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Why Democracy is the Best We've Got

Mar 12, 2019

Alexandra Mork

International Student Essay Contest Winner

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In response to the question " is it important to live in a democracy ", the following essay was selected as a winner of carnegie council's international student essay content..

Although the ongoing debate over the viability and efficacy of living in a democracy underwent a temporary pause after the conclusion of the Cold War and accompanying democratic revolutions, the international rise of authoritarian regimes and simultaneous decline of freedom in the geopolitical sphere makes discussions of democratic ideals and realities increasingly topical.

Democracy is a system of government in which the citizens of a nation determine its policies through elected representatives, direct voting, or in most cases, a combination of the two. Furthermore, in democratic elections, voters must have the capacity to replace political parties and leaders based off popular support. Finally, a democracy must allow the majority of residents to participate in political processes and not exclude certain groups of people from the political sphere on the basis on race, gender, class or sexual orientation.

First and foremost, democracies are a crucial step in achieving equality for oppressed groups by giving people who would otherwise be excluded from politics the ability to vote for the policies and people that they believe in. When given the right to vote, marginalized groups are naturally more likely to support politicians who will work to end the oppressive policies that are prevalent throughout the world. Some argue that democracy alone is insufficient in the pursuit of equality because the majority faction will still overpower minority factions. While this may be true, the importance of democracy should be viewed through a lens of the possible alternatives; other systems of government, such as autocracies, theocracies and monarchies are comparatively worse for achieving equality because they exclusively allow one person or group of people to make decisions for an entire population. Only democracy allows all groups, regardless of race, gender identity, class or sexual orientation, to participate in politics.

Not only does democracy allow all people to have an equal voice, but it is also inherently an extremely flexible system, which allows for the government to adapt according to changing ideologies. Because elected representatives have an incentive to maintain their positions of power, they appeal to public opinion to remain popular. Although many people critique democratic politicians for their inauthenticity, politicians mirroring the beliefs of the people is actually positive because it ensures that that the majority of citizens' beliefs are reflected in national policies. Furthermore, it functions as a crucial check on people in positions of power because if they act in an unpopular or unethical way, they will likely be voted out of office.

Finally, living in a democracy is important because democracies are the most statistically significant factor in reducing inter and intra state conflict. Director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute David Cortright and his colleagues conducted a study to determine the validity of democratic peace theory and examine how regime type relates to violence. They concluded that democracies are much less likely to both engage in war with other states and to participate in civil wars. This is likely because war, in any form, is politically unpopular as it costs human lives, which thus incentivizes democracies to avoid it at all costs. Civil wars in particular are unlikely in democracies because democratic governments function as a safety valve for discontent; while disaffected civilians living in democracies can express their grievances in the form of free speech or exercising their right to vote, citizens living in autocracies have no choice other than violence if they hope for governmental change because they lack political power. Cortright also cites Rudolph Rummel's book Death By Government, in which Rummel finds that autocratic regimes are three and a half times more likely to commit genocide than democratic regimes. Cortright suggests this is a result of the prevalence of exclusionary ideology that is reinforced by authoritarian regimes in comparison with democratic ones.

Some may argue that autocratic governments are preferable to democracies because they are more efficient. It is true that autocratic regimes are able to pass and implement policies in a more timely manner. However, the power of democracy lies in its ability to gradually change. Complex issues should not be swiftly and unilaterally decided by one ruler; they should be debated upon by large groups of people examining both sides of the issue until the majority is able to find a consensus.

Another common criticism of democracy that proponents of autocracies present is the lack of expertise of voters. While every voter is certainly not an expert on every topic, democracies encourage citizens to learn more about the world around them by creating a mutual responsibility between each voter and his or her nation, and by extension, his or her world. Democracies motivate voters to do research on important candidates and policies, whereas non-democratic governments foster political apathy because one's opinions have no impact on the world around them.

The 2018 Varieties of Democracy Report concludes that one third of the world's population lives in a country in which democracy is declining. Even more frighteningly, the Freedom House reports that the global freedom index decreased for the twelfth successive year. Editor Gideon Rose grimly wrote in the May/June 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs, "Some say that global democracy is experiencing its worst setback since the 1930s and that it will continue to retreat unless rich countries find ways to reduce inequality and manage the information revolution. Those are the optimists. Pessimists fear the game is already over, that democratic dominance has ended for good."

I fall on the side of the optimists. In the face of the global decline of rule of law, freedom of the press, equal representation, separation of powers and freedom of speech, democracy will be resilient—but only if we fight for it. The time is now to advocate for a more democratic world, and many are taking up the cause. Countries such as Ethiopia are experiencing democratic reforms as the new prime minister has freed political prisoners and promised more fair elections. Even in democratic nations such as the United States, the effects of political movements such as the Women's March and March For Our Lives, which were only possible because of the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, are evident.

Although democracy is far from a perfect political system, it is undoubtedly an important tool in achieving equality, decreasing conflict, and increasing civic engagement, making it the best available system of government.

Alexandra Mork is a former winner of Carnegie Council's international student essay contest. In 2018, while a junior at Harvard-Westlake High School in Los Angeles, Mork drafted the winning student essay titled, "Why Democracy is the Best We've Got." Mork is currently a student at Brown University where she serves as managing editor for the Brown Political Review.

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Essay on Democracy in 100, 300 and 500 Words

Updated on
Jan 15, 2024

The oldest account of democracy can be traced back to 508–507 BCC Athens . Today there are over 50 different types of democracy across the world. But, what is the ideal form of democracy? Why is democracy considered the epitome of freedom and rights around the globe? Let’s explore what self-governance is and how you can write a creative and informative essay on democracy and its significance.

Today, India is the largest democracy with a population of 1.41 billion and counting. Everyone in India above the age of 18 is given the right to vote and elect their representative. Isn’t it beautiful, when people are given the option to vote for their leader, one that understands their problems and promises to end their miseries? This is just one feature of democracy , for we have a lot of samples for you in the essay on democracy. Stay tuned!

This Blog Includes:

What is democracy , sample essay on democracy (100 words), sample essay on democracy (250 to 300 words), sample essay on democracy for upsc (500 words).

Democracy is a form of government in which the final authority to deliberate and decide the legislation for the country lies with the people, either directly or through representatives. Within a democracy, the method of decision-making, and the demarcation of citizens vary among countries. However, some fundamental principles of democracy include the rule of law, inclusivity, political deliberations, voting via elections , etc.

Did you know: On 15th August 1947, India became the world’s largest democracy after adopting the Indian Constitution and granting fundamental rights to its citizens?

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Democracy Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on democracy.

Democracy is known as the finest form of government. Why so? Because in a democracy, the people of the country choose their government. They enjoy certain rights which are very essential for any human being to live freely and happily. There are various democratic countries in the world , but India is the largest one. Democracy has withstood the test of time, and while other forms have the government has failed, democracy stood strong. It has time and again proved its importance and impact.

Significance of a Democracy

Democracy is very important for human development . When people have free will to live freely, they will be happier. Moreover, we have seen how other forms of government have turned out to be. Citizens are not that happy and prosperous in a monarchy or anarchy.

Furthermore, democracy lets people have equal rights. This ensures that equality prevails all over the country. Subsequently, it also gives them duties. These duties make them better citizens and are also important for their overall development.

Most importantly, in a democracy, the people form the government. So, this selection of the government by the citizens gives everyone a chance to work for their country. It allows the law to prevail efficiently as the rules are made by people whom they have selected.

In addition, democracy allows people of various religions and cultures to exist peacefully. It makes them live in harmony with one another. People of democracy are more tolerant and accepting of each other’s differences. This is very important for any country to be happy and prosper.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

India: A Democratic Country

India is known to be the largest democracy all over the world. After the rule of the British ended in 1947 , India adopted democracy. In India, all the citizens who are above the age of 18 get the right to vote. It does not discriminate on the basis of caste, creed, gender, color, or more.

Although India is the largest democracy it still has a long way to go. The country faces a lot of problems which do not let it efficiently function as a democracy. The caste system is still prevalent which hampers with the socialist principle of democracy. Moreover, communalism is also on the rise. This interferes with the secular aspect of the country. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure the happiness and prosperity of the citizens.

In short, democracy in India is still better than that in most of the countries. Nonetheless, there is a lot of room for improvement which we must focus on. The government must implement stringent laws to ensure no discrimination takes place. In addition, awareness programs must be held to make citizens aware of their rights and duties.

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Normative democratic theory deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions, as well as the moral duties of democratic representatives and citizens. It is distinct from descriptive and explanatory democratic theory, which aim to describe and explain how democracy and democratic institutions function. Normative democracy theory aims to provide an account of when and why democracy is morally desirable as well as moral principles for guiding the design of democratic institutions and the actions of citizens and representatives. Of course, normative democratic theory is inherently interdisciplinary and must draw on the results of political science, sociology, psychology, and economics in order to give concrete moral guidance.

This brief outline of normative democratic theory focuses attention on seven related issues. First, it proposes a definition of democracy. Second, it outlines different approaches to the question of why democracy is morally valuable at all. Third, it discusses the issue of whether and when democratic institutions have authority and different conceptions of the limits of democratic authority. Fourth, it explores the question of what it is reasonable to demand of citizens in large democratic societies. This issue is central to the evaluation of normative democratic theories. A large body of opinion has it that most classical normative democratic theory is incompatible with what we can reasonably expect from citizens. Fifth, it surveys different accounts of the proper characterization of equality in the processes of representation and the moral norms of representation. Sixth, it discusses the relationship between central findings in social choice theory and democracy. Seventh, it discusses the question of who should be included in the group that makes democratic decisions.

This entry focuses on issues in contemporary democratic theory. Although it mentions authors in the history of philosophy where relevant, it does not attempt to give a history of democratic theory. Readers interested in more in-depth discussions of historical figures important to the development of democratic theory are advised to look at the entries listed in the “Historical Figures” section towards the end of this entry.

1. Democracy Defined

2.1.1.1 the production of relatively good laws and policies: responsiveness theories, 2.1.1.2 the production of relatively good laws and policies: epistemic theories, 2.1.1.3 character-based arguments, 2.1.1.4 economic justifications of democracy, 2.1.2 instrumental arguments against democracy, 2.1.3 grounds for instrumentalism, 2.2.1 liberty, 2.2.2 democracy as public justification, 2.2.3 equality, 3.1 instrumentalist conceptions of democratic authority, 3.2.1 democracy as collective self-rule, 3.2.2 freedom and democratic authority, 3.2.3 equality and authority, 3.3.1 internal limits to democratic authority, 3.3.2 the problem of persistent minorities, 3.3.3 external limits to democratic authority, 4.1 the problem of democratic participation, 4.2.1 elite theory of democracy, 4.2.2 interest group pluralism, 4.2.3 neo-liberalism.

4.2.4. The self-interest assumption

4.2.5 The Division of Democratic Labor

4.2.6 sortition, 4.3.1 the duty to vote, 4.3.2 principled disobedience of the law, 4.3.3 accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus, 5.1 what sort of representative system is best, 5.2 the ethics of representation, 6. social choice and democracy, 7. the boundary problem: constituting the demos, 8. historical figures, other internet resources, related entries.

The term “democracy”, as we will use it in this entry, refers very generally to a method of collective decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the decision-making process. Four aspects of this definition should be noted. First, democracy concerns collective decision making, by which we mean decisions that are made for groups and are meant to be binding on all the members of the group. Second, we intend for this definition to cover many different kinds of groups and decision-making procedures that may be called democratic. So there can be democracy in families, voluntary organizations, economic firms, as well as states and transnational and global organizations. The definition is also consistent with different electoral systems, for example first-past-the-post voting and proportional representation. Third, the definition is not intended to carry any normative weight. It is compatible with this definition of democracy that it is not desirable to have democracy in some particular context. So the definition of democracy does not settle any normative questions. Fourth, the equality required by the definition of democracy may be more or less deep. It may be the mere formal equality of one-person one-vote in an election for representatives to a parliament where there is competition among candidates for the position. Or it may be more robust, including substantive equality in the processes of deliberation and coalition building leading up to the vote. “Democracy” may refer to any of these political arrangements. It may involve direct referenda of the members of a society in deciding on the laws and policies of the society or it may involve the participation of those members in selecting representatives to make the decisions.

The function of normative democratic theory is not to settle questions of definition but to determine which, if any, of the forms democracy may take are morally desirable and when and how. To evaluate different moral justifications of democracy, we must decide on the merits of the different principles and conceptions of human beings and society from which they proceed.

2. The Justification of Democracy

In this section, we examine different views concerning the justification of democracy. Proposed justifications of democracy identify values or reasons that support democracy over alternative forms of decision-making, such as oligarchy or dictatorship. It is important to distinguish views concerning the justification of democracy from views concerning the authority of democracy, which we examine in section 3 . Attempts to establish democratic authority identify values or reasons in virtue of which subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions. Justification and authority can come apart (Simmons 2001: ch. 7)—it is possible to hold that the balance of values or reasons supports democracy over alternative forms of decision-making while denying that subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions.

We can evaluate the justification of democracy along at least two different dimensions: instrumentally, by reference to the outcomes of using it compared with other methods of political decision; or intrinsically, by reference to values that are inherent in the method.

2.1 Instrumentalism

2.1.1 instrumental arguments in favor of democracy.

Two kinds of in instrumental benefits are commonly attributed to democracy: (1) the production of relatively good laws and policies and (2) improvements in the characters of the participants.

It is often argued that democratic decision-making best protects subjects’ rights or interests because it is more responsive to their judgments or preferences than competing forms of government. John Stuart Mill, for example, argues that since democracy gives each subject a share of political power, democracy forces decision-makers to take into account the rights and interests of a wider range of subjects than are taken into account under aristocracy or monarchy (Mill 1861: ch. 3). There is some evidence that as groups are included in the democratic process, their interests are better advanced by the political system. For example, when African Americans regained the right to vote in the United States in 1965, they were able to secure many more benefits from the state than previously (Wright 2013). Economists argue that democracy promotes economic growth (Acemoglu et al. 2019). Several contemporary authors defend versions of this instrumental argument by pointing to the robust empirical correlation between well-functioning democratic institutions and the strong protection of core liberal rights, such as rights to a fair trial, bodily integrity, freedom of association, and freedom of expression (Gaus 1996: ch. 13; Christiano 2011; Gaus 2011: ch. 22).

A related instrumental argument for democracy is provided by Amartya Sen, who argues that

no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press. (Sen 1999: 152)

The basis of this argument is that politicians in a multiparty democracy with free elections and a free press have incentives to respond to the expressions of needs of the poor.

Epistemic justifications of democracy argue that, under the right conditions, democracy is generally more reliable than alternative methods at producing political decisions that are correct according to procedure-independent standards. While there are many different explanations for the reliability of democratic decision-making, we outline three of the most prominent explanations here: (1) Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, (2) the effects of cognitive diversity, and (3) information gathering and sharing.

The most prominent explanation for democracy’s epistemic reliability rests on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (CJT), a mathematical theorem developed by eighteenth-century mathematician the Marquis de Condorcet that builds on the so-called “law of large numbers”. CJT states that, when certain assumptions hold, the probability that a majority of voters support the correct decision increases and approaches one as the number of voters increases. The assumptions are (Condorcet 1785):

each voter is more likely than not to identify the correct decision (the competence assumption );
voters vote for what they believe is the correct decision (the sincerity assumption );
votes are statistically independent of one another (the independence assumption ).

While Condorcet’s original proof was restricted to decisions with only two choices, more recent work argues that CJT can be extended to decisions with three or more choices (List & Goodin 2001). The use of CJT to explain democracy’s reliability is often thought to originate with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s claim that

[i]f, when a sufficiently informed populace deliberates, the citizens were to have no communication among themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences, and the deliberation would always be good. (Rousseau 1762: Book III, ch. IV)

Contemporary theorists continue to rely on CJT, or variants of it, to justify democracy (Barry 1965; Cohen 1986; Grofman and Feld 1988; Goodin & Spiekermann 2019).

The appeal of CJT for epistemic democrats derives from the fact that, if its underlying assumptions are satisfied, decisions produced by even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to be correct. For example, if the assumptions of CJT hold for an electorate of 10,000 voters, and if each voter is 51 percent likely to identify the correct decision of two options, then the probability that a majority will select the correct decision is 99.97 percent. The formal mathematics of CJT are not subject to dispute. However, critics of CJT-based arguments for democracy argue that the assumptions underlying CJT are rarely, if ever, satisfied in actual democracies (see Black 1963: 159–65; Ladha 1992; Estlund 1997b; 2008: ch. XII; Anderson 2006). First, many have remarked that voters’ opinions are not independent of each other. Indeed, the democratic process seems to emphasize persuasion and coalition building. Second, the theorem does not seem to apply to cases in which the information that voters have access to, and on the basis of which they make their judgments, is segmented in various ways. Segmentation occurs when some sectors of the society do not have the relevant information while others do have it. Modern societies and politics seem to instantiate this kind of segmentation in terms of class, race, ethnic groupings, religion, occupational position, geographical place and so on. Finally, all voters approach issues they have to make decisions on with strong ideological biases that undermine the claim that each voter is bringing a kind of independent observation on the nature of the common good to the vote.

Advocates of CJT-based justifications of democracy generally respond to these sorts of criticisms by attempting to develop variations of CJT with weaker assumptions. These assumptions are more easily satisfied in democracies and so the revised theorems may show that even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to produce correct decisions (Grofman & Feld 1988; Austen-Smith 1992; Austen-Smith & Banks 1996).

