Tyranny of the Minority: Steven Levitsky
October 12th, 2023
“Majorities should prevail. Those who win the most votes should govern.”
Steven Levitsky is Professor of Government at Harvard University. Together with Daniel Ziblatt, he is co-author of How Democracies Die and has just published Tyranny of the Minority. They argue that reforming American institutions to become more democratic will help us achieve a multiracial democracy—and in the process save democracy itself.
We are on the cusp of a multiracial democracy, but to get there we need to reform our constitution and end counter-majoritarian institutions. Majorities should be empowered to govern. If the majorities are not getting serious consideration in the legislature, something is wrong. For example, states with higher populations should get greater representation because democracy represents people, not territory.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Steven Levitsky
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Steve Levitksy Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
Most Americans revere the US Constitution. In the popular imagination, it's an infallible document that is part of a grand design, when in fact it was born of compromise, concessions, and second-best solutions. Prompted by the fear of the tyranny of the majority, America's founders designed counter-majoritarian institutions, such as the Electoral College, federalism, the Supreme Court, a bicameral Congress, a severely mal-apportioned Senate, the filibuster, the Bill of Rights, and extreme supermajority rules for constitutional change. Democracies do need some essential institutions that limit the power of majorities and protect minority rights. But excessive counter- majoritarian institutions enable minority rule -- and kill democracies.
Our guest today is Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University. Together with Daniel Ziblatt, he is co-author of How Democracies Die and has just published Tyranny of the Minority. They argue that reforming American institutions to become more democratic will help us achieve a multiracial democracy, and in the process, save democracy itself.
Welcome, Steve. Thank you for joining us.
Steven Levitsky: [00:01:42] Thanks for having me on.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:44] So to begin, let's set the stage. Why are counter-majoritarian institutions anti-democratic?
Steven Levitsky: [00:01:52] Well, if there's one core element to modern democracy, by which we mean not direct democracy, but modern representative democracy, it's that majorities should prevail. Those who win the most votes should govern, and majorities in legislatures or in government should be able to pass legislation that's supported by the majorities, assuming that they don't violate certain constitutional or minority rights. And so counter-majoritarian institutions are invariably undemocratic because they limit
the power of majorities. Now, most of us would agree that limiting the power of majorities is essential to modern democracy. In some ways, the Bill of Rights, basic protections of individual rights, right to free speech, right to association, to assembly, religious freedom. Those protections should be inviolable no matter what majorities think. Also, the rules of the game of democracy should not be up to the whims of a majority. A majority in the Congress or in a parliament shouldn't be able to legislate the opposition out of existence, for example, or change the rules of the game to favor the government. So there are certain ways in which majorities must absolutely be constrained. But there are other ways in which majorities ought not to be constrained. For example, I would argue, and most political scientists agree, that the loser of a presidential election probably shouldn't be made president. We're the only presidential democracy in the world where that's possible. It's also quite debatable whether there should exist supermajority rules for passing regular legislation. I'm not talking about treaties. I'm talking about regular laws. Should a minority of 40 or 41 be able to routinely and permanently thwart the will of a legislature of, say, 59 legislators? That's pretty anti- democratic when 41 can defeat 59. That's not only undemocratic, but probably undemocratic in a bad way.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:05] Right. You argue that the answer is constitutional reform, and your book points to examples of democracies around the globe enacting pro-democracy reforms. Norway, for example, has the second oldest democratic constitution in the world and has amended its constitution 316 times in the 200 years between 1814 and 2014. And in the US, of course, there is a lot of resistance to constitutional reform. The Equal Rights Amendment is a perfect example. A lot of people would say that constitutional reform would be a pipe dream, but I know you believe -- and we do too, that it's essential for ideas on constitutional reform to be a part of a larger national political debate. I'd love for you to articulate for the listeners why you believe ideas are critical.
