Militant Normals is an enjoyable read, a rollicking journey with the acid tongue of Kurt Schlichter as our tour leader.  It is full of facts that are impossible to dispute, because they are facts.  It draws difficult-to-argue conclusions, including that our near future is likely grim.  That said, I think Schlichter’s elite/normal framework misses important nuances and is a bit too glib.  But even so, the well-deserved spanking Schlichter gives the Left is worth the price of admission.

This may be the worst well-written book I have ever read.  That is, most awful books are bad in their writing, bad in their organization, bad in their reasoning, and bad in their typesetting.  No such badness is evident here—How Democracies Die hits all the points it intends to, and reads crisply and smoothly.  But it is ruined by a meta-problem:  its utter cluelessness and total lack of self-reference.  The authors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, are very much like the Ken Doll in the Toy Story movies—vain, preening, and, most of all, utterly unable to realize, not that the joke is on them, but that they themselves are the joke.