Many scholars of American government believe representative democracy is failing more systematically than even the recent spectacle of political extremism suggests. Unprecedented levels of elite polarization, severe partisan gerrymandering, weakened party institutions, easing of restrictions on campaign finance, and other forces-all in the context of rising levels of economic inequality-produce dysfunction that subverts healthy political competition. A gridlocked U.S. Congress offers few solutions to broadly recognized public problems. Legislation favors the interests of elites when they conflict with those of the majority. In his 2022 Berkeley Tanner Lectures, Charles Beitz examines the narrative of dysfunction by reading the literature of political science as democratic theory. The narrative raises two questions. First, are symptoms documented by political scientists really failures? What norms of democratic representation do they infringe? This is a problem of diagnosis. Second, wha
