“Exotic” cultivated meats claim to be harmless, but they could threaten actual endangered animals.
What is the strangest meat you’ve eaten?
For me, it’s reindeer. This was during a trip to Finland when I was 7. We’d gone to the Arctic Circle, where I hoped to meet Father Christmas. I remember being driven through dark forests on the back of a snowmobile to a firelit clearing where we ate reindeer sausages. Though my baby brain didn’t then realize I was eating one of Rudolph’s cousins and that Santa might disapprove, I enjoyed the meat. It was spiced and tender and warmed me after the freezing journey.
Eating reindeer remains one of my core memories, though I now consider eating all animals gross and unethical. But I’ve discovered reindeer is not a very exotic meat, at least compared with what my Instagram followers have been eating. When I posted the question: “What’s the most exotic meat you’ve eaten?” I discovered my followers had eaten everything, from alligator to minke whale.
Which animals we find acceptable to eat vary from person to person, according to our values, palates, and upbringing. Many consider eating cows and chickens okay, but not octopus, dolphin, or tiger. Right now, you’d be hard-pressed to find tiger meat in your local supermarket, but developments in tech are making a future possible in which eating exotic meats, from alligator to zebra, could be commonplace.
But, how? Well, factory-farmed tiger, thankfully, is not about to become a dystopian reality. But we might one day eat “ethical” tiger through innovations in cultured-cell technology.
Cultured meat, also known as cell-cultivated meat, is not pork reared on caviar and Italian neorealist cinema — it is meat that has been grown in a lab. It has the potential to liberate animals from exploitation, creating burgers and sausages from meat that has been grown in bioreactors and harvested without the death of a sentient being. The first cell-cultivated chicken in the US came to market this summer. It’s an exciting technology, as it could substantially reduce the number of animals slaughtered yearly (or, at least, limit the expansion of that number).
It’s not all chicken and pork, though. Recently, startups such as Primeval Foods and Vow have begun developing meat cultured from the cells of exotic (and even extinct) animals, such as tiger, zebra, or mammoth. A gigantic mammoth meatball produced by Vow earlier this year brought many people’s attention to the potential applications of cultured-cell technology, and advocates argue the novelty of nontraditional meats could help win over an otherwise hard-to-reach group of potential consumers.
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Mike Corder/Associated Press
Some animal advocates, however, have voiced concerns that popularizing exotic meats could have unforeseen consequences. The tech, if successful (a big if), could create an appetite for real tiger meat, putting additional pressure on already-endangered wild big cat populations. And some vegans, who advocate against the commodification of animals, worry that eating cell-cultivated meat could entrench the belief that animals are something to be exploited and consumed, rather than beings to be protected; they argue the desire to manufacture cultured tiger meat reveals that “clean” meat is a fallacy promoted by meat producers developing new ways to exploit the animal kingdom.
How cultured tiger steak could hurt real tigers
In April, I spoke with Yilmaz Bora, CEO of Primeval Foods, a company developing cultured tiger meat. I’d imagined Bora to be a meat-lover, but I was surprised to discover that he was the opposite.
“I went vegan roughly three, four years ago,” Bora said. “It started with activism, supporting UK [animal rights] groups. After a while, I realized that was not going to work. We had to involve the economy, involve the capitalist system, to have a meaningful impact on animals.”
From there, Bora began developing alternative proteins that he hoped would convert diehard meat eaters from factory-farmed animals. According to Bora, exotic meat seemed a viable option because, he believes, the “masculine” group that drives meat consumption would find meat grown from big cats more compelling than meat grown from conventional livestock cells.
“If you are making barbecue every weekend in Texas and you have no interest in climate, no interest in animal welfare, there is not any product for you,” he said. “Tigers, or other wild cats such as lions, represent power. … There is this masculine profile [that is firmly anti-vegan], and they tend to not eat alternative plant-based or alternative protein on the market, but it will appeal to them because it represents something luxury.”
Developing meat from the cells of an animal that represents power might be a compelling method of marketing cultured meats. But problems will arise if the appetite for lab-grown tiger causes an upsurge in demand for meat from wild tiger populations. Only 4,500 tigers remain in the wild. John Goodrich, of the big cat conservation charity Panthera, explained the potential complications cultured tiger meat could create for tiger conservation.
