Americans have a system of government that is specifically designed so that one guy can’t screw the whole thing up. It hasn’t worked out that way.
Over the last hundred-plus years, we’ve centralized more and more power in the hands of the president, and the success of our system depends more and more on the judgment and character of one man. If the judgment and character of that person is lacking, they can make a big mess very quickly.
If you’re a Republican, you were probably keenly aware of that a couple of years ago, and if you’re a Democrat, you’re probably keenly aware right now.
Who should we blame for runaway presidential power? Well, if you take our founding documents seriously, you shouldn’t blame the presidents. Chief executives are natural predators. Grasping for more power is simply in their nature. If you want to keep them from getting stronger and stronger, then someone has to go out and stop them.
Congress: ‘Your Primary Suspect’
The Constitution sets up several such someones to stop the president, but the big one is Congress, and if you’re going to blame someone for screwing up, Congress has to be your primary suspect, because it has a lot of the best tools for constraining the president.
The president needs the Senate’s consent to appoint most of the major officers in the executive branch. Congress can investigate what the executive is doing and potentially embarrass the president with what it finds. Congress can kick the president out of office if half of the House and two-thirds of the Senate are on board. And, most importantly of all, Congress has the right to make laws that tell the president what he must do, what he can do, and what he can’t do.
The problem is that Congress’s trump card of passing laws is not as not effective as it looks on paper. When Congress passes a law to rein in the president, the president can veto it. And to override that veto, you need 2/3 of the Senate and 2/3 of the House. Remember, impeaching the president requires only 2/3 of the Senate and half of the House. So, mechanically, it’s actually easier to kick the president out of office than to pass a law that reins in his power.
For practical purposes, this means that if the president makes a power grab, Congress can’t stop him unless there is a broad, bipartisan consensus. Members of the president’s own party need to be willing to tangle with him, and the problem with that is that it’s political suicide.
Also Responsible: Voters who Tune Out Congress
The president is the face of the party. Most voters have only a dim idea of who their member of Congress is and what they’re doing. Pop quiz: Do you know the name of the person who represents you in the House of Representatives? Can you name or describe any bill that that person introduced or cosponsored? Probably the biggest vote in the 2023-2024 cycle was the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the bill that made spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Do you know how your representative voted on that bill?
Congressional elections are rarely decided based on how voters feel about that member of Congress, because they usually don’t know enough to have strong feelings.
The only politician that they really know is the president, so insofar as their decision about whether to vote and who to vote for is at all predicated on what’s happening in Washington, it’s usually predicated on how they feel about the president.
If the president is popular and successful, members of Congress from their party will do well too. And if the president is going down, a lot of the party’s congresspeople are going down with him.
If you want a great illustration, just look at the last time a party took on their president in a sustained and serious way. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, congressional Republicans joined with Democrats to force Richard Nixon to resign and pass landmark legislation that seriously curbed presidential power. Then, in the 1974 elections, voter outrage over Watergate produced one of the biggest Democratic landslides in history. Ironically, but maybe not surprisingly given how little voters know about what their members are doing, this landslide swept away quite a few Republicans who had played important roles in getting rid of Nixon.
So you can’t really take a swing at a president from your party without hurting yourself and your whole party. And I think that’s why you see a lot of people who clearly don’t like what the president is doing keep quiet and don’t do anything to stop him.
Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, John Thune, and a lot of other senior, powerful congressional Republicans pretty obviously never cared for Trump. But I think they calculated that an open conflict between Trump and congressional Republicans would sink the whole party and hand the country over to the Democrats, and they weren’t willing to do that. If you want to know why congressional Democrats continued to insist that Biden was fit to lead even when it was obvious that he wasn’t, same deal.
I understand the appeal of blaming American political dysfunction on Congress. But I don’t think that gets at the root causes. They’re responding to the political incentives that we the voters create.
The Founding Fathers assumed that the people would feel more connected with their member of Congress than with the president. We don’t. We’re not interested. Our fixation on the president has put Congress in a tough spot.
If you want to understand how we’ve moved to this system where we depend so much on the judgment and character of one man and how we can get out of it, I think you have to consider that the problem is us.
