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Susan Burgess

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    Leveraging big ideas

    Keep the faith: History shows dark night of politics will end

    Susan Burgess
    January 24, 2022
    Sunrise behind the Statue of Liberty
    lucianojoaquim/Getty Images

    Burgess is a distinguished professor of political science at Ohio University, a senior professional lecturer at DePaul University and a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project.

    For the first time, the United States has been added to the list of backsliding democracies. And majority of young people no longer believe that they will do better than their parents, a key indicator of faith in the American dream.

    Few may doubt that the United States is in one of the darkest, most challenging times in its political history, one rife with cynicism and pessimism. Fourteen months after the election, many in the Republican Party still do not accept that Joe Biden won the presidential election of 2020.

    But history shows that politics change, sometimes beyond expectations. Fewer than 10 years ago, few may have thought that American democracy would be as imperiled as it is now. Likewise, positive political shifts that were once hard to imagine have become widely accepted, including the abolition of slavery, universal adult suffrage, minimum wage and maximum hours laws, easy access to birth control, and marriage equality for gays and lesbians.

    Time and again, politics has changed in unlikely directions, sometimes resulting in heartening new political horizons.

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