The Revolt of the Right and the Crisis of Democracy

In his Academy project, Ziblatt studies one of main sources of democratic crises in contemporary democracies: the rise of radical right or right-populist political parties. The current crisis of democracy in Europe and the United States, he argues, can be analyzed as an outgrowth of an old, reoccurring dilemma of conservatism and democracy. He begins with a history of Germany’s center-right CDU and the US Republican Party since 1945. Building on his 2017 analysis of pre- World War II conservatism in Germany and Britain, Ziblatt identifies an inherent dilemma in political conservatism. Under conditions of high socioeconomic inequality, representing the wealthy alone is no path to electoral majorities. To win, economic conservatives must mobilize voters and activists along other, non-economic lines of conflict. When they do this, their activists and voters begin to take these appeals seriously—sometimes too seriously. At issue can be race, ethnicity, nationalism, or defense of religion. But when pragmatic conservative-party leaders inevitably make compromises on symbolic and non-economic pledges that inspire party activists’ loyalty, the reaction is a storm of right-wing insurgency against conservative-party elites from below. A familiar pattern emerges: conservative political parties are challenged by radicals (AfD) or captured by them (US Republican Party), veering off-course and upending political systems in their wake. National political institutions thus become the site of stalemate and repeated norm-breaking – and democracy itself appears under siege.