What is democracy, anyway?

To explain the threat, focus on the *why* not the *what*

The United States is the world’s oldest and — I might attest — proudest democracy. The symbols of self-government and liberty, the veneration of the founding fathers and the institutions they set down. It was all supposed to be at the core of who we are.

If you poll the country, Americans almost uniformly support democracy and reject dictatorship.

And yet here we are, flirting with the possibility of an entrenched competitive authoritarian government. Worse, a huge portion of the country is unalarmed, apathetic, indifferent, or even generally supportive of what’s happening.

How is this disconnect even possible?

I think part of the problem is a lack of a common understanding of “democracy.” I’m not sure we all know or agree on what that word means. Too often we see it as an empty label; we take it for granted. After all, the United States has a constitution, congress, elections, laws, and courts. Few experts expect those things to disappear altogether (the worry, to be clear, is they might simply stop being a constraint on those in power).

In reality, though, democracy is so much more than those checkboxes. Russia has a constitution, Hungary has elections. Venezuela has courts and laws that ostensibly protect individual rights. Even the United States has long failed (and in many ways still fails) to live up to our founding ideals.

So how do we explain what democracy means for real?

There is no universally agreed-upon definition. Moreover, many of the critical ingredients, things like checks and balances and press freedom, can be somewhat hard to see in day-to-day life. As a result, I find democracy is best explained through its benefits. For most people, it brings three massive and intertwined advantages — the rule of law, individual rights, and electoral freedom.

It’s all a delicate balance. Each depends on and supports the other two.

Want to convince someone to care about democracy and, therefore, threats to it? Don’t just explain the “what.” Explain this “why.”

The rule of law, fairness, and predictability

Of these three pillars, I think the rule of law is the easiest to take for granted. It’s sort of like the air we breathe: part of what makes everything else possible, but easy to miss. We only notice when it’s gone.

But in aggregate, the positive impacts are profound.

The United States is a remarkably prosperous country. That success is directly thanks to our democratic systems, institutions, and processes that ensure predictable, fair, and rules-based outcomes.

Democracy is good for business. Full stop. This is true around the world. Per the Brookings Institution:

Democracy is a strong driver of a healthy economy. Economists have found that democratization causes an increase in GDP per capita of between 20% and 25%. Conversely, there is also indisputable evidence of the economic costs of democratic decline. These costs include stagnation, policy instability, cronyism, brain drain, and violence. Under autocratic regimes, businesses face new risks, as autocrats refashion markets to reinforce their political dominance. Common consequences are retaliatory and punitive applications of taxation, regulation, and licensure; discriminatory access to government contracts and public services; and extortionary demands for political contributions. The economic risks of autocracy are clear.

Just one example: Democratic countries are much less likely to go into recessions. This makes sense if you think about it — predictable, rules-based systems tend to be stable and well-run. But that’s not true when an autocratic leader with no safeguards can make impulsive or self-serving economic policy decisions.

…like, say, a massive, arbitrary, overnight change to tariffs and the global trade system?

Read more: Trump’s tariff roller coaster.

Plus, the economy is just one of the many ways the rule of law matters for everyone.

Last September, I talked about the danger of Trump’s promises to turn the DOJ and IRS into personal tools and how to think about what the rule of law means for each of us personally:

Preserving our freedom, in a law enforcement context, has a lot to do with predictability. Living in a free society doesn’t mean we’re free to do whatever we want. You can’t drive 100 miles an hour down a residential street or trick your neighbors into investing in an elaborate ponzi scheme. Those are illegal. And the consequences for breaking those laws — up to losing your freedom — need to be predictable. Enforced by people seeking to apply the rules fairly and rigorously, not to use the rules for their own interests.

Whether you lose your license needs to be about how fast you were actually driving, not whether the police officer agrees with your bumper stickers. Whether you go to jail for defrauding your neighbors needs to reflect the nature of the ponzi scheme, not whether or not you were willing to cut the investigator in on the proceeds.

