Capitalisn’t: How Big Money Changed the Democratic Game

Daniel Ziblatt: Big money is a problem because it distorts our politics. Consider the minimum wage. There’s an overwhelming majority of Americans in favor of a higher national minimum wage. Stuff gets blocked, and it creates legitimacy crises for our democracy, because more and more citizens feel that government’s out of touch. Then you’re attracted to outsiders, who in some cases may be good, but in other cases may be demagogic.

Bethany: I’m Bethany McLean.

Phil Donahue: Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed’s a good idea?

Luigi: And I’m Luigi Zingales.

Bernie Sanders: We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

Bethany: And this is Capitalisn’t, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.

Milton Friedman: First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed?

Luigi: And, most importantly, what isn’t.

Warren Buffett: We ought to do better by the people that get left behind. I don’t think we should kill the capitalist system in the process.

Bethany: We at Capitalisn’t are very interested in the interaction between capitalism and democracy. Democracy is essential for setting the rules of the game, and you need the right rules of the game to create a flourishing capitalist system. But then, in turn, capitalism can both help and hinder democracy. If it helps create economic freedom and freedom of speech, then it helps democracy. If capitalism is tilting toward corruption, both of ideas and of money, then it hurts democracy.

Luigi: If I’m allowed an infomercial, this year, the annual Stigler Antitrust Conference, which will take place on April 10 and 11, is dedicated to the effects of economic concentration on the marketplace of ideas. If you have any paper related to this topic, please send it our way, because it will be a very interesting discussion.

Bethany: I’m going to moderate a panel there. Very exciting.

Anyway, on this podcast, for obvious reasons, we’ve typically focused on economics: how money affects democracy. We’ve realized perhaps we’re a little bit monomaniacal about this. What if the real challenge to democracy doesn’t come so much from economics gone wrong, as it does from political or sociological factors?

Luigi: One of the main exponents of the sociopolitical view of the causes of the democratic backsliding was Juan Linz, a late professor of political science at Yale. Linz provided what is called a litmus test: a list of actions by politicians that can put democracy at risk. The list of actions is a refusal to unambiguously disavow violence, a readiness to curtail civil liberties, and the denial of the legitimacy of an elected government.

Bethany: The most successful Linz student is Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard professor of government and the author of many successful books, including How Democracies Die, and more recently, The Tyranny of the Minority.

Luigi: From an academic point of view, his most important book is Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy. There, he claims that the necessary condition for the birth of democracy in the West was the development of a strong conservative party, one with the electoral machinery needed to offset the appealing messages of the left—appealing because the left’s message is very much centered around redistributive policies.

If you have a very appealing left that preaches redistributive policies, then the people with money, if they cannot resist politically, they resist militarily. And so, if you cannot compete in elections effectively, then you need to stop the game and not be democratic.

In order to have a democracy, you need to have an alternation, and the alternation arises from the fact that even if conservatives might lose this election, they think that they can win next time. If they know that they are stuck in a position that they will never win again, they’re more tempted to go in an antidemocratic direction.

Bethany: In his latest book, The Tyranny of the Minority, which he wrote with Steven Levitsky, Ziblatt blames what he thinks is the democratic backsliding of the United States on what both authors argue is an outdated Constitution.

They argue that there are deliberate features of the US Constitution that are—I’m going to see if I can say it—countermajoritarian features. They’re appropriately designed to forestall the unfettered domination of the majority and to give political minorities institutional mechanisms for defending their basic interests and rights.

Think of the electoral college in presidential elections, the Senate with its disproportionate representation of small states and its filibuster, and the Supreme Court with its judicial review and its lifetime judges.

In Levitsky and Ziblatt’s view, the effort to prevent a tyranny of the majority through this globally unique institutional setup has gone too far. It’s allowed what they argued was a nationally ever-less-competitive Republican Party to establish, instead, a tyranny of the minority.

The authors also argue that this is, essentially, enabled by the Republican Party’s focus on racially resentful whites who refuse to adjust to multiracial diversity.

Luigi: But the book was written last year, before the election. In some ways, of course, the election makes their warning look prophetic, but in other ways, it doesn’t, because reducing Trump voters to racially resentful whites is obviously far too narrow of a framing. There’s a lot to discuss.

Let’s start with an easy question to set the stage. How do you define democracy, and what aspects of democracy are you most concerned will die?

Daniel Ziblatt: Democracy at its most basic level means rule by the people. It’s a moving target. Over time, throughout history, over the last 2,000 years, it’s a concept that’s changed in meaning.

In the modern version, I really subscribe to a definition that emphasizes that democracy consists of three big pillars. One is free and fair competition for power. Second is inclusive participation; that is, citizens should be able to run for office and to vote. Then the third big pillar is a package of civil liberties—freedom of speech, freedom of association—that make those first two pillars meaningful.

