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Respond to the following question in approximately 500-750 words. Be thoughtful and concise in your responses:
1. What are the causes of democratic deterioration in the United States?
2. What do you believe are the most worrying signs of “democratic backsliding”?
3. Do you believe that the biggest threat to the United States is the state of its democracy?
4. What do you think should be done to fix the flaws in American democracy
Bonus: Consider the following quotation from Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1999) (pp. ix-x):
“[A] concern over the massive, stubborn, and exasperating otherness of others… is at the core of the present book. The unsettling experience of being shut off, not just from the opinions, but from the entire life experience of large numbers of one’s contemporaries is actually typical of modern democratic societies. In these days of universal celebration of the democratic model, it may seem churlish to dwell on deficiencies in the functioning of Western democracies. But it is precisely the spectacular and exhilarating crumbling of certain walls that calls attention to those that remain intact or to rifts that deepen. Among them there is one that can frequently be found in the more advanced democracies: the systematic lack of communication between groups of citizens, such as liberals and conservatives, progressives and reactionaries. The resulting separateness of these large groups from one another seems more worrisome to me than the isolation of anomic individuals in “mass society” of which sociologists have made so much. Curiously, the very stability and proper functioning of a well-ordered democratic society depend on its citizens arraying themselves in a few major (ideally two) clearly defined groups holding different opinions on basic policy issues. It can easily happen then that these groups become walled off from each other – in this sense democracy continuously generates its own walls. As the process feeds on itself, each group will at some point ask about the other, in utter puzzlement and often with mutual revulsion, ‘How did they get to be that way?’”
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