How Democracies Fall Apart
How Democracies Fall Apart
An interview with Adam Przeworski.
The political scientist Adam Przeworski, born in Poland and now professor emeritus at New York University, is one of the most influential thinkers about democracy of the last century. He is the author of many books, including Capitalism and Social Democracy, Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism (with John D. Sprague), Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and Crises of Democracy. In February, he began posting a public diary to Substack to register his reactions to daily events. Over a series of emails this July, Adam and I discussed his life and career, how political science can and can’t help us understand historical transformations as they take place, and the perils and opportunities of our moment.
Patrick Iber: Over the course of your career, you have studied how democracies fall apart and get put back together. Classically, these events happen in sequence: first a coup, then a dictatorship, then a democratic restoration. But reading your daily reactions to what’s happening in the United States, the current situation doesn’t seem so clear cut. What makes it challenging to fit what is happening today into frameworks used to study previous democratic failures?
Adam Przeworski: Until about twenty-five years ago, breakdowns of democratic regimes were discrete events to which one could attach specific dates. The Weimar Republic fell when Hitler assumed dictatorial powers on March 23, 1933; Chilean democracy was overthrown by a military coup on September 11, 1973. Such events have declined dramatically in frequency in the twenty-first century. We have witnessed several governments maintain the trappings of democracy while taking incremental steps to ensure that they remain in office and remove institutional barriers to the discretion of the executive. The common label for such steps is backsliding, or sometimes deconsolidation, erosion, or retrogression. As this process advances, the opposition becomes unable to win elections or assume office if it wins, established institutions lose the capacity to restrain the executive, and popular protest is repressed by force.
This phenomenon took political scientists by surprise. Many of us thought that if a government were to conspicuously violate the constitution or cross another red line, citizens would coordinate against it, and, anticipating this reaction, the government would not commit such a violation. Other political scientists argued that the same would occur if a government were to refuse to hold an election or commit flagrant election fraud. A combination of separation of powers and popular reaction would make democratic institutions impregnable to the “encroaching spirit of power,” in James Madison’s phrase—that is, the desire of politicians for enduring and unlimited power. That was what we thought.
Yet by now we have seen several examples of chief executives successfully monopolizing power and eradicating all the institutional obstacles to its use: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. In all these cases, the government enjoys sufficient popular support to be able to win consecutive elections by harassing the opposition, undermining civil society organizations, and controlling the media without flagrant fraud (perhaps with the exception of Maduro). While in office, these administrations control the legislatures, pack or ignore the courts, and do whatever they want, some of which responds to the interests and passions of their political bases.
Iber: You’re known for a minimal definition of democracy: democracy is a system in which parties lose elections. Perhaps part of the problem now is that we don’t know if we are still in such a system, given that Trump refused to accept his previous loss, and we don’t know how he and his officials would respond to a loss in the future.
Przeworski: We do not know whether Trump will conduct midterm elections that Republicans could lose, whether Republicans would lose if those elections were clean, whether Trump would accept a defeat, or what the consequences would be if Democrats won. Trump behaves as if he is either sure to win or he does not care about the electoral consequences of his policies. The Democratic leadership seems to believe that the economy will tank, public opinion will turn against Trump, and they will win at least the House by doing nothing. Someone must be wrong.
Perhaps the economic consequences of Trump’s policies will be so disastrous that Republicans will suffer a resounding defeat in 2026. Still, my fear is that Trump will prevail in 2026, either because his base will remain solid or because of repression and fraud, or both. If Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress, Trump will be liberated to do whatever he wants, with no limits on his dictatorial power.
The budget bill that passed this summer will deprive millions of people of healthcare and food subsidies. One estimate predicts that 34 percent of Americans will be negatively affected by these cuts. The obvious question is who they are. If they are predominantly people who either did not or will not vote, or people who voted for Democrats in 2024, the electoral effect may be negligible. Moreover, even if the general economic effects will be negative, Trump will claim that they are only temporary and are caused by external enemies. Finally, while protests against Trump’s policies are massive, they need to assert an alternative vision of the future to have electoral consequences. Democrats have been visibly unable to provide an alternative. All I can conclude is that we just do not know what will happen in the forthcoming eighteen months.
