Two new books offer contrasting plans — one global, another national — to preserve freedom.
ILL WINDS: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency
By Larry Diamond. Penguin Press. 354 pp. $28.
THE DEMOCRACY FIX: How to Win the Fight for Fair Rules, Fair Courts, and Fair Elections
By Caroline Fredrickson. The New Press. 247 pp. $25.99
How Democracies Die? On Tyranny. How Democracy Ends? Trumpocracy. The Road to Unfreedom? Fascism: A Warning. Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America.
The Trump presidency has produced so many books about the risks to government of, by and for the people that their titles sound like they’re having a conversation. The works started appearing just weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and although the American president is not their sole preoccupation, Trump is their inspiration, the muse of the death-of-democracy bookshelf.
But this genre is evolving from diagnosis to prescription, from what’s-going-on-here to what now. New works such as “Ill Winds” by Larry Diamond and “The Democracy Fix” by Caroline Fredrickson still detail Trump’s disdain for democratic norms and his assault on the independent judiciary and free press, but the authors devote more effort to showing a way out, and their books are packed with memos, lists, bullet-point programs and, above all, big plans.
View the complete August 1 article by Carlos Lozada on The Washington Post website here.