The disintegration of a democracy is a deceptively quiet affair. For a while, everything looks the same. Each authoritarian milestone—the first political prisoner, the first closure of an opposition media outlet—is anticipated with fear. Then the milestone goes by, and after a brief period of outrage, life continues as before. You begin to wonder if things will be so bad after all.Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the Venezuela of my childhood, during the period when experts and historians warned, on television channels that would later be shut down, that Hugo Chávez was making himself a dictator. They said that his economic mismanagement—the extravagant expenditures, the graft, the attacks on central-bank independence—would cause a severe crisis when oil prices went down.My family listened to those pundits and believed them, but we didn’t know what to do with that information. My father used to say that living in Venezuela was like driving a car that you know is not being maintained. For now, the car works fine, but one day it will break down. And when it does, the moment to repair the car will have passed.Substantive change came to Venezuela, but it took time. In 2001, Chávez purged the nationalized oil company of managers and engineers who weren’t politically aligned with him. The company’s embittered ex-employees warned that national oil production would decline, and they were right, but that would take five more years to manifest. Chávez expropriated millions of hectares of farmland, and farmers went on TV to say that a food crisis was approaching. But as long as oil prices were high, supermarket shelves could be filled with imported milk.[Gisela Salim-Peyer: Why I left Venezuela]In those years, the 2000s, the most immediate changes concerned only names and symbols. The way we kept time changed: Chávez turned the clock back 30 minutes because the scheme of hourly divisions should not be dictated by the imperial United States. The name of the country changed: Venezuela became the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, after the independence hero Simón Bolívar. And Chávez added a star to the Venezuelan flag to recognize the province of Guyana, because that’s what Bolívar would have wanted.By the beginning of the 2010s, the crisis was coming, we were sure. Maybe it had already begun. In the meantime, what did we do? Some of the rich talked about a “plan B”—moving to Miami or Madrid. Those who had savings tried to convert them to U.S. dollars. On every national holiday, my grandmother made a point of waving the old version of the flag, challenging the police to fine her. She used to say that when democracy returned to Venezuela, the first thing the new government should do was remove the star Chávez added—Guyana be damned—arguing that Chávez should not have gotten to decide what was on the flag.Another activity that kept adults around me busy was debate. Up until inflation reached 1 million percent, the question of whether the criteria had been met to use the word hyperinflation preoccupied many Venezuelan scholars. And also: Could we say that Venezuela had become Communist, like Cuba? That Chávez was like Fidel Castro? Cuban exiles in Venezuela certainly saw many parallels between the two men’s leadership and sartorial styles. Both leaders wore military green and deployed the rhetoric of class warfare. But academics pointed out that Chávez’s repressive methods were not as suffocating as Castro’s were: We didn’t have to worry that our next-door neighbors were spying on us—at least not yet.Chávez died in 2013. Then the long-feared effects of his policies began to roll out, one by one. Just because the pundits had warned the public about the inevitability of an economic crisis didn’t mean we were ready for it when it happened.I was studying abroad during the worst years, circa 2018, but my family’s reports were as bleak as those on the news. People I knew, members of a middle class who had lived comfortably enough to assume that they would never lack food, grew skinnier. Shampoo became a luxury; when I asked one of my better-off friends how she was washing her hair, she teared up and told me she hadn’t done so in weeks. My European friends asked me how Venezuelans were surviving such scarcity, and the truth was, I didn’t know. But I would tell them about the mango tree in my garden.When I was growing up, so many mangoes fell from our tree during the summer months that my father would give most of them away, worried that otherwise they’d rot. He would pack them in plastic bags and bring them to the office where he worked as a computer programer, and the building employees were welcome to take as many as they wished. Usually, a few mangoes were left at the end of the day.Every year after Chávez died, food became less affordable, and the building employees took more mangoes. When I left the country, my father told me that not only the janitors were taking them, but also the secretaries and white-collar professionals. I understood how bad things had gotten only when my father told me that he had found two of the building’s security guards waiting for him in the parking lot, more than half an hour after their shifts had ended, to see if my father had any mangoes left.When I was a kid, I used to think that the Venezuelan opposition’s obsession with obtaining confirmation that a certain label applied to our country was a little silly, a little beside the point. But in America, I find myself participating in similar discussions: Is America “fascist”? Can we say that a “constitutional crisis” has arrived?The best argument in favor of having these conversations seems to be that if smart people can all agree on a certain label, then surely something will be done. But in Venezuela, the only reward many intellectuals got for eventually being proved correct was the right to say I told you so. I don’t think it gave them much satisfaction.The problem with constantly hearing about impending collapse as life goes on looking very much the same is that the urgency tends to dissipate.In a short story that I love, a man lives with his sister, Irene, in a beautiful, historic house. He spends his days shopping for and reading French books; she spends hers knitting. They love the house.One day, someone (we don’t know who) invades a part of the house (we don’t know why). Irene and her brother hear the noise and understand that they are now confined to the rooms that have not been taken over. Irene has her needles and yarn, so she can continue knitting. The man still has some of his books. They adjust and go about their lives. But in time, the rest of the house is taken over, and the siblings can no longer stay. Irene looks back and sees her ball of yarn in the room that was once hers but is now beyond her reach. She leaves it, and the house, behind.Julio Cortazar wrote “House Taken Over” in Argentina in the 1940s, when he was forced to resign from his job as a university professor under pressure from the government of Juan Perón. The story captures something essential about what it’s like to lose democratic freedoms. The word autocracy conjures images of police officers violently crushing protests and dissidents going to prison for their ideals. Those things do happen, but for many people, the experience is more passive: Living through the rise of a dictatorship just means inhabiting a space that is gradually shrinking. There’s no point in resisting, not at first. You just make do with whatever breathing room you still have—until you lose that too.[Read: America’s Perón]There is a lag in time between the abstract threat of authoritarianism and its concrete realization, between hoping that your fears are mere paranoia and seeing them fulfilled. For Irene, I imagine, the lag ended the moment she saw the ball of yarn in the room taken over. For my father, it ended the night he found the security guards waiting for mangoes.Many Venezuelans, including some of the people I love and respect the most, disagree over whether our experience has an analog in America. Some point out that America has a longer history of democratic rule than Venezuela does. That the American economy is much more diversified, so no authoritarian could control it as easily as Chávez did ours when he seized the national oil company.Sometimes, Venezuelans of this cast of mind convince me. Then I wonder if they think this way only because watching our country fall apart made us want to believe in a place where truly bad things could never happen: los Estados Unidos. When Venezuela’s currency collapsed, we used U.S. dollars. When a humanitarian crisis struck, many Venezuelans came to the United States. The notion of democracy falling here is too painful to fathom. It means not just that one’s house can get taken over, but also that there might be nowhere else to go.*Sources: Miraflores /Getty; Margaret Bushby Cockburn / Natural History Museum London / Bridgeman Images; Robert Pritchard / Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images