Democracy (Theory and Philosophy)

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      The U.S. Thinks ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’ It Already Has.

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      The move from democracy to autocracy isn’t a sudden shift. It is not a switch that flips from light to dark with nothing in between. But it’s also not quite right to call the path to authoritarianism a journey. To use a metaphor of travel or distance is to suggest something external, removed, foreign.It is better, in the U.S. context at least, to think of authoritarianism as something like a contradiction nestled within the American democratic tradition. It is part of the whole, a reflection of the fact that American notions of freedom and liberty are deeply informed by both the experience of slaveholding and the drive to seize land and expel its previous inhabitants.As the historian Edmund Morgan once wrote of the Virginians who helped lead the fight for Anglo-American independence, “The presence of men and women who were, in law at least, almost totally subject to the will of other men gave to those in control of them an immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the mercy of a tyrant.” Virginians, he continued, “may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like.”Similarly, the legal scholar Aziz Rana observed that for many Anglo-Americans in the 18th century, freedom was an “exclusivist ideal, accessible only to Anglo-Saxons and select Europeans, whose heritage, land practices and religion made them particularly suited to self-rule. Such exclusivism presupposed that settler security, as well as more grandiose dreams of utopian peace, required the subordination of internal and external enemies, who threatened Anglo social and political supremacy.” Freedom and domination, he wrote, were “bound together.”This duality is present in our federal Constitution, which proclaims republican liberty at the same time that it has enabled the brutal subjugation of entire peoples within the United States. The Constitution both inspired the democratic vistas of radical antislavery politicians and backstopped the antebellum dream of a transcontinental slave empire.Move a little closer to the present and you can see clearly how American democracy and American autocracy have existed side by side, with the latter just another feature of our political order. If we date the beginning of Jim Crow to the 1890s — when white Southern politicians began to mandate racial separation and when the Supreme Court affirmed it — then close to three generations of American elites lived with and largely accepted the existence of a political system that made a mockery of American ideals of self-government and the rule of law.It was a system that, as the legal scholar and former judge Margaret A. Burnham wrote in “By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners,” rested on “the chronic, unpredictable violence that loomed over everyday Black life.” In one of many such episodes detailed in the book, Burnham recounts the last moments of Henry Williams, a Black G.I. killed in 1942 by an Alabama bus driver named Grover Chandler for what Chandler perceived as “impudence on the part of the young soldier.” Rushing to escape the bus after being assaulted by the driver, Williams spilled his laundry on the ground. “As he turned to pick it up, Chandler fired three shots, one hitting Williams in the back of the head. He died instantly right there on Chandler’s bus.”All of this took place while the United States was fighting a war for democracy in Europe. Which is to say that for most of this country’s history, America’s democratic institutions and procedures and ideals existed alongside forms of exclusion, domination and authoritarianism. Although we’ve taken real strides toward making this a less hierarchical country, with a more representative government, there is no iron law of history that says that progress will continue unabated or that the authoritarian tradition in American politics won’t reassert itself.If we do see even greater democratic backsliding than we’ve already experienced over the past decade — since the advent of Donald Trump, yes, but also since the decimation of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder — there’s no reason to think that most elites, and most people, won’t accommodate themselves to the absence of democracy for many of their fellow Americans. After a time, that absence of democracy may become just the regular order of things — a regrettable custom that nonetheless should more or less be left alone because of federalism or limited government. That, in fact, is how many politicians, journalists and intellectuals rationalized autocracy in the South and reconciled it with their belief that the United States was a free country.In his 1909 biography of John Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois reflected on the legacy of the antislavery martyr with an observation about what it does to a society to tolerate exploitation, degradation and unfreedom. “The price of repression is greater than the cost of liberty,” he wrote. “The degradation of men costs something both to the degraded and those who degrade.”American traditions of authoritarianism have shaped American traditions of democracy in that they frame our ideas of who, exactly, can enjoy American freedom and American liberty. They degrade our moral sense and make it easier to look away from those who suffer under the worst of the state or those who are denied the rights they were promised as members of our national community.As we look to a November in which a number of vocal election deniers are poised to win powerful positions in key swing states, I think that the great degree to which authoritarianism is tied up in the American experience — and the extent to which we’ve been trained not to see it, in accordance with our national myths and sense of exceptionalism — makes it difficult for many Americans to really believe that democracy as we know it could be in serious danger.In other words, too many Americans still think it can’t happen here, when the truth is that it already has and may well again.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Threat to Democracy? Start With Corruption, Many Voters Say

