Cambridge, Mass. – In the days after Donald Trump's re -election as president, Harvard Steven Levitsky political scientist was dejected.
“I was in the fetal position,” he said. “I just wanted to wear sweat pants, eat ice cream and see hockey.”
Levitsky had spent two decades studying authoritarian regimes in other countries, but during Trump's first mandate, he had focused his attention on the United States. A book that was co-author, “how democracies die,” he had become a beast-seller surprise. He broke Trump's autocratic tendencies, his attacks against the press, the judiciary and the electoral system, and warned that one of the world's oldest democracies was in danger.
Trump's re -election “felt like an intestine,” Levitsky said. “I took it personally. I had been working for eight years to prevent this from happening.”
Pedestrians walk through the doors of Harvard Yard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
(Charles Kupa / Associated Press)
Finally, Levitsky turned off the hockey and changed sweat pants.
In recent months, Levitsky has resumed his mantle as a public intellectual leader who raises the alarm of Trump alarms. He had noticed for a long time that, during a second term, Trump would adhere to democratic norms, a prediction based partly on the attempt of the president to cancel the 2020 elections and block a peaceful transfer of power.
Even so, Levitsky said that he has been shocked by the speed at which Trump moved in his second term to the United States government parts and eliminates democratic railings, of trying to deport international students so that the political discourse refused to fulfill the judicial orders, as the recent ruler of the Supreme Court that the administration “facilitates” the return of a man.
“We are currently witnessing the collapse of our democracy,” Levitsky said.
President Trump meets with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, at the Oval Office of the White House on Monday.
(Brendan Smialowski / AFP through Getty Images)
This time, Trump's attacks are hitting near home, while the White House is immersed in the affairs of several of the country's main universities, including Harvard.
On Monday, the Trump administration froze $ 2.2 billion in subsidies because Harvard refused to meet several demands of the administration, including diversity programs, eliminated the “ideological capture” in a variety of academic programs and stop admitting international students “hostile to US values.”
The Trump administration says it seeks to restore balance to universities, which argues that they have been kidnapped by the left and eliminate anti -Semitism on campus.
Levitsky, who is Jewish, believes that the administration is using anti -Semitism “as a pretext”, and said that attacking academics is a classic tactic of strong men.
“The authoritarian go after universities,” he said.
In March, after Trump launched similar sides against Columbia University, but before making his demands against Harvard, Levitsky and his fellow Professor Ryan Enos wrote a letter, co-filmed by 800 of his colleagues, asking Harvard to defend himself and academic freedom in a broader way by assembling “an opposition coordinated to these anti-democratic attacks.”
His pressure seems to have helped Harvard president Alan Garber, to face Trump. On Monday, Harvard announced that he would not meet the demands of the administration, which said “invades the university freedoms recognized for a long time by the Supreme Court.”
Hours later, the Administration announced that it was freezing the $ 2.2 billion in subsidies. On Tuesday, Trump threatened to rescind Harvard's tax.
The problem will almost surely end in court. Meanwhile, Levitsky and many others on the campus gave a sigh of relief.
“If we are going to mobilize, it will be the most prominent, the best given, the most privileged and protected from us in civil society that we have to take the initiative,” Levitsky said. “Because state universities cannot absorb a Trump's blow such as Harvard.”
Before becoming the functioning of authoritarianism, Levitzky grew up in Ithaca, New York, son of a psychology professor at Cornell University.
In his adolescence, he was interested in Central America, where the United States was financing military efforts against leftist guerrillas in El Salvador and the Sandinista Revolutionary Government in Nicaragua. A pair of university trips to those countries transformed him from an activist into an academic: as much of Latin America left a dark period of authoritarian government, Levitsky decided that he wanted to study democracy: how it thrives, how it decreases and what happens when it is absent.
Levitsky attended Stanford and then UC Berkeley, and would probably have passed his career in relative darkness, writing academic volumes about political parties in Argentina. Then Donald Trump came to power in 2016.
Levitsky and his colleague Daniel Zibatt, an expert in the collapse of democracy in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, began to speak, comparing Trump's actions with those of the authoritarian leaders they studied. “We felt that this was a movie we had seen before,” Levitsky said.
It was not an accident, said Levitsky, that many of the first political scientists to give Trump alarms were not those who studied the United States, but to experts in authoritarian regimes in other places.
“Americans have taken to recognize this because we have never experienced it as a society,” he said.
Levitsky and Zibatt 2018's book, “how democracies die,” argued that autocrats are not always announced with tanks and a coup d'etat. In recent years, they have often come to power through legitimate elections, then stacked the deck in their favor assembling the State against their enemies and rewarding corrupt allies.
The book was a surprise success, embraced by the liberals who discovered that they gave voice to their fears. Joe Biden brought the book about his 2020 campaign for president, often citing her.
Joe Biden, while campaigning for the 2020 presidency.
(Josh Edelson / AFP through Getty Images)
Levitsky became a kind of academic rock star, appearing in CNN, informing foreign leaders and Democratic members of Congress.
Many conservatives ruled out Levitsky as, he says, “a partisan trick.” Some accused him of ignoring the role of Democrats in subverting democratic norms, citing, for example, the hug of the executive branch of President Obama or the democratic attempt of Filibuster the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
“Democracies are not destroyed due to the impulses of a single man; on the other hand, they degrade in the course of a Teta partisan dynamic by eye that degrades the rules over time until one side sees an opening to give the death coup,” wrote the columnist of the Wall Street Journal Jason Willick.
But while Levitsky acknowledges that he is a registered Democrat, he said that his investigation is not partisan.
Harvard Yard on a winter night during the final week, December 13, 2023, in Cambridge, Mass.
(Andrew Lichtenstein / Getty Images)
In a recent rainy afternoon in Cambridge, Levitsky went to a lectern in a room full of about one hundred students. The class was called “democracy and authoritarianism” and the conference entitled “how modern dictatorships work … and why they persist.”
Levitsky discussed the truly in authoritarian regimes: that strong men benefit from a resistant economy, which often place their family members in power positions, that their greatest threat can come from other elites instead of mass protest below.
He talked about Rwanda, Venezuela and China, and occasionally fell into references to the United States, at one time, the Secretary of Defense of Names, Pete Hegseth.
“If you are in power due to your ties with the leader … you have an incentive to remain loyal no matter what,” he said.
When Levitsky left the room, several students and a group of retirees who audit the course thanked him for pushing the university to face Trump. He nodded and told them to resist.
Levitsky says there are several factors that could hinder Trump. On the one hand, he said, Trump is unpopular, with only about four out of 10 Americans who approve his performance as president, according to many surveys. And then there is the stock market, which has shuddered in the midst of the threat of global tariffs of Trump.
A recession would damage Trump and perhaps the world economy, Levitsky said, “but ultimately, it will probably be good for democracy.”
In his heart, says Levitsky, is optimistic. Worldwide, he does not believe that democracy is in decline. He pointed to Brazil and South Korea, that they have a history of dictatorships and that in recent years have rejected antidemocratic threats.
“The majority of the countries that became complete democracies after 1975 are still democracies today, despite the emergence of China, despite [Vladimir] Putin, despite Trump, ”he said.
And the United States, he said, has a powerful civil society, with very rich individuals, powerful universities and independent journalists.
“We have more than enough muscle to go back,” he said.
Harvard is about to test that muscle.
On Monday, Levitsky read the university's response to the Trump administration to his students, who exploded in applause.
“It seems,” he said, “as Harvard has decided that it is time to fight.”
