Tyranny of the Minority

Chapter 1

Fear of Losing

On the evening of October 30, 1983, as the votes were being counted in Argentina s first democratic election in a decade, Peronists who gathered in their Buenos Aires campaign bunker were in a state of shock. When do the votes from the industrial belt come in? party leaders asked nervously. But the votes were already in. For the first time ever, the Peronists Argentina s working-class party had lost a free election.

We didn t see it coming, recalls Mario Wainfeld, then a young lawyer and Peronist activist. The Peronists had been Argentina s dominant party since Juan Perón, a former military officer, first won the presidency back in 1946. Perón was a talented populist figure who built Argentina s welfare state and quadrupled the size of its labor movement, earning the deep loyalty of the working class. Those loyalties persisted even after he was overthrown in a military coup in 1955 and exiled from the country for eighteen years. Even though Peronism was banned for much of the next two decades, the movement not only survived but remained a force at the polls winning every national election in which it was allowed to compete. And when an aging Perón was allowed to return and run for president in 1973, he won easily, with 62 percent of the vote. He died a year later, however, and in 1976, Argentina fell prey to another coup and descended into a seven-year military dictatorship.

Still, when democracy returned in 1983, just about everybody expected the Peronist candidate, Italo Luder, to prevail.

But much had changed in Argentina. Perón was gone, and industrial decline had destroyed hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs, decimating Peronism s working-class base. At the same time, younger and middle-class voters were turned off by Peronism s old guard union bosses, and as Argentina emerged from a brutal military dictatorship, most of them preferred Raúl Alfonsín, the human-rights-oriented candidate of the rival Radical

Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

A minority of voters can now inflict a legislative wallop of racism, sexism, nativism, homophobia, transphobia, and economic misery on the rest of us and never have to pay for it at the polls. This is the tyranny of the minority that Levitsky and Ziblatt rightly fear. No lawless strongman or populist autocracy, it s a product of the very Constitution that we have been taught to admire. The New Yorker

Why has American democracy come so close to a breaking point while other Western democracies appear more stable? In this sobering study, Levitsky and Ziblatt blame the United States eighteenth-century constitutional order for its modern democratic woes. Foreign Affairs

[Daniel] Ziblatt and [Steven] Levitsky are two of America s very best comparative political scientists, with expertise that makes them uniquely well-equipped for the subject they re examining. . . . Tyranny of the Minority is one of the best guides out there to the crisis of American democracy. Vox

Excellent . . . Levitsky and Ziblatt distinguish themselves by the clarity and scope of their account. For a one-stop-shop foray into the problem of America s outlier status among democratic systems and the challenges of reform, Tyranny of the Minority cannot be beat. The New Republic
 
In their exceptionally perceptive and wide-ranging new book, Tyranny of the Minority, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt document the rapid unravelling of democracy in nations from Peru to Thailand, Third Republic France to Viktor Orbán s Hungary. The Times Literary Supplement
 
In their must-read book, Tyranny of the Minority, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt cogently explain that Republicans, unable to appeal to a broader share of the electorate beyond diminishing numbers of White, rural Christians, have found ways to exploit, abuse and, indeed, break majority governance. Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post

Crisply argued.