The end of the Cold War was such an enthusiastic time for the field of the political science. Obviously, between the good and the ugly, the democracies had won and even the old ugly foe, USSR, was rebranded Russia and pushed towards multi-party system and free elections. For at least a decade later, most of the political scientists, following the enthusiasm shared by Fukuyama in the End of History was expecting a blooming of democratic systems all over the world.
NATO and EU expanded, Saddam and Gaddafi were toppled and even some Middle Eastern traditional dictatorships were giving some joyous signs of getting acquainted with democratic change. It was rather a religious belief in a redemption than a realistic evaluation based on clear facts and figures. The standards used to evaluate democratic systems were the results of the Cold War patterns of thinking and although at a certain extent - free elections, free media and multi-party system - were corresponding to the average projection of the democratic ideal, the concepts were way too generous to correspond to the constantly evolving dynamics of the various political systems all over the world.
In less than a decade, all over the world, including within the apparent big winner of the Cold War confrontation - USA - the democracies as we knew it are under attack. In How Democracies Dies, Steven Levinsky and Daniel Ziblatt are introspectively researching the causes of the death and how eventually democracies can be kept alive.
There is a plethora of books published lately on the topic of the strange democratic reflux taking place lately. Far right parties and populist politicians are taken seriously by the voters all over the world - again. America is apparently going through the biggest political farce right now. Political allies united by the common respect of democratic values are turning opposite sides of the political spectrum - I am thinking about two noticeable examples that it happens to know a bit much better than the others, Turkey and Hungary.
The populists are climbing high on the peaks of political power in a relatively similar way: attacking their political opponents, the media and the justice which is trying to make them accountable for corruption, tax evasion and other law breaking facts. In the end, they, the populist have won and from the position of their office they continue to keep those institutions under attack. Some of those institutions might suffer, especially the media. Hopefully, in the US the journalists are not -yet - sent to prison and their jobs are not becoming obsolete following obscure economic arrangements of politicians, but the fact that the average American is make believe that the media is its enemy is an obvious failure for the watchdog. The terms of the attacks against political opponents are as bad in terms of human relations as any kind of totalitarian discourse. The communist dictatorships used frequently a retoric which used a vituperating art of neutralizing the enemies, including by taking away any human qualities. And if someone follows with the highest attention the usual terms Trump uses against his opponents - including within his own party, as it was the case of Sen. McCain - he suits very well this category.
The two Harvard university professors who wrote the book are using an extensive comparative approach - mostly with Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Russia, Nicaragua and Peru - and historical insights into the American political - especially presidential - history. History is an useful tool to catch up with the present, by revealing patterns and possible trends. However, my biggest critic of this book is that it does not acknowledges on one side the lack of adaptation of the political science analysis itself to those new challenges - hence the fixation on the past, the more or less recent history - and on the other side, it ignores the influence of social media and technology on political analysis. In fact, both aspects are part of an old school of thought which is still predominant in the political science circles and that doesn't offer a measure good enough for a further understanding and building up new possible models and concepts.
Also missing from the book is a throughout evaluation of the state-of-arts of the political elites nowadays. Such an analysis might require a special volume - or two - but the current disfunctionalities in the American bipartisan system are dued at a great extent to the unpreparadness of the elites and often their inadequacies.
I completely agree with one of the assumptions of the book that when democracy is in danger you need more democracy, but how you can build concretely those democratic networks and institutions, formal and informal channels able to face and fight the threats the democratic systems are nowadays under attack for, is a question largely remaining unanswered in How Democracies Die.