This expert opinion piece by Christian Fong is based on his presentation at the second 2025 teach-in organized by University of Michigan faculty examining “US Democracy in Peril: National and Global Implications.” The event was held March 19, 2025, in the U-M Chemistry Building. Dr. Fong specializes in the study of the United States Congress. Before coming to Michigan, he was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, where he served as an economic policy advisor to Senator Mike Lee. Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies contributed to the development of this post. Read more on the recent teach-ins from the CPS Blog.
Democracy in the United States is in decline. This backsliding is part of a global trend that political scientists refer to as a “reverse wave”: For the first time in 50 years, there are more countries moving toward autocracy than democracy. Historically, this reverse wave has distinctive features: It’s distinguished by democratically elected leaders seeking to expand and centralize their power, following a shared playbook that undermines both institutional checks and balances and pathways for societal resistance. So what’s happening in the United States is not unique. But it’s also not inevitable, and global examples can provide some guidance on how to fight effectively for democracy.
Democratic Decline
Let’s start with some evidence.
A democracy is a political regime in which rulers are selected via free, fair, and competitive elections and exercise power via limits set by guarantees of human and civil rights, and by institutional checks and balances.
To measure and compare the health of democracies across nations over time, political scientists use a robust set of indices that track core features of democracy– indicators like political participation, electoral processes, and civil liberties.
These indices vary somewhat in their metrics and weighting strategies, but they show a consistent pattern. The three figures compiled by the Brookings Institution below show some of the main indices used in comparative politics to evaluate US democracy, and their contours each show a downward trajectory. They indicate that democracy in the United States has declined since roughly 2010, with a sharper decline since 2017. The Economist has ranked the US as a “flawed democracy” since 2016. Experts agree: Freedom and democracy in the US are in decline.
While this may seem academic, we can observe democratic decline in our daily lives when we see elections becoming less free, fair, and competitive; checks and balances being eroded, and human or civil rights being trampled upon.
The Reverse Wave
This democratic decline is part of a trend that is global and pervasive.
More than a third of the world population now lives under authoritarian rule. And over the past 50 years, the number of autocratizing countries has dramatically increased while the number of democratizing countries has dwindled. At the end of 2023, democratization was occurring in 18 countries, representing 5 percent of the world’s population; autocratization was occurring in 42 countries, representing 35% of the world’s population. We’ve seen surges away from democracy before– “reverse waves” occurred between World War I and World War II, and again between 1962 and 1973. But the reverse wave that the United States is now a part of is different from those we have seen before for three main reasons:
Today’s democratic reversals are happening in mature, consolidated democracies that are expected to be secure, including the US, India, Brazil and Greece, as well as newer democracies that were once considered stable like Hungary and Poland.
Some 70 to 90% of these global shifts have been driven not by military coups but by executive aggrandizement – leaders actively undermining checks and balances on their power and the capacity of opponents– with tactics such as packing courts; impeaching and intimidating judges; sowing disinformation; attacking the media; labelling civil society organizations as a threat, and finding ways to prevent people from mobilizing peacefully.
Democratically elected, autocratic leaders are using a shared playbook to expand their authority, and sharing tactics to serve common goals. Not by accident, the plans laid out in Project 2025 mirror those implemented by Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
Hope for democracy
So will this trend continue? Is there any hope? If the tools that we would use are being deliberately eroded or undermined, what tools do we have to guard against democratic backsliding?
Countries like Brazil, Poland, Bolivia and Moldova provide some cues on what has worked to halt or reverse backsliding.
Autocratization can be fought when five key factors work against it in conjunction.
Democratic preservation relies on institutional and societal pushback. The institutional mechanisms come from other branches of government standing up to the erosion of democracy. We see the judiciary in the United States trying very hard, even if lately ignored, to enforce due process and push back against illegal and unconstitutional actions.
Coalitions have been critical for unifying opposition to autocratic rulers. We have recently seen for the first time broad coalitions of political parties and trade unions across the political spectrum demonstrating against the populist Orbán regime in Hungary, with tens of thousands gathering to protest this month in Budapest. Large-scale popular mobilization is also a necessary but not sufficient means of defending democracy.
