Sheri Berman is a Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University, the author of Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe, and “Democracy’s Troubles Should Be No Surprise” in the most recent issue of the Journal of Democracy.
The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
If democracy wants to regain the upper hand, it has to not only do a better job than the other guys, but in fact, a good job.
Sheri Berman
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:20
- What We Forgot About Democracy – 3:39
- The Social Foundations of Democracy – 13:55
- Inequality, Insecurity, and Policy – 28:16
- Universities, Cruise Control, and the Purpose of Democracy – 40:55
Introduction
Today’s guest is Sheri Berman. She is a Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University and the author of Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe. Recently, she authored an interesting article in the Journal of Democracy “Democracy’s Troubles Should Be No Surprise.”
Sheri is a legend among scholars of democracy. Even though this is my first time interviewing her, her name has come up multiple times on the podcast over the years. She is one of a growing number of scholars reincorporating historical analysis into the study of democracy. What makes Sheri’s analysis sharp is her wide historical breath. We talk a little about Weimar, some about the third wave of democratization, but we are consistently placing those lessons into a contemporary context and showing the implications for democracy today.
The conversation covers a lot of ground. You’ll notice we spend a lot of time of time talking about scholars from the past with aa particular emphasis on Seymour Martin Lipset. Some of you might find this a little much but the conversation isn’t really about what people said in the past. It’s really about what they knew about democracy back then that helps us understand democracy today. Later in the conversation, I turn the tables on Sheri and ask whether we will one day be looking back and wondering whether we were overreacting about democracy’s challenges. I spend a lot of time talking to scholars about what went wrong and have found myself wondering if we are going to overlook when things start to change.
My challenge to you is to consider whether the challenges democracies face was predictable and whether we should also anticipate a recovery. These are two different questions even though they approach the same question from different angles. The larger question is really this – Based on what we already know about democracy, what can we reasonably predict about its future?
Please share your thoughts. If you listen to Spotify, you can leave your thoughts as a comment on the episode. You can also send me your thoughts as an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. There is also a link to the complete transcript in the show notes.
The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Make sure to mark your calendar for the upcoming Global Democracy Conference on May 19th and 20th. This year’s conference will take place at the University of Notre Dame. Check the link in the show notes to register today. But for now… here is my conversation with Sheri Berman…
Podcast Interview
jmk: Sheri Berman, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Sheri Berman: I’m happy to be here.
jmk: Well, Sheri, it’s an amazing pleasure to have you here today. I’ve read your stuff for so long, so it’s exciting to finally talk to you. The most recent article though that you wrote was very interesting. It was published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Democracy, “Democracy’s Troubles Should Be No Surprise.” I mean, it’s fascinating. It dovetails with some of the work that you’ve done in terms of history, in terms of democracy, like Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe, which at this point is pretty much a landmark work in terms of democracy ideas. I mean, it’s something that everybody has read at this point.
Coming back to this article, it builds on some of that because it’s referring to some of that from a more historiographic type approach in terms of how the literature evolved but also relating it back to actual events. So I guess where I’d like to start here is I feel the way that we think about democracy has changed, not just in terms of the experience that we have, but the way that we think about it over the years, especially as we’ve moved towards more quantitative approaches. So, what I’d like to know is what you think we have forgotten about democracy that past generations like Dewey or even Lipset and some of those others like Dahl actually understood that we have forgotten today.
Sheri Berman: Thanks for that question because it really allows me to go back over what is now a very, very long career and think broadly about what the cumulation of knowledge is. So, we are obviously, as the very existence of your podcast indicates, living in a time when people are once again, really thinking very, very deeply about democracy, about what makes it work, what makes it not work, why it arises in some places and sometimes in not others. Now, obviously this is not the first time the world has lived through such an era. One of the things that we’d like to think is that there is progress, however non-linear, and that people accordingly learn over time.
So, one of the very, very few advantages of being old is that one has by definition lived through more history. I started my career at a time when the scholarship produced by people who were very much grappling with the tragedies of the interwar years. Then the very successful reconstruction of the post-war years really did dominate scholarship. The students that I teach today have really no knowledge of that and in particular in graduate programs, much of that literature is poo-pooed and frankly ignored because it is objectively by today’s standards very methodologically squishy. One of the things that I have grappled with, as I’m sure you have and many of your listeners have, is how do we understand what’s going on today?
