The title of this book raises a critically important question that, so often, produces a depressing answer: Is US democracy doomed, destined to collapse on itself because of the pressures of shrinking equality and rising polarization? That question in turn builds on an even deeper puzzle: Has James Madison’s grand design sowed the seeds of the country’s ultimate downfall, because intuitions constructed to solve the eighteenth-century’s cross-pressures have proved to be a poor match for the twenty-first-century’s challenges?

This book, which grew from the Social Science Research Council’s Anxieties of Democracy program, concludes that we have plenty to be anxious about. Indeed, in summing up the book’s contributions, editors Frances E. Lee and Nolan McCarthy claim that the source of the greatest angst facing the country “might be seen as the sins of James Madison,” especially because “checks, balances, and federalism are enormous impediments to government action.” That is surely enough to make any reader swallow hard in thinking about the prospects for US democracy. But the editors also sum up the book’s biggest finding on a more hopeful note, suggesting that “the very fragmentation of power that makes our system so difficult to manage and mobilize also serves as a bulwark against democratic erosion and executive aggrandizement” (p. 343).

The authors of the chapters in this wonderful collection remind us that the US experiment has sailed through even tougher seas. The book is a rich, textured, and detailed consideration of the biggest issues facing governance in the United States. It is an important collection of essays by first-rate scholars, a sweeping survey that deserves careful reading by anyone who cares about the country’s political system.

There is a lot jammed into this book that deserves to be carefully unpacked. The chapters are uniformly strong, and each has important insights, built on a careful review of the literature and a thorough examination of the evidence. Indeed, the book is invaluable both as an outline and a core text for courses seeking to help students understand what is really going on under the hood of US politics.

Woven throughout the book are two threads: inequality and the strains that the growing differences between the rich and the poor are putting on the system, and polarization, which challenges the role of political parties and political institutions. These threads create a rich fabric connecting the book’s three major sections: the anxieties of power, influence, and representation (especially with challenges to political parties stemming from the power of business, interest groups, and big money); procedural anxieties (especially about whether Congress has simply broken down and whether political discourse has become dumber); and the anxieties of governance (especially in the effects of polarization on the bureaucracy and policy). With respect to these themes, most of the authors paint a picture of a situation that is bad—but not as bad as might be feared.

In his chapter in the section on the anxieties of power, for example, Anthony S. Chen finds that business influence is surely large, but that there is not strong evidence that the power of big business buys policy outcomes. Rather, it tends to act as a drag on change, enhancing a bias toward the status quo. Daniel Scholzman and Sam Rosenfeld find that the political parties have become hollow, strong at marshaling the support of voters but weak in making nominations, bringing nonvoters to the polls, and framing lucid policies. Minority groups prove remarkably successful in finding ways to force attention to their grievances, Daniel Grillion and Patricia Posey conclude.

The section on procedural anxieties produces “perhaps the most reassuring entries in the volume,” Lee and McCarthy write reassuringly (p. 335). It is hard to craft positive arguments about the role of Congress, but Peter Hanson and Lee Drutman find that Congress works relatively well on budgetary matters, with a sense of deliberation and bipartisanship, even as it otherwise gets sucked into a partisan morass. And is political discourse getting worse, culminating in a “dumbing down” of debate? Kenneth Benoit, Kevin Munger, and Arthur Spirling examine formal communication, ranging from Supreme Court decisions to State of the Union addresses, and find that political discourse is no less sophisticated than it was previously, although their analysis does not dig into the rising role of polarization-inducing tweets and other forms of social media. It is worth considering, for example, how different politics would be if the cap on Twitter posts had been 280 or 560 characters, instead of 140, or if the cloaked world of social media posts was more transparent to more people. This is perhaps the most surprising section of the book, because the authors argue that the forces of decay are not as bad as observers often think.

It is the last section, on governance anxieties, that is the most anxiety producing, with a picture of a national government increasingly falling out of sync with its ability to solve the problems it faces. The increasingly polarized Congress finds itself gridlocked in its capacity to deal with the challenges faced by big programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, Suzanne Mettler and Claire Leavitt contend. The capacity of bureaucracy to tackle big issues is shrinking, David Spence finds in a sweeping and powerful chapter, because its tools (ranging from public law to expertise) are lagging behind. Polarization not only hamstrings administrators but also makes it far more difficult for Congress to provide guidance and to reshape policies in ways that keep up with changing social and economic conditions. Moreover, Nolan McCarthy discovers, these forces of polarization have cascaded down into state governments, which gives them “the enhanced opportunity and incentive to resist federal policy” (p. 323). In the states, increased polarization has brought less divided government, as more states have become locked into either Democratic or Republican majorities. That, McCarthy concludes, may “produce more extreme policy outcomes and more variation in policies across states” (p. 324).

It is worth noting that most of the work in this volume preceded much of the turmoil of the Trump administration, whose full and lasting impact on governance in the United States will take years to sort out. It is very likely, however, that Donald Trump’s legacy will only reinforce some of the biggest anxieties that predated his election, anxieties that are richly analyzed in this book. Inequality has only increased, and fierce partisan conflict has surely deepened the forces of polarization. But despite the inability to provide an historical assessment of the Trump years, Can America Govern Itself? is nevertheless an important reminder that Trump did not create these forces but rather built his success on top of long-existing trends.

That makes this fascinating edited volume an even bigger contribution. It will be impossible to look ahead to the future without understanding how the US political system got to the present. Can America Govern Itself? not only helps us understand the historical roots of our current anxieties but it is also an invaluable guide to where Madison’s grand design has taken us—and to the questions we will need to answer if it is to survive, let alone thrive, into the mid-twenty-first century.