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The probability of two political scientists writing a best-seller is like the probability of Donald Trump winning a presidential election. But we are not in normal times. How Democracies Die is an extraordinary volume: well documented, beautifully written, and accessible to a general readership. Its message is clear: America’s democracy is at risk because politicians are abandoning basic norms of toleration and forbearance, but a broad citizen coalition can save the republic.
Future generations will read this book as part of the great Trump Scare, a historical moment that forced American scholars to rethink the United States in comparative perspective. The Trump Scare has produced beautiful texts like Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and insightful studies like Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq’s How to Save a Constitutional Democracy. It has inspired projects like Bright Line Watch and the Authoritarian Warning Survey.1 All of them share three assumptions that underpin this book: 1) American democracy is at risk, and it is not alone; 2) politics is about moral choices; and thus 3) our discipline must provide effective answers.
The End of American Exceptionalism. The 2016 election prompted the realization that the United States is not unique: “Comparing our current predicament to democratic crises in other parts of the world, . . . it becomes clear that America is not so different from other nations” (p. 230). Since the end of the Cold War, most failing democracies have not been killed by military coups but by elected leaders. Demagogues spill vitriol on their critics and then dismantle the democratic game in three moves:...