Since the mid-twentieth century, urban political science has waxed, waned, and is waxing again as a site of disciplinary innovation. Dick Simpson’s remarkable career has spanned this entire cycle, and in this new book he shares how fine-grained local insights and experience can help us better understand—and perhaps remedy—contemporary democratic challenges. By highlighting the lessons of a generation ago, when US cities navigated the transition to multiracial democracy, Simpson has composed a self-proclaimed “manifesto” to examine how what we have learned locally might help us nationally.

Simpson has been a fixture on the Chicago scene for more than a half-century. As both a leading scholarly analyst of the city’s distinctive politics and a long-time political voice for political reform against the most corrupt and antidemocratic tendencies of the city’s machine organizations (including a stint on the Chicago City Council), Simpson is one of the very few APSA members to have held significant office. As noted in the book, subnational politics in the United States has always been the home of democratic contention, backsliding, and authoritarianism, even outside the obvious case of the antebellum and Jim Crow South—and Simpson has been there to see (in a metaphor that is perhaps too Chicago) “how the sausage is made.” The perennial, cyclical battle between reformers and “traditional party” organizations has played out in city halls and in the pages of political science journals for a century. For urbanists, Chicago has always been at the center of conceptual and empirical innovations in our field, with contributions from luminaries of each generation, from Gosnell (Machine Politics: The Chicago Model, 1937) through to Pinderhughes (Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics : A Reexamination of Pluralist Theory, 1987) and contemporary classics like Trounstine (Political Monopolies in American Cities: The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers, 2008) and Hajnal (Changing White Attitudes toward Black Political Leadership, 2007). Even as a valedictory rather than a presentation of new empirical work, Democracy’s Rebirth is another valuable entry in this canon.

The book situates itself as “both a theoretical discourse and a practical manifesto.” Brief introductory chapters clearly diagnose what Simpson sees as the main challenges to contemporary democracy, drawing on recent literature on democratic backsliding, inequality in representation, and nascent approaches to enhancing substantive democracy. The core chapters examine specific challenges to contemporary American democracy: social inequality, campaign finance, low levels of citizen participation, polarization and racial resentment, corruption, and structural impediments to improved participation and representation. Each chapter briefly illustrates why each challenge undermines democracy; describes how each challenge unfolds today (or in the past) in national politics and in Chicago; succinctly engages recent work in a different research literature; and concludes with a brief set of suggested reforms that might address the ill discussed in the chapter.

The concluding chapters address some of these suggested solutions in more depth and seek to tighten the book’s connection between local and national democracy. A key insight in a transition chapter draws a metaphoric connection to our developing understanding of the ongoing climate crisis—that these crises of democracy are not separate and severable but are part of potentially “cascading crises” that feed into each other and complicate any potential remedies. The final two chapters include long comprehensive lists of structural reforms that might bolster democracy before turning to the key developments that Simpson argues are the building blocks for the others. True to his “Good Government” reformer roots, Simpson is suspicious of elites and organized interests (both inside and outside the state), which leads him to emphasize programs that would scale models of deliberative democracy and encourage civic virtue among citizens and leaders. Many of the reforms will be familiar to students of American democracy, but it is helpful (if daunting) to see them in one place.

In several chapters, Simpson asks what is to be done and provides an answer. How it is to be done remains foggy, however, and readers might be left wanting more in this area. The concluding chapters on deliberative democracy and civic education suggest a bottom-up approach to reinvigorating grassroots democracy and accountability, but contemporary democratic realists are skeptical of this as a starting point. Among the core insights of Who Governs? (Dahl 1961)—another classic explicitly linking local and national political culture—was the observation that most Americans probably do not want to spend all day reading and carefully reasoning about politics: instead, they either want to get fired up or spend their time doing something else entirely. Informing and motivating atomized individuals to reason with each other might not be such a promising starting point, and reinvigorating curricula for civic education takes decades to yield results even if it does pay off. Simpson’s experience as a longtime critic and opponent of Chicago’s distinctive political culture, as well as his deep suspicion of strong political parties, seems to have limited where he looked to jumpstart an ailing democracy.

As Schattschneider famously observed in Party Government (1942), modern democratic politics is unthinkable without parties. But even in a book about Chicago in an era of extreme partisan polarization, Simpson does not think much about how these foundational organizing institutions might enhance participation, build bridges between otherwise divided social groups, and provide a countervailing force against oligarchy. It is certainly true that Chicago’s machine politics has been corrupt and authoritarian. However, the real aftermaths of the party deaths that are central to his book do not bode particularly well for the mission of collaborative public problem solving. When the national Republicans lost control of their primary nominating process in 2016, it led to a cult of personality, and eventually the substantive party program was replaced by obeisance to personal will and grievance in the 2020 election. As the Chicago organization dissolved into factions with the end of Rahm Emanuel’s mayoralty, the city council’s deliberations became more substantive. Yet, a six-way mayoral election in which no candidate wins a majority in any of the city’s 50 wards is closer to a roll of the dice than a basis for building sustained policy responses or durable coalitions to address the cascading crises Simpson correctly identifies as the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Though Simpson does not resist adding details of recent Chicago elections and city council developments to the record, the goal here is not to address narrow scholarly controversies but rather to connect reform-oriented questions across levels and literatures. This volume is more of a well-earned career valedictory and synthesis of normative reforms than a presentation of original empirical research. However, for a book that aims to emphasize how useful understanding local politics might be for solving contemporary national problems, the discussion here is fairly light on the renewed and rapidly developing literature that combines cutting-edge empirical techniques with local data and urbanist theories to critically engage contemporary political science and share lessons about how local institutions shape nationally pressing questions (see, e.g., Einstein, Glick, and Palmer, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis, 2020; Grumbach, Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics 2022; and Ogorzalek, The Cities on the Hill: How Urban Institutions Transformed National Politics, 2018). Because of this approach, the volume is probably more pedagogically appropriate for an undergraduate or popular audience than for graduate students or other analysts who are already steeped in the literature on local politics, deliberative democracy, or democratic backsliding.

Democracy in America is under pressure from the reaction of the “threatened” outgoing majority. As Simpson shows, getting to know cities like Chicago, with their long and fraught experience navigating the turbulence of demographic change but coming out the other side intact and even with moments of true inspiration, will provide actors and analysts helpful lessons for the coming decades.