When I lived in China, a decade ago, I often saw propaganda billboards covered in words that supposedly expressed the country’s values: Patriotism. Harmony. Equality. And … Democracy. Indeed, China claims to consider itself a democratic country. So do Russia, Cuba, Iran, and so on down the list of nations ranked by their level of commitment to rights and liberties. Even North Korea fancies itself part of the club. It’s right there in the official name: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

I thought of those Chinese billboards recently, when a postelection poll showed that many American voters touted the importance of democracy while supporting a candidate who had tried to overturn the results of the previous presidential election. According to a survey by the Associated Press, a full one-third of Trump voters said that democracy was their top issue. (Two-thirds of Harris voters said the same thing.) In a poll conducted before Joe Biden dropped out of the race, seven out of 10 uncommitted swing-state voters said they doubted that Donald Trump would accept the election results if he lost—but more people said they’d trust Trump to handle threats to democracy than said they’d trust Biden.

Almost all Americans say they support democracy. They even agree that it’s in trouble. But when researchers drill down, they find that different people have very different ideas about what democracy means and what threatens its survival, and that democracy is just one competing value among many. In the collective mind of U.S. voters, the concept of democracy appears to be so muddled, and their commitment to it so conditional, that it makes you wonder what, if anything, they’d do anything to stop its erosion—or whether they’d even notice that happening.

[Yoni Appelbaum: Americans aren’t practicing democracy anymore]

Americans perceive democracy through an almost completely partisan lens. In recent polls, Democrats tend to cite Trump—in particular, the likelihood of him seeking to subvert elections—as the biggest threat to democracy. They also point to gerrymandering, voter suppression, and Trump’s rhetoric about using the government to exact retribution as causes for concern. For Republicans, by contrast, threats to democracy take the form of mainstream media, voting by mail, immigration, and what they see as politically motivated prosecutions of Trump. Perhaps the best Rorschach test is voter-ID laws, which get characterized as “election integrity” or “voter suppression” depending on the perspective: Republicans see them as a commonsense way to make elections more accurate and accountable, while Democrats see them as a ploy to disenfranchise voters who don’t have state-issued identification. No surprise, then, that campaigning on a platform of preserving democracy didn’t work for Kamala Harris. Invoking the term to rally support assumes a shared understanding of what it means.

Even more troubling, American voters rarely prioritize democracy over other considerations. For the most part, we’re willing to overlook mischief that undermines democracy as long as our own team is the one doing it. A 2020 study in the American Political Science Review by Matthew H. Graham and Milan W. Svolik of Yale University found that only 3.5 percent of Americans would vote against a candidate whose policies they otherwise support if that candidate took antidemocratic actions, like gerrymandering or reducing the number of polling stations in an unfriendly district. Another survey found that when left-wing voters were presented with hypothetical undemocratic behavior by right-wing politicians—prohibiting protests, say, or giving private groups the ability to veto legislation—62 percent of them considered it undemocratic. But when the same behavior was attributed to left-wing politicians, only 36 percent saw it as undemocratic.

[Graeme Wood: Only about 3.5 percent of Americans care about democracy]

Some scholars have dubbed the phenomenon “democratic hypocrisy.” Others, however, argue that voters aren’t pretending that the antidemocratic behavior they’re supporting is democratic; they really feel that way. “People are pretty good at reasoning their way to believing that whatever they want to happen is the democratic outcome,” Brendan Nyhan, a political-science professor at Dartmouth, told me. That’s especially true if you can tell yourself that this could be your last chance before the other guy abolishes elections altogether. We just have to sacrifice a little democracy for the sake of democracy, the thinking goes. Graham, who is now an assistant professor of political science at Temple University, has studied the reaction to the 2020 presidential election and the “Stop the Steal” movement. “Our conclusion was that pretty much everyone who says in polls that the election was stolen actually believes it,” he told me.

