Goodbye to All That Democracy

There ought to be a German word for the unpleasant feeling that comes when one's dire predictions come true. Schmerz-Prognose: pain in premonition. Something like that feeling likely overcame Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman at around 10 p.m. on November 8, 2016, when a demagogue with kleptocratic tendencies won the White House. Sitaraman essentially predicted as much—and worse—in his new book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution.

There are plenty of theories for Donald Trump's victory: misogyny, nativism, cultural anxiety, economic insecurity, and the decline of shared cross-partisan media sources. Sitaraman doesn't rebut any of these, but makes a different, more dire structural argument: inequality and stable democracy don't mix.