Democracy Unmoored: Populism and the Corruption of Popular Sovereignty

A powerful new account of how populist movements are sabotaging political institutions from within and undermining democracies across the globe. The 2016 election of Donald Trump focused people's minds on populism, and most of the attention paid to the subject since has been on the threat it poses to wealthy democracies. In Democracy Unmoored, Samuel Issacharoff takes a far wider-angle view of the phenomenon, covering countries from across the globe: Brazil, Poland, Argentina, Turkey, India, Hungary, Venezuela, and more. Just as importantly, he focuses on populism's attack on the institutions of governance. Democracy requires two critical features: first, a commitment to repeat play such that political actors understand that what goes around comes around; and, second, institutional constraints so that the majority can prevail, albeit not by too much. Democracies must avoid the doomsday scenario in which the contending parties see the next election as the final choice between salvation and perdition. Issacharoff shows how populist governance undermines each of these two critical underpinnings of stable democracy, first by compressing the time horizon to the immediate, and second by eroding institutional constraints on strongman rule. At the same time, Issacharoff highlights the fact that ascendent populists were pushing in an open door as they found democracies in states of disrepair in the post-2008 world. Electorates around the world had come to see institutional democratic party systems as cabals of elites working against "the people," which anti-institutionalist populists took advantage of in country after country. Global in coverage and featuring a powerful explanation of the true threat populism represents to democracy, this book will be essential reading for anyone who cares about the survival of democratic institutions.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I: The World the Populists Found Chapter 1: The Frayed Social Fabric of Democracy Chapter 2: The Capacity to Govern Chapter 3: The Political Institutions of Democracy Part II: Politics Under Populism Chapter 4: Populism and the Here and Now Chapter 5: Caudillos in Command Chapter 6: Judicial Intercession Chapter 7: Corruption Simpliciter Chapter 8: Institutional Wreckage Part III: A Democratic Restoration? Chapter 9: The Exposed Underpinnings of American Democracy Epilogue: Glimmers of Hope?

About the Author :
Samuel Issacharoff is the Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. He is a leading figure in the study of democracy, constitutions, and the courts, and the author of Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts. He is a leading figure in the law of democracy in the U.S. and has written scores of articles on democratic challenges around the world. He served as a senior legal advisor to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and is long experienced as an appellate advocate in American courts. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Review :
There are few more important subjects than the future of democracy and few better people to analyze it than Samuel Issacharoff in this important and timely book. How is it that democracy, worldwide, finds itself so threatened three decades after its apparent triumph over other forms of political ordering? This brilliant new book explains how a series of economic, technological, sociological, and legal shifts undermined the shared commitment to citizen self-government and the constellation of institutions necessary for democracies to flourish. An engaging and provocative, truly interdisciplinary, work. An exceptional mastery of the historical background and structural conditions out of which have emerged the populist threat to democratic norms and institutions. This is a simply superb contribution to the urgent debate about the fate of liberal democracy. An insightful if troubling description of the ills of democracies around the world face as populism rises, and some prescriptions for how to cure the problems. This readable analysis contains important lessons for both the Right and Left if they hope to govern successfully in these uncertain and transformational times. Democracy Unmoored is a brilliant and engaging addition that brings together thinking about the relationship between formal institutions and social mobilization in way that is unusual in the literature on populism. This is one of our foremost scholars of democracy in top form. The book is a must read if we want to understand our democratic predicament. Samuel Issacharoff is a cosmopolitan and global thinker with a keen understanding of the complexities and subtleties that led to the decline of contemporary democracies. This indispensable book is a warning, but also a source of hope in the struggle to push history in the right direction. Democracy Unmoored is original and insightful.