here the other day. I just finished it. The authors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are government professors at Harvard. They came up with a key indicators to authoritarian behavior and then applied them, not just to Germany and Italy which seem almost impossibly ancient, but also more to more recent examples like the Philippines, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezula as well as countries which faced challenges like Finland and Costa Rica. There is also an analysis of Donald Trump. In summary the indicators are...

1. Rejection of, or weak commitment to, democratic rules of the game. (Do they reject or express willingness to violate the Constitution, do they suggest cancelling elections or restricting them, do they endorse extraconstitutional means to change government, do they undermine the legitimacy of elections by refusing to accept electoral results?)
2. Denial of legitimacy of political opponents. (Do they describe rivals as subversive, do they describe them as an existential threat, do they baselessly describe them as criminals, do they baselessly describe them as foreign agents?)
3. Toleration or encouragement of violence. (Do they have ties to armed gangs or militias, do they encourage mob attacks on opponents, do they refuse to condemn violence on their behalf, do they praise or refuse to condemn acts of violence elsewhere in the world?)
4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including the media. (Have they supported expanded libel or defamation laws, or laws restricting protest or criticism of the government, have they threatened legal action against rival parties or the media, have they praised repressive measurements by governments elsewhere?)

I think we can come up with some obvious examples in this administration. But the most cogent point in the book I thought, was that all of the countries in questions had Constitutions remarkably similar to ours, intentionally so. Nevertheless, erosion of democratic norms and institutional integrity led to authoritarianism. I think we are well down the road to eroding these norms, which is one reason, for example, that I think the SOTU should go on and why I want us to defeat Trump at the ballot box and not by impeachment. The problem with authoritarians is that if we violate the norms to try to remove them, we risk setting the playing field for other more dangerous people in the future.