Where Does American Democracy Go From Here?

Early last year, Freedom House, an American organization that since World War II has warned against autocracy and repression on the march around the world, issued a special report on a country that had not usually warranted such attention: its own. Noting that the United States had slid down its ranking of countries by political rights and civil liberties — it is now 59th on Freedom House’s list, slightly below Argentina and Mongolia — the report warned that the country faced “an acute crisis for democracy.” In November, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an influential Stockholm-based think tank, followed suit, adding the United States to its list of “backsliding democracies” for the first time.

The impetus for these reassessments was Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that followed. But as the reassessments themselves noted, those shocks to the system hardly came out of nowhere; like the Trump presidency itself, they were both products and accelerants of a process of American democratic erosion and disunion that had been underway for years and has continued since. In states across the country, Republican candidates are running for office on the platform that the 2020 election was stolen — a view held by about three-quarters of Republican voters. Since the beginning of 2021, Republicans in at least 25 state legislatures have tried, albeit mostly unsuccessfully, to pass legislation directly targeting the election system: bills that would place election oversight or certification in the hands of partisan legislatures, for instance, and in some cases even bills specifically punishing officials who blocked attempts to overturn the 2020 election outcome in Trump’s favor. And those are just the new developments, happening against a backdrop of a decade-long erosion of voting rights and a steady resurgence of political extremism and violence, and of course a world newly at war over the principles of self-​determination and democracy.

How bad is it, really? We convened a panel of experts in an attempt to answer that question: political scientists who have studied the lurching advances and retreats of democracy in other countries and the dynamics of American partisanship; a historian of and activist for civil rights in the United States; and Republican legal and political operatives who guided the party to victories in the past and are now trying to understand its current state.

Charles Homans: Steven, when you and Daniel Ziblatt published “How Democracies Die” in 2018, you considered the possible futures ahead of us as a country after Donald Trump’s presidency. And you concluded that the likeliest scenario was maybe not the worst outcome — full-blown authoritarianism — but a moderately grim one: an era “marked by polarization, more departures from unwritten political conventions and increasing institutional warfare.” How do you think that prediction holds up?

Steven Levitsky: I think it was broadly right. Trump didn’t consolidate an autocracy. But things got a lot worse more quickly than we expected. Even though our book was considered a little on the alarmist side when it was published, I think we were insufficiently alarmed.

We did not anticipate the rapid and thoroughgoing Trumpization of the Republican Party. We did not consider the Republican Party to be an antidemocratic force when we wrote the book in 2017. Today I consider the Republican Party to be an antidemocratic force. That’s a big change. We thought that there were elements in the party capable of constraining Trump four years ago. We were wrong. And we never anticipated anything remotely like the attempted presidential coup of 2021.

Sarah Longwell: I agree. When I co-founded Republicans for the Rule of Law in 2018, I looked at Trump’s victory in 2016 and thought, OK, this is an accident of history. I would have told you that Trump is a cancer on the party, but if you cut him out, you know, there’s enough institutional memory that the party will bounce back. But Trump metastasized, right? He reconstituted much of the party in his image. In 2022, there are hundreds of mini-Trumps running for office.

That Jan. 6 happened isn’t the most surprising part. What is most alarming is that Trump wasn’t held accountable for it, and that the party has decided today that, even after he incited an insurrection, he should still be the leader of the party. People like Tim Scott — people that you might have said, “These are the good, reasonable, post-Trump Republicans,” the people I counted on to constrain him — are now happy to be considered for his vice-presidential candidate and to endorse him for 2024.

Sherrilyn Ifill: I think that it’s really important for us not to begin with Trump. I have repeatedly described Trump as an accelerant. But he was able to accelerate something that already existed. One of the issues that I’ve been most frustrated by is the failure of so many of those who really study democracy, and who see themselves as people who are committed to democracy and democratic ideals, to see the signs that were quite apparent long before Trump came into office. Things like voter suppression against Black voters, or police officers killing unarmed Black people with impunity, were treated as a race issue and not a democracy issue, when if we saw them in any other country, we would recognize them as indicators of something being wrong with a democracy.

