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 subversion of democracy by democratically elected officials, which he says has been the modal form of democratic subversion for the past 45 years. He finds that democratic breakdowns almost always come in one of two forms—either executive takeovers or military coups—and that executive takeovers occurred in a plurality of cases. The rise of executive takeovers challenges our understanding of democratic stability. Politicians must first gain enough popular support to capture the executive by