Michael Briand (2019)
Writing in the New York Times in 2016, months before the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency, columnist Charles M. Blow raised the possibility that Americans no longer have the will, or even the ability, to respond effectively to the policy problems that continue to drag down the quality of life in our country.[1] Two years later, this question has taken on even greater urgency. As Roger Cohen puts it, “…Fracture is the nation’s overriding condition. It keeps widening.” According to political scientist Ronald Inglehart, “in recent years U.S. democracy has become appallingly dysfunctional.”
Late last year, 20 leading political scientists gathered at Yale University to address this concern.[2] The general consensus was that “American democracy is eroding on multiple fronts — socially, culturally, and economically.” We are seeing “breakdowns in social cohesion, the rise of tribalism, political polarization, the erosion of democratic norms such as a commitment to rule of law, and a loss of confidence in the electoral system.” Similarly, Foreign Policy magazine recently asked several national security experts to evaluate the chances of another civil war during the next ten to fifteen years. “The sobering consensus,” Robin Wright reported, “was 35 percent. And that was five months before Charlottesville.”[3]
Worse, support for democratic ideals and principles is weakening. Anna Grzymala-Busse, a political scientist at Stanford, says it’s not simply that formal institutions have been shaken, but that the informal norms that underpin them [have become] more fragile. Norms of transparency, conflict of interest, civil discourse, respect for the opposition and freedom of the press, and equal treatment of citizens are all consistently undermined, and without these the formal institutions become brittle.
Alarmingly, many Americans appear to be open to “alternatives” to democracy.[4] “People have lost faith in the system. The social compact is broken. …Many citizens…no longer believe that democracy can deliver on their most pressing needs and preferences.” An angry, resentful public provides fertile ground for demagogues and autocrats.
This situation didn’t arise overnight. Since the 1960s, political conflict in the U.S. has been growing increasingly adversarial and intractable. It has now reached the point where political opponents agree on almost nothing, not even the most rudimentary facts. Indeed, the very idea that there are or can be facts independent of people’s differing perceptions and predispositions has been severely eroded. In current conditions, political debate stands little chance of generating effective, widely-accepted policies to remedy the nation’s worsening problems—and to reduce the growing danger that, by failing to solve them, we will put democracy itself at risk.
In the social, cultural, and economic conditions that prevail in our country at present, we need desperately to begin resolving—or at least mitigating—political conflicts that are rooted in divergent worldviews and value systems. Where do we begin?
An important first step is to realize that, generally speaking, any effective effort to resolve political conflict or reduce it substantially must be responsive to the kinds of demands placed upon people by two aspects of human social life. One is affective, or emotional. The other is cognitive, or intellectual.
Needs and Emotions
Human beings have needs (such as those enumerated by Abraham Maslow), and all of them have the potential to arouse emotions. As John Burton once remarked, “human beings are neither naturally good nor naturally bad—they’re naturally needy.” People who are experiencing a deficit in the fulfillment of one or more needs can’t be readily “talked down” from the defenses they’ve erected to stave off emotional pain. In particular, those whose identity needs are strong find it difficult to revise or even examine critically the worldviews with which they identify.
The perceptions, norms, beliefs, attitudes, interpretations, aspirations, and expectations that constitute a worldview are deeply rooted in the mental life of the people who hold it—so much so that its influence on them is undetectable most of the time (and just for that reason, highly resistant to modification, even when recognized). When elements of a worldview are called into question, they often prompt uncomprehending and even defensive reactions. Identities are tightly interwoven with worldviews, and few people tolerate well having their identities challenged. In a contest between maintaining a worldview through which a person meets his or her identity needs, on the one hand, and on the other hand accepting an argument or assertion that would challenge it, maintaining the worldview will win every time.
Since the 2016 presidential campaign there has been much discussion of a psychological phenomenon related to the basic human need for safety and security: fear. Although people’s fears are often generated and sustained by non-rational psychological factors (e.g., instinctive wariness in response to unfamiliar circumstances), they are always linked to cognitive beliefs about the threats people perceive. Whether those beliefs are well-founded is a separate question. But warranted or not, beliefs both reflect and affect people’s attitudes, dispositions, sensitivities, and actions.
