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Brigid Bergin: Hi, everybody. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Melissa Harris-Perry. This is The Takeaway. We're taking a big look at the state of our democracy.

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The past six years have been marked with hyperpartisan divides, political violence, false allegations of voter fraud, and stalled legislation. This conversation extends beyond the Trump years because there has been a slow breakdown of our political institutions that facilitate and support our democracy. It seems like since the 2020 election, we hit the gas pedal and when zooming down a cliff of democratic disarray.

Donald Trump: If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.

Brigid Bergin: What is now known as former President Trump's big lie led to--

[mob chanting]

President Joe Biden: I call on this mob to pull back and allow the work of democracy to go forward.

Donald Trump: We love you. You're very special.

[mob chanting]

Brigid Bergin: Since the 2020 election and the January 6th capital insurrection, voting rights has become even more a major hot button issue on both sides of the aisle.

Speaker 1: Today, more than 50 democratic members of the Texas house left Texas, breaks our heart that we have to do it, but we do it because we are in a fight to save our democracy.

Speaker 2: For the right to vote and that that vote counted is democracy's threshold Liberty.

Brigid Bergin: But still federal voting rights legislation has failed to pass.

Speaker 3: Voting rights legislation failing once again in the Senate. Every Republican Senator voting against it, calling it a power grab, a federal takeover.

Brigid Bergin: Given all the turbulence of the last few years, we wanted to give you a chance to weigh in on the state of democracy.

Speaker 4: It is under siege. It is under assault. It is being battered by cynical campaigns of misinformation.

Speaker 5: Collapsing. I am really disturbed

Speaker 6: The state of our democracy looks fragile

Speaker 7: Currently at war with each other.

Speaker 8: It's available to the highest bidder.

Speaker 9: Failing, getting overrun.

Speaker 10: Democracy in the United States is on life support while democratic leadership tries to play nice with the people who are trying to pull the plug.

Brigid Bergin: Now, we didn't want to sound all doom and gloom, but really, what are we to expect this coming midterm election season? Looking even further ahead, what is the future of American democracy? For more on this, I spoke with Charles Homans, staff writer at the New York Times and New York Times magazine, and Dr. Liliana Mason, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, an author of Uncivil Agreement, How Politics Became our Identity. Charles recently hosted an expert panel for the New York Times magazine on where American democracy goes from here. I asked him what he took away from the panel and how worried we should be.

Charles Homans: The crossroads that we're at now is a genuinely new place. I think there's not a clear sense of how we necessarily get through the spot that we're in, where all sorts of longstanding ideological and racial, and cultural conflicts that have been present in American history for many, many years, have really become mapped onto partisan identity and partisan conflict in a way that has no real precedence in modern American history. I think we don't really know what comes next. We're figuring this out.

Brigid Bergin: Was there anything that you were particularly surprised about in the conversation you had?

Charles Homans: That's a good question. I think that everybody seemed to share a certain view. It's difficult to see how we get through this. Yes. There are barriers to getting through it that we haven't really yet figured out how to get across.

Brigid Bergin: Certainly we didn't just arrive at this moment out of nowhere. Lilly, can you talk a little bit about some of the moments or events that have brought us to where we are at this point?

Dr. Lilliana Mason: Yes. One of the things that's been happening gradually over the last few decades is that we've seen the gradual realignment of the parties around issues of culture, social status, gender, and racial equality. This all started after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Then after that period, white Southern Democrats were really disaffected and over a generation left the party and became Republicans.

That process was basically finalized in the last 10 years or so and especially with both the election and the campaign of Trump. The parties have been moving targets over the last few years and divided over what America looks like, who Americans are and whether we've made enough progress towards equality, or whether we've gone too far. Those tend to be the most contentious partisan arguments right now.

Brigid Bergin: Do you get a sense at all, Lilly, that the party leaders themselves take any responsibility for the way their infrastructure has deteriorated to some degree?

Dr. Lilliana Mason: It's hard to change infrastructure when you're part of it. The people who are in government rely on the government, the infrastructure of government that got them in there. It's really hard to change the system from within it. Then, on the other hand, it's impossible to change it from outside. That's a catch 22 that we're stuck in right now where we need people on the inside to work to change it, but it's against their incentives to do so.

Brigid Bergin: How much have the supposed culture wars contributed to the partisanship that we're seeing now?

Dr. Lilliana Mason: The culture wars really are the central argument that is really riling people up. Part of the reason that we're seeing such a reliance on culture wars, particularly from the right, is that economic policies of the Republican party have never been very popular. The conservative policies that are anti-government support and tend to not be very popular in the electorate as a whole, even among Republicans.

It's really in the interest of the Republican party to focus on grievance politics, identity-based politics to stoke really deep divisions in American society like racial divisions, gender roles, all of these things that tend to be arguments that we're not very good at having and that we tend to get really upset about. That's really become the center because the policies the two parties are arguing over aren't actually, that's not really what people are paying attention to right now.

