Trump’s potential path to total control

Politics: How Democracies Die: What History Tells Us About Our Future, By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Viking, €17.95

In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was invited to become Germany’s chancellor by a group of elite politicians who thought they could control him. “We’ve engaged Hitler for ourselves,” the nobleman Franz von Papen boasted to his colleagues. “Within two months, we will have pushed him so far into a corner that he’ll squeal.” One ...