Justice David H. Souter, who died last week at age 85, made few public appearances after he retired from the Supreme Court in 2009. When he did, he stayed away from politics.
But a seemingly bland question from an audience member at a New Hampshire arts center in 2012 provoked an impassioned response from the justice, who was the opposite of excitable.
He said he was worried that public ignorance about how American government works would allow an authoritarian leader to emerge and claim total power. “That is the way democracy dies,” he said.
“An ignorant people can never remain a free people,” the justice said. “Democracy cannot survive too much ignorance.”
Not understanding how power is allocated among the three branches of government, he said, leaves a void that invites a strongman. After a crisis, he said, “one person will come forward and say, ‘Give me total power, and I will solve this problem.’”
That was four years before Donald J. Trump, as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination for the first time, said something strikingly similar: “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
There is no reason to think Justice Souter had Mr. Trump in mind when he spoke. Among the things the justice did not pay attention to were New York real estate and reality television.
In his remarks in 2012, during an hourlong interview with Margaret Warner of “PBS NewsHour” before over 1,300 people in Concord, N.H., Justice Souter was in an amiable mood, but he gave guarded answers. He did not enjoy public attention, once telling a colleague that “in a perfect world, I would never give another speech, address, talk, lecture or whatever as long as I live.”
He made an exception for Ms. Warner, who had covered him for The Concord Monitor when he became New Hampshire’s attorney general in 1976. But there was little reason to think he would say anything of note.
Then a woman from Windham, N.H., lobbed a gentle softball of a question: What should schools be doing to produce civically engaged students?
Justice Souter grew animated. He warned the audience that he might be talking for a while, and he later thought to make clear that the question had not been planted.
“I’ll start with the bottom line,” he said. “I don’t believe there is any problem of American politics and American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government.”
He remembered his high school days, in Concord. “There were two required civics courses,” he said. “When we got out of high school, we may not have known a lot, but we at least had a basic understanding of the structure of American government.”
Justice Souter, a Rhodes scholar with a deep knowledge of history, sensed a parallel.
“That is how the Roman Republic fell,” he said, with Augustus becoming an autocratic emperor by promising to restore old values.
The rise of such a strongman was hastened, Justice Souter said, by public ignorance. Americans’ lack of knowledge means, he said, that “the day will come when somebody will come forward, and we, and the government will, in effect, say: ‘Take the ball and run with it. Do what you have to do.’”
In the rest of the conversation, Justice Souter gave cautious answers to questions about what were then recent Supreme Court decisions.
A student asked how he would have voted in a challenge to the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s health care law. “Going to take a pass on that one,” Justice Souter said.
Ms. Warner asked about the Citizens United campaign finance case, which was decided a few months after he left the court. “I’m going to take a partial pass on that,” he said, because “you can’t get into that subject and explore it fully without getting into politics.” He may have also been reluctant to discuss the case because, as Jeffrey Toobin reported in The New Yorker, he had written a scathing draft dissent that caused the case to be argued a second time.
Justice Souter did say that he was “certainly unrepentant” about joining a dissent from the court’s 2008 decision recognizing an individual right to own guns.
As the event neared its end, Ms. Warner asked Justice Souter to say more about the threat to democracy.
“I don’t think we have lost it,” the justice said. “I think it is in jeopardy. I am not a pessimist, but I am not an optimist about the future of American democracy.”
“We’re still in the game,” he added, “but we have serious work to do, and serious work is being neglected.”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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