Iber: In a 1996 paper, “What Makes Democracies Endure?,” you and your coauthors identified a number of variables that influence whether a country that is a democracy one year is likely to remain one the next year. Recently you ran a calculation based on these variables and determined that the chance of a breakdown in the United States is almost vanishingly low: one regression predicted it would happen once in 2.6 million years, another once every 263 years. Do we need new models, or are we just living through very low-probability events?
Przeworski: Trump won the most votes in fair elections. His popular support, even if it remains minoritarian, seems to have a solid floor. Nothing he has done thus far disqualifies the current political regime in the United States as a democracy. At the same time, many of his policies, some only announced but several already implemented, violate extant laws. Moreover, the government is pursuing some of these policies even after being temporarily stopped by the courts.
Whatever categories we apply to the Trump regime, his refusal to admit defeat in 2020 was historically unprecedented. All the historical lessons drawn from statistical studies such as the one you mentioned predict that such an event should not occur in a country as wealthy as the United States and with such a long tradition of peaceful transfer of power through elections. Should we treat it as a unique event that can be ignored, or must we conclude that history is no longer a reliable guide? Perhaps our understanding of the past is determined by circumstances about which we were blind. Perhaps conditions in the United States in 2020 combined in a way that was historically unprecedented. Perhaps we have been overconfident. Anomalies throw established beliefs into disarray, and disarray, I think, is where we are.
Iber: Let’s step back for a moment. The through line of your career has been studying the relationships between capitalism, socialism, and democracy. What took you to Chile early in your career, and what did you learn there? What did it feel like, both as a person and, perhaps separately, as a political scientist?
Przeworski: I arrived in Chile in the fall of 1968. I had left Poland a year earlier and could not return because of the massive wave of repression in March 1968—I would have most likely ended up in jail. But I was denied a visa to remain in the United States, where I had been a visiting professor, so I had no country, no job, and no money.
I quickly became enamored with Chile and found myself at home in the culture. Life there was not very different from my native country. The passion for football was universal, so that was a topic I could discuss with everyone across class lines. I stayed in Chile for four months and then returned to the United States. But Chile beckoned. I received a grant from the Social Science Research Council and arrived back in Chile on September 5, 1970, the day after Salvador Allende’s election.
People on the streets chanted euphorically, “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (“The people united will never be defeated”). Either this inductive generalization is false, or the people were far from united. President Allende was elected by a tiny plurality as the candidate of a coalition of divergent and quarrelsome forces. Stabbed in the back by a party that portrayed itself as centrist, the Christian Democrats, Allende soon lost control over his own coalition, parts of which hallucinated about carrying out a socialist revolution. Henry Kissinger proclaimed that Allende was elected due to the irresponsibility of the Chilean people—such was his understanding of democracy—and the U.S. government decided to restore responsibility by force. When the force was unleashed, on September 11, 1973, it was ferocious. The Chilean events of 1970–73 transformed my intellectual agenda for the rest of my life.
The primary issue that these events raised for me was the tension between democracy and capitalism. Writing in 1886, Hjalmar Branting, leader of the Swedish Social Democrats, wondered whether “the upper class would respect popular will even if it demanded the abolition of its privileges.” A German Social Democractic leader, August Bebel, argued in 1905 that revolution may be necessary “as a purely defensive measure, designed to safeguard the exercise of power legitimately acquired through the ballot.” Allende did not have a popular mandate for far-reaching social and economic transformations; his coalition never had a majority in the legislature. He won according to the rules and tried to govern according to the rules, but he was pushed by the forces behind him to reach beyond his mandate. The upper class, whose privileges were being threatened, turned to the military for rescue, and the military—not without hesitation—was willing to oblige.