For example, consider Arlie Hochschild’s recent argument that economic despair lies at the heart of the anger expressed by people who identify with the Tea Party.[5] Despair, an emotion, is associated with their belief that, though they might not be worse off materially than members of other demographic groups, their situation over the past four decades has worsened more than anyone else’s. Evidence supports this conviction. Hochschild cites the economist Phillip Longman’s finding that people in their fifties today are the first generation of Americans who, “at every stage of adult life … have less income and less net wealth than people their age ten years before.”[6] Not unreasonably, Tea Partiers worry that they will fall further. They see liberals and the federal government helping other groups, but not them. As a result, they fear being overtaken by groups and sinking to the bottom of the socioeconomic barrel.
Another example of the danger that emotions pose for democratic legitimacy and stability is the link between feelings of alienation and support for political leaders who display authoritarian tendencies.[7] In 2015, Matthew MacWilliams discovered that, in a large sample of likely voters in the upcoming presidential election, authoritarian views not only correlated with but predicted support for Trump more reliably than almost any other indicator.[8] “Authoritarian” voters express a deeper level of fear than the rest of the electorate. They respond positively to candidates who promise to relieve that fear through bold and determined action that will preserve or reinstate a social order they see as threatened, and that will return order to a world they view as chaotic.
Authoritarians value social order characterized by hierarchy because it offers reassurance in the face of change and uncertainty. Social change of the sort the country has undergone over the past few decades appears personally threatening to people with a high need for stability, security, and control. Demographic shifts, evolving social norms, political ferment, disruptions caused by technological innovation, and the aforementioned decline in economic status destroy the familiar, orderly, secure world they’ve known and replace it with one they don’t know how to navigate. People begin to feel unmoored, adrift. They become unsure not only where they are going, but who they are.
Insightful though this analysis might be, it is possible—and, I would argue, necessary—to dig even deeper into the sources of people’s political beliefs and attitudes. For example, in his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, the historian Christopher Lasch argued that the social, economic, and cultural conditions that formed in the United States after the Second World War led to the emergence of a personality-type consistent with clinical definitions of pathological narcissism.[9] This pathology is more than garden-variety egotism. In Lasch’s definition, the narcissist is a person whose alienation from the institutions and practices that historically have given people a grounded, secure sense of self develops a chronic social-psychological anxiety that he attempts to compensate for by “basking in the reflection” of others’ admiration for him. His need for attention and approval leads him to use them as a means to assuage that anxiety, first cultivating, then manipulating, and in the end ignoring them as his craving subsides or they no longer supply him with the attention and approval he seeks. Lasch considered “the fascination with fame and celebrity and the shallowness and transitory quality of personal relations” to be expressions of our narcissistic culture.
Lasch also blamed both the right’s blindness to the destructive effects of consumerism and the left’s cultural relativism for weakening crucial institutions such as the family, schools, and community-level voluntary organizations. Monomaniacal corporate managers and shareholders, he believed, “put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.” The desire to gain “competitive advantage through emotional manipulation,” he wrote, first taints and ultimately corrupts the spheres of community, family, and friendships.
In politics, cultural narcissism produces politicians with inflated self-images who devote themselves to flattering the opinions, desires, and prejudices of voters, whose own narcissism requires identification with “winners” that invariably disappoint and disillusion them. “Long before Stephen Colbert coined the term ‘truthiness’,” writes Lee Siegel, “Lasch perceived that ‘the air is saturated with statements that are neither true nor false but merely credible’ — which only makes it easier for the narcissist to see the world as an extension of his desires.”[10] Not surprisingly, both liberals and conservatives have cited cultural narcissism as support for their ideological agendas, each detecting a mote in the other’s eye, but not the beam in their own.[11]
To some degree, affective states such as anxiety, insecurity, fear, anger, and alienation can be mitigated by well-known dialogical strategies such as permitting people to express their feelings and acknowledging that they’ve been heard; listening carefully to the explanations and justifications they offer in an effort to understand and appreciate the “not-unreasonableness” of those statements; identifying and emphasizing common experiences, desires, and aspirations as a basis for cooperation; negotiating mutually beneficial, “non-zero-sum” outcomes, and so forth. Strategies like these make an invaluable contribution to reducing and managing conflict.