You also asked the second part to your question, though, which was, what are threats to democracy? That’s a good question. There are many ways for democracies to die. One of the major ones, it seems, is unlike during the Cold War, where the biggest threat to democracy came in the form of military coups, where men with guns killed democracy, today, the biggest threat to democracy comes from presidents and prime ministers who are elected to power—often democratically—who, once in power, begin to undermine those three big principles that I just talked about.

They begin to undermine competition, making it harder and harder to vote them out of office, or they make it more difficult for the opposition to participate in politics, or they may even restrict civil liberties. What makes this more modern version, I would say, of democratic death so pernicious is that it’s often done legally. There are no violations, sometimes, even of the constitution, of the law. Leaders do this under the cover . . . often using democratic language. And so, it’s much harder for citizens to recognize the threats.

Luigi: But in your definition of democracy, you emphasize by the people, not for the people. Let me give an example. Russia under Yeltsin was fairly competitive for positions and had fairly inclusive participation. Civil liberties were not perfect but were clearly improving.

However, the oligarchs were buying off members of parliament, so that they ruled in the interest of the oligarchs, not for the people. Would you consider that democracy, and what is missing, then, from the previous definition?

Daniel Ziblatt: One of the indicators that people often use for a democracy is whether they meet what is sometimes called the two-turnover test. If you really want to know if there is competition, the best test of that, in a sense, is when the incumbent goes to sleep at night, on the night before an election, is the incumbent nervous that he or she may not win?

And that has to happen over a couple of sequences, over a couple of elections. In the case of Yeltsin’s Russia, there really was no turnover in power. Yeltsin came into power, was in power through the 1990s, and then he essentially handpicked Putin. Although at the time people were talking about Russia as a democracy, there was never really any genuine competition for political power.

Now, to your point about the role of oligarchs, one thing that can undermine political competition is excessive concentrations of economic power. One of the reasons there probably wasn’t genuine competition is because the oligarchs had a lot of power.

Behind your question, I guess, is the idea that the Russian government wasn’t delivering for the people. So, in that sense, it was not a democracy. The reason I don’t emphasize the “for the people” component of it in the definition of democracy is that democracy is really a set of procedures to create a fair political game. We don’t judge it based on what government does.

Some democracies deliver more for their citizens; other democracies deliver less for their citizens. But the outcome of a political process, we can’t use that as a criterion, because that’s getting into the substance of politics.

If you go around deciding that whether or not you like a policy qualifies a country as a democracy or not, then there are going to be disagreements over policy. There are legitimate disagreements over tax policy, over environmental policy, over healthcare policy. Really, what matters most is, do you have a set of procedures in place that creates a fair political game?

Bethany: How do you think more broadly about whether the Democratic Party enforces democratic ideals better or worse than the Republican Party does, given that the last three presidential candidates don’t really seem to have represented the will of Democratic voters?

The party stacked the deck against Sanders in 2016, forced everybody else to step away after Biden in 2020, and then Harris was kind of parachuted into the race. If you had to pick between the Republican and the Democratic Party as to which one upholds democratic ideals, is there a clear winner?

Daniel Ziblatt: Yes. I would say that to be a political party committed to democracy, to be committed to the rules of the game, you have to do three very basic things. This is a really minimal requirement. Number one, you have to accept election results, win or lose. Number two, you have to be unwilling or not interested in using violence or threats of violence to gain power or to hold onto power. Third, you have to distance yourself from groups—let’s say, militia groups—to engage in those first two behaviors.

On those criteria, I think it’s pretty clear the Democratic Party is more democratic, small-d democratic, than the Republican Party today. That hasn’t always been the case, but just calling balls and strikes as I see them, using those objective criteria, I think it’s pretty clear.

The Republican Party had a tough time accepting the 2020 loss. There were acts of violence. The party leadership spoke out of both sides of its mouth. You’ve had similar kinds of much smaller-scale things with the Democratic Party in terms of not accepting election results. But party leaders, by and large, have accepted election results throughout the 21st century.

Now, in terms of your specific question about the Democratic primary process, I guess I would challenge the point on two regards. One, you had a primary process in 2020, free and fair competition. The primary process itself is flawed for both parties, at some level, but there was a process, and voters, in the end, voted for Joe Biden. You may say, “Well, the Democratic leadership put their thumb on the scale and so on.” Yeah, possibly, and I’ll come to that in a moment, but there was a genuine process.

Similarly, in 2016, again, the party leadership may have played a role, but at the end of the day, African American voters in South Carolina chose—and this was a key moment in the primary process in 2020—Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders. There was nothing fraudulent about that.

