From SciTechDaily: Democracy in Distress? Global Trend of Democratic Governments That Collapse From Within

For your paper, if you want.

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When the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, it seemed democracy had triumphed among political systems. But more recently, many democracies have run into a common set of troubles, with authoritarian leaders grasping enough power to create illiberal regimes.

Understanding how this happens was the focus of MIT’s October 23, 2020, Starr Forum (see video below), an online event hosted by the Center for International Studies (CIS) in which a series of experts evaluated the condition of democracy around the globe.

“Democracies do not die the way they used to die,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, during the virtual event. “Democracies used to die at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, three out of every four democratic breakdowns took the form of a classic military coup. … Today democracies die in a much more subtle way. They die at the hands not of generals, but of elected leaders, presidents, prime ministers who use the very institutions of democracy to subvert it.”

Indeed, while in the U.S. democratic difficulties are often expected to create a “constitutional crisis,” this can be an “amorphous term” that fails to address the longer-term political dynamics, noted Susan Hennessey, the executive editor of the Lawfare blog, general counsel of the Lawfare Institute, and a Brookings Fellow in national security law.

“In the United States we often think about it as a discrete precipitating event in which the constitutional order is imperiled and then the constitutional order is restored,” Hennessey said. “The more useful analogy of this moment is constitutional rot. We are unlikely at this point to be faced with a single event that shatters the system. Instead what we’re seeing is a slow erosion over time.”