Steven Levitsky: [00:04:55] First of all, it is difficult to reform the US Constitution. As you know very well, among democracies, the US Constitution is really by far the hardest in the world to amend. So that does make constitutional reform difficult. And in a context of intense partisan polarization like we have today, it makes constitutional reform seem impossible. But that hasn't always been the case. I think it's important to remember that through most of our history, going back to the very beginning, Americans have worked
to make our political system more democratic, sometimes through constitutional reform, sometimes through other reforms. And not all of the reforms that we're proposing are constitutional. Eliminating the filibuster, for example, doesn't take a constitutional reform. But literally, we can go back to 1787. Just months after the Constitutional Convention, George Washington himself wrote a letter to a friend in which he described the Constitution as an imperfect document that it would take successive generations to perfect. Our founders expected that the Constitution would have to be reformed. They didn't believe that they had it all figured out. They expected that future generations would reform it. And that's exactly what successive generations did. The Bill of Rights was a major constitutional reform that was achieved just two years after the passage of the Constitution and through various phases, really almost every generation in American history, whether it's reconstruction or expansion of the suffrage, the progressive era reforms, the very important reform in which we started to directly elect senators rather than indirectly appoint them, through the civil rights revolution in the mid 20th century, which wasn't so much about reforming the Constitution, but actually enacting and implementing the Constitution. Really through every period of US history, with the exception of the present one, we have -- both our leaders and activists have -- debated constitutional reform, have pushed for constitutional reform, and in many cases have carried out constitutional or other legal reforms aimed at making our system work better and aimed principally at making our system more democratic. We have stopped doing that work over the last half century during most of our lifetimes, and we think of the present day in which we sort of treat the Constitution as a virtually untouchable document. And constitutional reform is being sort of laughably impossible. We think of that as normal, but it's not normal. In fact, it's outside the American tradition. The American tradition is to work to make our system more democratic. That's what we've done throughout our history going back to the 18th century. And unfortunately, it's something that we stopped doing in the early 1970s.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:55] Well, thanks for inspiring us to go back to this tradition and embrace new ideas and engage in reform. Let's dive into some of the ideas that you laid out in the book. Your blueprint starts with upholding the right to vote. Tell us more.
Steven Levitsky: [00:08:13] First of all, I don't think it's a blueprint. It's a set of ideas that we hope Americans will discuss, debate, and that we think will help get us closer to basic majoritarian democracy that exists elsewhere in the world, in Europe and New
Zealand, in Australia and Japan, meaning electoral majorities should win power and majorities that are in power as long as they're adhering to the constitution should be able to govern. There should not be rules and procedures that allow partisan minorities to systematically thwart and even govern over majorities. So the essence of of all 15 of our proposals is getting closer to basic majority rule. So one key element of any modern democracy is voting. Most democratic constitutions include the right to vote. It seems pretty basic. It ought to be a constitutional right. It's not a constitutional right of all Americans. It never has been. It's not even federal statutory law. There are debates about how much that would matter if we were to constitutionalize the right to vote. But we argue, first of all, it ought to be a constitutional right. But secondly, that the government and the law ought to make it as easy as possible for Americans to vote. If you look at almost any other democracy in the world, the government goes out of its way to help people vote. In many democracies, it's mandatory to vote. Voting is like paying taxes. It's an obligation of citizens. It seems unlikely that we would go that far in the United States, but most democracies, in fact, almost all democracies, automatically register people to vote. Governments want people to vote, so they make it easy. You're automatically registered when you turn 18. Election Day is either a holiday or in most cases, on a Sunday. So it's not difficult for people to get off work and go to vote. Really only in the United States, among established democracies, are there a series of obstacles. More in some states than others, but a series of obstacles that actually make it difficult for college students, for people without cars, usually for older people, or people who live a greater distance from polling places. It's actually really hard for people in many places to vote. And that's just from a democratic theory standpoint. It's just ridiculous. This is no panacea, but our democracy would be healthier if 75% to 80% of the adult population voted, as is the case in most of Europe, rather than 50% to 60%, as is the case here.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:58] Mm hmm. Well, one of the things that you mentioned earlier as we were discussing this in the beginning is that we also need to ensure that election outcomes reflect majority preferences, whether that's on the minimum wage, let's say, or book bans, gun safety legislation. And I want to note here, what I noticed in the book that really stood out to me, that when we think about polarization of the American public, we often are reminded about parity in our institutions, especially in representative bodies. But actually parity is manufactured by countermajoritarian institutions. So let's say we win the majority of votes. But as you explained, we really are under minority
rule. So how can we make sure that those who win electoral majorities actually get to govern?
