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The Last Time Democracy Almost Died

By Jill Lepore

The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “Now, now, we don’t allow that,” the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave.

In the nineteen-thirties, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks to get scraps of food, and democracies dying, from the Andes to the Urals and the Alps.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson’s Administration had promised that winning the Great War would “make the world safe for democracy.” The peace carved nearly a dozen new states out of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. The number of democracies in the world rose; the spread of liberal-democratic governance began to appear inevitable. But this was no more than a reverie. Infant democracies grew, toddled, wobbled, and fell: Hungary, Albania, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia. In older states, too, the desperate masses turned to authoritarianism. Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. It had taken a century and a half for European monarchs who ruled by divine right and brute force to be replaced by constitutional democracies and the rule of law. Now Fascism and Communism toppled these governments in a matter of months, even before the stock-market crash of 1929 and the misery that ensued.

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“Epitaphs for democracy are the fashion of the day,” the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, dismally, in 1930. The annus horribilis that followed differed from every other year in the history of the world, according to the British historian Arnold Toynbee: “In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work.” When Japan invaded Manchuria, the League of Nations condemned the annexation, to no avail. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Mussolini predicted in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” By 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann was telling an audience of students at Berkeley that “the old relationships among the great masses of the people of the earth have disappeared.” What next? More epitaphs: Greece, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia. Authoritarians multiplied in Portugal, Uruguay, Spain. Japan invaded Shanghai. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. “The present century is the century of authority,” he declared, “a century of the Right, a Fascist century.”

American democracy, too, staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” F.D.R. said in his first Inaugural Address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans’ own declining faith in self-government. “What Does Democracy Mean?” NBC radio asked listeners. “Do we Negroes believe in democracy?” W. E. B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered, and hungered, and wondered. The historian Charles Beard, in the inevitable essay on “The Future of Democracy in the United States,” predicted that American democracy would endure, if only because “there is in America, no Rome, no Berlin to march on.” Some Americans turned to Communism . Some turned to Fascism. And a lot of people, worried about whether American democracy could survive past the end of the decade, strove to save it.

“It’s not too late,” Jimmy Stewart pleaded with Congress, rasping, exhausted, in “ Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ,” in 1939. “Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light.” It wasn’t too late. It’s still not too late.

There’s a kind of likeness you see in family photographs, generation after generation. The same ears, the same funny nose. Sometimes now looks a lot like then. Still, it can be hard to tell whether the likeness is more than skin deep.

In the nineteen-nineties, with the end of the Cold War, democracies grew more plentiful, much as they had after the end of the First World War. As ever, the infant-mortality rate for democracies was high: baby democracies tend to die in their cradles. Starting in about 2005, the number of democracies around the world began to fall, as it had in the nineteen-thirties. Authoritarians rose to power: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Donald J. Trump in the United States.

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“American democracy,” as a matter of history, is democracy with an asterisk, the symbol A-Rod’s name would need if he were ever inducted into the Hall of Fame. Not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act can the United States be said to have met the basic conditions for political equality requisite in a democracy. All the same, measured not against its past but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from “full democracy” to “authoritarian regime.” In 2006, the U.S. was a “full democracy,” the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a “flawed democracy,” and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed. True, the United States still doesn’t have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn’t saved the nation from misinformation, tribalization, domestic terrorism, human-rights abuses, political intolerance, social-media mob rule, white nationalism, a criminal President, the nobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, and an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe.

Nothing so sharpens one’s appreciation for democracy as bearing witness to its demolition. Mussolini called Italy and Germany “the greatest and soundest democracies which exist in the world today,” and Hitler liked to say that, with Nazi Germany, he had achieved a “beautiful democracy,” prompting the American political columnist Dorothy Thompson to remark of the Fascist state, “If it is going to call itself democratic we had better find another word for what we have and what we want.” In the nineteen-thirties, Americans didn’t find another word. But they did work to decide what they wanted, and to imagine and to build it. Thompson, who had been a foreign correspondent in Germany and Austria and had interviewed the Führer, said, in a column that reached eight million readers, “Be sure you know what you prepare to defend.”

It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent. American democracy in the nineteen-thirties had plenty of critics, left and right, from Mexican-Americans who objected to a brutal regime of forced deportations to businessmen who believed the New Deal to be unconstitutional. W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that, unless the United States met its obligations to the dignity and equality of all its citizens and ended its enthrallment to corporations, American democracy would fail: “If it is going to use this power to force the world into color prejudice and race antagonism; if it is going to use it to manufacture millionaires, increase the rule of wealth, and break down democratic government everywhere; if it is going increasingly to stand for reaction, fascism, white supremacy and imperialism; if it is going to promote war and not peace; then America will go the way of the Roman Empire.”

The historian Mary Ritter Beard warned that American democracy would make no headway against its “ruthless enemies—war, fascism, ignorance, poverty, scarcity, unemployment, sadistic criminality, racial persecution, man’s lust for power and woman’s miserable trailing in the shadow of his frightful ways”—unless Americans could imagine a future democracy in which women would no longer be barred from positions of leadership: “If we will not so envisage our future, no Bill of Rights, man’s or woman’s, is worth the paper on which it is printed.”

If the United States hasn’t gone the way of the Roman Empire and the Bill of Rights is still worth more than the paper on which it’s printed, that’s because so many people have been, ever since, fighting the fights Du Bois and Ritter Beard fought. There have been wins and losses. The fight goes on.

Could no system of rule but extremism hold back the chaos of economic decline? In the nineteen-thirties, people all over the world, liberals, hoped that the United States would be able to find a middle road, somewhere between the malignity of a state-run economy and the mercilessness of laissez-faire capitalism. Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 on the promise to rescue American democracy by way of a “new deal for the American people,” his version of that third way: relief, recovery, and reform. He won forty-two of forty-eight states, and trounced the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, in the Electoral College 472 to 59. Given the national emergency in which Roosevelt took office, Congress granted him an almost entirely free hand, even as critics raised concerns that the powers he assumed were barely short of dictatorial.

New Dealers were trying to save the economy; they ended up saving democracy. They built a new America; they told a new American story. On New Deal projects, people from different parts of the country labored side by side, constructing roads and bridges and dams, everything from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Hoover Dam, joining together in a common endeavor, shoulder to the wheel, hand to the forge. Many of those public-works projects, like better transportation and better electrification, also brought far-flung communities, down to the littlest town or the remotest farm, into a national culture, one enriched with new funds for the arts, theatre, music, and storytelling. With radio, more than with any other technology of communication, before or since, Americans gained a sense of their shared suffering, and shared ideals: they listened to one another’s voices.

This didn’t happen by accident. Writers and actors and directors and broadcasters made it happen. They dedicated themselves to using the medium to bring people together. Beginning in 1938, for instance, F.D.R.’s Works Progress Administration produced a twenty-six-week radio-drama series for CBS called “Americans All, Immigrants All,” written by Gilbert Seldes, the former editor of The Dial. “What brought people to this country from the four corners of the earth?” a pamphlet distributed to schoolteachers explaining the series asked. “What gifts did they bear? What were their problems? What problems remain unsolved?” The finale celebrated the American experiment: “The story of magnificent adventure! The record of an unparalleled event in the history of mankind!”

There is no twenty-first-century equivalent of Seldes’s “Americans All, Immigrants All,” because it is no longer acceptable for a serious artist to write in this vein, and for this audience, and for this purpose. (In some quarters, it was barely acceptable even then.) Love of the ordinary, affection for the common people, concern for the commonweal: these were features of the best writing and art of the nineteen-thirties. They are not so often features lately.

Americans reëlected F.D.R. in 1936 by one of the widest margins in the country’s history. American magazines continued the trend from the twenties, in which hardly a month went by without their taking stock: “Is Democracy Doomed?” “Can Democracy Survive?” (Those were the past century’s versions of more recent titles, such as “ How Democracy Ends ,” “ Why Liberalism Failed ,” “ How the Right Lost Its Mind ,” and “ How Democracies Die .” The same ears, that same funny nose.) In 1934, the Christian Science Monitor published a debate called “Whither Democracy?,” addressed “to everyone who has been thinking about the future of democracy—and who hasn’t.” It staked, as adversaries, two British scholars: Alfred Zimmern, a historian from Oxford, on the right, and Harold Laski, a political theorist from the London School of Economics, on the left. “Dr. Zimmern says in effect that where democracy has failed it has not been really tried,” the editors explained. “Professor Laski sees an irrepressible conflict between the idea of political equality in democracy and the fact of economic inequality in capitalism, and expects at least a temporary resort to Fascism or a capitalistic dictatorship.” On the one hand, American democracy is safe; on the other hand, American democracy is not safe.

Zimmern and Laski went on speaking tours of the United States, part of a long parade of visiting professors brought here to prognosticate on the future of democracy. Laski spoke to a crowd three thousand strong, in Washington’s Constitution Hall. “ Laski Tells How to Save Democracy ,” the Washington Post reported. Zimmern delivered a series of lectures titled “The Future of Democracy,” at the University of Buffalo, in which he warned that democracy had been undermined by a new aristocracy of self-professed experts. “I am no more ready to be governed by experts than I am to be governed by the ex-Kaiser,” he professed, expertly.

The year 1935 happened to mark the centennial of the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “ Democracy in America ,” an occasion that elicited still more lectures from European intellectuals coming to the United States to remark on its system of government and the character of its people, close on Tocqueville’s heels. Heinrich Brüning, a scholar and a former Chancellor of Germany, lectured at Princeton on “The Crisis of Democracy”; the Swiss political theorist William Rappard gave the same title to a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago. In “The Prospects for Democracy,” the Scottish historian and later BBC radio quiz-show panelist Denis W. Brogan offered little but gloom: “The defenders of democracy, the thinkers and writers who still believe in its merits, are in danger of suffering the fate of Aristotle, who kept his eyes fixedly on the city-state at a time when that form of government was being reduced to a shadow by the rise of Alexander’s world empire.” Brogan hedged his bets by predicting the worst. It’s an old trick.

The endless train of academics were also called upon to contribute to the nation’s growing number of periodicals. In 1937, The New Republic , arguing that “at no time since the rise of political democracy have its tenets been so seriously challenged as they are today,” ran a series on “The Future of Democracy,” featuring pieces by the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. “Do you think that political democracy is now on the wane?” the editors asked each writer. The series’ lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took issue with the question, as philosophers, thankfully, do. “I call this kind of question ‘meteorological,’ ” he grumbled. “It is like asking, ‘Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?’ ” The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. “We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.”

Don’t ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain.

Here are some of the sorts of people who went out and stopped the rain in the nineteen-thirties: schoolteachers, city councillors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil-rights activists, and investigative reporters. They knew what they were prepared to defend and they defended it, even though they also knew that they risked attack from both the left and the right. Charles Beard (Mary Ritter’s husband) spoke out against the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, when he smeared scholars and teachers as Communists. “The people who are doing the most damage to American democracy are men like Charles A. Beard,” said a historian at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking at a high school on the subject of “Democracy and the Future,” and warning against reading Beard’s books—at a time when Nazis in Germany and Austria were burning “un-German” books in public squares. That did not exactly happen here, but in the nineteen-thirties four of five American superintendents of schools recommended assigning only those U.S. history textbooks which “omit any facts likely to arouse in the minds of the students question or doubt concerning the justice of our social order and government.” Beard’s books, God bless them, raised doubts.

Beard didn’t back down. Nor did W.P.A. muralists and artists, who were subject to the same attack. Instead, Beard took pains to point out that Americans liked to think of themselves as good talkers and good arguers, people with a particular kind of smarts. Not necessarily book learning, but street smarts—reasonableness, open-mindedness, level-headedness. “The kind of universal intellectual prostration required by Bolshevism and Fascism is decidedly foreign to American ‘intelligence,’ ” Beard wrote. Possibly, he allowed, you could call this a stubborn independence of mind, or even mulishness. “Whatever the interpretation, our wisdom or ignorance stands in the way of our accepting the totalitarian assumption of Omniscience,” he insisted. “And to this extent it contributes to the continuance of the arguing, debating, never-settling-anything-finally methods of political democracy.” Maybe that was whistling in the dark, but sometimes a whistle is all you’ve got.

The more argument the better is what the North Carolina-born George V. Denny, Jr., was banking on, anyway, after a neighbor of his, in Scarsdale, declared that he so strongly disagreed with F.D.R. that he never listened to him. Denny, who helped run something called the League for Political Education, thought that was nuts. In 1935, he launched “America’s Town Meeting of the Air,” an hour-long debate program, broadcast nationally on NBC’s Blue Network. Each episode opened with a town crier ringing a bell and hollering, “Town meeting tonight! Town meeting tonight!” Then Denny moderated a debate, usually among three or four panelists, on a controversial subject (Does the U.S. have a truly free press? Should schools teach politics?), before opening the discussion up to questions from an audience of more than a thousand people. The debates were conducted at a lecture hall, usually in New York, and broadcast to listeners gathered in public libraries all over the country, so that they could hold their own debates once the show ended. “We are living today on the thin edge of history,” Max Lerner, the editor of The Nation , said in 1938, during a “Town Meeting of the Air” debate on the meaning of democracy. His panel included a Communist, an exile from the Spanish Civil War, a conservative American political economist, and a Russian columnist. “We didn’t expect to settle anything, and therefore we succeeded,” the Spanish exile said at the end of the hour, offering this definition: “A democracy is a place where a ‘Town Meeting of the Air’ can take place.”

No one expected anyone to come up with an undisputable definition of democracy, since the point was disputation. Asking people about the meaning and the future of democracy and listening to them argue it out was really only a way to get people to stretch their civic muscles. “Democracy can only be saved by democratic men and women,” Dorothy Thompson once said. “The war against democracy begins by the destruction of the democratic temper, the democratic method and the democratic heart. If the democratic temper be exacerbated into wanton unreasonableness, which is the essence of the evil, then a victory has been won for the evil we despise and prepare to defend ourselves against, even though it’s 3,000 miles away and has never moved.”

The most ambitious plan to get Americans to show up in the same room and argue with one another in the nineteen-thirties came out of Des Moines, Iowa, from a one-eyed former bricklayer named John W. Studebaker, who had become the superintendent of the city’s schools. Studebaker, who after the Second World War helped create the G.I. Bill, had the idea of opening those schools up at night, so that citizens could hold debates. In 1933, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and support from the American Association for Adult Education, he started a five-year experiment in civic education.

The meetings began at a quarter to eight, with a fifteen-minute news update, followed by a forty-five-minute lecture, and thirty minutes of debate. The idea was that “the people of the community of every political affiliation, creed, and economic view have an opportunity to participate freely.” When Senator Guy Gillette, a Democrat from Iowa, talked about “Why I Support the New Deal,” Senator Lester Dickinson, a Republican from Iowa, talked about “Why I Oppose the New Deal.” Speakers defended Fascism. They attacked capitalism. They attacked Fascism. They defended capitalism. Within the first nine months of the program, thirteen thousand of Des Moines’s seventy-six thousand adults had attended a forum. The program got so popular that in 1934 F.D.R. appointed Studebaker the U.S. Commissioner of Education and, with the eventual help of Eleanor Roosevelt, the program became a part of the New Deal, and received federal funding. The federal forum program started out in ten test sites—from Orange County, California, to Sedgwick County, Kansas, and Pulaski County, Arkansas. It came to include almost five hundred forums in forty-three states and involved two and a half million Americans. Even people who had steadfastly predicted the demise of democracy participated. “It seems to me the only method by which we are going to achieve democracy in the United States,” Du Bois wrote, in 1937.