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      In a Times/Siena survey, respondents’ concerns about democracy often diverged from typical expert analysis.A rally called Save America last week in Mesa, Ariz. People have very different ideas of what that term means. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesWhen we started our national poll on democracy last week, David Leonhardt’s recent New York Times front-page story on threats to democracy was at the top of my mind. His article focused on two major issues: the election denial movement in the Republican Party, and undemocratic elements of American elected government like the Electoral College, gerrymandering and the Senate.But when we got the results of our Times/Siena poll late last week, it quickly became clear these were not the threats on the minds of voters.While 71 percent of registered voters agreed that democracy was “under threat,” only about 17 percent of voters described the threat in a way that squares with discussion in mainstream media and among experts — with a focus on Republicans, Donald J. Trump, political violence, election denial, authoritarianism, and so on.Instead, most people described the threat to democracy in terms that would be very unfamiliar to someone concerned about election subversion or the Jan. 6 insurrection — and I’m not just talking about stop-the-steal adherents who think the last election already brought American democracy to an end.The poll results help make sense of how so many voters can say democracy is under threat, and yet rank “threats to democracy” low on the list of challenges facing the country.When respondents were asked to volunteer one or two words to summarize the current threat to democracy, government corruption was brought up most often — more than Mr. Trump and Republicans combined.For some of these voters, the threat to democracy doesn’t seem to be about the risk of a total collapse of democratic institutions or a failed transition of power. Or they may not view the threat as an emergency or a crisis yet, like being on the brink of sustained political violence or authoritarianism.Instead, they point most frequently to a longstanding concern about the basic functioning of a democratic system: whether government works on behalf of the people.Many respondents volunteered exactly that kind of language. One said, “I don’t think they are honestly thinking about the people.” Another said politicians “forget about normal people.” Corruption, greed, power and money were familiar themes.Overall, 68 percent of registered voters said the government “mainly works to benefit powerful elites” rather than “ordinary people.”Another 8 percent of voters cited polarization as the major threat to democracy. Like corruption, polarization poses a threat to democracy but might not necessarily count as an imminent crisis.And perhaps most surprising, many voters offered an answer that wasn’t easily categorized as a threat to democracy at all. Inflation, for instance, was cited by 3 percent of respondents — about the same as the share citing political extremists and violence. For perhaps as many as one-fifth of voters, the “threat to democracy” was little more than a repackaging of persistent issues like “open borders” and “race relations” or “capitalism” and “godlessness.”The 17 percent of voters who cited something related to Mr. Trump and election denial seemed to elevate the issue of democracy the most: Overall, 19 percent of those respondents volunteered that the state of democracy was the most important problem facing the country — more than any other issue.Among everyone else: Just 4 percent stated that concern as the No. 1 issue.My colleagues have more on this story here. More

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      Poll Shows Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority

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      Voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger, with few calling it the nation’s most pressing problem, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.Voters who are open to candidates who reject 2020 election resultsThinking about a candidate for political office who you agree with on most positions, how comfortable would you be voting for that candidate if they say they think the 2020 election was stolen? More

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      A New Playbook for Saving Democracy, Defeating Fascism and Winning Elections

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      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 AttentionThe 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 MeaningA 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 AreThere 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 FightsIf 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 HomeMany 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 StoryAs 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.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Ben Sasse Is Nothing if Not Thoughtful. Right?