Steven Levitsky: [00:11:47] There are three ways. And I also get frustrated when I hear commentators talk about how balanced our elections are and the level of parity. In reality, the Democratic Party has won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections. You know, it takes three elections every two years to fully renovate the Senate. We elect one third of the Senate every two years. So for every six year cycle, meaning full renovation of the Senate going back to 1996 to 2000, going back to the 20th century, every six year cycle, for more than two decades, the Democrats have won the popular vote. And yet the Republicans have controlled the Senate for about half that time. That's a real problem. That is, in effect, minority rule. How can we change that? There are three steps we can take in the United States. The first and most obvious is to eliminate the Electoral College and thereby eliminate the possibility that the loser of the presidential election assumes the presidency. That used to be sort of a theoretical possibility that that never actually happened, but now it's happening with much greater frequency. It's happened twice in the 21st century, and there's a reasonable chance it happens again in 2024. So this is a real problem. So one way to avert minority rule is just to do what every other presidential democracy in the world does, which is directly elect our president.
Steven Levitsky: [00:13:15] A second thing we can do, which is much, much more difficult -- it's almost impossible because every state would have to agree to it -- is have a more proportional system of representation in the Senate. It should not be the case, at least according to basic democratic theory, that Vermont and Wyoming have the same representation as Texas and California. States with more people should get greater representation. Democracy doesn't represent territory. Democracy represents people. That's what democracy means. And so our senators should be representing people and not land right now in the Senate. They represent land and that's not very democratic. And that allows for a party that represents sparsely populated territories to beat parties that represent more metropolitan areas, even though they win less, fewer votes. So this is a very, very difficult, arguably borderline impossible reform. But we ought to have a system more like Germany, which also has a federal system and a powerful Senate. But that Senate has a degree of proportional representation. The bigger, more populous states have more senators than the less populated states. So that's another way to help
to attenuate minority rule. A third, slightly more plausible, because it's not it's not necessarily constitutional, is to adopt a proportional representation system of elections rather than what we have in the United States, which is a plurality electoral system, a system in which every member of Congress is elected from a single district, allows for what scholars have called manufactured majorities in the legislature. And this was made much worse by gerrymandering, at least in some states. A proportional system in which parties present lists of candidates and parties get the number of representatives more or less in proportion with the percentage of the vote they get, allows for a much more faithful translation, from votes to shares of seats in the Congress. So it's practically impossible for a party to win fewer votes but get more seats in the legislature. Today, we have a handful of state legislatures where over the last couple of decades -- and Wisconsin is an egregious example of this -- where the parties that don't win a majority of the vote win a majority, and sometimes an overwhelming majority, of the state legislature due to this combination of plurality electoral rules and sometimes pretty perverse gerrymandering. So an electoral reform that moves from plurality electoral system to proportional representation as exists in most of continental Europe and Latin America, would also help to avert minority rule in the legislature.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:09] We're taking a short break to share about a fellow democracy group podcast called Politics in Question. And we'll continue with Steve when we come back. If you love Future Hindsight, then you'll love Politics in Question. A podcast about how our political institutions are failing us and ideas for fixing them. Join hosts and political scientists Lee Drutman, Julia Azari, and James Wallner, three lively experts on American political institutions and reform. They imagine and argue over what American politics could look like if citizens questioned everything. The Founding Fathers did their best. But Lee, Julia, and James have some ideas, too. You can find their podcasts on Spotify, Apple and at politicsinquestion.com.
And now let's return to my conversation with Steve Levitsky.
Well, you just mentioned Wisconsin. And like you said, it's egregious over there, but it's not the only place. You know, the problem with that, of course -- I know that you agree here -- that the Republican Party basically does not have to make itself more broadly
appealing. In fact, instead, it has abandoned democracy and become more extremist. So how did this come about?