They do so, however, in large measure by avoiding the ideological, cultural, and psycho-social sources of deep-rooted disagreement. They focus chiefly on achieving civil, mutually respectful conversation--on encouraging people to interact without experiencing and expressing strong emotions. But substantive beliefs matter. For one thing, beliefs—especially evaluative beliefs—and emotions often appear together, one evoking the other. Because they do, we can often modify our emotions by reflecting on or reconsidering what we believe.
Moreover, all of us hold beliefs—about what is factually the case and what isn’t, about what is good and bad, right and wrong, desirable and undesirable, acceptable and unacceptable. As citizens of a democratic republic, we face choices. We have to set priorities and make decisions. We can’t avoid the task of assessing the truth-claims inherent in the beliefs that constitute our differing political outlooks. Lamentably, too many of us lack the thinking skills democracy depends on. When Arlie Hochschild pointed out the contradictions in the political logic of the Tea Partiers she interviewed, her subjects “[fell] into long pauses. Cognitive dissonance reduce[d] them to childlike inanity.” How do we reduce conflict when people are so gripped by their emotions that, when faced with contradictions, their minds essentially stop working?
Working together across social, cultural, economic, and political divides is especially difficult to do in the U.S. because it is the only country, as Garry Wills (invoking G.K. Chesterton) once put it, to have been founded on commitment to an idea. Or rather, to a set of ideas: individualism and self-reliance; the primacy of freedom and rights; equality before the law and in democratic politics; the subjectivity and incommensurability of values; the moral authority of Christianity, and so forth. “If there is an American idea,” Wills remarked, “then one must subscribe to it in order to be an American. …To be fully American, one must adopt this idea wholeheartedly, proclaim it, prove one’s devotion to it.” Not to do so is to open oneself up to the charge that one is not really or sufficiently an American. It is to call into question both one’s identity and one’s patriotism.
To compound the problem, the “idea” we hold in common and that largely defines the nation to which we belong is susceptible to conflicting interpretations. Those interpretations are profoundly affected by our belief systems. As Mark Gerzon puts it in A House Divided,
We are in a struggle about our deepest values and our most cherished beliefs. …The divided states of America is made up of Americans who are bound together not by where they live, but by what they believe. …What is acceptable to adherence of one belief system is immoral to another. … Belief systems purport to explain everything. In effect they do our thinking for us.[12]
The mutual reinforcement that occurs between the larger webs of belief and emotion each of us inhabits and our competing interpretations of the American “idea” can have a pernicious effect on our attitudes and dispositions toward our fellow citizens:
"We no longer trust…each other. …We know we are witnessing a culture at war with itself and that unless something changes it will fragment beyond repair."[13]
Gerzon’s observations lend support to Lasch’s diagnosis of cultural narcissism. If the latter is correct, we should expect that—over time, and in order to satisfy our cravings for personal validation—it will erode our ability and willingness to think and speak critically about our beliefs, which are central to our identities. At the same time, we should expect it to undermine our ability and willingness to listen with an open mind to the beliefs that others hold, and to resist feeling threatened by the emotions others express in connection with their beliefs. We should expect further that, sooner or later, we will reach the point where mutual incomprehension destroys the respect and trust we need from each other in order to work through our differences and arrive at policies that will prove both effective and widely supported.
It seems clear that this prediction has been borne out. As Sean Illing observes, today
there are two distinct communities in America today: “identitarian” activists concerned with issues like racial and gender equality, and the “nativist” coalition, people suspicious of immigration and cultural change. They live in different worlds and share almost nothing in common. For them, there is no real basis for agreement and thus no reason to communicate. …Every political contest becomes an intractable existential drama, with each side convinced the other is not just wrong, but a mortal enemy.”[14] (emphasis added)
These two “communities” continue to grow apart. Conflict between the differing worldviews and interpretations of the American “idea” that these communities represent pose a serious danger to democracy. Unless we can achieve resolution or sufficient mitigation of our differences to yield a shared perspective appealing enough and accepted widely-enough to command our collective allegiance, democracy in any meaningful sense could slip out of our already-tenuous grasp. But a shared perspective will elude us unless more of us form the habit of thinking critically about the beliefs we subscribe to.