The federal government paid for it, but everything else fell under local control, and ordinary people made it work, by showing up and participating. Usually, school districts found the speakers and decided on the topics after collecting ballots from the community. In some parts of the country, even in rural areas, meetings were held four and five times a week. They started in schools and spread to Y.M.C.A.s and Y.W.C.A.s, labor halls, libraries, settlement houses, and businesses, during lunch hours. Many of the meetings were broadcast by radio. People who went to those meetings debated all sorts of things:

Should the Power of the Supreme Court Be Altered? Do Company Unions Help Labor? Do Machines Oust Men? Must the West Get Out of the East? Can We Conquer Poverty? Should Capital Punishment Be Abolished? Is Propaganda a Menace? Do We Need a New Constitution? Should Women Work? Is America a Good Neighbor? Can It Happen Here?

These efforts don’t always work. Still, trying them is better than talking about the weather, and waiting for someone to hand you an umbrella.

When a terrible hurricane hit New England in 1938, Dr. Lorine Pruette, a Tennessee-born psychologist who had written an essay called “Why Women Fail,” and who had urged F.D.R. to name only women to his Cabinet, found herself marooned at a farm in New Hampshire with a young neighbor, sixteen-year-old Alice Hooper, a high-school sophomore. Waiting out the storm, they had nothing to do except listen to the news, which, needless to say, concerned the future of democracy. Alice asked Pruette a question: “What is it everyone on the radio is talking about—what is this democracy—what does it mean?” Somehow, in the end, NBC arranged a coast-to-coast broadcast, in which eight prominent thinkers—two ministers, three professors, a former ambassador, a poet, and a journalist—tried to explain to Alice the meaning of democracy. American democracy had found its “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” moment, except that it was messier, and more interesting, because those eight people didn’t agree on the answer. Democracy, Alice, is the darnedest thing.

That broadcast was made possible by the workers who brought electricity to rural New Hampshire; the legislators who signed the 1934 federal Communications Act, mandating public-interest broadcasting; the executives at NBC who decided that it was important to run this program; the two ministers, the three professors, the former ambassador, the poet, and the journalist who gave their time, for free, to a public forum, and agreed to disagree without acting like asses; and a whole lot of Americans who took the time to listen, carefully, even though they had plenty of other things to do. Getting out of our current jam will likely require something different, but not entirely different. And it will be worth doing.

A decade-long debate about the future of democracy came to a close at the end of the nineteen-thirties—but not because it had been settled. In 1939, the World’s Fair opened in Queens, with a main exhibit featuring the saga of democracy and a chipper motto: “The World of Tomorrow.” The fairgrounds included a Court of Peace, with pavilions for every nation. By the time the fair opened, Czechoslovakia had fallen to Germany, though, and its pavilion couldn’t open. Shortly afterward, Edvard Beneš, the exiled President of Czechoslovakia, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on, yes, the future of democracy, though he spoke less about the future than about the past, and especially about the terrible present, a time of violently unmoored traditions and laws and agreements, a time “of moral and intellectual crisis and chaos.” Soon, more funereal bunting was brought to the World’s Fair, to cover Poland, Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. By the time the World of Tomorrow closed, in 1940, half the European hall lay under a shroud of black.

The federal government stopped funding the forum program in 1941. Americans would take up their debate about the future of democracy, in a different form, only after the defeat of the Axis. For now, there was a war to fight. And there were still essays to publish, if not about the future, then about the present. In 1943, E. B. White got a letter in the mail, from the Writers’ War Board, asking him to write a statement about “ The Meaning of Democracy .” He was a little weary of these pieces, but he knew how much they mattered. He wrote back, “Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.” It meant something once. And, the thing is, it still does. ♦

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Our Democracy Is in Crisis

President Biden convenes global democracies at a difficult time for our own.

• Election Security
• Redistricting
• Vote Suppression

Tomorrow, President Biden will host a global summit on democracy. It is a pared down version of the original planned gathering. Instead of a grand meeting hall, delegates will gather on Zoom. ( Unmute yourself, Mr. Prime Minister. ) Still, Biden’s core insight is right: the world is dividing into a camp of authoritarians facing a community of liberal democracies.   

But it is more than a little awkward for the United States to host this summit right now. An assault on democracy is underway in our country, an assault every bit as unnerving as the rollbacks in places such as Hungary and Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. Indeed, according to Freedom House, our country is backsliding.

We all know the facts. The Big Lie pushed by the former president and his millions of followers. Laws to cut back on voting targeted at racial minorities. Gerrymandering designed, as the Justice Department just alleged in a lawsuit against Texas, to choke off the political voice of Latinos. A systematic drive to remove the obstacles to the theft of the 2024 presidential election. What would we say if this were happening in another country? 

A group of 150 top scholars of American democracy issued an alarming call to action just before Thanksgiving. “Defenders of democracy in America still have a slim window of opportunity to act,” they wrote. “But time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching. To lose our democracy but preserve the filibuster in its current form — in which a minority can block popular legislation without even having to hold the [Senate] floor — would be a short-sighted blunder that future historians will forever puzzle over. The remarkable history of the American system of government is replete with critical, generational moments in which liberal democracy itself was under threat, and Congress asserted its central leadership role in proving that a system of free and fair elections can work.” 

There’s no substitute for presidential leadership at a moment like this. The presidential bully pulpit can be overrated. Chief executives, especially ones with wobbly polling like Biden, cannot simply summon a torrent of public opinion for a preferred policy. But presidents can help set agendas and focus the attention of political and media elites.

President Biden, despite his weakened political standing, can point his party and its lawmakers to the need to act.

Big legislation like the Freedom to Vote Act doesn’t pass without a champion to set the agenda and break the inertia. President Biden’s summit presents a golden opportunity to acknowledge that our democracy is in crisis. It’s time for everyone in Washington to declare which side they’re on. Unmute yourself, Mr. President.

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The Uncomfortable Truths That Could Yet Defeat Fascism

By Anand Giridharadas

Mr. Giridharadas is the author, most recently, of “ The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy .”

Polls swing this way and that way, but the larger story they tell is unmistakable. With the midterm elections, Americans are being offered a clear choice between continued and expanded liberal democracy, on the one hand, and fascism, on the other. And it’s more or less a dead heat.

It is time to speak an uncomfortable truth: The pro-democracy side is at risk not just because of potential electoral rigging, voter suppression and other forms of unfair play by the right, as real as those things are. In America (as in various other countries), the pro-democracy cause — a coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, even decent Republicans who still believe in free elections and facts — is struggling to win the battle for hearts and minds.

The pro-democracy side can still very much prevail. But it needs to go beyond its present modus operandi, a mix of fatalism and despair and living in perpetual reaction to the right and policy wonkiness and praying for indictments. It needs to build a new and improved movement — feisty, galvanizing, magnanimous, rooted and expansionary — that can outcompete the fascists and seize the age.

I believe pro-democracy forces can do this because I spent the past few years reporting on people full of hope who show a way forward, organizers who refuse to give in to fatalism about their country or its citizens. These organizers are doing yeoman’s work changing minds and expanding support for true multiracial democracy, and they recognize what more of their allies on the left must: The fascists are doing as well as they are because they understand people as they are and cater to deep unmet needs, and any pro-democracy movement worth its salt needs to match them at that — but for good.

In their own circles and sometimes in public, these organizers warn that the right is outcompeting small-d democrats in its psychological insight into voters and their anxieties, its messaging, its knack for narrative, its instinct to make its cause not just a policy program but also a home offering meaning, comfort and belonging. They worry, meanwhile, that their own allies can be hamstrung by a naïve and high-minded view of human nature, a bias for the wonky over the guttural, a self-sabotaging coolness toward those who don’t perfectly understand, a quaint belief in going high against opponents who keep stooping to new lows and a lack of fight and a lack of talent at seizing the mic and telling the kinds of galvanizing stories that bend nations’ arcs.

The organizers I’ve been following believe they have a playbook for a pro-democracy movement that can go beyond merely resisting to winning. It involves more than just serving up sound public policy and warning that the other side is dangerous; it also means creating an approachable, edifying, transcendent movement to dazzle and pull people in. For many on the left, embracing the organizers’ playbook will require leaving behind old habits and learning new ones. What is at stake, of course, is everything.

Command Attention

The right presently runs laps around the left in its ability to manage and use attention. It understands the power of provocation to make people have the conversation that most benefits its side. “Tucker Carlson said what about the war on ‘legacy Americans’?” “Donald Trump said what about those countries in Africa?” It understands that sometimes it’s worth looking ridiculous to achieve saturation of the discourse. It knows that the more one’s ideas are repeated — positively, negatively, however — the more they seem to millions of people like common sense. It knows that when the opposition is endlessly consumed by responding to its ideas, that opposition isn’t hawking its own wares.

Democrats and their allies lag on this score, bringing four-point plans to gunfights. Mr. Trump’s wall was a bad policy with a shrewd theory of attention. President Biden’s Build Back Better was a good policy with a nonexistent theory of attention. The political left tends to be both bad at grabbing attention for the things it proposes and bad at proposing the kinds of things that would command the most attention.

An attentional lens, for example, would focus a light on the pressure applied on Mr. Biden, successfully, to wipe out some student debt. In a traditional analysis, the plan is a mixed bag, because it creates many winners but also engenders resentments among nonbeneficiaries. What that analysis underplays is that giving even a minority of Americans something that absolutely knocks their socks off, changes their lives forever and gets them talking about nothing else to every undecided person in earshot may be worth five Inflation Reduction Acts in political, if not policy, terms.

Make Meaning

A concept you often hear among organizers (but less in electoral politics) is meaning making. Organizers tend to think of voters as being in a constant process of making sense of the world, and they see their job as being not simply to ask for people’s vote but also to participate in the process by which voters process their experiences into positions.

Voters read things. They hear stories on cable news. They notice changes at work and in their town. But these things do not on their own array into a coherent philosophy. A story, an explanation, a narrative — these form the bridge that transports you from noticing the new Spanish-speaking cashiers at Walgreens to fearing a southern invasion or from liking a senator from Chicago you once heard on TV to seeing him as a redemption of the ideals of the nation.

The rightist ecosystem shrewdly understands this mental bridge building to be part and parcel of the work of politics. Mr. Carlson of Fox News and Mr. Trump know that you know your town is changing, your office is doing unfamiliar training on race, you are shocked by the price you paid for gas. They know you’re thinking about it, and they devote themselves to helping you make meaning of it, for their dark purposes.

And while the right inserts itself into this meaning-making process 24/7, the left mostly just offers policy. Policy is a worthy remedy for material problems, but it is grossly inadequate as a salve for the psychological transitions that change foists on citizens. We are asking people in this era to live through a great deal of change — in the economy, technology, race and demographics, gender and sexuality, world trade and beyond. All of this can be stressful . And this stress can be exploited by the cynical, and it can also be addressed, head-on, by the well intentioned — as it is by a remarkable if still small-scale door-to-door organizing project nationwide known as deep canvassing. But it cannot be ignored.

Meet People Where They Are

There is a phrase that all political organizers seem to learn in their first training: Meet people where they are. The phrase doesn’t suggest watering down your goal as an organizer because of where the people you are trying to bring along are. It suggests meeting them at their level of familiarity and knowledge and comfort with the ideas in question and then trying to move them in the desired direction.

Many organizers I spoke to aired a concern that, in this fractious and high-stakes time, a tendency toward purism, gatekeeping and homogeneity afflicts sections of the left and threatens its pursuits.

“The thing about our movement is that we’re too woke, which is why we don’t have mass mobilization in the way that we should,” Linda Sarsour, a progressive organizer based in Brooklyn, said to me. She added: “It’s like when you’re going into a prison. You have to go through this door, and then that door closes, and then you go through another door, and then another door closes. And my thing is, like, if we’re going to do that, it’s going to be one person at a time coming into the movement, versus opening the door wide enough, having room to err and not be perfect.”

In a time of escalating and cynical right-wing attacks on so-called wokeness, some practitioners I spoke to called for their movements to do better at making space for the still waking. They want a movement that, on the one hand, is clear that things like respecting pronouns and fighting racism and misogyny and xenophobia are nonnegotiable and that, on the other hand, shows a self-interested gentleness toward people who haven’t got it all figured out, who are confused or even unsettled by the onrushing future.

Meeting people where they are also involves a pragmatic willingness to make the pitch for your ideas using moral frames that are not your own. The victorious abortion-rights campaigners in Kansas recently showcased this kind of approach when they ran advertisements obliquely comparing government-compelled pregnancies with government-compelled mask mandates for Covid-19. The campaigners themselves believed in mask mandates. But they understood they were targeting moderate and even some rightist voters who have intuitions different from theirs. And they played to those intuitions — and won stunningly.

And meeting people where they are also requires taking seriously the fears of people you are trying to win over, as the veteran reproductive justice advocate Loretta Ross told me. This doesn’t mean validating or capitulating to the fears you are hearing from voters. But it does mean not dismissing them. Whether on fears of crime or inflation or other subjects, figures on the left often give voters the sense that they shouldn’t be worried about the things that they are, in fact, worried about. A better approach is to empathize profoundly with those fears and then explain why your policy agenda would address those fears better than the other side’s.

Pick Fights

If the left could use a little more grace and generosity toward voters who are not yet fully on board, it could also benefit from a greater comfort with making powerful enemies. It needs to be simultaneously a better lover and a better fighter.

“What Republicans are great at doing is telling you who’s to blame,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told me. “Whether it’s big government or Mexican immigrants or Muslims, Republicans are going to tell you who’s doing the bad things to you. Democrats, we believe in subtleties. We don’t believe in good and evil. We believe in relativity. That needs to change.”

Once again, the exceptions prove the rule. Why did the Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Beto O’Rourke, go viral when he confronted the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, during a news conference or called a voter an incest epithet? Why does the Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman so resonate with voters for his ceaseless trolling of his opponent, the celebrity surgeon and television personality Mehmet Oz, about his residency status and awkward grocery videos? In California, why has Gov. Gavin Newsom’s feisty postrecall persona, calling out his fellow governors on the right, brought such applause? Because, as Anat Shenker-Osorio, a messaging expert who advises progressive causes, has said, people “are absolutely desperate for moral clarity and demonstrated conviction.”

Provide a Home

Many leading political thinkers and doers argue that the right’s greatest strength isn’t its ideological positioning or policy ideas or rhetoric. It is putting a metaphorical roof over the head of adherents, giving them a sense of comfort and belonging to something larger than themselves.

“People want to find a place that they call home,” Alicia Garza, an activist prominent in the Black Lives Matter movement, told me. “Home for a lot of people means a place where you can feel safe and a place where someone is caring for your needs.

