‘Completely uncharted territory’: The threat to US democracy in 2024

A Harvard scholar of democracy talks about what makes the U.S. different from Chile and Hungary – and how serious a threat the country could be facing as it heads into the next election cycle.

Steven Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard University who studies democratization and authoritarianism, with a focus on Latin America. In 2018, he and Daniel Ziblatt, a fellow Harvard government professor, published “How Democracies Die,” which examined the problems in American politics in the context of other democracies’ backsliding into authoritarianism.

One of the...