How to Defend Democracy in America

The 250th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence has come at a time when many Americans have heightened concerns about the future of our republic’s democratic experiment. At such a time, it is appropriate to re-examine the principles on which this nation was founded and to ask how they can best be extended into a new century.

We should recognize that the Declaration of Independence did more than just offer an idealistic proclamation of human rights. It insisted that the power of governments must be based the consent of legislatures whose members have been locally elected by the people in their communities, as the surest mechanism for protecting people’s rights. The US Congress and the fifty state legislatures can be seen today as the direct continuing legacy of the institutions that the Declaration was written to defend in 1776.

For most of the 250 years since the Declaration, American political life has been organized in a two-party system that the founders did not anticipate. Today, the leaders of America’s major political parties have long experience in developing strategies to win elections, but different strategic priorities may be needed when the goal is to defend democracy against an authoritarian challenge. There are serious questions about whether protests and lawsuits against unconstitutional extensions of executive power can restrain a would-be authoritarian president who has broad popular support in much of the country.¹ However, when we re-examine the fundamental principles of federal democracy, we may argue that America’s great democratic traditions are best served by the major parties when they actively compete for the privilege of representing voters in every community, in every state of the union.

How could an authoritarian get any popular support?

It might seem surprising that anyone could have concerns about the survival of democracy in a prosperous nation that has elected its leaders for 250 years.² But if people could take it for granted that democracy has been irreversibly established after so many years, then they might see no constitutional risk in supporting the election of a would-be authoritarian leader to the nation’s highest office, when his campaign promises seemed appealing. Thus, even in America, there may be times when people need to act for the defense of democracy.

Still, questions about how to defend democracy would not arise if we could just assume that voters everywhere would reject any leader who tried to undermine the political system in which their votes can decide who governs. A supreme national leader would fear to violate the constitutional guardrails of democracy if doing so would cause people in his essential political base to distrust him. So democracy becomes vulnerable when large groups of voters do not perceive any real benefits from democratic political competition. To understand how democracy can be defended, we need to think more deeply about why people should value democracy.

The basic political argument for democracy is essentially the same as the economic argument for free markets. Just as consumers can benefit from competition among suppliers in any market, so voters should be able to benefit from competition among political parties to offer better public service. Thus, even a voter who generally prefers one particular party should expect that elected leaders from this party would not work as hard to maintain good government services if the leaders did not have to worry about competition from an opposing party.³

If everyone always recognized this basic point, then the defense of democracy would be easy, because people everywhere would rally to defend the system of multiparty democratic competition against any would-be authoritarian leader. But there are two kinds of political strategies that party leaders may use to make this basic point obscure or inapplicable for many voters: demagoguery by leaders of the voters’ preferred party, and strategic neglect by leaders of the other party.

Devaluing democratic competition by demagoguery

We may use the term demagoguery here to describe political rhetoric in which the speaker tries to characterize his opponents as completely untrustworthy, whether it is because they are fundamentally malevolent or corrupt or just deluded, so that voters should only trust the speaker and his party.⁴ For example, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s response to Edward R. Murrow in 1954 included no reference to any statements of fact that Murrow had made; instead McCarthy focused on depicting Murrow as a dangerous agent of international Communism, implicitly suggesting that patriotic Americans should simply disregard everything that Murrow said.⁵ When a political leader uses such rhetoric, the leader is essentially denying the benefits of honest political discourse and democracy for his followers. If the demagogue’s critics and opponents should never be trusted, then what benefit could anyone expect from listening to them or maintaining their right to compete for power in free and fair elections?

The defense of democracy requires us to counter such demagoguery and clearly affirm the fundamental benefit of democratic competition: that voters’ ability to choose among rival political parties is what compels each party to compete for voters’ support by promising better government. For voters to retain their power of political choice, they should never let any politician tell them to always distrust his opponents. The demagogue’s big lie, that people should trust only the demagogue’s political party, should be recognized as a ruse to trap people under one-party domination.

To avoid demagoguery ourselves, we cannot say that people should never believe statements from a politician who has used such rhetoric of demagoguery. Logical consistency would require us to counter his falsehoods one at a time, even while he can simply tell his supporters to disbelieve everything that we say. Such principled restraint in countering demagoguery is appropriate when the demagoguery is just rhetoric, protected by freedom of speech.

