Fifteen Questions: Steven Levitsky on Democracy, Latin America, and the Mets

Steven Levitsky is a Harvard professor of Government and Latin American Studies who serves as the director of the David Rockefeller Center of Latin American Studies. He co-authored “How Democracies Die” with fellow Harvard Government professor Daniel Ziblatt.

FM: You’re from Ithaca, New York, the college town of Cornell University. Was academia something you always knew you wanted to go into?

SL: My dad was a professor, and in my family, it was kind of taken for granted that you were supposed to get a Ph.D., which is pretty nuts. But that was the case. And so, I fought it for a while, I thought about journalism, I thought about other things, but it was always there.

FM: How did you come to study Latin America?

SL: I studied Spanish in high school. I’ve always been interested in politics, but I was attracted to Latin American politics in part because I spoke some Spanish, but in part because when I was roughly your age — late high school, early college — Central America was a very, very hot issue in the United States. It was the mid and late 1980s and there’d been a revolution in Nicaragua, there were civil wars in three of the five countries in Central America, it was front page news.

And I basically got initially involved more as an activist, someone who was critical of the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America, and then when I got to college, I was able to take some classes in Latin America and fell in love with the region.

FM: While you were at Stanford, you were involved in apartheid divestment protests against South Africa. What was that like?

SL: It was how I cut my teeth in politics. It was my first activist issue. As a high school student, there were anti-apartheid or pro-divestment protests at Cornell, and so that was the first issue I ever got involved in.

As you get older, you realize the world is full of grays and not so many black and whites. And when you’re young, when you’re 17 or 18 or 19, you see the world in much more Manichean black white terms. It’s the pure good versus the pure evil, and as you get older, you realize things are much more complicated, but not that one. I mean, that was just really clear in terms of what was ethically right and what was ethically wrong.

FM: I’ve heard you’ve met Fidel Castro once. Can you tell me more about that?

SL: Early 2000s, we were invited to be a part of an observer mission at the Ibero-American Summit in Panama, the summit for all the Latin American presidents, and there was an incident in which a Cuban exile apparently tried to get in the country with a Salvadoran passport allegedly to try to assassinate Castro. And so there was a press conference, and my wife is a journalist and we used her press kit credentials and got into the press conference. And Fidel was in classic form, going on for hours and hours about what the CIA did in 1976 and just ranting for a very long time.

After the press conference, pandemonium broke out, and my wife and I were basically standing in a hallway and out of a crowd of people — it was as if the Red Sea had parted — and suddenly Fidel Castro was marching right towards me. Not because he wanted to see me, he just happened to be walking in my direction, and I stuck out my hand and said, “Hello,” and that was it.

FM: You went to college at Stanford and got your Ph.D. at Berkeley, but you’re now here at Harvard. Do you prefer the West Coast or the East Coast?

SL: I love the West Coast, I love the Bay Area, everything about it. That’s another reason why I think I really got into Latin American politics, because California’s connection to Latin America is so much stronger, particularly back then, was so much stronger than the East Coast. But I’m an East Coast guy. I grew up on the East Coast. My identity is more East Coast, my sports teams are from New York. So I was also very comfortable coming back home. This feels like home.

FM: In addition to being a professor, you’re the director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, which sponsors many opportunities for students to spend time abroad in Latin America. Why do you think it’s important for students to spend time abroad?

SL: I have a real personal connection to that.

For me, I would not be doing what I’m doing today had it not been an opportunity as an undergraduate to go to, in my case, Central America, to travel to Latin America, to study Spanish, to do summer research for my thesis. My summer in the summer of 1989 doing senior thesis research in Managua, Nicaragua, changed my life. I mean, I’m doing what I’m doing today because of the opportunity I had in college to travel to Latin America.

FM: You’ve co-written books and articles with fellow Harvard Government professor Daniel Ziblatt. How did you guys become collaborators?

SL: Well, we met in graduate school. We both studied at UC Berkeley together. He arrived at Harvard a few years after me. But, since we already knew each other, and we both studied comparative politics, and we had some of the same professors at Berkeley, I think I probably got to know him better than some of my colleagues.

But what happened is when the 2016 presidential campaign started, he and I basically started having watercooler conversations, and we started talking in the hallway, or there used to be a cafeteria across the street in CGIS back before Covid.

During the campaign, we basically just started shooting the shit in the hallway and realized that what we were seeing early in the campaign was reminiscent to both of us of things we had seen in our own region, not in the United States, but him as a Europeanist who’s spent a lot of time studying the breakdown of democracy in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, me as a Latin Americanist, who had spent time studying the breakdown of democracy in the earlier periods in Latin America in the 60s and 70s. And we both felt, having very different experiences studying different parts of the world, that this was a movie that we’d seen before and that most Americans hadn’t seen.

I gave a lecture the day after the election, or two days after the election, and I didn't know what to say and I didn't want to be too partisan, and I decided not to say anything. And after that lecture, a student came up to me and just ripped the shit out of me and told me, “You need to see something, you’re an expert on democracy and you didn't say anything.”

So the next lecture, I gave a 20 minute mini lecture on what this means for American democracy, and that was a kernel of the op-ed that Daniel and I wrote, which eventually became the book “How Democracies Die.”