In particular, there’s this sense that we’re going through something that is entirely unprecedented and unpredictable. This was prompted more specifically by a piece that I quoted in that article, I could have quoted others, where people say political science is just garbage. All of this methodological sophistication, all of these endless articles, and for the biggest event of the last 20 years, you don’t have any explanations for that. Why have we had this horrific reverse wave? Why has there been such democratic decay in many parts of the globe? This forced me as a political scientist to sit down and think am I useless? Is the scholarship useless? Have we learned nothing over the course of generations? At first I thought, maybe that’s true. I didn’t predict Trump. I didn’t expect to be living in a period in the United States of such incredible turmoil and polarization.
So maybe it was useless and I should retire and just take care of my cats. But then upon some further reflection I realized there is an ideal and then there is what we can expect. I did think that there was, in fact a lot in our scholarship, in our accumulative knowledge, that is very helpful in explaining what was going on. Indeed, the original title for this article was “Predicted, But Unpredictable.” The editors of the Journal of Democracy decided they didn’t like that. But I thought it’s easy in retrospect to do this, but not invalid to do so. The idea was that first of all anybody who is historically minded, who would spend too many years of their life writing a book like Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe knew that any democratic wave was going to be followed by an undertow.
The reason why we use the term wave is because waves have undertows. You could have used a different term. Waves have undertows. So, any student of history, of which very few exist within political science, should have understood that an undertow is going to follow. Now, that is not simply a don’t be squishy, history repeats itself, comment There’s no causal logic in that. So we should suspect indeed predict that many of those countries that made transitions in the late 20th and early 21st century would backslide either into authoritarianism or into very weak and, whatever you want to call them, illiberal kinds of democracy. Totally and utterly predictable. But I would say a combination of a lack of historical knowledge and the optimism of the late 20th century blinded us to that.
jmk: Let me push back a little bit on that. When I look back at the literature in the 1990s, I don’t get quite as triumphalist a view as people describe it when they’re writing about it. Because I think of things like Larry Diamond writing in 1997 “Is the Third Wave Over? and then the book that came out just a few years after that Towards Democratic Consolidation and the idea that we have to consolidate these new regimes, because there was almost a sense that this collapse was coming. I mean, he was writing about it in the late 1990s. We had Fareed Zakaria writing about the rise of illiberal democracy in 1997 as well.
By the time we get to the late nineties, there’s a lot of concern about that and in the early nineties, there was a lot of talk about how do we consolidate these democracies. And almost a sense of accepting that democracy’s going to be imperfect going all the way back. O’Donnell and Schmitter are writing about the way that you’ve got to have pacted democracy and then Linz and Stepan are writing about consolidating as best you can. It feels like there’s a lot less triumphalism. There’s almost two strands. One group is saying democracy is here. Then another group that’s very cautious and skeptical all at the same time within the nineties and going into the two thousands.
Sheri Berman: I think that is totally fair and I didn’t mean to say that there were not a lot of very smart scholars and certainly someone like Larry Diamond who knows more about democracy than probably anybody else on the planet understood that post-transition, that is to say post-third wave. The challenge of consolidation was a great one and in fact, again to sort of rephrase what I said before that consolidation is actually harder than transition. Right. When you’re in the midst of over throwing an authoritarian regime, you are obviously like Jesus, this is the hardest thing ever. I’m not trying to poo-poo that, but we know historically that there have been more overthrows of authoritarian regimes than there have been consolidations of democracy and certainly people like Larry Diamond and many other very, very smart scholars were there.
The vibe at the time though was very much on that optimism side. So point well taken. I’m not suggesting that there weren’t a lot other scholars in the nineties, in the early 21st century saying this is a very critical challenge, the challenge of consolidation, and we need to really focus on it now because it is an extraordinarily difficult and complex process. Absolutely. That was there. This brings me to the second part of the article, which is that on the one hand many of these new democracies would prove weak, illiberal to use that term that was popularized first by Fareed Zakaria and would even backslide that is again, to have been expected. Absolutely there were a lot of people working on the challenges of consolidation within the discipline.
