How long do democracies last

Many experts think that patching cracks is only part of the solution. Another part might be building democracy in the first place — addressing the inequalities of representation and participation that have blighted the nation since its founding. After the extraordinary events of the past five months, American democracy may be under stress like never before in the modern era.

The great machine of governance established by the Constitution in has long been beset by underlying problems such as partisanship, gridlock, and disinformation.

Then in November an incumbent president threw a match on this tinder: a false claim that the election was stolen, and that despite certified counts electing his opponent, in fact he had won. A mob smashed into the U. Capitol on Jan. That false belief endures despite more than 60 court cases heard by more than 90 judges, including Trump appointees, and despite Trump administration officials, including the attorney general and the top cybersecurity official, saying the elections were secure and there was no credible evidence of widespread fraud.

Republicans are all-in on enacting new voting restrictions , Sen. White supremacists powered the mob. They were angry about the demise of the world as they had known it, including a loss of political power they felt rightfully theirs. Their leaders called on them to take it back.

The year was , not , and the place was Wilmington, North Carolina. But the similarities between the 19th-century insurrection, in which a mob of white men overthrew an elected biracial government in Wilmington, and the Jan. Capitol to stop the counting of Electoral College votes, are inescapable, says Suzanne Mettler, professor of American institutions at Cornell University. The most obvious similarity is the refusal to accept an election.

This denial was clearly anti-democratic. Another similarity between the events of and is the extensive planning involved in operations. While some organization took place at the grassroots, it was political leaders in both cases who rallied and aimed the crowds at their destination. At least a dozen Capitol rioters facing federal charges have said they stormed the building because their president told them to.

Race was also a driving factor in both events. It was more central to Wilmington, but white supremacist symbols, signs, and supporters were present in Washington as well. It was a major example of the backsliding from racial progress that occurred throughout the post-Civil War South.

The prewar white aristocracy of Wilmington, largely Southern Democrats, had seethed while Black Republicans and white populists rose to elected power in the decades after In they acted, enlisting white militia groups to help retake the city. On Nov. The building of the Black-owned Daily Record newspaper was burned to the ground, and the police chief and other officials were driven out of town at gunpoint. President William McKinley declined to intervene in the coup. In coming months, the insurrectionists changed state voting laws, making access to the ballot subject to new restrictions such as literacy tests and poll taxes.

Democracy was under siege, as it has been at crucial times throughout American history. After analyzing the events of these periods, four distinct types of disruption emerge, says Professor Mettler. Second is the question of who is a full member of society, which touches directly on the racism and nativism that have stained American history. Third is economic inequality, which has weakened belief in democracy from the Gilded Age to today.

Fourth is growing executive power, which strains the Constitution itself. Sometimes it takes only one of these factors to threaten American democracy, according to Professors Mettler and Lieberman. Sometimes a number of them combine to deepen a crisis, as they did in the s and s. The U. The presidential election was the ninth in a row in which the popular vote margin was less than 10 percentage points — a record.

Democrat Joe Biden won the presidency, but Democrats did worse than expected in House races. In this context politics itself on the national level has become hypercompetitive, as both sides have every incentive to fight for every ballot.

Both sides see the basic rules of democracy as their key to future victory, tweeted New America senior fellow Lee Drutman earlier this month. But the two parties are taking very different approaches to the current focus of their struggle over rules: voting rights. Democrats are pushing a mammoth catch-all bill at the national level that would mandate automatic registration, expand early and mail-in voting, establish a public financing option for congressional campaigns, and establish ethics rules for Supreme Court justices, among other things.

Republicans are generally working at the state level in legislatures where they have the power to enact voting restrictions. In Georgia the GOP has already passed a bill that tightens voter ID requirements for absentee ballots, limits drop boxes, and most importantly, shifts some electoral oversight powers to the state legislature. GOP lawmakers are pushing similarly restrictive bills in at least 43 states.

As justification, many state Republicans cite uncertainties about the election, driven by the false accusations about fraud made by Mr. Trump and his allies. Both sides in this struggle may be trying to gain an advantage over the other, but one side has been far more aggressive and even anti-democratic in its tactics: Republicans.

Much of this is rooted in Mr. For instance, Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who refused to accede to Mr. 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.

He won forty-two of forty-eight states, and trounced the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, in the Electoral College to 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.

Writers and actors and directors and broadcasters made it happen. They dedicated themselves to using the medium to bring people together. Beginning in , for instance, F.

What were their problems? What problems remain unsolved? The record of an unparalleled event in the history of mankind! 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.

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. Had I better take my umbrella? 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. That did not exactly happen here, but in the nineteen-thirties four of five American superintendents of schools recommended assigning only those U. Nor did W. 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. Possibly, he allowed, you could call this a stubborn independence of mind, or even mulishness. The more argument the better is what the North Carolina-born George V. Denny, Jr. Denny, who helped run something called the League for Political Education, thought that was nuts. Town meeting tonight! Should schools teach politics? 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.

His panel included a Communist, an exile from the Spanish Civil War, a conservative American political economist, and a Russian columnist. 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.

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 after the Second World War helped create the G. Bill, had the idea of opening those schools up at night, so that citizens could hold debates. In , 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.

They attacked capitalism. In December, Protect Democracy organized a statement, which eight hundred and fifty legal scholars signed, asserting that the President had committed impeachable offenses. In some other countries that have registered a decline in democracy over the past decade, such as South Korea and Poland, demonstrators have flooded the streets in opposition. The erosion has been gradual enough that many Americans have become inured to it, numb to the alarm.

First, they stopped paying attention to the tweets. Then they found it easier to ignore the rallies and the random acts of transgression.

American legal activists seeking to stop the slide documented by Freedom House consider that, since Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial, he has entered a more audacious phase. Many experts fear that Trump will veer even further from the traditions of American governance. Bassin suspects that he will, but also thinks that Americans are gaining a new awareness of their own role in preserving democracy. Jim Mattis?

John Kelly?