“One of the biggest threats to big cats, especially tigers, is poaching for their body parts, primarily for use in traditional Chinese medicine,” Goodrich said. “You’d hope that [cultivated meat] would flood the market so that there would no longer be any market for wild tiger parts.”
It’s not at all clear that this would happen, even if cultivated tiger meat did become a success. “My concern is that there’s always going to be the contingent that wants the real thing,” Goodrich added. “By mainstreaming it, you are creating this much, much bigger market for tiger parts. … Let’s say your market is a billion people: If less than 1 percent of that wants the real thing, that’s still enough to put tremendous pressure on the remaining 4,500 tigers in the wild.”
“It’s not worth the risk,” he concludes.
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Michael Sohn/Associated Press
When I put this to Bora, I was met with a confusing response. He said he was “not aware” of the market for tiger in China, and added that he believed people would not consume wild tiger because sourcing it “is not convenient” and “it will taste really really bad … because they are very muscular animals, they move a lot … they have little to no fat.”
Cultivated meat technology, Bora added, allows Primeval Foods “to change the fat percentage on the end product. … We can do whatever we want to have that better mouthfeel, better texture, better taste.”
That’s fine, but, as Goodrich explained, what if even a small contingent of Primeval Foods’s future intended consumers decide they want to eat real tiger? With wild tiger populations dwindling, any increase in poaching would be catastrophic, and the fact that real tiger meat “tastes really really bad” can only be discovered after the animal has been slaughtered.
It’s hard to fathom that degree of ignorance from the CEO of a startup with potentially harmful environmental implications — especially since others in the industry have engaged with such concerns more deliberately. When I spoke to George Peppou, founder of Vow, he said that, in the preliminary stages of developing Vow’s cultured cell products, Vow “started to work with the Zoo and Aquarium Association in Australia,” who “scared the crap out of me about … unintentionally stimulating wildlife crime.”
Ultimately, the product that Vow aspires to bring to market is not mammoth or other exotic animals, but what Peppou describes as “the Cheerios of meat” — synthetic, branded meats made from combining different animals’ cell lines in a way that’s comparable to the mixing of oats, wheat, and barley to create breakfast cereals. This would avoid problems like stimulating wildlife crime, as the meat Vow takes to market cannot be traced to a single species.
Vow’s cultivated mammoth, according to Peppou, is a stunt intended to “challenge people’s perception of what meat is and get them comfortable with the idea that it can look different to what we have available to us now.”
The mammoth meatball was developed, Peppou explained, after the company asked itself the question, “How do we move the window of what’s acceptable in meat?” Right now, synthetic “chimera meats” seem strange, and many consumers would choose chicken over lab-grown hybrids. Making synthetic meats seem conventional — at least compared to mammoth meatballs — is the strategic goal of Vow’s stunt.
The philosophical trouble with tiger and all cultivated meat
While Vow is embracing exotic cultivated meats with an eye toward preventing knock-on effects like further harming endangered species, there are also broader philosophical questions about cultured meats, whether conventional, exotic, or extinct, that are worth considering.
John Sanbonmatsu, an animal rights philosopher and professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, argues that cultivated meat only entrenches the commodification of animals and the idea that it’s okay to consume their flesh.
The development of tiger steaks by Primeval, he said, is “fundamentally disrespectful of their personhood.”
“One of the major problems with the way we relate to other animals is we treat them as commodities,” Sanbonmatsu told me. “If you look at the discourse of Primeval Foods or these other companies, the way they describe the rationale for their enterprise is reinforcing the idea that humans are meant to exploit nature and other animals for their purposes without any ethical limits.”
To Sanbonmatsu’s thinking, the assumption that animals are available for exploitation is only underscored by the development of exotic cultivated meat. Viewed through that lens, growing tiger meat is just another example of humanity’s disregard for the animal kingdom, demonstrating that the drive to find “ethical” ways to exploit them creates fresh problems that need solving further down the line.
For example, Sanbonmatsu and charities such as Food & Water Watch argue that because lab-grown meat doesn’t challenge the idea that animal flesh is edible, it will augment rather than replace factory farming. As the market for meat increases around the world, they predict, there could simply be no reduction in the number of animals currently slaughtered yearly (tens of billions of land animals and hundreds of millions or even trillions of fish). Rather, cultivated meat could merely limit the expansion of this number. While this is arguably a good thing, insofar as one dead cow is better than two, animal slaughter will continue to be a massive, cruel industry with an immense environmental impact.