The second aspect of this democratic pessimism that we’re living in today, and perhaps actually the most puzzling or at least unexpected part, is the decay that we have seen in countries, kinds of long established democracies, were in play. That in fact is historically unusual. The very fact that we have the category consolidated means that at least in the middle term they were considered. Safe and secure.
So I think very few people had on their scorecard, and I’m not going to speak for Larry again. Maybe he was even more perspicacious than I was that we would be talking about incredibly rapid decay of norms and institutions in the United States that we have experienced here over the last year. By some measures we’ve seen more democratic decay in the United States over the course of a year – we’re not an authoritarian regime, but decay – than in almost any other case. This really did seem to many to be something we were not intellectually prepared for.
jmk: I wouldn’t go so far to say Larry Diamond thought that the consolidated democracies of the United States, Western Europe, Canada, and Australia were at risk of democratic decay. I think that really caught a lot of people off guard completely. He was very concerned about fragile democracies and I think the key point I’d bring up about that is that while in some ways it was a contrarian view that was expressed about that concern, it was some of the biggest names in the discipline and it did carry a lot of weight. We’re talking about people like Fareed Zakaria, who’s incredibly well known even outside the discipline, Larry Diamond, to a lesser extent Linz, some of the other thinkers who were at the forefront of democratization.
But I think coming back to the idea that the established democracies were starting to decay, why do you think that is happening within this third reverse wave or this third wave of autocratization as some call it? What is it that’s making it different than the second wave? Is it just that we’re more democratic than we were in the past where there’s more room for backsliding or is there something that is actually happened that distinguishes us today from the past?
Sheri Berman: If we are limiting ourselves now to the subset of what you might call established democracies, countries where democracy had been in existence for decades that were considered stable, consolidated, this is where I found myself very informed by this earlier literature that is to say this post-war literature that was fundamentally grappling with the tragedies at the interwar years, the collapse of democracy, and then also trying to figure out what would make democracy work during the post-war period. Now, there’s lots of problems with this literature. I’m not trying to romanticize it. But one thing that it was laser focused on, which I found very helpful, was the social and economic underpinnings of stable democracy.
That is to say that regardless of whatever kind of institutions you slap on a country, no matter how well designed they are, you have a presidential versus a parliamentary system, a majoritarian electoral system versus pr – irrelevant if the social and economic foundations are not correct. And again, we can talk about what that means when those institutions were not likely to thrive. This strikes me as almost a kind of truism. But one that was not forgotten in the sense that the reason why we know so much about degenerative social and economic trends in the United States, for example, is because scholars have been investigating them. But thinking very carefully about the role those have played in democratic decay.
So if we look back, for instance, at that literature, which is broadly termed modernization – and I hesitate to use the term because it just triggers so many people, but whatever. It’s very clear that things like cross-cutting cleavages are extraordinarily important. Low levels of inequality, extraordinarily important. Thriving civil society of a very particular type, extraordinarily important. A profound sense, particularly on the part of the lower and middle classes, that the system offered them both social mobility and an associated sense that the future would be better for them. That without those things you were creating a context within which extremism could thrive. A major obsession of these people having lived through both communist and fascist regimes and with that extremism party systems that would pull apart and democracies that would weaken and perhaps die.
This was absolutely the fundamental insight of these scholars. I think if we want to understand democratic decay in places like the United States and parts of Western Europe has not seen the same level of democratic decay, but some similarly worryingly trends. That it’s not that our primary system promotes extremism. Absolutely it does. Our party system also extremely problematic. Campaign finance, just terrible. Absolutely. All of these things are true and can and should be improved. The fundamental challenges in the US I think are at the societal and economic level. They’re not going to be solved, in other words, simply by fixing our political institutions, which is absolutely necessary, but in no way sufficient for dealing with the problems that our democracy is facing today.
jmk: Yeah, I think that to put a name on it that’s what Seymour Martin Lipsett was saying. People oftentimes reduce it, because he did do that study where he looked at income levels and democracy, to if people make more money, then that means that they’re going to be democratized. But Lipset just didn’t have sophisticated tools. I mean, doing a correlation analysis by hand is a lot more difficult back then than it is today. So, he’s trying to use the tools that he’s got and he’s using that as shorthand for these bigger social and cultural trends that he thinks are at the bottom of it. The book that came out around the same time as this article was Political Man.