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      Among the hundreds of books I read during my years as a critic for The Washington Post, only three proved so paralyzingly pointless that, upon reaching the last page, I found I had nothing to say. One was an unnecessary memoir, another a dispiriting manifesto. The third book was “Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal” by Senator Ben Sasse.It’s not that “Them” is a terrible book; I have read and reviewed worse. Bad books can be valuable, even delightful, to read and critique, as long as their shortcomings lead to worthwhile questions or send readers down unexpected paths. But “Them,” which came out in 2018, offers few such consolations. Sasse, the junior senator from Nebraska and now the sole finalist to become president of the University of Florida, delivered a generic, forgettable work: packed with big-think buzzwords rehashing old arguments, clichés and metaphors passing for analysis, thought-leader-ese masquerading as vision. It was not compelling enough to dislike in public. At least not then.I was reminded of “Them” when I read the Republican senator’s brief statement on his potential move to Gainesville — a possibility that has elicited campus protests and varying reactions from state and national leaders. Sasse wrote that the University of Florida is “the most interesting university in America right now,” and that he would be delighted to help it become the nation’s “most dynamic, bold, future-oriented university.” Interesting. Dynamic. Bold. The future! It sounded a lot like “Them.” Nothing the book or statement says seems really wrong, but only because they both say so little.Dirk Shadd/Tampa Bay Times, via ZUMA PressThe central message of “Them” is that community life in the United States is in decline because of various cultural, technological and political forces, and that the isolation and anger replacing them threaten American democracy. This phenomenon has been documented and discussed at length for decades, yet the senator approaches it with a big-reveal vibe. “Something is really wrong here,” he writes. “Something deeper is going on.” Americans have a “nagging sense that something bigger is wrong.” The mayhem of the 2016 presidential election was “only the consequence of deeper problems.”The problems may be deep, but Sasse clings to the surface of things. “America seems to be tearing apart at the seams,” he writes, so much so that “there are, today, effectively, two different Americas.” (Somewhere, John Edwards is tearing out his $400 hair.) The term “disruption” recurs throughout the book, a reliable sign that an author was vaguely tech-savvy a decade ago. Facebook and Twitter are frowned upon, naturally, while italics are strategically deployed throughout the text to give concepts a weighty air. “Our world is nudging us toward rootlessness, when only a recovery of rootedness can heal us,” he writes, and the word “connections” is occasionally rendered as “connections,” which I gather makes it more significant. Sasse has a weakness for the melodramatic single-sentence paragraph. “We’re hyperconnected, and we’re disconnected.” Or: “We live — and work — in unusual times.” And, in case you hadn’t heard: “America is an idea.”“Them” relies on exactly the roster of social scientists and assorted thinkers you’d expect to see in a work of this kind. Kudos to the senator for reading Robert Putnam, Bill Bishop and many other luminaries of the America-is-coming-apart genre, but their presence only underscores the book’s secondhand feel. (Chapter one relies so heavily on Putnam that the senator could have skipped it and just encouraged readers to pick up “Bowling Alone” and “Our Kids.”) Sasse summons the ghosts of the American Revolution, but in the most Founders 101 way possible. Ben Franklin makes an appearance to say, “A republic, if you can keep it,” whereas James Madison shows up to remind us that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” I learned more from “Hamilton,” and I never even saw it with the original cast.I may have expected too much from this book; my impressions are likely colored by my disappointment. In addition to his time in the Senate, Sasse is a scholar (with a Ph.D. in history) and an educator (the former president of Midland University in Nebraska), and with his early willingness to question Donald Trump’s candidacy he seemed a promising and thoughtful new voice on the shrinking center-right. Published just weeks before the 2018 midterms — when Trump was promising to make the elections all about migrant caravans and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation — “Them” was an opportunity for this lawmaker-teacher-historian to offer a meaningful alternative to the politics he decried.Instead, “Them” is on the dulling edge of political thought, a book that can safely be omitted from the syllabus of any University of Florida seminar unless Sasse himself teaches