The Road to Autocracy (How We Lost-and Can Recover-Our Democracy)

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist’s sweeping, six-decade reckoning with how America’s powerful elites fractured the nation opening the road to autocracy, and how We the People can bring our democracy back from the brink.

American democracy stands at a precipice. In this urgent, authoritative book, veteran reporter Hedrick Smith asks how a nation founded on the separation of powers arrived at the brink of one-man rule.

What marks Smith’s book apart from other democracy-in-crisis titles is his vantage point, his eyewitness accounts of pivotal moments of history. Smith has covered Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, the Kremlin and the Cold War, Corporate America and the fleecing of the middle class, and the Washington power game under six US presidents.

As a former Moscow and Washinton correspondent, Smith compares Donald Trump to Russian leader Vladimir Putin: Two rulers, both bent on wielding absolute power, imposing their will on the world, trampling on rival power centers, overturning the rule of law, hunting down their enemies, and unilaterally waging war, only to get trapped by delusions of their omnipotence.

Trump’s imperial presidency, Smith argues, is the culmination of a long, slow fracturing of America by the nation’s power elites: presidents, generals, congressional leaders, and corporate CEOs. From bitter discord over forever-wars, a winner-takes-all economy that left a stagnating middle class smoldering against a soaring elite, from rigged elections, dark money and hostile partisan warfare, Smith exposes the fault lines that made our republic vulnerable to an aspiring autocrat.

The Road to Autocracy is also a roadmap back. Smith highlights the riptides of resistance—in the courts, in the states, in an angry electorate—and lays out how to repair our constitutional guardrails. Vivid, clear-eyed, and ultimately hopeful, this is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here—and how to find our way home.