A second common epistemic justification for democracy—which is often traced to Aristotle ( Politics , Book II, Ch. 11; see Waldron 1995)—argues that democratic procedures are best able to exploit the underlying cognitive diversity of large groups of citizens to solve collective problems. Since democracy brings a lot of people into the process of decision making, it can take advantage of many sources of information and perspectives in assessing proposed laws and policies. More recently, Hélène Landemore (2013) has drawn on the “diversity-trumps-ability” theorem of Scott Page and Lu Hong (Hong & Page 2004; Page 2007)—which states that a random collection of agents drawn from a large set of limited-ability agents typically outperforms a collection of the very best agents from that same set—to argue that democracy can be expected to produce better decisions than rule by experts. Both Page and Hong’s original theorem and Landemore’s use of it to justify democracy are subject to dispute (see Quirk 2014; Brennan 2014; Thompson 2014; Bajaj 2014).

A third common epistemic justification for democracy relies on the idea that democratic decision-making tends to be more informed than other forms of decision-making about the interests of citizens and the causal mechanisms necessary to advance those interests. John Dewey argues that democracy involves “a consultation and a discussion which uncovers social needs and troubles”. Even if experts know how best to solve collective problems, they need input from the masses to correct their biases tell them where the problems lie (Dewey 1927 [2012: 154–155]; see also Marsilius [DP]; Anderson 2006; Knight & Johnson 2011).

Many have endorsed democracy on the grounds that democracy has beneficial effects on the characters of subjects. Many agree with Mill and Rousseau that democracy tends to make people stand up for themselves more than other forms of rule do because it makes collective decisions depend on their input more than monarchy or aristocracy do. Hence, in democratic societies individuals are encouraged to be more autonomous. Relatedly, by giving citizens a share of control over political-decision-making, democracy cultivates citizens with active and productive characters rather than passive characters. In addition, it has been argued that democracy tends to get people to think carefully and rationally more than other forms of rule because it makes a difference to political outcomes whether they do or not. Finally, some argue that democracy tends to enhance the moral qualities of citizens. When they participate in making decisions, they have to listen to others, they are called upon to justify themselves to others and they are forced to think in part in terms of the interests of others. Some have argued that when people find themselves in this kind of circumstance, they can be expected genuinely to think in terms of the common good and justice. Hence, some have argued that democratic processes tend to enhance the autonomy, rationality, activity, and morality of participants. Since these beneficial effects are thought to be worthwhile in themselves, they count in favor of democracy and against other forms of rule (Mill 1861 [1991: 74]; Elster 1986 [2003: 152]; Hannon 2020).

Some argue in addition that the above effects on character tend to enhance the quality of legislation as well. A society of autonomous, rational, active, and moral decision-makers is more likely to produce good legislation than a society ruled by a self-centered person or a small group of persons who rule over slavish and unreflective subjects. Of course, the soundness of any of the above arguments depends on the truth of the causal theories of the consequences of different institutions.

There are a number of economic justifications of democratic institutions. They proceed from the idea that preferences are given and that institutions are justified in terms of how citizens, given their preferences, would rationally want their society to be organized. The two accounts we mention here are in a broadly contractarian tradition, which seeks to determine what persons would agree to as a framework for collective decision making. Probably the most famous of these efforts and the one that has led to the highly fruitful research program of public choice theory is that of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their classic work The Calculus of Consent (1963). They argue that something like constitutional democracy could arise from a state of nature in which persons, with their basic natural and property rights protected, would agree to a collective decision procedure. The basic preference structure is self-interest in which persons attempt to maximize the stream of benefits to themselves. Individuals desire a collective decision-making apparatus in order to take care of problems that arise in the state of nature from uncontrolled external costs and public bads, which are costs that arise for everyone because no individual has incentive to limit them. External costs are costs that persons impose others without their consent. Hence, the purpose of the collective decision making is to take care of problems that arise when markets are inefficient because of externalities and public bads. The design of the decision procedure is meant to minimize two kinds of costs: external costs and decision costs. Decision costs are costs that arise from the difficulty of making collective decisions. Such decision making takes time and resources. Here is the basic calculation each person considers when choosing a collective decision procedure. On the one hand, they consider the external costs imposed on them if the decision procedure is not a unanimity procedure. Each person reflects that as the decision procedure approximates unanimity the chance of external costs imposed on them goes to zero. Taking the external costs of the procedure alone into account each prefers unanimity. On the other hand, each person considers the decision costs of a collective procedure. Here, as the decision procedure approaches unanimity the decision costs grow extremely large because of all the haggling such a procedure would generate. The procedure each person would choose under the circumstances would attempt to minimize the combination of these two costs. It would be a procedure that is close to majority rule, though there is no reason to suppose that majority rule itself would be chosen.

One objection is that the assumptions behind the argument are too strong. Buchanan and Tullock argue that this process would lead to unanimous agreement on a collective decision procedure under certain assumptions such as individuals cannot be divided into groups with strongly opposed interests and when individuals are sufficiently uncertain of their fates in the long term that their interests become more or less the same. They are in effect behind a veil of ignorance with regard to the future. These assumptions have been contested as descriptions of any plausible circumstances in which societies find themselves.

Another broadly economic approach can be found in Douglas Rae (1969). Rae argues that individuals with preferences over social states would generally prefer majority rule over the long run because majority rule maximizes the chances of the satisfaction of their preferences. The Rae-Taylor theorem states that if each individual has an equal prior probability of preferring each of the two alternatives, majority rule maximizes each individual’s expected utility (see the Section 2.4 of the entry on social choice theory ). Again the background assumption is that people don’t know how often they fall in the majority or minority and don’t have any special preference for the status quo. Under these circumstances, one gets what one wants more often from a collective decision procedure when it is majoritarian (see also Coleman [1989]).

Not all instrumental arguments favor democracy. Plato argues that democracy is inferior to various forms of monarchy, aristocracy and even oligarchy on the grounds that democracy tends to undermine the expertise necessary to the proper governance of societies (Plato 1974, Book VI). Most people do not have the kinds of intellectual talents that enable them to think well about the difficult issues that politics involves. But in order to win office or get a piece of legislation passed, politicians must appeal to these people’s sense of what is right or not right. Hence, the state will be guided by very poorly worked out ideas that experts in manipulation and mass appeal use to help themselves win office. Plato argues instead that the state should be ruled by philosopher-kings who have the wisdom and moral character required for good rule. He thus defends a version of what David Estlund calls “epistocracy”, a form of oligarchy that involves rule by experts (Estlund 2003).

Mill defends a form of epistocracy that is sometimes referred to as the “plural voting” scheme (1861: ch. 4). While all rational adults get at least one vote under this scheme, some citizens get a greater number of votes based on satisfying some measure of political expertise. While Mill identifies the relevant measure of expertise in terms of formal education, the plural voting scheme is consistent with other measures. This scheme might be thought to combine the instrumental value of political expertise with the intrinsic value of broad inclusion.

One objection to any form of epistocracy—the demographic objection —holds that any criterion of expertise is likely to select demographically homogeneous individuals who are be biased in ways that undermine their ability to produce political outcomes that promote the general welfare (Estlund 2003).

Hobbes argues that democracy is inferior to monarchy because democracy fosters destabilizing dissension among subjects (Hobbes 1651: chap. XIX). On his view, individual citizens and even politicians are apt not to have a sense of responsibility for the quality of legislation because no one makes a significant difference to the outcomes of decision making. As a consequence, citizens’ concerns are not focused on politics and politicians succeed only by making loud and manipulative appeals to citizens in order to gain more power, but all lack incentives to consider views that are genuinely for the common good. Hence the sense of lack of responsibility for outcomes undermines politicians’ concern for the common good and inclines them to make sectarian and divisive appeals to citizens.

Many contemporary theorists expand on these Platonic and Hobbesian criticisms. A good deal of empirical data shows that citizens of large-scale democracies are ill-informed and apathetic about politics. This makes room for special interests to control the behavior of politicians and use the state for their own limited purposes all the while spreading the costs to everyone. Moreover, there is empirical evidence that democratic citizens often engage in motivated reasoning that unconsciously aims to affirm their existing political identities rather than arrive at correct judgments (Lord, Ross, & Lepper 1979; Bartels 2002; Kahan 2013; Achen & Bartels 2016). Some theorists argue that these considerations justify abandoning democracy altogether, while modest versions of these arguments have been used to justify modification of democratic institutions (Caplan 2007; Somin 2013; Brennan 2016). Relatedly, some theorists argue that rather than having beneficial effects on the characters of subjects as Mill and others argue, democracy actually has deleterious effects on the subjects’ characters and relationships (Brennan 2016: ch. 3).

Pure instrumentalists argue that these instrumental arguments for and against the democratic process are the only bases on which to evaluate the justification of democracy or compare it with other forms of political decision-making. There are a number of different kinds of argument for pure instrumentalism. One kind of argument proceeds from a more general moral theory. For example, classical utilitarianism has no room in its monistic axiology for the intrinsic values of fairness and liberty or the intrinsic importance of an egalitarian distribution of political power. Its sole concern with maximizing utility—understood as pleasure or desire satisfaction—guarantees that it can provide only instrumental arguments for and against democracy.

But one need not be a thoroughgoing utilitarian to argue for instrumentalism in democratic theory. There are arguments in favor of instrumentalism that pertain directly to the question of democracy and collective decision making generally. One argument states that political power involves the exercise of power of some over others. And it argues that the exercise of power of one person over another can only be justified by reference to the protection of the interests or rights of the person over whom power is exercised. Thus no distribution of political power could ever be justified except by reference to the quality of outcomes of the decision making process (Arneson 1993 [2002: 96–97]; 2003; 2004; 2009). Another sort of argument for instrumentalism proceeds negatively, attempting to show that the non-instrumental values most commonly used in attempted justifications for democracy do not actually justify democracy, and that an instrumental justification for democracy is therefore the only available sort of justification (Wall 2007).

Other arguments question the coherence of the idea of intrinsically fair collective decision making processes. For instance, social choice theory questions the idea that there can be a fair decision making function that transforms a set of individual preferences into a rational collective preference. The core objection is that no general rule satisfying reasonable constraints can be devised that can transform any set of individual preferences into a rational social preference. And this is taken to show that democratic procedures cannot be intrinsically fair (Riker 1982: 116). Ronald Dworkin argues that the idea of equality, which is for him at the root of social justice, cannot be given a coherent and plausible interpretation when it comes to the distribution of political power among members of the society. The relation of politicians to citizens inevitably gives rise to inequality; the process of democratic deliberation inevitably gives those with superior argument making abilities and greater willingness to participate more influence and therefore more power, than others, so equality of political power cannot be intrinsically fair or just (Dworkin 2000). In later work, Dworkin has pulled back from this originally thoroughgoing instrumentalism (Dworkin 1996).

2.2 Non-instrumentalism

Few theorists deny that political institutions must be at least in part evaluated in terms of the outcomes of having those institutions. Some argue in addition, that some forms of decision making are morally desirable independent of the consequences of having them. A variety of different approaches have been used to show that democracy has this kind of intrinsic value.

One prominent justification for democracy appeals to the value of liberty. According to one version of the view, democracy is grounded in the idea that each ought to be master of his or her life. Each person’s life is deeply affected by the larger social, legal and cultural environment in which he or she lives. Only when each person has an equal voice and vote in the process of collective decision-making will each have equal control over this larger environment. Thinkers such as Carol Gould conclude that only when some kind of democracy is implemented, will individuals have a chance at self-government (Gould 1988: 45–85; see also Marsilius [DP]). Since individuals have a right of self-government, they have a right to democratic participation. The idea is that the right of self-government gives one a right, within limits, to do wrong. Just as an individual has a right to make some bad decisions for himself or herself, so a group of individuals have a right to make bad or unjust decisions for themselves regarding those activities they share.

One major difficulty with this line of argument is that it appears to require that the basic rule of decision-making be consensus or unanimity. If each person must freely choose the outcomes that bind him or her then those who oppose the decision are not self-governing. They live in an environment imposed on them by others. So only when all agree to a decision are they freely adopting the decision (Wolff 1970: ch. 2). The trouble is that there is rarely agreement on major issues in politics. Indeed, it appears that one of the main reasons for having political decision making procedures is that they can settle matters despite disagreement.

One liberty-based argument that might seem to escape this worry appeals to an irreducibly collective right to self-determination. It is often argued that political communities have a right as a community to organize themselves politically in accordance with their values, principles, or commitments. Some argue that the right to collective self-determination requires democratic institutions that give citizens collective control over their political and legal structure (Cassese 1995). However, many argue democratic institutions are sufficient but not necessary to realize the right to collective self-determination because political communities might exercise this right to implement non-democratic institutions (Altman & Wellman 2009; Stilz 2016).

Another non-instrumental justification of democracy appeals to the ideal of public justification. The idea behind this approach is that laws and policies are legitimate to the extent that they are publicly justified to the citizens of the community. Public justification is justification to each citizen as a result of free and reasoned debate among equals.

Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of deliberative democracy has been highly influential in the development of this approach. Habermas analyses the form and function of modern legal systems through the lens of his theory of communicative action. This analysis yields the Democratic Principle:

[O]nly those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted. (Habermas 1992 [1996: 110])

Habermas advances a conception of democratic legitimacy according to which law is legitimate only if it results from a free and inclusive democratic process of “opinion and will-formation”. What might such a process look like in a complex and differentiated society? Habermas answers by advancing a “two-track” model that understands democratic legitimation in terms of the relationship between institutionalized deliberative bodies (e.g legislatures, agencies, courts) and informal communication in the public sphere, which is “wild”, and not centrally coordinated.

One possible objection to this view is that free and inclusive democratic procedures are insufficient to satisfy the demand for deliberative consensus embodied in the Democratic Principle. This demand is unlikely to be satisfied in diverse societies, since deep disagreements about which laws ought to be enacted is likely to remain after the relevant process of opinion and will-formation. The Democratic Principle might thus be thought to embody an overly idealistic conception of democratic legitimacy (Estlund 2008: ch.10). Another possible worry is that the Discourse Principle is not a genuine moral principle, but a principle that embodies the felicity conditions of practical discourse. As such, the Discourse Principle cannot ground a conception of democratic legitimacy that yields robust moral prescriptions (Forst 2016).

Drawing on Habermas and John Rawls, among others, Joshua Cohen (1996 [2003]) develops a conception of democracy in which citizens justify laws and policies on the basis of mutually acceptable reasons. Democracy, properly understood, is the context in which individuals freely engage in a process of reasoned discussion and deliberation on an equal footing. The ideas of freedom and equality provide guidelines for structuring democratic institutions.

The aim of Cohen’s conception of democracy as public justification is reasoned consensus among citizens. But a serious problem arises when we ask about what happens when disagreement remains. Two possible replies have been suggested. It has been urged that forms of consensus weaker than full consensus are sufficient for public justification and that the weaker varieties are achievable in many societies. For instance, there may be consensus on the list of reasons that are acceptable publicly but disagreement on the weight of the different reasons. Or there may be agreement on general reasons abstractly understood but disagreement about particular interpretations of those reasons. What would have to be shown here is that such weak consensus is achievable in many societies and that the disagreements that remain are not incompatible with the ideal of public justification.

The basic principle seems to be the principle of reasonableness according to which reasonable persons will only offer principles for the regulation of their society that other reasonable persons can reasonably accept. One only offers principles that others, who restrain themselves in the same way, can accept. Such a principle implies a kind of principle of restraint which requires that reasonable persons avoid proposing laws and policies on the basis of controversial moral or philosophical principles. When individuals offer proposals for the regulation of their society, they ought not to appeal to the whole truth as they see it but only to that part of the whole truth that others can reasonably accept. To put the matter in the way Rawls puts it: political society must be regulated by principles on which there is an overlapping consensus (Rawls 2005: Lecture IV). This is meant to obviate the need for a complete consensus on the principles that regulate society.

However, it is hard to see how this approach avoids the need for a complete consensus, which is highly unlikely to occur in any even moderately diverse society. The reason for this is that it is not clear why it is any less of an imposition on me when I propose legislation or policies for the society that I must restrain myself to considerations that other reasonable people accept than it is an imposition on others when I attempt to pass legislation on the basis of reasons they reasonably reject. For if I do restrain myself in this way, then the society I live in will not live up to the standards that I believe are essential to evaluating the society. I must then live in and support a society that does not accord with my conception of how it ought to be organized. It is not clear why this is any less of a loss of control over society than for those who must live in a society that is partly regulated by principles they do not accept. If one is a problem, then so is the other, and complete consensus is the only solution (Christiano 2009).

Many democratic theorists have argued that democracy is a way of treating persons as equals when there is good reason to impose some kind of organization on their shared lives but they disagree about how best to do it. Peter Singer argues that when people insist on different ways of arranging matters properly, each person in a sense claims a right to be dictator over their shared lives (Singer 1973: 30–41). But these claims to dictatorship cannot all hold up. Democracy embodies a kind of peaceful and fair compromise among these conflicting claims to rule. Each compromises equally on what he claims as long as the others do, resulting in each having an equal say over decision making. In effect, democratic decision making respects each person’s point of view on matters of common concern by giving each an equal say about what to do in cases of disagreement (Singer 1973; Waldron 1999: chap. 5).

