Post by Toni Vidal-Puig MD PhD FRCP FMedSci MAE MBA

A book I didn't expect to find so difficult to put down. One of the advantages of travelling is to have time to read. I recently finished How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two Harvard political scientists who have spent over twenty years studying democratic breakdowns in Europe and Latin America. My recommendation: read it. Not because it's comfortable, it isn't, but because it gives you a language for something many of us sense but struggle to name. Their central argument is disarmingly simple. Democracy no longer ends with a bang, in a coup or revolution, but with a whimper: the slow erosion of independent institutions, the hollowing out of norms that were never written down because no one imagined they needed to be. The book identifies two foundations that hold democracies together. The first is mutual toleration, the acceptance that political rivals, however much you oppose them, have an equal right to exist and to compete for power. Without it, opponents become enemies, politics becomes zero-sum, and every election feels existential. The second is institutional forbearance, the unwritten agreement to restrain the use of power even when the law technically permits otherwise. Both are more fragile than they appear. What makes the book unsettling to read right now is that the patterns it describes are no longer exceptions. We are watching democratic backsliding unfold not in distant or struggling nations, but across established Western democracies simultaneously in countries with long constitutional traditions, strong civil societies, and living memory of what the alternatives look like. That convergence was not part of the original analysis. It changes the picture considerably. The book also doesn't reckon with something that feels increasingly central to this moment: the return of military pressure as a shaping force in political life. We are entering a period of negotiations conducted under the shadow of bombs, of security anxieties being used to justify emergency powers, of the boundary between defence policy and democratic accountability becoming harder to locate. The authors wrote about autocrats who capture institutions from within. They wrote less about what happens when external pressure, real or manufactured, accelerates that capture, or provides its cover. The four warning signs they identify remain worth knowing: rejection of democratic rules; denial of opponents' legitimacy; tolerance or encouragement of violence; readiness to curtail civil liberties. These are not hypotheticals. They are observable, and they are being observed. The question the book leaves you with is not about any particular leader or country. It is simpler and harder than that: when we see the pattern clearly, what do we do with the recognition? Highly recommended and worth reading with the news open beside it.