How has discrimination changed over time? What does discrimination look like today? This chapter begins by highlighting severe and systematic acts of discrimination throughout American history. It then assesses contemporary discrimination through a range of audit studies and other methods and then delves into individual perceptions of discrimination.

Chapter 3 provides a review of democratic theory, moving from the “minimal conception” of democratic politics to democracy in its representative, constitutional, participatory, deliberative, and epistemic forms. The chapter offers a comparison of where America stands today among the world’s democracies and introduces the question of whether democracy carries the assumption of equality; it also reviews data on inequality throughout American history and on the more recent increase in inequality. We propose the idea that inequality is not extraneous to our democratic politics, but a direct result of it.

In recent years, there has been increasing pressure on corporate entities to engage in moral or ethical decision- making. Given the immense economic and political power of modern corporate entities, it becomes critical to determine the origin point of these ethical decisions, both to ensure that corporations are held responsible for their moral choices and to tether corporate moral decision-making power to the appropriate group, or groups, of human beings. Determining to whom corporate morality should be attributed is not an easy task, however, and requires consideration not just of the people involved in the corporation but also of the role the corporation plays within a representative democracy. Ultimately, inquiry into the attribution of a corporation’s moral judgments may best be seen as fluid and context-dependent. That is, it should examine both the way the corporation is structured and the importance of representation for the moral choices of corporate stakeholders.

The legacy of nineteenth-century constitutionalism hampers the effective realization of democracy in the UK. Bagehot’s eulogizing of the fusion of the executive and legislature now appears to grant far too much power to the government, given the context of parliamentary sovereignty and a ‘first past the post’ electoral system. But democracy is a far richer notion than one which requires merely that power should be exercised by a majority of elected representatives. Democracy also requires that individuals and minorities have certain fundamental protections from majoritarian interests. Democracy in Britain has also been weakened by vagueness as to the role of direct democracy (and how it relates to popular sovereignty) and referendums in the UK. The UK Cabinet Manual (which, absent a codified Constitution, is the closest Britain comes to codifying its constitutional principles) does not specify the role of referendums in British governance, nor suggest that a referendum vote might override other constitutional principles. However, the Brexit referendum, although advisory in status, was nonetheless perceived as binding and implemented. If referendums are to become a more frequent feature of British constitutional practice, there is an urgent need for clear principles regarding their use to be articulated.

This chapter explores the Manichean narrative between political and legal constitutionalism. Examining the rival arguments of Jeremy Waldron and Ronald Dworkin, this chapter argues that we need to move beyond Manicheanism in order to capture the multi-institutional modes of rights protection in contemporary constitutional democracies. It argues that both Dworkin and Waldron succumb to the nirvana fallacy, a fallacy we need to shake off if we are to devise realistic accounts of how the key institutions act, counteract, and interact in a constitutional democracy. The chapter also puts pressure on the notorious ’counter-majoritarian difficulty’, arguing that we need counter-majoritarian checks, not only in the name of rights, but in the name of democracy as well. This chapter defends the idea of ’mediated majoritarianism’. Finally, it turns to the ongoing schism between political versus legal constitutionalism in UK public law, arguing that it suffers from similar flaws to the broader Manichean narrative. Instead of a zero-sum game between courts and legislatures, the branches of government can interact in mutually respectful and supportive ways.

The British Constitution possesses many distinctive features: from its uncodified character and lack of entrenchment to the status as ordinary statutes rather than ‘higher’ law of those written rules that comprise it. However, all these features can be regarded as manifestations of its most distinguishing characteristic – its quality as a predominantly ‘political’ rather than a ‘legal’ constitution.1 Whereas codification, and those other features that the British Constitution notoriously lacks, comprise essential elements of a legal form of constitutionalism, their absence has traditionally been deemed necessary for the integrity of the UK’s political constitution.

Individual decisions have to be aggregated to make group decisions. Markets aggregate decisions by consumers and producers into prices that might reflect social values. But markets allow and generate inequalities, and many aspects of human well-being and the environment do not have market prices. In large societies, direct voting on some policies is possible but most voting is for representatives who become part of a larger policy system. Deliberation is an ideal that underpins most justifications for democracy. It can be linked effectively to scientific assessments at the local to regional level. Ways to use deliberation at the national or global scales require further experimentation. In the United States, high levels of polarization challenge the idea of public deliberation. New technologies will create further challenges for sustainability decisions. Identifying strategies to move forward requires understanding variation in the public and drawing on strategies for nonviolent social change and conflict resolution.

This chapter reconstructs the content of the three principles that play a key role in the constitution and the disciplining of public power in the European Union: ’sound money’, economic freedoms(s) and ’free’ competition. Such a trio is the fundamental parameter of the validity of all national norms, at the same time that the division of labour between supranational decision-making processes favours their reflection in European legislation, while constituting a major obstacle to efforts at approving regulations and directives promoting alternative socio-economic visions. The fundamental norms of the European Union also include norms and practices that shift decision-making powers from the supranational legislature to (some) private actors, (some) technocrats and (some) national governments. The result is the affirmation of private property as the sovereign value of European law, which requires that supranational public power becomes a powerful external constraint that once and at the same time constitutes, disciplines and fragments (national) public power.

We live in a period of hope and fear for democracy. The fears are top of mind, with surges of authoritarian populism in most countries in Europe as well as most developed democracies, and a series of high-profile setbacks for the project of the European Union (Chapters 2 and 13). In contrast to earlier challenges, the threats to the democratic project are not so much other forms of government, but rather mismatches between the problems that peoples and societies face, and the capacities of representative democracies to address them. Where the mismatch becomes a gulf, mechanisms long associated with democratic government, particularly competitive elections, have become a vehicle for authoritarian populists to undermine other, equally necessary institutions, including those associated with the rule of law and the rights that define and empower democratic citizenship (Galston 2018; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Mounk 2018; Diamond 2020). Although the patterns vary by country, in places where representative democracy has been long established we are seeing elected leaders with autocratic tendencies, using the very tools central to the democratic project to erode democratic institutions. Democracies, we fear, may be eroding precisely through the electoral institutions that have come to define them (Chapter 13).

