How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

In 2010, more than one hundred Tea Party–backed candidates ran for Congress, and more than forty were elected. By 2011, the House Tea Party Caucus had sixty members, and in 2012, Tea Party–friendly candidates emerged as contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2016, the Republican presidential nomination went to a birther, at a national party convention in which Republican leaders called their Democratic rival a criminal and led chants of “Lock her up.” For the first time in many decades, top Republican figures—including one who would soon be president—had overtly abandoned norms of mutual toleration, goaded by a fringe that was no longer fringe.