The book is called the Tyranny of the Minority.
What is-- so you wrote How Democracies Die,
a recipe to kill our democracy and now
Tyranny of the Minority.
What is Tyranny Of The Minority about?
Well, when we wrote How Democracies Die, many years
ago now, before it seemed so imminent to so many Americans
that democracy was in danger, we
wanted to write a book that described
for Americans what it looks like when
a democracy gets into trouble.
I studied Latin America.
My co-author Daniel studies Europe
and the interwar period.
So we've seen democracies get in trouble.
We've seen democracies die.
And we wanted to describe to Americans what this looked
like so they would be warned.
After we wrote the book, we got a lot of questions about,
What the hell do we do?
How do we get out of this mess?
And so the book is an effort, first of all,
to better understand how we got into this mess,
but also, to think a bit about how to get out.
So how-- when you talk about how
we get into the mess, the Constitution
is really our touchstone.
Is that the document that actually
got us into this mess?
The Constitution, I should say, is a brilliant document.
It is the world's--
Don't hedge, sir.
It is the world's oldest-- [LAUGHTER]
--written constitution.
It's done us a lot of good.
Yes.
But it is also part of the problem today.
A majority of Americans support democracy.
A majority of Americans support the really interesting
experiment with multiracial democracy
that we are evolving into in the 21st century.
A majority of Americans every day
since Donald Trump came down the golden escalator
have opposed Trump.
But we have a Constitution that protects, that enables,
and that empowers an authoritarian minority party.
And that's a problem.
But isn't that-- the very nature of the Constitution
was the contradiction at its--
when it was being written.
All men are created equal.
Some caveats.
Black people are 3/5.
I mean, it's a mathematical equation that
from the get go was absurd.
It was absurd.
Now, in some fairness to the founders,
the elites across the world were
undemocratic in the 18th century.
But over the course of 200-plus years,
democracies across the world have
gone about fixing the original sins in the Constitution.
So you're saying the Constitution was a balance
between that ideal and the practicalities
of, well, How do we let the Southern states, who
have less population, not be steamrolled
by a pure democracy?
Right.
It was a couple of things.
First of all, it was a document created
by people who feared democracy, who feared majority rule.
Because majority rule didn't exist in the world
in the 18th century.
What did they think--
if it wasn't kings, what did they think it was going to be?
They didn't know.
They were in completely new terrain.
There had never been a republic like this before.
We never had an elected leader before.
The electoral college was a third choice.
It wasn't Madison's first choice.
Madison designed a system that would
have looked more like Europe's parliamentary democracies--
JON STEWART: Right.
--that was shot down.
A number of folks in the convention
pushed for direct election of the president, which
is what all other presidential democracies in the world
today do.
That got voted down--
JON STEWART: Didn't they also push--
Because the South--
--not even for a unitary executive.
Didn't they push for the executive
would be a panel, would be a group of individuals?
There were-- that was one suggestion.
But so they were--
they were scrambling, right?
They couldn't reach a majority, and they didn't
know how to elect a president.
So the electoral college was an improvisation.
It was an experiment.
Was it an improvisation to bring a compromise
to the Southern states?
Is that-- because the North was more
industrialized in the South and the smaller states.
Right, right, look--
So this was the compromise to bring the Union together?
Yeah.
I mean, this was a really tough problem, right?
JON STEWART: Right.
We had 13 colonies that were--
and there was a fear that they would break
apart, that there might be civil war,
that there might be violence.
The Articles of Confederation had failed miserably.
And there was a real fear that if we didn't hang together,
the Brits or the French would-- would come in and make
things very difficult for us.
The whole project could be blown to bits.
So these guys had to forge a compromise.
And they made concessions that were imperfect.
In fact, George Washington-- let me just say this.
George Washington, just weeks after the Philadelphia
convention, wrote a letter to his nephew,
describing the Constitution as an imperfect document
and saying that it would be up to future generations
to improve upon it.
But is it-- do you think it's strange, then,
that a lot of the Constitution really is a practical matter,
sort of a pragmatic document that is very much
nuts and bolts of, How do we do this
mechanically, logistically?
And yet we infuse such almost religious dogma.
We almost view the founders now in a kind
of a fundamentalist way of it was
spoken through them from God.
It was they were absolutely sure this is scripture.
Right.
We didn't always see it that way.
For much of US history, Americans, both politicians
and American citizens of all types,
have worked to make our system more democratic--
the expansion of suffrage, the reconstruction reforms,
the progressive era reforms.
JON STEWART: But oftentimes, that was brought
through violent upheaval.
I mean, the Civil War is what brought that
about, suffragette.
Even the Vietnam war, when they lowered the voting age,
if there hadn't have been the draft,
people hadn't gone to Vietnam, I
don't think you would have seen the expansion of voting
to 18-year-olds.
Constitutional reform is tough.
It's costly.
It takes work.
But we've done it throughout our history.
And it's really only the last 50 years,
only in our lifetimes, that we've kind of
stopped thinking about how to make
our system more democratic.
We' stopped doing the work of improving our democracy.
Let me ask you-- and this is a slightly different
point, than.
Maybe it's the design of the Constitution
that allows for rural states to have maybe
an outsized influence, especially
in the Senate, which is a relatively minoritarian body,
to begin with.
One person can blue slip something
that people can constantly stop things as one person.
And that person is always Rand Paul.
No.
[LAUGHTER]
But-- but is there also an issue, that as the world
changes so rapidly, is democracy foundationally
an analog system and that in an increasingly
digital and fast world, it's unwieldy,
even in its best iteration?
And is that what also gives a kind of shine
to the idea of dictatorship or authoritarian principles,
where things can be mobilized more quickly,
decisions can be made?
democracy is painstaking.
It's a grind.
It is.
And this is not the first time we've been around this bend.
Right?
In a century ago, whether it was the Russian revolution
or the rise of fascism, during a period of dramatic change,
industrialization, the entry into the modern era,
people looked around and said, yeah,
Stalin, that works better.
Hitler, Mussolini, that worked better.
JON STEWART: Made the trains run on time.
Turns out, in the long run, there
are costs to dictatorship and that dictatorships don't--
they may shine for a while, but in the long run,
you don't much like the results.
So we always have to be--
we've got old institutions.
And we constantly have to be thinking
about how to improve them.
But the basic idea of electing our governments
and electing our governments in a context in which we enjoy
a wide range of individual liberties,
I don't think that's outdated.
Right.
That stays no matter what the kids say on, I'm going to
say, Instagram.
[LAUGHTER]
I think the kids are-- the kids get a bad rap sometimes.
They are among the-- our strongest defenders--
JON STEWART: Well, you teach them in college,
so you see them.
I see them.
I find them to be fascinating.
There's always that millennials--
or whatever they're saying. I don't find that at all.
They're the ones who are going to save our emerging
multiracial democracy.
JON STEWART: They better.
[APPLAUSE]
Somebody's got to.
The Tyranny of the Minority, it's available right now.
Steven Levitsky, thank you so much for being here.