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In todays deeply polarized political and social environment, having a conversation with someone with different opinions can seem like an impossible task.

The University of Virginias Democracy Initiative has partnered with StoryCorps One Small Step program to facilitate such fraught conversations and help individuals with opposing views find common ground.

Melody Barnes, executive director of UVAs Karsh Institute of Democracy and co-director of the Democracy Initiative, talked about the overarching goal of the new partnership.

We know one conversation cant change the longstanding challenges our country and our communities must confront, but One Small Step is one, small step forward. Its an opportunity to create dialogue, perhaps find that you have something in common with someone surprising, or to disagree productively and with respect. One Small Step complements our research, teaching, policy and public engagement efforts, she said.

The Democracy Initiative and One Small Step will host a launch event Wednesday at 11 a.m., featuring a discussion between StoryCorps founder Dave Isay and UVA President Jim Ryan. Barnes will moderate. Students who have participated in One Small Step also will talk about their experiences with the program. Laurent Dubois, Bicentennial Professor and director of academic affairs at the Democracy Initiative, will moderate the student discussion. The event will be offered in person at Carrs Hill, as well as online. Registration is now open.

At the event, the Democracy Initiative and One Small Step will recruit community members to participate in recorded conversations. They plan to conduct more than 250 conversations with a wide range of participants at the University and in the Charlottesville community. Participants will be recruited directly, as well as through partnerships with local organizations. The Democracy Initiative also intends to use the conversations in an upcoming podcast.

Since its founding in 2018, One Small Step has worked to facilitate conversations with the goal of reminding individuals of their common humanity. One Small Step initially launched in four cities: Richmond, Virginia; Wichita, Kansas; Birmingham, Alabama; and Shreveport, Louisiana. Charlottesville will be the fifth and UVA is its first academic partner.

Samyuktha Mahadevan, the One Small Step program manager, talked about the inspiration for the program.

Cultural and political tension is nothing new, but the 2016 election heightened concerns, and thats when StoryCorps decided to act. StoryCorps has always been about storytelling and helping people feel connected to one another. After noticing increasing feelings of us vs. them and hoping to help individuals see the inherent worth in every person, the StoryCorps team created One Small Step, she said.

A number of recent events, both in Charlottesville and at the national level, have highlighted the need for greater dialogue in American society and politics. Mahadevan emphasized the significance of the partnership in the local community and at UVA.

Charlottesville has been at the center of the national reckoning on racial and social justice, and UVA is uniquely positioned to help study and respond to the moment. One Small Step is an investment in the health of the community and our democracy, and we hope that people benefit from participating in meaningful engagements with one another, she said.

The Democracy Initiative views the partnership with One Small Step as a cornerstone of both its programming and its mission. Barnes noted how feedback from students shaped the decision to partner with One Small Step.

Two years ago, we asked UVA students about their views on democracys biggest challenges and the kind of work they hoped the Democracy Initiative would do, she said. During those sessions, a wide range of students consistently told us that theyre concerned about our democratic culture and are looking for more opportunities to engage a variety of viewpoints.

The partnership also represents an achievement for the UVA strategic plan. One of the key initiatives of the 2030 Plan is the Good Neighbor Program, which emphasizes increased collaboration and engagement between UVA and Charlottesville. The program, as well as the partnership, both look to highlight local challenges and the need for improved communication.

Barnes emphasized how the Democracy Initiative and One Small Step will look to engage the broader community on a range of topics.

We respect those who live, work and study in Charlottesville their experiences, perspectives and history and One Small Step is intended to capture the dialogue that follows when individuals have the opportunity to engage with one another, she said.

See the rest here:
UVA Democracy Initiative and StoryCorps to Focus on Tough Local Conversations - UVA Today

Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is leaving the Democratic Party for a new way "Forward."

Yang hopped on the phone with Fox News on Thursday to discuss his new book, "Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy," his departure from the Democratic Party, and his push for the nation to adopt rank-choice voting.

