Lot of post-2016 handwringing among pundits and academics about the future of American democracy. The vast majority of it was genuinely unhelpful because it failed to give real people the cognitive tools to deal with *actually existing episodes* of democratic subversion.

Almost nothing a prominent political scientist or journalist wrote between 2016 and 2017 will help Wisconsin pols or voters understand what they should do to respond to an illegitimate election. Few analyses to speak of that treat democratic decline as an already-existing thing

One major problem with this work: democratic breakdown still treated as a binary outcome. This dramatically shrinks the # of positive cases. And ignores, as I argue here, evidence of deconsolidation in the US states: https://medium.com/@philrocco/laboratories-of-what-d68ce29565f4?source=---------2------------------

Another, as Chris Maisano argues here, is that few of the "big picture" analyses (Przeworski is one exception) taken into account how the systematic dismantling of working-class power undermines functioning of electoral/representative institutions https://catalyst-journal.com/vol3/no2/democracys-morbid-symptoms

3rd reason: I suspect that academic / pundit prestige is strongly correlated w/ a subconscious acceptance of the postwar consensus view of US history /political economy. Lipset's idea that the US polity is synonymous w/ democracy.

4th: far easier, more parsimonious, and publishable to talk about a small handful of easily recognizable cases of *regime change* (Germany 30s, Chile 70s) than to confront the coalface of undemocratic *episodes* in the life of a regime.

This is all salty disciplinary inside baseball but it has real-world consequences. Generates among political elites (who are indeed affected by ideas) by allowing them to think that the question is "can it happen here?" rather than "how can we reverse what is already happening?"