Where Does American Democracy Go From Here?

Where Does American Democracy Go From Here?

Freedom House: The United States had slid down its ranking of countries by political rights and civil liberties — it is now 59th on Freedom House’s list, slightly below Argentina and Mongolia.

Mason: The word “identity” keeps coming up, and this is a really crucial part of it. And remember that we have research about intergroup conflict, right? Don’t look at this as, like, a logical disagreement situation. We’re not disagreeing on what kind of tax structure we should have. We’re not just disagreeing about the role of the federal government in American society. What we’re disagreeing about is increasingly the basic status differences between groups of people that have existed in America for a very long time. One of the things that Nathan Kalmoe and I found in our forthcoming book is that if you look at Democrats and Republicans who really, really hate each other and call each other evil and say the other party is a threat to the United States, the best predictor of that is how they think about the traditional social hierarchy.

White Democrats and Republicans had basically identical levels of racial resentment in 1986; today they’re 40 points apart. So one of the most passionate divides that we’re seeing between the parties right now, more than it has been in decades, is, does systemic racism exist? Does systemic sexism exist? Have we done enough to overcome it? Have we gone too far? When Trump made that an explicit conversation instead of a dog whistle, we actually had to start talking about it. And now we’re having this extremely difficult conversation as a country, and it’s never going to go well. It’s just not. There’s no possible way for us to have this conversation and stay calm and rational and reasonable about it. We’ve never done it before. It’s just very messy, and it’s going to be messy, and it’s going to get even uglier than it currently is.

Anderson: What is so scary is that, you know, what generally happens is that if you have a common enemy, it causes a coalescence among these disparate groups. Covid-19 was that common enemy, and instead, you saw greater fissioning between folks, greater division with this common enemy that has killed almost one million Americans. We couldn’t pull it together. We couldn’t rally around. We couldn’t agree on basic facts. That fissioning tells me how in trouble we are. I worry greatly about our democracy because where we should be able to see us coming together, instead of a “we” moment it is an “I” moment. And we’ve got to get to the “we.” We have got to get to the “we.”

Homans: I wonder, though — is there a “we”? I’ve been thinking about this, watching the war in Ukraine, which, besides bringing the matter of democracy’s global health to the fore, has so clearly centered on the question of how nations define things like cultural identity, sovereignty and an agreed-upon history — and what they define them against. Are Americans anywhere close to having a shared answer to that question themselves? Have these events changed your thinking at all about the fragility — or resilience — of democracy, or suggested any lessons we should apply to the United States?

Levitsky: The crossroads that American democracy is at right now are pretty damn close to unique. I mean, we are on the brink of something very new and very challenging. So it is not easy to find solutions, best practices elsewhere; the creation of a truly multiracial democracy is uncharted territory.