Those ethical concerns bring up an underlying question animal rights advocates will have to confront: What does it take for meat to be “clean?” For vegans such as Sanbonmatsu, who believe in animal personhood and the absolute equality of animals and humans, there is no scenario where that is the case.
For others, the cleanest cultivated meat would be a product created without harming animals at all, but even this is proving to be a quixotic goal, as cultivated meat companies struggle to make their products without animal-derived ingredients. Cultivated meat companies are also taking funding from conventional meat companies like Tyson and Cargill, some of the world’s biggest perpetrators of animal suffering.
It might still be that the current fastest way to dramatically limit animal suffering is through embracing cultured meat companies while putting the total abolition of animal exploitation on the back burner.
Deeper ethical questions aside, it is undeniable that some advocates, such as Bora, are working to develop cultivated meat with the aspiration, however unlikely, of ending factory farming and conventional meat consumption. All I ask is that they confront the potential implications of the tech: Developing cultivated tiger, mammoth, or anything else might be a cool way to draw attention to cultured-meat technology, and it could succeed in drawing new consumers. But if people decide they want to eat “the real thing,” then many wild animals, from tigers to elephants to lions, could go the way of the woolly mammoth.
Speaking up for yourself in a medical setting is a skill. Here’s what to know.
In his medical school classes at Washington State University, Joel Bervell was constantly reminded of health care disparities during lectures, like how Black and brown people were more likely to die of Covid-19 and how where you live can impact life expectancy. But he was never taught why these inequities exist in the first place. So Bervell did some research on his own and began creating videos on TikTok explaining race bias in medicine and how race intersects with medical care. “A lot of my followers were saying things like, ‘There’s problems out there, what can I do to actually help myself out?’” Bervell, now a fourth-year medical student, says.
His tips, shared in a 2022 video, became a jumping-off point for Bervell to empower his audience. “Even if you don’t have the medical background,” he says, “you know your body better than anyone else.” Discrimination can look like a medical professional making you feel inferior, less-than, or outright unsafe because of your race, weight, sexual orientation, education level, physical disability, or age. Providers may also dismiss your pain by insisting your symptoms are a byproduct of psychological factors or that you’re “dramatic.”
Speaking up at the doctor’s office can be difficult for many people because of previous discrimination or dismissal by medical professionals. According to a 2022 Verywell survey, one in three Black Americans said they experienced racism within the health care system. Twenty-nine percent of women ages 18 to 64 reported that their doctor had dismissed their concerns, according to the 2022 KFF Women’s Health Survey. Nearly a quarter of LGBTQ+ Americans said they had been blamed for their health problems, a 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll found last year. Two-thirds of study participants who were treated negatively in the past because of their weight said they experienced weight stigma from doctors, per a 2021 study. Additionally, neurodivergent patients report experiencing lower-quality health care due to poor communication, increased anxiety, and sensory sensitivity, research suggests.
“Marginalized people can really start to blame themselves for our mistreatment and think that either we deserve it or we shouldn’t push back,” says board certified patient advocate Ragen Chastain.
Regardless of your past medical experiences, patients can take greater control over their interactions with providers, experts say. Here are some ways to advocate for yourself at the doctor’s to ensure you walk out of the exam room with a clear understanding of your health and a concrete path forward.
Make a plan before your appointment
To prepare for your visit, experts advise making a list, either on your phone or a hard copy, of everything you want to discuss with the provider, in order of importance, so you can ensure the doctor is addressing all of your concerns. You can also write out your goals for the appointment, Chastain suggests. Maybe it’s to get a diagnosis, maybe it’s to get a prescription refilled.
You’ll want to be as specific as possible when describing any symptoms, so try keeping a symptom diary in the days leading up to your appointment, says Haley Collins, a nurse practitioner with FOLX Health, a digital health care provider for the LGBTQIA+ community. If you’re looking to get your migraines treated, keep track of what time you had a migraine, on what day, and the context of the migraine. (What did you eat? Were you stressed?)
Have a brief overview of your medical history available, including any chronic illnesses, medications you’re taking, when you last had blood work, and any relevant medical issues within your family, especially if it’s your first visit with the provider. “If you have a significant family history of diabetes or stroke,” Collins says, “that’s usually pretty important, particularly in … your immediate family.” It’s also helpful to have access to any data you keep track of at home, like blood sugar or blood pressure.
