What does it mean to believe in democracy?

Let the election bring clarity about what, specifically, we’re fighting for.

There are many reasons to despair today, and many writers attempting to process and console. I’ll let them handle most of it.

The one dismay I’ll grapple with is disgust with something we love. At 3:44 AM, my mom texted: “I’m so disappointed in our country.” Good people tried really hard to defend democracy, because they really passionately believed in it. And then democracy did something hideous. Something really hard for good people to believe in. That plants doubt, no? What if what we’re trying to save is already too far gone? What if China really is the way of the future, etc.?

Before we dive into the necessary bickering about how Democrats need to rebuild, I think it’s worth sitting with those feelings for a while. Here’s how I think about it.

Belief in democracy can be thick, or thin.

Mine is thin. It has always been thin, but it’s certainly never been thinner. By this I mean that I believe:

• The least bad political systems require free speech and some degree of popular accountability for leaders, expressed through fair and regular democratic elections.

This claim is not trivial. It refutes those who claim China is a democracy or among the best systems. It affirms that if people are dissatisfied with their leaders, they should be able to change them without resorting to violence. It demands an orderly collection of their decisive and unpressured preferences regarding who should govern them and to what ends.

Note also that this belief is not weak or ambivalent on account of its thinness. I very passionately believe it! When free elections are absent or under threat, it is incredibly urgent to defend, honor, repair, or institute them.

Still, the thin belief is not exactly enthused. It frames democracy as a way to minimize harm (“least bad”) and does not weigh in on how direct, specific, or sweeping public input should be. Nor does it say how important democracy is relative to other, competing aspects of a good political system. Finally, it presents democracy as a means to an end, rather than a standalone value. Democracy is valuable insofar as it respects and produces equality, liberty, security, prosperity, or other things we care about.¹ Where too much democracy threatens these values, democracy should be limited.

Many Americans have a thicker belief in democracy than I do. They see democracy as an end in itself: a self-evidently beautiful and virtuous thing, worth maximizing for its own sake. Some even see it as an almost limitless good, or the single most important value of all. Depending on how thick one’s belief in democracy is, it may include some of the following claims:

• Democracy is all of us reasoning together toward social progress. This can be a slow, fitful, and frustrating process, but the story of America illustrates that it’s ultimately a reliable one.

• Democratic governments can be trusted with power because “We the People” call the shots – and given the facts, ordinary people can be trusted to sort out which leaders and policies are best.

• Therefore, majority support for a policy position lends it moral weight or credence, while majority opposition does the opposite.

• The more democratic a government is, the more ethical it is; the better outcomes it produces; and the friendlier the US should be with it.

• Even outside of government, it is good to democratize all kinds of decisions, from business to philanthropy,² which are currently made by a concentrated few.

• Democracy is so important that promoting it in other countries should be a major foreign policy objective of the United States. The thicker one’s belief in democracy, the more cost and risk this objective is worth.

• Elected leaders should have few restrictions on their ability to implement “the will of the people,” aka their “mandate,” which is a real and coherent thing that democratic elections reveal.

I get why Americans want to believe these things. We are socialized to esteem democracy from primary school, in our founding myths and in every political ad. The left associates it with equality; the right, with American exceptionalism. And truly, the world owes much to our embrace of democracy. It is the quintessential patriotic value. The better democracy is, the better we are by extension, and the more central a role we’ve played in humanity’s long arc toward justice. So we uplift it; celebrate it; glorify it.

We also romanticize it. We make it a sacred cow. We take offense to skepticism of the thick view, and conflate it with denying the thin. And that, I worry, creates blind spots. It makes us naïve, where the rest of the world is less enamored. Instead of constantly lecturing them, it may be time to acknowledge and correct our national bias toward thicker beliefs in democracy than the 21st-century warrants.

To my immeasurable disappointment, nothing I have seen in my adult lifetime has given me faith in society’s ability to reason toward justice together. People are too tribal, irrational, distracted, biased, misinformed, or wildly ignorant about the very basics of what they’re voting on.³ Even specific policy referendums tend to reflect public sentiment about everything other than the question up for a vote. On the other hand, voting for an entire platform makes it impossible to tease out which policies do or do not have a popular mandate; yet winners carry on as if their whole agenda is popular.

If American democracy used to work better than it does now, that was with a certain amount of elite marshaling of the conversation. There was a good faith effort from experts and journalists on both sides to frame the people’s choice, by highlighting the relevant facts and values tradeoffs. Speeches and debates were held at a collegiate reading level. Informed people invited the masses to weigh in on elite debates about how to run the country, and whichever elite ideas people liked more took office. This had important downsides, but they were smaller than the problems we have now.

That model is gone for the foreseeable future. The internet made it fragile and Trump smashed what was left. The model we have now is that elites debate policy at a fourth-grade reading level and then pretend that’s what voters are voting on too, when really they’re voting on vibes and culture and soundbites they heard on the Hawk Tuah podcast; or worse, on preposterous conspiracy theories about vaccines and pedophiles and sinister plots to import dog-eating immigrants to swing states.

Nor is the problem limited to the United States. Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood are linked not only by their varying penchants for authoritarian violence but also by having once been democratically elected. Several of those figures remain very popular in their respective countries and would be reelected in fair elections today. The thick belief is tough to square with democracies’ increasing tendency to vote themselves out of existence.