Elections– opportunities to vote incumbents who abuse their power out of office– can be critical events. But what happens when the incumbent loses the election but refuses to step down? In this case it can be critical to have international support. In the case of Brazil, the US and other countries honored the outcome of the legitimately won democratic election. The question is, if that happened in the United States, would there be foreign power to back up the opposition against a defiant incumbent? This could prove crucial and necessary for the future of our democracy.
This post is based on a presentation by Pauline Jones given at the second 2025 teach-in organized by University of Michigan faculty examining “US Democracy in Peril: National and Global Implications.” The event was held March 19, 2025, in the U-M Chemistry Building. Pauline Jones is a Professor of Political Science, a Research Professor at the Center for Political Studies, and the Edie N. Goldenberg Endowed Director for the Michigan in Washington Program. She is an expert on politics in the former Soviet Union (including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia) and on assessing the impact of mass protest in authoritarian regimes. She regularly teaches PoliSci140: Introduction to Comparative Politics. This post was developed by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies with contributions from Pauline Jones.
Faculty from the University of Michigan offered their expertise on these issues at a February “teach-in” panel at Angell Hall to help students understand how recent policy changes have been made and why they matter for democracy.
So how did we get to this point? And where do electoral politics go from here?
At the February teach-in, political scientist Robert Mickey highlighted the role of America’s history of white supremacy and focused on the story of party elites, and the evolution of the Republican Party “from the mainstream, conservative party committed to democracy, into something very different.”
Republican Radicalization
Robert Mickey’s account began with the observation that US democracy is young, given its slow, historical turn to secure voting rights for all adults and the civil rights and liberties needed to make elections free and fair. Following the Civil War, efforts to build a biracial democracy were eventually turned back, with Jim Crow segregation in much of the country underwritten by state-sponsored violence. As Mickey describes in his book, Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944-1972, the 11 states of the Confederacy remained enclaves of authoritarian rule, sustained by the federal democracy and the national Democratic Party, with Democrats “maintaining a stranglehold on nearly every elected office in the region for seven decades.” America’s history of racist and xenophobic appeals to white voters should make the current wave of party-led democratic backsliding less surprising, said Mickey.
The rooster icon and banner, “White Supremacy for the Right,” served as the emblem of the Alabama Democratic Party from 1904 to 1966.
The current threat to American democracy has links to the authoritarianism of the preceding century but with novel features. Focusing on the last one-half century of stable democratic rule, Mickey argued that three trends have combined in recent decades to lead us to today’s challenging moment.
The first is elite polarization. The move of culturally conservative Southern whites to the Republican Party in the 1970s widened partisan disagreement, and that party’s members of Congress have become much more extreme over time. Following their elites, growing numbers of voters have viewed the opposing party with increasing social antipathy, hatred, and distrust. And with Congress passing fewer bills every year, voters have become more tolerant of antidemocratic behavior by their own party’s politicians, Mickey said.
Second, increasing economic inequality over recent decades has motivated the rich to defend their wealth, principally through massive campaign contributions. This “wealth defense” has transformed the Republican party; its mega-donors have demanded radical cuts to the regulation of business, the decimation of popular government programs, and the nomination of judges who support these goals.
Neither of these trends alone necessarily threaten democracy, said Mickey, but they have dangerously combined with “a growing panic about the country’s ‘ownership’ among millions of white Americans.” That panic is worsened by the country’s approaching “majority minority” milestone and the “reaction of many whites to the mere fact of Obama’s presidency.”
The result: Republicans, constrained by their donors from changing their economic appeals to white voters, have opted to invoke cultural issues. The precursor to MAGA is the Tea Party revolt of grassroots conservatives more than a decade ago who “talked a good game about being upset about budget deficits and debt” but were actually much more united on and energized by the issue of immigration, said Mickey.
“These trends have combined to radicalize the Republican Party into an organization that’s no longer committed to democracy,” said Mickey. “Right now, it’s an uneasy combination of white nationalism and libertarianism.”
