Polarization, diversity, and democratic robustness

In the Madisonian Constitution, fragmented and overlapping institutions of authority are supposed to manage democracy’s innate rivalry, channeling competition to serve the public interest. This system of safeguards makes democracy more robust: capable of withstanding and, if need be, adapting to challenges posed by a changing problem environment. In this essay, I suggest why affective polarization poses a special threat to democratic robustness. While most scholars hypothesize that polarization’s dangers are that it leads to bimodality and extremism, I highlight a third hypothesized effect: Polarization reduces interest and information diversity in the political system. To be effective, democracy’s safeguards rely upon interest diversity, but Madison took that diversity for granted. Unique among democracy’s safeguards, federalism builds in a repository for diversity; its structure enables differences between national- and state-expressed interests, even within the same party. This diversity can be democracy hindering, as the United States’ history with racially discriminatory politics painfully makes clear, but it can also serve as a reservoir of interest and information dispersion that could protect democracy by restoring the possibility that cross-cutting cleavages emerge.

Assassination

This chapter examines the continuation of anti-Mormon sentiments in western Illinois and the rise of hostile dissenters in Nauvoo. Many are committed to killing Joseph Smith. Their opportunity arises when Smith, in his role as mayor, orders the destruction of a printing press used to print an anti-Mormon newspaper. After several days of tense negotiations that include Smith declaring martial law in Nauvoo, Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum, submit to arrest. However, the court denies them bail because treason is added to the charge of inciting a riot, and they are forced to stay in the Carthage, Illinois, jail. On June 27, 1844, a mob storms the jail, killing Joseph and Hyrum Smith. The chapter considers the various motivations for the act. Although Joseph Smith is not assassinated because he is running for president, he has the unwanted designation of the first assassinated presidential candidate in United States history.

What the eyes can’t see

Over the last years, Monteiro Lobato has been rightfully accused by Brazilian and Latin American scholars of expressing racist and eugenic ideas in his body of work. In this article, we take a step further and add to this traditional portrait of his literary production an analysis of the impact of a new set of technological media during the first decades of the twentieth century on his writings. We discuss how these two main issues – i.e., technology and race – played out in Lobato’s historical representation of Brazil’s past and future and the influence that the United States could play in it. We show how a revisionary and racist version of the United States’ history and the ideal of an American technological prosperity in the 1920s inspired one of Lobato’s most contentious novels, the technological dystopia O Presidente Negro, ou O Choque das Raças, published in 1926.