Citizenship in Hard Times

"We live in difficult times for democracy. If this book found its way to your hands, this is probably not new information. In the United States, democratic insecurity may seem rather sudden, with the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016, an outsider candidate with weak commitments to liberal democratic norms, uncomfortable admiration for authoritarian strongmen, a toxic mix of xenophobic and racial politics, and little deference to the Constitution. This view culminates in the violent, January 6, 2021 insurrection, where Trump supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol building to disrupt the certification of Electoral College votes confirming Joe Biden the successful and legitimate winner of the 2020 Presidential Election. For others, 2016 and everything that followed only laid bare the fragility of American democratic institutions, preserving counter-majoritarian institutions and exposed by gerrymandering practices and decades of voting suppression. and, with it, a persistent second-class citizenship for America's ethnic and racial minorities. From either perspective, ordinary Americans are confronting an unprecedented crisis of democracy. This crisis is both sudden and systemic, and not easily resolved by changing Presidents"--