Carol Anderson: With Obama, there was this narrative: “Woo, we have crossed the racial Rubicon! We have overcome! We put a Black man in the White House!” Without looking at the data that shows that a majority of white people did not vote for Barack Obama and that they have not voted for a Democratic candidate for president since 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

Ifill: Our democracy was in terrible trouble when we had a Black president and a Black attorney general, and there was this thin veneer that we were moving in one direction. I remember at the time being in a meeting with President Obama and saying: “Let me explain to you what is happening in Texas. Let me explain to you what’s happening in Alabama.” After the Supreme Court decided the Shelby County v. Holder case, which removed the preclearance provision, a critical provision from the Voting Rights Act, there was this wave of voter-suppression laws that were happening around the country with very explicit statements from Republican leaders of those states, saying, “We’re free and clear now.”

The Legal Defense Fund and other civil rights organizations were litigating cases in 2014 in Texas and North Carolina. And in both of those cases, you had courts saying that the legislatures had passed these laws for the purpose of discriminating against Black voters. That’s kind of a big deal. That sounds to me like a democracy problem. That is a problem that existed before Trump.

Homans: In the past year, there have been many more state-level Republican legislative efforts to pass laws on voting in the vein of the 2013 and 2014 laws you mentioned, and also more novel legislation directly targeting the election system — though very few of those bills actually passed. Congressional Democrats spent a lot of last year trying to respond to all this legislatively. Their first move was the For the People Act: a sweeping bill that Democrats passed in the House (though not in the Senate) in 2019. It mostly addressed longstanding Democratic priorities regarding voting rights, gerrymandering and campaign-finance reform, not the new election-related concerns, and it ran into total Republican opposition and the unwillingness of some Senate Democrats to scrap the filibuster to pass it. After that, Democrats introduced narrower bills like the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, but so far they have run aground on the same obstacles. Now we finally have a small, bipartisan group of senators exploring whether it would be possible to at least fix holes in the Electoral Count Act, an archaic and confusing 19th-century law that Trump tried to use to overturn the election in 2020.

Did the Democrats blow what might have been their one chance to avert a future constitutional crisis by making it, in effect, about the whole fight over voting — which is to say, over race — in America? Or were the Republicans never going to go along with this anyway?

Benjamin Ginsberg: The elections bills the Democrats proposed included the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, which had historically gotten significant Republican support. For whatever reason, the Democrats layered their proposal extending the Voting Rights Act into a massive bill with numerous provisions that, from a Republican perspective, were all designed to gain them partisan advantage: taking redistricting away from legislatures by mandating commissions, after failing to flip any state legislative chambers despite spending many millions of dollars; public funding from the U.S. Treasury for political candidates; endorsing statehood for the heavily Democratic District of Columbia to offset the party’s decline in rural states; changing the makeup of the Federal Election Commission; and trying to create a one-size-fits-all set of voting rules in all 50 states. Including this political wish list with the Voting Rights Act provisions was a political miscalculation and a huge disservice to the Voting Rights Act. By making it all such a partisan power play, Democrats poisoned the well for Republican support, which meant they also couldn’t win over Democratic senators who did not believe the filibuster should be broken to pass a partisan bill.

Ifill: Ben is right that the Voting Rights Act had long been a bipartisan bill and had received overwhelming Republican support of each reauthorization. But the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was a proposed amendment to the Voting Rights Act that was decoupled from the other provisions that Ben talked about, which, I agree, were much more likely to draw partisan resistance. But the only Republican senator willing to vote for just moving that bill to debate was Lisa Murkowski. Just one.

Ginsberg: But I think there were reasons for that. The John Lewis act did not fix the coverage formula of which jurisdictions would be subject to preclearance of their voting changes in a way Republicans could embrace as not targeted at them and designed to give Democrats an electoral advantage. Democrats made the Voting Rights Act part and parcel of a partisan bill that was never designed to win any Republican support.

