… “Joe Scarborough once came on MSNBC with a copy of a piece we’d written and said that we were ‘laughable,’” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University professor who has spent the last several years arguing that American democracy is facing challenges similar to those that brought down Latin American democracies in coups during the last century. …
“Today democracies don’t die at the hands of generals, but at the hands of elected leaders — presidents, prime ministers,” began Mr. Levitsky in front of a packed lecture hall at Cornell last week. “Many citizens are not fully aware of what’s happening until it’s too late.” …
A key turning point for many democracies was the moment when political rivals began to see themselves as enemies rather than competitors, losing a key norm Mr. Levitsky calls “mutual toleration.” In his opinion, American politics lost that early in the Trump era when the president referred to his rivals as “traitors” and “scum.”
The story, or some variation of it, is Mr. Levitsky’s bread and butter, with similar patterns of democratic breakdown seen in Chile, Hungary, Turkey, Spain before the Spanish Civil War, and Germany and Italy before World War II. “I never thought I would be seeing it in the U.S.,” Mr. Levitsky said. CONT.
Nicholas Casey, New York Times