The disturbing implication of the political-science research is that if the typical forms of incipient democratic backsliding did occur, at least half the country likely wouldn’t notice or care. Stacking the bureaucracy with loyalists, wielding law enforcement against political enemies, bullying critics into silence—these measures, all credibly threatened by President-Elect Trump, might not cut through the fog of partisan polarization. Short of tanks in the streets, most people might not perceive the destruction of democratic norms in their day-to-day life. And if Trump and his allies lose elections or fail to enact the most extreme pieces of their agenda, those data points will be held up as proof that anyone crying democratic erosion is a Chicken Little. “This is a debate that’s going to be very dumb,” Nyhan said.

You might think that, in a democracy, support for democracy itself would be nonnegotiable—that voters would reject any candidate or leader who didn’t clear that bar, because they would recognize that weakening democracy threatens their way of life. But that simple story isn’t always true. The job of genuinely pro-democracy politicians is to convince voters that democratic norms and institutions really are connected to more tangible issues that they care about—that an America with less democracy would most likely also be one with more economic inequality, for example, and fewer individual liberties.

The alternative to making and remaking the case for democracy is a descent into apathetic nihilism. Just look at the Chinese media’s coverage of the U.S. election. A video shared by China News Service said that whoever won would merely be “the face of the ruling elite, leaving ordinary people as mere spectators.” The state broadcaster China Central Television claimed that the election was plagued by “unprecedented chaos.” That kind of talk makes sense coming from democracy’s enemies. The danger is when democracies themselves start to believe it.

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An aspiring fascist is the president-elect, again, of the United States. This is our political reality: Donald Trump is going to bring a claque of opportunists and kooks (led by the vice president–elect, a person who once compared Trump to Hitler) into government this winter, and even if senescence overtakes the president-elect, Trump’s minions will continue his assault on democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.

The urge to cast blame will be overwhelming, because there is so much of it to go around. When the history of this dark moment is written, those responsible will include not only Trump voters but also easily gulled Americans who didn’t vote or who voted for independent or third-party candidates because of their own selfish peeves.

Trump’s opponents will also blame Russia and other malign powers. Without a doubt, America’s enemies—some of whom dearly hoped for a Trump win—made efforts to flood the public square with propaganda. According to federal and state government reports, several bomb threats that appeared to originate from Russian email domains were aimed at areas with minority voters. But as always, the power to stop Trump rested with American voters at the ballot box, and blaming others is a pointless exercise.

So now what?

The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy. If I may invoke Winston Churchill, this is not the end or the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.

For a decade, Trump has been trying to destroy America’s constitutional order. His election in 2016 was something like a prank gone very wrong, and he likely never expected to win. But once in office, he and his administration became a rocket sled of corruption, chaos, and sedition. Trump’s lawlessness finally caught up with him after he was forced from office by the electorate. He knew that his only hope was to return to the presidency and destroy the last instruments of accountability.

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers.

After Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to make Obama a one-term president, and obstructed him at every turn. McConnell, of course, cared only about seizing power for his party, and later, he could not muster that same bravado when faced with Trump’s assaults on the government. Patriotic Americans and their representatives might now make a similar commitment, but for better aims: Although they cannot remove Trump from office, they can declare their determination to prevent Trump from implementing the ghastly policies he committed himself to while campaigning.

The kinds of actions that will stop Trump from destroying America in 2025 are the same ones that stopped many of his plans the first time around. They are not flashy, and they will require sustained attention, because the next battles for democracy will be fought by lawyers and legislators, in Washington and in every state capitol. They will be fought by citizens banding together in associations and movements to rouse others from the sleepwalk that has led America into this moment.

Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.

Related:

David Frum: Trump won. Now what?

Democracy tops list of issues for US voters, followed by economy — exit poll

Last month, the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to three scholars, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, for “studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” Don’t let the dry language fool you: The award generated more controversy than any other in recent memory. One critic wrote that “it exposes how the economics discipline fails to ask critical questions.” Another called the trio’s work “historically inaccurate, if not ideologized.” I confess to emailing a long rant to colleagues in my department.