Ifill: I did work on the bill, and there was a lot of attention to making sure the bill was in fact not targeted at any particular state. I think the truth is, having been freed from the preclearance provisions, why would you want to now be back under them if not being under them is working for you and your party? I was in a meeting with about 13 Republicans talking about these bills last summer, and I remember one Republican senator said: “Well, we’ve never been covered by the Voting Rights Act. So why would we agree to a bill with nationwide coverage that would now suddenly cover us? Why would I impose on my constituents something that they’ve never had to comply with before?”

I think we in this country tend to think of civil rights legislation as being about advancing the fortunes or the power of particular groups of people and not as pro-democracy legislation. I started out as a civil rights lawyer in 1988, and one of the lawsuits I was involved in was a voting rights case against then-Gov. Bill Clinton. The first case that I put together myself that went up to the Supreme Court, the person who argued it with us for the Justice Department was the then-solicitor general, Ken Starr. So this is something of a new phenomenon, where it’s impossible for Republicans to imagine that they have something to gain in a piece of legislation that is really pro-democracy legislation, because what they’re counting on is whether it would disadvantage them in the next election. That’s not how Republicans voted in 2006, when the Senate voted 98 to 0 to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.

Lilliana Mason: The important thing is to remember that the parties are not static objects. They have been changing consistently and gradually in a single direction since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Republicans and Democrats had to work together to pass that legislation, but the legislation itself was a signal to Southern white conservative Democrats that this was maybe not their party anymore. But because partisanship is such a strong identity, it took a generation for those people to not just leave the Democratic Party but join the Republican Party. That process happened so gradually that it was sort of hard to see for a lot of people. What Trump did was to come in and basically solidify that trend.

For a recent article, I worked with co-authors to look at data from interviews conducted with people in 2011 and then again in 2016, 2017, 2018. You can predict who’s going to like Trump in 2018 based on their attitudes in 2011 toward African Americans, Latinos, L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and Muslims. And those are people coming not just from the Republican Party; they’re also coming from the Democratic Party, they’re independents. Trump basically worked as a lightning rod to finalize that process of creating the Republican Party as a single entity for defending the high status of white, Christian, rural Americans.

It’s not a huge percentage of Americans that holds these beliefs, and it’s not even the entire Republican Party; it’s just about half of it. But the party itself is controlled by this intolerant, very strongly pro-Trump faction. Because we have a two-party system, we effectively empowered 20 to 30 percent of the country that is extremely intolerant and doesn’t really believe in democracy; we’ve given them a whole political party. And the last time we did that was really around the Civil War.

Homans: Sarah, I’m curious how that squares with your experience. You’ve spent the past several years working in various organizations to mobilize opposition to this faction within the Republican Party, but you’ve also been regularly conducting focus groups to explore why Trump has elicited so much support within that party.

Longwell: I still try to really remain optimistic about the goodness and the decency of a lot of Americans and of parts of the Republican Party. I have to. I mean, the old Republican Party did support the Voting Rights Act. But there was this recessive gene in the party that went through the Pat Buchanans and Sarah Palins. The party would say, “Palin can have the vice presidency” — like, she’ll be a nationalist-populist type, and that’s going to sate this recessive gene. And of course, Trump turned it into the dominant gene.

But I don’t want to let Democrats off the hook entirely here. You know, when I started doing the focus groups, I would ask G.O.P. voters who really didn’t like Trump why they voted for him. And the No. 1 answer you would get was: “I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I voted against Hillary Clinton.” A lot of that is the longstanding hatred Republicans have for the Clintons and probably a bit of sexism as well. But there is also a reaction to a Democratic Party that is moving left and has a more difficult time appealing to swing voters. It is increasing negative polarization: I hate their side more than I like my side. And the cultural-war stuff is so much of it now. Whether it’s critical race theory, defund the police or the fight over using pronouns, Democrats often sound like aliens to many voters — including Black and Latino voters. Republicans have been increasing their support among minorities, because often these groups are more culturally conservative in ways that wedge them off from the current Democratic Party.