"Our country is facing a lot of challenges, and I think that more and more Americans are waking up to the fact that were not being set up for success, starting with the fact that were being pitted against each other and see other Americans as our mortal enemies when theyre not," Yang told Fox News.

ANDREW YANG QUITS DEMOCRATIC PARTY, CALLS IT THE RIGHT THING TO DO

Yang said his book reflects on his "experiences running for president," wanting to share what he "learned about both why it feels like we cant come together and then what we can do to change it."

The Democrat-turned-independent said he wanted people "to understand what its like to run for president" and for them "to understand why it feels like were stuck."

"Were stuck because the system is designed not to work, really," Yang said. "And if you have a system thats dysfunctional and designed not to work, then expecting it to work will actually make you more and more angry and frustrated over time."

"Whats needed is to actually change the system so that our legislators incentives are tied to us and our lives and how were doing and what we think as opposed to who its tied to right now," Yang continued.

Yangs new book coincides with his launch of a new political party, the Forward Party. He told Fox News he believes America needs "a third party" and compared a third party to an alternative to two companies.

"Im an entrepreneur and I want everyone to reflect on: If you showed up to a marketplace and there were two companies, and then 62% of people wanted an alternative to those companies," Yang said. "Wouldnt you want there to be at least a third choice? And I think a lot of Americans are on the same page."

"We can see that the current system is not working, that were losing a lot of common sense, that there should be a common-sense, middle-ground party," Yang continued. "And thats what the Forward Party is."

Yang also said his new party is an "inclusive popular movement" open to registered members of both parties.

In his blog post announcing his departure from the Democratic Party, Yang encouraged his supporters to stick with their respective parties, claiming they would become "disenfranchised" if they left due to the heavy presence of a single party in an area.

ANDREW YANG PROMOTES INCLUSIVE NEW THIRD PARTY, SLAMS CURRENT POLITICAL DUOPOLY: IT'S NOT WORKING

Yang stuck by his call for supporters to stick with their parties, saying the "practical truth" is that "many people, if they were to change their party registration, would have no ability to vote in any of their local elections."

"Again, that is the way the system is set up. Its unfortunate, but were not impractical at the Forward Party," he said. "Were not going to tell you, Hey, give up your ability to influence whats going on in your community. You can help the Forward Party achieve its goals and maintain current party registration."

"The goal is to make it so that you have a vibrant system that allows for more independents, but asking someone to reduce their ability to participate before we make that change is one of the reasons we have to work as quickly as we can," Yang added.

Yang also advocated for the national adoption of ranked-choice voting, saying the system enables people "to be able to vote for whoever you want and no one can accuse you of being a spoiler or wasting your vote."

The former Democrat claimed that "83%" of congressional elections are decided "before the general election in the primary" due to the seat being a safe seat for one party and that "most people don't even have two choices" in an election anymore.

"So if you have somewhere between one choice, which is not a real choice, which is where most people are, then you have a stuck system," Yang argued. "If you have ranked-choice voting, you can vote for whoever you want and, even if they only get like a handful of votes, then you're not hurting anyone because you can just rank the Republican or whomever second."

Yang also said that Americans are "being manipulated and being told that the problem is the other side" when the political system "is set up both to make us more and more upset over time and also not to make any meaningful progress on any of the issues that most Americans care about," which he revealed was a factor in his exit from the Democrats.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Yang told Fox News that his new party is already seeing support after its launch and that the party plans to "elevate" both Republican and Democratic candidates "who are for these principles of having a more vibrant democracy that reflects different points of view and gives every American regardless of party affiliation a say in their representation."

"Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy" hit the shelves Tuesday and can be found on Amazon.

Houston Keene is a reporter for Fox News Digital. You can find him on Twitter at @HoustonKeene.

