“If you know where the lines are, and you don’t cross them, you can have a good life,” a social scientist says, of living in Hungary, where democracy has been under siege for more than a decade. In this week’s magazine, Marantz reports from Budapest, and speaks with people on the front lines of our current political crisis. Plus:

Is the U.S. Becoming an Autocracy?

Other countries have watched their democracies slip away gradually, without tanks in the streets. That may be where we’re headed—or where we already are.

By Andrew Marantz

The nonfiction best-seller list in early 2018 included “Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic” and “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.” The cover of the former was emergency-alert red; on the latter, a map of the United States was bursting into flames. By comparison, the cover of another book, “How Democracies Die,” was somewhat muted—white capital letters on a black background. The word “DIE,” though, did loom large.

The anti-Trump books were received the way most information about Donald Trump is received. Those who hated him felt apoplectic, or vindicated; those who liked him mostly tuned it out. But “How Democracies Die,” by two political scientists at Harvard, was about a global phenomenon that was bigger than Trump, and it became a touchstone, the sort of book whose title (“Manufacturing Consent,” “Bowling Alone”) is often invoked as a shorthand for an important but nebulous set of issues. When a book attains this status, the upside is that it can have a wide impact. (In 2018, according to the Washington Post, Joe Biden “became obsessed” with “How Democracies Die” and started carrying it around with him wherever he went.) The downside is that many people—including those who are aware of the book but haven’t quite got around to reading it—may hear a game-of-telephone version of the argument, not the argument itself.

Trump’s first term lasted four years—no more, no less. The sun rose every morning and set every evening. The President made some wildly unsettling statements; he allowed his relatives to exploit their power for profit; he badly mishandled a pandemic; he threatened to nuke North Korea, or (reportedly) a hurricane, but in the end he didn’t do either of those things. Nor did he declare martial law, barricade himself inside the White House, and refuse to leave. In his final days, he did gin up a fleeting attempt at a “self-coup,” but he never had the judges or the generals on his side. By the time he left, many casual observers found it absurd to imagine that American democracy was dying. What would that even mean?

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