it. “Genuine wisdom will require not just acknowledging the disruption of our ways of making a living, but also our way of thinking about ourselves, our identities and our places in the world,” Sasse offers in a typically vapid sentence. He cautions us not to tackle America’s troubles with a “formula” or a “silver bullet” or a “one-size-fits-all solution,” an impressive trifecta of triteness.Sasse, who was against Trump before he supported him before he was against him once again, is disappointed by both Fox News and MSNBC. (Same.) At the end of the book, after lamenting how a politics-obsessed country has split into us-versus-them factions, he urges Americans to resist partisan tribalism, de-emphasize politics and spend more time with their families. That’s fine, except the inverse of your problem is not its solution. It’s just another way of phrasing the same problem.Books, like politicians, can impress on their own merits, or they can just sound good compared to the competition. No doubt, Sasse is more intellectually stimulating than the election-denying conspiracists who have overrun his Republican Party. But shouldn’t the bar remain higher than that?Unfortunately, “Them” is that familar type of book, one that serves only to affirm the author’s rep as a Washington intellectual or — what journalists call people with “Master of the Senate” in their Skype backgrounds — a “student of history.” Sasse, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Cold War-era debates over religion in American public life, requires no such validation. But he is committed to the bit.“Them” followed the senator’s 2017 volume, “The Vanishing American Adult,” which extols the value of hard work, self-reliance and adversity for young people — listen up here, Gators — lest their passivity torpedo the nation’s freedoms and entrepreneurialism. The links between greater individualism (book one) and greater community (book two) as the cures to America’s ills seem intriguing enough to explore, but the author takes a pass. Maybe he’ll write another book on campus.In hindsight, “Them” hinted at Sasse’s discontent with the world’s greatest nondeliberative body. “It was not Washington, D.C., that gave America its vitality,” he writes, one of many times he dings the capital and his role in it. “Deep, enduring change does not come through legislation or elections,” Sasse writes, but from “the tight bonds that give our lives meaning, happiness and hope.”In a Q. and A. at the University of Florida on Monday, Sasse said that he looks forward to “the opportunity to step back from politics.” That opportunity seems unlikely to materialize should he win the top job. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, whose office issued a statement calling Sasse a “deep thinker” and a “good candidate” for university president, has made a culture war out of the state’s education system at multiple levels, and Sasse must now take sides in those battles.Former President Trump reacted to the news in his usual measured tones, predicting that the university would “soon regret” hiring “Liddle’ Ben Sasse,” calling him a “lightweight” and a “weak and ineffective RINO.” And the students who protested during Sasse’s visit denounced the opacity of the university’s selection process and the senator’s past positions on same-sex marriage. (Sasse has stated that though he disagrees with the protesters, he “intellectually and constitutionally” welcomes them.)Based on the senator’s Twitter statement, “Them”-style ideas may be on their way to Gainesville. “The University of Florida is uniquely positioned to lead this country through an era of disruption,” Sasse wrote. (Disruption: check.) “Technology is changing everything about where, when, why, what and how Americans work.” (Technology: check.) “Washington partisanship isn’t going to solve these work force challenges” (Washington, bad: check). And Sasse is “delighted to be in conversation with the leadership of this special community about how we might together build a vision.”If having conversations about maybe building visions is the job on offer here, Sasse is the right guy for it, and “Them” the right blueprint.I guess I could have reviewed the book after all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How the Supreme Court’s State Legislature Case Could Change Elections

