Oh yes, excerpt...

Political scientist Robert Blair was at home on the morning after President Trump’s first travel ban, scrolling through Facebook photos of his lawyer friends sitting on the floors of airports and meeting refugees from seven predominantly Muslim nations whose path to the United States Trump had blocked. An unmoored worry washed over Blair, an assistant professor of political science and international and public affairs at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “I don’t know if U.S. democracy is under threat,” he recalls thinking. “I don’t feel that I have the tools even to know what to worry about.”

Blair, 35, specializes in post-conflict security in Africa. But in the months that followed, he began to think about the idea of teaching a new course at Brown. It would address three big questions that were troubling him: “Is America’s democracy at risk? If it is, how would we know? If it’s not, why are we all so freaked out that it is?”

He reached out to professors at other universities to see if they wanted to work together, received a $4,000 grant from Brown and employed some research assistants. The result of that collaboration is a university course now being taught across the country. At Brown, the course is called Democratic Erosion; it might have a slightly different name at other schools — Democratic Decay or Democratic Backsliding, for example — and some universities are offering it as a master’s-level class, but the syllabus is virtually the same.

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