FM: I want to ask about “How Democracies Die.” Several chapters of it critically examined Donald Trump’s presidency, and it was published in 2018 in the middle of the Trump presidency and the year of the midterms. Was that timing intentional?

SL: What happened is neither Daniel or I ever imagined we would write that book. We did write an op-ed in the New York Times, right after Trump got elected. But we never thought about writing that sort of a book.

So what happened is after we wrote the op-ed, a book agent who Daniel just happened to meet a few months earlier reached out to Daniel and said, “You guys need to turn this into a book” and offered to help us put together a book proposal, which we did over Christmas break of 2016. This book agent saw the book way before we did, and she came up with the idea for the book and convinced us.

This was before the whole world was talking about a crisis of democracy in the United States.

So this idea that a couple of professors who study democracy think there might be a threat to American democracy was new, and so we kind of happened to be first. Soon after Christmas break, as soon as we got that book proposal together, publishers snatched it up and we signed a contract and then I think we had one year to write the book. And we just wrote the book as fast as we could.

So it came out in January 2018 because that was as fast as we could produce it.

FM: Even post-Trump, discourse about the fate of American democracy still circulates. Are you optimistic?

SL: Well, actually, Daniel and I are writing another book. We’re finishing it up right now, and it will be out in October. It’s called “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached The Breaking Point.”

It’s not terribly optimistic. I mean, it is very good news for American democracy that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and we are in better shape now as a result. Had he been reelected, I think we would have been in some serious trouble. But Daniel and I think — and we’re going to argue in this book — that some of the underlying conditions that caused the crisis of the last five years, they’ve not gone away.

In particular, the radicalization of the Republican Party continues, and some of our country’s very old institutions, which are very, very counter-majoritarian, much more counter-majoritarian than other established democracies in the world, are protecting and empowering what is essentially an authoritarian minority party. So the threat of another round of democratic crisis continues to be pretty high.

FM: You were an activist in college, what do you think college students can do to help preserve democracy, if anything?

SL: It’s a great question. I mean, of course, students can do things and there are many, many different ways to defend democracy and students should follow their own passions and beliefs.

The issue of voting — whether it’s efforts to register people, or to push for voting rights — I think continues to be, as it has been for more than two centuries, a critical issue for citizens to fight for. That’s just one, of course.

FM: You’ve taught the introductory Government class Gov 20: “Comparative Politics.” What do you hope the main takeaways for your students are?

SL: That is a fun class to teach because it’s mostly first-semester fresh-people. First-semester fresh-people are this great mix. I mean, they’re really smart, but they haven’t yet been socialized into the Harvard cool. So they still ask questions, they're not inhibited.

For every big question that we care about there are always two or three or four different ways to look at it, different ways of explaining it. And getting students to think critically, and be able to look at questions from multiple angles, and to think about two or three different competing explanations and try to figure out which explanation is most persuasive and most compelling, has the bulk of the evidence behind it, is a really important skill not just in social science, not just in political science, but in life.

FM: What are some ways you like to spend your time outside of the classroom?

SL: I am a big sports fan for one. So whenever New York sports teams are on television, I’ll be there watching.

FM: What sports teams?

SL: I’m a big Mets fan in baseball. Rangers and Knicks. Little less in football, but a big big sports fan. My wife and I love to travel so whenever we get a chance we travel, trying to visit new countries everywhere in Latin America.

One hobby that probably most people don’t know I have is I’m a big bird watching fan. I like birds.

FM: Has studying declines in good governance been demoralizing?

SL: Yes and no. Sometimes it is, when particularly countries that I know, and have lived in, have studied, and care about, when they experience democratic reversals it can be hard.

When I first started studying democracies in Latin America — and elsewhere in the world — it was the mid 1980s. And we continue to be in a much better place in the world today than we were back then. The reason I’m in this business, the reason I study democracy, is I had the fortune — I don’t know if it was good fortune or bad fortune — but the fortune, to be wandering around Central America in the 1980s and seeing firsthand what the absence of democracy is like. What authoritarianism, and military rule, and real human rights violations are like. What it’s like to not have democracy. And one, that has inspired me my whole life to work to find ways to make democracy succeed. But it also, it reminds me that even today, we’re in a much, much better place than we were back then. And, it reminds me that democracy is always a struggle. There always are setbacks. Democracy is always an unsettled system. It’s always going to be open to threats and so it requires a tireless fight.

FM: How do you stay motivated studying something that fluctuates so much, like democracy does?

SL: I think I have a smaller brain than many of my colleagues here. I don’t get bored that easily, just because I’m not that smart. But also, it truly goes back to the experience I had when I was your age.

I was in college, learning about democratization, just as Latin America was pulling out of its worst period of authoritarian rule. The 1970s and early 80s had been a terrifying period of authoritarian rule across most of the region. And I had the very, very, immensely good fortune of being taught by a generation of scholars and practitioners who lived through that period.

I learned from them, and for some reason I just never let those lessons slip away — they’re with me today. That, and the experience of actually visiting, as a very young, very, very naive kid, but seeing through my own eyes the effects of civil war and authoritarianism, for some reason that just never left me. It continues to get me out of bed in the morning everyday.

—Staff writer Charlotte P. Ritz-Jack can be reached at charlotte.ritz-jack@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @charritzjack.