Taking Ideas and Beliefs Seriously
Beliefs matter. The “American idea,” different interpretations of that idea, and the competing belief systems with which people identify are bound up with emotions that we can and must modify through reflection and reconsideration. The choices we face involve beliefs. In order to set priorities and make decisions, we have to be able to evaluate the assertions and claims in which they appear.
“Reflection and reconsideration” is another term for “critical thinking.” Definitions of critical thinking abound, and they change over time.[15] For present purposes, though, the definition (and rationale) offered by the Foundation for Critical Thinking is useful.
"…Human thinking left to itself often gravitates toward prejudice, over-generalization, common fallacies, self-deception, rigidity, and narrowness. The critical thinking tradition seeks ways of…training the intellect so that such “errors”…and “distortions” of thought are minimized.
…The history of critical thinking…allows us to distinguish two contradictory intellectual tendencies: a tendency on the part of the large majority to uncritically accept whatever was presently believed…and a conflicting tendency on the part of a small minority…to systematically question what was commonly accepted and seek, as a result, to establish sounder, more reflective criteria and standards for judging what it does and does not make sense to accept as true.
…Critical thinking…entails…a commitment to overcome our native egocentrism and sociocentrism."[16]
Learning to think critically requires training ourselves to avoid “errors” and “distortions” of thought. Its chief characteristic is the ability and willingness to follow certain rules that support standards for ensuring that the conclusions we reach are the best ones of which we are capable. There are at least two broad categories of such rules:
One type consists of rules for offsetting the influence of affective and attitudinal proclivities that may lead us to flawed conclusions. These include, for example, avoiding the assumption that conflict is “zero-sum” (i.e., that what party gains inevitably comes at a cost to another party); guarding against “confirmation bias”; taking care not to project our beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, etc. on to others, who may not share them; listening carefully in order to understand others, not to find weaknesses in their arguments and to “score points”; and considering evidence on the merits rather than on the source that supplies it.
A second category of rules helps us identify weaknesses and errors in higher cognitive processing—i.e., in reasoning. These include formal fallacies (in which the logical structure of an argument is faulty), such as “affirming the consequent,” the “appeal to probability,” “negative conclusion from affirmative premises”; and informal mistakes in reasoning (in which the informational content of the argument is in some way defective or inadequate), such as the “appeal to common sense,” the “middle ground” fallacy, and “begging the question.”
But important though it is to be mindful of such rules in political argumentation, they require supplementing. Confucius, reputedly, said that “the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.” More prosaically, there probably is no greater impediment to productive political discussion that the failure to be clear and precise in defining key terms. When we talk about freedom, for example, are we talking about liberty, or independence, or autonomy? Is there a difference between individualism and individuality? What is equality? In which ways should people be considered equal? What is justice? Does it differ from fairness? Is there a difference between truth, knowledge, facts, beliefs, opinions? What is the difference between a democracy and a republic? Between a plutocracy, an oligarchy, and a plutarchy?
Without achieving clarity and precision in the terms we use to talk about what we believe, we’re no more likely to arrive at a sound conclusion than if we were trying to solve the equation “1 + 1 = ?” without knowing whether “1” means precisely “1.00” or is simply an average of many numbers over a given range. (For example, if the range is from 0.50 to 1.50, the average could be as little as .50 or as much as 1.50. Hence “1 + 1” might equal as little as 1.00 or as much as 3.00.) Without clarity and precision, we can’t expect to arrive at sound conclusions to questions such as: Which is more fundamentally important, freedom or equality? Is something good because we desire it, or do we desire it because it’s good? Can a person be mistaken in thinking that what she happens to want is what she really desires? Can what’s good conflict with what’s right? If it’s wrong to do a thing, might it still be the best thing to do? Is asserting that something is unethical the same thing as contending it’s immoral?
Without good answers to basic conceptual questions such as these, we don’t stand a chance of reaching agreement concerning the political questions that inevitably arise: Must government be neutral in the matter of what people do with their freedom? Can it be? Should it support “better” uses of freedom and discourage less-desirable uses? What rights do people have? Are they absolute? Can political ends justify the means by which people seek to achieve them? Does capitalism conflict with democracy? Which should we give priority? What are the trade-offs? Is democracy a system of government or a way of life? Can we sustain democracy without asking—and answering—the question of what democracy is for? Can institutions and processes by themselves sustain democracy? What happens if they lose legitimacy? Will a democracy prove sustainable if people aren’t guided in their actions by personal ethical integrity? Is it possible for ethics to carry enough authority to elicit voluntary compliance from people? Do human beings have spiritual needs? Can a democracy address those needs? Should it? Can we have ethics without religious values? If democracy depends on talk, does the quality of talk matter?
