David Runciman, _How Democracy Ends_

THERE IS SUCH a spate of these--Fascism: A Warning by Madeline Albright, How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder--that I figured I should read at least one. I went with Runciman because The Confidence Trap was one of my favorite books of 2014. It was the right call.

Once again Runciman enlightens by doing an end run around the congested areas of the conversation. Is our moment like the 1930s? We've heard a lot about how it is, but Runciman advises we look instead at the 1890s, with its own economic crash, its own populist insurgencies, and its own nativist anxieties (e.g., the Dreyfus Affair). It was "the great age of conspiracy theories" and a time of technological upheaval. I was convinced.

Democracy found a way to save its own bacon in the 1890s with an energized progressive movement--Runciman mentions not just Teddy Roosevelt, but David Lloyd George and Jean Jaurès.  Could it happen again? Well, maybe.

Plenty are skeptical about democracy's ability to address slowly-unfolding catastrophes like climate change, since it will always be in democratic politicians' short-term interests not to disrupt long-established patterns of production and consumption, but Runciman finds reason for hope in democracy having found a way (thus far) to avert nuclear destruction. I don't know if we can give democracy all the credit for this, since the Soviet Union and China, neither one a democracy, had as much to do with averting nuclear holocaust as the democracies did, no? But it does suggest democracy has deeper resources than we think.

Runciman is less optimistic about whether democracy can survive our age of the internet giants, though. Will Facebook, Google, and Amazon eventually decide that they ought to run everything, and furthermore, be able to do so? Will AI, once achieved, decide it ought to be running things, like 2001's HAL? Is this the new Leviathan?

Runciman is not as worried about Trump as some, nor as alarmed by the Brexit vote, but he is none too sanguine about long-term prospects for democracy: "Western democracy will survive its mid-life crisis. With luck, it will be a little chastened by it. It is unlikely too be revived by it. This is not, after all, the end of democracy. But this is how democracy ends."

Gulp.

Bit of a downer, that conclusion.

Nice shout-out to Roth and The Plot Against America in the "Further Reading" appendix, though: "Even in the age of Trump, I don't think Roth's alternative past is our collective future. Still it is one of the scariest and most compelling works of fiction I have ever read."

The outlook is bleak. In the meantime, I should really read Roth through again.