How Democracies Die: The International Bestseller: What History Reveals About Our Future Paperback – 3 Jan. 2019

The extensive reviews on Amazon.com are excellent summaries - I wouldn't presume to add. So why review it? well, first of all to praise a book that's so well-written it's difficult to put down, and wears its scholarship lightly but thoroughly. As an elderly politics junkie I thought I was pretty well-informed, but this book gave me a much better view of the events I've lived through.The other reason for reviewing, of course, is the question 'could it happen here?' Probably not, at least as the authors define it; we have pretty good separation of powers and sense of history. But - Brexit? the behaviour of some of the extremists does begin to fit some of the authors' criteria: Ian Hislop remarked shortly after the referendum that if the result had gone the other way, does anyone think that the Brexiters would have shut up and gone away? What began to worry me as I read this book was their analysis of those European countries that had defeated attempts by extremist authoritarians to seize power - hence the election of Macron in France recently, events in Scandinavia last century, and of course Germany's determined efforts to structure things so that nothing like Hitler could ever happen again. I don't know whether the UK would have the resilience to defeat a determined attempt..That's a personal reflection. Whatever - this is an excellent book, calm, analytical, unhysterical, measured, serious. It should be read now; it will stand for a very long time.

The work is well informed and it makes a good read. It is specially interesting in all that concerns American constitutionalism, past and present. The argumentation is focused on the fail-safe procedures and pitfalls of what we currently take for the democratic system, but surprisingly ignores the factor which, in the last instance, is the most important for the preservation of democracy: the people, the voters themselves. You can build all the fail-safes you want into the democratic system to assure its undefeated continuity, but if you have a manipulable pool of voters, a population of mostly simple-minded, uninstructed, reactive people, incapable of thinking by themselves, receptive to the typical lies forged into all-day-long-sounding slogans by crooked politicians —if you have that, your democracy is doomed no matter what. There is no democracy without an enlightened “demos”. Without it, all you have is a “demofallacy”. Not taking into account this factor, makes the argumentation of the work very academic, yes, but also very weak, specially in what it has as a warning against the future that awaits us.A second weakness has this work too: it takes the democratic system as something good in itself without a critical assessment of its failures and shortcomings, particularly in a time like the present, when there is a price to pay (normally high) for the slow-motion consensus-buildups and decision-making processes typical of the complex system Western democracies are. When rapid and decisive action is required you can’t allow yourself to be stopped into inactivity, which is why the Romans substituted dictatorship for the Republic in times of national crises.

Excellent! It's very easy to read and as someone who is quite slow at reading, nicely broken down. The book focuses mainly on the breakdown of modern American politics, primarily starting in the 1990s, with the arrival of Gingrich. It talks more about the Republican Party than just Trump. Throughout it is laced with examples of broken democracies from the 20th and 21st Centuries. Great read. I especially liked the discussion on the importance of political norms and the 'guardrails' of democracy. Interesting stuff.

This book provides a very good insight into the decline of democracies around the world through time, looking in particular at the US with a lot of background hostory on past cases in Latin America. A very relevant book for our times, it was a breeze and a pleasure to read through.

What happened in the 2020 US election could happen to any Democracy. We all need to wake up & be aware of what is the truth & what are lies & conspiracies. Unless you want to live in an Autocracy or under a Narcissistic Dictator's rule, then we all need to listen carefully to what comes out of Politician's mouths, understand why they say what they say & be aware of hidden motives. This book needs to be read & it needs to be understood.

This is a decent book - and well worth the read. It is good to see political scientists write about the real world. In this the book is a welcome sign that this discipline's practitioners are still writing knowingly about relevant issues. The observation that most dictatorships are undermined by procedure and continue to exist in name only (with sham elections etc.) is a valid one. Just think of Rome after Augustus - compete with the Senate and everything and yet a pale imitation of the 'Res Publica'. So far, so good.My concern, though, is that they are quick to compare Hitler's rise to power with what we see in America today. That is a wild exaggeration. Any comparison with the German dictator is unhelpful. The level of violence in Germany in the dying years of the Wiemar Republic was astronomical and cannot in any way be compared to the USA today. Further, any comparison with Italy in 1920 and Spain after 1932 is inaccurate. These were not consolidated democracies like the US.But all in all a well-written, entertaining and good book.