Williams: Inequality, Meritocracy, and Privilege: Some D.C. Private Schools Leave AP — and Further Abandon Our Shared Democratic Life

Connor P. Willliams wrote for The 74 about a group of private schools in the Washington, D.C., area that are leaving the Advanced Placement curriculum behind.

Squint through the fireworks’ haze this July 4, and yep, you could see it right there: These are fraught, tense, dangerous times for American democracy. Our national project’s frayed seams are showing. Political crisis no longer “looms” or “lurks” — it’s arrived.

What kills a democracy? Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous analyst (and cautious admirer) of early American democracy, argued that the regime’s greatest strength was its social and cultural core, those “habits of the heart” that bound all Americans together. “[Americans] do not always agree about the best means of governing well,” he wrote, “but they agree about the general principles which should rule human societies.”

Tocqueville believed democracies grow from — and run on — equality. Democratic governance requires us to inhabit, debate, and build a common world together. Stiff economic barriers separating the rich and poor are deadly to democracies, because they replicate themselves into cultural and political divides. A people can’t self-govern without some consensus on the “general principles” guiding its common life.