Abstract
The book’s main focus is to educate the readers about the defining moment in the history of the United States of America. According to the authors, the US is now standing at the brink of a democratic breakdown. The book, How Democracies Die, has nine chapters that discuss the factors that contributed to the derailment of the American political process, with politicians hurling outrageous allegations at each other and the institutions becoming discredited, leading the US to a point where its democratic system is under threat. The authors explain the lessons that history teaches us, by closely studying the collapse of democracies in other states and then pointing out similar pitfalls in America’s political life in the past. After highlighting the discrepancies between what had happened and what ought to have happened, it provides us with a roadmap to survive in the three possible scenarios in the face of this looming crisis: post-Trump America where democracy manages to stands up from its knees to on its feet. The second scenario envisaged by the authors is the darkest where Trump continues down this road of democratic derailment and gets elected as president for a second term and the last where Trump might fall but the American nation would be left highly polarized and democracy would once again be in grave danger.