Book Review: The Great Experiment-Diverse Democracies Under Duress

Author: Yascha Mounk

Rating: Four out of Four multicultural flags

Ease Of Reading: 291 pages. A Harvard man who is able to write for readers who don’t have a PhD.

When To read: After you’ve visited your in-laws, who watch the news every waking hour and insist that America was much better off in the “good old days.”

One of the joys of reading non-fiction is that you can manage your book reading list so that books build on the knowledge, wisdom, and opinion of the previous book as you choose the next book.

In my case, several months ago, I read How Civil Wars Start: And How To Stop Them by Princeton Professor Barbara Walter. In her excellent treatise on how and why civil wars begin, Walter makes the case that most civil wars do not begin with military action, but instead with an aggressively authoritarian but democratically elected chief executive who gradually accumulates power and subverts democratic institutions to the point that the nation is a democracy in name only. With not one shot being fired, the voters in a democratic nation wake up one day to discover that the people in power control everything, and they have no way to displace them.