American democracy is at a precipice, experts say. And time is ticking | CBC Radio

There's the ongoing impact of disinformation and hyperpolarization, as well as a sizable segment of the public that now questions the results of the 2020 election.

Public trust in the government is at a near-historic low, polling shows, and 43 per cent of respondents in one poll said they think a civil war could be likely in the next decade. .

Roughly 200 Republicans running for office on November's ticket maintain the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

"There's a great passage in [Ernest] Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises where one person is asked, 'How did you go bankrupt?'" said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass. .

Lessig has been warning about threats facing American democracy for years.

This kind of political inequality threatens democracy, Lessig said.

But combined with a polarized media and calls to overturn the 2020 election, he calls the current landscape "as bad as it gets.".

Although some Americans fear the country may be headed toward another civil war, experts are quick to point out the landscape looks very different than it did during the lead-up to the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865. .

Omar El Akkad, a journalist and the author of the 2017 novel, American War, which imagines a second civil war set in the near future, notes some ideas from the conflict never really went away.

The billboard is one example of how ideologies promoting the disintegration of the country are allowed to persist, El Akkad said, from secession to insurrection. .

Lessig said this is a decisive moment in the nation's history.

"I think the next four years will determine whether, 50 years from now, people will look back on this as a bad moment in American history, the way you might [have] looked at the Civil War as a bad moment in American history," said Lessig.

"Or look back on it as the moment when America's democracy perished.".

Lessig said he fears a situation where election results are reversed by state legislatures or secretaries of state in heavily gerrymandered swing states due to unfounded allegations of fraud?

"If these techniques get deployed in 2024 to subvert the democratic results, it's easy to see how that spins into violence in a way that we have no clear mechanism for tamping down," Lessig said.

"And so the question is, will people be organized to achieve and organize themselves to achieve a multiracial, more equitable democracy in the 21st century?" said Woodly.

Before coming to journalism, she earned a PhD in American history and lived in the U.S