Why so much drama? In the work that won the Nobel, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson—three highly respected economists almost universally referred to as “AJR” by their peers—argue that nations with democratic institutions have the most economic growth. It’s an appealing thesis that reaffirms the political systems of Western democracies. The problem—not just for the theory, but for the resilience of those political systems—is that it simply isn’t true.

According to AJR, certain kinds of economic institutions—private property, freedom of contract, a strong and impartial legal system, the freedom to form new businesses—are “inclusive,” meaning they allow most people to freely participate in the economy in a way that makes the best use of their skills. These institutions create modern, wealthy economies that are driven forward by technological innovation, not merely propped up by having won the natural-resources lottery.

Economic institutions do not just drop out of the sky. The laws and systems that make an economy run, such as market regulations, must be created and maintained by governments. AJR therefore argue that political institutions dictate economic outcomes. A nation’s political institutions are what determine who can rule, how these rulers are chosen, and how power is distributed across government. The institutions are enshrined in constitutions, electoral rules, and even traditions. In a dictatorship or monarchy, political power is narrowly distributed and relatively unconstrained. In such cases, AJR argue, a small ruling class will tend to use its power to restrict competition and extract wealth for itself. By contrast, if political power is widely distributed across diverse groups in a society, then their common interest in doing business, and competition among them, will result in prosperity-generating economic institutions.

In the United States, for instance, the oil industry would prefer not to have to compete with alternative energy. Old-stock citizens don’t want to compete with recent immigrants. But if the government is given the power to exclude my rivals, that same power could potentially be used against me. So, according to AJR’s thesis, our common desire to maximize our individual liberties and protect our property prevents us from ceding such power to the government. We’d rather keep the competition than risk getting shut out of the game. And that competition forces us to be ever more efficient.

In the end, AJR claim, decentralized democratic systems such as those found in the U.S., Germany, and Switzerland foster economic prosperity by improving a nation’s ability to innovate. Democracies with more centralized power are less productive. (Think of countries such as France, Portugal, and Greece, which have less separation of powers, fewer checks and balances, and relatively weak state and local governments.) Finally, one-party states and authoritarian regimes—those with even more centralized and less competitive political systems—breed stagnation.

[Gisela Salim-Peyer: Why does anyone care about the Nobel Prize?]

The most common critique of the AJR thesis hinges on methodological objections to the way in which they collected and analyzed the data. But you do not need a degree in economics or statistics to be skeptical of their argument. The real world simply provides too many counterexamples.

On the one hand, there are the nondemocratic systems whose economies have done quite well. To take the most obvious, China’s economy has grown fantastically since the late 1970s even as its political system has remained autocratic and repressive. It is now a global competitor or leader in electric vehicles, solar panels, quantum computing, biotechnology, mobile payment systems, artificial intelligence, 5G cellular, and nuclear-fusion research. South Korea and Taiwan are democracies now, but each grew from an agricultural backwater into a technological powerhouse from the ’60s to the ’90s, while they were relatively authoritarian states. The same goes for Japan. After World War II, Japan’s wealth grew dramatically as the country became a world leader in technology and manufacturing. At the time, it was a one-party state, with heavy government intervention in the economy. Elections were held regularly, but only the Liberal Democratic Party won. The party therefore controlled almost every major political institution throughout the country for nearly four decades, resulting in infamous, widespread corruption. Still, the economy flourished.

On the other hand, examples abound of decentralized democracies that don’t experience the kind of knowledge- and technology-driven growth that AJR celebrate. Canada is a relatively wealthy nation, but over the past several decades, without any change to its institutions, it has fallen into a prolonged productivity slump. AJR consider Australia, another decentralized democracy, to be an example of their theory in action, but its wealth comes overwhelmingly from natural resources; it is not particularly good at cutting-edge science and technology. Nor has decentralized democracy propelled Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and India into the economic stratosphere. Great Britain was the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced high-tech superpower during the 18th and 19th centuries, but it lost that position even as its political institutions became more democratic and distributed.