It was much more about political culture than it was about raw economics leading to democratization, which is what people think of when they think of modernization theory. Just if people have more money, they’ll become democratic. The one thing that was very similar though – talking about cultural trends and linking it to democracy – during this period that was incredibly optimistic was the work that Inglehart and Welzel were doing at the time. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel. I don’t want to get lost in terms of the names, but the ideas are what’s important. The fact that they thought that the cultures were completely transforming over time and it was moving more or less in a linear direction to encourage democratization.
I mean, Inglehart moved back a little bit in that book, Cultural Backlash, he wrote with Pippa Norris in 2019, but that’s after Trump and after Brexit. Before that they were completely optimistic and just assumed it was almost just a straight line and that as people became in their words, post-materialist, the world would become more democratic. Why is it that that thesis didn’t turn out to be true? Why is it that as people are becoming, and they do seem to be becoming more post-materialist in a lot of ways, it hasn’t always led to people having the values that have encouraged democracy?
Sheri Berman: I think the point about Lipset is crucial, which is the caricatured version of modernization theory that we have today is, I think partially because a lot of students don’t actually read those articles anymore, because they do seem very squishy and as you said the title of the most famous article is “The Social Requisites of Democracy.” It’s the social requisites of democracy. Now, what Lipset had observed, which was indeed largely true for the post-war period, was that economic development growing well was associated with a variety of societal changes that tended to produce the norms and behaviors necessary to make democracy work during the post-war period. That was largely true. It diminished inequality, cross-class, cross-societal, cross-divide cleavages were growing. Civil society was thriving.
Changes that he assumed followed from that economic development which is why the article is called The Social Requisites of Democracy. I should say that the sort of extensions to that rule – growing wealth, higher propensity, higher likelihood of democracy – the countries that did not fit that correlation, the oil rich countries – the understanding of why they were the exception was precisely that. Because that type of economic wealth did not generate the social and thereby cultural changes necessary to make a transition. So, for someone working within that paradigm, those exceptions illuminated the causal logic, not obviate it.
I should say that the other example Weimar, which of course was so central to these people, also was explained in precisely that way, which is that you had economic development. Imperial Germany by the First World War was as rich, as developed, as economically advanced as Britain, but the argument was that it had not had the requisite societal changes to produce the norms and behaviors necessary to make democracy work. So, I want to stress that this is part of the problem with not reading old stuff. Yes, it’s squishy. There’s no statistics. There’s no experiments. There’s no large language models to churn tons of data. But there is an insight there that remains important that we could now use and improve upon with the fancy tools that we have. I think that for me what drew me back there is that emphasis on cultural effects downstream.
jmk: Let me push back a little bit on that though, because one of the assumptions that Lipset had is he’s thinking that if you build up a very strong civil society, have lots of engagement within citizens, produce cross-cutting cleavages, that you’re going to have the social basis necessary for democracy. What’s interesting about some of your writing is that you pointed out that in Weimar Germany, they actually had a very vibrant civil society. Rather than bringing people together, it’s actually what contributed to bringing it apart.
That’s a very different approach to it and it kind of turns upside down some of the earlier approaches that we thought about democracy. The idea that if we just get people more engaged, that’s really the key. We should encourage these clubs, these organizations. But Weimar Germany had all of that. Not only did that not prevent democratic decay, but it actually contributed to it. How do we explain that?
Sheri Berman: Absolutely. I mean, if you wanted to stretch it too far as anybody who studies history does, you want to make sure that your cases seem pertinent. It’s a version of the pathologies of bubbling that we talk about today. Which is what you had in Weimar was a very active civil society, but it tended to engage people within their own, what we would call today, partisan bubbles rather than create the kind of cross cutting cleavages that folks like Lipset recognized were necessary to create healthy societies. You know, the people who participate most, in whatever it is, political discussions, political organizing, protests, are people who are not – I don’t like the terms again, everybody does their own favorite term – moderate, centrist.
