Authoritarian Rupture

Authoritarianism rarely arrives in a single day. It grows through fear, grievance, lies repeated until they feel true, institutions bent toward private power, and ordinary people taught to see one another as enemies.Authoritarian Rupture examines the point at which those pressures stop looking like politics as usual and begin breaking a democratic society apart. Zoë Roberts traces the mechanisms behind the fracture: manufactured crisis, scapegoating, political violence, institutional capture, social isolation, and the steady replacement of shared reality with loyalty to power.But rupture is not only destruction. A system can crack because people finally see what it has become.Clear-eyed, urgent, and grounded in history, psychology, political theory, and civic life, Authoritarian Rupture is a guide to recognizing the break before it becomes irreversible-and to understanding what citizens can still do when democracy is under strain.