That predictability — that impartiality — helps ensure our freedom. Otherwise, we’re all at the whims of people with power.

Defending “institutions” might feel unimportant to many people. But ensuring that your taxes don’t go up because a politician didn’t like your social media posts?

Well, that’s a lot more tangible.

Individual rights and the restraints on power

In our day-to-day lives, many of us don’t spend much time thinking about our rights: to speak our minds, to travel freely, to worship as we wish, to feel safe and secure in our homes, to earn a living, to love and marry, to criticize the powerful, and to not be arbitrarily and indefinitely imprisoned. But in reality, everything around us is built on the foundation of fundamental rights like freedom of speech and due process and privacy and equal protection.

Yes, violations of those rights can happen dramatically — like being abducted by the government to a prison in El Salvador. But it can also be more subtle. Just some examples:

• In Turkey, public sector employees — including doctors, police officers, and teachers — are routinely fired for not demonstrating sufficient loyalty to the president. According to Amnesty International, “[a]ctions such as depositing money in a certain bank, membership of certain trade unions or downloading a particular smartphone app were used as evidence of ‘links’ with proscribed ‘terrorist’ groups.”

• China employs over 40,000 internet censors and essentially all social media activity is subject to censorship and possible punishment for criticism of the government. As you can imagine, self-censorship is rampant.

• In Iran, the government routinely labels dissidents and journalists as “terrorists.” According to Freedom House, the term is used to justify a “full spectrum of transnational repression tactics, including assassinations, renditions, detentions, unlawful deportations, Interpol abuse, digital intimidation, spyware, coercion by proxy, and mobility controls.”

Often, these violations of individual rights start with — and are built around — centralized databases and surveillance structures to monitor citizens. The more the government knows about you, the more options it has to potentially curtail your basic freedoms.

Right now, the Trump administration and DOGE are attempting to build a massive, unified database of all Americans. We don’t know what this database will be used for.

Read more: DOGE’s data “panopticon” pales compared to what’s next.

Whatever its purpose, trust me: Our rights are worth protecting before they’re dismantled, not after.

Electoral freedom and the ability to choose our leaders

Finally, elections. If I had to pick one of the many single definitions of democracy, I’d go with Adam Przeworski’s:

Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.

His key insight is that, instead of explaining the many complex factors that make our elections meaningful and Russia’s meaningless, you can just look at the outcomes. Do the people in power routinely lose and leave power through elections? If yes, great. If no, that’s not a democracy.

This gets to the heart of why free and fair elections really matter. It’s not just that we the people get to select our leaders — and therefore have a say in policy decisions (although obviously that’s important). It’s that we have a failsafe way to remove leaders from power when we inevitably need to do so.

Unfortunately, we know from countries like Russia and Hungary and Turkey that, once you lose that ability, it is very hard to get that back.

To be clear: This has not happened yet in the United States — but we are on the path. We won’t know for sure we’re stuck until it’s too late.

Read more: Day 100 — Where we are now.

For many people, I suspect the importance of free & fair elections doesn’t resonate because they’re just happy if their side wins. Or, alternatively, they don’t really care who wins — they’re not happy either way. Or maybe they assess our electoral system and campaign finance laws to be so flawed that they think our elections are already suspect.

But, even in those cases, I suspect just about everyone can agree we need to maintain the ability to vote to throw our leaders out of office if needed.

Maybe start there.

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Democracy is supposed to be inspiring

When we start to talk about democracy as more than just a singular thing — as a why, not a what — I find it helps illustrate not just the threat of authoritarianism, but also the inspiration that a healthy democracy is supposed to provide.

I was reminded yesterday by Daniel Stid (in his excellent newsletter) of the best reflection of the meaning of democracy I know. The writer E.B. White — of Charlotte’s Web and Strunk & White’s Elements of Style — was asked by the Writers’ War Board, a WWII-era domestic government communications apparatus, to reflect on “The Meaning of Democracy.”

We received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on “The Meaning of Democracy.” It presumably is our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure.

Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

We’ll have more in the coming weeks on how to deploy this all in your conversations with other Americans.

If you’re not subscribed to get this in your inbox, you can do so here.

In the meantime, I’m curious: What do you think of this framework for explaining democracy? Is there anything missing? Let us know in the comments.

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How to assess politicized investigations & indictments

The Trump administration continues to use the prosecutorial powers of the Department of Justice against political adversaries. First it was Judge Dugan in Wisconsin, then Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, then Democratic Congresswoman LaMonica McIver. Now the DOJ is opening an inquiry into NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo just months after senior administration leaders intervened to end the criminal case against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, leading prosecutors to resign in protest.

All of this is exactly what weaponization of the DOJ would look like.

At the same time, no one is above the law and democracy means being able to hold public officials accountable when they commit crimes. If the facts alleged in some of these cases are true, prosecutions could be warranted — *if* they are conducted in accordance with DOJ policy. So how do we tell the difference between politically motivated prosecutions and legitimate ones?

All the way back in 2023, my colleagues released a guide to assessing whether an investigation or prosecution is politicized. It’s worth looking at again today: How to tell whether a government investigation or prosecution is “weaponized.”

It’s like a step-by-step, make-your-own assessment guide. It starts from the premise that political leaders should be subject to prosecution when the facts and circumstances warrant it. The guide then works through three key questions:

• What is the publicly available evidence in the case and similarly situated cases?

• Does the Justice Department or local prosecutor’s office have safeguards in place to avoid politicization and does it appear to be following them?

• What do the external and internal checks against abuse indicate?

You should judge for yourself.

But my assessment is that all of these investigations and indictments are, to put it mildly, suspect, based on the conduct of the president and DOJ’s political leaders in issuing public threats and otherwise sensationalizing the cases. (One small external indicator in the Baraka case — per the NJ Globe, “[f]ederal magistrate judge Andre Espinosa reprimanded the federal prosecutors for more than five minutes” on the “embarrassing” conduct.)

[Read the guide.]

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What else we’re tracking:

• Thursday, my colleagues argued in court in our case challenging the NIH cuts. Read about the sort of research being cut here.

• The Steady State — a group of former national security officials — sent a letter to Senate and House Intelligence Committees raising the alarm over the politicization of intelligence. The letter follows DNI Gabbard's firing of two high-ranking intelligence officials after a National Intelligence Council assessment on the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua reportedly contradicted the administration's position.

• I really enjoyed this conversation on the National Affairs podcast with Jennifer Dresden on the forgotten history of fusion voting.

• The murder of two Israeli embassy aides in Washington, DC is a frightening development for political violence in the United States.

• We can all agree DOGE is not an efficiency or cost-cutting effort. But what would those things even look like? Is it possible? Christian Johnson investigates in: The DOGE debacle.

• Maybe a record: Within hours, a court blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to ban international students from attending Harvard. The attempted ban was a dramatic escalation in the White House’s assault on universities who don’t show fealty to the president. (Note: This would have included banning international Jewish and Israeli students, whose defense the administration has used as a pretext for the attacks.)

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What you can do to help:

The folks at Stand Up for Science are leading a summer-long series of grassroots, local actions anyone can take to show support for the science and research community targeted by the Trump administration.

Take action, find an event near you, or host your own here.

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Your moment of collective courage

United Way Worldwide and a group of foundations launched a new award for “civic bravery” recognizing nonprofits and individuals who stand up for their communities. Their first honorees include educators from an upstate New York town (we talked about their story here), standing together to protect a family detained by ICE.

UCLA Professor Jana Gallus explained the power of collective courage recognitions like these:

People sometimes say recognition awards are this fluffy thing, they are soft. It’s actually very strategic. Recognition is not soft in that sense. It shapes who feels seen, who is seen, what actions then stand a chance of gaining traction.

Refusing to obey in advance and helping others to do the same is how democracy wins.

Have other examples of collective courage you think people should know about? Let us know in the comments below and on social media using the hashtag #CollectiveCourage.