Those are all squishy terms, but they do tend to be the people who are most committed and therefore the most radical. I don’t mean anti-democratic, but I do mean radical in the sense of being at the tail end of the distribution. So to get back to the case, what happened was you got people mobilized. You got them involved in a whole variety of political and civil society organizations, but they tended to do that within their own, again, what we would call today partisan bubbles. That was unhelpful. These deeply grassroots organizations, incredibly mobilized and organized, but around a very particular cause, bringing together people with similar kinds of views, that may be useful in getting politics done, but it is not the kind of cross-cut cleavages that are necessary to make democracy work.
jmk: So, the difference in Weimar then you’re saying is the fact that it’s the type of civil society, the type of society that we have. Rather than just saying we need a more vibrant society, we need more economic development, it’s the type of society that we have, the type of social connections as well as the type of economic system, like the way that the economy works. Are people all at the top, all at the bottom? Are people, in terms of society, all in one group and then all in another?
Sheri Berman: That’s exactly right. It’s the qualitative, not just the quantitative. So again, if we just go back to Lipset, I’m not saying he got everything right, but still is considered a classic, even if often now, not read, he had this great, and I always use this for my students because it’s an easy visual, idea that poor societies had this pyramid shape. You had a small elite at the top and then a large mass of people at the bottom. But he said economic development and again, at his time, this was largely true, created societies that were diamond shaped, where the largest class was the group in the middle. Also, he said in addition to that diamond shape, there was a lot of mobility between these different parts of the diamond. This is what he said was healthy for democracy.
So, if you live in a country that’s rich but has moved from that diamond shape towards something closer to a pyramid shape, for him it was equally causally significant when mobility goes down. That is to say hope for the future diminishes. This is not healthy for democracy. One where people felt that they were not stuck in a caste, where even if they were lower middle class, that their kids would very well not be in that creates fear. That creates hope, future, and it creates faith in the quote unquote establishment creating a system in which again, it’s possible to move around. Once that disappears and Lipset would absolutely have predicted that you are going to have fertile ground for extremism and serious problems for democratic stability.
jmk: So, one of the problems I have with the idea that if we resolve economic inequality, that’s really the key to being able to make democracy healthy again, is when I look at the countries that have actually attempted that, countries like Venezuela, we look at Bolivia, a lot of the countries in Latin America, with the left turn that happened, it didn’t necessarily strengthen democracy when they put in policies that were designed to reduce economic inequality. Venezuela has experienced a complete democratic collapse and some of the other countries experienced real problems with democracy. I’m not saying that those aren’t the right policy decisions, but what does that mean in terms of how we think about democratic breakdown and democratic backsliding, if putting policies in place designed to reduce economic inequality aren’t going to reverse the trend, like they don’t make things automatically more democratic?
Sheri Berman: Well, certainly reducing inequality at the price of crashing your economy, I don’t think there’s very many people who think that’s a good idea. I go so far, although I don’t want to speak for Seymour Martin Lipset, since he’s not here to defend himself, but I’m fairly confident that’s not what he meant. I mean, I think there are lots of ways to address skyrocketing inequality, while at the same time recognizing that it’s equally important to have a pie that’s expanding because you can have increasing profits and better provision of welfare state resources. He understood that’s not rocket science. I would also say that inequality is simply one albeit important economic pathology characterizing our economy today, but surely dealing with inequality at the price of crashing your economy is no one’s idea of a formula for either democratic stability or a healthy economy, for sure.
What we’re dealing with today, and I think most people recognize this, is we really have a kind of concatenation of very serious problems that for whatever reasons, we could or could not talk about forever, the establishment mainstream parties have not been very successful in dealing with. So, people’s grievances are myriad and real. Again, ones that I think traditional democratic theorists would’ve recognized as very problematic for democratic stability.
jmk: The years though that we saw the democratic decline under Chavez, the economy wasn’t crashing yet. That didn’t happen until the commodity prices changed dramatically. We can look at Bolivia. I mean, they didn’t really experience an economic crash. Morales just decided to stay in power forever until people rose up and protested. I guess the thought in the back of my head is I haven’t seen a situation, yet where a country has introduced policies, particularly ones designed to reduce economic inequality that have necessarily produced a healthier democracy all at the same time. I don’t think that it hurts democracy. Those can be great policies.
My point is that I haven’t seen the causal relationship where that fixes democratic backsliding. It might prevent it, but I haven’t seen it reverse the trend. I guess I’m wondering if you think that is the path to reversing the trend or if it has to be a completely different path.
