Democracies typically die gradually, not in a single dramatic event

Snyder's foundational point is that authoritarian takeovers of once-functioning democracies rarely resemble a sudden coup; more often, they proceed through a series of individually defensible-seeming steps — an emergency decree here, a norm quietly abandoned there — each of which is easier to accept than the last because the previous step has already normalized a slightly eroded baseline. Weimar Germany's transition provides his central historical reference point, where legal mechanisms were used, step by step, to dismantle the very democratic structures that enabled them.

His warning is that this incrementalism is precisely what makes authoritarian consolidation hard to resist in real time: by the point the erosion is unmistakable to everyone, the institutional tools needed to reverse it have often already been weakened or captured.

Takeaway: the earliest, smallest steps toward authoritarianism are the ones easiest to resist — and the ones most likely to be dismissed as not yet serious.