A particularly revealing example is Spain. Spain has been institutionally transformed since 1975. It went from 40 years of military dictatorship to a market-oriented, decentralized democracy. Despite this revolution, there has been little relative change in Spain’s national innovation rate. Its economic growth per capita has averaged less than 1.5 percent per year since the dictatorship ended. That’s far worse than Ireland (a unitary democracy), Singapore (a “partly free” one-party democracy, according to Freedom House), and Vietnam (a communist dictatorship), each of which leveled up its economic competitiveness during the same time period.

AJR have responded to these critiques, often in point-by-point fashion. They have argued, for example, that China’s growth will be unsustainable in the long term if its political institutions don’t change. India, meanwhile, might be a decentralized democracy, but it is “highly patrimonial,” which “militates against the provision of public goods.” Arguments such as these are unfalsifiable: One can always explain away seemingly inconsistent results by pointing to some overlooked characteristic of a given country. And if a culture of patrimony has defeated otherwise-healthy institutions in India, then maybe institutions aren’t so fundamental after all.

If political institutions don’t explain economic outcomes, what does? My colleagues who study innovation and economic growth point to many possible answers, including culture, ideology, individual leadership, and geography. In my own research, I have found that countries with technology-driven, high-growth economies share one thing in common: a powerful sense of external threat. Some fear invasion; others worry about being cut off from a vital economic input, such as energy, food, and investment capital. Taiwan’s very existence is threatened by China, as was Israel’s after the Arab states began to unite around it. These two countries needed to build high-tech defense industries at home and earn money to purchase advanced weapons systems produced abroad.

Stagnant economies, by contrast, tend to be more focused on internal divisions. They are less concerned about military attacks or imports of essential goods and suffer more from deep conflicts over class, race, geography, or religion. If a nation’s internal threats are perceived to outweigh its external threats, then its people will fear the costs, risks, and redistribution of building a competitive economy. The pie is safe, so they fight over the relative size of their slice. (If I’m right, then Donald Trump’s focus on persecuting “the enemy from within” bodes ill for America’s economic prospects should he be reelected this week.) But if a nation’s sense of external threat is greater than its sense of internal threat, then it tends to invest in innovation. The costs and risks are worth it. The pie is in danger, so people cooperate to defend it.The question of why some countries thrive and others stagnate isn’t just an academic one. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, under pressure from the West, Russia created a parliament and privatized state assets; the West declared victory. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, set up a parliament and a stock market, and then announced “Mission accomplished.” The promised economic miracles never materialized.

[Brian Klaas: The dictator myth that refuses to die]

Western democracies too often assume that setting up the right institutions will bring about the desired outcomes. It doesn’t. A society uses institutions to accomplish its goals. But the goals come first, and they are determined by fights over wealth, power, resources, ideas, identities, culture, history, race, religion, and status.

How did such a demonstrably incorrect thesis win the Nobel Prize? In part, I suspect, because it tells the story that many educated Westerners want to hear about democracy. We want to live in a world where democracy cures all. But if democratic nations overpromise what democracy can achieve, they risk delegitimizing it. In Russia, China, and much of the Middle East, democracy is widely seen as dysfunctional, partly because it has not delivered the promised economic prosperity.

Ambitious politicians recognize that institutions are tools, not causal forces. In different hands, the same tools will achieve different ends. Men such as Hitler and Mussolini understood this. They exploited fundamental political divides to undermine both democracy and markets. These lessons are not lost on modern leaders such as Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and even some here in the United States. We therefore ignore the more fundamental political forces at our peril. So do Nobel Prize winners.

Everything about the staging of Kamala Harris’s “closing argument” rally Wednesday night on the White House Ellipse seemed designed to frame the upcoming election as a referendum on democracy. Flanked by American flags and surrounded by banners that screamed FREEDOM, the Democratic nominee delivered her speech against the same backdrop that Donald Trump used on January 6 when he addressed the crowd that went on to storm the Capitol.

