How will American democracy survive? | No. 188 – March 20, 2022

A multiracial, pluralistic society is "uncharted territory" for representative democracy

I am ending a week of vacation today, so do not have a long post for you, but I carved out an hour or so for writing because I wanted to send a short post commenting on this piece in the New York Times Magazine about the future of American democracy.

Among other things, Charles Homans asks six experts — among them political scientists, lawyers and activists — what they think about the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the anti-democracy turn of the Republican Party, the increasing radicalization of pro-democracy politics and attacks on equal representation and the Voting Rights Act, and about the political-psychological roots of American democratic decline.

The panelists present a truly grim portrait of the United States today. The critical mass of (lower-case “d”) democrats necessary to sustain the country’s current level of (comparatively restricted) political freedoms is under threat from multiple angles. With competitive Congressional and Presidential elections on the near horizon, …