Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future
A coherent and interesting analysis of how democracy within the USA has been eroded over the last few decades culminating in the way that Trump is acting as president. My problem with the book is that although it mentions apassing how the USA wasn't really that democratic internally and definitely not externally given all the non democratic regimes the USA supported and indeed initiated it misses the point that USA governments have never ideologically supported democracies. The authors stating that Chile was an example of a lasting democracy in 1989 when Pinochet was still in charge?! There are loads of such instances. Examples of American politics stopping potential totalitarians but in fact they were assassinated or nearly so rather than stopped by politics. They ignore USA & USSR & others meddling in other's politics with only a passing reference to CIA funding of Pinochet and no list of all the other elected regimes toppled by the CIA. In fact that's the main reason democracy fails. Because it's not working in the present western system for most citizens of the west and certainly not for developing nations. Why should we keep western democracies when they fail citizens through capitalist exploitation and this book seems to be a reason for keeping society as it is i.e. increasing inequalities in the west and exploitation of the rest of the world through supporting undemocratic regimes which is highly hypocritical of both regimes and to some extent the authors. They only see good democracies as two party states and don't say much about the "forbearance" of politics when crushing democratic left leaning and environmental organisations. There is no analysis of the economics of USA i.e. capitalism wanting to keep a two party system keeping most citizens in check and how due to globalisation big business will want to exploit Americans like any others. Which is what is driving Trump and his supporters. Overall this seems like a capitalist apology to keep the status quo with no coherent analysis of the overall system. So maybe the book isn't that coherent - at least lacking a high level view.
