Crossing the line.

DEMOCRACY is dying. This may seem a strange thing to say as the world breathes a sigh of relief, buoyed by the pro-democracy paean that was US President Joe Biden's inaugural speech. But as important as they are, beautiful speeches cannot resuscitate dying political systems. And dying they are.

In How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the real threat to democracy no longer comes from major upheavals such as coups, dictatorships or suspensions of the constitution. Instead, it comes from within the system itself.

As the authors put it: 'Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders - presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.' They continue: 'Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are 'legal', in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even by portrayed as efforts to improve democracy'. The authors argue that this form of democratic collapse is more sinister as people don't realise what is happening; 'there is no single moment ... in which the regime obviously 'crosses the line' into dictatorship, nothing may set off society's alarm bells'.

Levitsky and Ziblatt also provide a litmus test for authoritarian behaviour, to help track when elected leaders begin to behave in ways that make democracies die. They focus on four traits: rejection of democratic rules of the game (refusing to accept election results, delaying elections, restricting civil rights); denial of the legitimacy of political opponents (declaring opponents to be foreign agents, national security threats, anti-patriotic, or criminal); toleration or encouragement of violence (refusal to condemn violence by supporters, endorsement of mobs); readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including the media (including laws that restrict protest or criticism of the government, legal or punitive action against rivals, such as political parties and the press).

The danger comes from within the system.

Writing following the election of Trump in 2016, the authors' goal was to help ostensible democracies recognise their slide into authoritarianism. Beyond Trump, their model can be applied to lapsed democrats such as Hungary's Orban or Turkey's Erdogan.

Pakistanis may think this analysis has less relevance for our...