Can it happen here? No, says Kurt Weyland. At the end of his new book, Assault on Democracy, he assures the reader that “if concepts are used with any precision, then observers need not worry about a revival of fascism” (p. 316). For Weyland, totalitarian fascism was a product of a particular concatenation of circumstances that describe the only period in modern history in which democracy has truly been on the defensive: the interwar years. Across much of Europe and Latin America—the regions that the book covers—liberty and democracy fell to nondemocratic actors and movements during the 1920s and 1930s.

According to Weyland, the period between the two world wars is also the great era of misperceptions. Using the bounded rationality approach he has developed in a series of prior books on waves of regime changes, he shows how the interwar assault on democracy was a product of fundamental miscalculations among political actors on both the left and the right. All important political actors, save large democratically organized parties capable of processing information in an open and critical way, misinterpreted the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 as something that could easily happen elsewhere. Communists therefore attempted to imitate the Bolshevik takeover even in places where this was well-nigh impossible; rightists groups doubled down to hinder the impossible from happening. Totalitarian fascism was a direct response to the exaggerated threat from the communist left, and Benito Mussolini’s fascist power grab in Italy in 1922 could not have come about in the absence of the events of 1917.

But this is only half the story about the interwar autocratic wave. The 1922 March on Rome and the fascist success that followed created another set of misconceptions. Traditional elites feared a revolution from the right almost as much as from the left. The result was what Weyland terms a “double deterrent effect” (p. 9). Most democratic breakdowns occurred because established forces in the military, the nobility, the monarchy, and the old parties preempted the totalitarian threats they saw to the left and to the right. What is so telling about the interwar wave of democratic breakdowns is that it almost only took the form of what Weyland terms “conservative authoritarianism.” The Soviet Union remained the only communist dictatorship (Hungary joined the club briefly in 1919); Italy and Germany remained the only fascist dictatorships, at least until the war began in 1939. The paradox of interwar regime change is that fascists could only reach the summit of power in socioeconomically developed countries but that such modernization normally made democracy immune to the fascist threat. So communism and fascism, by spreading, created much more powerful forces of counter-diffusion than of imitation.

According to Weyland, the great tragedy of the period was therefore that the threats from both communists and fascists were constantly overestimated. These misconceptions not only created democratic breakdowns but also spurred almost inconceivably brutal terror against opponents—especially in Eastern Europe in the early 1920s—and they led traditional elites to ramp up repression in the 1930s, even in countries where democracy had long since vanished.

Assault on Democracy is a wonderful read because it takes the reader through the drama of the interwar years, country by country. Weyland does three things to ensure that these historical narratives put his theoretical claims to the test. First, whereas he imports the bounded rationality approach he has previously developed, the interwar universe provides an “out-of-sample assessment” (p. 12). Second, he focuses on major “episodes” (p. 29) of regime change in order to see how his claims fit with the historical consensus among specialists. Third, to do this, he mainly relies on the work of historians. Weyland’s point is that these are “neutral third parties” (p. 14), who have no stake in the debate about rationality among political scientists, and who therefore serve as objective umpires.

However, Weyland, of course, cannot entirely escape the problem that the evidence itself is colored. For instance, when analyzing the German case, he repeatedly uses memoirs written by political actors—such as key Social Democrats—in the second part of the 1920s to show how they overestimated the threat of communism in 1918–1919. But surely these tracts are colored by what happened in the Soviet Union after 1919, no? Often, they probably say more about how ex-president Friedrich Ebert and others conceived of communism at the time of writing, following the bloody Russian civil war of the early 1920s and the consolidation of dictatorial power, than about what they knew and believed about Lenin and his fellow communists in the chaotic circumstances of 1919. In other words, these memoirs probably read history backward. The same is not the case with the newspaper articles that Weyland also interrogates, but the use of narrative eyewitness sources as evidence could have deserved more discussion. More generally, it is not always clear whether Weyland’s empirical evidence is mainly used to test his theory or to interpret the events that happened, or both at the same time. I sometimes found myself believing Weyland without knowing precisely why.

Then again, these are mere quibbles. Weyland does so many interesting things in this book: he dissects the interwar reverse wave of democracy; he shows why established democracies in northwestern Europe were immune to the double deterrent effect; he identifies the clear limits to both communist and fascist success; and he even analyzes regime changes within nondemocratic countries—for instance, he carefully distinguishes not only fascist and authoritarian takeovers but also, within the second category, whether these takeovers happened with fascist junior partners or to preempt a perceived fascist Machtergreifung.

Perhaps the greatest contribution is the way he uses the interwar evidence to understand the challenges that face democracy today. As Weyland shows, many observers have been quick to invoke the ghost of the interwar era without realizing just how different the period between the world wars was from the situation that faces us today, in both established and new democracies. Despite all the drama he recounts, his cool and calm analysis puts many of the present worries about a repeat of history to rest. Assault on Democracy shows that in socioeconomically modernized country such as interwar Germany, only totalitarian fascism could create democratic breakdown. Add to this that no genuine fascist threat exists today, and the worries about the hollowing out of democracy are laid to a rest—or at least cannot be sustained by the interwar evidence.

Interestingly, Weyland’s theoretical edifice also allows us to better understand why so many otherwise lucid and well-informed analysts overstate the threat of fascism today: the era of misconceptions is not over yet. Weyland’s bounded rationality approach sheds light on some of the exaggerated fears that we find currently, reinforced by the kind of sloppy conceptual distinctions that makes it possible to equate populist forces with interwar totalitarian fascism. Weyland, here, proffers a warning: populists thrive on the kind of confrontational tactics proposed by some of today’s warning voices. Beware not to misconceive the threat from the right again, as happened in the interwar era.