There is some political science here to help us understand the process of getting to this point, most notably, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's How Democracies Die. The literature is not very broad, but the literature on democratic backsliding is there. You get a party that engages in "ideological collusion," and yes, that really is the term. That means the offending party decides to support an anti-democratic* demagogue who slowly erodes democratic norms and rules, and the demagogue's party goes along with the erosion of those norms and rules because they get policy victories in the process, and they care more about that than about democracy. The end result is that the party that engaged in "ideological collusion" has participated in the destruction of democracy for the sake of some victories, leaving the country bigger-picture-doomed.
There are scholars working on how demagogues get elected, the rise of nationalist movements, and so forth. These are all active topics of research.
There is also a field of research on how non-democratic states turn democratic. Some totalitarian states make a successful transition to democracy (think Germany post WWII), and some don't (like Russia). Why? This isn't really my field, to be blunt, so I'll refrain from commenting broadly, but I read a bunch of stuff years ago. I choose not to embarrass myself by typing things that are highly likely to be wrong given my aging memory and the fact that I was never really an expert on this anyway. However, the political science research is there.
You know what isn't really there? Reversal of backsliding. Democratic backsliding is a thing. See: Levitsky and Ziblatt, which is about as far into comparative politics as my reading usually gets. How scary is Viktor Orban? Hungary arguably had a period of democratic functionality before backsliding, unlike Russia, so I'm putting that in the backsliding category. And that dude is terrifying.
So, yes, democratic backsliding is real. What, though, are the cases in which it reversed itself? We don't really have a broad literature here, to my knowledge. I could be wrong here, but I haven't read it.
Why don't we have that literature? Well, bluntly, democratic backsliding, as opposed to state failure, is a relatively new phenomenon. Because democracy, in historical terms, is a relatively new phenomenon.
What about countries that have experienced democratic backsliding, or anything like it? Are they just forever doomed?
Well, what's the worst case?
Arguably, Germany. Stalin and Mao have the motherfucker beat in terms of body count, and yeah, clutch those pearls because I typed, "motherfucker." That's the right reaction when the topic is genocide. Perspective, right?
Anyway, let's go with Germany. (Neither the Soviet Union nor Mao's China were post-democratic states anyway.) As we all know, racist, white-nationalist demagogues only get elected when the economy is in tatters, right?
Oh, right. Never mind. I'll come back to this one in a future post, but for now, remember that Germany did actually have a vaguely-democratic system, and yeah, it was weird, but it didn't stop Hitler. Hi, Godwin!
Anyway, Germany may not be paradise, but in terms of small-d democracy, they're not one of the countries in tatters today. One can make some critical arguments about the role they play setting monetary policy in the EU, but it is possible to go from Hitler to functioning democracy.
That's just... not a path anyone wants to take. Of course, Trump ain't Hitler, but the basic problem is that there is a point at which problems are so deeply ingrained, not just within existing governmental institutions, but within the party that ideologically colluded with the anti-democratic demagogue that reform to governmental institutions alone doesn't work anymore, and that's the problem.
When a party is willing to violate the rules for the sake of power, changing the rules is a) impossible, and b) futile.
That's why we don't really have much of a literature on the reversal of democratic backsliding. Levitsky & Ziblatt explain what's going on now. Reversing it? I think we're past that point. Without facts, and without the institutional capacity for checks and balances, we're past that point.
And we don't have a political science literature for what comes after Levitsky & Ziblatt. Of course, that's partially because their book is still rather new, as the phenomenon they observe spreads.
And it may be a moot point anyway. If it takes too long for any kind of correction, climate change will take care of everything anyway. I suppose that's one way to look at it.
*Small-d