What if people disagree on the democratic method or on the particular form democracy is to take? Are we to decide these latter questions by means of a higher order procedure? And if there is disagreement on the higher order procedure, must we also democratically decide that question? The view seems to lead to an infinite regress.

An alternative way of justifying democracy on the basis of equality is to ground democracy in public equality. Public equality is a principle of equality which ensures that people can see that they are being treated as equals. This view arises from three ideas. First, there is the basic egalitarian idea that people’s interests ought to be equally advanced, or at least that they ought to have equal opportunities to advance them. Second, human beings generally have highly fallible and biased understandings of their own and other people’s interests. Third, persons have fundamental interests in being able to see that they are being treated as equals. Public equality is an egalitarian principle that can be seen to be realized among persons despite the dramatically incomplete forms of knowledge people have. It is not all of justice, but it is essential that the principle be realized in a pluralistic society.

Democracy is a uniquely publicly egalitarian way to make collective decisions when there is substantial disagreement and conflict of interest among persons about how to shape the society they share. Each can see that the only plausible way of overcoming persistent disagreement over how to shape the society they all live in, while still publicly treating all persons as equals in the face of bias and fallibility, is to give each person an equal say in the process of shaping that society. Thus, democracy is necessary to the realization of public equality in a political society. Within the framework determined by this publicly realized equality, persons are permitted to attempt to bring about their more particular ideas about justice and the common good that they think are right.

The idea of public equality also grounds limits to democratic decision making. The thought is that a society cannot democratically decide to abolish the democratic rights of some of its members. Public equality also requires that basic liberal and civil rights be respected as well, by the democratic process and so serves as a limit to democratic decision making (Christiano 2008; Valentini 2013).

A number of worries attend this kind of view. First, it is generally thought that majority rule is required for treating persons as equals in collective decision making. This is because only majority rule is neutral towards alternatives in decision making. Unanimity tends to favor the status quo as do various forms of supermajority rule. But if this is so, the above view raises the twin dangers of majority tyranny and of persistent minorities, i.e., groups of persons who find themselves always losing in majority decisions. Surely these latter phenomena must be incompatible with public equality. Second, the kind of view defended above is susceptible to the worry that political equality is not a coherent ideal in any modern state with a complex division of labor and the need for representation. This last worry will be discussed in more detail in the next sections on democratic citizenship and legislative representation. The first worry will be discussed more in the discussion on the limits to democratic authority.

A related approach grounds democracy in the ideal of relational equality . A concern with relational equality is a concern for

human relationships that are, in certain crucial respects at least, unstructured by differences of rank, power, or status. (Scheffler 2010: 225)

Niko Kolodny argues that democratic institutions are an essential component of relational equality (Kolodny 2014a,b). One line of Kolodny’s argument holds that political decisions involve the use of coercive force. Inequalities in the power to use force undermine equal social status at least in part because the power to use force is “the power that usually determines the distribution of other powers” (Kolodny 2014b: 307). Individuals who have superior power to use force on others have a superior social status. An egalitarian distribution of political power is thus essential for realizing social equality. And only democratic institutions provide an egalitarian distribution of political power. We will discuss the relationship between relational equality and democracy further when we discuss the authority of democracy in Part 3 below.

3. The Authority of Democracy

Since democracy is a collective decision process, the question naturally arises about whether there is any duty of citizens to obey democratic decisions when they disagree with it.

There are three main concepts of the legitimate authority of the state. First, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that it is morally justified in coercively imposing its rule on the members. Legitimate authority on this account has no direct implications concerning the obligations or duties that citizens may hold toward that state. It simply says that if the state is morally justified in doing what it does, then it has legitimate authority. Second, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that its directives generate duties in citizens to obey. The duties of the citizens need not be owed to the state but they are real duties to obey. The third is that the state has a right to rule that is correlated with the citizens’ duty to it to obey it. This is the strongest notion of authority and it seems to be the core idea behind the legitimacy of the state. The idea is that when citizens disagree about law and policy it is important to be able to answer the question, who has the right to choose?

Instrumental arguments for democracy give some reason for why one ought to respect the democracy when one disagrees with its decisions. There may be many instrumental considerations that play a role in deciding on the question of whether one ought to obey. And these instrumental considerations are pretty much the same whether one is considering obedience to democracy or some other form of rule.

There is one instrumentalist approach which is quite unique to democracy and that seems to ground a strong conception of democratic authority. That is the epistemic approach inspired by the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which we discussed in section 2.1.1.2 above. There, we discussed a number of difficulties with the application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem to the case of voting in elections and referenda in large-scale democracies, including lack of independence, informational segmentation, and the existence of ideological biases.

One further worry about the Jury Theorem’s epistemic conceptions of authority is that it would prove too much since it undermines the common practice of the loyal opposition in democracies. If the background conditions of the Jury Theorem are met, a large-scale democracy majority is practically certain to produce the right decisions. On what basis can citizens in a political minority rationally hold on to their competing views? The members of the minority have a powerful reason for shifting their allegiance to the majority position, since each has very good reason to think that the majority is right. The epistemic conception of authority based on the Jury Theorem thus threatens to be objectionably authoritarian, since it looks like it demands not only obedience of action but obedience of thought as well. Even in scientific communities the fact that a majority of scientists favor a particular view does not make the minority scientists think that they are wrong, though it does perhaps give them pause (Goodin 2003: ch. 7).

Some theories of democratic authority combine instrumental and non-instrumental considerations. David Estlund argues that democratic procedures have legitimate authority because they are better than random and epistemically the best of the political systems that are acceptable to all reasonable citizens (Estlund 2008). They must be better than random because, otherwise, why wouldn’t we use a fair random procedure like a lottery or coin flip? Democratic authority must have an epistemic element. And the justification of democratic procedure must be acceptable to all reasonable citizens in order to respect their freedom and equality. Estlund’s conception of democratic authority—which he calls “epistemic proceduralism”— thus combines the ideal of public justification with a concern for the tendency of democracies to produce good decisions.

3.2 Intrinsic Conceptions of Democratic Authority

Some theorists argue that there is a special relation between democracy and legitimate authority grounded in the value of collective self-rule. John Locke argues that when a person consents to the creation of a political society, they necessarily consent to the use of majority rule in deciding how the political society is to be organized (Locke 1690: sec. 96). Locke thinks that majority rule is the natural decision rule when there is disagreement. He argues that a society is a kind of collective body that must move in the direction of the greater force. One way to understand this argument is as follows. If we think of each member of society as an equal and if we think that there is likely to be disagreement beyond the question of whether to join society or not, then we must accept majority rule as the appropriate decision rule. This interpretation of the greater force argument assumes that the expression “greater force” is to be understood in terms of the equal worth of each person’s interests and rights, so the society must go in the direction in which the greater number of persons wants it to go.

Locke thinks that a people, which is formed by individuals who consent to be members, could choose a monarchy by means of majority rule and so this argument by itself does not give us an argument for democracy. But Locke refers back to this argument when he defends the requirement of representative institutions for deciding when property may be regulated and taxes levied. He argues that a person must consent to the regulation or taxation of his property by the state. But he says that this requirement of consent is satisfied when a majority of the representatives of property holders consent to the regulation and taxation of property (Locke, 1690: sec. 140). This does seem to be moving towards a genuinely democratic conception of legitimate authority.

Rousseau argues that when individuals consent to form a political community, they agree to put themselves under the direction of the “general will” (Rousseau 1762). The general will is not a mere aggregation of individuals’ private wills. It is, rather, the will of the political community as a whole. And since the general will can only emerge as the product of a properly organized democratic procedure, individuals consent to put themselves under the direction of a properly organized democratic procedure. On one interpretation of Rousseau, democratic procedures are properly organized only when they (1) define rights that apply equally to all, (2) via a procedure that considers everyone’s interests equally, and (3) everyone who is coerced to obey the laws has a voice in that procedure.

There are at least two ways of understanding the idea of the general will. On what might be called the constitutive interpretation, the general will is constituted by the results of a properly organized democratic procedure. That is, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the general will in virtue of the fact that they emerge from a properly organized democratic procedure, and not because they reflect some procedure-independent truth about the common good. On what might be called the epistemic interpretation, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the way of tracking the procedure-independent truth about the common good. As we discussed in section 3.1 , Rousseau is often interpreted as appealing to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem to support the epistemic credentials of a properly organized democratic procedure.

Anna Stilz develops an account of democratic authority that appeals to the value of “freedom as independence” (Stilz 2009). Freedom as independence is freedom from being subject to the will of another. In order not to be subject to the will of others, individuals need property rights and a protected sphere of autonomy to pursue one’s plans. Drawing on Kant, Stilz argues that attempts by particular individuals, no matter how conscientious, to define and secure rights to property and autonomy in a state of nature will be inconsistent with freedom as independence. Such attempts unilaterally impose new obligations on others through acts of private will in the face of competing claims. But even if individuals in a state of nature do agree to a resolution of their competing claims, they are dependent on the will of others to honor this agreement. Stilz thus argues that justice must be administered by an authoritative legal system which can coercively impose one set of objective rules—rules we must respect even when we disagree—to adjudicate our conflicting claims. But if such a system is to be consistent with the freedom of subjects, it cannot be imposed by the private wills of rulers. The solution, Stilz argues, lies in Rousseau’s idea of the general will. When subjects obey the general will, they are not obeying the private will of any individual; they are obeying a will that arises from all and applies to all.

One worry with this account is that those who oppose democratically-enacted laws or policies can complain that those laws or policies are imposed against their will. Perhaps they are not subject to the will of a particular individual, but they are subject to the will of a majority. This might be thought to constitute a significant threat to individuals’ freedom as independence. Another worry, which Stilz’s view arguably inherits from Rousseau, is that the conditions for the general will to emerge are so demanding that the view implies that no state that exists or has existed has legitimate political authority. Stilz’s view might thus be thought to entail what A.J. Simmons calls “a posteriori anarchism” (Simmons 2001).

Another approach to democratic authority asserts that failing to obey the decisions of a democratic assembly amounts to treating one’s fellow citizens as inferiors (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). In the face of disagreement about substantive law and policy, democracy realizes a kind of public equality by giving each individual an equal say in determining which laws or policies will be enacted. Citizens who skirt laws made by suitably egalitarian procedures act contrary to the equal right of all citizens to have a say in making laws. Those who refuse to pay taxes or respect property laws on the grounds that they are unjust are affirming a superior right to that of others in determining how the shared aspects of social life ought to be arranged. Thus, they violate the duty to treat others publicly as equals. And there is reason to think this duty must normally have some pre-eminence. Public equality is the most important form of equality and democracy is required by public equality. The other forms of equality in play in substantive disputes about law and policy are ones about which people can have reasonable disagreements (within limits specified by the principle of public equality). Citizens thus have obligations to abide by the democratic process even if their favored conceptions of justice or equality are passed by in the decision making process.

Daniel Viehoff develops an egalitarian conception of democratic authority based on the ideal of relational equality (Viehoff 2014; see section 2.2.3 above for more on relational equality). Viehoff argues that relational equality is threatened by “subjection” in a relationship, which occurs when individuals have significantly different power over how they interact with and relate to one another. According to Viehoff, obeying the outcomes of egalitarian democratic procedures is necessary and sufficient for citizens to achieve coordination on common rules without subjection. It is sufficient because democratic procedures distribute decision-making power equally, which ensures that coordination is not determined by unequal power advantages. It is necessary because parties must set aside the considerations of greater and lesser power to realize non-subjection in their relationship.

Fabienne Peter develops a fairness-based conception of democratic authority that incorporates epistemic considerations (Peter 2008; 2009). Drawing on insights from proceduralist epistemology, Peter’s “pure epistemic proceduralism” holds that suitably egalitarian democratic decisions are binding at least in part because they result from a fair procedure of knowledge-production. This account differs from Estlund’s epistemic proceduralism (see section 5.1 above) because it does not condition the authority of democratic procedures on their ability to produce decisions that track the procedure-independent truth. Rather, the authority of democratic procedures is grounded in their fairness. And it differs from pure procedural accounts because the relevant notion of fairness is fairness in knowledge-production.

3.3 Limits to the Authority of Democracy

What are the limits to democratic authority? A limit to democratic authority is a principle violation of which defeats democratic authority. When the principle is violated by the democratic assembly, the assembly loses its authority in that instance or the moral weight of the authority is overridden. A number of different views have been offered on this issue. We can distinguish between internal and external limits to democratic authority. An internal limit arises from the constitutive requirements of the democratic process or from the principles that ground democracy. An external limit arises from principles that are independent of the values or requirements that ground democracy.

External limits to democratic authority are rebutting limits, which are principles that weigh against—and may sometimes outweigh the principles that ground democracy. So in a particular case, an individual may see that there are reasons to obey the assembly and some reasons against obeying the assembly and in the case at hand the reasons against obedience outweigh the reasons in favor of obedience. Internal limits to democratic authority are undercutting limits. These limits function not by weighing against the considerations in favor of authority, they undercut the considerations in favor of authority altogether; they simply short circuit the authority. When an undercutting limit is in play, it is not as if the principles which ground the limit outweigh the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly, it is rather that the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly are undermined altogether; they cease to exist or at least they are severely weakened.

Some have argued that the democratic process ought to be limited to decisions that are not incompatible with the proper functioning of the democratic process. So they argue that the democratic process may not legitimately take away the political rights of its citizens in good standing. It may not take away rights that are necessary to the democratic process such as freedom of association or freedom of speech. But these limits do not extend beyond the requirements for proper democratic functioning. They do not protect non political artistic speech or freedom of association in the case of non political activities (Ely 1980: chap. 4).

Another kind of internal limit is a limit that arises from the principles that underpin democracy. And the presence of this limit would seem to be necessary to making sense of the first limit because in order for the first limit to be morally important we need to know why a democracy ought to protect the democratic process.

Locke gives an account of the internal limits of democracy in his idea that there are certain things to which a citizen may not consent (Locke 1690: ch. XI). She may not consent to arbitrary rule or the violation of fundamental rights including democratic and liberal rights. Since consent is the basis of democratic authority for Locke, this account provides an explanation of the idea behind the first internal limit, that democracy may not be suspended by democratic means but it goes beyond that limit to suggest that rights that are not essentially connected with the exercise of the franchise may also not be violated because one may not consent to their violation.

More recently, Ronald Dworkin has defended an account of the limits of democratic authority (Dworkin 1996). He argues that democracy is justified by appeal to a principle of self-government. He argues that self-government cannot be realized unless all citizens are treated as full members of the political community, because, otherwise, they are not able to identify as members of the community. Among the conditions of full membership, he argues, are rights to be treated as equals and rights to have one’s moral independence respected. These principles support robust requirements of non-discrimination and of basic liberal rights.

The conception of democratic authority that grounds it in public equality also provides an account of the limits of that authority (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). Since democracy is founded in public equality, it may not violate public equality in any of its decisions. The basic idea is that overt violation of public equality by a democratic assembly undermines the claim that the democratic assembly embodies public equality. Democracy’s embodiment of public equality is conditional on its protecting public equality. To the extent that liberal rights are grounded in public equality and the provision of an economic minimum is also so grounded, this suggests that democratic rights and liberal rights and rights to an economic minimum create a limit to democratic authority. This account also provides a deep grounding for the kinds of limits to democratic authority defended in the first internal limit and it goes beyond these to the extent that protection of rights that are not connected with the exercise of the franchise is also necessary to public equality.

This account of the authority of democracy also provides some help with a vexing problem of democratic theory. This problem is the difficulty of persistent minorities. There is a persistent minority in a democratic society when that minority always loses in the voting. This is always a possibility in democracies because of the use of majority rule. If the society is divided into two or more highly unified voting blocks in which the members of each group votes in the same ways as all the other members of that group, then the group in the minority will find itself always on the losing end of the votes. This problem has plagued some societies, particularly those with indigenous peoples who live within developed societies. Though this problem is often connected with majority tyranny it is distinct from the problem of majority tyranny because it may be the case that the majority attempts to treat the minority well, in accordance with its conception of good treatment. It is just that the minority never agrees with the majority on what constitutes proper treatment. Being a persistent minority can be highly oppressive even if the majority does not try to act oppressively. This can be understood with the help of the very ideas that underpin democracy. Persons have interests in being able to correct for the cognitive biases of others and to be able to make the world in such a way that it makes sense to them. These interests are set back for a persistent minority since they never get their way.

The conception of democracy as grounded in public equality can shed light on this problem. It can say that the existence of a persistent minority violates public equality (Christiano 2008: chap. 7). In effect, a society in which there is a persistent minority is one in which that minority is being treated publicly as an inferior because it is clear that its fundamental interests are being set back. Hence to the extent that violations of public equality undercut the authority of a democratic assembly, the existence of a persistent minority undermines the authority of the democracy at least with respect to the minority. This suggests that certain institutions ought to be constructed so that the minority is not persistent.

One natural kind of limit to democratic authority is the external kind of limit. Here the idea is that there are certain considerations that favor democratic decision making and there are certain values that are independent of democracy that may be at issue in democratic decisions. For example, many theories recognize core liberal rights—such as rights to property, bodily integrity, and freedom of thought and expression—as external limits to democratic authority. Locke is often interpreted as arguing that individuals have natural rights to property in themselves and the external world that democratic laws must respect in order to have legitimate authority (Locke 1690).

