The New York Times Opinion [unlocked], Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors of government at Harvard and the authors of “Tyranny of the Minority.”

:”…In the United States, the civic response to the Trump threat has been tepid. For a moment, business leaders seemed poised to defend democracy. After the Jan. 6 insurrection, many leading U.S. businesses announced that they would not contribute to lawmakers who voted to decertify the results of the 2020 election.Unfortunately, most of these companies — including AT&T, Boeing, Comcast, G.E., General Motors, Home Depot, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, UPS, Verizon and Walmart — soon abandoned their pledge. Politico identified more than 100 companies and business groups that pledged to suspend or review donations to election deniers in early 2021. More than 70 of them resumed contributions to election deniers before the 2022 midterms. Overall, ProPublica found that at least 276 Fortune 500 companies have contributed to congressional election deniers. As the 2024 election approached, many American chief executives publicly downplayed the threat posed by Mr. Trump. Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, declared that “America is going to be fine … no matter what happens in this election,” while Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said his company would “survive and thrive” under either party’s candidate. Mr. Dimon, who is considered influential in financial circles, has privately supported Ms. Harris but publicly declared himself undecided in the election’s final weeks. Although many individual business leaders have worked to defend democracy, leading national business associations like the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce remain on the sidelines, refusing to repudiate Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism. Many of America’s religious leaders have also remained quiet. Most prominent evangelical leaders have either remained silent or endorsed Mr. Trump. To give one example, although Franklin Graham claimed to be above the partisan fray, he called on his followers to “Pray for former President Donald Trump. His enemies want to do everything they can to destroy him.” Catholic leaders have also failed to speak out. Although the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a public statement condemning the Jan. 6 insurrection, it was, in the words of the Catholic writer Thomas Reese, “remarkably silent” in the face of Mr. Trump’s subsequent resurgence. In November 2023, the bishops conference issued an election-year document entitled “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” as it does every four years. The letter listed abortion as a “pre-eminent priority,” but it did not mention the defense of democracy. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was sharply critical of the first Trump administration’s immigration policies, but unlike the German bishops’ response to the AfD’s mass deportation plans, it has not publicly denounced Mr. Trump’s own mass deportation plans.