"Nothing lasts forever. At some point democracy was always going to pass into the annals of history. But few people around today thought it would happen in their lifetimes. And until very recently almost no one thought it might happen right before our eyes. Now many are asking: Is this how democracy ends? In this surprising and counterintuitive book, the eminent political philosopher David Runciman argues that we are trapped in outdated modes of thinking. Our expectations are shaped by past stories of democracies collapsing--Europe in the 1930s, Latin America in the 1970s--but we are wrong if we think that history will repeat itself. Western societies are too affluent, too elderly, and too networked to fall apart as they did in the past. We need to stop looking for tanks in the streets and start looking for the twenty-first-century symptoms. The real danger to democracy lies in our increasingly decayed institutions. We are more at risk from conmen than from extremists. We are more likely to see our democracy hollowed out by technology than taken over by tyrants. All political systems come to an end. Runciman helps us think about the previously unthinkable: what will democratic failure look like in the twenty-first century? And what will come after?"--Dust jacket.