Crisis

David M. Ricci

doi:10.1017/9781009731614.002

1 - Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2026

David M. Ricci

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David M. Ricci: Affiliation:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Book contents

Summary

This chapter begins the analysis of how American society prepared a space for someone like Trump to dominate public life. The major symptom was that citizens failed to not elect Trump and therefore twice elevated to be president a man who had no qualifications to administer the Executive Branch of a democratic government consisting of more than 4,000,000 employees and multiple responsibilities. He was, however, a “populist,” who promised to act on behalf of “the people” as if the people were entitled to throw off rule by “elites.” And together, he and his associates admired what scholars call “neoliberalism,” whereby many traditional, and democratic, political practices are overridden in favor of unleashing “private innovators” – such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – to acquire enormous wealth and influence. Assuming that Trump is a populist, we should observe that America’s crisis is not so much a failure of democratic “institutions” – agencies, procedures, etc. – as it is that “citizens” have failed to vote to support those institutions. Thus Defending Democracy is about how citizens must do their job – their “vocation” – more and better.

Keywords

crisis citizenship democracy populism demagogue neoliberalism resentment defending democracy

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Defending Democracy
Citizenship as a Vocation
, pp. 8 - 21

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009731614.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2026

1 Crisis

In 2020, Republican Donald Trump lost the presidential election to Democratic Joe Biden.Footnote ¹ By modern standards, it wasn’t even close, because Trump got only 48% of the votes. Afterwards, he denied that he had lost, tried to persuade Vice President Mike Pence (R-OH) to ignore some of the state-certified electoral ballots, and encouraged his fans in January 2021 to storm the Capitol Building in Washington, DC.

Thereafter, Trump’s behavior got worse. Still, almost 50% of American voters decided to support him in 2024. This time, everyone knew he was a crook, having been convicted in a New York State Supreme Court of felonious activity by falsifying financial records regarding hush-money payments made to a movie actress named Stormy Daniels.Footnote ² On Election Day, he had not yet been sentenced. But he was eligible for years of imprisonment, and additional cases were pending in other jurisdictions.

Nevertheless, because Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D-CA) received in 2024 about six million votes fewer than she and Joe Biden had received in 2020, Trump won the election. Therefore, regardless of his criminal record, Donald Trump would take office in 2025 as the 47th president of the United States of America.

Many millions of Americans, who did not vote for Trump, believe that his most recent triumphs, first in dominating the Republican Party and then in capturing the presidency, are generating a national crisis. Maybe they are comparing his first steps in office, this time around, to those of previous Republican presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Whatever, I believe they are right.

However, the crisis now unfolding is not the crisis I will explore in this book. Before we obsess on where the country is today, we should try to understand how, even before Trump was first elected in 2016, America prepared a political space for someone like him to act – often impulsively and inconsistently, sometimes ignorantly and illegally – as he does.

Eventually we will see how, by moving into that space, Donald Trump became a symptom rather than the cause of America’s plight. Unfortunately, however, hard political times will live on after him, based on trends already existing.

It is that situation which suggested to me, and I am not alone, that American democracy may be falling apart. Therefore, I decided to write this essay in response to where the country is now, which sometimes looks to me like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and standing, although not for long, on thin air.

Citizenship

Let us begin at the beginning, then, even before Trump introduced himself to Americans as a candidate for the presidency by riding, with his wife Melania, down the golden – well, brass – escalator in the atrium of Trump Tower in Manhattan on June 16, 2015.Footnote ³

To explain the escalator event, and to dip into other, related events, the main aim of this book is to explore the nature of “citizenship” and especially the version of it that I will call “good citizenship.” Thus, the subtitle of this book is “Citizenship as a Vocation.”

The context for this emphasis is clear: Tens of millions of Americans in 2016, 2020, and again in 2024, failed to exercise their citizenship properly. That is, they failed to do it well – in the form of practicing “good citizenship” – when, as we shall see, they elected Donald Trump to the White House, not once but twice.

Citizenship and Democracy

For our purposes, it is useful to consider the entire matter of citizenship, good and bad, within a framework of understandings first promoted by the great German sociologist Max Weber. Therefore, I will introduce him to readers of this book starting in Chapter 3, “Vocations.”