“The right deeply understands people,” Garza continued. “It gives them a reason for being, and it gives them answers to the question of ‘Why am I suffering?’ On the left, we think a lot about facts and figures and logic that we hope will change people’s minds. I think what’s real is actually much closer to Black feminist thinkers who have said things like ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’”

The Democratic Party establishment is abysmal at this kind of appeal. It is more comfortable sending emails asking you to chip in $5 to beat back the latest outrage than it is inviting you to participate in something. As Lara Putnam and Micah L. Sifry have observed in these pages, the left has invested little in “year-round structures in place to reach voters through trusted interlocutors,” opting instead for doom-and-chip-in emails, while the right channels its supporters’ energy “into local groups that have a lasting, visible presence in their communities, such as anti-abortion networks, Christian home-schoolers and gun clubs.”

There is nothing preventing the Democratic Party and its allies from doing more of this kind of association building. Learn from the Democratic Socialists of America’s New Orleans chapter, which in 2017 started offering free brake light repairs to local residents — on the surface, a useful service to help people avoid getting stopped by the police and going into ticket debt and, deeper down, an ingenious way to market bigger political ideas like fighting the carceral system and racism in policing while vividly demonstrating to Louisiana voters potentially wary of the boogeyman of “socialism” that socialists are just neighbors who have your back.

As Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin, the leftist magazine, has observed, the political parties most effective at galvanizing working-class voters in the 20th century were “deeply rooted” in civil society and trade unions, “tied so closely with working-class life that, in some countries, every single tenement building might have had a representative.” He suggests rehabilitating the idea of political machines, purged of connotations of corruption, signifying instead a physical closeness to people’s lives and needs, offering not just invitations to vote on national questions but also tangible, local material help navigating public systems and getting through life.

Tell the Better Story

As befits a polity on the knife’s edge, Democrats have good political days, and Republicans have good political days. But in the longer contest to tell the better story about America and draw people into that story, there is a great worry among organizers that the left is badly falling short.

The left has a bold agenda: strengthen voting rights, save the planet, upgrade the safety net. But policies do not speak for themselves, and the cause remains starved for a larger, goosebumps-giving, heroes-and-villains, endlessly quotable story of America that justifies the policy ambitions and helps people make sense of the time and place they’re in.

There are reasons this is harder for the left than for the right. As the writer Masha Gessen said to me not long ago, it is easier to tell a story about a glorious past that people vividly remember (and misremember) than it is to tell the story of a future they can’t yet see and may not believe can be delivered. It is easier to simplify and scapegoat than to propose actual solutions to complex problems.

Still, there are better stories to tell, stories that would point to where we are going, allay the diverse anxieties about getting there, explain the antidemocracy movement’s successes in recent years and galvanize and inspire and conflagrate.

One could tell the story of a country that set out a long time ago to try something, that embarked on an experiment in self-government that had little precedent, that committed itself to ideals that remain iconic to people around the world. It’s a country that also struggled since those beginnings to be in practice what its progenitors thought it was in theory, because its founding fathers “didn’t have the courage to do exactly what they said,” as the artist Dewey Crumpler recently put it to me. America was blinded by its own parchment declarations to the exploitation and suffering and degradation and death it allowed to flourish. But since those days, it has tried to get better. The country has seen itself more clearly and sought to improve itself, just as people do.

Over the last generation or two, in particular, it has dramatically changed in the realm of law and norms and culture, opening its promise to more and more of its children, working fitfully to become what it said it would be. It is now a society that still struggles with its original sins and unfinished business but has also made great strides toward becoming a kind of country that has scarcely existed in history: a great power forged of all the world, with people from every corner of the planet, of every religion, language, ethnicity and back story. This is something to feel patriotic about, an authentic patriotism the left should loudly claim.

What the country is trying to do is hard. Alloying a country from all of humankind, with freedom and dignity and equality for every kind of person, is a goal as complicated and elusive as it is noble. And the road to get there is bumpy, because it has yet to be paved. Embracing a bigger “we” is hard.

The backlash we are living through is no mystery, actually. It is a revolt against the future, and it is natural. This, too, is part of the story. The antidemocracy upheaval isn’t a movement of the future. It is a movement of resistance to progress that is being made — progress that we don’t celebrate enough and that the pro-democracy movement doesn’t take enough credit for.

It is time for the pro-democracy cause to step it up, ditch the despair, claim the mantle of its achievements and offer a thrilling alternative to the road of hatred, chaos, violence and tyranny. It’s going to take heart and intelligence and new strategies, words and policies. It’s going to take an army of persuaders, who believe enough in other people to try to move — and join — them. This is our righteous struggle that can and must be won.

Anand Giridharadas is the author, most recently, of “ The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy ,” from which this essay is adapted.

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American democracy is in crisis. Do we have what it takes to save it?

The journalist Robin Wright, writing in The New Yorker (11/8/20), asks, “Is America a Myth?” , a myth that no longer holds the country together. Unlike other countries united by blood and soil, the United States, social scientists have told us, has been held together by a set of ideas—the self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence: that “all men are created equal” and that “they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights … [to] life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The American myth today faces existential challenges that no longer only come from the fringes. Rage consumes many in America. At the heart of it all, like the magma at the center of the Earth, lies a not entirely genuine sense of moral righteousness, a fruit of America’s Puritan past that is present in the ideas and mind-sets of some groups that are politically or economically influential.

The American myth today faces existential challenges that no longer only come from the fringes.

In the era after the Second World War, many Americans considered their country an exception to the political frailties that afflicted much of the rest of the world. For much of its history, however, the United States has been riven by internal conflict. The early republic endured fierce political competition between Federalists and Republicans, marked by dirty tricks and assassinations. From the 1820s through the 1860s, the proponents of slavery and its adversaries were engaged in a bitter struggle that ended in civil war. Reconstruction (the period from 1863 to 1877) provided only a temporary settlement until the “Jim Crow” laws re-established (from 1870 onwards) white supremacy over Blacks.

The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement brought a decade of contestation that set the general lines of division for the next two generations. “Today, America is still conflicted about its values,” observes Robin Wright, “whether over the social contract, the means of educating its children, the right to bear or ban arms, the protection of its vast lands, lakes, and air, or the relationship between the states and the federal government.” One has to add: The most painful division, as the Black Lives Matter movement has reminded us, is over racial justice and the wrongful exercise of police power.

In the political distemper of the hour, the historic sources of comity, compromise and civic cohesion in the American polity seem to have dried up. For decades, the consensus that held America together has been eroding away; fissures have begun to grow in the very bedrock of American society. The forces splitting the bedrock beneath the republic run deep in post-World-War-II culture: a decline in civic consciousness, a debasement of the media, a degeneration of political processes and long-term dysfunction in the American constitutional system.

The Decline of Civic Consciousness

The loss of civic consciousness is fundamental to the present crisis of American democracy. From its beginnings in the 19th century, the American public school system concerned itself with forming a literate citizenry. Especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when wave after wave of immigrants came to American shores, it aimed at integrating the newcomers into American life. An early emphasis on Protestant culture, especially in the use of the Bible, led to the formation of Catholic schools; but up through the 1950s, civic education remained a goal of schooling.

In the 1960s, with tensions over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the stresses of generational change, schools grew nervous about being the transmitters of values, even more so its enforcers. The teaching of history and civics declined. At the same time, teachers were graduating from programs trained to treat history and politics from more critical and sometimes clearly ideological points of view. In response parents and local school boards, after growing discontent with what they regarded as unacceptable ideas taught to their children, began to insist on expurgated curricula and textbooks. Large conservative states, such as Texas, because of their buying power, exercised undue influence on the design of textbooks by publishers seeking to protect their profits.

Finally, as U.S. demographic patterns grew more diverse and protections for minorities became normal, multiculturalism led to a splintering of social studies (Black studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies, etc.), and debates accelerated over the inherited canons of education as dominated by “dead white males.” More and more Americans disagreed about what counted as American culture.

The news business lost much of its sense of civic purpose when it started to be regarded as a source of profit.

The Debasement of the Media

In recent years, social media (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and the like) have been blamed for their fissiparous effect on American political culture. Much of the blame, however, belongs to the old print and broadcast media. For decades, they have reduced their foreign coverage. Not only has news coverage largely narrowed to the domestic arena, it has focused more and more on politics and treated politics more and more like entertainment.

The news business, moreover, lost much of its sense of civic purpose when it started to be regarded as a source of profit, managed for financial yield rather than quality of content. As a result, reportage diminished and opinion journalism prospered; reporters gave way to “talking heads,” and cable news has turned into a highly repetitive debating society, adding to the public’s cynicism about politics.

The media has also contributed to the collapse of values in American society. When HBO’s Real World pioneered reality TV in the 1980s, it exhibited adolescent and early-adult bad behavior as entertainment for a niche audience. In the intervening years, it became the norm. Women, customarily believed to be the molders and nurturers of virtue, were no exception. “Girls Behaving Badly” gave rise to “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” “The Real Housewives of New York City,” “The Real Housewives of Potomac,” etc. Reality TV now crowds the prime-time broadcast schedule with shows like “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” “The Bachelor” and “Love Island,” where adults behave like unchaperoned teenagers acting out Lord of the Flies . President Trump himself first won wide attention with his roles in “The Apprentice” and “WrestleMania.”

Degeneration of the Political Processes

America’s culture crisis has become a political crisis because in a winner-take-all society, the guardrails have been removed. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Supreme Court voided limits on contributions to political campaigns, equating money with free speech. As a result corporations and wealthy individuals gained disproportionate influence on political campaigns. In 2013, the court voided a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that submitted to the federal courts the electoral legislation in nine states and many counties and cities where there had been historic evidence of racial discrimination.

Soon after Shelby County v. Holder , Alabama, Arizona, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin took action to restrict the voting rights of minorities. The actions of North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory stood out. He signed legislation that terminated valid out-of-precinct voting, same-day registration during the early voting period, and pre-registration for teenagers about to turn 18, as well as enacting a stricter voter ID law. Critics contend that voter ID laws had the effect of suppressing minority votes. In Texas, the requirements were so complicated that state officeholders, including Attorney General, now Governor, Greg Abbott, were prevented from voting for a time. In a peculiar twist, Arizonans who utilized federally issued identification had also to show proof of citizenship (birth or naturalization papers) to cast their ballots. In North Dakota, ID laws prevented Native Americans from voting because their homes on reservations lacked street addresses.

Voter suppression takes many forms. In a number of states, authorities have reduced the number of voting places, forcing voters to travel long distances and wait in long lines to cast their ballots. Sometimes minority voting places are denied sufficient equipment, staff or even ballots to operate efficiently. In the recent election period, despite the protests of state authorities, Trump maligned voting by mail, even though he himself voted in Florida that way.

Dysfunctions in the American Constitutional System

Finally, the crisis of the U.S. democracy results from dysfunctions in its constitutional system. Compromise is presumed to be the way democracies do business . The U.S. Constitution had its origin in a number of compromises, but over time compromises can become weak points in the political process. Two such problematic arrangements contribute to the current crisis in American democracy. The first is the electoral basis of the U.S. Senate by which each state has two senators. It was and is presumed to maintain a balance between small and large states and between rural and urban populations. The second is the Electoral College, the body that makes the actual choice of presidents, which in close elections can lend decisive weight to the votes of the popular minority.

The Senate is designed to be a deliberative body, not just a more thoughtful chamber but one that keeps legislators from rash responses to the public will. The House of Representatives, with only two-year terms, is considered “the people’s House” where popular opinion is more readily reflected. Because of six-year terms, senators are expected to be more resistant to shifts in popular opinion. Until the early 20th century, senators were not directly elected but chosen by state legislatures.

In today’s blue-red divide, the populous coastal states are pitted against the land-rich, less populous states of the heartland. With a national population of 330 million and preponderant numbers living in urban areas, the Senate gives disproportionate power to rural states, their interests and preferences, defying the expectations of democratic legitimacy, expectations not held by the founding fathers.

Like the Senate, the Electoral College was designed as a check on popular power in the days before “democratic elections” became the standard of legitimacy. Twice in the last two decades (2000 and 2016), American presidential elections produced an Electoral College winner who did not receive at least the plurality of the nationwide popular vote. Especially when combined with voter suppression, victories dependent on narrow majorities in a few swing states lead to perceptions of illegitimacy of electoral outcomes, undermining trust in the democratic process.

The Latest Elections

On Saturday, Nov. 7, the major U.S. news outlets announced that Joe Biden had been elected president with 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump’s 232. Ten days later Trump had still not conceded his opponent’s victory or set in motion the process of presidential transition. Biden’s victory came with some negative outcomes, with the Democrats losing seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate still hanging in the balance, awaiting a double senatorial run-off vote on Jan. 5 in Georgia. Despite talk of a new Democratic majority during the campaign, Republicans succeeded in winning ballot votes, holding on to the majority of state legislatures and governorships.

In some ways, the vote itself was a victory for American democracy with a record voter turnout of 145 million. The courts, now dominated by Republican, Trump appointees, time after time rejected legal efforts to hold back, limit or otherwise challenge the voting counts. Voting largely went on peacefully. Tallying the vote results was a bipartisan process conducted by civic-minded poll workers and defended by secretaries of state, the state officials responsible for supervising elections.

The vote, however, revealed deep fissures in the body politic. The election was a repudiation of Trump’s divisive political style. Ironically, despite the death of a quarter million Americans due to Covid-19, so deep is the ideological divide that the administration’s handling of the pandemic seemed to have played only a minor role in the voting public’s decisions.

In the wake of his victory, Biden promised to unite and heal the nation. Deprived of acknowledgment and cooperation for the presidential transition by the Trump White House, his campaign began to take on the mantle of a government in waiting. Biden appeared before backdrops reading “Office of the President-elect.” He immediately announced the formation of his own pandemic taskforce and appointed members of his White House staff.

The vote revealed deep fissures in the body politic.

Unless there is an electoral miracle in Georgia with two Democratic candidates winning senate seats, it is unlikely that the new president will be able to have significant new legislation endorsed by a Republican-controlled senate. The wins will be pragmatic ones, bipartisan packages that Biden, with his long legislative experience, is suited to achieve. Of course, with the pandemic to wind down and an economic depression to reverse, the everyday work of government will have serious challenges to meet.

Both parties will face questions related to their identity. Will the Republican party remain Trump’s party, or will it carve out a new identity for itself? Even without Trump, can it wean itself from a win-at-any-cost ethos that has deprived it of any real interest in governing to a renewed civic-mindedness, once associated with Middle America? The Democratic Left has to face the bad news that in the suburbs and the countryside the Trump campaign had succeeded in painting their preferred policies (the Green New Deal, the public option in health care, free college education) as extremist “socialism.” On the other side, some of their most effective campaigners were Trump-No-More Republicans like Steve Schmidt and the members of the Lincoln Project. Furthermore, commentators’ projections of a major political realignment, with African-Americans and Latinos bolstering the party’s numbers well into the future, seems to be exaggerated. The majority of both groups vote Democratic, but not in reliably large numbers, and significant minorities of both groups vote Republican.

Beyond partisan identities, a great gulf of incomprehension divides the American public. Some of it is tribal, with political identities taking on a quasi-religious quality, allowing many to dismiss those on the other side as evil and dangerous. One commentator has proposed that it is no longer appropriate to identify conservative Evangelicals as “Evangelical” or the Christian right as “Christian,” because the religious identity of many has been swallowed up by their political allegiances. Religious nationalism has come out of the shadows as a self-confident political force untrammeled by church structures or the demands of religious orthodoxy, to the detriment of both political and religious life. Healing America promises to be an ever more difficult challenge for politically engaged believers, like Catholic Biden.