See original here:
Andrew Yang explains why he's leaving the Democratic Party - Fox News

In a recent interview withMSNBC, former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt issueda stern warning to Americans who have not yet grasped the nature of our present crisis of democracy. "We have an autocratic movement teeming with violence and the intimations of violence in this country," he said, inviting viewers of the liberal news channel to imagine "that domestic terrorist, that criminal who desecrated the American flag by wrapping it around his head, who committed violence in the name of right-wing extremism."

What is it that he has heard? He has heard that he lives in an occupied country with an illegitimate president who lost the election, who was put into power by millions of fraudulent votes, mostly Black and brown votes out of the inner cities.

Discussing the threat still posed by former President Donald Trump, Schmidt observed that Republicans seem obsessed with "the language of violence, the image of the gun, the idea that their countrymen are their enemies":

So, historically, we knowwhen you put all of that fuel on the groundand you start throwing sparks at it, you can ignite a conflagration, and when you dehumanize people the way that this man and this movement has, in the end, it kills people. Historically, this type of politics has wound up, in its worst excesses, killing tens of millions of people. That's why it's such a frightening moment, and that's why it's time to wake up and understand that we don't have a shortage-of-panic-buttons problem. We have a political extremism problem that is very quickly metastasizing into violent extremism that we'll be dealing with for a generation because of what happened over the last five years.

New polling and other research show that tens of millions of Americans have been radicalized into potentially supporting political violence in order to remove Joe Biden who they perceive as ausurper from office. This is part of alarger pattern where the Republican-fascist movement will support any strategy or tactics they believe will help preservetheir "way of life."

To that point, a new poll from the University ofVirginia's Center for Politics shows that more than 50% of Trump voters would supportsecedingfrom the Union. Given theracial grievance andwhite supremacy politics of Trump's followers, such a course of action could leadto a second American civil war. It is no coincidence that a fair number of Trump's terrorists waved Confederate flags as they attackedthe U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Ultimately, the coup attempt of Januaryisonlya prelude tosimilar events in the future, whenRepublicans and their allies fully intend to overthrow any election they lose, and therefore deemillegitimate. In a much-discussed recent essay at the Washington Post, Robert Kagan summarizes this moment of existential crisis:

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial.

We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.

What comes next? Can a full-on collapse of America's democratic institutions and political culture be stopped? Whyhas the mainstream news media consistently normalized the anti-democraticand other politicallydeviant behavior of the Trump regime and the Republican Party? Can the media confront its own culpability in terms of failing to warnthe American people about the rising threat of fascism?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Norm Ornstein,emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of the bestselling books "One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported" and "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism."

Ornstein has been a guest on numerous cable and broadcastnews outlets, includingCBS News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and "PBS NewsHour."His essays and other writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Foreign Affairs, The Atlanticand other leading publications.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

American democracyand our system of government feels like it's all on the verge of collapse. Thesedeep crises that made Trumpism possiblefeellike a type of national breakdown or crackup. My concern is that once things are this broken, they cannot be put back together again. Help me make sense of these feelings and intuitions.

I believe that it is more broken than anything else. There are several layers of problems here.

One layer is that the Republican Party has really descended into the abyss. It's not a party anymore. It's a cult,a full-blown cult. We could call it a cult of personality, but it was really a cult before Donald Trump came along. He's just the leader right now. We see this, for example, with the fact that literally only two Republican members of Congress were willing to stand up to a violent insurrection and a complete collapse of norms and that is in the House and Senate combined.

Mitch McConnell is saying that if the Republicans recapture the majority in the Senate, he won't vote to seat any Supreme Court nominee from Joe Biden. There is also the COVID response by Republican governors and other elected officials.

This problem is going to get worse before it gets better at the level of elected officials. Every serious candidate that Republicans have for president is going to be saying, "I'm just like Donald Trump, except I'm tougher, meanerand stronger." Anybody who is even to the slightest side towardsanity is going nowhere in today's Republican Party. That is a big problem at the level of elites and across the federal, stateand local levels.