“So look,” Harris said about halfway through her speech. “In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office …”

Scattered shouts of You will! You will! echoed from the audience near the stage. In my conversations with Harris supporters afterward, their confidence seemed authentic. To a person, everyone I talked with believed they were on the verge of victory—that Harris would defeat the “wannabe dictator” once and for all, pull America back from the brink, and save the world’s oldest democracy from descending into facism.

Then I would ask a question they found dispiriting: What if she doesn’t?

It’s a question that’s been on my mind for months. We are in a strange and precarious political moment as a country: With four days left in one of the closest presidential races in history, supporters of both campaigns seem convinced that they are going to win—and that if they don’t, the consequences for America will be existential.

Trump and his allies have already clearly signaled what they will do if he loses: Claim victory anyway, declare the election rigged, and engage in another conspiracy to overturn the result, whether by litigation, extra-Constitutional arm-twisting, or even violence. The pressure campaign is unlikely to work; as Paul Rosenzweig noted in The Atlantic, none of the officials overseeing vote tabulation in battleground states is a partisan election denier. Still, this full-frontal assault on the validity of the election represents an ongoing threat.

If Harris loses, the response from her coalition would almost certainly be less dramatic and damaging; unlike Trump, she has committed to accepting the result. But as the election nears and panic over Trump’s authoritarian impulses reaches a fever pitch in certain quarters, I’ve begun to worry that prophecies of democratic breakdown following a Trump reelection could become self-fulfilling. What happens to America if Harris voters have fully internalized the idea that democracy is on the ballot, and then “democracy” loses?

In 2016, Trump’s surprise victory was met with a groundswell of small-d democratic energy. There were marches in the streets, and record-breaking donations to the ACLU, and waves of grassroots organizing. Subscriptions surged at newspapers committed to holding the new administration to account; books about combating tyranny became best sellers. The energy wasn’t contained to the liberal “resistance” movement. Conservative expats launched their own political groups and publications. As my colleague Franklin Foer recently wrote, the warnings of impending autocracy in America at the time “helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump.”

That energy contributed to record-high turnout in the 2020 election, when Trump was defeated. To many people outside the MAGA coalition, Joe Biden’s victory represented a triumphant climax in the narrative of the Trump era. And had the one-term, twice-impeached president simply receded into a Mar-a-Lago exile, the story might have ended with a tidy civic moral: An aspiring authoritarian was vanquished in the most American way possible—at the ballot box. Democracy wins again.

But of course the story didn’t end there. And the fact that, four years later, Trump is within a coin flip of returning to the Oval Office has created some dissonance in liberal America. Trump has, in his third campaign, been more explicit than ever about his illiberal designs. He has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, replacing thousands of civil servants with loyalists, and revoking broadcast licenses for TV networks whose news coverage he doesn’t like.

Democrats have sought to warn voters about the threat that these actions would pose to democracy—sometimes dialing up the rhetoric in an effort to wake Americans to the peril. But the messaging seems to have had an unfortunate dual effect, deeply stressing out voters already inclined to believe it while largely failing to resonate with the undecided and politically disengaged. Last week, The New York Times reported on a memo circulated by the leading pro-Harris super PAC warning Democrats that persuadable voters weren’t being moved by messages that focused on the former president’s authoritarianism. “Attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” the email read. Compared with 2020, fewer Americans are telling pollsters that they are highly motivated to vote, or that this is the most important election of their lifetime.

Within a certain segment of Harris’s base, though, the struggle against autocracy remains very much top of mind. And if you spend too much time online monitoring the discourse, as I do, you might come away with the impression that, for many, Election Day will be the decisive moment in the battle for American democracy. Some liberals are even making plans to leave the country if Trump wins. Biden’s son Hunter recently told Politico he was worried that Trump’s reelection would mean “losing our democracy to a fascist minority” and warned that a second Trump term “is potentially the end of America as we’ve known it.”

