US founders feared distrust would undo democracy

The United States was celebrated as the world’s first modern democracy, but its founders feared that distrust in government could be its undoing, the author of a new book says.

Two decades ago, protestors disrupted a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle with multiple days of demonstrations and property destruction. They punctuated their actions with a now-world-famous chant, “This is what democracy looks like!”

Since then, other activists have taken up the phrase as a rallying cry for everything from protesting police brutality, most recently during demonstrations in response to the killing of George Floyd, to advocating for women’s rights and blasting corporations. The line even found its way into a modernized production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Central Park in 2017.

But what does democracy actually look like?

You won’t find the answer just by looking to a familiar origin story about ancient Greece, says David Stasavage, a professor in the politics department, dean for the social sciences at New York University, and author of the newly released The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (Princeton University Press, 2020).

While this form of government dates back thousands of years and covers multiple continents, Stasavage’s research shows that its contours are varied, with no two democracies looking exactly alike. Some lacked constitutions and even elections, Stasavage says, but nonetheless “still adhered to the principle that the people ought to hold some sort of power.”

Questions about what a democracy can or should be are very much alive in the US today, amidst a pandemic that has tested faith in local, state, and federal government responses in what already would have been a contentious presidential election year. While many saw the suffering caused by COVID-19 as the result of a failure of an elected government to protect and serve its citizens, demonstrators this spring compared restrictions designed to halt the virus’s spread to “tyranny”—implying they were democracy’s true defenders.

More globally, some historians, such as Michael Lind, have expressed concerns about democracy’s viability, sounding alarm bells over its “decay” in Western Europe and North America. But others, including Jill Lepore, have acknowledged that while the 21st century has seen a decline in the number of democracies, the concept has previously survived dire threats—such as in the 1930s, when industrialized nations turned to fascism.

Here, Stasavage explains where democracy has been, where it’s headed, and why he remains cautiously optimistic about its survival—provided we heed history’s lessons:

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