While some medical professionals caution against googling their symptoms, Chastain encourages responsible research. Reading studies or other trusted online medical advice can help inform your questions for the doctor. (Be wary of any content on TikTok or other forms of social media that aren’t created by someone with a medical degree — or will soon have a medical degree. Any content encouraging a self-diagnosis should also be taken with a huge grain of salt.)
While you’re making an appointment, whether it’s for a check-up or a colonoscopy, ask for the price of the visit, both with and without insurance, says Cynthia Fisher, the founder and chairman of PatientRightsAdvocate.org. “All patients have the right to know all prices from hospitals in advance of care and we have the right to compare our prices to other insurance plans if we have insurance,” she says. “Even if we have insurance, we have the right to pay the discounted cash price, which is oftentimes nearly 40 percent lower than insured rates.”
Bring a trusted friend or family member with you to the doctor’s
Patients are able to bring a relative or friend with them to their medical appointments. HIPAA allows a doctor to talk about a patient’s health, treatment, and payment with the patient’s spouse, family members, friends, or anyone else the patient gives permission to hear about their medical care. “People are entitled to an advocate,” Chastain says. This can be helpful to get an extra set of ears as well as another perspective for questions. Choose someone who makes you feel supported and will effectively communicate on your behalf, Chastain says. “Typically when I work with people, I have a physical signal that they give me when they want me to talk,” she says. “It might be tugging their ear lobe or something like that, so that I know this is where they want me to jump in.”
Your doctor may ask your support person to leave the room at some point during the appointment, Collins says, to ensure you can speak freely about sensitive issues.
Take a detailed record of the visit
Experts stress the importance of keeping track of the content of your appointment. Either keep notes on your phone, in a notebook, or ask your provider if you can record audio of the visit. “Ask for permission before you record,” Bervell says. “By recording a conversation, you can listen to it and say, there’s something I want to ask a question about. You can follow up on MyChart or some other way to reach out to the physician.” MyChart is an online portal for patients to message their providers and view some medical records. Interacting with a medical professional this way can be helpful for patients who are not comfortable talking on the phone, Collins says.
At the end of the appointment, you can review your notes with your provider to ensure you fully understand what was discussed, Chastain says. You can say, “This is what I understand you said…” Make sure you’ve asked all of your questions and are clear about next steps.
Ask the provider to explain their decisions
Bervell says patients should feel empowered to ask medical professionals to show their work. “Ask ‘What is your differential diagnosis?’” he says. A differential diagnosis is a list of potential conditions that fit your symptoms. For a patient with shortness of breath, the cause can range from asthma to cancer, Bervell says. If a provider orders a test to rule out any of these issues, patients should know why. Inquiring about a differential diagnosis lets a provider know you want to hear every potential outcome and options for next steps, Bervell says. Don’t be afraid to ask if there are other options for diagnoses and treatments, too.
You can defer to the provider’s expertise when asking for more clarity, Chastain says. Try saying, “I’m not a doctor, so I don’t quite understand this, but I’d really like to understand more. Can you tell me where you got that conclusion from?” or “Can you tell me more about your diagnosis or why you chose that treatment plan?” You can also ask the doctor if they have any research or other materials you can read about your condition or medication.
Utilize the time you have with the doctor
The average primary care provider visit clocks in at 18 minutes, according to a 2021 study. To make the most of this time, start by giving your nurse a detailed reason for your visit, Collins says. Oftentimes, the information you provide on the phone to the employee who makes the appointment doesn’t get passed along to your providers, she says. But the nurse has a direct line of communication with both you and your doctor. Nurses may be able to answer your questions, too, Collins says, so don’t be afraid to ask them during intake or after your appointment, while you’re checking out.
If you sense the doctor is in a rush to end the appointment, or their hand is on the door to leave and you have other topics to discuss, tell the provider you still have more questions and you’d love it if they sat down with you for a few moments more, Chastain says. “Let them know you see that they’re trying to run out of the room and that is not going to work for you,” she says. Next, recap the appointment: “You’re saying my diagnosis was X and your treatment plan is Y and you’ll be calling in this prescription.” Then ask about any next steps. You can also take this time to review the list of questions you prepared before the appointment to ensure you addressed all of your concerns.
