Why Politics Fails

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Michael Wolraich's new book, Why Politics Fails, is published by Simon & Schuster. Wolraich: We avoid chaos, but replace it with animosity and violence in American politics. He says the key message of the book is that politics may fail time and again, but it's helpful for us to know why it fails. The author also offers some ideas on how we can improve our political system.

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.”