There is also the problem that begins with the leadership of Trumpand extendsdown through Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, Laura Ingrahamand many others,including social media more generally. That's the problem of disinformation, misinformationand conspiracy theories.

There is a majorcultural gap that is not going away anytime soon. For example, 30% of the Republicans basically say that violence is appropriate if people are supposedly trying to "destroy your way of life."In this case, "destroying your way of life" meansbasically doing anything that does not protect white people first.

Then you've got the fact that there'snot just voter suppression, but that direct attempts to overturn the results of lawful and fair elections are running rampant.

We are also seeing a Supreme Court that willbasicallyprovide no boundaries. There is the farce of having the most extreme partisan justices saying, "Well, it's ridiculous to think that decisions are made on the basis of personal views or partisanship." These Supreme Court justices are not only partisans, they are liars.

We can mitigatesome of these problems with election and voting reform. We can also reform the laws that enabled Donald Trump to use executive power in misguided ways. But ultimately, I would say the system is broken.

Why do America's political elites,especially thepundit class,keep treating these "revelations" about Trump and his regime's criminality and attacks on democracyas something surprising? The coup attempt and attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 were all obvious and threatened in public by Trump and his followers.

The sheer volume of scandals dilutes the impact of each of them singularly and together. Most people don't pay close attention, day to day,to what's going on. When you see a scandal become something of political consequenceis when it gets hammered away at, day after day and week after week. That can be a real scandal or a faux scandal.

An example would be the Afghanistan withdrawal. The American news media were all over that story for 10 days. Almost all of the coverage was harshly critical. For a large number of Americans who had not really spent three minutes thinking about Afghanistan previously, the story is processed as being something terrible that happened all of a sudden.

The signal that goes out to the general public is that if something is discussed on the front page on a regular basis, or on the cable news programs and the Sunday programs, overand overand over again,it must therefore be something serious and important. If a news story comes up and thendisappears the next day, that must mean it is not important.

There is an obsession with being "neutral" and doing the "both sides" type of coverage. They do not know how to treat abnormal behavior, therefore the American news media largely normalizes it. And there's a certain amount of bandwidth that news organizations are going to give to stories about a presidentor a president's familyor an administration. If there are 20 stories, 19 of them are not going to get covered and the 20thstory will soon be superseded by another one that comes along.

We are also in a situation where the mainstream news media wants to show equal treatment, which means they take a president likeJoe Biden, who doesn't have scandals of any significance, and then blow them up by using the same amount of bandwidth as was used to cover Donald Trump. That story on Biden has more resonance because there is only one such story to focus on.

So many members of the media kept denying even the possibility that Trump and his regime would attempt a coup. They were openly contemptuous of voices who kept trying to warn the public about what was obvious and imminent. Will those individuals and organizations in themediaever publicly explain or apologize for their failings in terms of Jan. 6 and the Trump eramore generally?

The New York Times, just days before the 2016 election, hada front-page, above-the-fold story saying that the FBI says there is no evidence of Russian connections to Trump's campaign. That story had a big impact. Whoever in the FBI gave the Times that story lied. Now, does the Times out the person who lied?

If you have a source and the bargain is that they will remain anonymous if they give you significant information,and they lie to you, that bargain is broken.Has the New York Times ever apologized for publishing an utterly inaccurate and distorted and deceptive story that could have turned the election? No, of course not. Are there news organizations that are willing to apologize for their failures or their misleading stories? No. If you get a story on the front page that's wrong and you show factually that it's wrong, you'll get a correction somewhere inside.

This notion that a news organization never explains and never apologizes unless they are under threat of a lawsuit that could cost them large sums of money is deeply ingrainedin the DNA of journalism. This is especially true of large and highly influential news organizations. If they are wrong about a major story because they just didn't get what was going on, not because they published something that was flat out wrong the likelihood that you'll get an apology or that they'll learn a lesson from it or do anything about it is zero.