A Democracy, If You Can Keep It

Americans did not always think of their government as a democracy. Queried by the wife of Philadelphia’s mayor, Elizabeth Willing Powel, about what the outcome of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had been, Benjamin Franklin is reported to have replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin and the other framers, schooled in ancient history, were apprehensive of popular democracy, and they designed the Constitution with a variety of checks against the assertion of popular power. A more favorable view of democracy came with the electoral reforms of the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s)—primary elections, referenda, recall, the direct election of senators and women’s suffrage—that rolled back the constraints of the republican model for a more democratic one. Two World Wars fought “in defense of democracy” fostered in the public mind the conviction that the United States of America is a democracy.

To a great extent the popular passions the founders and the ancients they read both feared have brought the United States to a moment of crisis. To this point, neither the Constitutional restraints, nor the virtues of today’s elites have been able to stay the dismantling of the American Experiment. Whether a republic or a democracy, the question is, will the American public continue to support it?

More from America:

— Biden chose a Black Catholic to lead the Pentagon. It’s a historic pick—and it violates civil-military norms. — Rep. Joaquin Castro: It’s time for a Latino secretary of agriculture — Bishops call on Trump and Barr—again—to stop executing people and remember mercy during Advent

Drew Christiansen, S.J., former editor in chief and president of America , is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Global Development at Georgetown University and a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. This article originally appeared in La Civiltà Cattolica and is reprinted with permission.

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American Democracy Is in Crisis

Our democratic institutions and traditions are under siege. We need to do everything we can to fight back.

It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States. On the day after, in my concession speech, I said, “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown.

They were not.

In the roughly 21 months since he took the oath of office, Trump has sunk far below the already-low bar he set for himself in his ugly campaign. Exhibit A is the unspeakable cruelty that his administration has inflicted on undocumented families arriving at the border, including separating children, some as young as eight months, from their parents. According to The New York Times , the administration continues to detain 12,800 children right now, despite all the outcry and court orders. Then there’s the president’s monstrous neglect of Puerto Rico: After Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, his administration barely responded. Some 3,000 Americans died. Now Trump flatly denies those deaths were caused by the storm. And, of course, despite the recent indictments of several Russian military intelligence officers for hacking the Democratic National Committee in 2016, he continues to dismiss a serious attack on our country by a foreign power as a “ hoax .”

Trump and his cronies do so many despicable things that it can be hard to keep track. I think that may be the point—to confound us, so it’s harder to keep our eye on the ball. The ball, of course, is protecting American democracy. As citizens, that’s our most important charge. And right now, our democracy is in crisis.

I don’t use the word crisis lightly. There are no tanks in the streets. The administration’s malevolence may be constrained on some fronts—for now—by its incompetence. But our democratic institutions and traditions are under siege. We need to do everything we can to fight back. There’s not a moment to lose.

As I see it, there are five main fronts of this assault on our democracy.

First, there is Donald Trump’s assault on the rule of law.

John Adams wrote that the definition of a republic is “a government of laws, and not of men.” That ideal is enshrined in two powerful principles: No one, not even the most powerful leader, is above the law, and all citizens are due equal protection under the law. Those are big ideas, radical when America was formed and still vital today. The Founders knew that a leader who refuses to be subject to the law or who politicizes or obstructs its enforcement is a tyrant, plain and simple.

That sounds a lot like Donald Trump. He told The New York Times , “I have an absolute right to do what I want to with the Justice Department.” Back in January, according to that paper, Trump’s lawyers sent Special Counsel Robert Mueller a letter making that same argument: If Trump interferes with an investigation, it’s not obstruction of justice, because he’s the president.

The Times also reported that Trump told White House aides that he had expected Attorney General Jeff Sessions to protect him, regardless of the law. According to Jim Comey, the president demanded that the FBI director pledge his loyalty not to the Constitution but to Trump himself. And he has urged the Justice Department to go after his political opponents, violating an American tradition reaching back to Thomas Jefferson. After the bitterly contentious election of 1800, Jefferson could have railed against “Crooked John Adams” and tried to jail his supporters. Instead, Jefferson used his inaugural address to declare: “We are all republicans, we are all federalists.”

Second, the legitimacy of our elections is in doubt.

There’s Russia’s ongoing interference and Trump’s complete unwillingness to stop it or protect us. There’s voter suppression, as Republicans put onerous—and I believe illegal—requirements in place to stop people from voting. There’s gerrymandering, with partisans—these days, principally Republicans—drawing the lines for voting districts to ensure that their party nearly always wins. All of this carries us further away from the sacred principle of “one person, one vote.”

Third, the president is waging war on truth and reason.

Earlier this month, Trump made 125 false or misleading statements in 120 minutes, according to The Washington Post— a personal record for him (at least since becoming president). To date, according to the paper’s fact-checkers, Trump has made 5,000 false or misleading claims while in office and recently has averaged 32 a day.

Trump is also going after journalists with even greater fervor and intent than before. No one likes to be torn apart in the press—I certainly don’t—but when you’re a public official, it comes with the job. You get criticized a lot. You learn to take it. You push back and make your case, but you don’t fight back by abusing your power or denigrating the entire enterprise of a free press. Trump doesn’t hide his intent one bit. Lesley Stahl, the 60 Minutes reporter, asked Trump during his campaign why he’s always attacking the press. He said, “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

When we can’t trust what we hear from our leaders, experts, and news sources, we lose our ability to hold people to account, solve problems, comprehend threats, judge progress, and communicate effectively with one another—all of which are crucial to a functioning democracy.

Fourth, there’s Trump’s breathtaking corruption.

Considering that this administration promised to “drain the swamp,” it’s amazing how blithely the president and his Cabinet have piled up conflicts of interest, abuses of power, and blatant violations of ethics rules. Trump is the first president in 40 years to refuse to release his tax returns. He has refused to put his assets in a blind trust or divest himself of his properties and businesses, as previous presidents did. This has created unprecedented conflicts of interest, as industry lobbyists, foreign governments, and Republican organizations do business with Trump’s companies or hold lucrative events at his hotels, golf courses, and other properties. They are putting money directly into his pocket. He’s profiting off the business of the presidency.

Trump makes no pretense of prioritizing the public good above his own personal or political interests. He doesn’t seem to understand that public servants are supposed to serve the public, not the other way around. The Founders believed that for a republic to succeed, wise laws, robust institutions, and a brilliant Constitution would not be enough. Civic, republican virtue was the secret sauce that would make the whole system work. Donald Trump may well be the least lowercase- R republican president we’ve ever had.

Fifth, Trump undermines the national unity that makes democracy possible.

Democracies are rowdy by nature. We debate freely and disagree forcefully. It’s part of what distinguishes us from authoritarian societies, where dissent is forbidden. But we’re held together by deep “bonds of affection,” as Abraham Lincoln said, and by the shared belief that out of our fractious melting pot comes a unified whole that’s stronger than the sum of our parts.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Trump doesn’t even try to pretend he’s a president for all Americans. It’s hard to ignore the racial subtext of virtually everything Trump says. Often, it’s not even subtext. When he says that Haitian and African immigrants are from “shithole countries,” that’s impossible to misunderstand. Same when he says that an American judge can’t be trusted because of his Mexican heritage. None of this is a mark of authenticity or a refreshing break from political correctness. Hate speech isn’t “telling it like it is.” It’s just hate.

I don’t know whether Trump ignores the suffering of Puerto Ricans because he doesn’t know that they’re American citizens, because he assumes people with brown skin and Latino last names probably aren’t Trump fans, or because he just doesn’t have the capacity for empathy. And I don’t know whether he makes a similar judgment when he lashes out at NFL players protesting against systemic racism or when he fails to condemn hate crimes against Muslims. I do know he’s quick to defend or praise those whom he thinks are his people —like how he bent over backwards to defend the “very fine people” among the white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The message he sends by his lack of concern and respect for some Americans is unmistakable. He is saying that some of us don’t belong, that all people are not created equal, and that some are not endowed by their Creator with the same inalienable rights as others.

And it’s not just what he says. From day one, his administration has undermined civil rights that previous generations fought to secure and defend. There have been high-profile edicts like the Muslim travel ban and the barring of transgender Americans from serving in the military. Other actions have been quieter but just as insidious. The Department of Justice has largely abandoned oversight of police departments that have a history of civil-rights abuses and has switched sides in voting-rights cases. Nearly every federal agency has scaled back enforcement of civil-rights protections. All the while, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running wild across the country. Federal agents are confronting citizens just for speaking Spanish, dragging parents away from children.

How did we get here?

Trump may be uniquely hostile to the rule of law, ethics in public service, and a free press. But the assault on our democracy didn’t start with his election. He is as much a symptom as a cause of what ails us. Think of our body politic like a human body, with our constitutional checks and balances, democratic norms and institutions, and well-informed citizenry all acting as an immune system protecting us from the disease of authoritarianism. Over many years, our defenses were worn down by a small group of right-wing billionaires—people like the Mercer family and Charles and David Koch—who spent a lot of time and money building an alternative reality where science is denied, lies masquerade as truth, and paranoia flourishes. By undermining the common factual framework that allows a free people to deliberate together and make the important decisions of self-governance, they opened the way for the infection of Russian propaganda and Trumpian lies to take hold. They've used their money and influence to capture our political system, impose a right-wing agenda, and disenfranchise millions of Americans.

I don’t agree with critics who say that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy—but unregulated, predatory capitalism certainly is. Massive economic inequality and corporate monopoly power are antidemocratic and corrode the American way of life.

Meanwhile, hyperpolarization now extends beyond politics into nearly every part of our culture. One recent study found that in 1960, just 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said they’d be displeased if their son or daughter married a member of the other political party. In 2010, 49 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats said they’d be upset by that. The strength of partisan identity—and animosity—helps explain why so many Republicans continue to back a president so manifestly unfit for office and antithetical to many of the values and policies they once held dear. When you start seeing politics as a zero-sum game and view members of the other party as traitors, criminals, or otherwise illegitimate, then the normal give-and-take of politics turns into a blood sport.

There is a tendency, when talking about these things, to wring our hands about “both sides.” But the truth is that this is not a symmetrical problem. We should be clear about this: The increasing radicalism and irresponsibility of the Republican Party, including decades of demeaning government, demonizing Democrats, and debasing norms, is what gave us Donald Trump. Whether it was abusing the filibuster and stealing a Supreme Court seat, gerrymandering congressional districts to disenfranchise African Americans, or muzzling government climate scientists, Republicans were undermining American democracy long before Trump made it to the Oval Office.

Now we must do all we can to save our democracy and heal our body politic.

First, we’ve got to mobilize massive turnout in the 2018 midterms. There are fantastic candidates running all over the country, making their compelling cases every day about how they’ll raise wages, bring down health-care costs, and fight for justice. If they win, they’ll do great things for America. And we could finally see some congressional oversight of the White House.

When the dust settles, we have to do some serious housecleaning. After Watergate, Congress passed a whole slew of reforms in response to Richard Nixon’s abuses of power. After Trump, we’re going to need a similar process. For example, Trump’s corruption should teach us that all future candidates for president and presidents themselves should be required by law to release their tax returns. They also should not be exempt from ethics requirements and conflict-of-interest rules.

A main area of reform should be improving and protecting our elections. The Senate Intelligence Committee has made a series of bipartisan recommendations for how to better secure America’s voting systems, including paper ballot backups, vote audits, and better coordination among federal, state, and local authorities on cybersecurity. That’s a good start. Congress should also repair the damage the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act by restoring the full protections that voters need and deserve, as well as the voting rights of Americans who have served time in prison and paid their debt to society. We need early voting and voting by mail in every state in America, and automatic, universal voter registration so every citizen who is eligible to vote is able to vote. We need to overturn Citizens United and get secret money out of our politics. And you won’t be surprised to hear that I passionately believe it’s time to abolish the Electoral College.

But even the best rules and regulations won’t protect us if we don’t find a way to restitch our fraying social fabric and rekindle our civic spirit. There are concrete steps that would help, like greatly expanding national-service programs and bringing back civics education in our schools. We also need systemic economic reforms that reduce inequality and the unchecked power of corporations and give a strong voice to working families. And ultimately, healing our country will come down to each of us, as citizens and individuals, doing the work—trying to reach across divides of race, class, and politics and see through the eyes of people very different from ourselves. When we think about politics and judge our leaders, we can’t just ask, “Am I better off than I was four years ago?” We have to ask, “Are we better off? Are we as a country better, stronger, and fairer?” Democracy works only when we accept that we’re all in this together.

In 1787, after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman on the street outside Independence Hall, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” That response has been on my mind a lot lately. The contingency of it. How fragile our experiment in self-government is. And, when viewed against the sweep of human history, how fleeting. Democracy may be our birthright as Americans, but it’s not something we can ever take for granted. Every generation has to fight for it, has to push us closer to that more perfect union. That time has come again.

This essay was adapted from the afterword of the paperback edition of What Happened , which will be published on September 18.

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Strong Democracy in Crisis: Promise or Peril?

Related Papers

Trevor Norris

Jean-Paul Gagnon , Selen AYIRTMAN ERCAN

The introductory article to this special issue highlights three fundamental yet often neglected questions related to the current diagnosis of a crisis of democracy: What is meant by the term “crisis”? Which democracy is in crisis? And what, if anything, is “new” about the current crisis of democracy? We answer these questions by considering the multi-vocal contribution of purposefully curated short articles in this special issue. We argue that when engaging with the “crisis of democracy” diagnosis, it is important to unpack not only the normative presumptions one has in relation to what democracy is and should be, but also the recent transformations in the way politics is understood and practiced in contemporary societies.

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences

Marco Cilento

Natalie J Doyle , Marcel Gauchet

Democracy is in crisis. This crisis is the paradoxical outcome of its triumph over its erstwhile rivals. Having prevailed over the totalitarian projects of the first half of the 20 th century it has developed in such a way that it is now undermining its original goals of individual and collective autonomy. Modern liberal democracy – the outcome of an inversion of the values of tradition, hierarchy and political incorporation – is a mixed regime. It involves three different dimensions of social existence, political, legal, historical/economic, and organises power around these. A balance was achieved after the upheaval of World War II in the form of liberal democracy, on the basis of reforms which injected democratic political power into liberalism and controlled the new economic dynamics it had unleashed. This balance has now been lost. Political autonomy, which accompanied modern historicity and its orientation towards the future, has been overshadowed by economic activity and its pursuit of innovation. As a result, the very meaning of democracy has become impoverished. The term used to refer to the goal of self-government, it is now taken to be fully synonymous with personal freedom and the cause of human rights. The legal dimension having come to prevail over the political one, democratic societies see themselves as 'political market societies', societies that can only conceive of their existence with reference to a functional language borrowed from economics. This depoliticisation of democracy has facilitated the rise to dominance of a new form of oligarchy.

