Daniel Ziblatt

Digging a Hole: The Legal Theory Podcast

Squarely in the heart of the Trump administration, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published a book titled How Democracies Die which proved enormously popular. Celebrities read it. Obama read it. Most people you know probably pretended to have read it. Five years later, Levitsky and Ziblatt are back with a sequel of sorts, arguing that in the United States, democracy might never have been fully alive in the first place, strangled in the cradle by our very own constitution. To explain how their thinking has changed since How Democracies Die and discuss the new book, Tyranny of the Minority, we’re thrilled to have on today’s podcast Daniel Ziblatt, Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the Transformations of Democracy group at Berlin's Social Science Center.

In this episode, we poke around into all of the different ways the United States privileges minoritarian politics. Ziblatt explains that a major contribution of Tyranny of the Minority is showing how regular politics interact with our constitution’s minoritarianism to create a particularly potent anti-democratic danger for the United States. We discuss the legislative advantage minorities have in the U.S. thanks to our love of holding onto grand old traditions like the filibuster and what that means for statutory interpretation. Democratic backsliding, the advantages of party politics, papal smoke and mirrors–it’s all in there. We hope you enjoy.

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

• How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

• Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment by Brad Snyder

• “Inside or Outside the System?” by Eric Posner and Adrian Vermuele

• After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It by Julie Suk

• The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy by Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath

• “The Insulation of Local Governance from Black Electoral Power: Northern Cities and the Great Migration” by Jacob Grumbach, Robert Mickey, and Daniel Ziblatt