Sheri Berman: So let me say two things to that. One is obviously we did have during a post-war period in the West, dramatic declines in inequality at the same time as we’ve also had very successful economies, significant economic growth, yada, yada. Now, that was obviously associated with a period of democratic consolidation in Western Europe also, with recovery, FDR, the New Deal, all that kind of thing. I would say at the very least, there’s that correlation. The most successful period of democracy in the West was also the period when we managed to find that combination of economic growth and declining inequality. I mean, insofar as we’re taking some correlation there I think that if we want to strengthen democracy today in the United States, the west, wherever we have to deal with a variety of problems, as I’ve already said.
I do think these economic problems are obviously crucial. We do need to find ways to diminish inequality. I would point out that this is not only inequality of income, wealth inequality, but we also have today in the United States as in Western Europe, unprecedentedly high levels of inequality between different regions of the country. New York has always been wealthier than Iowa. But what we have today in the US and in many countries in Western Europe are differences between regions of unprecedentedly large proportions. That is not a recipe for political stability. You cannot have a country divided in that way. That is just simply unhealthy. So that needs to be dealt with. By the way, inequality and social mobility are not exactly the same thing. Many folks actually believe that it’s the social mobility that is even more politically consequential than inequality.
There is the related, but not same measure that is often referred to sometimes as insecurity or precarity. This is also something that has grown dramatically over the past years in Western societies and I would say grown dramatically. So much so that it is now infecting much of the middle class. This is not the same thing as saying people are poor or they lack a job. It is saying that they are now worried about keeping their jobs. They are worried about whether the career that they have chosen will be there in ten years. They are worried about whether or not if they get hit in the United States, for example, with a major health expense, if they will be able to afford it. This level of constant anxiety.
This is also politically very consequential and we can see it manifest itself in a whole variety of ways. Recent college graduates in New York upset that they can’t afford $5,000 rents in Williamsburg. These are now people who are left populist. There are a lot of economic trends that we understand do need to be addressed. They are admittedly very difficult challenges, but it is very hard to see how if people do not believe that the system is performing for them, working for them, that they are going to have much faith in it. They’re going to care when politicians start attacking it, undermining it.
jmk: So, it sounds like you’re saying that the solution to make democracies healthier is going to come down to different policies. You emphasized before that it’s not so much about changing the institutions, but you see it as if we adopt different policies, and I don’t need to press you on what those specific policies would be, but it sounds like you’re arguing that we need to adopt the right policies to secure democracy.
Sheri Berman: I am arguing something that I think is almost trivial, which is that we face in the United States and elsewhere a series of very, very real economic challenges, social challenges, technological challenges, and that if our politicians and priorities do not find policies to address those challenges dissatisfaction with democracy will increase, the willingness to vote for extremist parties will rise. I think that is a fairly straightforward and uncontroversial argument. Controversial, of course, is how to deal with these things, but I would say that all of these things must be recognized in addition to the economic problems that we’ve already discussed. I think equally important, and this has also been well documented, the decline of cross-cutting cleavages strikes me as just incredibly important.
You simply cannot have people living in bubbles where they do not interact with others, where they do not learn how to have conversations with others, where they do not understand what diversity really means. You must have the kinds of quotidian everyday interactions that enable you to understand, not agree with, understand your fellow citizens and not be prone therefore, to view them as some kind of dangerous other. There is simply no way for democracy to work in context where we are so divided and so polarized. It’s just not possible. We need to figure out ways to deal with that.
Again, the technological issue is on the side of that, whether we’re talking about social media and how it accelerates our ability not only to stay within our own bubble, but also encourages a discourse that is absolutely antithetical to the compromise bargaining sense of fellow feeling without which democracy simply cannot function.
jmk: Now, you talked about the lack of crosscutting cleavages. I think that one is incredibly difficult to deal with because when we talk about economic inequality, we can imagine policies that would be put in place to tax people who are wealthy to redistribute that money to people who have less. You can imagine policies that can address inequality of wealth and inequality of income. It might be hard to put them in place. It might be hard to find the right balance between that and a dynamic and growing economy. Those are always debates, but finding a way to get people to interact with each other differently that feels a lot more complicated and I’m not sure what the policies or what government can actually do about it.
