Tyranny of the Minority

Informationen zum Autor Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt Klappentext America is undergoing a massive experiment, moving toward a multiracial democracy. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of the American political system. From two bestselling authors comes a call to reform the United States' antiquated political institutions before it's too late. 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 denial. “They still haven’t counted the votes from La Matanza” (a working-class Peronist bastion outside Buenos Aires), party boss Lorenzo Miguel insisted. The Peronist vice presidential candidate, Deolindo Bittel, even accused the election authorities of withholding the results from working-class neighborhoods. By midnight, however, it was clear that these hidden votes simply didn’t exist. Peronists have a saying: “The only truth is reality.” And the reality was that they had lost. Defeat was hard to swallow. Party leaders, licking their wounds, initially hid from the press. But none of them considered rejecting the results. The next day, the losing Peronist candidate Luder joined Presiden...

Product details

• Authors: Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 12.09.2023
• EAN: 9780593728161
• ISBN: 978-0-593-72816-1
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 210 mm x 25 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Politics