Brigid Bergin: Charles, I'm wondering to what extent do you think the fight over our election infrastructure and the reliability of our elections is really just an accelerant to some of these problems we've been talking about?

Charles Homans: I think it is in the sense that it reflects a real profound lack of faith in that system that people really on both sides of the political argument in the United States have now. One thing that's really striking is just the degree to which faith in the actual fairness of elections has eroded for obviously very opposite reasons on the right and the left in the United States. One way that you've seen that manifest itself has been in these bills that have been proposed at the state level in a number of states by Republican legislators that would place one or another element of the election system under more direct partisan control.

Very, very little of that, of that legislation has actually passed, but it's been on the table. You've also seen the Democrats really struggle to respond to it at the federal level in part, because a couple of Democrats in the Senate, made the decision that this was not blowing up the filibuster over. Also, Democrats have been really unwilling to separate this out from the broader issue of voting rights and some of these much bigger, more longstanding policy issues that have been out there.

Brigid Bergin: Lilly, in the panel. You said that it's, quote-unquote, "Going to get even uglier than it currently is talking about the differences in identity politics." Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Dr. Lilliana Mason: Yes, it's really a reflection on looking back in our history as a country when we do have discussions about equality, racial and gender equality, particularly racial equality, how have we behaved ourselves? How have we comported ourselves? If we look back at the civil rights movement, that was met with a lot of violence. Even just even going all the way back to the civil war and reconstruction, that reconstruction was effectively ended because of a huge wave of violence against newly formed Black communities. We go two steps forward, one step back in terms of making progress toward a more egalitarian multiracial democracy.

In my view, where we are right now is in another one of those steps where we're trying to make more progress and it's just going to be met with backlash. There's never been a point in American history when progress towards equality has not been met with backlash. It's in my mind an inevitable part of any process in which we make progress towards actually becoming a multiracial democracy.

Brigid Bergin: Lilly, this week has been so dominated by the confirmation hearings for Judge Jackson. I'm wondering to what extent the issues with partisanship that we've seen on full display in those hearings. I'm wondering whether you think this is yet another warning sign or if you see any signs of hope in them.

Dr. Lilliana Mason: I think that there's both hope and disappointment. It's not surprising that we're seeing an extremely partisan approach to the questioning, but it's also pretty unsavory behavior towards the potential justice who has a stellar record. It's not surprising, but it's the way that we would expect partisans to behave these days, particularly coming from the Republican party. I do think that the way that Judge Jackson has been questioned, is certainly reflective of a different attitude towards her as a person. We're seeing that coming from unsupported attacks against her record.

This is the place we're in right now, and this is where President Trump got us to, is that we're saying the quiet parts out loud at this point when we're talking about racial equality. 20 years ago, it was prohibited language in, quote-unquote, "Respectable places," but increasingly, we're starting to see the is gendered and racial language really out in the open, even in the Congress.

Brigid Bergin: On our final minute or so, what do you see in terms of the hope for the future of American democracy, just for each of you? Lilly, why don't you go first.

Dr. Lilliana Mason: The most hopeful potential future is one in which we actually do really start to live up to the things that we've enshrined in the constitution, and specifically the 14th and 15th amendments of the constitution, where actual equal protection under the law, equal voting rights for everyone, having less or probably no institutionalized prejudice against any American. These are very far-off goals, but we have been making progress in that direction. The backlash that we're seeing is evidence of that. I think that my most hopeful vision is that we actually get to a place where we're a more tolerant and representative democracy.

Charles Homans: This isn't the first time we've had very deep abiding political arguments in this country. As Lilly says, a lot of this stuff has built over time, and sometimes those dynamics change over time. I think some of these fights are fights that this country just probably needs to have and to get through one way or another. The other stuff may fall by the wayside, the political landscape does change pretty quickly at times in this country. I think it's probably the best hope for the future is the uncertainty about what's coming. It could be bad, or it could be not so bad.

Brigid Bergin: Charles Homans is staff writer at The New York Times, and the New York Times magazine, and Dr. Lilliana Mason is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, an author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Thank you both so much.

Charles Homans: Thank you.

Liliana Mason: Thank you.

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Speaker 11: In one sentence, the state of the US democracy is, we have to be vigilant because the old white men are not going to give up their power easily.

Speaker 12: Currently, the state of US democracy is gravely imperiled because we have the almost unthinkable situation in which one of our two major political parties continues to lie about the last election, somehow being illegitimate.

Speaker 13: The current state of democracy looks extremely endangered.

Speaker 14: I think the state of our democracy right now is like an us versus them tag of war with each team looking for that ringer that will come in and rip the rope right out of the hands of the other side.

Speaker 15: The state of American democracy is in disarray.

Speaker 16: State of the US democracy looks to me like the beginning of the fall of the Roman empire.

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Speaker 17: Call us at 877-869-8253, that's 8778-MY-TAKE. Let us know what you're feeling or what you're looking for us to cover. It's The Takeaway.

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