American democracy’s extraordinary capacity for violence.

David Runciman writes that American democracy is an amazing, fascinating, bewildering thing. There has never been anything else like it. Even now, as democracy becomes an ever more familiar feature of our world, there is still nothing like the American version.

During the second half of the 19th century, what fascinated outsiders was American democracy’s extraordinary capacity for violence.

The immediate objection to any story about two hundred years of American democracy is that it’s changed so much that we’re not talking about the same thing anymore. A democracy with slavery is different from one that abolishes it;