In just a few words now, however, let us note that such citizenship is a matter – of practice and ideal – which is admired by political societies known as “democracies.” That is, since the more or less formal end of the Enlightenment in the late 1700s, many Europeans, and after them Americans, have believed that most residents in modern countries should enjoy the status of citizen and possess the rights and obligations of democracy’s smallest public office.

In this sense, citizenship since the Enlightenment is a singular possession (1) which entails the right of “political equality” – that is, the right of each citizen to participate in choosing public officials and to hold public office if elected – and (2) which we regard as the hallmark of democratic life. Accordingly, we believe that citizens who enjoy that sort of equality should use it so well that we will succeed in living together safely and prosperously.

Our Target

The overall problem is this: on behalf of what they regarded as good government and common decency, but not perfection, Americans decided about 250 years ago to become, roughly speaking, a democracy. This they did even though there were respectable ideas and experiences in circulation at that time warning that democracies – ruled by many citizens possessing equal rights – can easily deteriorate into unmanageable regimes while no one knows how to define good citizenship in them as the right way of participating in public life under all circumstances.Footnote ⁴

So, there is what puzzles me. In fact, the Founders who promoted democracy, no matter how inadequate by today’s standards, were thereby committing themselves, as I will show, to something which they did not entirely understand.Footnote ⁵ And we have recently realized that enabling many approximately equal citizens to act through the institutions of democracy – for example, through free speech, frequent elections, fair trials, and freedom of religion – will not necessarily produce desirable results such as domestic peace and prosperity.

The Trump Shock

So where are we in all of this today? Many impressive thinkers – among them scholars, journalists, activists, and politicians – now believe that the practice of American citizenship is deeply in trouble. Therefore, let us begin by noting some of their observations. With the qualification, of course, that there are so many worriers, sometimes from the Right and sometimes from the Left, that we can cite only a few of them and their ideas here.

* * *

Act I in this play started in 1789, when elections according to the Constitution were first held. Since then, as we shall see, exactly how to practice citizenship well has been debated and no consensus among thinkers has emerged. However, even where no consensus reigned on how citizens should behave, it was obvious all along that there were some things that good citizens should never, ever, do.

Accordingly, many Americans were thoroughly shocked in 2016 when, as described by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, “for the first time in U.S. history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president.”Footnote ⁶ Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), a graduate of Princeton and Harvard universities, who was one of that man’s opponents in the 2016 Republican primary elections, put the matter even more starkly. Trump, said Cruz, is “a pathological liar … utterly immoral … and a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.”Footnote ⁷

According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, the 2016 election elevated a “demagogue” to the presidency. We will return to that momentous term. Let us note here only that, at that time, Donald Trump, who was the demagogue in this case, had never held public office, was most famous for bombastically hosting a television “reality” show (which, of course, was not at all real), and had displayed (a) an exciting rhetorical flair that was accompanied by (b) zero regard for truth.Footnote ⁸ Nevertheless, with all of these characteristics fully on display, Trump in 2016 obtained the voluntary support of 61,985,106 voting citizens and won the election.

In other words – and here was the shock – in 2016 almost 62 million adult Americans decided, of their own free will, that they wanted as president of their country a man who had no experience managing any public enterprise, and who was therefore patently unqualified to run the Executive Branch of America’s government, whose four million or so employees, including massive armed forces, are responsible for dealing with national defense, environmental protection, currency regulation, diplomacy, food and drug safety, national forests, agricultural subsidies, workers’ safety, industrial pollution, strategic intelligence, scientific research, educational standards, social security, health insurance, border patrolling, and more.

After 2016, I thought that some of those pro-Trump citizens should be forgiven because they knew little about how public policies are made and administered in the nation’s capital, and therefore they did not know in advance how badly Trump would perform while in office.Footnote ⁹ But I am less forgiving of citizens who, unrepentantly, voted for him again in 2020 and 2024.

In 2020, there were 74 million of those unapologetic Americans, and they endorsed Trump after seeing, if they had watched him from 2017 to 2020, what a disaster he was in the White House. In 2024, there were 77 million such voters, even though, in the interval, Trump had revealed no new talent for the job. In which case, the second-time shock of his winning was even bigger than the first time around.

Populism

Trump is obviously a striking example of nationwide democratic strain. There have been many other strains, accumulating for years, and we will look at some of them later. Here, let us consider that scholars and pundits who currently fear for the survival of modern democracy have described that regime as suffering from a political malady which they call “populism.”

