Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today

Edited by D. Berton Emerson and Gregory Laski (Oxford UP, 2023)

My review of this volume appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books September 10, 2023.

Democracies in America aspires to be a resource for those who want to understand and potentially shore up democratic institutions that are currently in jeopardy. It remains to be seen whether the book can make much of a difference, much less succeed in its goal, given the extreme polarization of our current political climate. We are witnessing nothing less than a blatant attack on democracy, as evidenced by the dissemination of so-called alternative facts, false claims about election fraud as a pretext for disenfranchising voters, state legislative efforts to enable tampering with election results, and a greater willingness to resort to political violence. To their credit, the editors acknowledge that this book arrives at a particularly fraught moment of “polarization, technological innovation, demographic change, and economic inequality.” If most Americans agree that the country is in crisis, however, they disagree on which side is to blame.