You have to think about this. Bernie Sanders wasn’t even a member of the Democratic Party, and the party was willing to consider this guy to be the head of the party. Could you imagine the Green Party ever selecting a candidate for the head of the chancellorship in Germany without even being a member of the party?

2024 was a slightly different story. I think it would have been much better had Joe Biden, with the benefit of hindsight, stepped out earlier. But, again, there was a process where Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, and people could have challenged her. They didn’t.

It’s not as if anybody limited the ability of all the various ambitious governors to run against her. That just didn’t happen. There wasn’t much time.

That wasn’t an ideal process. But I think I would also make the broader point that there’s a big, big difference between a primary process and a general election. Throughout the history of democracy, political parties have generally, in smoke-filled rooms, picked their candidates. Actually, we have a pretty open process in the US.

As for party leaders, the goal of parties is to win elections. I think for parties, the same democratic criteria that I just used—and this may be my controversial view—ought not necessarily be applied to internal party decisions. Parties’ main goal is to win elections. These basic criteria of democracy should apply to general elections but not to internal party decisions.

Luigi: That’s a little bit controversial, because you define democracy as competition for power, but this competition in the United States is basically limited to parties, and they do everything in their power to block any alternative.

It’s very different from Germany, where there are a number of parties, and there is much more intense competition on the margin. In the United States, this competition doesn’t exist. The only competition takes place in replacing people within the party.

We have seen that with all the defects, the Republicans have been very open—you might argue even too open—because they were taken over by Trump. The establishment of the Republican Party in 2016 wasn’t happy that Trump won, which is ultimate evidence of democracy. In the Democratic Party—and you conveniently skipped 2016 in your analysis—basically, the system is rigged to have the establishment win. There is no way in which somebody not blessed by the establishment can win.

Daniel Ziblatt: But you’re mixing up two different issues. One is the electoral system we have. Do we have a proportional representation system with multiple parties, or do we have a majoritarian, first-past-the-post system with two parties?

Luigi: I think that they must be analyzed together, because when you have first past the post, then the democracy inside the party is an essential element of competition. Otherwise, you don’t have real competition.

Daniel Ziblatt: No, you have competition between two parties.

Luigi: Yeah, but if one of these two parties does not allow free primaries, then there’s no competition.

Daniel Ziblatt: Look, I think that our primary-system process is broken. We have to put this in historical context. Until 1972, there was no primary that ever mattered in American history. You had closed conventions where leaders got together in smoke-filled rooms and chose the candidates.

Beginning in 1972, we opened up the process, and what political scientists discovered is that even though this process was opened up and made more democratic . . . And, to be clear, I don’t think we should go back to the smoke-filled rooms. I think having primaries makes a lot of sense, but from 1972 until 2016, the establishment candidate usually won. Not always, but usually. For instance, in 2008, Barack Obama won. He was the outsider. Hillary Clinton was the insider. So, there are instances where the outsider wins. The primary process does allow, to some degree, the outsider to win.

Now, is that an unmitigated good? I would say that it’s a double-edged sword. In 2016, the outsider won, and in this case, it was somebody who I regard, and many people regard, as being really problematic for democracy. There’s no silver bullet.

I do agree with both of you, though, that this primary system that we have is a broken process. It’s an arbitrary process, but it’s broken not just because party elites and bigwigs call the shots—because, again, as we saw in 2016, they didn’t call the shots. They lost out.

The reason it’s a broken process is that, as you say, it’s not very democratic. That’s one reason. It’s the arbitrary sequence of states. You have low voter turnout. I would be much more in favor of something like, which some states have begun to introduce, an open primary, a little bit like, let’s say, the French presidential election, where anybody can run in the first round, and then the top candidate vote-getters make it to the second round.

I agree that our current system is broken. But as far as I know, I’ve never seen a better system. What the tragic thing is, in some ways, is that many democracies around the world are increasingly adopting our model. For most of British history, you didn’t have this kind of system, and for most of post-war German history, you didn’t have the system where you have voters choosing the candidates. In fact, as they’ve introduced this, it’s not clear we’ve gotten much better outcomes.

Luigi: You started by saying that you want to judge a democracy on procedure, not outcome, and the procedure is competition for power. Actually, the system of primaries makes competition for power less effective, and so, it’s less democratic. We want a system to be more democratic with more competition for power. And then, you said, “No, no, no, this is not necessarily good, because the outcomes we get are not very good.” So, are we measuring outcome or procedure? If we measure procedure, more-open primaries are more democratic.

Daniel Ziblatt: I agree with you on that. As I said, I’m in favor of open primaries. I just think that it’s sometimes overstated the degree to which our party establishment dominates the primary process. When I say good outcomes, I mean good democratic outcomes in the sense of free and fair competition. I mean good procedural outcomes.