There has never been a conclusive, uncontested definition of this disorder, but several components of it have often appeared. One is that someone very articulate will offer to rule on behalf of “the people” as if “the people” are entitled to throw off oppression by “elites.”Footnote ¹⁰ The assumption, usually on the Right, is that such a candidate will attract support because many of “the people” are angry from being exploited, to the point where they will vote for candidates like Donald Trump in America, or Viktor Orban in Hungary, or Marine Le Pen in France, from a sense of “resentment” over their social and economic rank in society.Footnote ¹¹

On this score, some thinkers more on the Left understand populism to be a form of “anti-pluralism,” where populist voters regard themselves as “the real people” while other countrymen, of various sizes, shapes, colors, origins, sexes, genders, convictions, talents, and preferences, are somehow outsiders.

Jan-Werner Muller made this point in classical terms. Candidates promising to serve the Roman “plebs,” he said, were representing “the people” properly. However, if candidates regarded the plebs, and no other classes, as the sole “authentic people” of Rome, they were unforgivably assigning moral weight to only part of the Roman population.Footnote ¹² And that, although Muller did not say so but I will add, would be like during the McCarthy Era (roughly 1947–1954). At that time, some Americans, including the film star Ronald Reagan, who was president of the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952, scorned many other Americans – like Arthur Miller, who was a leading playwright and husband of the popular actress Marilyn Monroe – as “un-American.”

Neoliberalism

Various thinkers have highlighted additional populist practices promoted by candidates and voters, leaders and followers. Many of those people, say the critics, are inspired by modern economic theories – a sort of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, and Greg Mankiw worldview writ large – which extol and recommend a later-day form of capitalism recently labeled “neoliberalism.”Footnote ¹³

Again, there has never been an uncontested definition of neoliberalism. But Wendy Brown, for example, describes it as “licensing capital, leashing labor, demonizing the social [which is identity politics] … and the political [thus respecting economic markets more than the state and other communities], attacking equality, [and] promulgating freedom [‘against state solutions to economic and social problems’].”Footnote ¹⁴

In other words, as Brown and other critics understand neoliberalism, (1) it dismantles the existing society, in the sense of not insisting on some measure of equality whereby citizens can, by acting as an empowered demos, maintain a democratic regime. Moreover, (2) it dethrones politics, in the sense that it recommends that some fateful statewide decisions should be made not by politicians and their loyalists but by commercial actors – here, think Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg – in a so-called “free” and “rational” marketplace.Footnote ¹⁵

And (3) it extends the personal rather than the social sphere, which invites religious zealots to impose their sectarian beliefs on other members of the community.Footnote ¹⁶ This, in effect, downgrades the community as a whole, which consists of all its citizens together – secular and devout – because some religious people claim, against the community’s neutral stance, that their principles, known by faith, are divinely inspired and therefore possess superior moral validity.Footnote ¹⁷

All these acts and practices together, Brown said, create conditions of life which are so stressful, especially for many traditional white men, that they will enthusiastically vote for someone like Trump because he promises to punish those whom they “hold responsible for their suffering.”Footnote ¹⁸

Imbalance

Populism and neoliberalism are abstract analytical concepts, but concrete institutional arrangements also affect American public life. Thus, in constantly changing configurations and alignments, through small and large groups and organizations, via modest campaign contributions of ordinary people and huge financial interventions of mega-donors like the Koch brothers, Miriam Adelson, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Kenneth Griffin, and Timothy Mellon, the preferences and aspirations of democratic citizens come to bear in complicated ways on how elected officials make decisions.Footnote ¹⁹

Who gets a tariff? Who gets appointed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals? Who gets an air pollution ban? Who gets a Cabinet seat? Who gets mortgage relief? Who gets a public park? Who gets a NASA contract to build a moon rocket? Who gets a soil bank? Who gets a new subway? Who gets a presidential pardon? Who gets to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Who gets to hear Pablo Casals play his cello in a White House concert? Who gets to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom?