Some views may assert that there are only external limits to democratic authority. But it is possible to think that there are both internal and external limits. Such an issue may arise in decisions to go to war, for example. In such decisions, one may have a duty to obey the decision of the democratic assembly on the grounds that this is how one treats one’s fellow citizens as equals but one may also have a duty to oppose the war on the grounds that the war is an unjust aggression against other people. To the extent that this consideration is sufficiently serious it may outweigh the considerations of equality that underpin democratic authority. Thus one may have an overall duty not to obey in this context. Issues of foreign policy in general seem to give rise to possible external limits to democracy.

4. The Demands of Democratic Participation

In this section, we examine the demands of participation in large-scale democracies. We begin by examining a core challenge to the idea that democratic citizens are capable of governing a large and complex society. We then explore different proposed solutions to the core challenge. Finally, we examine the moral duties of democratic citizens in large-scale democracies in light of the core challenge.

A vexing problem of democratic theory has been to determine whether ordinary citizens are up to the task of governing a large and complex society. There are three distinct problems here:

Plato argued that some people are more intelligent and informed about political matters than others and have a superior moral character, and that those persons ought to rule ( The Republic , Book VI)
Others have argued that a society must have a division of labor. If everyone were engaged in the complex and difficult task of politics, little time or energy would be left for the other essential tasks of a society. Conversely, if we expect most people to engage in other difficult and complex tasks, how can we expect them to have the time and resources sufficient to devote themselves intelligently to politics?
Since individuals have so little impact on the outcomes of political decision making in large societies, they have little sense of responsibility for the outcomes. Some have argued that it is not rational to vote since the chances that an individual’s vote will a decide the outcome of an election (i.e., will determine whether a candidate gets elected or not) are nearly indistinguishable from zero. For example, one widely accepted estimate puts the odds of an individual casting the deciding vote in a United States presidential election at 1 in 100 million. Many estimates put the odds much lower. Worse still, Anthony Downs has argued that almost all of those who do vote have little reason to become informed about how best to vote (Downs 1957: ch.13). On the assumption that citizens reason and behave roughly according to the Downsian model, either the society must in fact be run by a relatively small group of people with minimal input from the rest or it will be very poorly run. As we can see these criticisms are echoes of the sorts of criticisms Plato and Hobbes made.

These observations pose challenges for any robustly egalitarian or deliberative conception of democracy. Without the ability to participate intelligently in politics one cannot use one’s votes to advance one’s aims nor can one be said to participate in a process of reasoned deliberation among equals. So, either equality of political power implies a kind of self-defeating equal participation of citizens in politics or a reasonable division of labor seems to undermine equality of power. And either substantial participation of citizens in public deliberation entails the relative neglect of other tasks or the proper functioning of the other sectors of the society requires that most people do not participate intelligently in public deliberation.

4.2 Proposed Solutions to the Problem of Democratic Participation

Some modern theorists of democracy, called elite theorists, have argued against any robustly egalitarian or deliberative forms of democracy in light of the problem of democratic participation. They argue that high levels of citizen participation tend to produce bad legislation designed by demagogues to appeal to poorly informed and overly emotional citizens. They look upon the alleged uninformedness of citizens evidenced in many empirical studies in the 1950s and 1960s as perfectly reasonable and predictable. Indeed they regard the alleged apathy of citizens in modern states as highly desirable social phenomena.

Political leaders are to avoid divisive and emotionally charged issues and make policy and law with little regard for the fickle and diffuse demands made by ordinary citizens. Citizens participate by voting but since they know very little they are not effectively the ruling part of the society. The process of election is usually just a fairly peaceful way of maintaining or changing those who rule (Schumpeter 1942 [1950: 269]).

On Schumpeter’s view, however, citizens do have a role to play in avoiding serious disasters. When politicians act in ways that nearly anyone can see is problematic, the citizens can throw the bums out.

So the elite theory of democracy does seem compatible with some of the instrumentalist arguments given above but it is strongly opposed to the intrinsic arguments from liberty, public justification and equality. To be sure, there can be an elite deliberative democracy wherein elites deliberate, perhaps even out of sight of the population at large, on how to run the society.

A view akin to the elite theory but less pessimistic about citizens’ political agency and competence argues that a well-functioning representative democracy can function as a kind of “defensible epistocracy” (Landa & Pevnick 2020). This view holds that, under the right conditions, elected officials can be expected to exercise political power more responsibly than citizens in a direct democracy because each official is far more likely to cast the deciding vote in legislative assemblies (the “pivotality effect”) and officials have more incentive to exercise power with due regard for the general welfare (the “accountability effect”). Moreover, under the right conditions, representative democracy allows individuals to assess the competence of candidates for office and to select candidates who are best able to help the community pursue its commitments.

One approach that is in part motivated by the problem of democratic citizenship but which attempts to preserve some elements of equality against the elitist criticism is the interest group pluralist account of politics. Robert Dahl’s early statement of the view is very powerful.

In a rough sense, the essence of all competitive politics is bribery of the electorate by politicians… The farmer… supports a candidate committed to high price supports, the businessman…supports an advocate of low corporation taxes… the consumer…votes for candidates opposed to a sales tax. (Dahl 1959: 69)

In this conception of the democratic process, each citizen is a member of an interest group with narrowly defined interests that are closely connected to their everyday lives. On these subjects citizens are supposed to be quite well informed and interested in having an influence. Or at least, elites from each of the interest groups that are relatively close in perspective to the ordinary members are the principal agents in the process. On this account, democracy is not rule by the majority but rather rule by coalitions of minorities. Policy and law in a democratic society are decided by means of bargaining among the different groups.

This approach is conceivably compatible with the more egalitarian approach to democracy. This is because it attempts to reconcile equality with collective decision making by limiting the tasks of citizens to ones which they are able to perform reasonably well. It is not particularly compatible with the deliberative public justification approach because it takes the democratic process to be concerned essentially with bargaining among the different interest groups where the preferences are not subject to further debate in the society as a whole.

A third approach inspired by the problem of participation may be called the neo-liberal approach to politics favored by public choice theorists such as James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock (1962). Against elite theories, they contend that elites and their allies will tend to expand the powers of government and bureaucracy for their own interests and that this expansion will occur at the expense of a largely inattentive public. For this reason, they argue for severe restrictions on the powers of elites. They argue against the interest group pluralist theorists that the problem of participation occurs within interest groups more or less as much as among the citizenry at large. Only powerful economic interests are likely to succeed in organizing to influence the government and they will do so largely for their own benefit. Since economic elites will advance their own interests in politics while spreading the costs to others, policies will tend to be more costly (because imposed on everyone in society) than they are beneficial (because they benefit only the elites in the interest group.)

Neo-liberals infer that one ought to transfer many of the current functions of the state to the market and limit the state to the enforcement of basic property rights and liberties. These can be more easily understood and brought under the control of ordinary citizens.

But the neo-liberal account of democracy must answer to two large worries. First, citizens in modern societies have more ambitious conceptions of social justice and the common good than are realizable by the minimal state. The neo-liberal account thus implies a very serious curtailment of democracy of its own. More evidence is needed to support the contention that these aspirations cannot be achieved by the modern state. Second, the neo-liberal approach ignores the problem of large private concentrations of wealth and power that are capable of pushing small states around for their own benefit and imposing their wills on populations without their consent.

Somin (2013) also argues that government be significantly reduced in size so that citizens have a lesser knowledge burden to carry. But he calls for government decentralization so that citizens can vote with their feet in favor of or against competing units of government, in effect creating a kind of market in governments among which citizens can choose.

4.2.4 The self-interest assumption

A considerable amount of the literature in political science and the economic theory of the state are grounded in the assumption that individuals act primarily and perhaps even exclusively in their self-interest narrowly construed. The problem of participation and the accounts of the democratic process described above are in large part dependent on this assumption. When the preferences of voters are not assumed to be self-interested the calculations of the value of participation change. For example, if a person is a motivated utilitarian, the small chance of making a difference is coupled with a huge accumulated return to many people if there is a significant difference between alternatives. It may be worth it in this case to become reasonably well informed (Parfit 1984: 74). Even more weakly altruistic moral preferences could make a big difference to the rationality of becoming informed, for example if one had a preference to comply with perceived civic duty to vote responsibly (see section 4.3.1 for discussion of the duty to vote). Any moral preference can be formulated in consistent utility functions.

Moreover, defenders of deliberative democracy often claim that concerns for the common good and justice are not merely given prior to politics but that they can evolve and improve through the process of discussion and debate in politics (Elster 1986 [2003]; Gutmann & Thompson 2004; Cohen 1989 [2009]). They assert that much debate and discussion in politics would not be intelligible were it not for the fact that citizens are willing to engage in open minded discussion with those who have distinct morally informed points of view. Empirical evidence suggests that individuals are motivated by moral considerations in politics in addition to their interests (Mansbridge 1990).

Public deliberation in any large-scale democracy will occur within a complex and differentiated “deliberative system”, a

wide variety of institutions, associations, and sites of contestation accomplish political work. (Mansbridge et. al. 2012)

Moreover, the deliberative system of a complex democracy will be characterized by a division of democratic labor , with different parts of the system making different contributions to the overall system. The question arises: what is the appropriate role for a citizen in this division of labor? Philosophically, we should ask two questions. What ought citizens have knowledge about in order to fulfill their role? What standards ought citizens’ beliefs live up to in order to be adequately supported? One promising view is that citizens must think about what ends the society ought to aim at and leave the question of how to achieve those aims to experts (Christiano 1996: ch 5). The rationale for this division of labor is that expertise is not as fundamental to the choice of aims as it is to the development of legislation and policy. Citizens are capable in their everyday lives of understanding and cultivating deep understandings of values and of their interests. And if citizens genuinely do choose the aims and others faithfully pursue the means to achieving those aims, then citizens are in the driver’s seat in society and they can play this role as equals.

To be sure, citizens need to know who to vote for and whether those they vote for are genuinely advancing their aims. This would appear to require some basic knowledge of about how best to achieve their political aims. How is this possible without extensive knowledge? In addition, there is empirical evidence that those who are better informed have more influence on representatives (Erikson 2015). So, if this task requires some kind of knowledge to do well, how can this be compatible with equality?

One promising response is that ordinary citizens do not need individually to have a lot of knowledge of social science and particular facts in order to make political decisions based on such knowledge. Recent research in cognitive science indicates the individuals use “cognitive shortcuts” to save on time in acquiring information about the world they live in (Lupia & McCubbins 1998). This use of shortcuts is common and essential throughout economic and political life. In political life, we see part of the rationale for the many intermediate institutions between government and citizens (Downs 1957: 221–229). Citizens save time by making use of institutions such as the press, unions and other interest group associations, political parties, and opinion leaders to get information about politics. They also rely on interactions in the workplace as well as conversations with friends and families. Political parties can connect ordinary citizens in various ways to expertise because each one contains a division of labor within them that mirrors that in the state. Experts in parties have incentives to make their expertise intelligible to other members (Christiano 2012). In addition, under favorable conditions, political parties stimulate the development of citizens’ normative perspectives and facilitate a healthy public competition of political justifications based on those perspectives (White & Ypi 2016).

People are dependent on social networks in other ways in a democracy. People receive “free” information (which they do not deliberately seek out) about politics and law in school, through their jobs, in discussion with friends, colleagues and family and incidentally through the media. And this can form a better or worse basis on which to pursue other information. Institutions can make a difference to the stream of free information individuals receive. Education can be distributed in a more or less egalitarian way. The circumstances of work can provide more or less free information about politics and law. People who have jobs with a significant amount of power such as lawyers, business persons, government officials will be beneficiaries of very high quality free information. They need to know about law and politics to do their jobs properly. Those who hold low skilled and non-unionized jobs will receive much less free information about politics at work. To the extent that we can alter the economic division of labor by for example giving more place to unions or having greater worker participation, we might be able to reduce inequalities of information among citizens.

It has been argued that some of the core problems of electoral representative democracy can be solved by embracing the appointment of political officials by random selection, or sortition . Athenian democracy involved direct democracy for the making of laws and sortition for the choice of officials. Sortition is arguably consistent with the definition of democracy offered in section 1 because, in virtue of the fact that citizens have an equal chance of being selected, sortition is characterized by equality at a crucial stage of the decision-making process. Alex Guerrero (2014) argues that sortition can avoid the related problems of political ignorance, lack of representative accountability, and capture of the political process by elites. The problems are solved because the appointment of public officials does not depend on the input of ordinary citizens who are likely to be ignorant about political matters, nor does it leave space for the wealthy and powerful to influence official decision-making through funding electoral campaigns. One objection is that sortition ignores citizens’ interests in being part of the process of collective self-governance and rather than merely having an equal chance to be part of this process (Lafont 2019). Another objection is that the process of sortition does not allow for choosing representatives and political parties that have put together a conception of how all the interests in society are to fit together in a just and reasonable whole.

4.3 The Moral Duties of Democratic Citizens

What are the moral duties of democratic citizens in complex democracies? In this section, we discuss three important democratic duties: (1) the duty to vote, (2) the duty to promote justice through principled disobedience of the law, and (3) duties to accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus.

It is often thought that democratic citizens have a moral duty to vote in elections. But this is not obvious. Individual votes are a causally insignificant contribution to the democratic process. In large-scale democracies, the chance that any particular citizen’s vote will decide the outcome of an election is minuscule. What moral reason do democratic citizens have to participate in politics even though they’re almost certain not to make the difference to who gets elected? Why shouldn’t they seek to promote the good or justice in other ways?

Parfit develops an act-utilitarian answer to this question (Parfit 1984: 73–75). Act-utilitarians hold that morally right actions maximize the total expected sum of the utilities of all persons in the society. Parfit argues that voting might nonetheless maximize expected utility if one candidate is significantly superior to the other(s). If we add the benefits to each member of the society of having the superior candidate win, we get a very large difference in value. So when we multiply that value by the probability of casting the deciding vote, which is often thought to be about 1/100,000,000 in a United States presidential election, we might still get a reasonably high expected value. When we subtract the cost to the voter and others of voting, which is often quite low, from this number, we may still have a good reason to vote.

One worry with Parfit’s view is that it faces a version of what Jason Brennan calls “the particularity problem” (Brennan 2011). This is the problem of explaining why citizens ought to promote value through political participation as opposed to through non-political acts. Voting is just one way of promoting overall utility; we need to know the expected utility of the different acts they might perform instead. Even if the argument above is correct, it might be the case that many individuals maximize expected utility by not voting and doing something even more beneficial with their time.

Alex Guerrero argues that citizens have moral reasons to vote because candidates who win by a larger proportion of votes can claim a greater “normative mandate” to govern (Guerrero 2010). Still each individual vote makes only a tiny contribution to the proportion of votes a candidate receives. So, we might doubt the strength of the reason to vote that Guerrero identifies.

Some theorists argue that individuals have a moral duty to vote in order to absolve themselves of complicity in state injustices (Beerbohm 2012; Zakaras 2018). All states commit injustices—they make and enforce unjust laws, wage unjust wars, and much else. And citizens of large-scale democracies have a kind of standing responsibility, by paying taxes and obeying laws, for their state’s injustices of which they must actively absolve themselves The complicity account argues that citizens avoid shared responsibility for their state’s injustices if they oppose those injustices through voting and of public advocacy (Beerbohm 2012).

One worry is that it is unclear why voting and publicly advocating against injustice should be thought to absolve responsibility that is established by paying taxes and obeying laws. Another worry is that one’s concern to oppose injustice should derive from a more direct concern for the wrongs suffered by victims of injustice rather than a concern with keeping one’s hands clean.

One sort of account that avoids this worry grounds the moral duty to vote in the importance of doing one’s fair share of the demands of political justice consistent with public equality. The demands of creating and sustaining just institutions distribute fairly among all citizens (Maskivker 2019). If one fails to do one’s fair share of these demands, then one fails to show due regard for the eventual victims of injustice. Furthermore, voting provides citizens with a mechanism for doing their fair shares of the demands of making their institutions just in a way that is consistent with respecting the public equality of fellow citizens. By showing up and casting a vote, citizens can contribute to the collective achievement of justice while maintaining equal decision-making power with fellow citizens.

Civil disobedience has long been recognized as a central mechanism through which democratic citizens may legitimately promote political justice in their society. According to the standard view, civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law that aims to change laws or government policies. People who engage in civil disobedience are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions in order to show fidelity to the law (Bedau 1961; Rawls 1971: ch. 55). The standard definition of civil disobedience has been subjected to challenge. For example, some argue that the private acts in which the disobedient seeks to evade legal consequences can count as instances of civil disobedience (Raz 1979; Brownlee 2004, 2007, 2012).

Perhaps the most common way of justifying civil disobedience argues that the same considerations that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law sometimes make it appropriate to engage in civil disobedience of the law (see, e.g., Rawls 1971: ch. 57; Sabl 2001; Markovits 2005; Smith 2011). For example, Rawls argues that while citizens of a “nearly just” society have a pro tanto duty to obey its laws in virtue of it being nearly just, civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant society more just (Rawls 1971: ch. 57). Similarly, Daniel Markovits argues that members of a society with suitably egalitarian and inclusive democratic procedures have a general duty to obey its laws because they are produced by procedures that are suitably egalitarian and inclusive, but that civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant procedures more egalitarian or inclusive (Markovits 2005).

