**New York Times bestseller** A sort of survival book; a sort of symptom-diagnosis manual in terms of losing your democracy and what tyranny and authoritarianism look like up close Rachel Maddow these 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century; and all that we appear to have forgotten Observer History does not repeat; but it does instruct. In the twentieth century; European democracies collapsed into fascism; Nazism and communism. these were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people; promised to protect them from global existential threats; and rejected reason in favour of myth. European history shows us that societies can break; democracies can fall; ethics can collapse; and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. History can familiarise; and it can warn. Today; we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. But when the political order seems imperilled; our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny. Now is a good time to do so.