The Road to Fascism
Over the past 100 years there have been numerous revolutions and movements that have overthrown authoritarian regimes. Russia (1917) and China (1949) were among those that, despite their initial promise, reverted to a form of autocracy worse than before. Hitler and Mussolini, however, came into power by democratic means, then subverted their democracies to authoritarianism. There have been other countries that have overcome authoritarian regimes recently that initially moved in the direction of democracy, but many have succumbed to autocracy and seem to be heading toward actual fascism. They are deteriorating into what Steven Livitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their book How Democracies Die , describe as democracies that have gone very wrong: Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders – presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the R...