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      EASTPOINTE, Mich. — The conversation started with potholes.Veronica Klinefelt, a Democratic candidate for State Senate in suburban Detroit, was out knocking on doors as she tries to win a seat her party sees as critical for taking back the chamber. “I am tired of seeing cuts in aging communities like ours,” she told one voter, gesturing to a cul-de-sac pocked with cracks and crevasses. “We need to reinvest here.”What went largely unspoken, however, was how this obscure local race has significant implications for the future of American democracy.The struggle for the Michigan Senate, as well as clashes for control of several other narrowly divided chambers in battleground states, have taken on outsize importance at a time when state legislatures are ever more powerful. With Congress often deadlocked and conservatives dominating the Supreme Court, state governments increasingly steer the direction of voting laws, abortion access, gun policy, public health, education and other issues dominating the lives of Americans.The Supreme Court could soon add federal elections to that list.The justices are expected to decide whether to grant nearly unfettered authority over such elections to state legislatures — a legal argument known as the independent state legislature theory. If the court does so, many Democrats believe, state legislatures could have a pathway to overrule the popular vote in presidential elections by refusing to certify the results and instead sending their own slates of electors.While that might seem like a doomsday scenario, 44 percent of Republicans in crucial swing-state legislatures used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a New York Times analysis. More like-minded G.O.P. candidates on the ballot could soon join them in office.Republicans have complete control over legislatures in states that have a total of 307 electoral votes — 37 more than needed to win a presidential election. They hold majorities in several battleground states, meaning that if the Supreme Court endorsed the legal theory, a close presidential election could be overturned if just a few states assigned alternate slates of electors.Democrats’ chances of bringing Republicans’ total below 270 are narrow: They would need to flip the Michigan Senate or the Arizona Senate, and then one chamber in both Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in 2024, in addition to defending the chambers the party currently controls.Democrats and Republicans have set their sights on half a dozen states where state legislatures — or at least a single chamber — could flip in November. Democrats hope to wrest back one of the chambers in Michigan and the Arizona Senate, and flip the Minnesota Senate. Republicans aim to win back the Minnesota House of Representatives and take control of one chamber, or both, in the Maine, Colorado and Nevada legislatures. They are also targeting Oregon and Washington.An avalanche of money has flowed into these races. The Republican State Leadership Committee, the party’s campaign arm for state legislative races, has regularly set new fund-raising records, raising $71 million this cycle. The group’s Democratic counterpart has also broken fund-raising records, raising $45 million. Outside groups have spent heavily, too: The States Project, a Democratic super PAC, has pledged to invest nearly $60 million in five states.At a candidate forum on Wednesday in Midland, Mich., Kristen McDonald Rivet, a Democrat, and Annette Glenn, a Republican, faced off in their highly competitive State Senate race.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesThe television airwaves, rarely a place where state legislative candidates go to war, have been flooded with advertising on the races. More than $100 million has been spent nationwide since July, an increase of $20 million over the same period in 2020, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.Herschel Walker: A woman who said that the G.O.P. Senate nominee in Georgia paid for her abortion in 2009 told The Times that he urged her to terminate a second pregnancy two years later. She chose to have their son instead.Will the Walker Allegations Matter?: The scandal could be decisive largely because of the circumstances in Georgia, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Pennsylvania Senate Race: John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee, says he can win over working-class voters in deep-red counties. But as polls tighten in the contest, that theory is under strain.Democrats are finding, however, that motivating voters on an issue as esoteric as the independent state legislature theory is not an easy task.“Voters care a whole lot about a functioning democracy,” said Daniel Squadron, a Democratic former state senator from New York and a founder of the States Project. But, he said, the independent state legislature “threat still feels as though it’s on the horizon, even though it’s upon us.”For some Republicans, the issue of the independent state legislature theory is far from the campaign trail, and far from their concerns.“If it’s a decision by the Supreme Court, based on their legal opinion, I would defer to their legal expertise,” said Michael D. MacDonald, the Republican state senator running against Ms. Klinefelt. “I certainly respect the court’s opinion when they make it. I think it’s important that we do.”Instead, Republicans are focusing on economic topics like inflation.