Ifill: We’re only talking about political parties. And in my view, that’s part of the problem, because a democracy has many, many elements that hold it together. You need a functioning fourth estate. You need transparency, you need good information, you need education, you need the professions. I mean, I’ve been on this tear about my profession, the legal profession, and how much it has been part of this. We have to be looking at our professions, we have to be looking at the faith community, we have to be looking at our educational system. All of those are elements of what is going to decide the future of American democracy.

Levitsky: I take your point, Sherrilyn, but I think there is a difference. I think that for all the many weaknesses of other institutions, there is nothing within the judiciary, the media and the professions comparable to what is going on in the Republican Party.

Ifill: I agree with you, but I don’t think it’s possible to imagine creating a healthy democracy just by politically overcoming one party without also addressing the weakening of the other institutions that are supposed to constitute a check on the excesses of political parties. How would it have happened without the excesses in our media, the 24-hour megaphone of Fox News and One America News Network? How would it have happened without these other unravelings that actually aided and abetted it, without the judiciary itself? Without the disinformation that social media has allowed on those platforms?

Levitsky: But it’s entirely possible to polarize and break down without social media, right? We did it in the 1850s and 1860s. The Chileans managed to do it in the 1970s; the Spanish did it in the 1930s. And cable media exists in democracies across the world today, and only our Republican Party is going over the railing. I’m not saying the media is performing well, but I think that the central problem is the Republican Party.

Ginsberg: If it’s the Republican Party’s fault and the Republican Party’s fault alone, what’s the solution? What can you do about it? You have to recognize that the Democratic brand is as toxic in rural America as the Trump brand is in the salons of Manhattan and Northwest D.C. There are lots of solutions being proposed, but they’re being discussed only by people who agree with one another. I mean, there’s nobody in this conversation, with the possible exception of Sarah, who has the ability to impact the Republican Party at this point. The country is so divided that the red team and the blue team are not talking to each other, and the dismissal of one side by the other is not going to solve the problem.

And this divide goes beyond the political. There’s a much more fundamental and basic shift that has taken place in the country over the last 50 years, and that’s the “Big Sort” that Bill Bishop has described. We now have a country where people are more and more wanting to live with people like themselves. Now, that certainly has an impact in our politics, but it’s not being driven by our politics. It’s being driven by something deeper.

Homans: Lily, one detail that I found fascinating in your book “Uncivil Agreement” is that according to survey data, since 2008 partisan enmity has increased much more rapidly than disagreement over the parties’ policy positions, which hasn’t changed that dramatically since the late 1980s. At this point, our arguments are not primarily about what the parties stand for but whom they stand for.

Mason: The word “identity” keeps coming up, and this is a really crucial part of it. And remember that we have research about intergroup conflict, right? Don’t look at this as, like, a logical disagreement situation. We’re not disagreeing on what kind of tax structure we should have. We’re not just disagreeing about the role of the federal government in American society. What we’re disagreeing about is increasingly the basic status differences between groups of people that have existed in America for a very long time. One of the things that Nathan Kalmoe and I found in our forthcoming book is that if you look at Democrats and Republicans who really, really hate each other and call each other evil and say the other party is a threat to the United States, the best predictor of that is how they think about the traditional social hierarchy.

White Democrats and Republicans had basically identical levels of racial resentment in 1986; today they’re 40 points apart. So one of the most passionate divides that we’re seeing between the parties right now, more than it has been in decades, is, does systemic racism exist? Does systemic sexism exist? Have we done enough to overcome it? Have we gone too far? When Trump made that an explicit conversation instead of a dog whistle, we actually had to start talking about it. And now we’re having this extremely difficult conversation as a country, and it’s never going to go well. It’s just not. There’s no possible way for us to have this conversation and stay calm and rational and reasonable about it. We’ve never done it before. It’s just very messy, and it’s going to be messy, and it’s going to get even uglier than it currently is.

Homans: With that in mind, we should talk about the resurgence of overt political violence that we’ve seen in this country in the last two years. Obviously this is a country that’s had a whole spectrum of political violence over the course of its history, even its relatively recent history. But the thing that really struck me in 2020 was that we saw things that really looked like partisan violence.