European Political Science

Emmy Eklundh

Democratization

Aurel Croissant

Journalism and Mass Communication

José Álvaro Moisés

Democratic Theory

Jean-Paul Gagnon

Development

Tamara Soukotta

International Journal of Research

Edupedia Publications

The apparently overwhelming expansion of democratic regimes should not, however, hide their intrinsic weaknesses. The paper examines how five (hypo)theses proposed by the author 10 years ago are still valuable instruments of analysis in periods of troubled times. The discrepancy between aspirations, programmes and the harsh reality of today is examined in the background of the Europeanisation and globalisation processes. Keywords : democracy; crisis; globalisation; Europeanisation of politicsand policies

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Essays on democracy draw attention to critical threats, explore safeguards ahead of Jan. 6

by Tracy DeStazio, University of Notre Dame

Following the events of Jan. 6, 2021—when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building in an effort to interrupt the certification process of the 2020 presidential election—experts began to question how to protect the next presidential election from a similar threat. To that end, University of Notre Dame political scientists have partnered with preeminent scholars of democracy from across the country to produce a set of recommendations to strengthen and safeguard democracy in America.

The University's Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy established the January 6th, 2025, Project in an effort to understand the social, political, psychological and demographic factors that led to that troublesome day in the capital.

By pursuing research, teaching and public engagement , the project offers insight into how American democracy got to this point and how to strengthen and protect it, while emphasizing how to prepare for a similar attack many deem imminent on Jan. 6, 2025, when Congress seeks to certify the 2024 presidential election results. The project includes 34 members who represent various disciplines and leading universities—10 of whom hail from Notre Dame's faculty.

Matthew E.K. Hall, director of the Rooney Center, said one of the project's first goals was to create a collection of essays written by its members to be included in a special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , which was published this month. These essays aim to draw attention to the vulnerabilities in our democratic system and the threats building against it, and to create consensus on ways to remedy both problems.

The authors set out to tackle the following tough questions, but from different perspectives: How serious are the threats to our democracy, how did we get to this point, and what can we do to fix the situation? The 14 essays are broken down into categories, falling under the headings of "'Us' Versus 'Them,'" "Dangerous Ideas" and "Undermining Democratic Institutions." With most pieces being co-authored by faculty from multiple institutions, the collection offers a collaborative approach to evaluating what led America to this crisis and how to avert it.

David Campbell, director of the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative and the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy in the Department of Political Science, described the project as "an example of how Notre Dame can be a national leader on the issue of preserving American democracy. Not only do we have top scholars working on the issue, but we can provide a forum for a community of scholars across many leading universities. Maintaining democracy will require all hands on deck."

In the collection's introduction, Hall explained the backdrop of what led America to this point and why these essays help acknowledge the challenges we are facing as a nation.

"We are basically living through a revival of fascist politics in the U.S.," Hall wrote, "where politicians are using divisive rhetoric to separate us into an 'us' versus 'them' paradigm—left versus right, white versus Black, rich versus poor, urban versus rural, religious versus secular—the divisions go on and on."

Hall estimated that between 25 and 30% of Americans have consistently endorsed some fascist ideas such as racial oppression, conspiracy theories and authoritarianism. "Ordinarily, this consistent minority is held in check by the democratic process," Hall explained.

"These candidates don't even get nominated for major political positions because their co-partisan allies don't want to lose the general election.

"But when our politics become this intensely polarized, most partisans will support their party no matter who is nominated," he continued. "As a result, politicians pushing these fascist ideas can gain power by taking over one political party and then exploiting the polarization to win elections. Once taking power, they will likely manipulate the electoral process to remain in power."

Consequently, Hall said, fascist leaders are able to exploit these social divisions to break down basic social norms and shared understandings about American politics. This pushes huge swaths of society toward accepting dangerous ideas that would normally be rejected, such as expanded executive power, intense animosity toward political opponents, a wavering support for free speech, and political candidates who deny election losses.

This weakened support for democratic norms enables attacks on our democratic institutions, such as ignoring court rulings, enacting voter suppression laws and—most shockingly (as in the case of Jan. 6)—openly subverting elections.

With the political situation as dire as many feel it to be, the January 6th, 2025, Project's essays outline a few practical steps that can be taken to strengthen and safeguard democracy in America.

For example, Hall said, as the nation moves forward into this next election year, American voters have to stay focused on the "deliberate denial of reality" on the part of some politicians so that they can discern the difference between lies, truths and just plain distractions.

"The more we lose touch with basic facts and accept misinformation, conspiracies and contradictory claims as the norm in our society," he said, "the more vulnerable we are to losing our democracy.

"Even more importantly, we have to be willing to sacrifice short-term political gains in order to preserve the long-term stability of our democracy. That might mean holding your nose to vote for candidates that you would not otherwise support."

Hall added that Americans must redouble their devotion to democratic principles such as open elections and free speech, and states should adopt institutional reforms that remove partisans from the electoral process (for example, employing nonpartisan election commissions). He also noted the importance of paying close attention to efforts that divide groups of Americans, especially those that portray outgroup members as evil or less than human.

The members of the project hope that by honestly acknowledging the challenges our nation is facing, understanding the mistakes that were made and recognizing the vulnerabilities in our system that led us to this situation—and by resolving to fix these issues—we can pull our country's political system back from the edge of the cliff before it's too late.

"The public needs to take these critical threats seriously and we're hoping that these essays draw attention to them, and help to build consensus about the underlying problems in our politics and potential remedies," Hall concluded.

Democracy is one of several University-wide initiatives emerging from Notre Dame's recently released Strategic Framework . The Democracy Initiative will further establish Notre Dame as a global leader in the study of democracy, a convenor for conversations about and actions to preserve democracy, and a model for the formation of civically engaged citizens and public servants.

Provided by University of Notre Dame

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Democracy in crisis: Lessons from Ancient Athens

• August 5, 2020

Erica Benner

Demagogues thrive if moderate politicians flatter citizens into an unrealistic sense of their own greatness.

I recently typed the words ‘Democracy Crisis’ into Amazon Search, and an avalanche of new and forthcoming titles tumbled onto my screen: Democracy in Crisis , The Crisis of Democracy , Democracy in Crisis? , Constitutional Democracy in Crisis . And that’s on top of books already on my desk-side shelf: How Democracies End , How Democracies Die , The People Vs Democracy , Against Democracy .

So the publishing industry is in accord: Democracy – both its guiding ideals and particular instantiations – is either in crisis or on its deathbed. Polls everywhere show a massive loss of public trust in democracy as a form of government. The authors of all these recent books and of long articles in major news outlets ask almost daily: what can be done? Can democracy be saved?

I’m going to suggest something counterintuitive: that some of the best lessons in thinking about problems facing contemporary democracies come from writers who lived almost 2,500 years ago, in late 5th and early 4th century (BCE) Athens. This might seem unlikely, given the very different structures and scale of ancient and modern democracies. Their democracy was tiny by our reckoning, with approximately 40,000 male citizens in a population of some 140,000. Participation was direct, with any citizen having the right to speak in the Assembly ( ekklesia ). Democracies today are vast, run mainly by representatives and bureaucrats who have few contacts with voters. And there are even bigger differences in the globalising economic, international, and technological conditions in which our democracies operate. Within the past decade or so, developments in internet technology and social media have revolutionised means of political communication, making it seem harder than ever to apply ancient analyses or remedies to the pathologies of modern democracy.

My argument is not that we should turn to ancient Athens for detailed empirical models of democracy, let alone for straightforward prescriptions about the best institutional designs for us. The main question that Athenian writers – playwrights, philosophers, historians – posed to their own fellow citizens when their city fell into crisis and civil war was: How did we get here? This is a historical and philosophical question, not a directly practical one. But it must be the basis for any useful practical ideas about how to make democracies stronger.

Whether we turn to philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, whose main readers were a highly educated few, or playwrights who wrote comedies and tragedies for the wider public, one of their key points is this: to answer the question ‘How did we get into this or that political mess’, ordinary citizens need to do some deep self-examination when democracies fall into crisis – not take the easy road of blaming particular leaders or their partisan enemies. Democracy is self-government, which means that each citizen is co-responsible in some small way for its general health, even if they strongly disagree with some of the state’s decisions.

All these things may seem to make a lot more sense in a small-scale, direct democracy like theirs than in mega-democracies like ours. It’s true that it is easier to imagine what the somewhat pious-sounding phrase ‘citizen responsibility’, or the slightly less pious ‘active citizenship’, might mean in practice when you think of citizens in the thousands in one city rather than tens or hundreds of millions spread over several time zones. We’ve seen a dramatic shrinking of most ‘ordinary individuals’ power to influence decisions, coupled rather scarily with the increased power of very few extraordinary individuals and corporations – sometimes for the general good, often not at all.

But one of the most important lessons that Greek writers teach us, over and over, is that to be fully human means to think about whatever conditions we find ourselves in, for better or worse – and to try to act, to affect our situation in some way, however miniscule. It may or may not be true that the gods or our past or our animal nature make our efforts pointless. What later came to be called ‘free will’ may well be just self-deception. But as long as we can’t be 100% sure, it seems to be part of our humanity to keep trying to make a tiny difference even while entertaining the most fatalistic thoughts.

So what can nearly powerless citizens do? For one thing, they can look in a self-critical way at their history – not just their country’s writ large, but also at their own personal decisions (or indecisions) that may have contributed to their democracy’s present travails. For another, citizens can take a long hard look at the ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that drove their decisions. These are partly what moderns call ideologies – official or collective-shared worldviews – and partly personal dispositions and prejudices. Ancient Greek plays, Plato’s philosophical dialogues, and other works of the time confront citizens with the awkward question: are your political ideals and motives really as high-minded – or as realistic – as you like to think they are?

No writer, old or recent, shows how to do democratic self-examination better than the Athenian historian Thucydides. He played an active part in his city’s political and military struggles, and took a personal battering in the process – the Athenians exiled him for his role in losing a key battle against the Spartans and their allies in the Peloponnesian War. He started composing a history of that war, he tells us, from its beginnings, already thinking it would turn into a far greater conflagration than most Athenians expected. An early biographer says he paid people on both sides – Athenian and Spartan – for information so he could check for bias. He calls his work ‘a possession for all times’ – and indeed long after his death, whenever civil conflicts erupted on a grand scale, in the Roman Republic or during the English Civil War, deep thinkers turned to Thucydides to help them understand what was happening to their countries. For if he wrote in the first instance for Athenians and other Greeks in his own times, he also knew that certain causes of democratic sickness are common to all times and places, because human psychology, human patterns of cooperation and conflict are always similar – whatever new technologies we devise or institutions we set up to manage our refractory human-animal selves.

In the Preface to his 1629 English translation (the first) of Thucydides’ histories, Thomas Hobbes wrote that the Athenian did not lay down ‘open conveyances or precepts’ but instead ‘so clearly set before men’s eyes the ways and events of good and evil counsels, that the narration itself doth secretly instruct the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept.’ Thucydides shows brilliantly, without direct lectures or partisan polemic, that both the causes of sickness in democracies and their symptoms, are often recognised only after things have already gone very bad indeed. Most people can see after the fact what went wrong, but at the time corruption tends to happen through very small steps that seem harmless enough: laws are tweaked and twisted just a bit, politicians are allowed to get away with medium-sized crimes, and soon the public get used to all this. Questionable practices become normalised: just ‘real politics’ as usual.

Thucydides’ forte is showing how this almost invisible normalising of corruption happens in a medium that is so ubiquitous in human lives, and so inherently complex, that we find it hard to notice all the small ways in which it can lead us astray, though most of us know that it can. That medium is speech, or language. All politics relies on speech, but democracy more widely and intensely than aristocracies or monarchies. You not only have formal councils and consultations like kings, or the narrow assemblies of patricians; you also have very frequent assemblies where citizens high and low debate the most important questions, and the marketplace ( agora ) or its cyber-equivalents where citizens argue and speechify. Thucydides’ history dramatizes the dangers that come from democracies’ dependence on the slippery, hard-to-control powers of speech.

Long, ingenious speeches drive his war story, showing us the arguments that persuaded Athenians and other Greeks to launch and prolong what proved a hellishly costly war. Readers can track how speakers introduce subtle, almost imperceptible shifts in the meaning of words until, before you’ve noticed, they mean something totally different, making constructive communication impossible. At first all Greeks understand something similar by the word ‘justice’, dike – something like ‘what’s fair to all, from a general perspective.’ But as war drags on, ‘justice’ acquires different meanings for Athenians: ‘what seems fair to us’ and eventually, as things get worse, ‘the advantage of the strongest’. These shifts fracture any sense of koine or common good, privatising language so that it starts to fail as an instrument for healing divisions. And when language fails, civil wars of words polarise whole cities, harden warring factions, and eventually turn into physical violence, as Thucydides says happened inside many Greek cities:

The accepted value of words was changed arbitrarily. Reckless audacity was counted as brave loyalty to party. Prudent deliberation was called cowardice; reasonable moderation weakness. Frantic impulsiveness was praised as manly. The hot-headed man was always trusted, his opponent suspected…Transparency was considered ‘ignorant goodness’, fraud and deceit the height of intelligence. Thucydides 3.81-2

It is a commonplace now that internet and group-targeted media intensify democratic ‘language wars’ in various ways – not least by fostering ‘bubbles’ where like-minded people can escape exposure to other points of view. The technologies may be different, but as Thucydides says about the ‘language wars’ of his own times: ‘Many terrible things happened (in his times) that shall be seen again as long as human nature is the same.’ The basic psycho-political dynamics that corrode civil speech and are much the same then and now, and Thucydides helps us understand how they work.

We hear a lot today about the need to ‘educate’ citizens to be better at seeing through misleading rhetoric and posturing leaders. Reading Thucydides is a great exercise in how to be a sceptical auditor of political spin, particularly the kind that leads unwary citizens to make deadly decisions. This may have been one of his chief aims in writing. But he clearly implies that the education citizens need doesn’t just involve studying clever tricks of rhetoric and patterns of democratic decay. The ignorance that most weakens democracies cannot be corrected through training in logic or political science, or by studying the past as if it were a foreign country. Democratic education needs to stimulate critical self-examination on the part of citizens themselves. People, that is, need to take a long hard look at their own democracy-threatening attitudes and dispositions – some of which they’ll be most reluctant to admit.

Thucydides is a devastating debunker of all sorts of myths, and his history quietly explodes one of democracy’s pet illusions: the illusion that its citizens are natural egalitarians.

It seems obvious to us that in Athenian democracy citizen equality was parasitic on massive inequalities – notably slaves and women who were excluded and held up the fort while men went off to war. But Thucydides’ point holds even when all adults have the vote. For the root cause of the corruptions just described, he says, was a very widespread human desire to feel superior to others – at least the desire for kratos (power over someone) or, more pathologically, for overweening greatness ( megalos ).

People who hunger for some sort of superiority are easy targets for demagogues who promise to make the weak powerful and the powerful more so. In his comedy Knights , the comic playwright Aristophanes, Thucydides’ contemporary, stages a contest among a motley crew of demagogues (whose names resemble those of Athenian politicians) for citizens’ affections. One of them says to the character Mr Demos, who represents citizens-at-large: ‘You know I’d do anything to please you: I’ve tortured people and played the dirtiest games to fill your purse!’ Another produces an oracle predicting that Mr Athenian Demos will soon rule the world, and conjures an alluring image of him judging court cases, while reclining on his throne and nibbling canapés, in the Persian capital Ecbatana. At the end of the play the demagogue contest’s winner transforms Mr Demos into a beauteous young man, taking him back to the golden days when Athenians were on a high after the Persian War.