Scholars have long studied such political pay-offs, and pro-democracy thinkers are especially worried about them. They worry, for example, that polarization and gridlock flowing from antagonism cultivated by populistic leaders and their followers can produce undesirable budgetary jackpots by bypassing longstanding checks and balances upon which liberal democracy rests.Footnote ²⁰

Thus, Levitsky and Ziblatt explained how, in forums like the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court, passionate Republicans, representing low popular-vote counts, mostly in “red” rather than “blue” states, often prevent popular Democratic majorities from making great national decisions and vital judgments, especially about who gets what, in budgetary allocations and legislative resolutions, which can extend to personal issues, such as misogyny, racism, and abortion.Footnote ²¹

This situation amounts to a triumph of minority over majority rule, to which we will return. Where it obtains, it violates one of democracy’s basic procedural axioms, which says that, apart from occasionally exercising momentary power, a minority cannot continually and legitimately represent the self-governing will of most of the people.Footnote ²²

Democracy and Citizenship

Enough for the moment. These are matters that concern sensible thinkers who worry about democracy today. We will return to some of their worries later, but now we need only to note that the talk is about democracy, but the problem is citizenship.

Here is a crucial takeoff point for my analysis. For almost a decade, grim thinkers have cited Trump’s effect on American democracy as evidence that the problem is not abstract and theoretical but concrete and dangerous in the real world. However, in a way, the problem is not really democracy in the sense of a collection of roles, agencies, and procedures, but the fact that these things are in the hands of people who look like they may not do all that needs doing to preserve liberal government.Footnote ²³

That is, an impressive collection of writers suggest that citizens, including all of us, should do their job better than they are doing it now. The analytical assumption on this score is that, as we have seen, citizens occupy “the smallest public office” in democracies because, together, citizens choose the men and women who represent “the people” in the halls of government and should therefore promote prudence and decency in the conduct of public life.Footnote ²⁴

So in a way – and I will have more to say about this – while citizens are small cogs in the democratic political system, they are also, as a sector, the designated rulers of most modern societies, whereupon they must do their work well – via good citizenship – for those societies to prosper.

Defending Democracy

That is why this book is entitled Defending Democracy. I will return to that point later but, for now, in plain language, (1) it is citizens who must defend democracy, because, (2) if they don’t do that, democracy will not be in town to defend them.

For instance, they must believe, not partly but fully, in democratic principles and act to uphold them in political institutions.Footnote ²⁵ To this end, they must not vote for candidates like Donald Trump, who they can see will do nothing to maintain self-government.Footnote ²⁶ And if some local governments use police powers to trample civil rights, as in the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd in 2020, citizens must act to assert reasonable control over those police. And if some judges, as in the Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), authorize unlimited spending by anyone, like Elon Musk, who spent $270 million in 2024 aiming to buy Republican electoral success and policy dominance, citizens must support candidates who, if elected, will appoint new judges to replace those set on issuing decisions that permit such behavior.Footnote ²⁷

In short, and we will come back to this, there are things that citizens should do to preserve democracy. Therefore, the cardinal political problem is how to produce good citizenship rather than how to preserve democracy. If “the people” will achieve the former, the latter will be there for them to enjoy.

Terms

But if that is the goal, what should be done? What are modern citizens capable of? What are they disposed to do? And what can we expect from them today?

As I noted earlier, I will address questions like these in the following pages in an essay which incorporates useful terms that I hope will permit us to think sensibly about the present condition of modern democratic politics. These terms will include some of those I already highlighted, such as good citizen, democracy, political equality, demagogue, populism, the people, elites, anti-pluralism, resentment, neoliberalism, minority rule, majority rule, and democracy’s smallest public office.Footnote ²⁸

Footnotes

¹ Biden’s colleagues call themselves the “Democratic Party.” Since the 1940s and 1950s, many Republican and/or right-wing opponents of Biden et al., have referred to the New Deal’s political heirs as the “Democrat Party.” This is a snarky way of intimating that that party should not be permitted to suggest or imply, by use of an adjective, that it is especially committed to democracy. I will discuss this sort of ideological polarization in Chapter 5, “Muddling.” For an example, see Mark R. Levin, The Democrat Party Hates America (New York: Threshold Editions, 2023).

² https://bit.ly/4pJpRLr. See also www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/30/nyregion/trump-trial-verdict.

³ It is a little noted fact that, despite Trump’s incessant slurs against legal and illegal immigrants, he is married to one. Maybe he is a fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who observed that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. On the hobgoblin thesis, see Emerson’s essay on “Self-Reliance” (1841) at https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/triumphnationalism/cman/text8/selfreliance.pdf.