Levitsky: From a comparative perspective, it is really troubling to see mainstream parties’ reactions, or lack of reaction, to acts of political violence. You’re right, Charles, we’ve seen periods of violence before — a lot of violence in the late 1960s and early ’70s, for instance. But it was not partisan violence in the same way that we’re potentially seeing now. And one of the things about democratic breakdowns in Europe in the ’20s and ’30s and in South America in the ’60s and ’70s is that without exception, they were preceded by periods of paramilitary violence that was tolerated, condoned, justified, sometimes encouraged by mainstream political parties.

When acts of violence occur, mainstream parties need to close ranks in defense of democracy. The left, right and center need to stand up and, essentially in unison, publicly and forcefully denounce these acts and hold perpetrators accountable. That’s what needs to be done. And in cases when that happens, like Spain during its 1981 coup attempt or Argentina during its 1987 military uprising, democratic institutions can be shored up. But when one or both mainstream political parties is silent or winks at — or encourages or gives a fist pump to — acts of political violence or declares it “legitimate political discourse,” that is a really troubling sign.

Anderson: What we’re seeing, I liken it to a land, sea and air attack. The land attack is on voting rights. That is one of the ways that you begin to undermine democracy. The sea attack are these attacks against teaching critical race theory and “divisive” topics, so you can erase people from American history and erase the role of various people in American history. And the air attack is the loosening of gun laws that we’re seeing in Texas, Tennessee and Georgia. This is a full-blown assault on American democracy that’s going after voting rights, that’s going after education and that is reinforcing political violence as an acceptable method of bringing about your political aims. That’s where we are, and that’s why this moment is so dangerous.

Ifill: I will share with you some of the most depressing moments for me in the past two years. One, of course, was Jan. 6 — and as you said, Sarah, not just Jan. 6 but the subsequent lining up of Republicans to say this was OK or to be silent. The second one was during the massive protests that happened following the release of the video of the killing of George Floyd, when the administration assembled a constabulary that stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with masks on. We didn’t know where they were from, whether they were National Guard. We had no idea what their names were. Their badges weren’t visible. There was something so antidemocratic, something so crude about that, that truly frightened me.

And then the third one was the killing by Kyle Rittenhouse of two people in Wisconsin, and the reaction to that — because again, I’m presuming, whatever you believe happened in the interaction, that most of us who are parents would rather our children not have killed people by the time they’re 18 years old. That was a kind of an article of faith among us, as parents: that he would have been treated as a child who engaged in a traumatic activity, and not instead hailed as a hero. The Republican Party had been the party that regularly wagged its fingers at the Black community about our family values, and his mother was greeted with a standing ovation at a G.O.P. dinner. These were the three moments where I thought, This is so off the rails. The places where I would have thought, you know, some Republicans might say enough is enough.

Homans: Ben, you worked for the Republican Party for decades as an election lawyer. Did the way in which the party metabolized Trump’s response to the 2020 election, and the Jan. 6 attack, surprise you?

Ginsberg: The whole thing, honestly, has shocked me. It’s not so much the elected officials who were giving the fist pumps on Jan. 6, because they were sort of predictable in doing that. It’s the many people within the party whom I know and have known for years who are good, decent, principled people, who are silent. It’s the silence of the Republican Party that is most surprising to me and most upsetting. We’ve described the problem in this conversation, but the much more difficult part is figuring out what to do about it. I think that’s what Sarah and I as Republicans have a particular obligation to do. But I don’t know how you bring the people within the Republican Party who should be speaking out to do exactly what you say, Steve, which is to make clear that this violence and election denial is not acceptable.

Homans: Steven, one clear takeaway from “How Democracies Die” is that the resolution to democratic crisis really has to come from within the party that is incubating the anti-democratic movement. This was what the center-right parties in Germany and Italy failed to do in the 1930s, which delivered Hitler and Mussolini to power. But other European center-right parties in Sweden and Belgium, for instance, succeeded in expelling fascist movements within their ranks in that same period.

Levitsky: But I think the Republicans will not reform themselves until they take a series of electoral defeats, major electoral defeats — and given the level of partisan identity that Lily describes, and given an electoral system that is biased toward the Republicans through no fault of their own, that’s not going to happen.

