How Democracies Die is an alarming book. The authors marshal their knowledge of democratic failure around the globe to warn us that American democracy is at risk under the Donald Trump presidential administration. They remind us that all democracies are fragile, including democracy in the United States. Through detailed retelling of the collapse of democracies in multiple countries, they outline the ways in which recent events in the United States resemble the pattern of the weakening of democracy more generally.

As the book’s title suggests, the authors describe what it looks like when democracies die, and in this description lies explanation. They derive two key causes of the death of democracy from their reading of history: the evaporation of the norms of mutual toleration, “or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals,” and forbearance, “or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives” (pp. 8–9). These norms form what they call the “guardrails of democracy.”

Although Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the guardrails of American democracy are broken, they are nevertheless hopeful that these safeguards can be repaired. They are deeply critical of choices made within the Republican Party, and suggest in their conclusion that Democrats take the high ground and restore the norms of mutual toleration and forbearance. They urge them to strive for greater inclusivity and racial and economic justice, rather than seeking retribution or revenge against their opposition.

This hopefulness derives from a view that humans are capable of doing enormous harm to each other, but that they are also capable of doing good. This is optimism, but it is deduced from their analysis of the past. They identify examples of political parties and leaders isolating and defeating extremist leaders, even when it means taking sides with the opposition in order to defeat an authoritarian (pp. 24–32). The book as a whole reminds us that the turn toward extremism and away from democracy around the globe is and has been a matter of human choice. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that democratic institutions are fragile, but also imply this is mutible. And therein lies the hope. In other words, How Democracies Die argues that people created this mess, and people can also get out of it.

Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the mess they seek to draw our attention to is bigger than populism, and bigger than Donald Trump. This is a very welcome contribution, as perhaps too much of the blame for the ills of American democracy has been focused on this particular president and the 2016 election. Through their rich historical detail, the authors illuminate the ways in which the current weakening of democracy has been decades in the making.

At the same time, however, Trump does play a starring role in their book, perhaps at the expense of attention to others leaders, especially those in the private sector who have ignored the interests of ordinary people, setting the stage for authoritarian appeals to take root.^{Footnote 1} The choices of corporate leaders to move manufacturing production to foreign countries have depleted job opportunities in many communities. Shifts toward consolidation in the news industry have depleted the availability of local and state news. These choices are smart for business but detrimental to democracy.

The book is short on its attention to the contemporary media environment generally and the way it has enabled extremists to come to power by circumventing established party systems.^{Footnote 2} Outsider candidates can reach millions directly through social media, at little cost. These platforms privilege provocation rather than dialogue, rewarding posts or Tweets that draw attention and intense emotion through the mechanisms of “likes” and “retweets.”

Neither of these shortcomings prevents this book from sounding an important alarm and also offering a fresh perspective on American democracy. One of the welcome turns it provides is the focus on political leadership. Too much of the conversation about authoritarian populism in the United States has been about the flaws of ordinary people. How Democracies Die turns our attention to the flawed choices and behaviors of leaders. The authors recount the occasions when mainstream party leaders in various countries accommodated an authoritarian extremist, only to be overtaken by such a person who then further wrenched the country away from democracy. They blame these democratic declines not on ordinary people but on the failures of leaders who offered up flawed and dangerous choices to the electorate.

We would do well to follow the lead of Levitsky and Ziblatt and give attention to elite failures, given that the field of political behavior has offered up ample evidence that measuring democracy by how ordinary people live up to mythical standards of civic competence is a fool’s errand.^{Footnote 3} How Democracies Die argues that it is elites who establish the norms that make democracy persist.

However, members of the public teach one another democratic norms and the identities that unite or divide us through their everyday interaction.^{Footnote 4} So there is more of a role here for ordinary citizens than Levitsky and Ziblatt grant. I have found in my own work that the divides that we see populist candidates making use of are preexisting. The contemporary resentment among rural residents toward urbanites, for example, has been decades in the making. Even if politicians draw attention to or exacerbate such divides, these divides persist because people reinforce them through offhand remarks, jokes (Cramer Reference Cramer2016). Candidates’ appeals to racism work because they resonate (Mendelberg Reference Mendelberg2001). Politicians of all stripes make use of social identities, arguing in various ways that they are one of us or stand up for people like us. These identities move us because they are basic tools with which we make sense of the world, including the political world (Cramer Walsh Reference Cramer Walsh2004). Politicians do not create the identities that matter in politics from scratch. They draw attention to the understandings that people already have practiced using with one another. Repairing democracy will require leaders to choose to emphasize the things that unite rather than divide us. But the work that citizens do to perpetuate divides requires some serious attention as well.

Nevertheless, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s focus on the behavior among political leaders is an important step forward, particularly because they illuminate the way leaders’ norms involve both rules and morality. The field of political science all too often separates the study of institutions from the study of behavior. One result is that we have done too little to understand the way institutions in the form of norms have a moral quality. We have moved away from studying personality and character among our leaders, and we have moved away from the study of great leadership. It seems that it is this resource that Levitsky and Ziblatt are diagnosing as the one that is in dangerously short supply.