The Recurring Crises of American Democracy

Please join the Chicago Center on Democracy as we host Suzanne Mettler (Cornell University) and Robert Lieberman (Johns Hopkins) in a conversation with Susan Stokes (University of Chicago) about Mettler and Lieberman's new book, Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy. The authors examine five tumultuous historical periods when Americans worried that democracy was in danger of deterioration, and from the patterns evident in those periods, analyze our contemporary circumstances.

These periods include the 1790s, 1850s, 1890s, 1930s, and Watergate (early 1970s). Over and over again, people braced themselves for secession, civil war, the loss of rights, or the rise of an autocratic president. On several occasions, antidemocratic forces prevailed and caused real harm, some of it with long-enduring consequences.

Scholars who study the rise and decline of democracy around the world find that four threats can endanger democracy: 1) political polarization, 2) raging conflict over who belongs in the political community and the status of its members, 3) rising economic inequality, and 4) excessive executive power. These four threats have each waxed and waned over time in the United States and appeared and reappeared in various combinations.

Today, for the first time ever, we face the convergence of all four threats at once. This formidable confluence makes the contemporary era an especially grave moment for democracy in the United States. Still, the ascendance of the threats does not doom us; what unfolds next depends on choices made by leaders and citizens.