How Democracies Die

Levitsky and Ziblatt are Harvard political scientists who spent their careers studying democratic backsliding in Latin America and Europe. In 2018 they turned that expertise on the United States and found the same patterns: the gradual erosion of democratic norms rather than sudden coup, the outsider who wins through existing institutions and then uses them to consolidate power, the complicity of established parties who think they can control what they cannot. Democracies rarely die at gunpoint anymore — they die through elections, through legislation, through the slow dismantling of the guardrails that weren't laws because they didn't need to be. The most clinically precise dispatch about the specific threat facing American democracy and the one that most clearly names what is happening by showing where it has happened before.