I’ve heard similar sentiments from my most anxious Harris-voting friends and family members. And I’ve wondered whether another Trump victory would spur in them the same spirit of post-2016 activism or send them spiraling into fatalism and disengagement.

On Wednesday night, Harris was careful in her speech not to wallow too much in the doom and gloom of an imperiled democracy. But she did take aim at her opponent’s illiberalism. She said that Trump was “out for unchecked power” and warned that if elected, he would enter the Oval Office with an “enemies list.” She alluded to the country’s birth in revolt against a “petty tyrant,” and described Americans who have fought over centuries to defend and promote democracy around the world. “They did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” Harris declared to cheers.

In my conversations after the speech, many supporters, teary-eyed and high on adrenaline as Beyoncé’s “Freedom” still blared from the speakers, were understandably loath to talk about what they’ll do next week if their candidate loses. But they politely indulged me.

Alyssa VanLeeuwen, a mom from Maryland who brought her eighth-grade daughter to the rally, emitted a guttural agghh when I posed the question to her. “Democracy is absolutely on the line,” she told me. A Trump victory, she said, would mean a bleak and uncertain future for her daughter. “I’m scared. I’m terrified if that happens.”

When I asked her if she thought that fear would translate to disillusionment or activism, she paused to give it thought. “I think,” she said, “everybody’s going to go to battle again to try to fight for their neighbors.”

I spoke with another Harris supporter who asked me not to use her name (“My family could be targeted”). She, too, called the prospect of Trump’s reelection “terrifying.” She said that Trump would herald “the return of McCarthyism” as he used federal power to root out and punish his political enemies, and went on to lay out in vivid detail the various worst-case scenarios of a second Trump term. But when I asked her whether she thought American democracy itself might be destroyed, she said no. “We have 300 million people in this country,” she told me, “and I don’t think we would allow that.”

This attitude was shared by almost everyone I spoke with that night on the Ellipse. Some of them told me about friends, glued to cable news and doomscrolling on their phones, who might tend toward fatalism if Trump wins again. But the people I met—the kind who travel long distances and wait outside in the cold for hours to attend political rallies—were not thinking of Election Day as a singular make-or-break moment. They seemed to know that, no matter who wins, America will still be a democracy next week, and the week after that. Its preservation depends, in part, on not pegging its fate to the outcome of any one election.

Before leaving the Ellipse, I met Salome Agbaroji, a 19-year-old Harvard student who had traveled from Cambridge to see Harris speak. As a poet, she spends a lot of time thinking about the language that shapes our politics, and she told me she resents what she considers hyperbolic rhetoric in the media about the end of democracy. A professor had recently taught her the root of the Greek word for democracy—demos, meaning “people,” and kratia, meaning “rule.” The power of the people doesn’t disappear overnight just because the White House is occupied by an illiberal leader.

“I don’t think democracy lives in an institution,” Agbaroji told me. “Democracy lives in the people.” As long as people hold on to “that spirit, it will be hard to kill.”

Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan, two of the nation’s prominent scholars and commentators on matters of democracy, freedom, and the American idea, are joining The Atlantic as contributing writers, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced today. Both writers join The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where they served as opinion columnists.

“The Atlantic is deeply committed to covering the crisis of democracy in all its manifestations, and having Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan join our already excellent team represents a real boon for our readers,” Goldberg said.

Allen, who serves as the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, is a political philosopher and scholar of public policy. She is also director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and director of the Democratic Knowledge Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has published numerous books on justice and citizenship, including 2023’s Justice by Means of Democracy, as well as Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality and the acclaimed memoir Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. Allen has contributed several articles to The Atlantic, the most recent about the history of a forgotten Black Founding Father.

Kagan is a senior fellow in the foreign-policy program at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. He has written for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal, and is the author of a number of critically acclaimed and best-selling books, most recently Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again. He is also the author of The Ghost at the Feast: America and Collapse of World Order, 1900–1941; The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World; and Of Paradise and Power. Kagan served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988 as a member of the policy-planning staff, as principal speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and as deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com