It is one thing to make mistakes and or do false equivalents on the small stuff. When a country is at a point where it iscrystal clear that the fundamentals of your political system are on the cusp of being destroyed, the first thing that will happen, ifand when those democratic norms and institutions are gone, is that the free press will no longer exist. We have seen that with every authoritarian society. So the failure to change, to understandand to be blunt about the reality of what's happening in this country is not just reckless for the American people. It is suicidal for the news media. In the end, that just shows how ingrained these practices I outlined above are.

For Black and brown folks, poor and working-class folks, women as a group, gays and lesbians, undocumented peopleand other marginalized folks, none of this isan abstraction. America's democracy crisis and the rising fascist tide areliterallya matter of life and death for those communities. But so many in the media elite are members of a social milieuwhere they are deeply invested in the system and have convinced themselves that they are immune from these threats. Is it that simple?

In general, it is just denial. It's denial and it is also just an unwillingness or inability to change decades-long patterns of behavior. In terms of the reporters who cover the White House and Congress, their own careers are tied to access. They pal around with the people they cover. I see not just Manchin and Sinemabut many others talking about their "Republican friends" and how they can all get along. I know a lot of these Republicans. I've had meals with many of them.

There are some who are really kind of fun to be around not the completely crazy ones but othershave gone along with all of the bad behavior. You can get lulled into thinking that is all just temporary, orthat the Republicans really don't believe these extreme things. You can convince yourself that it's only asmall fringe group doing such things. It distracts a person who operates in this political insider world that the Republicans vote for these policies repeatedly. They protect each other and they're all in on the cult.

There is another disconnect as well. So many members of this political class I am describing have never faced discrimination. It is just not on their radar screens in the same way aspeople who have. They're not sensitive to it. How can you not look at what we have seen, with a violent coup and everything else that's followed, and not recognize that you are at risk of racism and nativism?

People who have had in their family histories a history of discrimination and worseare going to be more sensitive to the path that's being taken here in this country and sensitive to the reality that this is the same roadmap that we saw in Germany.

But even for a whole lot of journalists who are or should be in that category, it gets superseded by the way in which they do their own business. To me, that is as sad as anything else.

Is American democracy and its political culture and governmental systemfacinga legitimacy crisis?

Yes, the United States is experiencing a legitimacy crisis. One recentprominent example: the Arizona fraudulent "audit" says that Biden "won."

How do I analyze that? What it says to me is this is the setup for the next election. What is going to happen is that the Republicans and their agents will say, "We, we did it fair and square so we can do the same thing all over again." And thenthey'll bring in the Cyber Ninjas or whoever and overturn the results of the next election.

The Trumpists and other Republicans have completely undermined the legitimacy of elections by targeting election workers as well.

The events of Jan.6were also at attack on the legitimacy of Congress. Gerrymandering, and the waythe Senate does not properly represent the will of the American people arealso a part of the country's legitimacy crisis.

For example, 30% of Americans will elect 70 senators. Those 30% of the population are in no wayrepresentative of the diversity of the country or its economic dynamism.

Those senators will not be representative of the country, and they are not going to be sensitive to the concerns of a large number of Americans. Over time, this notion that you voteand you're supposed to end up with representatives who will reflect the larger public's needs and views is going to disappear.

There is also the Electoral College, which is growing more and more distorted. Even if the elections are fair, it means there's a greater likelihood that we will elect, several more times, presidents who lose the popular vote, perhaps bymillions of votes.

At some point the majority of Americans are going to see those presidential elections as illegitimate.We've got crises all over the place in this country and society.

Excerpt from:
Norm Ornstein on the crisis of democracy: "This is the same roadmap we saw in Germany" - Salon

Perhaps the U.S. Senate should be restructured to eliminate the disproportionate power of less-populous states. (Senate Television)

Recently a White House commission heard testimony on a controversial proposal to strip the U.S. Supreme Court of its power to rule on the constitutionality of American laws. The court has grown too powerful and undemocratic, several witnesses said.

