Tyranny of the Minority is the effort of two prize-winning Harvard political scientists, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, to understand what they see as a crisis in the development of a diverse, multiracial democracy. The authors, who together previously wrote How Democracies Die (2018), do not believe the crisis began with the election of Donald Trump. The root of the danger is what they describe as the transformation of the Republican Party from the party that helped pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act to a party that is now a white racist and openly anti-democratic party.

Levitsky and Ziblatt link this crisis to the increased success of the Republican Party in presidential and congressional, as well as state, elections. But they exaggerate this success in order to bolster their argument. At present there are as many Republican and Democratic governors as there were in 2002: 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Control of the House and Senate has moved back and forth over the years, and since 2000 Republicans have held the House for eight terms and the Democrats for four terms. The Senate has been equally controlled by both parties in that time: six sessions each.

There is no mystery about this. It is simply the nature of electoral politics that the fortunes of the parties ebb and flow, and control of the government will move back and forth. Each party