How Democracies Die

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“A brilliant book, wise and nuanced.”
—Nicholas Kristof, New York Times

“Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Cool and persuasive... How Democracies Die comes at exactly the right moment.”
—The Washington Post

Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one.

Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved.

• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
• The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
• It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism
• The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die
• The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)
• The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
• Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World
• The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late 20th Century (The Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture Series)
• How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
• Introducing Comparative Politics: The Essentials