Ginsberg: Well, part of that is, to me, a completely inexplicable series of strategic decisions by the Democrats. To much of the country, the current Democratic disarray does not present a viable alternative. I mean, I hate to go back to the small politics of it all, but honestly, look at what the Democrats in Congress have done legislatively in this session. They control all three branches of government, but they’re constantly squabbling among themselves and failing to pass much of their agenda. I know these debates over the issues they’re having among themselves are heartfelt. But as a strategy, their infighting only makes sense if they’re either trying to lower expectations for 2022 and 2024 — which they have done masterfully — or if they’re trying to reward Republicans for bad behavior, which is what the polls say they’re about to do in the 2022 elections. The Republicans are the bad actors right now, that’s absolutely accurate and true, but the Democratic Party is contributing to this by its own fecklessness and failing to present a viable alternative.

Levitsky: Some of that is obviously true. I think what’s needed in the short term to preserve democracy, to get through the worst of this storm, is a much broader coalition than we’ve put together to date. Something on the lines of true fusion tickets that really brings in Republicans — maybe not a lot of the electorate, but enough to assure that the Trumpist party loses. That would mean bringing in a good chunk of that Bush-Cheney network that’s out there — that in private says the same things that I’ve said, but that has thus far been largely unwilling to speak out publicly — and having them in many cases on the same ticket.

And that means something that we have not seen enough of in the last couple of decades, which is real political sacrifice. It means that lifelong Republicans have to work to elect Democrats. And it means the progressives have to set aside a slew of policy issues that they care deeply about so that the ticket is comfortable to right-wing politicians. And we’re nowhere near that, neither in the Bush-Cheney network nor in the Democratic Party. Having talked to a number of Democratic elected politicians, I can tell you that we are nowhere near Democrats being willing to make those kinds of political sacrifice. But that is what is needed.

Longwell: Republicans have to lose elections, and the Democrats have to build a sufficient pro-democracy coalition, one that spans from Liz Cheney to Liz Warren, to defeat this authoritarian version of the Republican Party. My criticism of Democrats is this: I’ve always been focused on the national debt. Big issue for me; real deficit hawk over here. I still care, but I now have higher-order concerns because I think American democracy is at stake. If you believe that the Republican Party is the existential threat that we have all just laid out, and I agree that it is, then the only thing to do is win elections and defeat antidemocratic Republicans.

And right now, this insane authoritarian party appears poised to kick Democrats’ butts in 2022. Why? Democrats keep putting forward unpopular ideas. We’re being told they’re popular, but they’re not. Voters weren’t interested in “transformational change” from the Build Back Better plan. They wanted Covid under control. They wanted gas prices to be lower. They don’t want runaway inflation. Even voter ID is popular — and I’m not saying you should run on voter ID, but there needs to be a sense among Democrats of, how do we reach the swing voters on the center-right that do think the Republican Party is going too far? Why aren’t they talking to Republicans from the beginning about how to put together a voting rights bill that could pass?

Ifill: I agree with you that the big tent is the way, but I’m skeptical that we get there on the kind of logical proposals that in the past might have attracted a coalition. Going back to the voting bill: The summer of 2021 was devoted to giving Joe Manchin a chance, which he requested, to shop to Republicans a more modest and pragmatic bill, which did include voter ID. We realized that that’s what people like. I think we’re at a point right now where the offer of the sensible deal does not seem to be the kind of thing that people are prepared to coalesce around because of just what you described. There’s a kind of a madness in the air. There’s a kind of a decadence.

But can I ask — because I rarely get this opportunity and Ben is here — I’m wondering, what do you see? Are there avenues to get in to the party that you have known and to tap into some remaining moral integrity and vision of people who are in that party?

Ginsberg: Your question does point up the problem. I’m not at all in lock step with the current Republican Party, but I’m as close as many on the left get to interacting with a partisan Republican. We are so polarized that the different sides just are not talking to each other at all. It seems to me that if there is an avenue that’s going to work, it has to be that we all swallow hard and again start talking to people with whom we really don’t agree, and maybe think we don’t respect, to see if there is common ground. We need, as a country and as individuals in communities, to take the really difficult step of figuring out how to start having those conversations.