It is easy to see why this constitutes an attractive way of justifying civil disobedience, since it justifies it by appeal to the same values that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law. On the other hand, as Simmons notes, if there is no general duty to obey the law, there would seem to be no presumption in favor of obedience and thus no special need for a justification of civil disobedience; obedience and disobedience would stand equally in need of justification (Simmons 2007: ch 4).

Advocates of the standard approach generally assume that only civil disobedience can be justified in this way. However, some argue civil disobedience does not enjoy a special normative presumption over uncivil disobedience. The core idea that insofar as the values that ground a pro tanto duty to obey the law—for example, justice or democratic equality—are sometimes best served by civil disobedience of the law, they are sometimes best served by covert, evasive, anonymous, or even violent disobedience of the law (Delmas 2018; Lai 2019; Pasternak 2018).

Disagreement about what laws, policies, or principles ought to be implemented is a persistent feature of democratic societies. It is often argued that citizens and officials have duties to moderate their political activity in order to accommodate the competing views of fellow citizens or officials. Two duties of accommodation are widely discussed in the literature: duties of compromise and duties of public justification.

A compromise can be understood as an agreement between parties to advance laws or policies that all regard as suboptimal because they disagree about which laws or policies are optimal (May 2005). While it is widely accepted that there are sometimes compelling instrumental reasons to compromise, whether there are intrinsic moral reasons to compromise is more controversial. Some defend intrinsic reasons to compromise based on democratic values like inclusion, mutual respect, and reciprocity (Gutmann and Thompson 2014; Wendt 2016; Weinstock 2013). However, Simon May argues that such arguments fail and that all reasons to compromise are pragmatic (May 2005).

Advocates of the public justification approach to democracy (see section 2.2.2 ) often argue that democratic citizens and officials have individual moral duties of public justification. John Rawls argues for a “duty of civility” that requires citizens and officials to be prepared to give mutually acceptable justifications for important laws when voting and engaged in public advocacy. Given the inevitability of disagreement about comprehensive moral and philosophical truth in free democracies, the duty of civility requires citizens to appeal to a reasonable “political” conception of justice that can be the object of an “overlapping consensus” between different comprehensive doctrines. While different theorists motivate duties of public justification in different ways, many appeal to the need for exercises of coercive political authority to respect citizens’ freedom and equality.

5. Democratic Representation

Representation is an essential part of the division of labor of large-scale democracies. In this section, we examine two moral questions concerning representation. First, what sort of representative system is best? Second, by what moral principles are representatives bound?

A number of debates have centered on the question of what kinds of representative systems are best for a democratic society. What choice we make here will depend heavily on our underlying moral justification of democracy, our conception of citizenship as well as on our empirical understanding of political institutions and how they function. The most basic types of formal political representation available are single member district representation, proportional representation and group representation. In addition, many societies have opted for multicameral legislative institutions. In some cases, combinations of the above forms have been tried.

Single member district representation returns single representatives of geographically defined areas containing roughly equal populations to the legislature and is prominent in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, among other places. The most common form of proportional representation is party list proportional representation. In a simple form of such a scheme, a number of parties compete for election to a legislature that is not divided into geographical districts. Parties acquire seats in the legislature as a proportion of the total number of votes they receive in the voting population as a whole. Group representation occurs when the society is divided into non-geographically defined groups such as ethnic or linguistic groups or even functional groups such as workers, farmers and capitalists and returns representatives to a legislature from each of them.

Many have argued in favor of single member district legislation on the grounds that it has appeared to them to lead to more stable government than other forms of representation. The thought is that proportional representation tends to fragment the citizenry into opposing homogeneous camps that rigidly adhere to their party lines and that are continually vying for control over the government. Since there are many parties and they are unwilling to compromise with each other, governments formed from coalitions of parties tend to fall apart rather quickly. The post war experience of governments in Italy appears to confirm this hypothesis. Single member district representation, in contrast, is said to enhance the stability of governments by virtue of its favoring a two party system of government. Each election cycle then determines which party is to stay in power for some length of time.

Charles Beitz argues that single member district representation encourages moderation in party programs offered for citizens to consider (Beitz 1989: ch. 7). This results from the tendency of this kind of representation towards two party systems. In a two party system with majority rule, it is argued, each party must appeal to the median voter in the political spectrum. Hence, they must moderate their programs to appeal to the median voter. Furthermore, they encourage compromise among groups since they must try to appeal to a lot of other groups in order to become part of one of the two leading parties. These tendencies encourage moderation and compromise in citizens to the extent that political parties, and interest groups, hold these qualities up as necessary to functioning well in a democracy.

In criticism, advocates of proportional and group representation have argued that single member district representation tends to muffle the voices and ignore the interests of minority groups in the society (Mill 1861; Christiano 1996). Minority interests and views tend to be articulated in background negotiations and in ways that muffle their distinctiveness. Furthermore, representatives of minority interests and views often have a difficult time getting elected at all in single member district systems so it has been charged that minority views and interests are often systematically underrepresented. Sometimes these problems are dealt with by redrawing the boundaries of districts in a way that ensures greater minority representation. The efforts are invariably quite controversial since there is considerable disagreement about the criteria for apportionment.

In proportional representation, by contrast, representatives of different groups are seated in the legislature in proportion to citizens’ choices. Minorities need not make their demands conform to the basic dichotomy of views and interests that characterize single member district systems so their views are more articulated and distinctive as well as better represented.

Advocates of group representation, like Iris Marion Young, have argued that some historically disenfranchised groups may still not do very well under proportional representation (Young 1990: ch. 6). They may not be able to organize and articulate their views as easily as other groups. Also, minority groups can still be systematically defeated in the legislature and their interests may be consistently set back even if they do have some representation. For these groups, some have argued that the only way to protect their interests is legally to ensure that they have adequate and even disproportionate representation.

One worry about group representation is that it tends to freeze some aspects of the agenda that might be better left to the choice of citizens. For instance, consider a population that is divided into linguistic groups for a long time. And suppose that only some citizens continue to think of linguistic conflict as important. In the circumstances a group representation scheme may tend to be biased in an arbitrary way that favors the views or interests of those who do think of linguistic conflict as important.

What moral norms apply to representatives carrying out their official duties? We can get a better handle on possible answers by introducing Hannah Pitkin’s famous distinction between trustees and delegates (Pitkin 1967). Representatives who act as trustees rely on their own independent judgments in carrying out their duties. Norms of trusteeship are supported in recognition that, given a natural division of democratic labor, officials are in a much better position to make well-reasoned and well-informed political decisions than ordinary citizens.

Representatives who act as delegates defer to the judgments of their citizens. These norms might be thought to reflect the value of democratic accountability. Because the people authorize representatives to govern, it is natural to think that representatives are accountable to the people to enact their judgments. If representatives are not accountable in this way, citizens lose democratic control over their representatives’ actions.

Which norms should win out when they conflict? Pitkin argues that the answer varies by context. This seems plausible. For example, if we take the view that citizens primarily have the role of determining the aims of the society, we might think that representatives ought to be delegates with regard to the aims, but trustees with regard to the ways of realizing the aims (Christiano 1996). See Suzanne Dovi’s discussion of representation for a deeper and more nuanced discussion of these issues.

Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem is thought by some to provide a major set of difficulties for democratic theory (Arrow 1951). William Riker, Russell Hardin, and others have thought that the impossibility theorem shows that there are deep problems with democratic ideals (Riker 1982; Hardin 1999). Neither of these thinkers are opposed to democracy itself, they both think that there are good instrumental reasons for having democracy.

The basic results of social choice theory are laid out in detail elsewhere in the encyclopedia (List 2013). Here we will simply articulate the basic result and an illustration. The question of Arrowian social choice theory is: how do we determine a social preference for a society overall on the basis of the set of the individual preferences of the members? Arrow shows that a social choice function that satisfies a number of plausible constraints cannot be defined when there are three or more alternatives to be chosen by the group. He lays out a number of conditions to be imposed on a social choice function. Unlimited domain : The social choice function must be able to give us a social preference no matter what the preferences of the individuals over alternatives are. Non dictatorship : the social choice function must not select the preference of one particular member regardless of others’ preferences. Transitivity and completeness : The individual preferences orderings must be transitive and complete orderings and the social preference derived from them must be transitive and complete. Independence of irrelevant alternatives : the social preference between two alternatives must be the result only of the individual orderings between those two alternatives. Pareto condition : if all the members prefer an alternative x over y , then x must be ranked above y in the social preference. The theorem says that no social choice function over more than two alternatives can satisfy all of these conditions.

A useful illustration of this idea involves an extension of majority rule to cases of more than two alternatives. The Condorcet rule says that an alternative x wins when, for every other alternative, a majority prefers x over that alternative. For example, suppose we have three persons A , B and C and three alternatives x , y and z . A prefers x over y , y over z ; B prefers y over z and z over x ; C prefers x over z and z over y . In this case, x is the Condorcet winner since it beats y , and it beats z . The problem with this plausible sounding rule is the case of a majority cycle. Suppose you have three persons A , B and C , and three alternatives, x , y and z . In the case in which A prefers x over y and y over z , while B prefers y over z and z over x , and C prefers z over x and x over y , the Condorcet rule will yield a social preference of x over y , y over z and z over x . One can see here that the Condorcet rule satisfies all the conditions except transitivity of social preference. One way to avoid intransitivity is to restrict the domain of preferences from which the social preference arises. Another is to introduce cardinal information that compares the how much people prefer alternatives (violating independence). Another might be to make one person a dictator. So, this case nicely illustrates that one cannot satisfy all of the constraints simultaneously.

Riker argues that the theorem shows that the idea that the popular will can be the governing element in a society is false. If an existence condition for a popular will is a restricted set of preferences the question naturally arises as to whether such a condition is always or normally met in a moderately complex society. We might wonder whether a highly pluralistic society with a very complex division of labor is likely to satisfy the restricted preference set condition necessary to avoid cycles or other pathologies of social choice. Some have argued that we have empirical evidence to the effect that modern societies do normally satisfy such conditions (Mackie 2003). Others have argued that this seems unlikely (Riker 1982; Ingham 2019). This is not merely a defense of unlimited domain. It is a defense of the thesis that normally the collections of preferences in modern societies are not likely to have the properties that enable them to avoid cycles.

The fairness critique from social choice theory is based on the idea that when a voting process meets requirements of fairness, the fairness of the process and the preferences may not generate determinate outcomes. If cycles are pervasive, the outcomes of democratic processes may be determined by clever strategies and not by the fairness of the procedures (Riker 1982). Three remarks are in order here. First, it is compatible with the process being completely fair that the outcomes of the process are indeterminate. After all, coin flips are fair. Second, there is some question as to how prominent the cycles are. Third, one might think that if the conditions which enable opposing sides to strategize effectively are themselves roughly equal, then the concerns for fairness are fully met. If resources for persuasion and organization are distributed in an egalitarian way, perhaps the fairness account is vindicated after all. This point can be made more compelling when we consider Sean Ingham’s account of political equality. He includes intensity of preference in his account of fairness. This is a departure from the Arrowian approach, but it is in many ways a realistic one. The idea is that majorities have equal control over policy areas when they are able to get what they want with the same amount of intensity of preferences. And equality holds generally when all groups of the same size have the same control (Ingham 2019). There remains an extreme case in which all majorities have equal intensity of preference and are caught in a majority cycle. But the chances of this happening are very slim, even if the chances of majority cycles more generally are not as small. Even if there are a lot of majority cycles, if the issues are resolved in such a way that those majorities that have most at stake in the conflict are the ones that get their way, then we can have fairness in a quite robust sense even while having pervasive majority cycles.

If democratic societies allow members to participate as equals in collective decision making, a natural question arises: who has the right to participate in making collective decisions? We can ask this question within a particular jurisdiction (ought all adults have the right to participation? Ought children have the right to participation? Ought all residents have such rights?). But we can also ask what the extent of the jurisdiction ought to be. How many of the people in the world ought to be included in the collective decision-making? An easy, though slightly misleading, way of asking this question is, what ought the physical boundaries of a particular institution of collective decision-making be? We see partially democratic societies within the confines of the modern nation-state. But we might ask, why should we restrict the set of persons who participate in making decisions of the modern state just to those who happen to be the physical inhabitants of those states? Surely there are many other persons affected by decisions made by democratic states aside from those persons. For example, activities in one society A can pollute another society B . Why shouldn’t the members of B have a say in the decisions regarding the polluting activities in A ? And there can be many other effects that activities in A can have on B .

Some have suggested that the boundaries of a state ought to be determined through a principle of national self-determination. We identify a nation as an ongoing group of persons who share certain cultural, historical and political norms and who identify with each other and with a piece of land. Then we determine the boundaries of the territory by appeal to the size of the group of people and the land they cherish (Miller 1995; Song 2012). This is an appealing idea in many ways: shared nationality breeds a willingness to share the sacrifices that arise from collective decision making; it generates a sense of at-homeness for people. But it is hard to use as a general principle for dividing land among persons when one of the central facts for many societies is that a diversity of nations, ethnic groups and cultures co-mingle on the very same land.

Is there a democratic solution to the boundary problem? A number of ideas have been suggested. The first idea is that the people ought to decide what the boundaries are. But this suggestion, while it may be a pragmatic resolution to the problem, seems to beg the question about who the members are and who are not (Whelan 1983).

A second theoretical solution that has some democratic credentials is to invoke the principle that all who are subjected to decision making, in the sense of who are coerced or have duties imposed upon them, ought to have a say in the decision making (Abizadeh 2008). This principle is plausible enough, but it doesn’t get at enough cases. The pollution case above is not a case of subjection.

A third proposed theoretical solution is the all-affected principle. One formulation is “all affected persons ought to have a say in the decisions that affect them”. This does suggest that when the activities in one state affect those of another state, the people of the other state ought to have a say in those activities. Some have thought that this principle tends to lead to a kind of politically cosmopolitan principle in support of world government (Goodin 2007).

But the all-affected principle is conceptually quite uncertain and morally deeply problematic, and it provides very little, if anything, in the way of a solution to the boundary problem.

First, “having a say” is not clear. Does it require having a vote in collective decision-making? Or is it also satisfied by a person’s being able to modify another’s action by negotiating with them, as we see when there is bargaining over an externality? This latter version would undermine the idea that the all-affected principle has direct implications for the boundary problem. When the United States permits activities that produce acid rain in Canada, Canada can negotiate with the United States to lessen the production of acid rain and/or to compensate Canada for the harm. As long as there is a fair and effective system of negotiation, this would seem to satisfy the all-affected principle without giving Canadians a vote in American politics or Americans a vote in Canadian politics.

Second, it is not clear what “being affected” means. One, does a person being affected just mean that there is a change in the person’s situation or must the effect involve the setting back of one’s preferences, or interests, or legitimate interests, or exercise of one’s capacities or one’s good? Two, are one’s interests affected by a decision only when they are advanced or set back relative to some baseline (either the present state of affairs or some morally defined baseline like what you have promised me), or am I affected by decisions that could be to my advantage or disadvantage but end up making no difference? For example, if I am drowning in a pool and you are deciding whether to save me or go buy yourself a candy bar, am I affected by your buying the candy bar? If I am not affected when no change occurs, then who is affected by a decision often depends on who participates in the decision and we have no solution to the problem of inclusion. If I am affected, then the principle has some quite extraordinary implications. Now it turns out that impoverished persons in South Asia are affected by my buying a candy bar, since I could have sent the money to them (Goodin 2007).

The all-affected principle is a merely suggestive and rhetorically effective phrase. It is a conversation starter and a list of topics to be discussed, not a genuine principle. For example, if I must include everyone possibly affected by my decision for every decision I make, I will not be able to make many decisions and my decision making will no longer enable me to give a shape to my own life and my relations with others. My life becomes fragmented and lacks integrity (Williams 1973). An analog of this problem would arise for political societies, presumably. Each society would have to include a variety of different persons in each decision. It is hard to see how any society could take on any particular character if this is the case.

A more plausible principle that encompasses some of the suggestions of the all-affected principle is that a framework of institutions should be set up so that people have power to advance and protect their legitimate interests in life.

But if we understand the principle in this way, it is not clear that it helps us much with the boundary problem. First of all, there are different ways in which people can be said to possess power over their lives. One kind of power is the power to participate as an equal in a collective decision-making process. Another kind is to be able to advance one’s interests in a decentralized process like a market or a system of agreement making like international law. Recalling our pollution problem above, we could give the state of which they are members power to negotiate with the polluting state terms that are mutually agreeable. Only the power to participate as an equal in collective decision-making involves the boundaries of collective decision-making.

Another solution to the boundary problem is a conservative one. The basic idea is to keep the boundaries of states roughly as they are except if there is a pressing need to change them. Trying to alter the boundaries of political societies is a recipe for serious conflict because there is no institution that has the legitimacy or power actually to resolve problems at an international level and there is likely to be a lot of disagreement on how to do it. States as we know them, are by far the most powerful political entities in the international system. They have developed more effective practices of accountability of power than any other entity in the system. They have created unified societies with highly interdependent populations. Finally, states and the individuals in them can be made accountable to some degree to other individuals and states through the process of negotiation and international law making. The origin of these boundaries may be arbitrary, but it is not, for all that, irrelevant. To be sure, there are clear cases where borders can be changed. One source of pressing need is serious injustice within a country. Another might be the existence of permanent minorities that are sectionally defined. Here, we ask only how to revise boundaries and the basis of such revision is that it is a remedy for serious injustice (Buchanan 1991).