However, we may appropriately argue that voters should never trust a leader who has blatantly acted to violate constitutional provisions and guardrails of democracy. Voters who agree with ideas that such a leader has advocated should be urged to support other politicians who advocate similar ideas but have not acted to undermine the vital institutions of democracy. Constitutional constraints will be in danger of failing when a leader who has violated them can still get support to retain political power.⁶ Americans have seen how Donald Trump’s second presidential term was set on a fundamentally different course from his first term, after it was shown that he could openly act to obstruct a constitutional duty of Congress and still be re-elected President.⁷

Narrowing the base for democratic competition by strategic neglect

Even when voters are not blinded by demagoguery from their preferred party, they may still find reasons to believe that the other party is not responsive to their concerns. Under the American system of constitutional democracy, a party can win control of a legislative chamber by getting a majority of votes in just over half of the districts, and so parties have tended to focus their resources on campaigns in the districts that seem closest to flipping. Within any district, a party’s efforts to increase voter turnout are best concentrated in the areas where most voters are favorable to the party.

These electoral incentives have brought America to a political equilibrium in which each party strategically neglects much of the country. In recent years, vast expanses of rural America have been largely abandoned by Democrats. There are now twelve states that have no Democratic representation in the 119th US Congress, and another eight states have no Republican representatives.⁸ New waves of redistricting, with the Callais decision, threaten to make these numbers even higher in the next Congress.

Such strategic neglect and the resulting geographic polarization become dangerous when constitutional democracy itself is at risk. Neglected regions can become fertile ground for the divisive rhetoric of demagoguery. When large groups of voters believe that only one party is really paying attention to them, they may feel no real stake in our system of multiparty democratic competition, and so they may support their elected leader in shaking off democracy’s inconvenient constitutional constraints. With such mass support, an unprincipled president could subvert democracy while portraying his actions as democracy’s ultimate fulfillment.

Thus, the defense of democracy against an authoritarian challenge may require political priorities that are fundamentally different from the standard playbook for winning elections. When the goal is to defend democracy in America, it is vital to ensure that Americans everywhere can see the benefits of having two parties competing for their votes.

Recommitting to compete for voters everywhere

The authors of the US Constitution believed that an effective check against the potential for presidential abuse of executive power could be found in the Congress, as an assembly of political representatives from every state in the union.⁹ In an ideal democracy, voters would demand that their elected representatives should place loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to their party. But politics is a team sport, and it will always be difficult for politicians to call out a leader of their own party for acting against the essential norms of constitutional democracy.

So in a two-party system, when one party controls the government, we must look to the other party to offer leadership in the defense of constitutional democracy against abuses of executive power. From this perspective, we may ask, what should the Democratic party do now, as the major opposition party, when many of its members have serious concerns about a potentially authoritarian president.

As we have argued above, the Democratic leadership can no longer afford to leave millions of voters in Republican-dominated areas believing that nobody in the Democratic party is listening to them. These are voters who could be encouraging their Republican representatives in Congress to join in bipartisan defense of basic democratic norms. The legacy of strategic neglect must be reversed and replaced by a strategy of working to provide better political alternatives for voters in all 50 states.

But rebuilding trust where it has been lost will require real efforts to reach people in the communities where they live.¹⁰ To lead this local outreach, the Democratic party would need a strong roster of candidates for local offices, including local representatives to the state legislature. The essential goal of this outreach would be achieved when voters in these Republican strongholds see that they can benefit from competitive Democratic candidates offering valuable alternative perspectives on local issues, even if few of these Democrats ultimately get elected. The cause of democracy will be stronger when the voters have been reminded that their hopes for better public service, even from a Republican-led government, can depend on their ability to vote for competitive Democratic candidates in the American system of constitutional democracy that we are trying to preserve.

Representing voters means listening to them and responding to their concerns, not just to the concerns of national party donors or professional political consultants.¹¹ So the Democratic party might do better by identifying itself as the party that does not just march to its leaders’ commands, but that everywhere supports candidates who focus on their local voters’ concerns, with a commitment to work for practical solutions in a broad coalition. From this perspective, it should be acceptable to have candidates who are democratic socialists in New York and gun-rights supporters in Utah, if this is what the local voters want.

To recruit strong local candidates in every part of America, both political parties need effective local organizations in every county. Local party leaders at the county level generally tend to favor a broader distribution of campaign resources, compared to the narrower focus on a few pivotal districts that may seem advantageous for winning power at the national level or at the state level.

So institutional reforms that strengthen the collective voices of county-level Democratic party organizations could help the Democratic party to make a commitment to limit the strategic neglect of many rural areas across the country. As a first step in this direction, local leaders of county-level Democratic organizations in Republican-dominated areas could be encouraged to form a national network for sharing best-practice ideas about how to reach more people in their communities.¹² Their communities are on the front line in the competition to defend democracy in America today.

