Another setting is Weimar Germany. We often retrospectively think of all the reasons why things could have gone poorly there, but this was also a political system after 1918 [and World War I] that was highly democratic, it was founded by this incredible democratic coalition of Catholics, liberals, and socialists that had an overwhelming majority of the vote in the first years of the Weimar Republic. There were lots of right-wing critics of the regime. There was economic crisis. Certainly all of these factors mattered as well. But I think one really important factor that prevented the regime from stabilizing was the inability of the conservative party to bind all of the right-wing forces to the regime.

Friedman: Why do you feel it was a conservative failure in particular that paved the way for Hitler versus [a failure on the part of all German] political leaders?

Ziblatt: In the 19th century and early 20th century, conservatives represented those elements in society that were the greatest threat to democratic stability. The far-right end of the political spectrum—these were the potential saboteurs of democracy. And so the question is: How do you get these guys to buy in? The question of how you get liberals to buy in to democracy is important but not as critical. Socialists were pushing for democratic reform. Certainly there were far-left elements, communists, who were trying to undermine the regime, but these groups on the far-right had the motive to undermine democracy and they also had the means to undermine democracy because they often had access to the state, to the military.

There were these intervening years in the middle of the 1920s where you had relative stability [in the Weimar Republic] and these were also the years where the successor to the Conservative Party was doing well electorally. In 1928, they had a big electoral loss. There was a grassroots rebellion of the far-right who thought that the party leadership had been making too many concessions to the democratic order, and the party was taken over by this right-wing media mogul, Alfred Hugenberg, who pushed the party far to the right and began to open the door to the much further right, and sought out alliances with Hitler and the rising Nazi Party. The question becomes: Do these parties on the right ally with the very far right that are explicitly trying to overthrow the democratic system, or do they distance themselves? In this case, they clearly made the wrong choice.

Going back to 19th-century Britain there’s a positive case where conservatives played a critical role in helping support democracy. When conservatives in the 1880s signed onto a franchise extension because they thought they could win elections—they helped negotiate the Third Reform Act. And the Conservative Party, because it was a well-organized political party, thrived in the face of democratic changes.