Back in the real world, Thucydides shows how easy it was for one man to rouse Athenians of all classes to war-fervour by promising them easy victory over their enemies, thereby expanding their empire to a height of greatness not seen by any other Greek polis. Pericles, the brilliant, aristocratic orator who dominated the demos as if he were its monarch – as Thucydides notes – moves Athenians to war by playing up the enemy’s weaknesses and over-praising Athens’ powers. A few years into the war, after many terrible losses, Pericles delivers a Funeral Oration where he praises Athens even more effusively, claiming that the city is a ‘school for the whole world’ and that Athenians respect laws and love freedom more than other people – treating these attitudes as marks of superiority that justify that city’s imperial policies. Thucydides paints Pericles as a dazzling yet moderate-sounding orator – at first. Compared with the rabble-rousing popular leaders who came after him, the aristocratic Pericles seems elegant rather than vulgar. His speech contains no overt abuse of enemies. Yet he conjures for Athenians an idealised image of their own, vast superiority in everything, and insinuates that this greatness somehow entitles them to dominate other Greeks and guarantees ultimate victory in war.

Without saying so directly, Thucydides’ portrait makes an important point about how speech corrupts democracies though one not all his readers have grasped: raving, divisive demagoguery is seldom the root source of that corruption. Demagogues often thrive only after more moderate politicians have initiated the insidious process of flattering citizens into an unrealistic sense of their own greatness, thus goading them to pursue imperial or military or economic dominance beyond their actual capacities. Yet neither Thucydides nor Aristophanes portrays citizens as the innocent victims of cunning leaders. Demagoguery is a two-way street. Leaders try to beat their competition by playing on citizens’ sensitivities and longings, but it is a citizen’s business to be aware of those vulnerable sensitivities and longings and to keep them from being played on.

On the surface, Aristophanes’ Knights might seem simply to blame the demagogues for democracy’s troubles. Their fights are so entertaining that it’s easy to be distracted from the underlying problem: why does Mr Demos get swept up in all this farce? For most of the play he’s offstage or dead silent – much as in Thucydides’ histories we hear almost nothing from ordinary Athenians deliberating the war in this supposedly robust democracy. Mr Demos looks like a brainless dupe of the demagogues. But when the chorus of ‘elite’ Knights accuse him of being easily flattered and deceived, Mr Demos turns on them and says: You’re the brainless ones if you think I’m stupid. There’s a method in my foolishness: I like my daily bread, so I pick a leader, raise him up to do what I want and fatten him, then swat him down when he gets too full. I’m the one in control, not my leaders.

The deeper truth, then, is that Demos and demagogues ‘play’ each other. Citizens want leaders who promise to keep them fed, put down their would-be superiors, do the grunt-work of self-government for them, while the demagogues gratify their thirst for inglorious glory on democracy’s stage. The sneering Knights don’t help either by mocking Mr Demos’ stupidity. They might be right – Aristophanes certainly thought so – to call Athens’ real-life demagogues ‘filthy disgusting shout-downers, who’ve thrown our city into a sea of troubles, deafening our Athens with your bellowing’. But their posture of moral and patriotic superiority irritates, as does their claim that their great services to Athens warrant their pseudo-aristocratic long hair and taste for luxuries. Between the laughs, Aristophanes’ comedies are also dead-serious wake-up calls to his fellow Athenians on both sides of the popular-elite divide, goading them to see that they – all of them – might be a bigger part of the problem of democratic crisis and the miseries of war than most want to recognise.

In Thucydides’ history, readers track the fast-spiralling consequences of self-ignorance and arrogance through the three speeches he gives to Pericles, all delivered in the first two years of the Peloponnesian war. Having urged Athenians to throw themselves into war with a view to expanding their empire – though not in too obvious or aggressive a manner, Pericles warned at the outset – things go pear-shaped for the great leader. His policies had fostered insanitary conditions in the city, a plague strikes hard, and people blamed him for the many thousands of Athenian deaths. In the last speech Thucydides gives him, desperate to shore up his popularity, Pericles frankly admits an uncomfortable truth, one that his rhetoric had so far concealed from the demos’ egalitarian eyes. At the start of the war Athenians didn’t want to admit that their alliance of Greek cities had become, a de facto, hated empire; they preferred to think of themselves as mere ‘hegemons’ who lead a coalition of the willing for everyone’s equal benefit. Athenians were proud egalitarians, at least in dealing with free men. Pericles affirmed this self-image and eulogised his freedom-loving compatriots in his Funeral Oration. Very shortly afterwards, however, he sings a different tune. For all their supposed love of equality and freedom, he now says, Athenians hold their empire over other Greeks ‘like a tyranny’. Now that this dirty secret is out in the open, he tells Athenians to throw off their scruples and fight their enemies ‘with a spirit of contempt’.

So they do. And in the end they lose because, as Thucydides shows, people usually do who ‘contemptuously assume’ that they deserve to win because of their superior power or wisdom; for in their self-assurance they are ‘caught off guard’, he says, and so ‘perish in greater numbers’. They underestimate the intelligence and ferocity of opponents, who fight all the harder when treated with contempt. This basic tenet of Thucydides’ so-called ‘realist’ political psychology is one that we egalitarian moderns tend to forget. One of the core lessons of his histories is a warning to citizen-readers in all times and places, a warning against the illusion that democracies and democratically minded people are immune to the self-destructive temptations of overambitious megalos or greatness, whether at home or abroad, towards foreigners or fellow-citizens. The basic rationale for democracy is that by giving every citizen an equal share in government, it is supposed to rule out the permanent dominion of any individual or party or social stratum, thus avoiding constant, deadly battles for supremacy. But a healthy democratic self-image – one that can help citizens think realistically about the choices that leaders put before them – needs less self-flattery and more honesty about our own capacities for the kinds of arrogance, self-deception, and self-serving speech that corrode democratic life.

This essay was first published in Past and Present: Perspectives from the Engelsberg Seminar, Axess Publishing, 2020

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DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

Democracy in crisis: civic learning and the reconstruction of common purpose.

Introduction: Civic Learning for a Democracy in Crisis

By Bruce Jennings, Michael K. Gusmano, Gregory E. Kaebnick, Carolyn Neuhaus, and Mildred Z. Solomon This multiauthored report offers wide-ranging assessments of increasing polarization and partisanship in American government and politics, and it proposes constructive responses to this in the provision of objective information, institutional reforms in government and the electoral system, and a reexamination of cultural and political values needed if democracy is to function well in a pluralistic and diverse society. The essays in the special report explore the norms of civic learning and institutions, social movements, and communal inno¬vations that can revitalize civic learning in practice. This introductory essay defines and explains the notion of civic learning, which is a lynchpin connecting many of the essays in the report. Civic learning pertains to the ways in which citizens learn about collective social problems and make decisions about them that reflect the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. Such learning can occur in many social settings in everyday life, and it can also be facilitated through participation in the processes of democratic governance on many levels. Civic learning is not doctrinaire and is compatible with a range of public goals and policies. It is an activity that increases what might be called the democratic capability of a people.

The Vanishing Square: Civic Learning in the Internet Age

By Sheila Jasanoff Nation states in the twenty-first century confront new challenges to their political legitimacy. Borders are more porous and less secure. Infectious disease epidemics, climate change, financial fraud, terrorism, and cybersecurity all involve cross-border flows of material, human bodies, and information that threaten to overwhelm state power and expert knowledge. Concurrently, doubts have multiplied about whether citizens, subject to manipulation through the internet, have lost the critical capacity to hold rulers accountable for their expert decisions. I argue that the primary threat to democracy is not the public’s epistemic incompetence but a slow dissolution of the deliberative practices that are essential for self-rule. We need a radical reimagining of the sites, forms, and performances of democratic deliberation. For this purpose, the American state needs to reconstitute a public square open to citizens who are deemed to be epistemically competent and capable of informed judgment.

Does the Civic Renewal Movement Have a Future?

By Peter Levine A civic ideal is an ideal of deliberative self-governance. People who participate in discussing what their own groups should do are being civic. Civic venues, institutions, and habits have waned since the mid-1990s. In the 1990s, a movement arose to restore them, under the banner of “civic renewal.” This movement was carefully nonpartisan, often impartial about specific issues, and interested in creating alternative settings that could complement such basic political institutions as Congress and elections. As the condition of democracy has worsened in recent years, this approach looks inadequate or irrelevant. The most promising sources of civic renewal now are parties and social movements that have substantive agendas, such as racial justice, and that improve civic life as a collateral benefit.

Can Our Schools Help Us Preserve Democracy? Special Challenges at a Time of Shifting Norms

by Meira Levinson and Mildred Z. Solomon Civic education that prepares students for principled civic participation is vital to democracy. Schools face significant challeng­es, however, as they attempt to educate for democracy in a democracy in crisis. Parents, educators, and policy-makers disagree about what America’s civic future should look like, and hence about what schools should teach. Likewise, hyperpartisan­ship, mutual mistrust, and the breakdown of democratic norms are perverting the kinds of civic relationships and values that schools want to model and achieve. Nonetheless, there is strong evidence that young people want to be civically engaged and are hungry for more and better civic learning opportunities. Reviving the civic mission of schools is thus a win-win-win. Adults want it, youth want it, and democracy needs it. We propose three means by which educators and the public can reconstruct our common purpose and achieve civic innovation to help democracy in crisis: support action civics , strengthen youth leadership outside the classroom, and engage both students and adults with “hard history” and contemporary contro­versies.

Residential Segregation and Publicly Spirited Democracy

By Michael K. Gusmano

Successful deliberations over contentious issues require a publicly spirited citizenry that will encourage elected officials to promote what James Madison called the “permanent and aggregate interests” of the country. Unfortunately, atomizing forces have pulled American society apart, undermining trust and making collective action difficult. Residential segregation is one of those atomizing forces. Residential segregation undermines a commitment to civic virtue because it encourages people to think about fellow citizens as “others” with whom they have little in common. To address this situation, we must start by fixing our neighborhoods and creating local institutions that enhance trust and foster a public-spirited democratic citizenry. For example, our existing educational policies reinforce the disparities associated with residential segregation and have created massive resource inequalities among school districts across the country. A useful first step would be to equalize school district funding to promote a more genuine equality of opportunity.

Creative Democracy: The Task Still before Us

By Robert Westbrook This essay looks to Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey, as well as a contemporary political theorist, Kevin O’Leary, for some guidance in confronting the present crisis in American democratic norms and practices—including that swirling around issues of public health.

Trust: The Need for Public Understanding of How Science Works

by Miriam Solomon General science literacy contributes to good public decision-making about technology and medicine. This essay explores the kinds of science literacy currently developed by public education in the United States of America. It argues that current curricula on “science as inquiry” (formerly the “nature of science”) need to be brought up to date with the inclusion of discussion of social epistemological concepts such as trust and scientific authority, scientific disagreement versus science denialism, the role of ideology and bias in scientific research, and the importance of peer review and responsiveness to criticism.

Civic Learning When the Facts Are Politicized: How Values Shape Facts, and What to Do about It

By Gregory E. Kaebnick Social debates about highly technical topics are often driven by values yet dwell on facts. The debate about whether genetically modified organisms are acceptable in food, for example, focuses on causal claims about consumers’ health or the environment, but the language and imagery surrounding it often point to underlying misgivings about the human relationship to nature or the use of science. In such cases, it is not always possible to resolve the factual disputes simply by articulating the facts better. Because of various features of human reasoning—cognitive biases and heuristics, the very nature of facts, and the central role of social trust in how people learn—facts cannot be fully disentangled from values. Three lessons can then be drawn.  First, values sometimes need to be discussed at the outset of debate, before or while addressing facts. Second, factual issues can and should sometimes be framed in less politicized ways. Third, factual claims that have a limited evidentiary basis may nonetheless need to be aired and discussed. 

Civic Learning, Science, and Structural Racism

By Kiameesha R. Evans and Michael K. Gusmano Vaccine hesitancy is a major public health challenge, and racial disparities in the acceptance of vaccines is a particular concern. In this essay, we draw on interviews with mothers of Black male adolescents to offer insights into the reasons for the low rate of vaccination against the human papillomavirus among this group of adolescents. Based on these conversations, we argue that increasing the acceptance of HPV and other vaccines cannot be accomplished merely by providing people with more facts. Instead, we must address the pervasive racial discrimination in the United States that undermines trust in social institutions, including the health care system. In the short term, it may be helpful to increase the number of clinicians of color working in the health system, but more fundamental changes are required. The U.S. must adopt and implement policies that dismantle structural racism if it hopes to produce greater trust and community-oriented thinking on behalf of people who have been exploited for centuries.

White Privilege, White Poverty: Reckoning with Class and Race in America

By Erika Blacksher and Sean A. Valles This essay argues that a failure to think and talk critically and candidly about White privilege and White poverty is a key threat to the United States of America’s precarious democracy. Whiteness frames one of America’s most pressing collective challenges—the poor state of the nation’s health, which lags behind other wealthy nations and is marred by deep and entrenched class- and race-based inequities. The broadscale remedies experts recommend demand what is in short supply: trust in evidence, experts, government, and one another. The authors’ prescription is threefold, beginning with a call for intersectional health studies and reports that avoid one-dimensional misrepresentations of widespread health problems as simply Black or White problems. Second, there is the need for a “critical consciousness” about race and class. Lastly, the essay calls for widescale opportunities for Americans to engage in cross-racial and cross-class democratic conversations about their struggles and aspirations in search of common ground.

Redoing the Demos

By Bruce Jennings Forces including extreme economic inequality, cultural polarization, and the monetizing and privatizing of persons as commodities are undermining the forms of moral recognition and mutuality upon which democratic practices and institutions depend. These underlying factors, together with more direct modes of political corruption, manipulation, and authoritarian nationalism, are undoing Western democracies. This essay identifies and explores some vital underpinnings of democratic citizenship and civic learning that remain open to revitalization and repair. Building care structures and practices from the ground up and developing inclusive and egalitarian modes of solidarity in a pluralistic society are the focus of discussion. The essay argues that solidarity and care are essential relationships and practices of moral recognition upon which democratic political agency and freedom rest. The social-relational lifeworld and the democratic lifeworld are interdependent. Democratic citizenship is itself a relational practice that supports other practices. Democratic governance properly carried out fosters an underlying social solidarity and care and in turn draws moral and political legitimacy upward from them.

Recommendations for Better Civic Learning: Building and Rebuilding Democracy

By Bruce Jennings, Michael K. Gusmano, Gregory E. Kaebnick, Carolyn P. Neuhaus, and Mildred Z. Solomon This essay provides an integrative discussion of various theoretical and practical reform perspectives offered by other essays in the report. It also offers a number of recommendations. It notes that the aim of the special report is not to propose specific reform measures but, rather, to consider larger, more theoretic concerns related to political and economic questions, which are personal and structural—psychological, cultural, and institutional—at the same time. In response, this essay argues that the best relationship between the citizenry and government in a democracy is not one of deference, nor one of contestation, but one that is critically constructive, which in turn is linked to practices of civic learning. To be constructive, citizens need scientific literacy, an understanding of how government and other institutions work, critical thinking abilities, and many open and diverse forums for civic learning to offset the increasingly isolating media “bubbles” that are the only source of information for many. The essay then formulates five recommendations designed to facilitate critically constructive citizenship and civic learning. These are creating a basis for civic participation, acquiring information, talking to each other, designing institutional change, and achieving deliberation.

