Contemporary democratic politics faces exorbitant stakes on a broad range of issues: from existential threats such as global climate change, pandemic disease and growing dangers to human health from toxic pollutants; through major social issues like the erosion of wages and standards of living, increasing inequality and stalled social mobility, a scarcity of jobs that deliver security and dignity, and the ever-more frayed social safety-net; to on-going security and humanitarian challenges (North Korea, South Sudan, Russia, Syria, refugee crises, cyber-crime and cyber–warfare, etc.). Yet in a season of toxic elections, democratic politics seems no match for these stakes and instead have grown increasingly fractious and dysfunctional.

In these circumstances, many people argue that it is imperative that we redouble our efforts to determine why American democracy has become so deeply disfigured. In this lecture, we will consider two central themes: the concomitant rise in inequality in American society and a decline of responsiveness in American national government to all but the most affluent; and the threat posed by an increasingly fractured and toxic informational ecosystem to the very idea of public opinion. Focusing on these twin threats to democratic accountability and self-rule allows us to situate current events in a deeper analytic perspective informed by recent work in economics, sociology, media studies and political philosophy.