Partisan candidates of either party need an ability to assure local voters that their concerns can be heard also by the higher-level party leadership. People cannot be expected to trust a party that has no effective mechanism for communicating their local concerns to its national leaders. In particular, even when voters in Republican strongholds might feel harmed by some policies of a Republican administration, these voters might still favor the Republican party if they perceive that their local interests are advocated in Washington only by Republican representatives. From this perspective, it is particularly problematic that almost a quarter of the US states now have no voice at all in the Democratic congressional caucuses, where the Democrats’ national political agenda is largely shaped.

To ensure that views from these Republican-dominated red states are not ignored, the House Democratic Caucus could invite these states’ Democratic parties to designate a recent congressional candidate to serve as a liaison with the House Democrats.¹³ Bringing such nonvoting representatives of red-state perspectives into the congressional Democrats’ deliberations would be a strong signal of the Democratic party’s commitment to work for people in every part of America.

We have focused here on the Democratic party because it is currently the out-of-power opposition party, and many of its members are concerned about threats to our democratic system. But points suggested here may be similarly recommended for the Republican party. The House Republican Conference might help their party to broaden its competitive base by admitting voices from state Republican parties in Democrat-dominated blue states.

The ability of Republican congressmen to advocate their constituents’ local interests has been reduced by the President’s effective power to threaten primary challenges against congressmen who question any aspect of the President’s agenda. In earlier periods of US history, such presidential interventions in congressional primaries were more likely to stimulate a jealous defense of local autonomy.¹⁴ So there may be a need now for reforms to strengthen political independence for members of Congress; one possibility might be a federal law requiring the states to let incumbents in Congress run for re-election as independents if they lose their party’s primary.

For either party, a wider commitment to address concerns of American voters everywhere could help to strengthen American democracy, even while improving the party’s long-term competitive position. Investments in listening broadly to voters outside the party’s regional base can also provide much-needed feedback about where the party’s policy positions might be unpopular. Conversely, a narrowly focused political strategy that neglects large regions of the country would increase the susceptibility of people in those neglected regions to polarizing us‑versus‑them rhetoric by demagogues from the other party.

Lessons from democratic state-building abroad and at home

The challenge of defending democracy against authoritarianism raises questions that may seem new and unfamiliar in the context of American domestic politics, but we may gain some perspective by recalling lessons from recent American efforts to promote democratic political systems in other countries.

When policymakers planned foreign state-building missions with the seemingly benevolent goals of installing a democratically elected government, it was easy to hope that these goals could be achieved as soon as the people in the target country had an opportunity to choose new national leadership in a free and fair election. Unfortunately, this simple theory of centralized state-building was severely dashed in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2003.

A leader who has won a majority of votes in a national election might still be seriously distrusted by local groups in many parts of a large country. People could be concerned about the possibility of the nationally elected government asserting its power to control or suppress vital forms of local leadership that people have come to trust in their communities. Democracy will be destabilized if there are extensive regions where such concerns cannot be addressed.

The key lesson that US policymakers learned too late in these foreign state-building missions was that efforts to maintain a democratic political system can fail when local politics is ignored.¹⁵ Even in countries with no tradition of democratic accountability for national leaders, traditional institutions generally have ways of ensuring that local leaders’ authority depends on broad respect from people in their community. A strong democratic political system must be well rooted in local politics throughout the nation.

To understand how a successful democratic system can maintain its essential connection with local politics throughout a large nation, there is no better example than the United States itself.¹⁶ The government of the United States was first established in 1776 by a congress of delegates from thirteen provincial assemblies, each of which consisted of representatives elected by their local communities. From this starting point, two core principles of democratic federalism have remained fundamental in America’s constitutional development: the primacy of Congress in the national government, and the principle of federal power-sharing that leaves substantial public authority in the hands of locally elected local governments.

The primacy of Congress helps to ensure that locally elected congressional representatives from every part of the country can express the concerns of their constituents in the high-level policy deliberations of the national government. When it functions well, Congress can be an effective mechanism for gathering information about how major national decisions could affect important local concerns in all the widespread communities that the members of Congress represent. Its information-gathering effectiveness can be reduced, however, when national party discipline makes members of Congress feel that conforming to their party’s ideological positions must take priority over representing the interests of their constituents in legislative negotiations. Fortunately, when one party errs on the side of too much ideological discipline, the other party may find a competitive advantage in marketing itself as a big tent that welcomes voters everywhere.

From the beginning, the primacy of Congress over the executive branch of government has been sustainable because the members of Congress have been recognized as representing the wider population of voters through a democratic process of popular elections. If competitive elections were eliminated in a transition to authoritarianism, the President could continue to govern unconstrained, but the influence of Congress would decline, as there would be little or no reason for officials in the executive branch of government to defer to the will of legislators who were just appointed by the authoritarian government itself. So the primacy of Congress in America’s democratic system has given its members collectively an institutional motivation for maintaining the democracy of their elections.