The Chilean debacle transformed the international left. Until the coup, many among its ranks had wavered between the quest for socialism and respect for democracy. The Chilean tragedy forced a choice, reminiscent of that faced by social democrats in the interwar period: socialism or democracy first? The clearest response emerged from the debates within the Italian Communist Party, and it was resolutely for democracy. The Chilean experience had suggested that pushing the socialist program too vigorously, without sufficient popular support, would lead to tragedy.
I approached the topic historically, focusing on the choices that movements for socialism have confronted in democratic capitalist societies. I learned that these choices have been threefold: first, whether to seek the advancement of socialism by organizing within existing institutions or by replacing them; second, whether to seek the agent of socialist transformation exclusively in the working class or to rely on multi-class or even non-class-based support; and third, whether to seek reforms and partial improvements or to dedicate all efforts to the abolition of capitalism.
The existing institutions were privately owned firms in the economic realm and democracy in the political realm. The first socialist thinkers had proposed a program of replacing private firms with “associations of producers,” a system of workers’ cooperatives organized at the national scale. This way of thinking, however, lost favor after Marx’s criticism that it was not feasible unless the working class first gained political power. The question that tormented the leaders of early socialist parties was whether political power could be attained by electoral means or only by force. The rapid increase in socialists’ electoral vote shares around the turn of the century imbued socialist leaders with the hope that socialism could be achieved at the polls—ballots were to replace barricades (in the title of my book coauthored with John Sprague, they became “paper stones”).
Once socialist parties entered electoral competitions, the question became how to win electoral majorities that would usher in socialism. According to Marx, workers would become a majority in capitalist societies, and because workers would vote for socialism, electoral victory was inexorable. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, some German Social Democratic leaders began to doubt whether relying on workers alone would be sufficient and advocated extending socialist appeals to the petite bourgeoisie, peasants, and white-collar employees. The dilemma they faced was that broadening the appeal to other classes decreased workers’ identification with socialist parties. Still, electoral support for these parties grew sufficiently for them to become parts of governing coalitions and even to be able to govern alone in several countries.
This is when the third choice became pressing: how should parties that saw abolishing capitalism as their ultimate goal manage capitalist societies when they were in power? Should they opt for an immediate transition to socialism, with massive nationalization of the means of production, or should they adopt gradual measures aimed at improving the conditions of the working class under capitalism? How should they cope with the resistance of the bourgeoisie: by force or by gradual reforms aimed at increasing electoral support for socialism? Should socialists be prepared to lose elections, halting the road to socialism? Facing these choices, social democrats opted for reformism: a strategy of implementing only those measures that would enjoy electoral support of current majorities, and of respecting and defending democratic rules.
Iber: In the opening line of Paper Stones, you wrote, “No political party ever won an electoral majority on a program offering a socialist transformation of society.” That hit me like a bolt of lightning when I first read it decades ago. Allende won a plurality, not a majority. Other candidates elsewhere have won majorities as socialists, but not by promising socialist transformation. While Marx believed that workers would become a majority in capitalist societies and inevitably vote for socialism, this has not been borne out. In our time, the class basis of support for the left is changing—the “Brahmin left” is a real phenomenon, and many working-class voters are attracted to the populist right. Yet no government has been able to offer a better standard of living than social democracies. This can feel baffling. How do you explain it?
Przeworski: Many socialist movements came to believe that revolution would be accomplished by a cumulation of irreversible reforms, all observing democratic norms. The genius of reformism was that appealing to and implementing the most immediate desires of current majorities constituted steps toward realizing long-term objectives. This strategy was glaringly successful for a long time. Improved work conditions, reduced income inequality, expanded access to education and health, a minimum of material security for most people—the list of social democratic achievements is long.
Yet the limits of the project of allowing markets to allocate resources and distribute incomes, taxing these incomes, and providing social services became apparent in the 1970s. Attempts at transformation—workers’ co-management, workers’ funds, economic planning, not to speak of nationalizations—were attempted and often failed. Social democrats adopted the neoliberal verbiage of trade-offs between equality and efficiency, equality and growth. They moved from revolution to reform to coping with problems as they appeared. The 1970s may have been the last time when social democrats maintained a transformative perspective while coping with an immediate crisis. The disappearance on the political left of any vision of society that transcends the perspective of the next election focuses political competition on coping with immediate problems. When party programs become purely reactive, no longer guided by a long-term project formulated in terms of class, social bases of different parties become fluid.