Before ending the appointment, Bervell suggests asking your provider three questions. When should I see you next? Are there any medications I should pick up? What are the signs that my condition is worsening and what should I do if that happens?
There may be questions you forgot to ask or additional concerns that arise after your appointment. Don’t hesitate to follow up with your doctor through your online patient portal or call the office.
Push back if you need to
In the event your doctor shows any sort of racial or weight bias, misgenders you, or dismisses your pain, you should speak up. Again, this can be difficult for people who have experienced stigmatization or have been brushed off before. However, your self-advocacy may lead to better outcomes for future patients, Collins says.
There are a few things you can say to a provider if you are experiencing fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, or other forms of discrimination or if the doctor is minimizing your experience, according to experts.
- I practice weight-neutral health, so I like to focus on my health and not my body size.
- Actually, my pronouns are…
- I’ve read that people of color tend to get less pain management and I just want to make sure that’s not happening here.
- Can I speak to another doctor about this?
- What would you do for a thin person in this situation?
- I feel you’re not taking my concerns seriously.
- Would you document in my chart that I requested this test and you denied it?
- I understand you’d like to know about my history, but I’m really concerned about…
It may not be easy for those with limited access to health care providers to push back against their doctor, Collins and Chastain note. For example, those in rural areas may only have one or two practitioners or specialists available. Or it may be difficult to get an appointment with another provider. “They may need care from this doctor,” Chastain says, “so they might choose how to push back or not to push back based on that.” If your goal for the appointment is to get a prescription filled and move on, you may want to let the doctor proceed and not speak up in response to insensitive remarks in order to get the result you want.
Find another doctor, if necessary
However, if the provider is not treating you with respect, is dismissing your discomfort, and is focusing on stereotypes, find another doctor, experts say. You can ask if there is another medical professional within the clinic you can see — perhaps one who shares a background and identity with you, Collins says — if you want to stay within the same practice.
To help guide your search for a provider at a new facility, check out reviews on Zocdoc and Healthgrades. You can also ask friends and people in your community if they would recommend their doctor.
Before making an appointment, ask the office staff questions about the provider, Chastain says. When you call, you can say something like, “I’m looking for a new practitioner. I need a doctor who is [weight neutral/anti-racist/sex worker positive/trans positive]. Is there a doctor there who meets that criteria?” In some states, such as South Carolina and Mississippi, medical providers can decline to treat patients based on their religious beliefs. If you live in one of these states, ask a new provider about their policy, Chastain says: Say, “I know in this state, doctors are allowed to bring their religious beliefs into consideration when treating transgender and non-binary people. Is that something that you do? And in what way?” You can remain anonymous or even have a loved one make the call for you if you’re nervous.
Sometimes it can be easier to advocate for a friend than yourself, Chastain says. So consider your body a friend that deserves your support both in and out of the doctor’s office. “We’re the CEO of our body,” she says. “So we’re going to walk in there to support our body.”
What a brilliant new book gets right — and wrong — about America’s democracy.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew are forced to navigate a strait bounded by two equally dangerous obstacles: Scylla, a six-headed sea serpent, and Charybdis, an underwater horror that sucks down ships through a massive whirlpool. Judging Charybdis to be a greater danger to the crew as a whole, Odysseus orders his crew to try and pass through on Scylla’s side. They make it, but six sailors are eaten in the crossing.
In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced an analogous problem: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.
The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side of the strait: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.
“By steering the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule,” they write.
This is not a hypothetical fear. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, today’s America is currently being sucked down the anti-democratic whirlpool.
The Republican Party, they argue, has become an anti-democratic institution, its traditional leadership cowed by Trump and a racially reactionary base. As such, it is increasingly willing to twist legal tools designed to check oppressive majorities into tools for imposing its policy preferences on an unwilling majority. The best way out of this dilemma, in their view, is radical legal constitutional reform that brings the American system more in line with other advanced democracies.
Tyranny of the Minority is an exceptionally persuasive book. I think it is almost inarguably correct about both the nature of the modern Republican Party and the ways in which it exploits America’s rickety Constitution to subvert its democracy. I come to some similar conclusions in my own forthcoming book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit (which, full disclosure, has benefited significantly from Levitsky’s feedback in drafting).