Steven Levitsky: [00:17:31] So first of all, I think it is important to take a step back and think about how unusual this is. It is not common. If you look at democracies around the world, it is very uncommon for a mainstream political party, be it of the center left or the center right, that has existed and competed in elections for decades to suddenly go off the rails and turn against democracy. Our principal explanation is that it is a reaction to the rise of multiracial democracy. And let me just take a second to lay out this argument, because it's complex. The Republican Party initially was the party of civil rights in the United States. It was the party that gave us reconstruction. The Democrats were the staunchest defenders of slavery and the ones who brought us Jim Crow. But after the New Deal, the Republicans found themselves in the minority. They were the minority party. The New Deal Democrats were dominant, and the Republicans did what parties that are in the minority do. They looked around for ways to grow. And in the mid part of the 20th century, an opportunity arose with the civil rights movement. Neither party was wholeheartedly committed to civil rights. In fact, the Democrats had a massive faction in the South that was viscerally opposed to civil rights. But the party in the Northeast and at the national level began to inch towards civil rights. It began with Truman and the civil rights plank in 1948 and then eventually in the 1960s, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Because it was the Johnson administration that oversaw passage of those bills, the Democrats became the party associated with civil rights. So as listeners will know, Southern whites had been overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly Democratic since the Civil War. Generations of Southern whites had been diehard Democrats. But those folks grew very uncomfortable with the civil rights turn in the 1940s and 1950s, and definitely by the 1960s. And Republican leaders began to look around and say, "Aha, this is a constituency that we can go after. This is a hunting ground for us politically." And they began with Goldwater in 1964 and then much more systematically with Richard Nixon's Southern strategy in '68 and '72. And then finally in a different way with Ronald Reagan, who very explicitly appealed also to southern evangelical Christians. For about 20 years between Goldwater and Reagan, the Republican Party systematically hunted for votes of racially conservative whites, especially in the South. And they succeeded. They appealed to whites who were discontented, particularly with government efforts to actually combat racial inequality, affirmative action, busing, other measures to actually enforce racial
equality. A lot of southern conservative whites were very discontented with those policies, and eventually they migrated. It was a slow process. But over the course of a generation, generation and a half, they migrated to a party that basically stood for racial conservatism and that helped make the Republican Party America's dominant political party in the late 20th century. The 1980s, they won three presidential elections in a row. The 1990s, they finally won control of the House of Representatives in 1994. So it was incredibly successful, this bid to bring racially conservative whites and evangelical Christians into the Republican camp. Thing is, America changed. Not only did it grow slowly more racially equal, but it became much more diverse, particularly after immigration policy changed in the 1960s. By the early 21st century, the United States was a very, very different place. And the racial hierarchies that had been in place in this country for 200 years started to be seriously challenged. But most visible to Americans was the fact that an African-American family inhabited the White House beginning in 2008. So the Republicans now had two problems. First of all, they had spent a generation successfully shepherding racially conservative whites into their own party, positioning themselves as America's white Christian party. Being America's white Christian Party was very successful in the 1980s and 1990s when 75% of the American electorate was white and Christian. But in the 21st century, as we grew more diverse, it became harder and harder and harder for a white Christian party to win national majorities. This is why the party has lost the popular vote every election except for one since 1992. And secondly, a good chunk of the Republican base was very uncomfortable with the social, ethnic, and cultural changes that were really being felt with quite a bit of intensity in the 21st century, particularly, again, an Obama presidency. Many Trump voters felt like the country that they grew up in was being taken away from them. And so they radicalized. The perceived threat of a multiracial America, which wasn't so visible in the 1980s and 1990s, but was damn visible by the 21st century threatened and radicalized a lot of those white Christian Republican voters. There's one survey out two years ago, sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, found that 56% of Republicans agreed with the statement that "the American culture and way of life is changing so fast that we may have to use force to stop it." Right. That's a pretty authoritarian sentiment. So the party was having trouble winning elections as a white Christian party and its base was radicalizing. And that, we argue, is what lay the foundation for Trumpism.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:48] Well, I guess it makes perfect sense then, given that this is their belief that they might have to resort to violence, that they engaged in the insurrection on January 6th. And we have heard about this a lot now in the press about Section III of the 14th Amendment, which is an interesting tool to combat anti-democratic extremism within the Constitution. So it seems to me that the case against the former president, as well as many members of Congress who were involved in January 6th, is pretty clear cut. But what's your view?
