Authoritarian regimes are on the rise against democracies.

On January,2018, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt,two Harvard political scientists, published their new book is called “How Democracies Die”. Steven levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt try to give an answer that democracies are in danger or not in today’s world.

During and after 2016 election, they realized that Donald Trump is a treat to democracy. Cause Trump acted like a demagogue to the other candidate. As many people watched on the TV show, Donald Trump threatened to lock up hic political rival, Hillary Clinton,  if elected. It was the first time that a president rival behaving like this. In last decade, many candidates who became authoritarian leaders elsewhere in the world behave like this way such as Vladimir Putin, Tayyip Erdogan, Trump, Emmanuel Macron. But why did they adopted this act?

In recent years, people believed that the world is so close to a new war. The middle east problem is on one side and the huge immigrant problem is on the other side. Unemployment has been rising in countires because of the immigration. Racist discourses increase between people who live in same countries. Also governments are threating each other by war. At this stage, extreme righty leaders give fear to their citizens. Authoritarian leaders used these problems for their own power. People are believed that they are in danger by their leaders.Thus, people who live in their own country want to get the power to survive. They believe that the third world war is coming. Because of this situtation, people choose the power instead of democracy.

At this point, many believe that Trump gave to Americans what they want. Cause Americans were aware of power shifting from atlantic to pasific. During the elections, his aggressive attitudes worked. However his demagogue behaves ruled out democracy such as the other dictators’ behaves. The authoritarian leaders, such as Putin,Erdoğan, manipulate the constitution. Therefore, democracy is not working in these leaders’ countiries. Many believes that Donald Trump is on the same way.

These behaves brought the biggest problem in the countries: Polarization. People regard the other people who donot share the same idea as a threat. Mr. Levitsky and Mr. Ziblatt gave an example with regarding to this problem. They said that, %5 of democrats families did not want to match their children with the republicans in 1960 and its the same with republicans. But in 2017, this ratio had rised to %50.

Because of this polarization problem, Steven and Daniel believe that constitution is not enough by just itself to preserve democracy:  Contitutions work best when they are reinforced by two key norms.

 

One of them is mutual toleration. In democracies, people have to respect the others’ views. The other norm is forbearance. These two key norm are so important to protect democracy. According to their thought, if Amaricans donot want to lose democracy such as Russia,Turkey,Venezuale, they should keep hold of mutual toleration and forbearance.