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American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why.

Behind the sense that the political system is broken lies a collision between forces both old and new.

In a country where the search for common ground is increasingly elusive, many Americans can agree on this: They believe the political system is broken and that it fails to represent them.

They aren’t wrong.

Faced with big and challenging problems — climate, immigration, inequality, guns, debt and deficits — government and politicians seem incapable of achieving consensus. On each of those issues, the public is split, often bitterly. But on each, there are also areas of agreement. What’s broken is the will of those in power to see past the divisions enough to reach compromise.

The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is both an extreme emblem of what happens when democracy stops functioning as it should and the result of relentless attacks by former president Donald Trump on the legitimacy of the election process based on lies and distortions, a continuing threat to U.S. democracy.

In more routine ways, the political system feeds frustration and discontent with its incapacity to respond to the public’s needs. There is little on the horizon to suggest solutions.

The failure has multiple origins, including a collapse of trust in institutions. But one of the most significant is a collision between forces both old and new.

The old dates to the writing of the Constitution — debates and compromises that resulted in representation in the House based on population and in the Senate based on equal standing for the states; the odd system by which we elect presidents; and lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices. In general, the founders often distrusted the masses and sought to create structural protections against them.

The newer element, which has gathered strength in recent decades, is the deepening polarization of the political system. Various factors have caused this: shifts within the two parties that have enlarged the ideological gap between them; geographic sorting that has widened the differences between red and blue states; a growing urban-rural divide; and greater hostility among individuals toward political opponents.

The result is that today, a minority of the population can exercise outsize influence on policies and leadership, leading many Americans increasingly to feel that the government is a captive of minority rule.

Twice in the past two decades, the president was elected while losing the popular vote — George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016. That had happened only three times in the previous 200-plus years. The dynamic extends beyond the presidency to the other two branches of government.

A new Washington Post analysis found that four of the nine current justices on the Supreme Court were confirmed by senators who represent a minority of the U.S. population. Since 1998, Republicans have had a majority in the Senate a total of 12 years but did not during that time represent more than half the nation’s population, The Post’s analysis of population data and Senate composition shows.

The Post also found that during Trump’s presidency, 43 percent of all judicial and governmental nominees were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population. Under President Biden , not quite 5 percent of nominees were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.

The state of democracy is not uniformly negative. In moments of crisis especially, elected officials have found common ground. At times, government action does reflect the public will. Under Trump, bipartisan congressional majorities passed and the president signed multiple rounds of relief during the covid-19 pandemic . Biden and Congress came together to pass a major infrastructure package in 2021. Last year, there was bipartisan agreement on legislation to spur production of semiconductor chips in the United States.

At times, protection of minorities and their rights from the will of the majority is needed and necessary. Checks and balances afford further protections that nonetheless can seem to hamstring government’s ability to function effectively. But on balance, the situation now is dire. Americans are more dissatisfied with their government than are citizens in almost every other democracy, according to polling.

Henry Brady, professor of political science and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has been studying these issues for many years. As he surveys the current state of the United States’ democracy, he comes away deeply pessimistic. “I’m terrified,” he said. “I think we are in bad shape, and I don’t know a way out.”

This is the first in a series of reports examining what is fueling the visceral feeling many Americans have that their government does not represent them. Alongside debates over specific policies, the overall state of democracy roils the national discussion. Heading into the 2024 presidential election, this issue is likely to be a critical factor for many voters.

Distrust in government

Trust in the federal government began to decline during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and then took a big hit amid the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s. There have been occasional rebounds — after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, or during the late 1990s when the economy was doing well. But for the past two decades — through good economic times and bad — mistrust has been persistent.

Individual institutions have suffered as well. Of late it is the Supreme Court’s reputation that has been damaged due to rulings that have gone against popular opinion and a heightened sense that the court has become politicized. For Congress, the decline has been ongoing for decades. Only Wall Street and television news have seen more precipitous declines in trust over the past four decades, according to calculations published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Americans have long been skeptical of the power of the central government. Scandals and corruption over the years have added to the problem. Lately, officials have openly attacked the very institutions of which they are a part, making it even harder for the bureaucracy to function effectively. No one has done this more than Trump. Attacks on institutions have been a hallmark of his time in politics.

While there is some universality to these conditions, citizens in only a handful of democratic countries take a dimmer view of their government than Americans do of theirs.

Polarization

For much of the United States’ history, the constitutional system created by the founders worked reasonably well. The Civil War is an obvious exception, and other periods have tested the collective will. But overall, government generally functioned, even if not perfectly.

More recently, however, the system’s weaknesses became more apparent as tribalism shapes much of political behavior and the Republican Party has departed from its historical moorings. Trump’s impact has distorted traditional Republican conservatism and has led many Republicans to accept as reality demonstrably untrue beliefs. The best example of that is that a majority in the GOP say Biden was not legitimately elected . The hard-right wing of the Republican Party and Trump voters in particular have been resistant to compromise.

“In comparison to European countries, our constitutional system is not well suited for polarized political parties,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford Law School.

Election of presidents

The Constitution created an unusual mechanism for electing the president — an electoral college. It was built on assumptions that over the years have proved to be faulty.

The founders distrusted a system based on the popular vote, fearing many citizens would not be well-informed. They put power in the hands of electors. They thought the House would often end up picking the president, not anticipating the effects of what quickly became a two-party system in the United States. The rationale for the current system has been overrun by the realities of today’s politics.

“It was created because the founders couldn’t figure out what to do,” said George C. Edwards III, a political science professor at Texas A&M University and author of “Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America.” “It doesn’t work at all as the founders intended.”

During the first two centuries of the country’s history, there were only three cases in which the person elected president lost the popular vote, in 1824, 1876 and 1888. Now it has happened twice in a quarter century and could happen again in 2024. In both 2000, when Bush became president, and 2016, when Trump was elected, the popular vote supported the Democratic nominee, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, respectively, yet the electoral college vote went in favor of the Republican.

During the past two decades, the number of competitive states in presidential elections, where the victory margin has been five percentage points or fewer, has declined. Meanwhile, the number of states decided by margins of 15 percentage points or more has increased, based on an analysis of state-by-state results by The Post.

Because the outcome in the most competitive states can be decided by a relatively small number of votes, Republicans now have a significantly better chance of winning in the electoral college than in the popular vote. Democrats, meanwhile, roll up huge margins in deep blue states like California that give them no significant boost in the electoral college math.

In the Great Compromise among delegates to the Constitutional Convention, the House was to be divided based on population, and the Senate would give each state equal representation regardless of population.

In times past, many state delegations to the Senate were split between the two major parties. In 1982, for example, about two-dozen states had split representation. Today there are only six true splits, and those states account for about 9 percent of the U.S. population.

Republicans tend to have full control in less populated states, creating an imbalance in the number of senators they send to Washington and the percentage of the national population they represent. Even when they have recently held a majority in the Senate, they represent a minority of the population. In 2024, two of the nation’s least populous states — West Virginia and Montana — could flip control of the Senate from Democrats to Republicans, if GOP challengers prevail over Democratic incumbents.

This has had an impact especially on confirmations of judicial nominees and senior executive branch appointees. During the four years Trump was in office, nearly half of the individuals nominated for key positions were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population. No other recent president had more than 5 percent confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.

Through gerrymandering, population dispersion and the sorting of where people prefer to live, competition for House seats has declined.

The overwhelming majority of districts now lean strongly either to Republicans or to Democrats. In those districts, that makes the primary election more important than the general election. Because turnout is generally concentrated among the most fervent voters in primary contests, more extreme candidates have an advantage. This has widened the ideological gap in the House, which makes compromise even more difficult.

It has also led to the kinds of dysfunction seen this year, such as the multi-ballot marathon to elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as speaker, or the threats to let the government default on its debts that ultimately were avoided by an old-fashioned bit of compromise.

As the number of swing districts has declined, another phenomenon has become evident: Even in open-seat races, which historically have been more contested than those involving incumbents, the number of landslide victories by members of both major parties has increased dramatically.

The Supreme Court

Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past nine presidential elections. But during that time, Republican presidents have nominated six of the nine current members of the Supreme Court. Four of the nine justices, including the three nominated by Trump, were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.

The percentage of Americans represented by senators voting to confirm justices has been decreasing over the past half century. Now that justices can be confirmed with a simple majority vote, rather than a supermajority, the phenomenon of confirmation by a majority of senators representing a minority of citizens has become commonplace when Republicans hold the Senate majority.

State legislatures

In Washington, political divisions have led to gridlock and inaction on many issues. In the states, the opposite has occurred because states have increasingly become either mostly red or mostly blue.

In just two states is the legislature split between Republicans and Democrats. In more than half of the states, the dominant party enjoys a supermajority, which means they can override vetoes by a governor of a different party or generally have their will on legislation.

Similarly, full control of state government — the legislature and the governor’s office — is the rule rather than the exception. Today 39 states fit this definition. The result is a sharper and sharper divergence in the public policy agendas of the states.

The dominant party has been able to move aggressively to enact its governing priorities. That has meant tight restrictions on abortion in Republican states and few or no restrictions in blue states; it’s meant challenges to LGBTQ+ rights in red states and affirmation of those rights in blue states.

These divisions have made it possible for the dominant party to govern with little regard to the interests of those with allegiance to the minority party and often little accountability as well. The result is two Americas with competing agendas and values.

Public opinion vs. public policy

The gap between public policy and public opinion is one major consequence of today’s frozen federal government. Three of the most talked-about issues reflect that: abortion, guns and immigration.

On abortion, most Americans oppose last year’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , which ended the constitutional right to abortion. On guns, big majorities favor individual proposals to tighten laws, but the gun lobby remains powerful enough to block action.

On immigration, there has been a majority for some years favoring tougher border controls along with a path to citizenship, with some penalties, for the millions of undocumented immigrants living here. Every effort to deal with this in Congress over the past two decades has failed, including attempts to resolve the plight of people brought here illegally as children, known as “dreamers.”

The Constitution

One way to deal with some of the structural issues — the electoral college, a Senate where a minority of the population can elect a majority of members or the lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices — would be by amending the Constitution. But the U.S. Constitution, though written to be amended, has proved to be virtually impossible to change. Nor is there cross-party agreement on what ails the system. Many conservatives are satisfied with the status quo and say liberals want to change the rules for purely partisan reasons.

It was the drafters of state constitutions who saw the need for amending such documents. Over the history of the country, state constitutions have been amended thousands of times — more than half of all those proposed. But while there have been about 12,000 proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution, Congress has submitted just 33 to the states, of which 27 have been ratified.

The last amendment was approved in 1992, and that was a provision that had been proposed along with others that became the Bill of Rights. In reality, it has been half a century since a contemporary amendment has been ratified. Given the political conditions in the country, the prospect of two-thirds of both the House and Senate voting to propose an amendment and then three-fourths of the states ratifying it seems extremely unlikely.

To remain a living document, the Constitution needs to be adaptable to changing times, perspectives and conditions. The alternative to amending the Constitution is through judicial interpretation by the Supreme Court. Today, the court is dominated by “originalists” who interpret the document through a strict reading of the words and times in which it was written — long a goal of conservatives. But the America of 2023 is not the America of the framers of the Constitution in the late 18th century, a time when enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person and women did not have the right to vote.

Not all countries have written constitutions — Britain , for example. But the amendment process when functioning effectively is “a mechanism to peaceful revolution,” said historian Jill Lepore, who directs the Amendments Project at Harvard University. So there is value to a written constitution, but only if it can be changed.

“The danger,” Lepore said, “is that it becomes brittle and fixed — and then the only way to change your system of government or to reform a part of it is through an insurrection.”

About this project

In the analysis of population data and Senate composition, The Post’s count of senators in each year represents the composition of the Senate on Jan. 31 of that year, with two exceptions: Al Franken is counted in the 2009 Senate and Norris Cotton is counted in the 1975 Senate. In the analysis of confirmations over time, The Post examined all Senate roll call votes with a result of “confirmed.” For all senators who voted to confirm a given nominee, The Post calculated the percent of Americans from the states of those senators that year, with each senator representing half of their state population. Many nominees to various positions were confirmed with a voice vote or through a unanimous consent agreement; these confirmations are not reflected in this data. In the analysis of House elections, The Post determined open House races using several sources, including FEC and MIT elections results data.

Reporting by Dan Balz and Clara Ence Morse . Editing by Griff Witte . Copy editing by Mina Haq . Project editing by KC Schaper . Design and development by Courtney Beesch and Tyler Remmel . Design editing by Betty Chavarria . Illustrations by Courtney Beesch with images from iStock. Topper animation by Emma Kumer . Photo editing by Christine T. Nguyen . Graphics by Clara Ence Morse and Hanna Zakharenko . Graphics editing by Kevin Uhrmacher . Data editing by Anu Narayanswamy . Visual enterprise editing by Sarah Frostenson . Research provided by Monika Mathur . Additional editing, production and support by Philip Rucker, Peter Wallsten, Jenna Johnson and Tom Justice.

American democracy in crisis

The press reframes democracy coverage to capture a perilous, critical moment in u.s. history.

On August 9, 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) executed a lawfully ordered search of former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida home and private club in connection with documents — including potentially classified information — he'd allegedly taken from the White House and refused to return to archivists, as required by federal law.

As the news broke, rally cries came from Trump’s most ardent supporters, Republican allies in Congress and the media, for the FBI to be investigated, defunded and abolished entirely. Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Georgia) wasted no time plugging a new line of political merch with the logo: Defund the FBI.

On Fox News, U.S. Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) responded to news of the search by recklessly suggesting to viewers, “The FBI and the Department of Justice are going to give Trump a fair and impartial firing squad.” Lawyers for the former President took to the airwaves to suggest that the FBI had planted evidence, and there were news outlets that welcomed them on without challenge.

It became the “talking point” among conservative media — that the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) are not to be trusted.

Within days, a former Naval submarine officer attempted to attack the FBI field office in Cincinnati; he was later shot and killed by law enforcement. TikTok and other social media platforms saw a troubling spike in violent rhetoric used as recruitment tools for domestic extremists.

It was yet another in an interminable line of recent examples of how elections, law enforcement agencies, the courts, elected officials, branches of the government and the very rule of law — the Republic’s framework — are under sustained and concerted attack remarkably by its own citizens and elected leaders.

In November 2021, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), headquartered in Stockholm, published a report on the state of democracy around the world. “Significantly, the United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” the authors concluded, describing the U.S. as a “backsliding” democracy.

Protect democracy — a non-partisan, nonprofit group — published “The Authoritarian Playbook” in June 2022, designed to inform journalists about how authoritarianism takes hold, to recognize the symptoms and report on the threat in a measured, thoughtful and effective way. Its authors describe how cult-of-personality politicians and enablers corrupt elections, stoke violence, target vulnerable communities, politicize independent institutions, spread disinformation, aggrandize executive power and quash dissent — all now eerily familiar to the American people.

“The media has an essential role to play that is unbiased, but not neutral in applying a consistent standard about the threats to democracy,” the Playbook’s authors suggest. “In light of the authoritarian threat, the ongoing process of media evolution and adaptation necessitates that the media may draw on a different toolkit today than it did in the eras of Walter Lippmann’s ‘Public Opinion,’ the Pentagon Papers or Watergate.”

