Tyranny of the Minority - Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

Informationen zum Autor Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are professors of government at Harvard University and the authors of the New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, which won the Goldsmith Book Prize, was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Time, and Foreign Affairs . Klappentext "America is undergoing a massive experiment: it is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it? ... [The authors present a] framework for understanding these volatile times. They draw on a wealth of examples--from 1930s France to present-day Thailand--to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within"-- Leseprobe 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 Civic Union. Peronist leaders had lost touch with Argentine voters. They made the problem worse by choosing some thuggish and out-of-touch candidates. Their gubernatorial candidate in the all-important province of Buenos Aires, Herminio Iglesias, was known for his shoot-outs with rival Peronist factions during the violent 1970s. At the Peronists’ final campaign rally two days before the election, Iglesias stood prominently on center stage, on live national television, and burned a casket with the symbol of Alfonsín’s Radical Civic Union—a violent act that most Argentines, having just suffered through a decade of terrifying repression, found appalling. When early results showed Alfonsín ahead in the 1983 race, Peronist leaders, searching desperately for explanations, briefly fell into a state of denia...

Product details

• Authors: Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 12.09.2023
• EAN: 9780593443071
• ISBN: 978-0-593-44307-1
• No. of pages: 384
• Dimensions: 147 mm x 218 mm x 33 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book