FIRST OF 2 THINKING/WORKING PIECES. Sorry not widely available. How to Save the American Experiment
By John Fabian Witt
Mr. Witt is the author of “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.”
'As democracy in the United States spirals into a widening gyre of distrust, demagogy and violence, a question has been loosed in minds across America: How does this all end? The historical analogies seem bleak. Germany’s interwar political dysfunction looms largest because of its descent into fascism. Yet there is a more hopeful example, overlooked though much closer at hand: the United States of a century ago.
At the outset of the 1920s, a wave of attempted assassinations and political violence crested alongside new barriers to immigration, a campaign of deportations and a government crackdown on dissenting speech. America was fresh off a pandemic in which divisive public health measures yielded widespread anger and distrust. Staggering levels of economic inequality underlaid a fast-changing industrial landscape and rapidly evolving racial demographics. Influential voices in the press warned that a crisis of misinformation in the media had wrecked the most basic democratic processes.
Even presidential elections eerily converge. In 1920, national frustration over an infirm and aging president helped sweep the Democratic Party out of the White House in favor of a Republican candidate offering the nostalgic promise of returning America to greatness, or at least to normalcy. A faltering President Woodrow Wilson gave way to Warren Harding and one-party control over all three branches of the federal government.
Yet what is striking about the 1920s is that, unlike the German interwar crisis, America’s dangerous decade led not to fascism and the end of democracy but to the New Deal and the civil rights era. Across the sequence of emergencies that followed — the Great Depression and eventually World War II — the United States ushered in an era of working-class political empowerment and prosperity. The nation ended Jim Crow in the South and established free speech with court-backed protections for the first time in its history. . . .
The generation of Du Bois, Hillman and Lippmann refused to let crises go to waste. In the midst of tumult, they offered new experiments that wrought seismic changes on the landscape of American life. Today, the institutions of working-class organization inherited from Hillman’s mass-production generation are badly mismatched to the economy. Free speech rights, won at such cost a century ago, are once again at risk, but also outmoded in a world in which attention, not speech, is the scarce commodity. Never before have the pictures in our heads, as Lippmann described them, been more sharply divorced from the world outside; never before have the propaganda powers Du Bois diagnosed been more powerful. . .
For all the talk of red lines and points of no return, the modern United States has had democratic crises and authoritarian turmoil before. The language of break-glass, fire-alarm emergencies looks at our increasingly brittle existing modes of political organization and cannot see beyond them. But the way through will be to craft new modes of renewal adequate to the landscape of the world in which we find ourselves — forms analogous to the industrial union of the ’20s, and perhaps fueled by the generative civil society engine of the now vast nonprofit world. A century ago, in the forgotten history of a decade just barely out of living memory, we found pathways to a better place. The answer to how this all ends turns on experiments we have only barely begun to launch.'
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/opinion/politics/how-to-save-the-american-experiment.html