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We asked Luke Harris, a Fall Intern with the Fulcrum Fellowship, to share his thoughts on what democracy means to him and his perspective on its current health.
Representative Democracy is a form of self-governing; our Constitution delineates a set of values and principles that evolve and materialize as Americans exercise their rights to challenge societal norms and create legal and social change. The Democratic state produces the circumstances that provide the greatest freedoms, such that they are consistent with equality under the law: the liberties to freely express one’s ideas, vote in open elections to decide the politicians who will represent our diverse interests, and defend against leaders or citizens who endanger these freedoms. The current hyperpolarization, apathy, and extremism are incompatible with the preservation of these freedoms and the protection of our country. This is the deleterious effect of the failure of our educational and scientific institutions.
Liberalism is curring the flamer, sniffy, childhood-enduring preconceptions, and unthoughtful, or unchallenged beliefs—the ideas and attitudes that provide the easiest answers, but often perpetuate in collective thinking, and social pressure; the accountability of schools—in K-12, and higher education—to teach students how to think critically; preparing citizens of a democracy, with any level of education, to synthesize information and form their opinions independent of group identity or ideology. However, my teachers taught critical thinking as an intellectual skill and did not properly acknowledge or instill its value. The consequence of learning to think independently and reexamine yourself, your thoughts, and your beliefs should be uncomfortable; it can be linked to losing your social/self-identity, questioning your faith or secular-moral values, and often facing disapproval from your parents and friends. The issue is exacerbated in higher education, where there is social pressure to think in a certain way, and professors continue to teach students what to think, rather than how to think.
Furthermore, the conversation needs to include everyone. Someone with a thought disorder, people who are prone to emotional outbursts, have social or communication challenges, or have lower intelligence, or learning disabilities, are being excluded from these conversations. If someone does not have the words to express their ideas, whatever they can say could direct the group to new ways of thinking; if someone is mentally disabled, they may change how people talk with each other, and bring a different emotional attitude. However, if the person is not intelligent or they are harder to speak with, we are denying them entry into these types of discussions where they can provide value. Personally, in early elementary school, I had many of these problems. My experience is different; I make connections more fluidly, I have less linear thinking, but I can present as neurotypical and intelligent. People will listen and consider what I have to say, but someone who cannot communicate as clearly or is harder to talk with does not receive the same respect. The consequence is reinforcing the same ideas and providing only one way to think.
The scientific community is responsible for engaging in public discourse, making their discoveries and ideas accessible to the public, and honestly discussing criticisms and challenges to their work, which includes spotlighting different public figures in their field. If topics or theories are backed by strong empirical evidence, then scientists should denounce and criticize the merits, character, and fitness of those people presenting unbacked science or dangerous assertions. However, consistent appeals to authority and consensus are a strong indication that members of the scientific community are succumbing to social pressure or represent a homogenous intellectual class. The contributions of science are essential for the functioning of a healthy democracy. For this reason, classicist-collectivist behavior across various fields of research is concerning and also symptomatic of educational institutions that have failed to effectively instill the values and skills discussed above—those most essential for serious inquiry.
Democracy is unsustainable and short-lasting when there are severe restrictions on freedom of expression. The highest form of expression is holding your representatives accountable to your interests, both by speaking loudly and voting out incumbents when they are dishonest, unresponsive, and unrepresentative of their constituents. In any democracy where the party convention suppresses contest and does not put forth any alternative options, it is necessary to vote against party lines, because elected officials who are assured of their reelection are no longer accountable to represent the interests of their constituents. There is contention in democracies about the extent of acceptable speech. The line for the strongest advocates is often hate speech, and the debate about the function and benefits of hate speech should remain lively. However, there is a strong argument that protecting hate is necessary for remaining vigilant and aware of the dangerous fringes and movements within a democracy.
The excursions into democratic governing have not proven to be sustainable in the long term. This form of government is the freest and rests on the maintenance and continuance of the freedoms it provides—these freedoms and the institutions, such as schools, and the scientific establishment, serve specific purposes that both represent what democracy is, why democracy is the most befitting to the protection of human dignity, and justice, and the factors that determine how well and how long any democracy will function. The first step forward is understanding that polarization is the consequence, not the cause. The extreme polarization tearing our country apart is the consequence of our failing educational and scientific institutions.
Luke Harris is an op-ed author who writes about the US, UK, and international politics, policy, and culture. He has been published in outlets such as The North American Anglican and The Conservative Woman.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.