From the Pages of Orlando Weekly: Lessons from “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
• I’m not sure if it’s a bad time, or the perfect time, to be reading a book called “How Democracies Die.” This 2018 book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt presents case studies of how democratic governments throughout history have fallen into authoritarian regimes, as a warning that the American experiment is more fragile than we think. There’s nothing magical about the United States Constitution. Other countries have copied it, sometimes word for word, and collapsed. In its early days, the U.S. almost did, too. What held us together was a set of informal norms, an unspoken agreement that the parties would share power and the branches of government wouldn’t exploit the Constitution’s ambiguities to their own ends. For a …
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