M. Steven Fish is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He writes and comments extensively on international affairs and the rising challenges to democracy in the United States and around the world. His most recent book is Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge (2024). 

Fish appears on CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and other major networks, and has published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The American Interest, The Daily Beast, Slate, and Foreign Policy.

In addition to UC Berkeley, Fish has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and universities in Russia, Poland, China, and Indonesia. He has also served as an expert consultant to U.S. federal agencies and international organizations such as the European Commission for Democracy through Law.

Fish grew up in small cities and towns in the Midwest and the South. After graduating from Central High School in Louisville, Kentucky, Steve went on to earn a BA from Cornell, an MA from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a PhD from Stanford.

He spent much of his early career studying and living in Russia and wrote his first several books (Democracy from Scratch and Democracy Derailed in Russia) on Russians’ struggle for democracy and then the country’s return to authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin.

Steve’s interests then turned to religion and politics, and he spent time in Indonesia studying how the world’s largest Muslim-majority country threw off its dictatorship and wrote Are Muslims Distinctive? His research around the world also convinced him that countries with stronger legislatures have a better chance at achieving democracy, and he coauthored The Handbook of National Legislatures, which measures the power of every national legislature in the world.

Until Trump’s election, he assumed democracy was secure in his own country and that he could stick with studying countries where democracy was new or endangered. After Trump won and turned his party into a democracy-battering machine, Steve got busy trying to mobilize what he has learned as a comparative political scientist to grasp how we got Trump and how Americans who treasure their freedom can defeat authoritarianism on our own shores. Comeback is Steve’s answer to that burning question.