Plato’s ethics and politics in The Republic
Aristotle’s political theory
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Jean Jacques Rousseau
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By the People: Essays on Democracy

Harvard Kennedy School faculty explore aspects of democracy in their own words—from increasing civic participation and decreasing extreme partisanship to strengthening democratic institutions and making them more fair.

Winter 2020

By Archon Fung , Nancy Gibbs , Tarek Masoud , Julia Minson , Cornell William Brooks , Jane Mansbridge , Arthur Brooks , Pippa Norris , Benjamin Schneer

The basic terms of democratic governance are shifting before our eyes, and we don’t know what the future holds. Some fear the rise of hateful populism and the collapse of democratic norms and practices. Others see opportunities for marginalized people and groups to exercise greater voice and influence. At the Kennedy School, we are striving to produce ideas and insights to meet these great uncertainties and to help make democratic governance successful in the future. In the pages that follow, you can read about the varied ways our faculty members think about facets of democracy and democratic institutions and making democracy better in practice.

Explore essays on democracy

Archon fung: we voted, nancy gibbs: truth and trust, tarek masoud: a fragile state, julia minson: just listen, cornell william brooks: democracy behind bars, jane mansbridge: a teachable skill, arthur brooks: healthy competition, pippa norris: kicking the sandcastle, benjamin schneer: drawing a line.

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Introduction & Top Questions

Fundamental questions

Prehistoric forms of democracy
Classical Greece
The Roman Republic
“Constitutional oligarchies”
A democratic dilemma
Continental Europe
The United States
Democracy or republic?
Solving the dilemma
Factions and parties
Majority rule, minority rights, majority tyranny
Failures of nondemocratic systems
Market economies
Economic well-being
Political culture
Presidential and parliamentary systems
Unitary and federal systems
Proportional and winner-take-all systems
Two-party and multiparty systems
Majoritarian and consensual systems
The legitimacy of government
Answers to fundamental questions
Montesquieu
Features of ideal democracy
Ideal and representative democracy
Actual democracies
The value of democracy
Economic insecurity and inequality
The costs of identity politics
Democracy and clientelism
Authoritarian threats
Technological developments

What is democracy?

Where was democracy first practiced, how is democracy better than other forms of government, why does democracy need education.

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Table Of Contents

voting in the 2012 U.S. presidential election

Democracy is a system of government in which laws, policies, leadership, and major undertakings of a state or other polity are directly or indirectly decided by the “people,” a group historically constituted by only a minority of the population (e.g., all free adult males in ancient Athens or all sufficiently propertied adult males in 19th-century Britain) but generally understood since the mid-20th century to include all (or nearly all) adult citizens.

Studies of contemporary nonliterate tribal societies and other evidence suggest that democracy, broadly speaking, was practiced within tribes of hunter-gatherers in prehistoric times. The transition to settled agricultural communities led to inequalities of wealth and power between and within communities and hierarchical nondemocratic forms of social organization. Thousands of years later, in the 6th century BCE, a relatively democratic form of government was introduced in the city-state of Athens by Cleisthenes .

States with democratic governments prevent rule by autocrats, guarantee fundamental individual rights, allow for a relatively high level of political equality, and rarely make war on each other. As compared with nondemocratic states, they also better foster human development as measured by indicators such as health and education , provide more prosperity for their citizens, and ensure a broader range of personal freedoms.

The hallmark of democracy is that it permits citizens to participate in making laws and public policies by regularly choosing their leaders and by voting in assemblies or referenda . If their participation is to be meaningful and effective—if the democracy is to be real and not a sham—citizens must understand their own interests, know the relevant facts, and have the ability to critically evaluate political arguments. Each of those things presupposes education .

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democracy , literally, rule by the people. The term is derived from the Greek dēmokratia , which was coined from dēmos (“people”) and kratos (“rule”) in the middle of the 5th century bce to denote the political systems then existing in some Greek city-states , notably Athens .

(Read Madeleine Albright’s Britannica essay on democracy.)

The etymological origins of the term democracy hint at a number of urgent problems that go far beyond semantic issues. If a government of or by the people—a “popular” government—is to be established, at least five fundamental questions must be confronted at the outset, and two more are almost certain to be posed if the democracy continues to exist for long.

(1) What is the appropriate unit or association within which a democratic government should be established? A town or city? A country? A business corporation ? A university? An international organization ? All of these?

(2) Given an appropriate association—a city, for example—who among its members should enjoy full citizenship? Which persons, in other words, should constitute the dēmos ? Is every member of the association entitled to participate in governing it? Assuming that children should not be allowed to participate (as most adults would agree), should the dēmos include all adults? If it includes only a subset of the adult population, how small can the subset be before the association ceases to be a democracy and becomes something else, such as an aristocracy (government by the best, aristos ) or an oligarchy (government by the few, oligos )?

(3) Assuming a proper association and a proper dēmos , how are citizens to govern? What political organizations or institutions will they need? Will these institutions differ between different kinds of associations—for example, a small town and a large country?

(4) When citizens are divided on an issue, as they often will be, whose views should prevail, and in what circumstances? Should a majority always prevail, or should minorities sometimes be empowered to block or overcome majority rule?

(5) If a majority is ordinarily to prevail, what is to constitute a proper majority? A majority of all citizens? A majority of voters? Should a proper majority comprise not individual citizens but certain groups or associations of citizens, such as hereditary groups or territorial associations?

(6) The preceding questions presuppose an adequate answer to a sixth and even more important question: Why should “the people” rule? Is democracy really better than aristocracy or monarchy ? Perhaps, as Plato argues in the Republic , the best government would be led by a minority of the most highly qualified persons—an aristocracy of “ philosopher-kings .” What reasons could be given to show that Plato’s view is wrong?

(7) No association could maintain a democratic government for very long if a majority of the dēmos —or a majority of the government—believed that some other form of government were better. Thus, a minimum condition for the continued existence of a democracy is that a substantial proportion of both the dēmos and the leadership believes that popular government is better than any feasible alternative . What conditions, in addition to this one, favour the continued existence of democracy? What conditions are harmful to it? Why have some democracies managed to endure, even through periods of severe crisis, while so many others have collapsed?

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Democracy Essay for Students in English

Essay on Democracy

Introduction.

Democracy is mainly a Greek word which means people and their rules, here peoples have the to select their own government as per their choice. Greece was the first democratic country in the world. India is a democratic country where people select their government of their own choice, also people have the rights to do the work of their choice. There are two types of democracy: direct and representative and hybrid or semi-direct democracy. There are many decisions which are made under democracies. People enjoy few rights which are very essential for human beings to live happily.

Our country has the largest democracy. In a democracy, each person has equal rights to fight for development. After the independence, India has adopted democracy, where the people vote those who are above 18 years of age, but these votes do not vary by any caste; people from every caste have equal rights to select their government. Democracy, also called as a rule of the majority, means whatever the majority of people decide, it has to be followed or implemented, the representative winning with the most number of votes will have the power. We can say the place where literacy people are more there shows the success of the democracy even lack of consciousness is also dangerous in a democracy. Democracy is associated with higher human accumulation and higher economic freedom. Democracy is closely tied with the economic source of growth like education and quality of life as well as health care. The constituent assembly in India was adopted by Dr B.R. Ambedkar on 26 th November 1949 and became sovereign democratic after its constitution came into effect on 26 January 1950.

What are the Challenges:

There are many challenges for democracy like- corruption here, many political leaders and officers who don’t do work with integrity everywhere they demand bribes, resulting in the lack of trust on the citizens which affects the country very badly. Anti-social elements- which are seen during elections where people are given bribes and they are forced to vote for a particular candidate. Caste and community- where a large number of people give importance to their caste and community, therefore, the political party also selects the candidate on the majority caste. We see wherever the particular caste people win the elections whether they do good for the society or not, and in some cases, good leaders lose because of less count of the vote.

India is considered to be the largest democracy around the globe, with a population of 1.3 billion. Even though being the biggest democratic nation, India still has a long way to becoming the best democratic system. The caste system still prevails in some parts, which hurts the socialist principle of democracy. Communalism is on the rise throughout the globe and also in India, which interferes with the secular principle of democracy. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure a thriving democracy.

Principles of Democracy:

There are mainly five principles like- republic, socialist, sovereign, democratic and secular, with all these quality political parties will contest for elections. There will be many bribes given to the needy person who require food, money, shelter and ask them to vote whom they want. But we can say that democracy in India is still better than the other countries.

Basically, any country needs democracy for development and better functioning of the government. In some countries, freedom of political expression, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, are considered to ensure that voters are well informed, enabling them to vote according to their own interests.

Let us Discuss These Five Principles in Further Detail

Sovereign: In short, being sovereign or sovereignty means the independent authority of a state. The country has the authority to make all the decisions whether it be on internal issues or external issues, without the interference of any third party.

Socialist: Being socialist means the country (and the Govt.), always works for the welfare of the people, who live in that country. There should be many bribes offered to the needy person, basic requirements of them should be fulfilled by any means. No one should starve in such a country.

Secular: There will be no such thing as a state religion, the country does not make any bias on the basis of religion. Every religion must be the same in front of the law, no discrimination on the basis of someone’s religion is tolerated. Everyone is allowed to practice and propagate any religion, they can change their religion at any time.

Republic: In a republic form of Government, the head of the state is elected, directly or indirectly by the people and is not a hereditary monarch. This elected head is also there for a fixed tenure. In India, the head of the state is the president, who is indirectly elected and has a fixed term of office (5 years).

Democratic: By a democratic form of government, means the country’s government is elected by the people via the process of voting. All the adult citizens in the country have the right to vote to elect the government they want, only if they meet a certain age limit of voting.

Merits of Democracy:

better government forms because it is more accountable and in the interest of the people.

improves the quality of decision making and enhances the dignity of the citizens.

provide a method to deal with differences and conflicts.

A democratic system of government is a form of government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodic free elections. It permits citizens to participate in making laws and public policies by choosing their leaders, therefore citizens should be educated so that they can select the right candidate for the ruling government. Also, there are some concerns regarding democracy- leaders always keep changing in democracy with the interest of citizens and on the count of votes which leads to instability. It is all about political competition and power, no scope for morality.

Factors Affect Democracy:

capital and civil society

economic development

modernization

Norway and Iceland are the best democratic countries in the world. India is standing at fifty-one position.

India is a parliamentary democratic republic where the President is head of the state and Prime minister is head of the government. The guiding principles of democracy such as protected rights and freedoms, free and fair elections, accountability and transparency of government officials, citizens have a responsibility to uphold and support their principles. Democracy was first practised in the 6 th century BCE, in the city-state of Athens. One basic principle of democracy is that people are the source of all the political power, in a democracy people rule themselves and also respect given to diverse groups of citizens, so democracy is required to select the government of their own interest and make the nation developed by electing good leaders.

FAQs on Democracy Essay for Students in English

1. What are the Features of Democracy?

Features of Democracy are as follows

Equality: Democracy provides equal rights to everyone, regardless of their gender, caste, colour, religion or creed.

Individual Freedom: Everybody has the right to do anything they want until it does not affect another person’s liberty.

Majority Rules: In a democracy, things are decided by the majority rule, if the majority agrees to something, it will be done.

Free Election: Everyone has the right to vote or to become a candidate to fight the elections.

2. Define Democracy?

Democracy means where people have the right to choose the rulers and also people have freedom to express views, freedom to organise and freedom to protest. Protesting and showing Dissent is a major part of a healthy democracy. Democracy is the most successful and popular form of government throughout the globe.

Democracy holds a special place in India, also India is still the largest democracy in existence around the world.

3. What are the Benefits of Democracy?

Let us discuss some of the benefits received by the use of democracy to form a government. Benefits of democracy are:

It is more accountable

Improves the quality of decision as the decision is taken after a long time of discussion and consultation.

It provides a better method to deal with differences and conflicts.

It safeguards the fundamental rights of people and brings a sense of equality and freedom.

It works for the welfare of both the people and the state.

4. Which country is the largest democracy in the World?

India is considered the largest democracy, all around the world. India decided to have a democratic Govt. from the very first day of its independence after the rule of the British. In India, everyone above the age of 18 years can go to vote to select the Government, without any kind of discrimination on the basis of caste, colour, religion, gender or more. But India, even being the largest democracy, still has a long way to become perfect.

5. Write about the five principles of Democracy?

There are five key principles that are followed in a democracy. These Five Principles of Democracy of India are - secular, sovereign, republic, socialist, and democratic. These five principles have to be respected by every political party, participating in the general elections in India. The party which got the most votes forms the government which represents the democratic principle. No discrimination is done on the basis of religion which represents the secular nature of democracy. The govt. formed after the election has to work for the welfare of common people which shows socialism in play.

Democracy Essay

Democracy is derived from the Greek word demos or people. It is defined as a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people. Democracy is exercised directly by the people; in large societies, it is by the people through their elected agents. In the phrase of President Abraham Lincoln, democracy is the “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” There are various democratic countries, but India has the largest democracy in the world. This Democracy Essay will help you know all about India’s democracy. Students can also get a list of CBSE Essays on different topics to boost their essay-writing skills.

500+ Words Democracy Essay

India is a very large country full of diversities – linguistically, culturally and religiously. At the time of independence, it was economically underdeveloped. There were enormous regional disparities, widespread poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and a shortage of almost all public welfare means. Since independence, India has been functioning as a responsible democracy. The same has been appreciated by the international community. It has successfully adapted to challenging situations. There have been free and fair periodic elections for all political offices, from the panchayats to the President. There has been a smooth transfer of political power from one political party or set of political parties to others, both at national and state levels, on many occasions.

India: A Democratic Country

Democracy is of two, i.e. direct and representative. In a direct democracy, all citizens, without the intermediary of elected or appointed officials, can participate in making public decisions. Such a system is only practical with relatively small numbers of people in a community organisation or tribal council. Whereas in representative democracy, every citizen has the right to vote for their representative. People elect their representatives to all levels, from Panchayats, Municipal Boards, State Assemblies and Parliament. In India, we have a representative democracy.

Democracy is a form of government in which rulers elected by the people take all the major decisions. Elections offer a choice and fair opportunity to the people to change the current rulers. This choice and opportunity are available to all people on an equal basis. The exercise of this choice leads to a government limited by basic rules of the constitution and citizens’ rights.

Democracy is the Best Form of Government

A democratic government is a better government because it is a more accountable form of government. Democracy provides a method to deal with differences and conflicts. Thus, democracy improves the quality of decision-making. The advantage of a democracy is that mistakes cannot be hidden for long. There is a space for public discussion, and there is room for correction. Either the rulers have to change their decisions, or the rulers can be changed. Democracy offers better chances of a good decision. It respects people’s own wishes and allows different kinds of people to live together. Even when it fails to do some of these things, it allows a way of correcting its mistakes and offers more dignity to all citizens. That is why democracy is considered the best form of government.

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Democracy Arguments For and Against Essay

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Introduction

Arguments for democracy, arguments against democracy, works cited.

Contrary to other ideas in political science such as justice and liberty, democracy is a term that can be easily explained. It mainly relates to the government by the majority. Although characterizing democracy is not difficult, the latest political theory is often left this out. No strong argument is provided by political theorists regarding the reason for representative democracy.

On the other hand, if any is given, it lacks strength. One would anticipate that great literature can be created from the reasons for the promotion and institution of democracy. On the contrary, popular literature does not delve so much into why democracy is desirable, but instead, get to explain the reasons for the improvement of the current democracy. This essay examines what different philosophers have had to argue both for and against democracy.

One of the arguments is that democracy is important because it can be embraced and made deliberative. This implies that deliberation of a dialogical nature is vital to the democratic society. When democracy is made deliberate in a given society, instead of people’s mere adaptation to circumstance, their preferences are not only informed but also made clear.

Democracy also helps to remove points of difference among people without necessarily making them agree. At times, democracy requires that people be compelled to embrace a general perspective. As such, both their imagination and empathy are stretched. In the same vein of the deliberateness of democracy, selfish concerns can be separated from public-oriented considerations thus encouraging public reasoning for participants who are free and equal (Sosa & Villanueva 287-288).

Research also indicates that making democratic to be more deliberative is likely to result to other benefits such as legitimizing all decisions that are arrived at, encouraging the powerless to voice their concerns in decision making, promoting transparency among group members and enhancing outcomes that are just.

Another argument that favors the importance of democracy in deliberation is one that aims at making deliberation democratic and not vice versa. This implies that whenever there is democratic deliberation, then the probability of reaching the truth based on reliability increases with the presence of a democratic decision-making regime.

Moreover, democracy enhances the proper allocation of resources to appropriate uses. This argument is supported by the fact dictatorial leaders are not fully accountable to citizens and do not have motivations to put the total output into maximum use. Instead, they focus on their selfish ends.

Consequently, democracy ensures that property rights are protected hence allowing investors to have a long term perspective. Besides, allowing free flow of information ensures that the quality of economic decisions made is high (Dahl 448).

In attempting to argue against democracy, Gordon takes on several philosophers who have argued in favor of democracy. He does this by revealing how such arguments fail to hold water when based on democracy because, in his perspective, the proponents of democracy do not express the desirability of democracy as it were. A good example of writers who have omitted this fact is Bernard Barber.

He dismisses other philosophers on this matter arguing that a just political order can only be reached at through a discussion and not by avoiding it. Questions of distributive justice can properly be dealt with by individuals rather than by philosophers alone since it would be undemocratic to do the reverse. However, Barber does not clearly explain why people should value democracy.

