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. The last seven years are the hottest seven years are the hottest seven years ever recorded.

Breaking even more heat records this week,

the National Weather Service says this summer is the hottest in history.

Many cities are on track to experience their hottest summer on record.

The summer of 2024 broke heat records all around the world, just like the summer of

2023 and the summer of 2022.

But don't worry, the clever consumer goods industry

has thought up a solution.

Instead of telling you what it is,

I'll let you hear it.

Can you hear it? Wait, that's the neck fan?

It sounds freaking,

...