There's a common perception that democracy ends with a battle, soldiers in the streets, a coup d'etat, the fall of a government.

But we know that democracy can be lost one little step at a time.

We've reported on it and lived through it.

And when we look at America today, right now,

we see a place where the slide to autocracy has already begun.

It's not some distant future, it's the present.

I'm Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at the Atlantic.

I'm Peter Pomerantse of a senior fellow at the

S&F Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

We're the host of a new podcast from the Atlantic, Autocracy in America.

Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah Rosen, this is radio Atlantic. I came across a few stats recently in this book

Quick Fixes by Benjamin Fong that really confirmed a sense I had about how much we

Americans love our drugs.

Fong pulls together data that shows that at 4% of the Earth's population,

we use 80% of its opioids and 83% of its ADHD meds. One in three Americans suffers from anxiety, depression, or both,

and one in six is on psychiatric medication.

Fong calls these numbers truly world historical.

Why us?

I mean, it can't just be biological,

that these drugs somehow work differently on American bodies

than they do on other bodies.

It must also be cultural.

...