We now see evidence that the party is backing away from democracy in several ways: Since 2000, state-level Republicans have worked to make it harder to vote, Mickey said. Second, a large majority of House Republicans refused to certify Biden’s election, even after the invasion of the Capitol. Third, Republicans now in Congress have refused to conduct oversight of the executive when their own party leader occupies the White House.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Looking ahead, Mickey closed on the point that an organizationally “hollow” Democratic party – in his view, a “feckless gerontocracy” that failed to strengthen even modestly the Voting Rights Act in 2022 – can’t save U.S. democracy. Even more important, in a two-party system, both parties have to be committed to democratic rule. As political scientist Adam Przeworski tells us, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” For Przeworski, democracies remain stable only when its major parties accept the results of elections, content to pursue office another day.
“Republican [candidates] who lose their races are increasingly likely not to concede,” said Mickey. “Thus, the Republican party has to remake itself for American democracy to be safe.”
“That will probably require multiple defeats to reset their incentives,” said Mickey. A party committed to democracy must be strong enough internally “to push out their extremists: The Nazis, the Kanyes, the Jewish-space-laser believers, and they need to take their oversight responsibility seriously…. Democracy-loving conservatives don’t have the party home that they deserve, and they need to rebuild one immediately.”
Robert Mickey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Vincent Hutchings is the Hanes Walton Jr. Collegiate Professor in Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies. Both are affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
This post is part of a series that focuses on the 2025 teach-in held at Angell Hall that also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965. Recordings of the talks are available on YouTube.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Robert Mickey. The second of two complimentary posts on this topic, Vincent Hutchings shared the key insight in Pt. 1 that U.S. election outcomes often hinge on attitudes toward salient social groups, and, especially, Black Americans.
Faculty from the University of Michigan offered their expertise on these issues at a “teach-in” panel at Angell Hall this month. The aim was to help students understand how recent policy changes have been made and, in the words of organizer Josh Pasek, “why those processes matter for whether or not we remain a democracy.”
So how did we get to this point?
This is the first of two posts that will answer this question.
Teach-in presentations by political scientists Vincent Hutchings and Robert Mickey gave complimentary accounts: Speaking on American public opinion, Hutchings shared the key insight that U.S. election outcomes often hinge on attitudes toward salient social groups, and, especially, Black Americans.
Mickey’s talk, the subject of our forthcoming post (Part 2), focused on the story of party elites, and the evolution of the Republican Party “from the mainstream, conservative party committed to democracy, into something different.”
The Racial Divide
Decades of research on American public opinion may help us to understand the results of this election and others, Hutchings said, by correcting a common assumption that Americans pay attention to politics and cast votes based on ideology and policies.
“American voters are woefully uninformed about politics,” Hutchings said. Only about 20% of voters are familiar with the ideological terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ and a significant minority – maybe even a majority, depending on how you count– don’t know which party is the more conservative party. “You might think that is hyperbole,” said Hutchings. “I assure you, it is not.”
The perspective they do employ, said Hutchings, is one that focuses on “salient social groups.”
(Of note, the American National Election Studies, which has surveyed voters in every election since 1948, is a leading source of what we know about the U.S. electorate; Hutchings was a former principal investigator on the project.)
Politicians play to grievances, fears, and stereotypes, leveraging divisions based on race, religion, gender, and sexuality to build coalitions.
“Perhaps the most salient social group– certainly the most persistent and consistent in terms of its political impact– has been racial groups: In particular, attitudes about Black Americans,” said Hutchings. “It is, after all, the issue around which we had the bloodiest war in American history, the Civil War. It’s the group around which we had the largest social movement in the 20th century: The Civil Rights Movement. And it’s the issue around which we had the largest social movement of the 21st century: Black Lives Matter.”
“The racial divide is the biggest divide in American politics,” said Hutchings. It is the foundation of our current party system that, since the 1960s, has pitted one party that was “mostly the champion of civil rights, sometimes reluctantly,” against the party that was not.
