obstacles to democracy today, includ-
ing the anti-democratic skew of the
Senate and the Electoral College; the
rollback of voting rights by Republi-
can politicians and courts; the pluto-
cratic bent of the Supreme Court,
which enables corporate money to
overwhelm public interests; and Sili-
con Valley’s treatment of political
speech as a commodity. We need a
full-on, democratic with a small “d”
reconstruction.
Todd Gitlin
Professor of Journalism and Sociology
Columbia University
New York CityI was happy that Lepore wrote about
the schoolteachers and other citizens
who took an active role in pro-democ-
racy activities in the nineteen-thirties,
when many people in the U.S. were
turning to authoritarian systems for
comfort and security. It is worth not-
ing that a large percentage of these
teachers were women, who knew first-
hand what it meant to live without
agency in a developing democracy. They
had learned through their struggle for
suffrage how to organize, mobilize, and,
most important, educate. It is no sur-
prise that these teacher-led forums had
a pedagogical function; that is, they
subtly taught a diverse citizenship that
democracies survive only when people
are compelled to listen, learn, challenge,
argue, and find common ground. And,
as Lepore points out, they ultimately
helped move the U.S. against author-
itarianism. It is unclear whether we can
again educate an anxious citizenship
about the benefits of democracy, but
we must try.
Eric J. Weiner
Educational Foundations Department
Montclair State University
Montclair, N.J.DEMOCRACY, THEN AND NOW
Jill Lepore’s report on the grassroots
democracy debates that took place in
the nineteen-thirties is a useful anti-
dote to today’s widespread pessimism
(“In Every Dark Hour,” February 3rd).
But the question we must ask now is
not what people might do to preserve
democracy’s future but what democ-
racy might do to preserve theirs. The
surge of citizen engagement inspired
by the bicentennial of the American
Revolution, in the nineteen-seventies,
offers a model. Communities from
Maine to California gathered to dis-
cuss how they wanted their states or
localities to look in the year 2000. They
considered issues such as environmen-
tal sustainability, land use, race, and
poverty. These conversations could
have been the first steps toward a po-
litical culture of truly democratic ex-
change. But after Ronald Reagan was
elected, in 1980, there seemed little
point to crafting a common future in
a world driven by radical individual-
ism. Nevertheless, any strategy for re-
storing faith in democracy after the
Trump Presidency should involve or-
dinary citizens working together to
envision and create a better tomorrow.
Jeff Faux
Economic Policy Institute
Washington, D.C.
Lepore offers an astute accounting of
the last time the future of American
democracy was in doubt. As always,
she shines light into dark corners of
U.S. history. But the piece disappoints
insofar as Lepore, like many intellec-
tuals, overrates the power of media to
“bring people together.” She is correct,
of course, that grownup discussion has
deteriorated since the time when radio
gave Americans “a sense of their shared
suffering, and shared ideals.” Indeed,
disinformation is now a major imped-
iment to democratic life. But let’s not
kid ourselves that tinkering with the
programming on NPR or PBS is going
to drag us back from the brink. There
are many equally grave institutional
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