A few weeks later, a legal scholar wrote that it was time to lengthen the ludicrously short two-year terms that members of the House of Representatives serve under the Constitution. Little can get done, he wrote, in an atmosphere of perpetual campaigning.

Around the country, there are conversations underway about how the U.S. Senate could be restructured so that it doesnt allot the same number of senators two to a state like Wyoming, which has fewer than 600,000 people, as it does to California, which has nearly 40 million people. The current system leaves millions of Americans grossly underrepresented.

Theres also talk of doing away with the electoral college, of banning corporate money from politics, of breaking up the biggest states (Los Angeles County could become the countrys eighth-largest state!), of depoliticizing redistricting and of allowing noncitizens to vote.

Many of the proposals are old ones, long backed by frustrated academics and head-in-the-clouds idealists, but in my circles at least, I hear a new sense of urgency for radical, structural change in the government.

Is it any surprise?

The country is in the grips of crisis, stuck, incapable of moving forward. Presidents cant fulfill their agendas. Congress cant agree on legislation. The Supreme Court is deeply politicized. Were still reeling from four years under President Trump, who trampled on democracy and its rules. Bipartisanship is pass.

Problems as serious as the climate crisis, economic inequality and racial injustice, and problems as simple and uncontroversial as rebuilding crumbling infrastructure and covering our national debts, seem insuperable in the face of partisanship and enmity.

Its no wonder Americans are eager to reinvent or reinvigorate democracy.

Story continues

Id like to tell you that change is coming. Many of the proposals, after all, would improve our lot. The electoral college is an anachronism of course the presidency should go to the candidate who wins the most votes. The structure of the Senate is a glaring violation of the principle of one-person, one-vote; the result of a deal from 1787 that badly needs reassessment.

But ironically, at a time when people are willing to consider big changes, big changes may be more distant than ever.

Truly substantive reforms eliminating the electoral college or remaking the Senate, for instance, or undoing the Citizens United decision would require amending the U.S. Constitution.

Well, great, you might think thats why we have an amendment process, to keep the 234-year-old Constitution up to date with the modern world. Lets get started.

But dont get overexcited. In the 50 years since 1971, only one constitutional amendment has been approved, a relatively insignificant one about when congressional pay changes can go into effect. The amendment before that extending the vote to 18-year-olds could never succeed in todays partisan environment because it would be likely to benefit one party over the other.

More than 11,000 amendments have been proposed since 1789, but only 27 have been enacted.

Why so few? Because theyre extremely hard to pass. Too hard. To succeed, a constitutional amendment is usually proposed by a vote of two-thirds of both houses of Congress. After that it must be ratified by three-quarters of the states (currently, 38 of them). Thats right a double supermajority.

Good luck with that in this political climate. One critic recently went so far as to question whether the U.S. would ever pass a constitutional amendment again, quoting Aziz Rana, a constitutional law professor at Cornell University, saying: We have an amendment process thats the hardest in the world to enact.

And if you want to change that amendment process? That requires an amendment.

Even legislative change that could be accomplished by Congress alone for instance, rewriting the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013 is virtually impossible in the polarized mess of present-day Washington.

Thats why so many Democrats are focused on eliminating the filibuster, which makes it impossible to pass most legislation without a 60-vote supermajority in the 100-member Senate. Because the filibuster is a Senate rule, it could be abolished relatively easily through procedural maneuvering.

Theoretically.

But not all Democrats agree on doing away with the filibuster, so even finding a majority to do so could be difficult.

Eliminating the filibuster is the kind of change that seems like a great idea when as is now the case for Democrats your party is in power but is not strong enough to surmount the 60-vote threshold. But if you get rid of it, you must be prepared for the consequences when your party loses its majority (which could easily happen to Democrats in the Senate next year). You might come to regret the change.