U.S. historians are also sounding alarms. As The Washington Post reported on Aug. 10, 2022, President Biden spent some quality video conference time with historians, who warned him of troubling trends and occurrences of history repeating.  

“Comparisons were made to the years before the 1860 election when Abraham Lincoln warned that a ‘house divided against itself cannot stand’ and the lead-up to the 1940 election, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled rising domestic sympathy for European fascism and resistance to the United States joining World War II,” The Post’s Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker and Tyler Pager reported.

This was not the first time a president has been briefed on threats to democracy. The Post reporters noted that it’s a practice dating back to the Reagan administration. Barack Obama sought perspective from historians on multiple occasions, “though the sessions fell out of favor under Trump.”

Creating an historic chronicle

Sam Levine came to The Guardian in 2019 after reporting on voting rights for HuffPost. Initially, it was his focus at The Guardian, too. In time, his beat evolved to cover democracy more broadly, and today, his title is democracy correspondent. He works closely with Chief Reporter Ed Pilkington, as well as with the politics team, and spends untold hours reading and following up on local and state news from across the country. His audience is national, if not international, so he frames his coverage with that in mind, demonstrating that what’s happening in Maricopa County or Milwaukee is relevant to their own lives — for example, the erosion of trust in elections.

“No matter where you live, it’s a trend that we’re starting to see across the country,” he said.

One of the challenges on this beat is access to political candidates and elected officials who are less willing to communicate with the press.

“Regardless of what you publish, or how much effort you make to interview them, they’ll put something out that says that the story is biased or that it’s not accurate, but still refuse to talk to you,” Levine said.

“I went to a summit for a group that was hosting election integrity workshops across the country, and I was kicked out of the summit,” he recalled. “They wouldn’t answer any of the questions that I submitted to them afterward. We had to publish a story that just said they declined to comment, which I think is unfortunate because our readers deserve to know their perspective, as well.”

Asked about experiences that resonate with him, Levine recounted an April 2022 Trump rally in Michigan. Attendees lined up to get inside the venue hours before its start, so he took the opportunity to walk the line and speak with some of them.

“Almost everyone I talked to, I asked, ‘Is there anything that could convince you at this point that the 2020 election was not stolen and that the results in Michigan were accurate?’ And almost every person I talked to said that there was nothing that could convince them, which really stood out to me,” he said.

It’s not unusual to have partisans working those lines, signing folks up to vote, but this rally was different, Levine recalled. Instead, there were asking people in line if they believed the election had been stolen as a pretense for signing them up to be poll workers.

“It made me aware that there’s this huge infrastructure emerging to get people who questioned the election results to work elections — to be the people who are checking your ID as you come in to vote,” he said.

“This belief that the election was stolen is getting at something that people feel, and it might not be something that a set of facts is ever going to dissuade them, but we have to report on where those emotions are coming from, where the belief is coming from, the rhetoric that people are using to encourage that belief. But it might not be something that a fact check is ever going to dissuade them from. This is much more complicated than people having simply looked at the wrong set of facts,” he said.

And yet, Levine said that the best way to combat misinformation is to “stick to the facts.”

“As we report on elections, we need to show the processes — how ballots are counted; what processes elections offices use to make sure your ballot is counted, and all the steps along the way to make sure that I am who I say I am when I show up to vote,” he explained. “Figuring out ways to explain those processes and make them more accessible to people — to help people understand how these systems work — is becoming more important than ever.”

Levine suggested that particular challenges to democracy require a bolder approach to journalism. We must tell the public when they are being lied to and by whom.

“There’s been more of a willingness to treat voting rights and democracy as an area of coverage that is deserving of its own focus and its own reporters,” Levine said.

“Before 2020, voting rights were seen as sort of mixed in with politics, and claims of fraud or efforts to make it harder to vote was just another political squabble. In the last two years, we’ve seen a shift away from that and to saying this is something that merits its own set of reporters covering it. That’s been really encouraging to see,” he concluded.

On the ground in Arizona

Yvonne Wingett-Sanchez’s work in journalism began as an internship with The Arizona Republic in 2001. For nearly 20 years, she had what she called a “pretty conventional career,” leading to a position as the news outlet’s national political reporter.

“As part of that, I was asked — along with one of my other colleagues — to take a deep dive into efforts to subvert democracy and overturn the 2020 election in 2021 through the ballot review here in the county," she said. It was a transformative experience for the journalist.

“I read the job description that The Washington Post put out for the democracy reporter position in Arizona, and it was a clarifying moment for me, in terms of what I wanted to do with my life,” she explained.

“I still consider myself a local journalist who is working for a national outlet, trying to tell the story of Arizona, where democracy is broken. We’re asking why it’s breaking, how it’s breaking, and also where it’s working, but also why people feel the way they feel about their government and this place back in Washington, D.C., which seems so far away,” she said.

One of the challenges she faces doing this reporting is capturing the level of anger many Arizonans express to her. They are “deeply angry and deeply distrustful of the government,” she said. 

“It is manifesting in voting for people based on experiences that friends or family may have had with the government, or something they saw on social media that they don’t even know is true or not. They watch the news without participating in a meaningful way and just show up to vote because friends or family members have told them to vote for a candidate.

“They’re angry about inflation and gas prices and not being able to take vacations this summer,” she continued. “Across the board, people seem really angry, and they don't know what to do with it. The most immediate thing they can do is vote for the people who make these wild promises about upending or overhauling the government. Even people who aren’t all-in on the notion that the 2020 election was stolen feel like the election denialism is a gateway to feel affirmed — to feel a sense of belonging to a movement.”

Echoing what other journalists have observed about a slide toward a post-fact world, Wingett-Sanchez noted that many Arizonans can’t even agree on a set of facts essential for productive dialog and governance.

“Still, I think the key is to keep people talking,” she suggested. “I’m not going to argue with them, but I will continue posing my questions based on factual information. Keeping voters talking is going to be key to trying to understand this moment.”

Access to candidates, party officials and donors is increasingly impeded.

“In the past four years — and this is astounding to me — there have been so many debates and forums that [the press] hasn’t been allowed to cover, even if the candidate wants the press there. A lot of these clubs have taken an insular position, and they view the press as the enemy,” she said.

That, too, is manifesting in troubling ways. For example, Wingett-Sanchez recently covered a campaign event for a “MAGA slate of candidates” and was taken aback by the crowd’s anger toward reporters. Standard operating procedures for events of this size call for press pens, which can be purposely restrictive for journalists, and yet today, afford a modicum of security. This event had none.

“I ended up at the corner of the stage, unprotected. At least with a press pen, you feel like, okay, there’s some type of barrier that at least cues the audience that this was an area where you shouldn’t go. There was none at this event, which left me feeling more vulnerable than I’ve felt before,” she said.

Despite the challenges, she told E&P that she wakes up “excited for Monday” and looks forward to where this beat will lead her storytelling.

“Something we’re watching is the lack of action by traditional conservatives, or the business community, to stand up and say publicly what they say privately,” she said. In fact, Republicans who don’t fall in line with election denialism are censored, voted out and ousted from the Arizona GOP — in other words, canceled .

“They have gone silent, and traditionally — at least in Arizona — they have been viewed as a guardrail or the people who looked to set the record straight, and they are completely silent,” she remarked.

Reporting in from Fulton County

Democracy isn’t only under assault in the nation’s capital. States like Arizona, Michigan and Georgia are flashpoints. Take the case in Fulton County, Georgia, for example — a criminal inquiry into the former president’s attempts to corrupt the 2020 election tallies.

Senior Reporter Tamar Hallerman’s first story about the Fulton County case for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), published in February 2021, when the district attorney announced the investigation. Before that, she’d been more of an “enterprise features reporter,” but coverage of issues like racketeering laws, how a grand jury works, and what makes the Fulton County grand jury special required more hands-on-deck.

Today, it’s Hallerman’s full-time beat.

One episode of interest to Fulton prosecutors is a leaked conference call among staff at the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Northern District of Georgia.   AJC Investigative Reporter Chris Joyner received an audio copy of the conversation, which took place shortly after   the abrupt resignation of U.S. Attorney Byung J. “BJay” Pak.    A

“It was a major get for my colleague,” she said.

“He did not publish that conference call,” she explained. “He ended up just quoting relevant tidbits from that and doing a pretty long in-depth story.”

Naturally, the district attorney was paying attention, too, and subsequently subpoenaed AJC for the leaked audio of a conference call between U.S. Attorneys.

“We ended up reviewing it and making sure there was nothing that would have identified who the source was, and we made the decision that we would publish the conference call in full on our website, and then prosecutors would be able to listen to it on our site,” she said.

They also offered the public some context, reporting what was learned from the call, how it helped glean some insight into how the investigation was unfolding, and how prosecutors may be building the case. “That was my guiding light as I wrote this story,” Hallerman said. 

“It feels a little bit like a David-versus-Goliath story when you think of the players here,” she added. “You have Trump, who is well-resourced and has this army of lawyers working for him. He can still raise so much money, and he has a kind of hold on a substantial portion of the Republican Party. And then you have a local D.A. here — granted, this is one of the bigger D.A. offices in the state. But, in general, prosecutors don't like to take risks. They tend to be conservative with a small-c. They don't pursue cases they can’t win.”

The beat requires her to seek sources beyond Georgia — legal scholars who better understand the distinctions between federal and state laws. “It always helps to talk to folks who are outside of the local bubble here in Atlanta,” she said. 

You can sense her pride and enthusiasm when she speaks of the work. She said she’s “had a blast” reporting on this case.

“It’s a political story. It’s a legal story. It’s a hyperlocal story. It’s a story for the history books,” she reflected.

Leading the AP's Democracy team

Tom Verdin is the democracy editor at The Associated Press (AP), a position he’d held for just a few months when E&P spoke with Verdin in August. Verdin’s been with the AP for over two decades, most recently as the editor of AP’s state government team.

The democracy team now in his charge comes under the umbrella of AP’s national political team.

Though “democracy editor” may be a new title for newsrooms, Verdin pointed out that newspapers have been reporting on facets of democracy for more than 100 years.

“But things are different now. There’s a realization — with other news organizations, as well — that there’s been a change in the country that has compelled us to focus intently on the attack on American democracy,” Verdin said.

AP’s coverage of voting has delved into Russia’s meddling and hacks on state systems, how election systems work, and the changing ways people access their right to vote since the pandemic. Then came “January 6 th ,” which Verdin described as a watershed moment.

“This is the first time in the nation’s history that we had a president who was actively trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power. That’s a seminal moment. It was a clear attack on American democracy and the symbol of American democracy, the U.S. Capitol. So, before and after January 6, you have a former president who is continuing to peddle this false narrative, this lie … that has had profound effects on millions, if not tens of millions of Americans who believe that,” Verdin said. “And it’s not just rank-and-file Republican voters. As we’ve seen through the primary season this year, we have Republican candidates for office, for Congress, governor and on down the ballot, who continue to promote this lie that the 2020 election was stolen.”

“You’ve got to answer them with factual reporting to the extent that you possibly can,” he suggested. “And that's one of our missions here: This falsehood about phony elections permeating so much of America? We don't want to let that go. We want as much factual reporting to answer those charges as possible.”

AP will keep a keen watch on what happens this election cycle, particularly regarding candidates who are “election deniers.” The news agency tasks reporters with every statehouse in the nation.

“Some of these positions have great authority over elections, so I think that’s probably the biggest immediate concern. … What does that look like if they win? What does it mean for free, fair and accurate elections going forward?” he pondered. “We don’t know.”

Verdin also sees it as a journalistic duty to report on violent threats to local and state officials, many who now require security details or have been so egregiously harassed and threatened that they’ve resigned.

“For those reasons, it became clear that we needed a team that was focused on these threats to the very underpinnings of our system of government,” he explained.

Looking at January 6th through a long lens

E&P spoke with Ryan Reilly, fresh off an afternoon TV appearance on MSNBC. It was the day the Mar-a-Lago warrant and seized items documents became public.

Reilly covers the Department of Justice (DOJ) for NBC News, and since Jan. 6, he has been painstakingly reporting on the arrests and prosecutions related to the attack on the Capitol.

“[It was] the most overwhelming thing that has happened to the Justice Department and FBI, frankly, since 9/11,” Reilly said. “This is the largest investigation in FBI history, in terms of the number of defendants. It's a mess for them to sort of handle in terms of the digital evidence. There are just troves and troves and terabytes and terabytes of evidence in these cases.”

 A big part of the story is how January 6 th defendants came to believe that the election was fraudulent.

“There’s definitely a split between some of the defendants who recognize that they were sort of tricked and those who don’t,” Reilly said. “I think that’s tough for a lot of them to sort of swallow, realizing to a certain extent that they’ve thrown their lives away for a bit because they weren’t able to ascertain the truth.”

Reilly’s reporting is often empathetic. He’s cognizant that hardship, particularly during the pandemic, compounded anger for many January 6 th defendants. “Then, on the other hand, there’s a need for deterrence,” he said.

“You want to make sure that you tell the story of both. Okay, this person may have had a difficult life, and here are some of the ways that they lead up to this. But you also want to recognize what’s on the other side of that — what the officers went through that day, and the importance of making sure that this doesn't happen again,” Reilly explained.

In some way, Reilly has been reporting on voting and elections since 2012 — crackdowns on voting rights and voter ID laws, for example.

“We’ve covered some of the issues at the DOJ that have been left over from the Bush administration, these conspiracies around the notion of widespread voter fraud and how that’s been used as a political tool,” Reilly recalled.

“But obviously, Trump brought that to a whole new level. It can be frustrating to cover these issues closely and just see how many Americans actually believe that there’s this massive criminal conspiracy around voting and that people are just stealing elections left and right,” he said.

Following the 2020 election, Reilly spoke with law enforcement officials worried about the consequences of the so-called "Big Lie."

“When you have people who believe that there's this massive criminal conspiracy and that the election was stolen, they think this is 1776 version 2.0, and some of them are actually going to do something about it,” Reilly observed.

He’s planning future reporting on intelligence failures related to January 6 th . On the public’s behalf, he’s seeking answers to why law enforcement wasn’t better prepared to defend the Capitol — and who or what impeded them.

“There have already been massive changes that we’ve seen at DOJ and the FBI as a result of January 6 th and the intelligence failures that we saw there. But it’s also the largest domestic terrorism investigation by a number of defendants in American history, so it’s a massive pivot point for the Justice Department and FBI,” Reilly said.

He sees the January 6 th beat through a long lens. With backlogged dockets, cases are being scheduled deep into 2023, Reilly noted. At five years out, the statute of limitations will have expired for defendants not yet prosecuted.

“There are hundreds and hundreds more of these cases yet to come,” he said.

“The total scope of this is nearly 3,000 people who could be charged because you have more than 2,700 at this point who they know went inside the Capitol. On top of that, there are hundreds of individuals who assaulted law enforcement officers outside the Capitol, according to the FBI but have not yet been arrested or charged. So, there’s a very, very long road ahead here, and it's an important beat to cover, [with] sustained public interest in these cases.”

Reilly clarifies that the defendants’ criminal actions on that day have led them to legal jeopardy, not their passion for a former president nor their affinity for the Republican Party.

“People have a First Amendment right to believe crazy conspiracy theories,” Reilly said.

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