“I’m not here to make a moral claim,” said Hutchings, “but I am here to make a factual claim that race is the chief dividing point in American politics. …If we want to get a sense of how we arrived at this point we’re at now in our political collective lives, we can’t ignore race.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
To win future elections, Democrats would need to mobilize non-white voters without alienating white voters, while Republicans will confront the “diminishing number of angry white men,” said Hutchings. We can expect politicians to continue to prey on social divisions in the electorate: “They’re going to keep doing it as long as you keep responding to it,” he said.
Vincent Hutchings is the Hanes Walton Jr. Collegiate Professor in Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies. Robert Mickey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mickey, Hutchings, and Pasek are all affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
This post is part of a series that focuses on the 2025 teach-in held at Angell Hall that also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965. Recordings of the talks are available on YouTube.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Vincent Hutchings and Robert Mickey.
The second administration of President Donald Trump has opened with a cyclone of directives that many political scientists view as a threat to American democracy. The shuttering of departments and entities created by Congress, the attempt to shift the Congressional “power of the purse” to the executive branch, and the firing of Inspectors General charged with oversight of the executive are examples among a dizzying set of actions that have raised alarms and, in many cases, been challenged in the courts. Most recently, Trump signed a sweeping executive order seeking to bring agencies such as the FTC and SEC, set up by Congress to act independently, under more direct control of the president.
Congress is designed, among other things, to write laws and oversee the actions of the federal bureaucracy to make sure that agencies execute the laws faithfully. Under the control of a GOP firmly in the grips of Donald Trump, Congress has been virtually silent as the president seeks to expand executive power at the expense of congressional authority.
Political scientists Charlotte Cavaillé and Robert Mickey, both affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, shared their insights on Congress’s “missing” push-back at last week’s “teach-in” panel organized by Josh Pasek and faculty to help students understand the democratic process.
Talks presented by Cavaillé and Mickey suggested three reasons why Republicans in Congress have declined to resist. First, they support the policy goals; second, they aren’t worried about popular backlash; and last, they fear for their electability (and possibly their well-being) if they defy Trump.
Cavaillé opened with the argument that Trump 2.0 is using very popular policy goals to clash with the courts.
“Trump is a very smart politician, so he’s focusing on extremely popular goals,” said Cavaillé. The downsizing of federal government and the slashing of foreign aid are such widely supported policy goals that legislators might view them as ends that justify the means.
Second, members of Congress worry about backlash when it comes to supporting policy. Republicans in Congress will worry about backlash only if the consequences affect their own voter base and are “large, certain, and traceable,” Cavaillé said. “…Right now it’s such a mess that it’s hard to understand even what’s going on.”
In a talk that described how political history since the Civil War brought us to this moment, Robert Mickey suggested a third explanation for Congressional abdication: Unprecedented fear of reprisal.
“Congressional Republicans [now] refuse to conduct oversight of the executive when their own party is present,” said Mickey. On one front, they are pressured by the power Trump and Elon Musk hold to back a primary challenger to defeat them. Worse, “as the ones who are about to retire keep telling us, they’re also fearful of the threats of violence that they and their families are receiving from the current of violence on the extreme right,” said Mickey. “So it kind of is understandable that they’re being quiet.”
An article this week by Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, made the same point: “The most underestimated element in the current crisis of our democracy is the degree to which many politicians fear for their lives if they do anything forthright to cross or defy President Trump.”
Charlotte Cavaillé is an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Robert Mickey is an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. They are both affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research.
The teach-in held at Angell Hall was attended by an estimated 400-500 students seeking to learn about U.S. political institutions. The event also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965, also at Angell Hall. Participating scholars included Kenneth Lowande, Vincent Hutchings, Josh Pasek, Richard Primus, Salomé Viljoen, Jenna Bednar, Julian Davis Mortenson, and Devin Judge-Lord. Most talks are now available to watch on YouTube.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Charlotte Cavaillé and Robert Mickey.
Over the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders – more than 70 of them– that include controversial directives on immigration, the slashing of foreign aid, and the reshaping of the federal government. Organizations defending the rule of law have sounded the alarm that the orders breach constitutional separation of powers and violate due process, and many have already been challenged in court. Is this storm of executive orders unique? And in the end, will this strategy succeed? Kenneth Lowande, a political scientist affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, is an expert on executive power, and the author of the recently published book, ““False Front: The Failed Promise Of Presidential Power In A Polarized Age.”