But I think anything that increases competition and participation and civil liberties is more democratic. And so, if one can imagine a primary process that does that, I’m all in favor of it.

I guess I was just challenging the notion that the party establishment always tilts the playing field against outsiders. I think we saw in 2008 that wasn’t the case with Barack Obama, to come back to that example. Sometimes the insiders win; sometimes they don’t. It’s a little more open-ended, I guess, than sometimes people interpret it.

Bethany: One thing you didn’t mention in your definition of democracies and what we need is this whole . . . and I’m going to see if I can spit out the word. I realized I have trouble pronouncing it: countermajoritarianism. Given that the argument in your book is that countermajoritarianism has been used to essentially corrupt our democracy, why do we need it at all?

Daniel Ziblatt: Countermajoritarianism, essentially, is a multisyllabic word that means limits on majorities. Democracy is more than just majority rule. Without majority rule, as you both have been saying, democracy becomes meaningless. On the other hand, liberal democracy, as it’s developed over the last century, has required some constraint, in some areas, on majorities.

The danger is most clearly exemplified in the case of Hungary in the Viktor Orbán era, where he was able in one election to get a supermajority of the vote and, in a one-chamber assembly, outlaw, in effect, the opposition, or make it really hard for them to win. By hacking the courts, by changing election rules so that the opposition can never win again, by changing media rules, all doing this simply through majority rule.

There was a famous US Supreme Court decision back in the 1940s where Justice Jackson wrote that certain things should be beyond the reach of majorities. The premise here was that certain things like civil liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of association, as well as the democratic process itself, should be beyond the reach of majorities. No, you shouldn’t be able to put up to a vote whether people have the right to vote or not, or whether people have the right to free expression or not. There have to be certain areas that are carved out.

Our premise, though, a little bit more sympathetic to your question, is that there are certain areas where majorities need to be able to govern and where they don’t currently in the United States. Whoever wins the most votes should win power. I think what’s so striking about the American system today with the electoral college is that, very often, the party with the most votes doesn’t necessarily win power.

That’s where a majority should certainly govern. Similarly, within legislatures, majorities should govern. If you have a majority, whether through coalition or with a single party, you should be able to pass laws, provided you’re not trampling on the rights of fellow citizens.

In the American system, with the filibuster, with the US Senate, with the electoral college, with the Supreme Court, we have a system in which majorities are limited. Other democracies, over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, have empowered majorities—weakened the House of Lords, let’s say, in Britain, eliminated upper chambers in a lot of Scandinavian countries. Because our constitution is so hard to change, we still limit majorities in such a way that we have many public policies that are really out of sync with what voters want. Too much countermajoritarianism and countermajoritarianism in the wrong arenas can be very destructive.

Bethany: Daniel, one way to argue the premise of your book is that the Republican Party has become antidemocratic, but then you could stretch that one step further and say that a majority or close to a majority of Americans have actually become antidemocratic. What does it mean if people themselves become antidemocratic? Is that, then, democratic?

Daniel Ziblatt: I don’t think it’s right to say most Americans are antidemocratic, even if they vote for a candidate who acts in undemocratic ways, because I think most voters, both those who voted against Donald Trump and for Donald Trump, were not voting really on democracy.

If you look around the world, incumbents are incredibly unpopular. In many ways, what people were doing when they voted for Donald Trump was voting against the status quo, voting against the establishment. That, in a sense, is what democratic citizens should do.

The notion of a self-correcting democracy is one in which, when people are unhappy with the status quo, they should vote the incumbents out. That’s just what happened. In that sense, it’s a quite democratic process.

The problem in the United States is that the only other option on offer was a candidate who I regard as having been a problem for democracy, who probably has contributed to ongoing democratic instability.

The problem’s really not the voters. The problem is what the choices on offer were, number one. And, number two, that we only had two choices on offer. I’m very much in favor of a multiparty system. If we had multiple parties, we wouldn’t have had this outcome. I don’t blame the voters. I’m much more focused on political elites and their failures.

Luigi: In your book, you say that one of the conditions for a peaceful transfer of power is that the losing candidate is sufficiently confident that even if he loses, his essential rights are preserved afterward. I know it’s hard, but imagine you are Donald Trump. Do you think that if you lose, your essential rights are going to be preserved?

Daniel Ziblatt: The odds are probably that there would have been some kind of prosecutions against him. I think that’s exactly why he was so certain on winning, and had he lost, he would have probably challenged the outcome. It raised the stakes, and I think it contributed to the sense of instability of our political system.

Does that mean that there ought not have been a legal process against him? I’m not so sure. I tend to be a person who thinks that we should use the electoral process rather than a legal process to try to exclude people from power.

