A political science professor at Yale named Milan Svolik is an expert on authoritarian rule. In a recent publication on polarization and democracy, he asks, “When can we realistically expect ordinary people to check the authoritarian ambitions of elected politicians?” He then adds that the answer to this question is key to understanding the most prominent development in the dynamic of democratic survival since the end of the Cold War. Svolik examines what he calls “executive takeovers,” or the