Many of us were brought up on American exceptionalism and post-World War II braggadocio. It was common to hear the U.S. called the greatest country in the world, and for children to be taught that our Constitution was the most democratic and progressive there was.

That self-image has been badly battered recently.

For a society to remain healthy, responsive to its citizens and truly democratic, it needs to be able to change. And that doesnt happen easily in the United States.

Nevertheless, what choice do we have other than to keep trying, to vote our consciences, to protest peacefully and to speak out in favor of substantive democratic reform?

The alternative is more of the same.

@Nick_Goldberg

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Read more:
Column: America's democracy seems to need radical changes. But what are the chances, really? - Yahoo News

Sitting on a shelf in my sunlit study are two massive works of history by the late, great scholar Zara Steiner, each dealing with the international politics of the 1920s and 30s. The first volume is The Lights That Failed; the second is The Triumph of the Dark. They came particularly to mind when I learned of the latest poll results from the University of Virginia Center for Politics, in which about three-quarters of Joe Biden and Donald Trump voters say that representatives of the opposing party are a clear and present danger to American democracy, and that censorship should be introduced, the First Amendment to the Constitution notwithstanding.

Grim stuff, as the journalists David French and Robert Kagan both have argued in powerful essays that raise the specter of civil war and the collapse of American democracy. The available data tend to support their views, although arguably these essays underplay the resilience of the American political system. But there is enough going on in the United States and abroad to make one think of the interwar period, when, as Yeats wrote in his famous Second Coming, The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

What Steiner has to teach us is that the issue goes beyond the United States. All historical analogies are suspect, and the argument ad Hitlerum is, as has often been pointed out, a polemicists mark of desperation. Let us stipulate, therefore, that at the moment, no Hitlers or Stalins are on the prowl in the world. But that is not the point of analogizing the present to the interwar years. There are thuggish regimes and ruthless dictators, to be sure, and they are armed with tools of repression that the totalitarians of almost a century ago could only dream about. It is, however, the rot of democracies that is more troubling, and in this respect the interwar period still has its lessons.

Anne Applebaum: Liberal democracy is worth a fight

In that time, whose living memory has vanished with the passing of the older generation, cancel culture was real; George Orwell, among others, felt it. On one side, intellectuals infatuated with communism, or who were simply following the dictum that there are no enemies on ones left, felt comfortable preventing critics from being able to publish or even getting jobs. On the other side, a minority, now somewhat forgotten but important at the time, became infatuated with toxic forms of nationalism, and not only among the future Axis powers.

Internal, politically driven violence was rife; in France it culminated in a riot in Paris on February 6, 1934, launched by an array of right-wing groups. (Many of their leaders subsequently found a home in the collaborationist Vichy regime.) More insidious, however, was the spreading belief that parliamentary democracy could not handle the challenges of the fractured postWorld War I landscape. James Burnham, later an American conservative, declared that the managers would and should take over, because representative governments could not manage their countries. Plenty of reasonable people agreed that democracy could not cope with the eras economics; even Winston Churchill had some doubts.

In a world racked by economic dislocation, demagogues flourished, and not just in Europe. Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the Kingfish, Louisiana Governor Huey Long, the most dangerous man in America. The shocks of the 2008 financial crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, globalization, and the proliferation of information technologies are not yet equal to the Great Depression in human impact. But they have destroyed many jobs and deprived others (truck drivers, for example) of autonomy, and with it a kind of workers dignity. They have, in their own way, contributed to the radical discontent that has fueled Trumpism in the United States and its equivalents elsewhere.

In America, the 1930s were also the apogee of isolationism that had been born in part from disgustexcessive and ill-informed, but powerful nonethelessover the conduct and outcome of the First World War. No surprise then that students at elite institutions such as Yale flocked to the original America First movement, vowing to keep the United States out of the Old Worlds wars. Here, too, are echoes that we can yet hear today.

