Editors’ note: “Democracy in America: a symposium” examines the status of popular sovereignty in the United States today, nearly two centuries after the seminal work of the political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville. Other participants include Roger Kimball, Victor Davis Hanson, James Piereson & Glenn Ellmers.
It is difficult to dispute the claim that American democracy is in crisis. It is largely bereft of both the moral consensus and the spirit of compromise that are essential to a stable and vigorous democratic political life. As a people, we are divided in grave and perhaps irreparable ways. To paraphrase W. B. Yeats, the center has not held, and a profound sense of disaffection is the order of the day on both the left and right.
The “silent majority” heralded by critics of the counterculture and the New Left in the early 1970s—those who did not welcome “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” to cite Richard Nixon’s biting 1972 campaign formulation—is no more. The coalition that elected President Trump in 2016 and still supports him is far less traditional than its political forebears—patriotic, to be sure, but still very much a byproduct of the social and moral dislocations that have transformed the country over the last half century. The old McGovernite coalition of a left-wing “knowledge class”—activist students and professors, feminists, and aggrieved minorities—is much larger than it used to be. Today, many more young people go to college to have their “consciousness raised” than to receive anything resembling