Is it just that people need to step outside their comfort zone or their actual policies or institutions that we can create through politics to actually make that happen?
Sheri Berman: I think you’re right, which is to say that we could imagine a world where diminishing inequality, diminishing insecurity, creating more growth were put in place. That our politicians and parties are ding-dongs is one thing. But we could probably sit in a room with a bunch of economists, political scientists, informed citizens, and come up with those policies. I agree with you that these societal challenges are, in some sense, more complicated precisely because they are not usually considered to be the purview of governments. So let me say two things about that. One is there are a lot of people who are now cognizant of how American and other societies develop who are very much working to do that at the grassroots level. I think that those people are growing and they should be encouraged.
So there’s all sorts of initiatives about bringing people together, creating more constructive dialogue, that kind of thing. Here is a place where since I’m guessing as to the people who are listening to a podcast like this where actually universities and academics make a difference. I would say universities, particularly elite universities have been a significant part of this problem. They are just incredibly intellectually and politically homogenous. They have done very little to encourage their students, or for that matter, their faculty to engage with viewpoints and opinions that they are not comfortable with. They have therefore indirectly encouraged a kind of intolerance that is born from the idea that everybody think like I do. That is incredibly dangerous. And so there is a lot that can be done at universities to break this kind of bubbling without the sense that you’re just giving in preemptively to Trump.
I think Trump has been a disaster for actual reform in this regard, just because anything that changes now is easily viewed as some kind of concession to the authoritarian illiberal dictates that are coming from the government. That is very sad because universities are on the cutting edge of cultural and intellectual production and while they certainly cannot solve these problems just like they are not the cause of them, they are a major contributor to them. And in so far as we can increase real plurality, real plurality at our universities, they can contribute to responding to this challenge moving forward in real ways.
jmk: I’ve begun to think about the university as almost a modern version of a monastery. If you read history and you read about like the German Peasants Rebellion that came about during the reformation, the first thing that they did was they were targeting the monasteries. And so, I don’t think it’s surprising that people are frustrated and targeting universities because it seems like it’s a world apart from where ordinary, average citizens actually live, particularly in the United States where universities are tied to a global construct as opposed to a local one.
It’s something that is completely detached from their community and it’s very different than the way we used to think about universities back around the turn of the century where we had things like the Wisconsin idea that tried to incorporate the university back into the community itself. I think we moved away from that a very long time ago.
Sheri Berman: I agree. I think universities are in need of reform financially, intellectually, culturally. I think it’s very hard to get that kind of reform in this context just because everything looks like a concession to this administration and therefore likely to face blowback. But to get back to those social challenges that you mentioned before, this is not a place where government alone is going to make the difference. In fact, government is not going to be the major actor. This needs to come from citizens and civil society organizations themselves recognizing the urgency of the challenge, the need to create more cross-cutting cleavages, to create a sense of fellow feeling among Americans, not homogeneity opinion.
Nobody thinks that’s either desirable or necessary. But to create a sense of fellow feeling that without which we are going to be constantly prone to polarization, constantly prone to othering and therefore unable to keep our society, our democracy healthy.
jmk: Now the theme of the essay though is that we should have been able to identify trends or even just understood history better to know that democracy was going to have setbacks in the future. I feel to some degree that the vibes right now are that democracy is in decline. It’s going to always be in decline. There’s nothing that’s going to get better. Do you think that scholars today are overstating it and not understanding when democracy is going to see its next democratic wave. That in 20 years from now somebody’s going to be writing the essay that says democracy’s fourth wave should have been no surprise to anybody. I mean, is that possible?
Sheri Berman: I hope I’m writing that article if only because I hope I’m still around in 20 years, but I do think it’s possible because I think that the alternatives are all worse. Here’s the thing, I would say that the vibes now, as you say, are really bad and I would say that they’re bad for a good reason. I would not say democracy has really shown itself extraordinarily capable of dealing with these myriad challenges that we face. Let’s be honest, it’s not our proudest moment and I consider myself a strong ‘small d’ democrat. That said, one of the big advantages democracy has always had is that it is better than its alternative.