“The economy remains the issue that voters are most concerned about in their daily lives, and is the issue that will decide the battle for state legislatures in November,” said Andrew Romeo, the communications director for the Republican State Leadership Committee. The group’s internal polling shows that inflation and the cost of living are the No. 1 priority in every state surveyed.The issues defining each election vary widely by district. Some of them, like roads, school funding and water, are hyperlocal — subjects that rarely drive a congressional or statewide race.In the Detroit suburbs, Mr. MacDonald said he had heard the same concerns.“When they have something to say, it’s never ‘Joe Biden’ or ‘Donald Trump,’ it’s, ‘Hey, you know, actually my road, it’s a little bumpy, what can you do?’” Mr. MacDonald said. He added, “Sometimes it could be as small as, ‘Can they get a garbage can from our garbage contractor?’”His pitch to voters, in turn, focuses on money that Macomb County, which makes up a large part of the district, has received from the state budget since he was elected four years ago. More

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      We Had to Force the Constitution to Accommodate Democracy, and It Shows

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      In August, President Biden met with several historians at the White House to discuss the threats facing American democracy.Most of the conversation, according to a report in The Washington Post, was about “the larger context of the contest between democratic values and institutions and the trends toward autocracy globally.” Those present were people who had “been outspoken in recent months about the threat they see to the American democratic project, after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, the continued denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results and the efforts of election deniers to seek state office.”Now, I was obviously not at this meeting. But I have been thinking about what I would say to Biden about the threats to American democracy. The most acute threat, it’s true, comes from election deniers and the authoritarian mass movement led by the previous president, Donald Trump. But the long-term threat is less an imposition from bad actors and more a constitutive part of our political system. It is, in fact, the Constitution. Specifically, it is a set of fundamental problems with the structure of our government that flow directly from the Constitution as it currently exists.We tend to equate American democracy with the Constitution as if the two were synonymous with each other. To defend one is to protect the other and vice versa. But our history makes clear that the two are in tension with each other — and always have been. The Constitution, as I’ve written before, was as much a reaction to the populist enthusiasms and democratic experimentation of the 1780s as it was to the failures of the Articles of Confederation.The framers meant to force national majorities through an overlapping system of fractured authority; they meant to mediate, and even stymie, the popular will as much as possible and force the government to act with as much consensus as possible.Unfortunately for the framers, this plan did not work as well as they hoped. With the advent of political parties in the first decade of the new Republic — which the framers failed to anticipate in their design — Americans had essentially circumvented the careful balance of institutions and divided power. Parties could campaign to control each branch of government, and with the advent of the mass party in the 1820s, they could claim to represent “the people” themselves in all their glory.Americans, in short, had forced the Constitution to accommodate their democratic impulses, as would be the case again and again, up to the present. The question, today, is whether there’s any room left to build a truly democratic political system within the present limits of our constitutional order.In his new book “Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope,” the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy says the answer is, essentially, no. “Our mainstream political language still lacks ways of saying, with unapologetic conviction and even patriotically, that the Constitution may be the enemy of the democracy it supposedly sustains,” Purdy writes.This is true in two ways. The first (and obvious) one is that the Constitution has enabled the democratic backsliding of the past six years. Founding-era warnings against demagogues — used often to justify our indirect system of choosing a president — run headfirst into the fact that Donald Trump was selected constitutionally, not elected democratically. (Alexander Hamilton wrote, in Federalist No. 68, “The choice of several to form an intermediate body of electors will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.” This, it turns out, was wrong.)And consider this: In the 2020 presidential election, a clear majority of