Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman’s Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy places our current democratic fragility in a larger historical context. Drawing on six political moments from the 1790s to the present, they identify critical obstacles and tensions that have threatened the foundations of American democracy since its formation. The authors illuminate how long it has taken for American democratic institutions and values to take root and how shallow and tenuous some of these roots are when confronted by political and societal conflicts.

The “four threats” that the authors argue can foster distrust and democratic breakdown are partisan polarization, political conflicts over “who belongs” within the US citizenry, economic inequality, and executive aggrandizement. They identify three time periods when only one threat was manifest (the 1790s, 1930s, and 1970s) and three periods that were faced with multiple threats (the 1850s, 1890s, and 2010s). The more threats converge in the political system, the greater the vulnerability for American democratic institutions and fundamentals. Most alarmingly, they argue that the 2010s were the first time all four threats were manifest at the same time.

Six historical chapters cover these periods when threats were present, starting with the fraught politics over the nation’s first partisan transition at the end of the eighteenth century. The threats in the other chapters range from those culminating in the Civil War to President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal to the current day. Some of the ground they cover nicely dovetails with Levitsky and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die (2018), particularly the emphasis on norms and the behavioral choices of politicians: both books, for instance, detail Newt Gingrich’s shredding the norms of political combat in the 1990s as a precursor for the modern period. But whereas Levitsky and Ziblatt compare the United States to failed democracies around the world, Mettler and Lieberman effectively draw out the longer unstable continuum of US democratic development.

This is a smart and compelling book that will satisfy both a broad audience, with its accessibility and flair, and disciplinary insiders, with its historical details and argumentative nuance. I do wish, however, that these two prominent scholars of American political development (APD) had further explored the ways in which the development of political institutions, beyond executive aggrandizement, have been of consequence. For instance, President Trump repeatedly attacked the so-called deep state (as well as the “fake news” media) as principal threats to democracy. His opponents scoffed at this, but APD scholars (such as Mettler and Lieberman in prior works) have long argued that governing institutions have developed increased autonomy and authority over time, embedding potential veto points that can frustrate even a president with authoritarian aspirations. The authors stress the growth of presidential power, but the consequences of the broader institutionalization of the federal government can also serve to counter executive aggrandizement. This was evident between 2017–20 when a bipartisan group of State Department officials blew the whistle on Trump and state election workers certified vote counts in the face of intense pressure from the president and his allies. The judicial branch has also developed greater institutional authority and autonomy over time. Contrast, for instance, the greater success with which the Roberts Court blocked Trump’s efforts to deny civil liberties to the far less institutionally entrenched Marshall Court’s failed efforts to block Andrew Jackson’s implementation of Indian removal in the 1830s.

As with any book that attempts to make big and provocative claims with a sweep through large swaths of American political history, there are terms that could use clarification and concepts and time periods in need of further definition. Some, perhaps all, of the threats have the potential to be conceptually intertwined. For instance, economic inequality is strongly correlated with both racial tension and political polarization. Moreover, the absence of manifest threats in specific time periods could well be related to the denial of others. As the authors well note, the 1930s would likely have been more politically polarized if the Roosevelt administration had more directly challenged the Jim Crow South; for instance, Robert Mickey (Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972, 2015) importantly argues that US democracy during that time coexisted with explicitly authoritarian and white supremacist southern states.

In an attempt to keep the threats conceptually separate, they arguably go too far to claim that “only” certain threats existed in specific moments versus others. In the 1850s, for instance, they argue that only three threats were manifest because the threat of executive aggrandizement was absent. But if we extend that period by just a couple of years, the massive expansion of presidential power during the Civil War is apparent (as they dutifully note in the chapter’s conclusion). During the 1930’s, they classify executive aggrandizement as the only manifest threat, but Roosevelt’s executive order interning Japanese Americans, one of our government’s most antidemocratic acts, occurred only 14 months later.

The authors did not seek to write, nor could or should have written, a book meant to cover every antidemocratic act or moment. Both authors have written important works about race and gender discrimination in APD, and they raise such exclusions throughout this book. But, by categorizing acts of discrimination as a “threat” within certain moments and not others, they necessarily privilege certain types of attacks on the democratic process over others. They define the principles of democracy as rooted in free and fair elections, the rule of law, respect for the opposition, and the integrity of rights. The last of these is ever present throughout the book, but the emphasis is on regime stability. This is not inappropriate, given the politics of our current moment. At the same time, this emphasis leaves unsettled how we categorize and interpret those acts of state violence and authoritarianism that target populations separate from the broader “regime.” As such, the authors end up downplaying or excluding McCarthyism, Japanese internment, and Indian removal. One could argue as well that clear violations of civil rights and liberties inflicted on citizens of the world in the context of war also ought to be incorporated, particularly when they are only scantly authorized by democratic procedures (as with Vietnam and Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Iraq).

In chapter 7 the authors powerfully emphasize that much of the American democratic project has been reliant on privileging certain forms of discrimination in exchange for formal procedural democratic stability: “the most sobering observation about the recurring crises of American democracy is that the settlement of these crises has often revolved around a compromise of democratic values that entailed reaffirming or perpetuating racial hierarchy and exclusion” (p. 207). But the chapter is in tension with the rest of the book’s emphases, particularly its headline—that this current era of President Trump and populist politics is singularly the period in which all four threats are present. The headline makes sense given our current moment, but it also belies the more damning claims that the authors make in the details throughout the book, especially in chapter 7. The problem with American democracy is not just that the four threats are episodic or that all four threats may be present now for the first time, but that many of these threats are systemic, enduring, and premised within features of American democracy that cannot be rooted out simply through more honor and courage from our political leaders.

This is a learned book that smartly provokes and forces close intellectual engagement. It also provides a framework with which to further explore the health of American democracy, both in its present period and within its foundational nature. It will be read and debated for years to come.