But the idea that Donald Trump’s rights were being violated . . . There was no sense in which the court processes themselves were unfair. But I agree with you, this criminalization of our politics, in the sense where each side is accusing the other side of being a criminal, leads to democratic deconsolidation because it raises the stakes of politics.

The question of whether the legal investigations of him were valid or not . . . Another point I would make is that, in many democracies, people have been charged with crimes . . . Heads of state, heads of government have been charged with crimes. I don’t think that means that if you have people in positions of power who have committed crimes, that they have to be immune from this forever. I think it’s important for the rule of law for this to be done impartially, of course, but the process requires that the rule of law apply to everybody.

Bethany: But here we are postelection with Biden’s pardon of his son. How do you think about that through this lens? What I would see is both parties’ complicity in undermining Americans’ faith in the judicial system. It points a dark and dangerous finger at both parties for undermining democracy.

Daniel Ziblatt: By pardoning his son, it’s not that he empowered Trump to do this. He was going to do this anyway. But what it does is weaken the criticisms now when Trump does the same thing. Anything that facilitates the abuse of the rule of law . . . By weakening the criticisms, in effect, what you’re doing is allowing this to proceed in a way where it’s much harder to criticize this.

CNN and every network’s going to have people on, and anytime anybody criticizes Trump for pardoning the January 6 participants, the retort’s going to be, “Well, Biden did this, too.” And so, by having done that, it’s not helpful. It helps Trump at the end of the day.

Luigi: In your book you talk about the former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was democratically elected and then was basically deposed by lawfare from a party that calls itself democratic. I am Italian, of course, and you have a legitimately elected prime minister, Berlusconi, who was basically deposed by a party that calls itself democratic using lawfare.

In the United States . . . I’m not saying that all the troubles of Trump were manufactured. However, it is true that, at least in some cases—and I think, particularly, the stuff in New York—you had an attorney general, Letitia James, who campaigned on, “I’m going to put Trump in jail.”

You have a party that calls itself democratic but uses lawfare to basically preempt a party from participating. How do you reconcile this, and what are the similarities and differences between these cases?

Daniel Ziblatt: I agree with you. And I have to say, Luigi, your work on comparing Trump to Berlusconi in 2016 was one of the early comparative efforts to understand Trump and, I think, really was far ahead of the game.

But I think that the language that Trump has used in running for office has been more overtly antidemocratic than either Thaksin or, especially, Berlusconi. Calling on the enemies of the people, and we’re going to arrest my political opponents and all this stuff.

But I think it is important to distinguish between these different lawsuits that were facing Trump. I think the lawsuits connected to January 6, the lawsuits connected to his documents, were legitimate federal investigations. I agree with you that this kind of Mickey Mouse stuff in New York, where they were searching for exemptions, A, didn’t ever achieve their goal legally, and, B, probably increased his popularity.

In our book How Democracies Die, we argue against what we call constitutional hardball, where you weaponize the state and use any means you have at your disposal to go after your opponent. Now, we accuse Republicans of doing that, but in this case, I think, it turns out, probably Democrats did this as well, and they would have been much more well-advised to just focus on winning in an election.

Bethany: It’s not a subject that you explicitly touch on in your book, but what do you think about the growing rise of corporate power and how we almost seem today to live in a world where it’s government by the corporation, for the corporation? How does that filter into your worldview?

Daniel Ziblatt: The heart of democracy is a notion of political equality. That’s a normative underpinning. That’s why we want competition and inclusion of everybody, that there’s some sense that all citizens of equal value should have equal input, all have one ballot.

The problem with big money, especially when the guardrails limiting big money in the form of campaign-finance laws are lessened, is that it means that some people have more power than others. That’s always going to be the case, but this exaggerates it to a degree that undermines political equality in terms of pure definition. That’s one point.

One thing I should say is that there’s big money on both sides. There’s big money on the Democratic side; there’s big money on the Republican side. It’s not as if this necessarily favors one side over the other, but what it does is undermine this basic principle of political equality.

There’s another way, also, that big money is a problem, which is that because it distorts our politics . . . Consider the minimum wage. There’s an overwhelming majority of Americans in favor of a higher national minimum wage. Stuff gets blocked, and it creates legitimacy crises for a democracy, because more and more citizens feel that government’s out of touch. Then you’re attracted to outsiders who, in some cases, may be good, but in other cases may be demagogic. And so, you create opportunities for demagogues to play on the resentments of citizens.

I think it’s very destructive, and I think it’s really taken on a new, more visible, in-your-face form in the incoming administration, with the richest man in the world side by side with the president of the United States at all times. This is incredibly overt.

At the end of the day, I imagine there will be backlash eventually against this, but it’s certainly distorting those basic principles that I talked about, about fair and free competition, and broadening participation, because although people continue to vote, how meaningful is that vote if policy’s being determined by people who are closer in earshot to the president?

