Steven Levitsky

Uh, she's also at Johns Hopkins International Studies.

Uh, we got, uh, Steve Levitsky of Harvard University, uh, Daniel Ziblatt, also of Harvard University, and, uh, Gregor Eckertz of Harvard University discussing how to stop the AFD, Alternative for, uh, Germany, and calling them a populist extremist group and talking about getting rid of Trump.

That the title of that was, uh, essentially The World After Trump.

And I just wanna make clear that this has been going on a very long time, but it is all coordinated on a trans-Atlantic scale, just like the overthrow of the duly elected President of the United States in 2016 was a global operation.

Be explicitly grim here.

Um, uh, you know, a well-known book i- is by, uh, Levitsky and Ziblatt called How Democracies Die.

And, you know, their central point is that, uh, most democracies don't die because there's a coup, you know? They die because, um, a major faction or party at the elite level gives up on, on democracy and refuses to support the dem- democratic guardrails that have always protected it.

And, uh, that allows the system to go down, and it doesn't happen overnight.

But I was focused on Latin American politics.

So my main advisor was somebody who's very well known, Steve Levitsky, who wrote several very popular books with Dan Ziblatt, How Democracies Die and Sheepishly, I can't remember the name of the second one, even though I've read it.

And I worked with the other Latin Americans there who were wonderful, Scott Mainwaring and Fran Agopian.

And others.

And so I came initially to actually a Trotskyist movement for a little while.

But I very quickly discovered that that wasn't for me because selling the newspapers, not fun.

And also when you go to meetings and you don't say the right thing, then somebody after the meeting says, hey, Jared, let's get some coffee.

And I want to talk about your perspective on this or that thing so that they can, you know, and that quickly felt very culty to me.

In other words, other nations borrowed some of America's core insights, checks and balances, judicial review, constitutional limits on executive power, and then refined them in practice.

As I've shared before, Steven Levitsky, one of the foremost scholars of democratic collapse and the co-author of How Democracies Die, once told me that perhaps the deepest cause of this institutional decay is that America has been so successful for so long that it never felt much need to reform itself.

It's a truism in business, as in life, that people learn less from success than from failure.

[cheering]

As always, I'm gonna start with definitions.

You see, the term competitive authoritarianism comes from Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way.

Basically, competitive authoritarians use democratic institutions like elections, legislatures, and courts as a means of gaining power.

But the ruling party systematically abuses state resources that they control and manipulates the rules that they write to ensure that they almost always win.