Such questions are far from “academic.” Consider just one example: the current dispute over the role that money should be permitted to play in politics. In 2010, the Supreme Court held that the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for “electioneering communications.”[17] On its face, the issue is whether the value inherent in the right of freedom of speech in an election campaign outweighs the value of ensuring equal decision-making authority among citizens. How equally should political authority and power be distributed in a democracy?
One view, of course, is that it should be distributed strictly equally. That’s the idea captured by the expression, “one person, one vote.”[18] But here’s another view: A few years ago a Silicon Valley venture capitalist compared the situation of the wealthiest Americans today to that of Jews in Nazi Germany, calling it a “war on the…one percent….” The extreme progressivity of federal tax laws, he asserted “is a form of persecution. If you've paid 75 percent of your life’s earnings to the government, you are being persecuted.” His solution? “If you pay a million dollars [in taxes], you should get a million votes.” In short, the rich deserve to have more political influence than anyone else. (He also said that only taxpayers should have the right to vote.[19])
Granted, this is an extreme view. But it has a superficial plausibility—enough to bring a political dialogue to a halt. If people believe there’s nothing more important to the governed in a democracy than how much they’re taxed and for what purposes, what could be fairer that allocating votes according to one’s share of the tax burden? More to the point, the venture capitalist is far from alone in his belief that some people should have more influence on public policy-making than others. The distinction between a democracy and a republic[20] is not an idle “academic” matter—it is a question of practical import over which people are deeply divided.
Conclusion
St. Thomas Aquinas once commented that “a little error in the beginning leads to a great one in the end.” This is a rephrasing of a point made by Aristotle: “The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.”[21] The adage applies not only to our thinking, but also to the things we think about, including history. The effect of flaws in the design of American democracy, or even just assumptions that were reasonable at the founding but are no longer warranted, have magnified to the point where its future is in doubt.
We are living in an era in which the need for clarity, skill, and knowledge in resolving or reducing political conflict is pressing. It is imperative that people be able and willing to take fully into account both the affective (emotional) and cognitive (intellectual) factors that affect their thinking and decision-making. As the examples above from the work of Hochschild, Lasch, Gerzon, and others make plain, people need ready access to discursive methods that help them identify, evaluate, and apply deep contextual knowledge—not just knowledge of the issue at hand, but of the cultural, historical, ideological, and other beliefs that influence their perceptions and interpretations of an issue and different ways of resolving it. People also need help in developing self-knowledge and related skills to help them identify, evaluate, and respond to emotions such as anxiety, insecurity, fear, anger, and alienation. Finally, discursive methods must help people think together productively about the concepts—the abstract ideas—that are indispensable to our efforts to describe, secure support for, construct, and sustain a way of living together with others that will enable each of us to thrive and flourish.
The “contradictions” (as Marxists might say) in “Americanism”—and in the Enlightenment worldview more generally—are inching ever closer to an unambiguous crisis, one more serious than any in living memory. Continued disagreement over different interpretations of the American worldview, each of which supports the vulnerable identities so many of us suffer from today, will continue to threaten our way of life for as long as we lack a shared worldview appealing enough and widely-enough shared to command our collective allegiance.
At what point does democracy cease to exist? Have we reached that point already?[22] If so, what is to be done? Can we live together? On what terms? The answers remain to be worked out. Of one thing we can be sure, however: We need a much better understanding of human psychology and much greater clarity and precision in the terms of our public discourse. The only way the project of shoring up democracy stands a chance of succeeding is through dialogue and deliberation. But that dialogue and deliberation must begin doing a far better job of surfacing and satisfactorily addressing the deep factual, conceptual, ethical, and ideological forces building beneath the surface of our increasingly seismic public landscape.
