For me, the single bleakest data point about the health of our society concerns a difference across generations in that sense of attachment to democracy.
As political scientists Yascha #Mounk and Roberto #Foa have reported in a few different guises, there has been significant 🔸generational decline in 🔸how people value democracy.
In the starkest formulation, made in 2016, roughly 70 percent of Americans in the generation born before World War II consider it very essential, while not quite 30 percent of Americans who are now about 40 and younger do so.
This finding occasioned controversy, but the points about decline of young people’s attachment to democracy are robust.
Among those of us who have not been radicalized, on both sides of the aisle, there is work to do to forge a cross-ideological #supermajority.
First of all, people have to believe such a supermajority is possible.
Happily, the evidence abounds, especially in the results of state ballot #initiatives.
These are decided with cross-ideological supermajorities or near supermajorities voting in favor with surprising frequency.
Here are some examples:
🔹Legalization of recreational marijuana (2020): New Jersey, 67 percent;
🔹legalization of recreational marijuana (2022): Maryland, 67 percent;
🔹legalization of medical marijuana (2020): Mississippi, 74 percent;
🔹restoring voting rights to those who have completed felony conviction (2018): Florida, 65 percent;
🔹new state flag without Confederate emblems (2020): Mississippi, 71 percent;
🔹right to repair in support of small auto shops (2020): Massachusetts, 75 percent.
Look at these decisions and you’ll see American supermajorities voting over and over again for #fairness, #inclusion and the person getting the short end of the stick.
This is not only a ♦️cross-ideological supermajority ♦️in the making; it’s one with good, salt-of-the-earth values.
This potential American supermajority for constitutional democracy is what we need to forge.
No democracy can be stable without a supermajority supporting the basic rules of the game.
Inside the bounds of those rules, we can fight like the dickens over specific policy questions. But the rules themselves require supermajority support for stability.
#DanielleAllen
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/22/danielle-allen-constitutional-democracy-polarization/
