I think Trump follows or exhibits that make him feel so right to so many American Mormons:

Patriarchy: Trump clearly has little use for women holding positions of authority. Similarly, the LDS Church gives women very little institutional authority, having all-male leadership both at the general and local level. While Trump and the Church obviously disagree about rules around sex, they agree that women are the attractive objects who are responsible for it.

Prosperity gospel: Trump is wealthy. He may have driven many businesses to bankruptcy, but he at least has the appearance of having a lot of money. ... The Church spends a lot of money to make temples look fancy in ways that echo Trump’s love of plating things with gold.

[rorygilmorecore]

2024 Reading List 📚

Here is my reading list for 2024 and all the books I plan to get to that are not for school. Sorry for how non aesthetic the pictures look.

Dis United Nations by Peter Zeihan.

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick.

Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum.

Soft Power by Joesph S Nye Jr (eBook).

I'd like to try to read more novels this year, but I don't currently have any in mind right now. However, I used to be really into Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen, so maybe I will reread some favorites of mine.

These are also the books I plan to use for the LSAT.

Not pictured:

Lawhub tests | Khan Academy Prep | 7Sage LSAT Prep

I'm also trying to expand my vocabulary with GRE prep. Moreover, I also want to start doing word puzzles and sudoku regularly.