His concern is that individuals thinking on their own can reach wiser decisions than a group of individuals discussing the same issue. He’s satisfied with the fact that Rousseau concurs with the issue. If he were to be correct about this empirical matter, then it would be sound to conclude that if democratic governance would guide a society, then it would be prudent to arrive at decisions in such a society through discussions.

Although this point is still devoid of the desirability of democracy, it centers on the importance of democracy in discussing policy publicly. Deliberating on issues publicly is not a compulsory ingredient for democracy. For instance, during the nineteenth century, there was no democracy in the British government although public issues could be discussed broadly (Gordon para.5).

Plato presents a couple of arguments against democracy. First, Plato describes democracies as societies that are anarchic. He believes that societies that are democratic are marked with anarchy. For example, his attack describes governments that are democratic for being libertarian in such a manner every citizen can carry out their life issues in a way that appeals to them.

In this way, he asserts that people mistake anarchy for freedom. Plato criticizes democratic societies again by asserting that since they are characterized with anarchy, they are devoid of unity. They are not united on two fronts. First, due to the lack of political structure and are not politically organized. Second, democratic societies do not have a leadership structure since everyone can speak on political issues.

Second, Plato argues that democratic societies are likely to adhere to what their citizens want hence lacking any concern for the good of all. If anarchy is what features in democracies, then every individual has the freedom to choose what will ultimately benefit him or her. These choices may clash and encourage people to value their own needs rather those of others as well.

This is a clear pursuit of personal desires which may encourage loss of the common good. Since citizens have no idea of what ruling is, it happens that they pursue their passions and not the reason because reason cannot be applied in such pursuits. Any leaders that are elected through democracy are therefore servants who are out to satisfy the individual desires and appetites of the citizens.

Plato further argues that citizens who are guided by democracy are likened to individuals who grope in darkness since they do not have what it takes to execute governance (Kofmel 20). Moreover, Plato lists two more difficulties. First, numerous individuals falsely believe that they have adequate political proficiency that can qualify them to take part in political issues.

Citizens are not bothered by the fact that on account of their political standing, they are entitled to an equal political voice with each other. Second, when people get involved in a philosophical investigation with each other, they are more concerned with winning arguments instead of the following truth.

Therefore, even though citizens may be endowed with enough political expertise, it may be concluded that they will not be able to manage it effectively (Kofmel 21). The best remedy to this problem is to limit popular involvement in politics and allowing those who have sufficient political know-how in matters of governance to take the lead in the political decision-making process. Such are the people who can guide the citizens into achieving their common good.

Democracy is a term that is perceived differently by different people. Arguments put forth in favor of it are that it encourages fair allocation of resources, sound decision making especially by the powerless and allows for transparency and justice through deliberation.

Arguments against democracy are that it is not the best option for decision making, it encourages anarchy and hence lack of unity and that democracy encourages people who do not have sufficient political expertise to be involved in decision making. This results in a lack of common good.

Dahl, Robert. The Democracy Sourcebook. NY: MIT Press, 2003. June 19, 2011.

Gordon, David. What’s the Argument for Democracy? LeRockwell.com, 1992. June 19, 2011.

Kofmel, Erich. Anti-Democratic Thought. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2008. June 19, 2011.

Sosa, Ernest & Villanueva, Enrique. Social, Political and Legal Philosophy, Volume 1. Malden, USA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. June 19, 2011.

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The Case Against Democracy

By Caleb Crain

Voter ignorance has worried political philosophers since Plato.

Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them.

Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals. Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty:

Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy.

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.”

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread to almost all parts of the country. They helped racists in the South circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks, and even in immigrant-rich New York a 1921 law required new voters to take a test if they couldn’t prove that they had an eighth-grade education. About fifteen per cent flunked. Voter literacy tests weren’t permanently outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement had discredited them.

Worry about voters’ intelligence lingers, however. Mill’s proposal, in particular, remains “actually fairly formidable,” according to David Estlund, a political philosopher at Brown. His 2008 book, “Democratic Authority,” tried to construct a philosophical justification for democracy, a feat that he thought could be achieved only by balancing two propositions: democratic procedures tend to make correct policy decisions, and democratic procedures are fair in the eyes of reasonable observers. Fairness alone didn’t seem to be enough. If it were, Estlund wrote, “why not flip a coin?” It must be that we value democracy for tending to get things right more often than not, which democracy seems to do by making use of the information in our votes. Indeed, although this year we seem to be living through a rough patch, democracy does have a fairly good track record. The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has made the case that democracies never have famines, and other scholars believe that they almost never go to war with one another, rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently than other regimes do.

Still, democracy is far from perfect—“the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” as Churchill famously said. So, if we value its power to make good decisions, why not try a system that’s a little less fair but makes good decisions even more often? Jamming the stub of the Greek word for “knowledge” into the Greek word for “rule,” Estlund coined the word “epistocracy,” meaning “government by the knowledgeable.” It’s an idea that “advocates of democracy, and other enemies of despotism, will want to resist,” he wrote, and he counted himself among the resisters. As a purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid objections.

First, one could deny that truth was a suitable standard for measuring political judgment. This sounds extreme, but it’s a fairly common move in political philosophy. After all, in debates over contentious issues, such as when human life begins or whether human activity is warming the planet, appeals to the truth tend to be incendiary. Truth “peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate,” Hannah Arendt pointed out in this magazine, in 1967, “and debate constitutes the very essence of political life.” Estlund wasn’t a relativist, however; he agreed that politicians should refrain from appealing to absolute truth, but he didn’t think a political theorist could avoid doing so.

The second argument against epistocracy would be to deny that some citizens know more about good government than others. Estlund simply didn’t find this plausible (maybe a political philosopher is professionally disinclined to). The third and final option: deny that knowing more imparts political authority. As Estlund put it, “You might be right, but who made you boss?”

It’s a very good question, and Estlund rested his defense of democracy on it, but he felt obliged to look for holes in his argument. He had a sneaking suspicion that a polity ruled by educated voters probably would perform better than a democracy, and he thought that some of the resulting inequities could be remedied. If historically disadvantaged groups, such as African-Americans or women, turned out to be underrepresented in an epistocratic system, those who made the grade could be given additional votes, in compensation.

By the end of Estlund’s analysis, there were only two practical arguments against epistocracy left standing. The first was the possibility that an epistocracy’s method of screening voters might be biased in a way that couldn’t readily be identified and therefore couldn’t be corrected for. The second was that universal suffrage is so established in our minds as a default that giving the knowledgeable power over the ignorant will always feel more unjust than giving those in the majority power over those in the minority. As defenses of democracy go, these are even less rousing than Churchill’s shruggie.

“Yours was the blue Prius with the two stoners passed out in back right”

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In a new book, “Against Democracy” (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown, has turned Estlund’s hedging inside out to create an uninhibited argument for epistocracy. Against Estlund’s claim that universal suffrage is the default, Brennan argues that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To counter Estlund’s concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the public’s welfare is more important than anyone’s hurt feelings; after all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent. As for Estlund’s worry about demographic bias, Brennan waves it off. Empirical research shows that people rarely vote for their narrow self-interest; seniors favor Social Security no more strongly than the young do. Brennan suggests that since voters in an epistocracy would be more enlightened about crime and policing, “excluding the bottom 80 percent of white voters from voting might be just what poor blacks need.”

Brennan has a bright, pugilistic style, and he takes a sportsman’s pleasure in upsetting pieties and demolishing weak logic. Voting rights may happen to signify human dignity to us, he writes, but corpse-eating once signified respect for the dead among the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. To him, our faith in the ennobling power of political debate is no more well grounded than the supposition that college fraternities build character.

Brennan draws ample evidence of the average American voter’s cluelessness from the legal scholar Ilya Somin’s “Democracy and Political Ignorance” (2013), which shows that American voters have remained ignorant despite decades of rising education levels. Some economists have argued that ill-informed voters, far from being lazy or self-sabotaging, should be seen as rational actors. If the odds that your vote will be decisive are minuscule—Brennan writes that “you are more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row”—then learning about politics isn’t worth even a few minutes of your time. In “The Myth of the Rational Voter” (2007), the economist Bryan Caplan suggested that ignorance may even be gratifying to voters. “Some beliefs are more emotionally appealing,” Caplan observed, so if your vote isn’t likely to do anything why not indulge yourself in what you want to believe, whether or not it’s true? Caplan argues that it’s only because of the worthlessness of an individual vote that so many voters look beyond their narrow self-interest: in the polling booth, the warm, fuzzy feeling of altruism can be had cheap.

Viewed that way, voting might seem like a form of pure self-expression. Not even, says Brennan: it’s multiple choice, so hardly expressive. “If you’re upset, write a poem,” Brennan counselled in an earlier book, “The Ethics of Voting” (2011). He was equally unimpressed by the argument that it’s one’s duty to vote. “It would be bad if no one farmed,” he wrote, “but that does not imply that everyone should farm.” In fact, he suspected, the imperative to vote might be even weaker than the imperative to farm. After all, by not voting you do your neighbor a good turn. “If I do not vote, your vote counts more,” Brennan wrote.

Brennan calls people who don’t bother to learn about politics hobbits, and he thinks it for the best if they stay home on Election Day. A second group of people enjoy political news as a recreation, following it with the partisan devotion of sports fans, and Brennan calls them hooligans. Third in his bestiary are vulcans, who investigate politics with scientific objectivity, respect opposing points of view, and carefully adjust their opinions to the facts, which they seek out diligently. It’s vulcans, presumably, who Brennan hopes will someday rule over us, but he doesn’t present compelling evidence that they really exist. In fact, one study he cites shows that even people with excellent math skills tend not to draw on them if doing so risks undermining a cherished political belief. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. In recent memory, sophisticated experts have been confident about many proposals that turned out to be disastrous—invading Iraq, having a single European currency, grinding subprime mortgages into the sausage known as collateralized debt obligations, and so on.

How would an epistocracy actually work? Brennan is reluctant to get specific, which is understandable. It was the details of utopia that gave Plato so much trouble, and by not going into them Brennan avoids stepping on the rake that thwacked Plato between the eyes. He sketches some options—extra votes for degree holders, a council of epistocrats with veto power, a qualifying exam for voters—but he doesn’t spend much time considering what could go wrong. The idea of a voter exam, for example, was dismissed by Brennan himself in “The Ethics of Voting” as “ripe for abuse and institutional capture.” There’s no mention in his new book of any measures that he would put in place to prevent such dangers.

Without more details, it’s difficult to assess Brennan’s proposal. Suppose I claim that pixies always make selfless, enlightened political decisions and that therefore we should entrust our government to pixies. If I can’t really say how we’ll identify the pixies or harness their sagacity, and if I also disclose evidence that pixies may be just as error-prone as hobbits and hooligans, you’d be justified in having doubts.

While we’re on the subject of vulcans and pixies, we might as well mention that there’s an elephant in the room. Knowledge about politics, Brennan reports, is higher in people who have more education and higher income, live in the West, belong to the Republican Party, and are middle-aged; it’s lower among blacks and women. “Most poor black women, as of right now at least, would fail even a mild voter qualification exam,” he admits, but he’s undeterred, insisting that their disenfranchisement would be merely incidental to his epistocratic plan—a completely different matter, he maintains, from the literacy tests of America’s past, which were administered with the intention of disenfranchising blacks and ethnic whites.

That’s an awfully fine distinction. Bear in mind that, during the current Presidential race, it looks as though the votes of blacks and women will serve as a bulwark against the most reckless demagogue in living memory, whom white men with a college degree have been favoring by a margin of forty-seven per cent to thirty-five per cent. Moreover, though political scientists mostly agree that voters are altruistic, something doesn’t tally: Brennan concedes that historically disadvantaged groups such as blacks and women seem to gain political leverage once they get the franchise.

Like many people I know, I’ve spent recent months staying up late, reading polls in terror. The flawed and faulty nature of democracy has become a vivid companion. But is democracy really failing, or is it just trying to say something?

Political scientists have long hoped to find an “invisible hand” in politics comparable to the one that Adam Smith described in economics. Voter ignorance wouldn’t matter much if a democracy were able to weave individual votes into collective political wisdom, the way a market weaves the self-interested buy-and-sell decisions of individual actors into a prudent collective allocation of resources. But, as Brennan reports, the mathematical models that have been proposed work only if voter ignorance has no shape of its own—if, for example, voters err on the side of liberalism as often as they err on the side of conservatism, leaving decisions in the hands of a politically knowledgeable minority in the center. Unfortunately, voter ignorance does seem to have a shape. The political scientist Scott Althaus has calculated that a voter with more knowledge of politics will, on balance, be less eager to go to war, less punitive about crime, more tolerant on social issues, less accepting of government control of the economy, and more willing to accept taxes in order to reduce the federal deficit. And Caplan calculates that a voter ignorant of economics will tend to be more pessimistic, more suspicious of market competition and of rises in productivity, and more wary of foreign trade and immigration.

It’s possible, though, that democracy works even though political scientists have failed to find a tidy equation to explain it. It could be that voters take a cognitive shortcut, letting broad-brush markers like party affiliation stand in for a close study of candidates’ qualifications and policy stances. Brennan doubts that voters understand party stereotypes well enough to do even this, but surely a shortcut needn’t be perfect to be helpful. Voters may also rely on the simple heuristic of throwing out incumbents who have made them unhappy, a technique that in political science goes by the polite name of “retrospective voting.” Brennan argues that voters don’t know enough to do this, either. To impose full accountability, he writes, voters would need to know “who the incumbent bastards are, what they did, what they could have done, what happened when the bastards did what they did, and whether the challengers are likely to be any better than the incumbent bastards.” Most don’t know all this, of course. Somin points out that voters have punished incumbents for droughts and shark attacks and rewarded them for recent sports victories. Caplan dismisses retrospective voting, quoting a pair of scholars who call it “no more rational than killing the pharaoh when the Nile does not flood.”

But even if retrospective voting is sloppy, and works to the chagrin of the occasional pharaoh, that doesn’t necessarily make it valueless. It might, for instance, tend to improve elected officials’ policy decisions. Maybe all it takes is for a politician to worry that she could be the unlucky chump who gets punished for something she actually did. Caplan notes that a politician clever enough to worry about his constituents’ future happiness as well as their present gratification might be motivated to give them better policies than they know to ask for. In such a case, he predicts, voters will feel a perennial dissatisfaction, stemming from the tendency of their canniest and most long-lasting politicians to be cavalier about campaign promises. Sound familiar?

When the Founding Fathers designed the federal system, not paying too much attention to voters was a feature, not a bug. “There are particular moments in public affairs,” Madison warned, “when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.” Brennan, for all his cleverness, sometimes seems to be struggling to reinvent the “representative” part of “representative democracy,” writing as if voters need to know enough about policy to be able to make intelligent decisions themselves, when, in most modern democracies, voters usually delegate that task. It’s when they don’t, as in California’s ballot initiatives or the recent British referendum on whether to leave the European Union, that disaster is especially likely to strike. The economist Joseph Schumpeter didn’t think democracy could even function if voters paid too much attention to what their representatives did between elections. “Electorates normally do not control their political leaders in any way except by refusing to reelect them,” he wrote, in “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” (1942). The rest of the time, he thought, they should refrain from “political back-seat driving.”

Why do we vote, and is there a reason to do it or a duty to do it well? It’s been said that voting enables one to take an equal part in the building of one’s political habitat. Brennan thinks that such participation is worthless if what you value about participation is the chance to influence an election’s outcome; odds are, you won’t. Yet he has previously written that participation can be meaningful even when its practical effect is nil, as when a parent whose spouse willingly handles all child care still feels compelled to help out. Brennan claims that no comparable duty to take part exists with voting, because other kinds of good actions can take voting’s place. He believes, in other words, that voting is part of a larger market in civic virtue, the way that farming is part of a larger market in food, and he goes so far as to suggest that a businessman who sells food and clothing to Martin Luther King, Jr., is making a genuine contribution to civic virtue, even though he makes it indirectly. This doesn’t seem persuasive, in part because it dilutes the meaning of civic virtue too much, and in part because it implies that a businessman who sells a cheeseburger to J. Edgar Hoover is committing civic evil.

More than once, Brennan compares uninformed voting to air pollution. It’s a compelling analogy: in both cases, the conscientiousness of the enlightened few is no match for the negligence of the many, and the cost of shirking duty is spread too widely to keep any one malefactor in line. Your commute by bicycle probably isn’t going to make the city’s air any cleaner, and even if you read up on candidates for civil-court judge on Patch.com, it may still be the crook who gets elected. But though the incentive for duty may be weakened, it’s not clear that the duty itself is lightened. The whole point of democracy is that the number of people who participate in an election is proportional to the number of people who will have to live intimately with an election’s outcome. It’s worth noting, too, that if judicious voting is like clean air then it can’t also be like farming. Clean air is a commons, an instance of market failure, dependent on government protection for its existence; farming is part of a market.

