A review by lnetzel
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future by Daniel Ziblatt, Steven Levitsky

5.0

The authors study how democracies throughout the world have either died or have been broken for periods of time. The book covers democracies in Chile, Venezuela, Hungary, Germany and many whose authoritarian leaders I recognize from the news as I was growing up and in my 20's and 30s. Some of these formerly democratic countries have yet to recover and are still under authoritarian governments. They compare what happened in those countries and to what has happened in the US and particularly to the Republican Party. There is a lot of discussion around the alt-right, increasing inequality, immigration, etc. and how these impact certain groups of voters and how they contribute to our increasing polarization. Most frightening is that the breaking down of norms has been happening for several decades, which is setting us on a path for extremists in both parties to degrade our democracy.