The US federal system has also been designed, since the American Revolution, to guarantee that autonomously elected state and local governments would retain a substantial share of authority in the provision of local public goods and services. So even in regions where many people may feel alienated from the coalition that exercises decisive power at the national level, local majorities could still have confidence that their local government would be democratically responsive to their concerns. Thus, federal power-sharing has strengthened America’s system of constitutional democracy by ensuring that every part of the country always has a majority of voters who can see some tangible benefits of democratic accountability in government at some level, local or national. Then the vitality of our national two-party system has depended on both parties being deeply rooted in the local politics of every state.

A renewed commitment to federal democracy

The challenges of defending democracy demand that we understand democracy and its benefits more deeply. We must recognize that people can get a stake in democracy that is worth defending when more than one party shows a competitive commitment to providing better government that addresses their concerns.

So the opposition party’s best defense against an authoritarian challenge should include a good offense, competing for votes in the would-be authoritarian leader’s base by supporting candidates who can reach out to people in the communities that have favored him. For such a broad political outreach, however, the fact that so many US states have had no voice in the opposition party’s congressional caucuses is a fundamental problem that party leaders need to address. Reforms that reduce a President’s ability to threaten primary challenges against legislators of his own party could also help them to better represent the interests of all their constituents. Democracy is strengthened when each major party performs its essential functions of listening to voters in every part of the country and representing their interests in the deliberative bodies that formulate laws and policies of government.

In American democracy, the most important of these deliberative bodies must be the US Congress. But a strong democracy also requires preserving America’s vital constitutional system of federal power-sharing, to ensure that people in every part of the country will also benefit from competitive democracy in their local governments.

Such arguments for the value of representative democracy and federal power-sharing have been familiar in American political discourse from the founding of the Republic in 1776. If we can meet the challenges of defending democracy in America today, we may forge a renewed commitment to the core principles of federal democracy that have guided this great nation’s political development so well for 250 years.

^{[For a pdf copy of this note, see <https://home.uchicago.edu/~rmyerson/defend2026.pdf>]}

1. Larry Diamond, “How to end the democratic recession,” Foreign Affairs 103(4):126-140 (2024). <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/how-end-democratic-recession-autocracy-larry-diamond>

2. Adam Przeworski, “Democracy as an equilibrium,” Public Choice 123:253–273 (2005). <https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-005-7163-4>

3. See for example: S.C. Senate majority leader Shane Massey speaking on May 12, 2026 <www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrRLEMdCPaY> after 26:00.

4. Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy (New York: The Experiment LLC, 2017). <https://theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/fall-2017/demagoguery-and-democracy/>

5. "The Morrow-McCarthy Broadcasts." <https://www.billdownscbs.com/2015/11/edward-r-murrow-vs-senator-joseph.html>

6. Roger Myerson, "The autocrat’s credibility problem and foundations of the constitutional state," American Political Science Review 102(1):125–39 (2008). <https://www.jstor.org/stable/27644502>

7. Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (December 2022). <https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2022/12/Report_FinalReport_Jan6SelectCommittee.pdf>

8. Eric Ostermeier, "Number of single-party state congressional delegations reaches 70+ year high," Smart Politics (Nov 25, 2024). <https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2024/11/25/number-of-single-party-state-congressional-delegations-reaches-70-year-high/>

9. The Federalist Papers 65. <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed65.asp>

10. Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward, Dirt Road Revival (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022). <https://www.dirtroadrevival.com/>

11. Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, “Can Democrats succeed in rural America?” (2022). <https://ruralurbanbridge.org/distilling-best-practice>

12. Roger Myerson, "Democrats should remind local red-state voters they still need two parties," The Hill (Oct 8, 2025). <https://home.uchicago.edu/~rmyerson/oct2025note.pdf>

13. Roger Myerson and Kael Weston, "Democrats need to start winning elections in all 50 states," The Boston Globe (Jan 29, 2025). <https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/29/opinion/democrats-50-state-strategy-congressional-caucus-dnc/>

14. William H. Riker and William Bast, "Presidential Action in Congressional Nominations," in The Development of American Federalism, pp. 195-216 (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1969). <https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-3273-9_10>

15. Roger Myerson, "Local politics and democratic state-building," Journal of Democracy 33(4):62-73 (2022). <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/866642>

16. Roger Myerson, "The strength of US federal democracy," Horizons: Journal of International Relations and Sustainable Development 5:178-189 (Autumn, 2015). <https://www.jstor.org/stable/48573598>