Mitigating Illiberalism Will Require Civic Virtue, Not Just Institutional Tweaks

If we can agree that American democracy is backsliding, the question arises: How do we fix it, or at a minimum, reverse the most deleterious trends that pervade our current political milieu? The American Founders knew that citizens were not naturally imbued with the sensibilities on which democratic republics are based. In particular, the Founders recognized that “the people” could quickly devolve into “the mob,” that demagogues could come to power by exploiting a democratic society’s internal tensions, and that democratic citizens could be fickle and easily distracted. The system of checks and balances was constructed with these challenges in mind. Separating powers across the different branches of government was a deliberate attempt to thwart the worst impulses of demagogues and would-be authoritarians. Their political system is famously slow, messy, and often frustrating, but the Founders hoped these safeguards would prevent American democracy from derailing. The trouble now, however, is that these carefully curated institutions have turned on their host and are empowering and expanding the immoderate and illiberal forces they were intended to sideline. Given the extent of the decay, the kinds of modest institutional changes that generate considerable enthusiasm among democracy advocates and reformers—for instance, ending the Senate filibuster, adding more states to the Union, increasing the size of Congress and the Supreme Court, or term-limiting their members—are unlikely to meet the problem. Tinkering with our institutions distracts from a larger, more fundamental challenge that students of popular regimes have recognized for centuries: without a degree of civic virtue in both the masses and the elites, democracy will not be sustainable. Instead of grasping for institutional tweaks, we first should seek ways to build trust among our fellow citizens and within the political institutions we share. Without a revival of civic virtue to serve as a foundation, institutional reforms are unlikely to relieve what is troubling democracy in America; they may even exacerbate the problem.