Event Recap: Why Democracy is in Danger
Along with the United States, more than 70 countries faced major elections in 2024. On September 18th, 2024, the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry announced the inauguration of our year-long focus on “Democracy: Past, Present, Future” with a keynote lecture by Harvard political scientist Professor Steven Levitsky, author of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.
Following the lecture, Professor Levitsky was joined in conversation by Professor Carol Anderson, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote. This thought-provoking discussion addressed challenges facing democratic systems around the world.
Media Gallery
About the Speakers
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is also Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 25 languages. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Daniel Ziblatt are currently working on a book on the rise of (and reaction against) multiracial democracy in the United States.
Carol Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, which won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy, which was Long-listed for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Book Award in Non-Fiction. She has written three other books, including Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960 (Cambridge University Press), and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. She has been elected to the Society of American Historians, named a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected to the American Philosophical Society. In 2023, she was honored with the Ella Baker Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Dr. Anderson was a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee; the Pulitzer Prize Committee for History; and the National Book Awards Committee in Non-fiction.