⁴ For our purposes, I am simplifying the story of what happened. For more details, some of the many and sometimes conflicting ideas that underpinned the move of Americans toward democracy are described and explained in Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), passim, but esp. pp. 443–479. See also Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), passim. Schudson describes how the Founders feared some aspects of democracy as it was understood then. But he also explains how they believed in trying to maintain it within constructive limitations (such as less-than-universal suffrage and indirect election of senators) and informed by schools and newspapers.

⁵ Certainly, the original concept was imperfect by today’s standards. The United States did not immediately establish democracy for everyone but excluded most African Americans, most Native Americans, and most women. But no other countries in those days made much democratic room for such people, either, so we can leave that discussion for elsewhere and regard American democracy as an imperfect project that has, fortunately, undergone several serious upgrades, none of them arriving as quickly as we now think they should have. On one of those upgrades, better late than never, see Noah Feldman, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021). On the Nineteenth Amendment, an upgrade that assured women’s suffrage, see www.neh.gov/article/winning-vote-divided-movement-brought-about-nineteenth-amendment.

⁶ Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2023), p. 2.

⁷ Quoted in Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020), p. 177.

⁸ Journalists have for years variously described Trump’s disregard for truth. For example, a newspaper article before the 2024 election dismissed him as “a political candidate known for improvisational departures.” See www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/us/politics/trump-town-hall-dj-music.html.

⁹ His supporters should have read some of his critics. For instance, John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), p. 12: “By any independent account, Trump is a lazy, ignorant, unreflective, and unprincipled sociopath, a blowhard and a dangerous moron – a person who lies so routinely it appears he is incapable of even understanding the idea of truth or falsity.” Or, Mark Thompson, Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics? (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017), p. 92: “Donald Trump seems to have attained a unique Zen state in which random and rambling invention is truth, and the actual truth is a litany of lies cooked up by the pygmies who oppose him.” See also The Fact Checker Staff of the Washington Post, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims, and Flat-Out Lies (New York: Scribner, 2020). In Trump’s first three years in office, the Fact Checkers logged over 16,000 “false or misleading” statements.

¹⁰ A leader who claimed that he would rule on behalf of “the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, [and] the non-demonstrators,” appeared when Richard Nixon accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1968. This was later broadened when he claimed to speak, in 1969 while president, for “the silent majority” of Americans who had been abandoned by various elites but were patriotic citizens opposed to the anti-Vietnam War movement, which Nixon described as more of a threat to America than the country’s enemies abroad. On Nixon’s populism, see Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 106–139. Then came Donald Trump, who declared that he would speak and act on behalf of all “the people” to put “America first.” See his 2017 Inaugural Address at https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/.

¹¹ Resentment is often described as stemming from inequality felt within the modern American economy, and that inequality is often charged with especially afflicting people who regard themselves as middle class. These are important talking points on the American Left, approximately speaking. Thus, Jeffrey Madrick, The End of Affluence: The Causes and Consequences of America’s Economic Dilemma (New York: Random House, 1995); Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Growing Prosperity: The Battle for Growth with Equity in the 21st Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences (New York: Knopf, 2006); Robert Kuttner, The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity (New York: Vintage, 2008); Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, The Betrayal of the American Dream (New York: Public Affairs, 2012); Hedrick Smith, Who Stole the American Dream (New York: Random House, 2012); Jeff Faux, The Servant Economy: Where America’s Elite is Sending the Middle Class (New York: Wiley, 2012); Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); and John Ehrenreich, Third Wave Capitalism: How Money, Power, and the Pursuit of Self-interest Have Imperiled the American Dream (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). Concern for the American Dream and middle-class troubles also animate the American Right. They usually blame government policies (liberalism) and personal irresponsibility rather than the modern economy (neoliberalism) for hardships felt by Americans. Thus, William J. Quirk and R. Randall Bridwell, Abandoned: The Betrayal of the American Middle Class since World War II (New York: Madison Books, 1992); James Bovard, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Wayne Allyn Root, The Murder of the Middle Class: How to Save Yourself and Your Family from the Criminal Conspiracy of the Century (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2014); and Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL), The Courage to be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival (New York: Broadside, 2023).

¹² Jan-Werner Muller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 1–40, but esp. pp. 22–23. On the idea that populism fosters the legitimacy of some people over others, see Nadia Urbinati, Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

¹³ I have discussed the characteristics of neoliberalism in David Ricci, A Political Science Manifesto for the Age of Populism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), esp. pp. 61–91.

