Description
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than two decades studying how democracies actually fall apart, and their answer runs against the usual image of tanks in the street. It happens slower than that: courts lose their independence one appointment at a time, the press gets squeezed, and political norms that were never written into law simply stop being honored. The two draw their evidence from 1930s Europe, Jim Crow-era America, and more recent cases in Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, building toward the same question applied to the United States — and what, if anything, still holds it together.
