I love carrying books like this around with me in public because my friend thought I was reading a manual on how to destroy democracies.

How Democracies Die looks at the guardrails that maintain democracies and how they dissolve when put under pressure by want-to-be authoritarians. Books like this remind me why politics just flat-out annoys me half the time, because if a large part of our current issues with collapsing democracies stems from the refusal to abide by unwritten rules because they're unwritten...why don't we just write them down? Maybe I'm an idealist (I am, in some respects) or maybe I don't understand politics (I don't 75% of the time), but these feel like issues we could solve.

As seems to be the trend with the books I've been reading for my history classes, this book requires some level of prior knowledge to contextualize the argument the book is making. Because I'm not familiar with dictatorships in Latin America, I struggled to understand what points the book was trying to make. This isn't entirely the book's fault, but it does make the information feel just a little less accessible to those who aren't also experts in the subject. Again, this seems to be a trend with a majority of historical/political books that I've read.

How Democracies Die does have a focus on Trump and failing American democracy, which means if you're looking for a less US-centric summary of dying democracies, you'll probably be disappointed with this book. It's also fairly pessimistic in outlook, which can be discouraging, and its proposed solutions feel a bit unrealistic, but I think it's an important book to read, especially with the current American political climate.

We can only hope that this book is wrong and that our democracy doesn't fall in the near future.