¹⁴ Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), p. 2.

¹⁵ The relationship between capitalist philanthropy and democratic policy-making is fraught. For example, see Daniel M. West, Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2014); Linsey McGoey, No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (London: Verso, 2015); and David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age (New York: Knopf, 2017).

¹⁶ Thus Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), where the Supreme Court allowed a baker, licensed to serve the public, not to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple because he, the baker, being constitutionally free to believe in his religion, believed that their, the couple’s, lifestyle violated God’s commands. See the decision at www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-111.

¹⁷ Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, pp. 23–122.

¹⁸ Footnote Ibid., p. 179. An earlier version of some of this analysis, framed in different terms, appeared in Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

¹⁹ See Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), and Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). On mega-donors, see Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016), and Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Penguin, 2018).

²⁰ See James A. Thurber and Antoine Yoshinaka (eds.), American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of Political Polarization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

²¹ Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (New York: Crown, 2023). We will later discuss how, in the marketplace of ideas today, most ideas are denied, rejected, or discounted by their opposites. In this case, an argument with considerable supporting evidence, which claims that left-wing minority-espoused ideas deny various majority-espoused principles related to housing, health, transportation, and more, is available at www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/minoritarianism-is-everywhere.

²² A clear statement of this rule came from Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address: “A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism.” See the address at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp. Books that discuss institutional imbalance, which amounts to minority rule, include Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Orenstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012); and David M. Ricci, Post-Truth American Politics: False Stories and Current Crises (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023). Some Americans, who fear what they call the “tyranny of the majority,” believe that virtuous minorities are morally entitled to thwart, say, wicked majorities. This sort of approval for the filibuster and Electoral College may be linked, as in the case of many evangelical Christians, to the notion of virtue flowing from the observance of tradition, where “tradition” is regarded as “something fixed and unchanging, a pure spring that issues into a polluted river.” That is, in this view, if the Counterculture people wanted to create some new traditions, they had no moral right to do so. See the quotation in Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 202.

²³ See Michael Walzer, The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On Liberal as an Adjective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).

²⁴ On the duties of citizens, see Joseph Tussman, Obligation and the Body Politic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), and David Shelbourne, The Principle of Duty: An Essay on the Foundations of the Civic Order (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1994).

²⁵ See, especially, Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), and Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (New York: Doubleday, 2020).

²⁶ Alan Wolfe makes this one of his “lessons for the future” in The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), p. 179: “Treat every vote as if the future of democracy depends on it.”

²⁷ The size of Musk’s contribution is so unusual as to warrant demonstrating it by citing a right-wing rather than left-wing source. So here is the Wall Street Journal at www.wsj.com/politics/elections/elon-musk-trump-republican-super-pac-investment-78a725cb.

²⁸ Here is an observation more fit for a footnote than for the main text. Any book like this, about politics and democracy, will make its argument by using common words such as democracy, justice, equality, pluralism, populism, federalism, rights, dignity, decency, and more. That is appropriate. But, because these are concepts rather than entities, readers will tend to understand them differently. Not like when we discuss, say, dogs or eclipses. On dogs and eclipses, most readers will accept the opinion of experts (veterinarians, astronomers) and agree. But let’s say we confront even a higher-than-usual degree of shared understanding over what is written in a particular political text. So the text uses a word – for example, the word “party” – and two readers say that they agree 90% on the meaning of that word. That may be unusual but welcome, given that parties are really complicated entities and not all the same. Then the text moves on to another word, like “neoliberalism,” and the same two readers again agree on that word’s meaning at the rate of 90%, which is a lot better than they would if, say, one was from Seattle and the other was from Detroit. It takes only a simple mathematical calculation to see that the actual amount of agreement between the two readers is now down to 81%, that is, 90% × 90%. Add a few more contestable words, and one sees that any text with more such words brings the area of agreement steadily down, multiplying it by 90% repeatedly, so that, in the presence of eight or ten such words, it quickly reaches 30–40% and less. Therefore, it is because political language inevitably and inexorably works this way that I am trying in this book to explain my terms at the outset so that readers can follow later what I mean to say. They may still disagree with me. But my collection of terms, defined in advance, will at least draw readers in the direction I have in mind, to be persuaded or not about whether I am correct.

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