How to Lose a Country

The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship

By: Ece Temelkuran

Narrated by: Ece Temelkuran

Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

An urgent call to action from one of Europe’s most well-regarded political thinkers. How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship is a field guide to spotting the insidious patterns and mechanisms of the populist wave sweeping the globe - before it’s too late.

"It couldn’t happen here."

Ece Temelkuran heard reasonable people in America say it the night Trump’s election was soundtracked by chants of "Build that wall." 

She heard reasonable people in Britain say it the night of the Brexit vote. 

She heard reasonable people in Turkey say it as Erdoğan rigged elections, rebuilt the economy around cronyism, and labelled his opposition as terrorists. 

How to Lose a Country is an impassioned plea, a warning to the world that populism and nationalism don’t march fully-formed into government; they creep. Award winning author and journalist Ece Temelkuran, identifies the early-warning signs of this phenomenon, sprouting up across the world from Eastern Europe to South America, in order to define a global pattern, and arm the reader with the tools to root it out. 

Proposing alternative, global answers to the pressing - and too often paralyzing - political questions of our time, Temelkuran explores the insidious idea of "real people", the infantilization of language and debate, the way laughter can prove a false friend, and the dangers of underestimating one’s opponent. She weaves memoir, history and clear-sighted argument into an urgent and eloquent defence of democracy. 

No longer can the reasonable comfort themselves with "it couldn’t happen here." It is happening. And soon it may be too late.

©2019 Ece Temelkuran (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"Temelkuran, a treasure of a novelist, turns a nonfiction eye to the burning topic of today: populism. Vivid, visionary, terrifyingly familiar, How to Lose a Country is essential reading for everyone on planet Earth." (Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less)

"This is a keenly observed and passionately written book. Read it or be prepared to lose your country." (Rabih Alameddine)

"The opponents of authoritarian populist and nationalist regimes have often failed to foresee or effectively resist their rise until it was too late. This highly informed and original book is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the forces that are convulsing our world." (Patrick Cockburn, author of Rise of the Islamic State)

Canary in the coal mine

I've read about a dozen books on fascism and closely related topics -- for obvious reasons -- since November 2016, and this is easily one of the best. Ece Temelkuran describes her country's transition from democracy to authoritarianism in vivid, first-person, all-too-familiar detail. As it turns out, Turkey was a canary in the coal mine; Poland, Hungary, Brazil, the US, and many other countries are now on similar paths. (If you just balked at reading the previous sentence, even a little, you really need to read/listen to this book.) So good I bought a hard copy to read the old fashioned way.

Backwash

Complete backwash while it does have some merit it’s full of tangential garbage. You can’t compare autocracy and populism , left wing socialism is also populism and breeds violence and segregation.

Ece hates Trump

Ok, we get it. Ece hates Trump and all conservatives. The irony in this work is that almost all the things she hates about conservatives”populist” are the same things conservatives hate about the far left “populists”. A middle school temper tantrum at best.

A Wake-up Call for the Free World

As gripping and personal as it is scholarly in its understanding of what events need to happen to replace democracy with facism. This is a must-read/must-listen book if you are wondering , "is this my country?" I'm going to buy the Kindle edition next, so I can highlight and share important passages. No easy solutions in the book, but a call-to-action: stop being a spectator and participate in democracy.

Very personal stories, but very poorly supported

Starting with the good: The book provides a fairly engaging overview of the author's personal observations on right-wing populism, rooted in her personal experiences in Turkey and her personal observations (not experiences) in countries around the world. If you're interested in listening to how someone else might be processing these movements, it's a useful read.
That being said, this personal approach has its downsides. She grounds a lot of her argument in very light philosophy and beliefs in fluffy ideas on what she thinks is inherent to human nature. Thus, her specific points are flimsy at best. This becomes worse when she clearly misinterprets US politics on multiple occasions. These misinterpretations make me question her judgment and whether even her perspective on Turkey is valid.
Furthermore, the chapters themselves are not entirely coherent. The confusion stretches beyond countries that are foreign to her upbringing (like the US; she is from Turkey) to the narrative structure itself. There have been chapters (e.g., the one on the post-truth world) where she begins a discussion on one topic, segues into another topic as though it is connected, and never comes back to rationalize her points on the first topic. Perhaps this is because she gravitates towards attempting to contradict conventional wisdom (thus justifying the existence of the book and her perspective), but this obsession with unconventional "wisdom" ultimately leaves the book incoherent, and poorly-supported.
Many parts of the argument itself appear to be flawed. She is clearly dismissive of the ideas that those following populists have real grievances and that there is anything of value in neoliberalism (ironically, she proposes no *clear and cogent* alternative to neoliberalism). And since her argument isn't well-supported, her perspective is likewise easy to dismiss.
TL; DR: Read this to understand how someone else thinks about these movements. And maybe to learn a bit more about Turkey. But do your own thinking. And don't come here for wisdom.

Fantastical story telling

At the end, there was light.

I hope Turkey will wake up and stop this madness.