Steven Levitsky: [00:24:25] It's complicated. Many democracies have tools that enable the state to exclude from politics clearly anti-democratic actors. There's nothing crazy about that. Germany is probably the country where this practice of what is often called either militant or protective democracy that allows the state to investigate and ban political parties that are thought to be dangerous to democracy. Obviously, the history of that in Germany goes back to the experience with the Nazis, but it is not uncommon for democracies, for judges or state authorities in democracies, to say "you've clearly violated democratic rules. And so you're out." The Brazilian judiciary just ruled that that Brazil's Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, cannot compete in elections for the next eight years. It's a mainstream tool, but we've never actually enacted it, at least not since Reconstruction in the United States. We don't actually have a mechanism, a set of agreed upon procedures, through which this would work. Presumably somebody like Trump would have to be convicted in a court of law before he would be excluded. But we need some kind of minimally agreed upon consensus around the mechanisms by which we exclude candidates before we go ahead and do it. So I don't think it's a good idea for individual secretaries of state in the 2024 election to just go and knock Trump off the ballot. It's a plausible tool, but it's also a very dangerous tool if you give governments the power to exclude candidates, particularly without some kind of a judicial backing. You know, imagine handing that to the radical wing of the Republican Party today. Biden would be off the ticket in a second. Donald Trump should be excluded from electoral politics. But the healthiest way for that to happen -- and unfortunately, it seems like we're missing this boat -- is the Republican Party themselves should do the policing. The healthiest way to get Trump off the ballot would have been, for one, for the the Republicans in the Senate to have convicted him in... after January 6th, which would have automatically meant that he could not run for president. Or for the Republican Party as a whole today to say, "somebody with plausible felony charges cannot be our candidate" or "somebody who has clearly assaulted democratic institutions cannot be our candidate"
and refuse to nominate him. Unfortunately, the Republicans are obviously unlikely to do that.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:13] Yes, they are not looking like they're about to do that at all anytime soon. So we have to do the reform ourselves, although obviously reform doesn't happen on its own. And for sure, people within the system cannot do it alone. You stress the necessity of having a democratic reform movement, and you cite American presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, who acted under public pressure. There are a lot of organizations, though, right in this moment, actively invested in reform. What are some of the strongest efforts you've seen?
Steven Levitsky: [00:27:49] Well, to me, far and away, the most important pro- democracy movement we've seen in the United States in recent years is the Black Lives Matter movement. It's not often described as a democracy movement, but I think it was absolutely a movement aimed at moving us to take the final steps toward a truly multiracial democracy. In a multiracial democracy, the law truly protects all citizens equally, no matter what their racial, ethnic, religious background. The United States as a society has moved dramatically in that direction over the last 50 years, but clearly we're not there yet. And the Black Lives Matter movement, by most measures, the largest social protest movement in the history of the United States, which was overwhelmingly young, extraordinarily diverse, was a movement aimed at closing the gap in terms of police treatment of black and white individuals. That's the kind of movement that we're going to need to sustain to achieve multiracial democracy. It is also true that a large number of organizations formed at the local level, at the state level, at the national level, to protect our democracy. In the aftermath of Trump's election in 2016, very, very few Americans, myself included, thought about the need to protect democracy before 2016. But Americans rose up and responded to the challenge. And that's not the only reason why Donald Trump was defeated and removed in 2020. But it's important. One, Americans really did respond quite effectively. It's become increasingly clear to me that the goal can no longer be to just sort of go back to the democracy that we had before. Americans are too dissatisfied and too distrustful of our system today to want to get out of bed on a Saturday morning to sort of bring back 2008. We have to think about how to present a vision of a more democratic system that a majority of Americans aspires to.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:02] Right. So as an everyday person, what are two things I could be doing to take part in the movement for democratic reform? And how can I keep the faith? Because, you know, speaking about Black Lives Matter and you know, in the book, you talk about the ERA and the suffrage movement. All of these have taken so much time. And I feel like Black Lives Matter is also something that is coming on so late, post the civil rights movement, post reconstruction. I think a lot of people will say, what difference can I make as an everyday person in this struggle?
