The rise of populism is a direct threat to our political, social, and cultural fates, whether it occurs in the White House or in Poland. Populism challenges and pushes into relief the tensions that exist in a democracy; taken to extremes, it tends to presage a slide into flawed democracy and then into authoritarianism. Despite our sanguine belief in the permanence of the U.S. system of governance, according to the annual Democracy Index, we have fallen to number 25 on the list of functional democracies, below Canada, Mauritius, and Uruguay, to name a few.
