Here is an excerpt from my essay this week in NYU’s Democracy Project series of essays on challenges facing democracy today, both here and elsewhere:

Writing from Mussolini’s prison in 1930, the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci observed of democracies in his era: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” In our era, something about the old forms of democracy also seems to be dying.

The last decade and a half have witnessed pervasive dissatisfaction with democratic governments throughout the West. As a result, governments have become more fragile and unstable. In the last two years alone, the governments of Europe’s dominant powers, Germany and France, have c

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