The probability of two political scientists writing a best-seller is like the probability of Donald Trump winning a presidential election. But we are not in normal times. How Democracies Die is an extraordinary volume: well documented, beautifully written, and accessible to a general readership. Its message is clear: America’s democracy is at risk because politicians are abandoning basic norms of toleration and forbearance, but a broad citizen coalition can save the republic.

Future generations will read this book as part of the great Trump Scare, a historical moment that forced American scholars to rethink the United States in comparative perspective. The Trump Scare has produced beautiful texts like Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and insightful studies like Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq’s How to Save a Constitutional Democracy. It has inspired projects like Bright Line Watch and the Authoritarian Warning Survey.^{Footnote 1} All of them share three assumptions that underpin this book: 1) American democracy is at risk, and it is not alone; 2) politics is about moral choices; and thus 3) our discipline must provide effective answers.

The End of American Exceptionalism. The 2016 election prompted the realization that the United States is not unique: “Comparing our current predicament to democratic crises in other parts of the world, . . . it becomes clear that America is not so different from other nations” (p. 230). Since the end of the Cold War, most failing democracies have not been killed by military coups but by elected leaders. Demagogues spill vitriol on their critics and then dismantle the democratic game in three moves: They capture the judiciary and law enforcement; harass opponents, independent media, and intellectuals; and alter institutional rules to lock in permanent advantage. After describing this process in other countries (Chapter 4), the authors show that President Trump attempted all three moves (unsuccessfully) during his first year in office (Chapter 8).

These comparative references help place the United States in perspective. America has had its share of extremists, but political parties historically played the role of gatekeepers. In the 1970s, presidential primaries transferred gatekeeping power to the mass media, donors, and interest groups. Yet celebrities easily bypass them (Chapters 2 and 3). Trump’s rise, however, is part of a deeper historical trend. Basic norms of toleration and forbearance are in decline, assailed by “a syndrome of intense partisan polarization” (p. 167) that began with the GOP’s radicalization in the 1990s (Chapter 7).

Agency and Responsibility. A second theme central to the book is that political leaders have agency, and thus moral responsibility. Conventional analyses of democratic politics assume that political actors are morally equivalent and similarly constrained by institutional rules. Studies of democratic backsliding are forcing us to reconsider those assumptions.

Levitsky and Ziblatt propose a litmus test: Authoritarian wannabes 1) reject the democratic rules of the game, 2) deny legitimacy to their opponents, 3) encourage violence, and 4) are willing to curtail civil liberties (pp. 21–24). Chapter 3 shows that President Trump meets all four conditions. It follows that the American Constitution may not be sufficient to safeguard democracy—an argument echoed by Ginsburg and Huq’s recent book.

The authors thus argue that two informal norms are central to the workings of democracy: toleration and forbearance (Chapter 5). Mutual toleration implies that parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, forbearance that rulers exercise institutional powers with restraint: “The American system of checks and balances requires that public officials use their institutional prerogatives judiciously” (p. 127).

The focus on toleration and forbearance is no doubt the central and most insightful contribution of the book. It also raises unresolved questions. First, the choice of the term “forbearance” is somewhat unfortunate because it blurs the concept recently advanced by Alisha Holland. For Levitsky and Ziblatt, forbearance involves restraint in the use of power; for Holland, it involves the selective enforcement of norms.^{Footnote 2} The two meanings are related, but future scholars will be forced to untangle this semantic knot.

Second, Levitsky and Ziblatt do not provide much guidance on the causes of toleration and forbearance. The book offers some historical insights about the U.S. case, but it remains unclear whether politicians embrace those principles because they have a normative commitment to democracy or because their policy preferences are moderate enough. This question will no doubt pose a central challenge for future studies.^{Footnote 3}

What Is to Be Done? The third theme driving the book is that responses to democratic backsliding should reflect our moral commitments: They should be nonviolent, operate within the constitutional framework, and rely on broad coalitions. Levitsky and Ziblatt join a growing chorus of voices—including the works of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Laura Gamboa, and Srđa Popović—that remind us to do the right thing.^{Footnote 4}

The opening chapter builds on the experience of interwar Europe to argue that elites must isolate perilous leaders. Like Nancy Bermeo, the authors emphasize the elites’ “distancing capacity” from extremists.^{Footnote 5} The last chapter offers a plan for the United States: Urban progressives must build a broad coalition with business executives, evangelical leaders, and red-state Republicans (p. 218). American parties must recast themselves along traditional European lines, with the GOP embracing a Christian Democratic ethos and the Democratic Party embracing universal social policies. The authors adamantly oppose the idea that the Democratic Party should relegate minorities to court the working class.

These calls give the book a hopeful tone, but this is an area where we need more empirical research. The issue of “distancing capacity” provides a good example: When is scorn from traditional elites a boon for populist outsiders? The authors acknowledge that Republican attacks against Trump during the primary “had little impact and possibly even backfired where it counted: the voting booth” (p. 59). Traditional elites confronted Hugo Chávez, Alberto Fujimori, and Juan Perón in the fateful elections that brought them to power.

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book must be read as the prime example of a larger intellectual movement prompted by 2016. American institutions may prove to be dysfunctionally resilient, and the Trump Scare may be, in the end, unwarranted. But the consequences of this intellectual movement, I suspect, will shape our discipline well beyond the current administration.