Longwell: Part of what has changed is that Republicans have decided that it’s no longer important to be tethered to the truth. Even if Republicans don’t explicitly repeat Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, they help add credibility and fuel to his claims by auditing elections and pushing bills under the guise of “election integrity” even though there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020. Just ask Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr. You guys know who is most worried about democracy being under attack?

Mason: Republicans.

Longwell: Republicans! There’s a good CNN poll on this that asks, do you think American democracy is under attack? 46 percent of Democrats said “yes,” 46 percent of independents said “yes” and a full 66 percent of Republicans said “yes.” That’s because Republicans labor under the delusion that the 2020 election was stolen. So they are the most concerned about democracy. The people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 thought they were fighting for democracy.

So “democracy” can be kind of an opaque term for voters. The public doesn’t really care about democracy the way we are talking about it in this conversation. And one of the reasons I reach for politics as the best solution is that there has to be a lever by which we defend democracy by winning elections.

Mason: One possible scenario is that we are just in the middle of this very bumpy part of a very necessary road that we have to drive down. And ultimately, we might get to a better place, to a smoother part of the road, or the wheels fall off the car, right? We just don’t know what’s going to happen now because we’re in the middle of it. It feels totally chaotic because it is chaotic. And Trump’s presidency allowed us to see that for the first time.

Ifill: Something that we underestimate, that Trump sold, he sold a kind of freedom. Those rallies, you know, “punch him in the face,” “grab women by the P” — what he offered is: “You know how you’ve been in these meetings, and you’ve been wondering whether to call the person Black or African American, or felt uncomfortable making a joke that might seem sexist? You don’t have to worry about that anymore. Just be you, man. Just be you.” He sold that. And that was incredibly attractive.

Mason: On the other hand, we’ve never explicitly talked about equality in a productive way without also encountering violence. True multiethnic democracy is an elusive goal, and it’s not clear that we know how to get there.

Anderson: What is so scary is that, you know, what generally happens is that if you have a common enemy, it causes a coalescence among these disparate groups. Covid-19 was that common enemy, and instead, you saw greater fissioning between folks, greater division with this common enemy that has killed almost one million Americans. We couldn’t pull it together. We couldn’t rally around. We couldn’t agree on basic facts. That fissioning tells me how in trouble we are. I worry greatly about our democracy because where we should be able to see us coming together, instead of a “we” moment it is an “I” moment. And we’ve got to get to the “we.” We have got to get to the “we.”

Homans: I wonder, though — is there a “we”? I’ve been thinking about this, watching the war in Ukraine, which, besides bringing the matter of democracy’s global health to the fore, has so clearly centered on the question of how nations define things like cultural identity, sovereignty and an agreed-upon history — and what they define them against. Are Americans anywhere close to having a shared answer to that question themselves? Have these events changed your thinking at all about the fragility — or resilience — of democracy, or suggested any lessons we should apply to the United States?

Levitsky: I think it’s too early to tell. This is precisely the sort of issue that should bring our leaders together, as it has in most Western democracies. It certainly is good to see many leading Republicans taking a strong stance against the Russian invasion, but I am skeptical that the MAGA faction will come around in any serious way. And given the extremism of the Republican base, it’s hard to imagine many Republicans giving Biden the support he needs. In short, I’d be mighty pleased if Russian militarism helped bring our parties together, but I’d also be somewhat surprised.

Homans: Is there any reason to think there’s an alternative to the very bumpy road ahead that Lily talked about?

Levitsky: The crossroads that American democracy is at right now are pretty damn close to unique. I mean, we are on the brink of something very new and very challenging. So it is not easy to find solutions, best practices elsewhere; the creation of a truly multiracial democracy is uncharted territory.

Charles Homans covers politics for The New York Times.

This discussion has been edited and condensed for clarity, with material added from follow-up interviews.

Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.