Steven Levitsky: [00:30:35] Well, I think your last point is important, and I want to reiterate it at the risk of being too gloomy because I'm not gloomy. But it is true that most serious democracy movements have taken time. And so it's very important that we have some perspective, and not grow overly impatient. 2024 is is going to be a very important election. Whether Trump wins or loses that election, it's it's not the final act in the play. There is still going to be a struggle the next day. This is a multi act play. This is a struggle that's going to take a while and I hope that people aren't paralyzed or that that knowledge doesn't sap them of their energy. But that said, first of all, what can people do? First and foremost, it's very basic, but join organizations. I mean, this happened after 2016 and it mattered. We have to remember, as difficult as things seem that small d democrats in the United States were quite successful in preventing or at least minimizing democratic backsliding between 2016 and 2020. The fact that we defeated and removed Donald Trump from power is no small thing. And it was the many, many Americans from across the political spectrum, across the country who organized to defend democracy that that made that possible. There are 500 different ways that you can defend democracy, but Americans need to be organized. And it's about actually physically doing the 20th century thing and going out, leaving one's house, and joining organizations. That matters a lot. An organized democracy movement or an organized America is in a much better position to defend democracy than one that's sitting at home on the Internet. My own preference is for organizations dedicated to sustaining the right to vote, so helping people register and working on various issues of ballot access is always healthy for democracy. Some of the reforms that we, that Daniel and I, suggest in the final chapter of our book are not easy to achieve in the short term. Some of them are not easy to achieve in the medium term. But other ones can be achieved. And I would recommend for the sake of our democracy, focusing on ending the filibuster. And it's not just sort of pie in the sky democratic theory I'm talking about, as you mentioned a little earlier in this podcast.
Many Americans are really frustrated that policies that a large majority of Americans support gun control. For example, some issues of abortion rights, voting rights, minimum wage, are all issues where polls show large majorities of Americans support reforms. There has been legislation introduced, sometimes passed in the House, and in many cases blocked by the filibuster. And so this disjuncture between majority support and minority partisan veto in the legislature is causing people, particularly younger people, to lose faith in our democratic system -- and with good reason. Right? If the things that majorities want, prefer, are not getting serious consideration in the legislature, something is wrong. The first step towards facilitating the implementation of majority preferences in the legislature is is eliminating the filibuster. And once we do that, once people see that, "wow, maybe, you know, majorities can prevail," then that will, I think, have a sort of an empowering and a self-reinforcing effect. There's evidence from elsewhere in the world that reform can be self-reinforcing. One reform encourages people and makes more likely further reforms. An achievable objective is to eliminate the filibuster and which would perhaps enable gun legislation to pass, which is pretty darn important. It would also perhaps allow voting rights legislation to pass, which is also an incredibly important step towards protecting and democratizing our democracy, and I think would encourage and empower citizens to pursue further reforms.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:53] Yeah, these are really great suggestions. So, as we are rounding out our conversation here today, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Steven Levitsky: [00:35:03] What makes me hopeful is I think we are on the brink of a remarkable thing, which is a truly multiracial democracy. We open the book with two scenes. One of the scenes is January 6th, but one of the scenes is a now forgotten one, which is January 5th of 2021, which is when the voters in the state of Georgia elected their first African-American and first Jewish senator, which we present and we take -- and I view -- as a sign of our country's movement towards a truly multiracial democracy, the progress that we've made in the last 50 years towards a multiracial democracy, which is a really, really hard thing to pull off, has been enormous. And what gives me the most hope is the fact that the generations below me are much, much more committed to the core tenets of multiracial democracy than my own generation and certainly generations before me. Young people, Millennials and Gen Z, on the the two issues that matter most to making multiracial democracy work, which is one, toleration
of diversity and two, commitment to racial equality. Survey after survey after survey shows that younger Americans are much more on board with living in a diverse society and supporting true racial equality than are older Americans. And so I think there is a good chance that the younger generations are going to be the ones who finally get us across that goal line towards multiracial democracy. And so my goal is to hopefully reform our system at least a little bit so that we can empower that and give voice to that emerging multiracial Democratic majority.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:00] Well, hear, hear. That's indeed very hopeful. I really enjoyed our conversation, Steve. Thank you so much for joining us on Future Hindsight.
Steven Levitsky: [00:37:08] Thank you for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:10] Steven Levitsky is professor of government at Harvard
University and co-author of Tyranny of the Minority.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Sam Oliker-Friedland. He's a former Department of Justice voting rights litigator at the Civil Rights Division and current executive director at the Institute for Responsive Government.
Sam Oliker-Friedland: [00:37:37] We don't really realize how much the sort of participation gaps really are a crisis in our democracy. The fact that that 60% or 70% of people participating, which means 30% or 40% of people not participating, would be considered phenomenal for an off-year election and good for a presidential election -- that's a crisis to me.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:57] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, first of all, thanks for listening. You must really like the show if you're still here. We have an ask of you. Could you rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts? It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:38:35] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.