Democratic Guardrails

Preventing Authoritarianism

Democratic backsliding rarely announces itself. These books examine the conditions under which democratic norms degrade, the historical patterns of institutional collapse, and the social roots of political violence. The analytical question is always: how much explanatory work do the proposed mechanisms actually do?

Richard Rorty. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Harvard University Press, 1998.