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Leah Smart: We keep making the same mistakes again and again. She says it's best to understand why we do them, not just assume it's the fault of other people or politicians. The Democracy Trap is that there is no such thing as the will of the people unless we all agree on everything, she says.

As you may have noticed, modern democracies aren’t doing so hot. In country after country, income inequality soars while solidarity plummets. Resentment simmers while national unity cools. In places like the US and the UK, beacons of liberal democracy, words like “autocracy” and “anarchy” are thrown around with alarming regularity. Meanwhile, our ability to take action on existential threats like AI and climate change is stymied by sniping politicians who are obsessed with point-scoring and eerily disinclined to agree on a shared set of facts.

Given all this, it’s not unreasonable to wonder: Are we doomed?

This week, on the 247th anniversary of America’s birthday — and the dawn of the modern democratic experiment — we’ll get to the bottom of that unsettling question with Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford and author of “Why Politics Fail.”