With the midterm congressional races heating up and November 7 right around the corner, we are once again privileged witnesses of American democracy in action…or, as Alan Wolfe sees it, American democracy inaction. In his new book, Does American Democracy Still Work?, Wolfe identifies the current political conditions that have contributed to a worrisome new politics of democracy.

Glenn C. Altschuler, in a review of the book in The New York Observer, elaborates:

In Does American Democracy Still Work?, Alan Wolfe, a professor at Boston College, examines the political implications of voter ignorance. Americans, he reports, lack the factual basis to make informed choices. Two-thirds of survey respondents think the federal government spends more on foreign aid than on Social Security; a third do not know whether they pay more income tax than Social Security and Medicare tax—and many of the rest gave the wrong answer.Mainstream media and cable, Mr. Wolfe suggests, contribute to this ignorance by focusing on “soft news,” abandoning the ideal of disinterested authority and showcasing debates between partisans, where emotional appeals count for more than reason. And politicians, knowing they won’t be held accountable, exploit ignorance to take the public from the middle to the outer edges of the ideological spectrum.

Though he doesn’t hold Democrats blameless, Mr. Wolfe insists that right-wing Republicans, “who have never given any indication of being constrained by conscience,” are the principal architects and beneficiaries of “illiberal democracy.” Turning their backs on the Enlightenment, they use populist rhetoric to ignore, disdain and suppress scientific research so they can gut environmental regulations. They enact tax policies that are “among the more immoral actions taken by any presidential administration in the past century.”

Democracies, Mr. Wolfe observes, are not intrinsically just. They achieve “just outcomes only by working against the grain of democratic expectations,” including a crude majoritarianism and the politics of personal gratification, the very concepts invoked by the radical right.

The triumph of this new “democracy,” Mr. Wolfe believes, is not inevitable. But his strategies for restoring respect for pluralism and a civil, reasoned political discourse are mostly hortatory. Ignoring structural reforms, such as an end to the gerrymandering of Congressional districts, Mr. Wolfe places a bet on the cyclical nature of American politics. The Republican ascendancy, he declares, is “inherently unstable,” promising results it cannot deliver. Americans may tire of it. He concludes by calling for reform by spontaneous generation, as the voters rouse themselves, insist that “leaders tell them the truth even when it contradicts their desires,” and replace them when they don’t.