Luigi: I much prefer the second part of your answer to the first one, because the first one is what many of my colleagues say, “Oh, there is money on both sides, so money doesn’t matter.”

That’s not true. Money changes the conversation we have, so that certain topics are not even on the agenda. When is the last time that somebody campaigned on eliminating the loophole for private equity or taxing capital gains more heavily?

Actually, Kamala Harris tried, and then she had to walk it back during the campaign because she needed more funding. I think there is an enormous distortion that makes democracy not work for the people. That’s my view of a more substantive version, and then it creates all the resentment, so that at the end of the day, people don’t trust the system and are willing to make a bet on crazy outsiders.

Shortly after the first election of Donald Trump, I coordinated with some people at the law school a conference called “Populist Plutocrats: A Lesson from Abroad,” where we didn’t talk about Trump, but we did talk about Thaksin. We did talk about Berlusconi; we did talk about Fujimori. We did talk about—actually, the Philippines are blessed, because they have two of them. There was Duterte and before that Estrada.

What is unbelievable in all the stories is that you put them all together, and they’re so similar, it’s not even funny. The similarity is precisely that there is a major failure, and the major failure could be a financial crisis, it could be inflation, it could be terrorism in the Philippines. When the elite fail miserably, people want a change. If the system is not able to provide a change, they experiment with the craziest people on the face of the Earth.

What they don’t understand is the more the elite piles on them, the more they vote for them. The amazing thing about Estrada, who was a soap-opera actor in the Philippines, is that everybody was making fun of him. Every newspaper, like the local New York Times, was making fun of this guy, who basically was this B-rate actor—not just an actor, a B-rate actor.

In spite of that—actually, because of that—he got elected in a landslide, because people wanted change. So, I think that we need to look more carefully at how, in my view, money is changing the democratic game in a way that makes people feel they don’t have anything to lose.

Daniel Ziblatt: The question is, why have these concentrations of wealth come? Part of it is certainly technological, globalization, et cetera, but the concentration of political power has come through the weakness of the counterbalance.

The counterbalance of labor, in some ways, has weakened in the United States. In the other countries you’ve talked about, in many ways, maybe there never was a labor movement sufficient to serve as a counterbalance.

How to get out of this situation seems, to me, to be the theme of the age. In the moment in which we’re living with Elon Musk on the stage—and he’s just a symbol, in some ways, of broader problems—the big problem of our age is exactly what you’re describing here: these concentrations of wealth, what people call crony capitalism, and then how, in turn, this distorts the democratic process. It’s this terrible, self-reinforcing spiral.

Bethany: Part of the gist of your book is also this idea that the tyranny of the minority—what is indeed a minority—is motivated by racial resentment, in part, or in large part. How do the results of the election change your thinking, if it’s no longer a minority, and do you still feel as clearly that the chief motivation is racial resentment?

Daniel Ziblatt: Our account was really intended to try to explain why, in the first part of the 21st century, you had the rise of Trump—up until 2016, really. I think what drove this is some of these economic factors we’ve been talking about, but also the transformed culture of American society.

Just as western European societies have become more diverse, the US has become more diverse due to immigration. Part of the thing that fueled the transformation of the Republican Party is a sense, at least among some of its voters, that the country they grew up in was being taken away from them. A lot of the racial conservatives, as political scientists call them in the US South, who used to vote for the Democratic Party, increasingly were picked up by the Republican Party. And this pushed the Republican Party further and further to the right.

Now, one of the points that we make in our book is that if the Republican Party could become a multiethnic party . . . or at least, the logic of the book is that, in some ways, what this would mean is that they could win majorities. If they could win majorities, at least they wouldn’t challenge the results of elections and engage in violence to hold onto power. And that’s, in fact, what we saw in 2024. By becoming a multiethnic party, they’re able to win a democratic majority.

One may not like the policies they pursue, but in some sense, their democratic credentials are pretty solid. I think there continue to be these other economic issues that are weighing on our democracy, but the process of radicalization is driven by—and the reason demagogues can take advantage of economic dislocation in a way that benefits them is often to play onto—these racial resentments.

I think these have been a perennial part of American democracy. They continue to be there, but in a sense, in terms of how I’ve adjusted my thinking, if our parties are no longer polarized on race—and they still are, to a degree, we shouldn’t exaggerate it . . . but if the Republican Party can really become a multiethnic party, I think, ultimately, this would probably be a good thing for American democracy.

Bethany: A last question from me. Isn’t there a fundamental contradiction in that, though, that even as you argue the Republican Party doubled down on its radicalism, it also, at the same time, seems to have become a multiethnic party? How did those two things happen at the same time?

