I love a good story about authoritarianism as much as the next person, but Kurt Weyland’s recent tome in the Atlantic riled me up in a way that a bookish political science piece hasn’t in a long time.

In a long and somewhat drawn-out fashion, Weyland paints a Latin America that is becoming less democratic, succumbing to those charismatic populist tendencies of yore. He also conveniently and neatly draws the continent into two buckets: safely democratic and not safely democratic.

(To be fair, he doesn’t project the labels on Paraguay, much of Central America, or the Guyanas – I’m just assuming silence means authoritarianism.)

I’m not here to defend crazy economic policy, or the megalomaniacal tendencies that Weyland accurately portrays in his article, rather my beef is this pesky idea in American academic and policy circles that macroeconomic orthodoxy is a prerequisite for a democratic government, or that Latin American…