How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

So they changed the rules—and did away with democracy. “Give us a [constitutional] convention, and I will fix it so that…the Negro shall never be heard from,” former Georgia senator Robert Toombs declared as Reconstruction was coming to an end. Between 1885 and 1908, all eleven post-Confederate states reformed their constitutions and electoral laws to disenfranchise African Americans. To comply with the letter of the law as stipulated in the Fifteenth Amendment, no mention of race could be made in efforts to restrict voting rights, so states introduced purportedly “neutral” poll taxes, property requirements, literacy tests, and complex written ballots. “The overarching aim of all of these restrictions,” historian Alex Keyssar observed, “was to keep poor and illiterate blacks…from the polls.” And because African Americans were overwhelmingly Republican, their disenfranchisement could be expected to restore the Democrats’ electoral dominance. The goal, as a state senator from North Carolina put it, was to write a “good square, honest law that will always give a good Democratic majority.”