Yet at the same time, I believe he and Ziblatt slightly overweight the significance of America’s institutions in its current democratic crisis. Institutions matter for how authoritarian parties take power, but ultimately they may be less decisive than the social strength of the forces arrayed against democracy.
If a reactionary movement is popular or aggressive enough, it’s not clear that any kind of institution can stop it from threatening democracy. Hence why other advanced democracies with distinct institutional arrangements, like Israel, are currently going through democratic crises with root causes strikingly similar to America’s. It’s true that America’s institutions have paved a swift road for the Trumpist right’s attack on democracy. But they may not be quite as central to the story of its rise as Tyranny of the Minority suggests.
The American right’s turn against democracy
Ziblatt and Levitsky are two of America’s very best comparative political scientists, with expertise that makes them uniquely well-equipped for the subject they’re examining.
Ziblatt is the author of an important study of European conservative parties, concluding that their strategic choices played a unique role in determining the health of continental democracy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Conservative parties, by their nature, represent those forces in society — including the wealthy and powerful elite — opposed to radical social change. For this reason, Ziblatt found, they are especially important in determining whether defenders of the status quo attempt to stymie social change from within the democratic system or whether they reject elections and political equality altogether.
Levitsky is a Latin America specialist who, along with co-author Lucan Way, wrote a prescient analysis of a new style of autocracy back in 2002 — a system they termed “competitive authoritarianism” that subsequently emerged as the premier institutional means for turning a seemingly stable democracy into an autocracy (see: Hungary). Competitive authoritarian governments masquerade as democracies, even holding elections with real stakes. But these contests are profoundly unfair: The incumbent party ensures that the rules surrounding elections, like who gets to vote and what the media gets to say, are heavily tilted in their favor. The result is that the opposition has little chance to win elections, let alone pass their preferred policies.
Tyranny of the Minority analyzes the United States in light of these two broad themes, the importance of conservative parties and the ever-evolving institutional nature of authoritarianism. The first half of the book analyzes how and why the Republican Party went down an anti-democratic path. The second focuses on how the peculiar design of American institutions has created opportunities for the GOP to undermine democracy from within.
Around the world, they find two conditions that make political parties more likely to accept electoral defeats: “when they believe they stand a reasonable chance of winning again in the future” and when they believe “that losing power will not bring catastrophe — that a change of government will not threaten the lives, livelihoods, or most cherished principles.”
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Joe Raedle/Getty Images
In the 21st century, these conditions no longer held among the GOP’s conservative white base. Democrats were no longer a mere political rival, but avatars of a new and scary social order.
“Not only was America no longer overwhelmingly white, but once entrenched racial hierarchies were weakening. Challenges to white Americans’ long-standing social dominance left many of them with feelings of alienation, displacement, and deprivation,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. “Many of the party’s voters feared losing … their country — or more accurately, their place in it.”
This, they say, is what made the party vulnerable to conquest by someone like Trump. Rather than fight the base in democracy’s name, traditional Republican elites like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) acted as “semi-loyal democrats”: leaders who say the right things about supporting democracy and the rule of law, but value partisan victory over everything else — including basic, non-partisan democratic principles. This enabled the entire party to become a vehicle for an anti-democratic agenda.
“Openly authoritarian figures — like coup conspirators or armed insurrectionists — are visible for all to see. By themselves, they often lack the public support or legitimacy to destroy a democracy. But when semi-loyalists — tucked away in the hallways of power — lend a hand, openly authoritarian forces become much more dangerous,” they explain. “Throughout history, cooperation between authoritarians and seemingly respectable semi-loyal democrats has been a recipe for democratic breakdown.”
How America’s system makes life easy for would-be autocrats
In the US, Levitsky and Ziblatt see a democracy made vulnerable by its own Constitution.
The Constitution’s framers were the first to take Enlightenment ideas about freedom and translate them to an actual political system. The only historical democratic experiences they looked at were from antiquity, in places like Athens and Rome. Classical sources repeatedly chronicled threats to democracy, even outright collapse, emanating from mob rule.
Though the founders knew that democracy was at heart about majority rule, they took the Greco-Roman experience seriously and designed a system where majorities were severely constrained. The tripartite separation of powers, bicameral legislature, indirect election of the president and senators, lifetime Supreme Court tenure, the laborious process for amending the Constitution: all of these were built, in whole or in part, as limitations on the ability of majorities to impose their will on minorities.