Since 2016, it has been my hope that the entire phenomenon of Donald Trump might persuade thoughtful people to thin out their belief in democracy. Gradually, I hoped we’d snap out of it and see democracy unfiltered by Red-White-and-Blue-tinted glasses: as one of several useful but limited tools for improving the world, which needn’t be so centered our foreign or domestic policy narratives.

So far, I’ve been disappointed. Trump’s opponents have mostly insisted that really, the problem is that America isn’t democratic enough. They’ve blamed his success on deviations from “real” democracy like the electoral college, Russian misinformation, or permissive campaign finance laws.

But none of those fig leaves can cover up Tuesday’s disaster. Trump won the popular vote despite Harris outraising and outspending him. Misinformation was rampant, but not aberrant from our new normal. If democracy cannot cope with the internet, that is a mark against it. Besides, the core of the gripes against misinformation and Citizens United are basically “voters are easily manipulated,” which is itself an indictment of the thick view.

There is a widespread understanding that Trump threatens democracy, but we think too narrowly and wishfully about how. It is not merely that his beliefs, actions, and plans directly weaken U.S. institutions (though that’s certainly true). It is also that his success exposes ugly truths about what democracy is already, and has probably always been. He does not weaken the case for democracy, but he does narrow it.

If you still hold a relatively thick belief in democracy, I’d like to ask you why. And more importantly, what would it take for you to change that belief? What evidence would you need to see to shake your confidence?

Because my guess is that if I had asked you that question ten years ago, your answer might have sounded something like this:

“Well, maybe if the country elected some stupid celebrity President, who clearly had no idea what they were doing; or maybe, a total fascist who tried to become a dictator and launch a coup or overturn an election or something…and not like once, but multiple times he got elected, because he had a cult of personality and his cronies took over major media outlets or whatever...and not just in one country, but if democracies all over the world started doing this... So yeah, it’d have to be pretty far-fetched….”

On the other hand, suppose you’re convinced. So what? What are the implications of a thin belief in democracy?

There are several strategic implications that I’ll address in some future post about what Democrats have to do now. But for today, two stand out:

1. You needn’t take voters’ repudiation too harshly.

A thick belief in democracy treats every electoral defeat as a cause for profound soul-searching. If democracy is sacred and it didn’t choose you, it says something bad about you. As the great Ken White said yesterday:

“Nobody likes to lose. So when your side loses an election, there’s huge social and psychological pressure to change your stance, to moderate what you believe so you don’t feel like a loser. Don’t do it.”

Abandoning a thick belief in democracy can be depressing, for all the same reasons it feels patriotic to embrace it in the first place. But it does make days like today a little easier if you never put much faith in “the people” anyway. The repudiation is purely strategic. It reflects poorly on your party’s aptitude for the shady ugly business of winning elections, which is a wholly separate thing from the merits of your values and policy positions.

Democrats need a new strategy, absolutely. But miss me with the calls for self-flagellation. You don’t need to make a big show about questioning your assumptions about immigration or empirical reality. You don’t have to pretend 51% of the country disagreeing with you means     fuck     all     about whether you’re right or wrong. Voters may not like my ideas, but that’s okay because I’m not running for office, and I assure you the feeling is reciprocal.

2. For the next four years, most of what we’re defending is liberalism, including its restrictions on democracy.

Democracy was an apt description of what Trump threatened by trying to overturn the last election. He still threatens it moving forward, because he’s fundamentally at war with reasoned deliberation and has proven willingness to manipulate or ignore electoral processes. As a campaign pitch to voters, “democracy” was a close enough approximation of what he threatened. And we should keep defending democracy because the 2026 and 2028 elections are not guaranteed to be free and fair.

On all the days in between, though, the strongest bulwark we have against Trump is the ways our constitution limits democracy. The filibuster is now our friend. Federalism is now our friend. The Supreme Court, believe it or not, is probably now our frenemy. They have struck down Trump’s abuses before and I would rather it exist with a 6-3 bias than not exist at all. If Republicans try to pass a national abortion ban, or arbitrarily round up millions of legal residents, or use the military to shut down protests, the Bill of Rights will be all that legally stands in their way. It exists precisely because democracy cannot be trusted to respect individual liberties.⁴

A thin belief in democracy values these limits at least as preciously as it values elections. It’s all just one or another tool for minimizing harm. When I think about why I’m proud of the U.S. system, and the reasons I’m most grateful to live here instead of China, the rights I’m guaranteed and the non-Kangaroo courts erected to defend them stand out more to me than the quadrennial ritual of adding my drop to an ocean of ballots. I trust our flawed constitution at least as much as I trust my flawed neighbors. Democracy is just a means to an end, and the ends are what we’re ultimately fighting for.

1. Yes, a properly fashioned democracy innately respects the values of equality (everyone gets an equal vote) and liberty (people are free to vote and speak as they please), and even peace/security (by facilitating the peaceful transfer of power), all of which contributes to its appeal. This is a strong argument in favor of the thin belief: we should defend some minimally acceptable level of democracy preserving these elements. But it’s not a reason to maximize democracy beyond this minimum threshold (i.e., to broaden the range or frequency of questions we should trust these free and equal people to decide).

2. Or even, what to name your boat.

3. 100 stats verify this that I’ll let you look up on your own, but a personal favorite is that 30% of Republicans support bombing Agrabah, which is the fictional city from the movie Aladdin. This May, 17% of voters thought Biden was responsible for the end of Roe v. Wade.

4. Indeed, the whole point of Roe v. Wade was for courts to limit democracy: to prevent states from voting to ban it.