As part of a “teach-in” panel organized by Josh Pasek and faculty to help students understand what’s happening, Lowande argued that the executive orders of the Trump administration are unprecedented because they are illegal power grabs by design, and that their success depends critically on compliance.
A bit of background: Executive orders are presidential instructions that direct executive branch agencies and staff to take specific actions. Presidents often use executive orders to kick off their first 100 days in office to revoke executive orders of previous administrations and to signal they’ll make good on the promises of their campaign.
Lowande has argued that it is normal for politicians to pursue executive actions, even when they know they will fail. Unilateral solutions are often inefficient, short-lived, or empty, but presidents issue the orders to put on a compelling show for key constituencies. It is also normal, says Lowande, for presidents– Republicans and Democrats– to use ambiguous laws to change policy.
What we are seeing in 2025 is different in two ways, Lowande says. The first difference, he argues, is that political wins for the Trump administration are the first and most important objective.
“Today, they’ve hastened the expansion of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which will cost orders of magnitude more to construct than normal. They released reservoir water in California for no conceivable purpose. They attempted to freeze all federal spending without a good warning of preparation. Any president could have done those things,” said Lowande. “But for the second Trump administration, making political wins seems to be the point. The volume and pace [of executive action] is designed to give you the impression that Trump can do anything.”
The second difference, says Lowande, is that the executive orders appear to be designed to be illegal. “President Trump today is not fundamentally different than he was eight years ago,” said Lowande. “He doesn’t have different ideas about policy. The main difference is that he’s surrounded by people who will sign off on actions even when they suspect that their actions might later be determined to be unlawful.”
In a statement issued last week, the nonpartisan American Bar Association cited attacks on constitutionally protected birthright citizenship; the dismantling of USAID; attempts to criminalize those who support lawful programs to eliminate bias and enhance diversity, and the summary dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress as examples of “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself.”
To take effect, an executive order must be “founded on the authority of the president derived from the Constitution or statute.” And to be exercised, an executive order must in the end be carried out by a bureaucrat. The Trump administration has opened the game with a strategy of moving first and furiously with orders that are legally risky. The enforcement of those orders may in turn be costly: Opening up dozens of different policy processes has the potential to tax the time and energy of staff. According to Lowande, we can assume that the administration hopes the federal workforce will follow those orders without being forced.
“The success of President Trump’s executive actions depends on people believing,” said Lowande. “It depends on courts, businesses, this university and other organizations acting as if the president actually has the power that he claims to.”
Media narratives that describe the president steamrolling Washington are effectively creating the narrative the President and his advisors need for their strategy to be successful, said Lowande.
An opposing strategy would depend on accurate knowledge about the limitations of executive power. The opposition would need to force the administration to use its energy to make people comply with their directives. And in the face of risk, the people asked to comply would need to draw on their courage.
Kenneth Lowande is an Associate Professor of Political Science, Associate Professor of Public Policy (by courtesy), and a Faculty Associate at the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research.
The teach-in held at Angell Hall during last week’s snowstorm was attended by an estimated 400-500 students seeking to learn about U.S. political institutions. The event also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965, also at Angell Hall.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Kenneth Lowande.
This expert opinion piece by Christian Fong is based on his presentation at the second 2025 teach-in organized by University of Michigan faculty examining “US Democracy in Peril: National and Global Implications.” The event was held March 19, 2025, in the U-M Chemistry Building. Dr. Fong specializes in the study of the United States Congress. Before coming to Michigan, he was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, where he served as an economic policy advisor to Senator Mike Lee. Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies contributed to the development of this post. Read more on the recent teach-ins from the CPS Blog.
This post is based on a presentation by Pauline Jones given at the second 2025 teach-in organized by University of Michigan faculty examining “US Democracy in Peril: National and Global Implications.” The event was held March 19, 2025, in the U-M Chemistry Building. Pauline Jones is a Professor of Political Science, a Research Professor at the Center for Political Studies, and the 
