The following is the introduction from my upcoming book, Democracy versus autocracy in the USA: How to resist the autocratic playbook and be a more effective citizen of any democracy

I was born in the United States in 1959 and grew up on a story in which we were the heroes[1]. The story wasn’t completely false, but it was badly incomplete. It omitted much, including one of the most important things a citizen of a democracy needs to know: democracy isn’t guaranteed. It’s not even preferred by some, and it’s taken for granted by many. Participating in democracy is harder than it seems. It takes awareness and commitment, and it has to be learned.

Autocracy and how to participate in it, on the other hand, is clear — comply or rebel. It may arrive fast or slow, stealthily and/or wrapped in the language of freedom, nationalism, truth, and promises to right what is said to be wrong. It will thrive where citizens lack a shared account of what democracy is and what it requires of them. It will thrive where and when people are vulnerable to being turned against each other by fear, resentment, and the search for someone to blame.

Democracy is harder. It asks for education, restraint, the willingness to be wrong, and the discipline of treating opponents as fellow citizens rather than enemies. It has to be relearned in every generation, and we currently have no effective and agreed-upon approach for doing that work.

This book makes three claims.

The first is descriptive: democratic and autocratic tendencies have coexisted in the United States from the colonial period to the present. Neither is foreign to us. Both are continuously available. Which one prevails depends partly on institutional design—elections, courts, the press—but mostly on what citizens understand and how they conduct themselves. Institutions can be captured. Norms can be discarded. What holds democracy together, when it holds, is a critical mass of people who know what they are defending and how to defend it.

The second claim is analytical, and it is where this book adds something to a crowded conversation. The clearest account I know of how democratic culture is built and how it fails comes from social psychologist Kurt Lewin. Lewin grew up Jewish in Germany, watched the most constitutionally elaborate democracy in Europe collapse into Nazism, escaped to the United States in 1933, and devoted the rest of his life to a single question: what makes democratic culture resilient and what makes it fragile? His central finding is deceptively simple. Autocracy can be imposed on people. Democracy cannot. It has to be learned, voluntarily and responsibly, through the practice of participation. People raised in authoritarian families, schooled in compliance, and led by leaders who decide for them never develop the habits democratic life requires. When the test comes, they are prone to reach for the leader who promises certainty. Lewin spent the 1930s and 1940s producing experimental evidence for this claim and watching it confirmed at scale by events. We have spent the eighty years since largely ignoring him.

The third claim is normative: democracy is worth the work. Not because the United States has lived up to it—the record is at best mixed—and not because any existing democracy is the final word on self-government, but because the alternative is morally and practically worse. As we will see in Chapter Three, autocracies fail their citizens in predictable ways: they are over-dependent on the leader, which produces a system that is brittle, demoralized, and vulnerable to chaos or collapse when the leader is gone. Democracies fail too, but they retain the capacity to repair themselves. That capacity is what this book is about.

I want to be clear about what this book is not.

It is not neutral. I have a view: the United States should uphold the democratic principles laid out here in Chapter One. We are dangerously adrift from those standards.

It is also not an argument that the founders were saints, that the American story is only a story of progress, or that democracy means whatever a current majority wants it to mean. The founders built a system that protected slavery for nearly a century after they wrote that all men are equal. The American story is a record of democratic expansion and of organized resistance to that expansion, and the resistance has too often won. Democracy is not simply the will of the majority. It is a particular kind of self-government, with commitments to reason, equal citizenship, the rule of law, and limits on power—including the power of majorities. Those commitments have been imperfectly honored from the beginning. That is a reason to apply them more fully, not to abandon them.

The founders themselves understood democracy as an ongoing experiment rather than a finished product. The Declaration of Independence affirms the right and the duty of the people to alter or abolish a government that becomes destructive of its purposes. The founders did not expect us to preserve the system unchanged. They expected progress. This book honors that expectation and asks what change is needed now.

And it invites the reader to participate—voluntarily and responsibly—in the ongoing work of democratic renewal.

A note on method. I have tried to stay close to documented sources and to mark my interpretations as interpretations. Where the historical evidence is in dispute, I have tried to say so. Where I am making claims that outrun the evidence, I have tried to flag them as my own views rather than as established fact. Readers will disagree with some of what follows. That is appropriate. Disagreement, conducted by reason, is what democracy looks like.

The chapters that follow develop the argument in three sections. The first introduces Lewin and the social science of democratic and autocratic group life. The second traces the American historical pattern—particularly the management of class conflict through the exploitation of racial and ethnic divisions. The third turns to what democratic citizens actually need to know and to do: how to think, how to differ, how to listen, how to recognize the autocratic playbook when it is being used on them, and how not to use it on each other.

The autocratic playbook is well documented. We need a democratic playbook that is just as clear, and enough citizens who know it that it can hold.

[1] A story, like Santa Claus, that I believed into grade school. By then my father, and my experiences with segregation in Nashville, helped me begin to awaken to a more realistic view.