Daniel Ziblatt: It’s a good point. This is a party that should have been able to win majorities but never was really able to. It did in 2024. And so, it’s a time for some hard reflection on that. Is there some way in which the Republican Party has genuinely tapped into some deep changes that the Democratic Party has missed, or is this simply a bit of a fluke in that all parties—all incumbent parties around the West since COVID—are incredibly unpopular, so the Democrats delivered but just were not given credit for it?

I don’t want to be one of these people who thinks that interpreting the election is just confirming everything I thought. That’s a mistake. On the other hand, I think there’s this other equally pernicious tendency, which is to be a free-floating intellectual and just to have none of your prior theoretical commitments or prior arguments constrain you, and just say, “OK, actually, everything I said before now doesn’t work, and I’m just going to adapt with the times and come up with an interpretation that is current with the times.”

I think we need to really think hard: what was right about our interpretation of the past? How should we revise that in the face of new facts? I am personally in the process of doing that right now. You’ll have to invite me back in a couple of years, and I’ll let you know what my thoughts are.

Luigi: I think political scientists are really obsessed with this competition argument, but then they don’t really take it to, in my view, the logical consequences. If you really think that what defines democracy is competition, one definition of competition, at least in economics, is free entry.

We don’t really have free entry in politics. It is very difficult; there are a lot of barriers to entry. To some extent, you have to admit that the Republican Party is more open to free entry than the Democratic Party. If you go through a purely procedural issue, I think that the Republican Party is more democratic, but he wasn’t willing to admit that.

Bethany: Well, do you think that’s true? I actually don’t know the answer to this, so I’m asking. Does the Republican Party do something differently such that it is more democratic, or are you simply taking the rise of Trump to say it must be more democratic, because Trump was able to succeed in the Republican Party, where a similar outsider like Bernie Sanders wasn’t able to succeed in the Democratic Party? Then I might push back on that, because I think the Trump phenomenon is unique, and I don’t know if it owes itself to any greater democratic leanings within the Republican Party. I’m getting hung up on Democrats and democrats, big-d and small-d.

Luigi: Actually, it’s not just Trump. Historically, you have John McCain, who clearly was not part of the establishment. In fact, a bunch of the establishment rejected him even as a presidential candidate, and he was able to be nominated as a presidential candidate.

Go back in history—even Barry Goldwater. This was a crazy choice, because he lost by the largest margin in recent history. But that suggests that the system is less rigged to begin with. I am not an expert in party politics, but my understanding is the system of delegates is not rigged in a way to give disproportionate power to the establishment, like it was in the Democratic primaries until recently. I think it is first past the post in most states.

Whoever wins the most states wins, and sometimes they are crazy candidates. Even the election of Ronald Reagan is easy to talk about now, because he became the establishment, but when he was elected, he was considered a California cowboy. People were afraid that this guy was crazy, et cetera, et cetera. Again, I think that the Republican Party has been more able to change, in my view, than the Democratic Party.

Bethany: Well, if any of our listeners out there know the answer to this, I’d actually love to understand it a little bit better, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything written on that.

I really appreciated his nuanced answer about the use of the judicial system and the Hunter Biden pardon, because I’m frankly appalled by that. I was appalled by the prosecution of Trump in New York as well, both because I thought it was a faulty prosecution and because I thought it would whip his followers into an even greater frenzy.

To me, one of the more frightening things about where we sit now is that the most frequently articulated view of why the pardon of Hunter Biden was OK is that, “Well, we’re going to play their game, and since this is the way the Republicans play, we’re going to do it, too.” I just think that’s a descent into madness.

Luigi: I’m sorry, but I am mad twice. I’m mad for the reason you said, but also, I’m mad because the guy made a promise to the American people that he would not do it. How can you trust politics if even the most long-term politician, who had very little at stake at this point, et cetera, does not follow his own promises?

There wasn’t any new fact. Had he discovered that, God forbid, Hunter had cancer, then at least it would be a justification for saying, “I’m doing this out of compassion,” or some new evidence.

No, as far as I know, nothing changed between the moment when he said, “I will never pardon him,” and when he said: “Oh, I changed my mind. I pardoned him.” How can people trust anything coming out from any politician?

Bethany: Also, I know you weren’t as thrilled with his answer about the role of corporate power in all of this, but I did find it a missing part of his book, and I was glad to hear him expound on it a little bit more in our conversation, because I have been thinking about how it is that corporations have become as powerful as people and the long process by which that has happened. Where we sit now, an unelected man and his corporations are essentially among the most powerful people in the US government, if not the most powerful, meaning Elon Musk.

Luigi: I agree with you a hundred percent. My question—and maybe I’m a little bit cynical here—is whether this is one of the ideas that changed with the election, because now it is clear that corporate power is represented by Elon Musk. When corporate power was represented by Jamie Dimon and Mark Benioff and Mark Cuban, then it was benign, but all of a sudden now it’s become evil because it’s on the other side.