There’s really no evidence that authoritarian or populist regimes, particularly in countries that are already developed, is an attract alternative either ideologically, that was Frank Fukuyama’s point, which I still think remains, or performance based. Yes, China has done fabulously. There’s simply no doubt about that. But you’re running up now against what you know has always been called the middle income trap. I hope they do well because I don’t want Chinese people to be poor. But let’s be honest, there’s just not a lot of evidence that populists do a better job. Donald Trump, whatever you think about his policies, has not been a stellar steward of the American economy. Look as bad as democracy has been, the alternative is not better from a performance based perspective, nor does it have an attractive ideological program.
Most things being equal, people like the ability to vote. They like the ability to choose their own leader. They like freedom of speech. So, to tell people to give those things up, you have to offer them something pretty damn good in return – dramatic economic growth, let’s say. There’s no evidence that you’re going to get that from an authoritarian. So, do I think it’s possible that we’re going to be writing something different in 20 years? I’m sure it is and I think it may be a strengthening of democracy if only because the more time we have to see what the alternative is, the more we’re going to think maybe democracy has not been so great, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
jmk: Do you think that’s inevitable then or do you think that we have to make a dramatic conscious shift, because if we run on cruise control that it’s going to get worse?
Sheri Berman: I think running on cruise control is never a good idea. This is a debate that’s playing out now in the United States. The party that’s out of power almost always wins the midterms and the Democrats will surely do very well, not only because they are the party out of power, but because the party in power has really screwed up dramatically. You can win elections by playing off the obvious flaws of your opponent. Winning elections is better than losing them. Democracy can revive itself because people have gotten fed up with authoritarians or populists. Is that healthy? I would say no. I would say if we really want a revival of democracy, then we need to deal with all the things we’ve been talking about in this conversation.
We need to find ways to address economic grievances. We need to find ways to create healthier societies. We need to find ways to address the technological challenges that are creating unbelievable dislocation and anxiety among everyone. But these are real challenges and this is what governments and leaders are supposed to do. If democracy wants to regain the upper hand, it has to show they can not only do a better job than the other guys, but in fact, a good job.
jmk: So the study of democracy throughout history and going through that and I really see you as one of the people that’s tried to produce a shift back to actually understanding the way that history has happened and bring that back into democracy because so often I talk to scholars and they don’t have a historical perspective beyond the 1990s. It’s almost like nothing happened before 1991 or maybe 1989. So, what has that perspective really taught you not just about democracy, but the meaning and purpose of democracy – not its definition, but what it actually means and the purpose for it?
Sheri Berman: On some level, the purpose of democracy is to reflect the value of every individual. It is the political system within which people get to choose their own leaders in governments. That is the basic definition of democracy. But it captures something that’s simple but yet profound, which is if you look at history, the broad sweep of history and even much of the globe today, people do not have that right to choose, not own their own paths, their own version of the good life, but to want to stay in the running of the societies of which they are a member. There’s a belief in the value and importance of every individual.
I think that sometimes that gets swamped by the fact that as we’ve been talking about sometimes democracy just doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t respond to challenges. It doesn’t give people what they need, but it is the only system that reflects that value of every individual human being and that is something worth fighting for. With that performance falters because it enables every individual to have a say and it enables diverse groups of individuals to get together to solve their problems in a peaceful and iterated fashion. The more diverse your society is the more necessary democracy becomes. If we were all the same, if we all thought the same, if we all had the same preferences and priorities, democracy frankly would be superfluous. We could just have politicians go ahead, take public opinion polls and just do what they wanted without any input from us on our own.
But we don’t live in that world, thankfully, so democracy is just a particular view of the value of individual human beings. We should treasure it for precisely that reason, even when it seems like it’s not doing a very good job as frankly, it is today.
jmk: Sheri, thank you so much for joining me today. I’ve really appreciated all of the writing that you’ve done throughout your career. So, to mention the article one more time, it’s “Democracy’s Troubles Should Be No Surprise.” Thank you so much for talking to us today. Thank you so much for writing the article.
Sheri Berman: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.
Links
Learn more about Sheri Berman.
Read her article “Democracy’s Troubles Should Be No Surprise” in the Journal of Democracy.
Learn more about the Kellogg Institute.
Register for the 2026 Global Democracy Conference at the University of Notre Dame.
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