Notes
[1] Blow, Charles M. “The End of American Idealism.” The New York Times. March 7, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/opinion/the-end-of-american-idealism.html?emc=edit_th_ 20160307&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57317676&_r=0 [2] The conference was organized by BrightLineWatch. http://brightlinewatch.org/ [3] Wright, Robin. “Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?” The New Yorker. August 14, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-america-headed-for-a-new-kind-of-civil-war [4] According to a survey cited at the conference, 18 percent of Americans think a military-led government is a “fairly good” idea. [5] Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press. [6] Cited in Rich, Nathanial. “Inside the Sacrifice Zone.” The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/ articles/2016/11/10/american-right-inside-the-sacrifice-zone/. November 10, 2016 [7] As used here, “authoritarian” does not refer to a personality type. Rather, it is a label attached by political scientists to voters who hold certain beliefs and attitudes. [8] Taub, Amanda. “The Rise of American Authoritarianism.” Vox. March 1, 2016. http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism [9] Lasch, Christopher. 1979. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton. See also the review of Lasch’s body of work by Lee Siegel in The New York Times: Siegel, Lee. “The Book of Self-Love: Narcissism.” Feb. 5, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/books/review/Siegel-t.html?pagewanted=all [10] Siegel, Lee. “The Book of Self-Love: Narcissism.” The New York Times. Feb. 5, 2010. [11] Uncited quotation from Louis Menan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_Narcissism#References [12] Gerzon, Mark. 1996. A House Divided: Six Belief Systems Struggling for America’s Soul. New York: Tarcher/Putnam. xiii – 3. [13] Gerzon, 1996. xii, xxi. [14] Illing, Sean. “Is American Democracy in Decline? Should we be worried?” https://www.vox.com/2017/10/13/ 16431502/america-democracy-decline-liberalism [15] See, for example, https://www.slideshare.net/zubairsorathia/critical-thinking-2341028. [16] http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/our-conception-of-critical-thinking/411 [17] Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC [18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote. The suggestion that only propertied stakeholders should be permitted to vote has a history as old as the country. In the beginning, the Constitution didn’t say who was eligible to vote. It allowed each state to determine who could vote. In the early years, most states extended the franchise only to white male adult property-owners. Even so, by some estimates more than half of white men were disenfranchised. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_ the_United_States#Poor_whites_ and_free_African_Americans) The property requirement wasn’t eliminated by any state until New York dropped it in the 1820s. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Jacksonian_democracy#Election_ by_the_”common_man”) Within roughly five years, all but Rhode Island, Virginia and North Carolina had done so. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonian_ democracy#Election_by_the_”common_man.”) Still, the percentage of the total population who voted didn’t reach even five percent until 1828. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_ United_States) [19] Reuters. February 14th, 2014. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rich-guy-we-should-get- more-votes-poor-n30891 In Federalist No. 10, James Madison argues that the most serious source of political conflict is disagreement over fundamental issues such as whether in a democracy unanimity or something less than that should be required to make decisions. One such issue in particular worried him: whether the unequal distribution of property in society could lead to disagreements having the potential to tear the nation apart. “The most common and durable source of factions,” he wrote, “has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” Because some people owned a lot of property and others owned none, he believed they would align politically to pursue their divergent interests. This would give rise to the sort of permanently stratified society that the founders believed regularly produced political crises in European countries. More troubling, if the country’s unpropertied class were to gain control of the government they might use their political authority to redistribute wealth in a way that benefited the majority of the population at the expense of the country’s wealthy. The wealthy of the late 18th century had less to worry about than their counterparts today. In 1774, the wealthiest one percent of non-slave households accounted for just over 6 percent of total income. The bottom ninety percent took in slightly more than 70 percent. In contrast, in 2017 the figures were almost 39 percent and just under 23 percent, respectively. See https://eml.berkeley. edu/~webfac/ cromer/e211_f12/LindertWilliamson.pdf. See also http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/ news/ economy/ inequality-record-top-1-percent-wealth [20] A republic is a form of popular government in which people do not participate in making decisions themselves, but instead elect representatives who take on that responsibility. [21] http://selfeducatedamerican.com/2012/10/03/mortimer-j-adler-little-errors-in-the-beginning/ [22] More and more observers are concluding that the U.S. is not a democracy. See, for example, Mounk, Yasha. “America is not a Democracy.” The Atlantic Monthly. March 2018.