Bethany: Well, I’m with you. I think it’s always evil on both sides. I didn’t think he quite said that. I thought he was actually pretty clear that there was money on both sides. He didn’t make it just about money on one side of the aisle.

Luigi: Yeah, but he started with the typical reaction of saying there is money on both sides, so it doesn’t really matter that much. But now it’s really problematic, because we have Elon Musk.

Bethany: It’s really depressing to watch the way in which . . . And I would be saying this, by the way, if Biden had won, and Elon Musk and his crowd were now going to Biden hat in hand. There’s something just disgusting about watching the groveling after an election, as people try to be liked by the person in power in order to pick up political favors.

I didn’t hear that in his answer as clearly as you did. I didn’t think he said that it wasn’t a problem as long as there is money on both sides. I thought he said it was still a problem, because the money was influencing the ideas, and it was no longer each person with equal weighting. It was an entity with disproportionate weighting, wherever the money was coming from. So, maybe we both heard what we were looking for.

Luigi: No, I think that you’re right. The way I remember it is that he started by saying there’s money on both sides, so it doesn’t really matter. However . . . And that’s the reason why I liked the second part and not the first part of the answer, because . . . It is surprising, actually, how little political scientists are really interested in the power of money, and there is an entire branch of political science that shows that money doesn’t matter in politics.

Bethany: Really?

Luigi: Yeah.

Bethany: I didn’t . . . And is that a branch that existed in the past, or is that actually still an argument that people make with a straight face today?

Luigi: I think there are some people who still make it with a straight face.

Bethany: Oh, my goodness gracious. Well, that is interesting, because one of the things I think about a lot is the dangers of our hyperspecialized modern world, where everybody’s in their own little bucket and sees things through the framework of that bucket. Political scientists not thinking about money or economics is a classic example of that, right? Interdisciplinary studies, where you have the role of money and of economics in political science, would seem to me to be an area that is ripe for exploration.

Anyway, I was a little disappointed that he didn’t have an answer to this idea, because part of the core of his book . . . from my cynical side, I couldn’t tell if he was catering to New York Times readers by basically, in the book, making it seem that everyone who was a modern Republican must be a racially resentful white. If you can’t quite call it a multiethnic coalition that propelled Trump to victory, it was certainly more multiethnic than anybody would have foreseen. I appreciated that he said he didn’t have the answer to that, but I want to know the answer.

Luigi: Yeah, but give him some credit, he’s thinking. Maybe in two years, he will have an answer. That’s actually what a good academic does. He doesn’t necessarily blurt out an answer that is not well-thought-out. I think that—

Bethany: Here’s the difference between academics and journalists, Luigi: we just blurt out whatever we think. I’m teasing, that’s not quite true.

Luigi, what was your major takeaway from reading his book and talking to him? Did it change the way you thought about anything beforehand?

Luigi: I’m sorry to say, not really. I think that the book was very interesting in documenting all this distortion of democracy. I think that maybe the point that I will take with me is what he said toward the end. He said, “Look, democracies these days are not taken over by tanks but are killed in other ways that are more sophisticated and less visible.”

But then, it becomes a little bit tricky, again, who is democratic, who is not. Berlusconi was basically deposed by the European Union and by the financial crisis. Was that a modern form of tanks coming down the street, or was it a good thing?

Romania had the first round of its election and because, after the first round, a pro-Russian guy was winning, they called off the election. And is this . . . I would desperately like to have some scientific approach that is not very partisan, and it seems that at the end the day, what we like is democratic and what we don’t like is not democratic. That’s not very sophisticated. I’m sorry to say that, but I’m struggling.

Bethany: Yeah, I felt the same way. To me, the most interesting takeaway . . . I had never thought about this notion in his book that all democracies have to be tempered by a degree of countermajoritarianism, and that democracies essentially have to empower both majorities and empower minorities.

I think part of the reason that there’s no good answer to your question, or perhaps no formula, is that it is nuanced. It’s a balance, and you can align yourself with the majority or the minority, then, depending on which one is reflecting the views that you like. And so, it’s hard to come up with a framework when there’s no specific, scientific, quantitative balance between that majority and that minority rule. I thought that was really interesting.

I also thought his point about how so much of this is done legally now . . . It’s not illegal. It’s not a tank rolling down the street. It’s actually through co-opting the norms of a democracy or co-opting the rules of a democracy that the danger happens. I thought that was a really interesting point, too, and it just brings me back to this point that words and definitions really matter.

When you say democracy, you actually have to say what you’re talking about, instead of just taking for granted that everybody knows what you mean when you say democracy, because it can actually mean a lot of really different things.

Luigi: Perfect ending.