Is populism a threat to representative democracy? Is populism a reason for anxieties about democratic political systems? Or is the rise of populism a source of democratization, since it gives anxieties about the future a voice? In the self-description of leaders of contemporary populist parties, the response to the last question is positive. For instance, Alexander Gauland, co-chair of the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) at that time, argued 2018 against the dominance of a globalized elite and portrayed the AfD as the real representative of the German people competing democratically in elections (Gauland 2018). In his view, AfD supporters are democrats fighting against the impositions on national sovereignty by cosmopolitan elites.

Chapter 5 turns to the democratic defences of the free state. Whereas the aristocratic portrayals began immediately after the establishment of the free state, a democratic argument for the free state started to be developed only towards the end of 1649. Soon, however, numerous pamphleteers argued that the free state was a democracy, and, for them, it was a good thing too. This is one of the first times in early-modern European political thought that democracy was openly defended as a viable constitutional form. The aristocrats saw the free state as a golden mean between monarchy and democracy, but the democrats distinguished between a good and bad democracy and argued that their constitutional preference was a good democracy, which was a mean between monarchy and a bad democracy or anarchy. Moreover, both sides wrote in support of the free state and thus defended the supremacy of a unicameral representative institution. For the democrats, a bad democracy was the people’s direct rule, but a good democracy was based on a representative institution. The upshot is that this was the first time in the history of political thought that democracy was conceived in representative terms.

Throughout this book, I have maintained that populism and constitutionalism, and in particular post–WWII constitutionalism (of which Italy is a prime example, as seen in Chapter 2) cannot be reconciled, due to the exclusionary, holistic and majoritarian nature of populism. As we saw in Chapter 1, this does not mean that populism and constitutionalism cannot have something in common, namely the importance of emotional reactions and the distrust of political power.

Americans know the story of democracy: how the Framers built a government with branches that would check and balance, that would derive its authority from sovereign citizens, filtered and refined by their elected representatives. Americans may refer to our system as “democracy” but the representative republican framework provided by the Framers ensured the safe democratization of our country over time. This well-rehearsed story frames American democracy as a bequest from the Framers. Yet this powerful founding story is a victor’s tale, designed to erase from collective historical memory a very real battle with a robust alternative model of democratic theory and practice that was flourishing – much to the Framers’ consternation – in the early nation. This alternative democracy originated in the daily practices of ordinary colonists. Their vernacular democracy generated and motored revolution; and though the political elite embraced this participatory and equalitarian practice, they later pulled away, seeking in their words to “tame” the democratic enthusiasm and power of ordinary American citizens even as they drew on that power (renamed “sovereignty”) to authorize the representative federal republicanism they offered as a containment device. Knowing about vernacular democracy enables readers to see its record in the literature of the early United States.

In this chapter, I will analyse a case study that is crucial to exploring the way in which populists understand identity politics, while in subsequent chapters, I will investigate the perspective of politics of immediacy. The concepts of mimetism and parasitism presented in Chapter 1 will be tested, and the notion of sovereignism (‘sovranismo’) – frequently alluded to in the Italian debate and elsewhere – will be used as a case study.

In this chapter, I shall investigate the aspect of the politics of immediacy, exploring how populists understand the referendum. Following an idea endorsed by Davide Casaleggio, the mastermind of the Rousseau platform,1 former Minister Riccardo Fraccaro2 denounced the insufficiency of classic representative democracy and stressed the need for more direct democracy, especially with the advent of new technologies.

In this chapter, I shall undertake an in-depth analysis of how in-office Italian populists understand parliaments. Before going into the technicalities of constitutional law however, it is necessary to frame the issue in a broader perspective and mention the kind of politics that the Five Star Movement has in mind.

‘We will open up parliament like a can of tuna fish’.1 This is what Grillo said before the general election of 2013, when the Five Star Movement obtained its first representatives in the parliament. In the rhetoric of the movement, direct democracy is frequently understood as inevitably enriched by the use of new technology and in the long run, according to the Five Star Movement, this will reduce the centrality of parliaments.

Almost all economists, left and right, love markets. Studies show that markets are more efficient than government because, in the private sector, managers and owners reap the rewards when they efficiently respond to consumer demand. The power of markets increases when, as in the modern world, the uses of resources have multiplied beyond measure.

Dedicated policy professionals are focused on improving their programs. Economists are more likely to also focus on opportunity cost, the damage to other programs when too many resources go to any single one. They are aware that “setting priorities” should not mean our top priority gets all the resources. In some absolute sense, safety is more important than recreation. But we should not abolish all youth baseball leagues, because a child is very rarely struck in the head by the ball.

Despite their frequent usefulness, economists place unbalanced emphasis on narrow self-interest as both compelling motive and route to happiness. Competing disciplines can lead to a deeper perspective. Positive psychology reminds us that friends and family lead to more happiness than wealth. That discipline focuses on admiration and elevation, as does the discipline of virtue ethics. These very different disciplines also agree on the importance of gratitude; it is both a virtue and a feature of the road to happiness. We should be grateful for our economy, which has led us to income per capita that is 25 times what it was in 1820. Liberty sparks our economic dynamism and is also at the heart of our constitutional democracy. In difficult times in particular, we should be grateful for our freedom.