American Academy Lecture at Freie Universität

Inequality, Insecurity, and America’s Democratic Crisis

Why is American democracy so unsettled and threatened? Many see the root cause as  “Culture War” conflicts over divisive social issues. In this talk, Jacob S. Hacker questions this conventional wisdom and traces the fundamental economic shifts behind America’s democratic crisis, including the insecurity experienced by deindustrializing regions, the shifting economic orientations and alliances of the two parties, and the extreme inequality that has fueled America’s unusually plutocratic form of right-wing populism. Based on this diagnosis, he also discusses what must be done to reconstruct American democracy on stronger foundations.