What is so chilling and heartbreaking about this documentary is that it literally is “democracy  in action.” Whereas we might think a third grade class monitor election would be an opportunity for an innocent, good faith run-through of an idealized democratic process with low stakes and ample chances for kids to develop their self-confidence, public speaking skills, and interest in leadership, what happens instead is a ruthless simulation of the unpleasant realities of electoral politics as they exist in practice, even in countries who could reasonably claim to be far more democratic than China. The election has it all: an instant gravitation toward negative advertising, the relentless necessity of opposition research, various methodologies of internal polling, strategic voting in a three way race where one candidate is largely written off, a presidential-style emphasis of personality over policy, corrupt patronage promises to win votes, and the influence of corporate money and lobbying (in the form of Luo Lei’s interfering parents) that only serves to reproduce systemic class inequalities already embedded in society in the political system.

Also reinforcing societal inequities: the vicious and organized intimidation Xu Xiaofei receives before she even begins to campaign, the way Cheng Cheng condescends to her in debate, and way her meaningless personal habits (eating slowly) are weaponized against her; in short, all of the barriers that face women who would participate in politics manifest here, and if this is how little girls with aspirations to leadership are treated, the lack of gender proportionality in government, both in China and throughout the world, comes as no surprise.

All of this taken together, and Luo Lei’s victory is not much of a surprise; the advantages of incumbency, his powerful backers, and a campaign of bribery and intimidation prove to be enough to for him to win in a landslide. As no less hallowed a democracy as the United States has shown, a democracy with a poisonous political culture is in no way immune to legitimizing a leader with violent and authoritarian impulses.

While the prospect of American democracy’s possible decline and potential collapse have gained traction over the last decade, and even more so over the last year, the flaws that are currently metastasizing also reveal that American democracy was never a mythical ideal to begin with, and that its built-in contradictions have plagued it throughout its history. While the structure of the constitution has been vital in reproducing institutions and transferring power, the content of that constitution as originally conceived was fraught with the ramifications of building a liberal democracy while maintaining a violently illiberal slave economy. The original compromises of the constitutional convention, from the bicameral legislature to the three-fifths compromise to the Electoral College, all stem from the necessity to capitulate political power to an inherently undemocratic slaveholding south, and that geographic tension has long been the defining divide of partisan politics (political parties, incidentally, were a feature the founders failed to anticipate). The abolition of slavery was only possible with the total breakdown of democracy in a bloody civil war, the subsequent protection of black rights only possible while the South was militarily occupied and the Confederate elites disenfranchised. Periods of consensus and low polarization inevitably relied on compromises with illiberal policies; the Gilded Age allowed terror to sweep the South, the New Deal Coalition codified welfare for whites only. And our current hyper-polarization stems largely from the rise of the post-Reagan right, a backlash against the open embrace of Civil Rights that led to the first black president being succeeded by a man who equivocates on the evils of white supremacy. The question, then, is if American liberal democracy can ever survive without sacrificing a society that is liberal for all, or if those invested in white supremacy will see it fall before letting that happen.

The Grocer and the Chief’s presence in a 1955 issue of Harper’s magazine is an interesting example of how traditional journalism can supplement social science (in this case, surveys) in capturing idiosyncratic realities and the larger trends they potentially represent. The narrative style is deeply immersive, focusing on the physical details of Lerner’s journey and interviews (complete with illustration), and grounds its narration firmly in the lived experiences of the individuals the journalist interacts with, even as the article is framed in such a way as to illuminate a broader historical transformation. The conflict between tradition and modernity is complicated by the relationship each subject has to the fluid history in which they are living, and certain conventions of bitter intergenerational conflict are not followed because the human beings being interviewed are fleshed out in ways that go beyond broad-stroke archetypes. That complexity doesn’t dilute the implications for the larger cultural context so much as clarify and enhance it; the modernization of the Turkish state is a not a discretely defined process that will provoke a universal reaction, but a set of evolving circumstances based on dynamic systems of politics that has a unique and nuanced set of effects on both those individuals who represent traditional power structures and those whose professions are harbingers of an emergent cultural status quo. That this piece of long-form journalism, itself responding to a data-driven study, is able to illuminate the intersections of the quantitatively different but fundamentally co-dependent time scales of human life and political history is a testament to the effectiveness of multidisciplinary works that blend academic and popular media to try to better understand the world.