Iber: As a Polish political scientist and witness to Chile’s fall, you’ve experienced the end of both a consolidated democracy and a consolidated communist system. Those were very different processes: Chile’s democracy ended at the wrong end of a rifle, while the fall of communism in Eastern Europe was mostly peaceful (and coincided with the fall of Pinochet’s anticommunist dictatorship in the voting booth). Does the current situation in the United States now feel more like one case or the other?
Przeworski: In retrospect, we pretend to understand why history took a particular course. I spent a good part of my academic life explaining historical patterns that I thought I understood. Yet after reading several memoirs of the 1930–38 period in Germany, I was struck that no one, from eminent politicians to ordinary housewives, predicted what would eventually happen. Even in Chile, where by the late spring of 1973 everyone knew a coup was imminent, no one expected that it would be so bloody or that the dictatorship would last for sixteen years. A common prediction was that the military would depose Allende, send him to Cuba, announce a new election, which [Christian Democrat] Eduardo Frei would easily win, and that would be it. Predicting the fate of communism was an even greater failure: Samuel Huntington, who became the guru of the “third wave” of transitions to democracy, published an article in 1984 declaring that the fall of communism in Eastern Europe was impossible. Juan Linz wrote the same in 1989 and had the misfortune of his article being published a year later.
In all these situations—communism, Weimar Germany, Allende’s Chile—we did not have a theory on which we could rely. We had no science that would generate valid predictions or attach probabilities to the possible courses of history. We need theory: logically interconnected propositions that say “if this and that, then this,” the last “this” being observable. Without theory, we can rely only on conjectures, intuitions, or guesses. The brutal fact that we find it so difficult to predict what will happen under our current circumstances is evidence that we do not have theories we can rely on.
The question that looms over the United States is, “How can it all end?” One possibility is clear: Democrats win the 2028 presidential and congressional elections, dismantle the apparatuses of repression, restore essential social programs and services, and we will be back to “normal.” So is another one: Republicans win the 2026 midterms, the 2028 elections, and usher in an oligarchical, repressive regime for the indefinite future.
All other outcomes would be more dramatic and unprecedented in the country’s history. One is that Republicans do not accept a defeat, either in the midterms or in 2028, or generate some event like the Reichstag Fire, which they would use as a pretext to declare a state of emergency and attempt to impose their rule by force. It is perhaps also possible that Trump’s popularity tumbles to very low levels, street protests bring out tens of millions, and Republicans, freed from his control, seek some kind of compromise. There are too many contingencies and until some uncertainty is resolved—most likely by the midterms—I do not know what to expect.
Iber: Let me keep the final question as simple as possible: what is to be done?
Przeworski: Answering this question requires a degree of optimism I cannot muster. I am a Gramscian in that I believe that to become hegemonic an ideology must offer a vision of a future in which the interests of those who rule coincide with the interests of everyone else. MAGA fails to offer one. It is difficult to identify the ideological blueprint of Trump’s revolution other than shrinking the state. Yet the opposition to MAGA also fails to offer an alternative. The Democratic establishment is clearly betting that Republicans will offer them an electoral victory while they attend the wedding parties of billionaires. The only vision for the Democratic Party originates from its left wing, which is vigorously censured by its mainstream. It may well be that the Democratic leadership is correct in thinking that the best strategy is to do nothing and waiting for MAGA to fail. But this, like MAGA, is a “back again” ideology, one of “restoring” democracy rather than transforming the conditions that generated the present disaster. To restore democracy, it needs to be reformed. This is the project we need.
Adam Przeworski is the Carroll and Milton Professor Emeritus of Politics at New York University. He is the author of many books, including Capitalism and Social Democracy and Crises of Democracy.
Patrick Iber is co-editor of Dissent.