Americans voted against Trump in the highest turnout election of the 21st century so far. But with a few tens of thousands of additional votes in a few states, Trump would have won a second term under the Constitution. “A mechanism for selecting a chief executive among propertied elites in the late eighteenth century persists into the twenty-first,” Purdy writes, “now as a key choke point in a mass democracy.”The Constitution subverts democracy in a second, more subtle way. As Purdy notes, the countermajoritarian structure of the American system inhibits lawmaking and slows down politics, “making meaningful initiatives hard to undertake.” One result is that political campaigns have “shifted into a symbolic and defensive mode” where the move is not to promise a better world, but to impress on voters “the urgency of keeping the other candidate and party out of power.”“If enough people believe it is their responsibility to resist and disable any government they did not help to elect, self-rule can become impossible,” Purdy writes. “Donald Trump’s presidency,” he continues, “arose from all of these dysfunctions.”Even if you keep MAGA Republicans out of office (including Trump himself), you’re still left with a system the basic structure of which fuels dysfunction and undermines American democracy, from how it enables minority rule to how it helps inculcate a certain kind of political chauvinism — best captured in the hard-right mantra that the United States is a “Republic, not a democracy” — among some of the voters who benefit from lopsided representation in the Senate and the Electoral College.What makes this all the worse is that it has become virtually impossible to amend the Constitution and revise the basics of the American political system. The preamble to the Constitution may begin with “We the People,” but as Purdy writes, “A constitution like the American one deserves democratic authority only if it is realistically open to amendment.” It is only then that we can “know that what has not changed in the old text still commands consent.” Silence can have meaning, he points out, “but only when it is the silence of those free to speak.”There is much more to say about the ways that our political system has inhibited democratic life and even enabled forms of tyranny. For now, it suffices to say that a constitution that subverts majority rule, fuels authoritarian movements and renders popular sovereignty inert is not a constitution that can be said to protect, secure or even enable American democracy.In a speech in Philadelphia last month, Biden did speak publicly on the threats to American democracy. He focused, as almost any president would, on the Constitution. “This is a nation that honors our Constitution. We do not reject it. This is a nation that believes in the rule of law. We do not repudiate it. This is a nation that respects free and fair elections. We honor the will of the people. We do not deny it.”The problem, and what this country must confront if it ever hopes to turn its deepest democratic aspirations into reality, is that we don’t actually honor the will of the people. We deny it. And it’s this denial that sits at the root of our troubles.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      El bolsonarismo no se irá de Brasil

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      El rechazo tajante al gobierno reaccionario de Jair Bolsonaro que predecían las encuestas y deseaban millones de personas no llegó. Brasil está al borde del precipicio.No todo fue negativo. En las elecciones presidenciales del domingo, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, el antiguo líder sindical de centroizquierda que gobernó con destreza a Brasil de 2003 a 2011, se llevó aproximadamente el 48 por ciento de los votos; fue un resultado satisfactorio, dentro del margen de error de las encuestas finales. Lo malo es que Bolsonaro superó las predicciones y se llevó el 43 por ciento de los votos (cifra mucho más alta que las proyecciones previas), por lo que es probable que la segunda vuelta del 30 de octubre sea más cerrada de lo que se esperaba. Por si fuera poco, varios aliados y antiguos ministros del gabinete de Bolsonaro por todo el país lograron el mismo éxito en las elecciones locales.Los resultados mostraron, sin lugar a dudas, que Bolsonaro no es ningún accidente de la historia. Podría haber sido posible restarle importancia a su sorpresiva victoria hace cuatro años, cuando llegó al poder gracias a un sentimiento antiizquierdista generalizado, y explicarla como mera suerte. Pero ya no. Detrás de sus vagas referencias a “Dios, patria y familia” hay un respaldo muy firme por todo el país y de una parte amplia y diversa de la sociedad. Independientemente del resultado que obtenga a finales de este mes, los espíritus que alborotó Bolsonaro y la política que cultivó no desaparecerán.Las primeras incursiones de Bolsonaro en la política brasileña estuvieron marcadas por la