These phenomena were all understandable, and all products of a disjointed but interconnected world. And yet it was not nearly as interconnected a world as ours is today, when a group of South Asia scholars in the United States who criticize the government of India and some manifestations of Hindu nationalism can suddenly find themselves receiving hate emails and death threats. Worse, as Freedom House has recently documented, authoritarian governments can and do reach across international borders to punish, coerce, or even kill opponents of their domestic policies. And more and more, they have done so with impunity.

In short, liberal democracy feels as though its in a pretty bad way, and in many places, it is. No competing advanced ideologies as comprehensive and lethal as Nazism or communism are on offer, although that could conceivably change. What is certain is that dictators, whether Xi Jinping or Ayatollah Khamenei, Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, have at their disposal devastating weapons of precision repression and murder. The repeated and generally successful crushing of dissident individuals and movements in their countries and elsewhere is remarkable. Even a profoundly corrupt and incompetent regime, such as that of Nicols Maduro of Venezuela, can hang on despite multiple internal and external pressures, partly with the transnational assistance of governments and corporations eager to help.

It could get worse. We have yet to see where new technologiestargeted biological weapons, ubiquitous surveillance, drones of every type and kindwill take us. We have yet to experience the full external shocks of climate change, and we have yet, for that matter, to see what will happen when someone again lights off a nuclear weapon in anger. It was not without reason that Churchill spoke of the possibility of the world sinking into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. It all could happen, and if the first half of the 20th century has anything to teach us, it is that calamitous misfortune and horrifying deeds can occur, a lesson viscerally absorbed by the statesmen who attempted to piece the world back together in the first decade after World War II.

Read: It could happen here

Perhaps the biggest difference between that era and this one, however, lies in the United States role. It is no coincidence that at one of the bleakest moments in 1940, when Britain looked as though it might very well succumb to Nazi invasion, Churchill could speak of the New World, with all its power and might stepping forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old.

Churchill could pin his hopes on the worlds biggest economy and its liveliest (if turbulent) democracy, the United States. The problem today is that there is no United States behind the United States. If America succumbs to its internal divisions, to its preoccupation with partisan feuding and its desire to withdraw from international politics, the world order, such as it is, will crumble. The reverberations can already be felt: When the senior foreign-policy official of the United Arab Emirates, a close American ally, explains his countrys preliminary efforts to reach accommodations with an illiberal Turkey and an imperial Iran in terms of uncertainty about American purposeAfghanistan is definitely a test and to be honest it is a very worrying testthere is reason for concern.

The temptation for Americans today is to fight our internal fights and retreat, if not into isolation then into self-absorption. Many think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the way an earlier generation thought about World War I, despite the differences in scale. And even more see in globalized trade and commerce only the current reality of fractured supply chains and lost manufacturing jobs. This is a danger not just for Americans but for a wider world, because without American musclefinancial, cultural, and militarypolitics defined by the rule of law, civil and religious liberty, and free and fair elections will come under strain. We know that freedom around the world, measured in various ways, has been in decline for a decade or more. What Roosevelt and his enlightened Republican opponentsincluding their 1940 presidential candidate, Wendell Willkieunderstood is that American liberties would be profoundly less safe in an illiberal world. It is not clear that American politicians, or large swaths of the American public and its elites, grasp that today.

Zara Steiner diagnosed a significant part of the tragedy of the 1930s in the atomization of the international system. States began to follow their own independent trajectories as they struggled to find their place in a weakened international order, she wrote. Her account is more bloodless, but also yields more insight than those that focus exclusively on the rise of the great tyrants of the 1930s. An America consumed by internal strife will be a difficult enough place. Should it lead to a world in which an internally divided America does not or cannot exert global influence and pressure to sustain basic norms of decent behavior and governance, our lot will be immeasurably worse.

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The Last Best Hope - The Atlantic