Some American counter-majoritarian institutions emerged not from well-intentioned design but political necessity. Leading founders like James Madison bitterly resented the basic structure of the Senate, where each state gets two seats regardless of size; Alexander Hamilton called it “preposterous” during a constitutional convention debate. It was included purely to mollify small states like Delaware and Rhode Island, who were refusing to join the Union absent sufficient protections for their interests.
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GraphicaArtis/Getty Images/Howard Chandler Christy
Over time, the US shed some of these minoritarian trappings — senators are now directly elected, thanks to the 17th Amendment — but deepened others. In 1803’s Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court gave itself expansive power to strike down legislation that was not explicitly granted in the Constitution. More recently, the filibuster emerged as a de facto 60-vote requirement for passing legislation in the Senate — a practice similar to the supermajority vote that the founders explicitly rejected early on.
Levitsky and Ziblatt show that almost every other peer democracy went in the opposite direction.
The United States is “the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College,” “one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber,” and “the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.” Moreover, they note, “the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change” — making it extremely difficult for reformers to do anything about America’s minority-empowering institutions.
These institutions allow the Republican Party to rule despite being a distinctly minority faction — one that holds extreme positions on issues like taxes and abortion, and has lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.
So long as the party retains appeal among a hard core of racially resentful supporters, efficiently distributed around the country to take advantage of the Senate and Electoral College’s biases, it can remain nationally competitive. The right’s control over the Supreme Court will likely last decades, thanks to lifetime tenure, allowing it to remake American policy and institutions with impunity. The GOP’s disproportionate national power enables its cadres at the state and local level to pursue explicitly undemocratic policies for holding power, like felon disenfranchisement and extreme gerrymandering, without fear of federal intervention.
Hence the titular “tyranny of the minority”: The Republican Party, having broken with its core commitment to democracy, has now embraced a peculiarly American strategy for taking and wielding power undemocratically.
“America’s countermajoritarian institutions can manufacture authoritarian minorities into governing majorities,” they write. “Far from checking authoritarian power, our institutions have begun to augment it.”
Can good institutions save a rotted society?
Levitsky and Ziblatt are, in my mind, clearly correct about both of their two major points: that the GOP has become an anti-democratic faction, and that America’s minoritarian institutions have given them a straightforward pathway to wielding power undemocratically. The evidence for both propositions is overwhelming, and the book’s style — engaging historical case studies accompanied by a precise deployment of data — hammers them home persuasively. Tyranny of the Minority is an exceptional book, one of the very best in its genre.
But there are some tensions inside of it: in this case, a subtle conflict between the two halves of the argument.
The United States, Ziblatt and Levitsky note, is hardly the only wealthy democracy to have experienced the rise of far-right parties hostile to social change — citing the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and “all of Scandinavia” as prominent examples. Yet those democracies, in their view, “remain relatively healthy.”
The key difference, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, lies in the institutions. Because those countries are considerably more majoritarian, it is far harder for an authoritarian minority to corrode democracy at a national level. Therefore, they conclude, the best way to safeguard America’s institutions is to make them more like our peers abroad: abolish the Electoral College, eliminate lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices, end the filibuster, switch to proportional representation in Congress, ban partisan gerrymandering, and make the Constitution easier to amend.
The obvious objection to these proposals is that they are impractical, that the very nature of the problem — Republican control over minoritarian institutions — makes reforming them infeasible. But there’s a deeper, and more interesting, question raised by Levitsky and Ziblatt’s diagnosis: Is it really the case that our institutions are what make America unique?
America’s minoritarian institutions certainly create a particular pathway for our domestic revanchist faction to gain power and wield it against democracy. But there are plenty of other ways for a democracy to eat itself.
Israel, for example, has an extraordinarily majoritarian political system. It is a parliamentary democracy, meaning limited separation of executive and legislative power, whose legislature is elected on a purely proportional basis. There is a simple majority requirement for passing legislation and even amending the Basic Law (its constitution-lite). The judiciary is, for all intents and purposes, the only check on unfettered majority rule.
