When historians one day try to explain the decline of 21st-century American democracy, they may well point to Republican leaders’ willingness to minimize and excuse the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In denying the seriousness of that effort to block the peaceful transfer of power, those Republicans conformed to a political type that Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call the “semi-loyal democrat.” This is a politician who nominally supports democracy but in practice ignores co-partisans’ extralegal and often violent efforts to subvert and overturn it.

Semi-loyal democrats are indispensable to a democracy’s undoing, Levitsky and Ziblatt explain in their crisply argued new book, Tyranny of the Minority. An authoritarian like Donald Trump would find it hard to take power without the cover that semi-loyal democrats provide. They are central to the question at the book’s heart: Why have Republicans become so disaffected with American democracy that they are now likely to give their 2024 presidential nomination to a person who has betrayed it? The question is the right one, but the answers they provide fall short of satisfactorily explaining how this has happened and what to do in response.

Best known for their 2018 book How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt are leading authorities on the rise and fall of democracies in the world and consequently well positioned to offer insight into American democracy’s troubles. According to a wealth of research, the United States was not a candidate for democratic breakdown. For example, a much-cited 1997 study by political scientists Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi found that no democracy richer than Argentina in 1975—at a per capita income of $35,682 in contemporary dollars—had ever broken down. The United States was the very model of a wealthy, mature, stable democracy. If past patterns held, it couldn’t break down, or so it seemed.

Read more at The American Prospect