ignominia. Este capitán retirado del ejército capturó por primera vez la atención nacional a mediados de los años ochenta, cuando las fuerzas armadas comenzaron una retirada táctica de la vida política tras dos décadas de gobierno militar. Un conocido semanario reveló que Bolsonaro, insatisfecho por el salario tan bajo que recibían los militares, planeó provocar algunas explosiones en un cuartel de Río de Janeiro. Su intención, según le dijo al periodista con una tremenda franqueza, era crear problemas para el nada popular ministro del ejército.Tras una ráfaga publicitaria y una investigación interna en la que Bolsonaro pareció amenazar al periodista por testificar en su contra, el incidente quedó prácticamente en el olvido. Sin embargo, ese desplante ilustró la conducta habitual de Bolsonaro, un soldado deslucido cuyas enormes ambiciones políticas por lo regular molestaban a los militares distinguidos de mayor rango. Con todo, su pasado militar fue un arma electoral útil. En 1988, después de restaurada la democracia brasileña, decidió arrancar su carrera política posicionándose como representante de los intereses y perspectivas del militar típico.Con el paso del tiempo, su discurso adquirió un tono más general de derecha y adoptó el tono conservador, si no es que la teología, el cristianismo evangélico. La política de Bolsonaro —una mezcla de intolerancia, autoritarismo, moralismo religioso, neoliberalismo y teorías conspirativas espontáneas— casi no tuvo prominencia después del gobierno militar. No obstante, 13 años de gobierno del progresista Partido de los Trabajadores causaron descontento en la derecha. En opinión de las figuras de esa ideología, las repetidas victorias electorales de la izquierda parecían indicar que había juego sucio y atentaban contra la propia noción de democracia. Al frente de esta embestida, con una grandilocuencia ideológica inimitable, estaba Bolsonaro. En la mayor democracia de América Latina, ahora habla en nombre de decenas de millones de personas.Los sucesos del domingo subrayaron esta lamentable situación. Los candidatos respaldados por Bolsonaro tuvieron los mejores resultados en todo el país y obtuvieron victorias importantes contra candidatos respaldados por Da Silva en São Paulo y Río de Janeiro. De hecho, la primera vuelta de las votaciones parece indicar que el proyecto político que se impuso en 2018 (en una palabra, el “Bolsonarismo”) no solo sigue vigente, sino que puede crecer. Si pensamos en el desastroso manejo de la COVID-19 por parte de Bolsonaro, sus constantes amenazas a la democracia brasileña y la serie de escándalos de corrupción en torno a él y su familia, el futuro luce sombrío.Pero esto no es inexplicable. Aunque hay mucho que no sabemos (el censo, postergado debido a la pandemia y a un sabotaje institucional, tiene más de una década de retraso), algunas cosas son claras. A pesar de que Bolsonaro conservó su abrumadora ventaja en las áreas del oeste y el noroeste del país, el aspecto más sorprendente de las elecciones fue con cuánta claridad mantuvo las líneas establecidas de apoyo regional. En el sureste, un bastión tradicional de política conservadora, Bolsonaro prosperó. En el noreste, refugio del Partido de los Trabajadores, Da Silva sobresalió. El éxito de Bolsonaro ha consistido en mantener y ampliar la base de apoyo conservadora tradicional, convocándola en torno a sus amargas denuncias de los progresistas, el sistema de justicia, la prensa y las instituciones internacionales.Sin embargo, con todo y esta gran demostración de dominio de Bolsonaro, el resultado más probable todavía es la victoria de Da Silva. Después de todo, el segundo lugar en la primera vuelta de las elecciones nunca en la historia ha ganado la segunda vuelta. Además, lo más probable es que los candidatos que terminaron en tercer y cuarto lugar, Simone Tebet, de centroderecha, y Ciro Gomes, de centroizquierda, apoyen a Da Silva. El gusto del expresidente por las actividades de campaña, evidente en un animado mensaje que escribió en Twitter en cuanto los resultados fueron claros, es otra ventaja. Cuatro semanas dedicadas a hacer campaña deberían sentarle bien.El problema es que prolongar la campaña también podría ser peligroso. Los partidarios de Bolsonaro ya han estado envueltos en varios actos de violencia en contra de los seguidores de Da Silva. No sería inesperado que el “Bolsonarismo”, movimiento arraigado en una retórica violenta, se cobre más vidas antes del 30 de octubre. Mientras tanto, gracias a su sorpresivo éxito, el presidente Bolsonaro tiene más tiempo y credibilidad para seguir adelante con sus planes en contra de la democracia brasileña.Bolsonaro todavía debe librar varios obstáculos para hacerse con el poder. Pero acaba de superar uno muy importante.Andre Pagliarini (@apagliar) es profesor asistente de Historia en Hampden-Sydney College, investigador en la institución independiente Washington Brazil Office y columnista de The Brazilian Report. More