Yet Israel is, at the moment, in the midst of a democratic crisis every bit as serious as America’s, perhaps even more so, in which an anti-democratic governing majority seeks to remove the court as a barrier to its radical agenda. The root cause of the crisis is very similar: a far-right faction of the population that wishes to protect existing social hierarchies from the threat of change. But the extremist strategy for cementing their power is the polar opposite: exploiting majoritarian institutions, not minoritarian ones. It’s the founders’ fear come to life, the Scylla to America’s Charybdis.
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The point here is not that there are only two options for institutional design, America’s vetocracy or Israel’s blunt majoritarianism. Most advanced democracies fall somewhere in the middle, adopting a mix of majoritarian and counter-majoritarian institutions designed to generally permit majority rule while also preventing abuses of power.
Rather, the United States and Israel put together illustrate that institutions are an at-best-imperfect check on far-right authoritarian movements. The American far right has built a strategy tailored to American institutions; the Israeli far right has adopted a strategic approach tailored to the Israeli context. In both cases, the root of the problem is that there’s a sufficient social foundation for far-right authoritarian politics: one that provides the raw political muscle for bad actors to attack democracy using its own institutions.
Other democracies are not immune to far-right surges, including some that Levitsky and Ziblatt cite as relatively healthy.
The AfD, Germany’s far-right party, is surging in popularity, topping recent polls in four German states. A survey in May found that Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally, would defeat President Emmanuel Macron in their second rematch by a 55-45 margin. The UK approved Brexit by a majority referendum. Even in Canada, one of the most democratically stable Western democracies, extremist-linked legislator Pierre Poilievre is leading the traditionally center-right Conservative Party, which is currently ahead of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in the 2025 polls.
Not every far-right victory is a threat to democracy, of course, but it’s hard to be sure until they have power. Some Western far-right parties, like the AfD, are already showing troubling signs.
And in the US, where the far right is clearly undemocratic, surveys show a real chance that Trump wins the 2024 US election with an outright majority — not just in the Electoral College, but in the popular vote.
At root, Levitsky and Ziblatt appear a little too confident in their argument that the GOP’s extremism dooms the party to minority status.
It’s true that their agenda is out of step with the majority of Americans. But many voters, especially swing voters, don’t always vote on policy or ideology. They make ballot box decisions based on things like gas prices, inflation, and whether the party in power has been there for too long — factors that are often out of the president’s hands. Even if they do not agree with Trump that Mexicans are rapists or that the 2020 election was stolen, they’re willing to vote for him if they’re sufficiently frustrated with either the status quo or the other party’s option.
The same is true in other countries. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government was briefly dethroned in the 2021 election — only to return to power in 2022 after voters experienced life under a fractious coalition that spanned the right-left continuum. Marine Le Pen’s recent rise seems to be less about a majority of voters agreeing with her on immigration than a sense that she’s the only real alternative to an unpopular Macron.
Far-right parties, even potentially anti-democratic ones, can be politically viable under nearly any set of institutions. The key is to establish sufficient support among a large segment of the population that agrees with them, enough for there to be a large ideologically driven backlash. Once that happens, the party can establish itself as a viable alternative to the mainstream. And once that happens, they gain the potential to win over less ideological swing voters who simply have frustrations with the political status quo and look to any port in a storm.
This is not to let America’s institutions off the hook. Levitsky and Ziblatt are absolutely right that its outdated constitution makes it easier for the GOP to travel down an authoritarian path.
But “easier” doesn’t mean “necessary.” While Levitsky and Ziblatt ultimately take an institutions-first approach, seeing their reform as our way out of America’s crisis, I take a more society-first view: that America’s problems are primarily the result of deep social fissures exacerbated by outdated and poorly designed institutions. Even if the United States had a more authentically democratic institution, we’d still be riven by divides over race and identity that have unerringly produced the worst political conflicts in the country’s history.
It follows from this that institutional reforms are not enough: In addition to policies for political reform, we also need to think about ways to reduce the social demand for extreme politics. More bluntly: If widespread hostility to social change enables the GOP’s far-right authoritarian lurch, we need to figure out ways to shift Americans’ beliefs in a more egalitarian direction.
But such a proposal should be considered in addition to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s proposals, not in replacement of them — much as my critique of their book more broadly is less a fundamental concern than a difference in emphasis.
Tyranny of the Minority is one of the best guides out there to the crisis of American democracy. It just puts a touch too much focus on institutions at the expense of the deeper social forces rotting their foundations.