But maybe voting is neither commons nor market. Perhaps, instead, it’s combat. Relatively gentle, of course. Rather than rifles and bayonets, essentially there’s just a show of hands. But the nature of the duty may be similar, because what Brennan’s model omits is that sometimes, in an election, democracy itself is in danger. If a soldier were to calculate his personal value to the campaign that his army is engaged in, he could easily conclude that the cost of showing up at the front isn’t worth it, even if he factors in the chance of being caught and punished for desertion. The trouble is that it’s impossible to know in advance of a battle which side will prevail, let alone by how great a margin, especially if morale itself is a variable. The lack of certainty about the future makes a hash of merely prudential calculation. It’s said that most soldiers worry more about letting down the fellow-soldiers in their unit than about allegiance to an entity as abstract as the nation, and maybe voters, too, feel their duty most acutely toward friends and family who share their idea of where the country needs to go. ♦

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By Anthony Gottlieb

By Louis Menand

Interview with the Head of U.C.A.S. (Urban Cyclists Against Stopping)

By David Kamp

By Brendan Loper

What’s gone wrong with democracy

Democracy was the most successful political idea of the 20th century. why has it run into trouble, and what can be done to revive it.

THE protesters who have overturned the politics of Ukraine have many aspirations for their country. Their placards called for closer relations with the European Union (EU), an end to Russian intervention in Ukraine’s politics and the establishment of a clean government to replace the kleptocracy of President Viktor Yanukovych. But their fundamental demand is one that has motivated people over many decades to take a stand against corrupt, abusive and autocratic governments. They want a rules-based democracy.

It is easy to understand why. Democracies are on average richer than non-democracies, are less likely to go to war and have a better record of fighting corruption. More fundamentally, democracy lets people speak their minds and shape their own and their children’s futures. That so many people in so many different parts of the world are prepared to risk so much for this idea is testimony to its enduring appeal.

Yet these days the exhilaration generated by events like those in Kiev is mixed with anxiety, for a troubling pattern has repeated itself in capital after capital. The people mass in the main square. Regime-sanctioned thugs try to fight back but lose their nerve in the face of popular intransigence and global news coverage. The world applauds the collapse of the regime and offers to help build a democracy. But turfing out an autocrat turns out to be much easier than setting up a viable democratic government. The new regime stumbles, the economy flounders and the country finds itself in a state at least as bad as it was before. This is what happened in much of the Arab spring, and also in Ukraine’s Orange revolution a decade ago. In 2004 Mr Yanukovych was ousted from office by vast street protests, only to be re-elected to the presidency (with the help of huge amounts of Russian money) in 2010, after the opposition politicians who replaced him turned out to be just as hopeless.

Democracy is going through a difficult time. Where autocrats have been driven out of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable democratic regimes. Even in established democracies, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife. Yet just a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate the world.

In the second half of the 20th century, democracies had taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible—in Germany, which had been traumatised by Nazism, in India, which had the world’s largest population of poor people, and, in the 1990s, in South Africa, which had been disfigured by apartheid. Decolonialisation created a host of new democracies in Africa and Asia, and autocratic regimes gave way to democracy in Greece (1974), Spain (1975), Argentina (1983), Brazil (1985) and Chile (1989). The collapse of the Soviet Union created many fledgling democracies in central Europe. By 2000 Freedom House, an American think-tank, classified 120 countries, or 63% of the world total, as democracies.

Representatives of more than 100 countries gathered at the World Forum on Democracy in Warsaw that year to proclaim that “the will of the people” was “the basis of the authority of government”. A report issued by America’s State Department declared that having seen off “failed experiments” with authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government, “it seems that now, at long last, democracy is triumphant.”

Such hubris was surely understandable after such a run of successes. But stand farther back and the triumph of democracy looks rather less inevitable. After the fall of Athens, where it was first developed, the political model had lain dormant until the Enlightenment more than 2,000 years later. In the 18th century only the American revolution produced a sustainable democracy. During the 19th century monarchists fought a prolonged rearguard action against democratic forces. In the first half of the 20th century nascent democracies collapsed in Germany, Spain and Italy. By 1941 there were only 11 democracies left, and Franklin Roosevelt worried that it might not be possible to shield “the great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism”.

The progress seen in the late 20th century has stalled in the 21st. Even though around 40% of the world’s population, more people than ever before, live in countries that will hold free and fair elections this year, democracy’s global advance has come to a halt, and may even have gone into reverse. Freedom House reckons that 2013 was the eighth consecutive year in which global freedom declined, and that its forward march peaked around the beginning of the century. Between 1980 and 2000 the cause of democracy experienced only a few setbacks, but since 2000 there have been many. And democracy’s problems run deeper than mere numbers suggest. Many nominal democracies have slid towards autocracy, maintaining the outward appearance of democracy through elections, but without the rights and institutions that are equally important aspects of a functioning democratic system.

Faith in democracy flares up in moments of triumph, such as the overthrow of unpopular regimes in Cairo or Kiev, only to sputter out once again. Outside the West, democracy often advances only to collapse. And within the West, democracy has too often become associated with debt and dysfunction at home and overreach abroad. Democracy has always had its critics, but now old doubts are being treated with renewed respect as the weaknesses of democracy in its Western strongholds, and the fragility of its influence elsewhere, have become increasingly apparent. Why has democracy lost its forward momentum?

The return of history

THE two main reasons are the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the rise of China. The damage the crisis did was psychological as well as financial. It revealed fundamental weaknesses in the West’s political systems, undermining the self-confidence that had been one of their great assets. Governments had steadily extended entitlements over decades, allowing dangerous levels of debt to develop, and politicians came to believe that they had abolished boom-bust cycles and tamed risk. Many people became disillusioned with the workings of their political systems—particularly when governments bailed out bankers with taxpayers’ money and then stood by impotently as financiers continued to pay themselves huge bonuses. The crisis turned the Washington consensus into a term of reproach across the emerging world.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party has broken the democratic world’s monopoly on economic progress. Larry Summers, of Harvard University, observes that when America was growing fastest, it doubled living standards roughly every 30 years. China has been doubling living standards roughly every decade for the past 30 years. The Chinese elite argue that their model—tight control by the Communist Party, coupled with a relentless effort to recruit talented people into its upper ranks—is more efficient than democracy and less susceptible to gridlock. The political leadership changes every decade or so, and there is a constant supply of fresh talent as party cadres are promoted based on their ability to hit targets.

China’s critics rightly condemn the government for controlling public opinion in all sorts of ways, from imprisoning dissidents to censoring internet discussions. Yet the regime’s obsession with control paradoxically means it pays close attention to public opinion. At the same time China’s leaders have been able to tackle some of the big problems of state-building that can take decades to deal with in a democracy. In just two years China has extended pension coverage to an extra 240m rural dwellers, for example—far more than the total number of people covered by America’s public-pension system.

Many Chinese are prepared to put up with their system if it delivers growth. The 2013 Pew Survey of Global Attitudes showed that 85% of Chinese were “very satisfied” with their country’s direction, compared with 31% of Americans. Some Chinese intellectuals have become positively boastful. Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University argues that democracy is destroying the West, and particularly America, because it institutionalises gridlock, trivialises decision-making and throws up second-rate presidents like George Bush junior. Yu Keping of Beijing University argues that democracy makes simple things “overly complicated and frivolous” and allows “certain sweet-talking politicians to mislead the people”. Wang Jisi, also of Beijing University, has observed that “many developing countries that have introduced Western values and political systems are experiencing disorder and chaos” and that China offers an alternative model. Countries from Africa (Rwanda) to the Middle East (Dubai) to South-East Asia (Vietnam) are taking this advice seriously.

China’s advance is all the more potent in the context of a series of disappointments for democrats since 2000. The first great setback was in Russia. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the democratisation of the old Soviet Union seemed inevitable. In the 1990s Russia took a few drunken steps in that direction under Boris Yeltsin. But at the end of 1999 he resigned and handed power to Vladimir Putin, a former KGB operative who has since been both prime minister and president twice. This postmodern tsar has destroyed the substance of democracy in Russia, muzzling the press and imprisoning his opponents, while preserving the show—everyone can vote, so long as Mr Putin wins. Autocratic leaders in Venezuela, Ukraine, Argentina and elsewhere have followed suit, perpetuating a perverted simulacrum of democracy rather than doing away with it altogether, and thus discrediting it further.

The next big setback was the Iraq war. When Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction failed to materialise after the American-led invasion of 2003, Mr Bush switched instead to justifying the war as a fight for freedom and democracy. “The concerted effort of free nations to promote democracy is a prelude to our enemies’ defeat,” he argued in his second inaugural address. This was more than mere opportunism: Mr Bush sincerely believed that the Middle East would remain a breeding ground for terrorism so long as it was dominated by dictators. But it did the democratic cause great harm. Left-wingers regarded it as proof that democracy was just a figleaf for American imperialism. Foreign-policy realists took Iraq’s growing chaos as proof that American-led promotion of democratisation was a recipe for instability. And disillusioned neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist, saw it as proof that democracy cannot put down roots in stony ground.

A third serious setback was Egypt. The collapse of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in 2011, amid giant protests, raised hopes that democracy would spread in the Middle East. But the euphoria soon turned to despair. Egypt’s ensuing elections were won not by liberal activists (who were hopelessly divided into a myriad of Pythonesque parties) but by Muhammad Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. Mr Morsi treated democracy as a winner-takes-all system, packing the state with Brothers, granting himself almost unlimited powers and creating an upper house with a permanent Islamic majority. In July 2013 the army stepped in, arresting Egypt’s first democratically elected president, imprisoning leading members of the Brotherhood and killing hundreds of demonstrators. Along with war in Syria and anarchy in Libya, this has dashed the hope that the Arab spring would lead to a flowering of democracy across the Middle East.

Meanwhile some recent recruits to the democratic camp have lost their lustre. Since the introduction of democracy in 1994 South Africa has been ruled by the same party, the African National Congress, which has become progressively more self-serving. Turkey, which once seemed to combine moderate Islam with prosperity and democracy, is descending into corruption and autocracy. In Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia, opposition parties have boycotted recent elections or refused to accept their results.

All this has demonstrated that building the institutions needed to sustain democracy is very slow work indeed, and has dispelled the once-popular notion that democracy will blossom rapidly and spontaneously once the seed is planted. Although democracy may be a “universal aspiration”, as Mr Bush and Tony Blair insisted, it is a culturally rooted practice. Western countries almost all extended the right to vote long after the establishment of sophisticated political systems, with powerful civil services and entrenched constitutional rights, in societies that cherished the notions of individual rights and independent judiciaries.

Yet in recent years the very institutions that are meant to provide models for new democracies have come to seem outdated and dysfunctional in established ones. The United States has become a byword for gridlock, so obsessed with partisan point-scoring that it has come to the verge of defaulting on its debts twice in the past two years. Its democracy is also corrupted by gerrymandering, the practice of drawing constituency boundaries to entrench the power of incumbents. This encourages extremism, because politicians have to appeal only to the party faithful, and in effect disenfranchises large numbers of voters. And money talks louder than ever in American politics. Thousands of lobbyists (more than 20 for every member of Congress) add to the length and complexity of legislation, the better to smuggle in special privileges. All this creates the impression that American democracy is for sale and that the rich have more power than the poor, even as lobbyists and donors insist that political expenditure is an exercise in free speech. The result is that America’s image—and by extension that of democracy itself—has taken a terrible battering.

Nor is the EU a paragon of democracy. The decision to introduce the euro in 1999 was taken largely by technocrats; only two countries, Denmark and Sweden, held referendums on the matter (both said no). Efforts to win popular approval for the Lisbon Treaty, which consolidated power in Brussels, were abandoned when people started voting the wrong way. During the darkest days of the euro crisis the euro-elite forced Italy and Greece to replace democratically elected leaders with technocrats. The European Parliament, an unsuccessful attempt to fix Europe’s democratic deficit, is both ignored and despised. The EU has become a breeding ground for populist parties, such as Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, which claim to defend ordinary people against an arrogant and incompetent elite. Greece’s Golden Dawn is testing how far democracies can tolerate Nazi-style parties. A project designed to tame the beast of European populism is instead poking it back into life.

The democratic distemper

EVEN in its heartland, democracy is clearly suffering from serious structural problems, rather than a few isolated ailments. Since the dawn of the modern democratic era in the late 19th century, democracy has expressed itself through nation-states and national parliaments. People elect representatives who pull the levers of national power for a fixed period. But this arrangement is now under assault from both above and below. From above, globalisation has changed national politics profoundly. National politicians have surrendered ever more power, for example over trade and financial flows, to global markets and supranational bodies, and may thus find that they are unable to keep promises they have made to voters. International organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the European Union have extended their influence. There is a compelling logic to much of this: how can a single country deal with problems like climate change or tax evasion? National politicians have also responded to globalisation by limiting their discretion and handing power to unelected technocrats in some areas. The number of countries with independent central banks, for example, has increased from about 20 in 1980 to more than 160 today.

From below come equally powerful challenges: from would-be breakaway nations, such as the Catalans and the Scots, from Indian states, from American city mayors. All are trying to reclaim power from national governments. There are also a host of what Moisés Naim, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, calls “micro-powers”, such as NGOs and lobbyists, which are disrupting traditional politics and making life harder for democratic and autocratic leaders alike. The internet makes it easier to organise and agitate; in a world where people can participate in reality-TV votes every week, or support a petition with the click of a mouse, the machinery and institutions of parliamentary democracy, where elections happen only every few years, look increasingly anachronistic. Douglas Carswell, a British member of parliament, likens traditional politics to HMV, a chain of British record shops that went bust, in a world where people are used to calling up whatever music they want whenever they want via Spotify, a popular digital music-streaming service.

The biggest challenge to democracy, however, comes neither from above nor below but from within—from the voters themselves. Plato’s great worry about democracy, that citizens would “live from day to day, indulging the pleasure of the moment”, has proved prescient. Democratic governments got into the habit of running big structural deficits as a matter of course, borrowing to give voters what they wanted in the short term, while neglecting long-term investment. France and Italy have not balanced their budgets for more than 30 years. The financial crisis starkly exposed the unsustainability of such debt-financed democracy.

With the post-crisis stimulus winding down, politicians must now confront the difficult trade-offs they avoided during years of steady growth and easy credit. But persuading voters to adapt to a new age of austerity will not prove popular at the ballot box. Slow growth and tight budgets will provoke conflict as interest groups compete for limited resources. To make matters worse, this competition is taking place as Western populations are ageing. Older people have always been better at getting their voices heard than younger ones, voting in greater numbers and organising pressure groups like America’s mighty AARP. They will increasingly have absolute numbers on their side. Many democracies now face a fight between past and future, between inherited entitlements and future investment.

Adjusting to hard times will be made even more difficult by a growing cynicism towards politics. Party membership is declining across the developed world: only 1% of Britons are now members of political parties compared with 20% in 1950. Voter turnout is falling, too: a study of 49 democracies found that it had declined by 10 percentage points between 1980-84 and 2007-13. A survey of seven European countries in 2012 found that more than half of voters “had no trust in government” whatsoever. A YouGov opinion poll of British voters in the same year found that 62% of those polled agreed that “politicians tell lies all the time”.

Meanwhile the border between poking fun and launching protest campaigns is fast eroding. In 2010 Iceland’s Best Party, promising to be openly corrupt, won enough votes to co-run Reykjavik’s city council. And in 2013 a quarter of Italians voted for a party founded by Beppe Grillo, a comedian. All this popular cynicism about politics might be healthy if people demanded little from their governments, but they continue to want a great deal. The result can be a toxic and unstable mixture: dependency on government on the one hand, and disdain for it on the other. The dependency forces government to overexpand and overburden itself, while the disdain robs it of its legitimacy. Democratic dysfunction goes hand in hand with democratic distemper.

Democracy’s problems in its heartland help explain its setbacks elsewhere. Democracy did well in the 20th century in part because of American hegemony: other countries naturally wanted to emulate the world’s leading power. But as China’s influence has grown, America and Europe have lost their appeal as role models and their appetite for spreading democracy. The Obama administration now seems paralysed by the fear that democracy will produce rogue regimes or empower jihadists. And why should developing countries regard democracy as the ideal form of government when the American government cannot even pass a budget, let alone plan for the future? Why should autocrats listen to lectures on democracy from Europe, when the euro-elite sacks elected leaders who get in the way of fiscal orthodoxy?

At the same time, democracies in the emerging world have encountered the same problems as those in the rich world. They too have overindulged in short-term spending rather than long-term investment. Brazil allows public-sector workers to retire at 53 but has done little to create a modern airport system. India pays off vast numbers of client groups but invests too little in infrastructure. Political systems have been captured by interest groups and undermined by anti-democratic habits. Patrick French, a British historian, notes that every member of India’s lower house under the age of 30 is a member of a political dynasty. Even within the capitalist elite, support for democracy is fraying: Indian business moguls constantly complain that India’s chaotic democracy produces rotten infrastructure while China’s authoritarian system produces highways, gleaming airports and high-speed trains.

Democracy has been on the back foot before. In the 1920s and 1930s communism and fascism looked like the coming things: when Spain temporarily restored its parliamentary government in 1931, Benito Mussolini likened it to returning to oil lamps in the age of electricity. In the mid-1970s Willy Brandt, a former German chancellor, pronounced that “western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship”. Things are not that bad these days, but China poses a far more credible threat than communism ever did to the idea that democracy is inherently superior and will eventually prevail. Yet China’s stunning advances conceal deeper problems. The elite is becoming a self-perpetuating and self-serving clique. The 50 richest members of the China’s National People’s Congress are collectively worth $94.7 billion—60 times as much as the 50 richest members of America’s Congress. China’s growth rate has slowed from 10% to below 8% and is expected to fall further—an enormous challenge for a regime whose legitimacy depends on its ability to deliver consistent growth.

At the same time, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in the 19th century, democracies always look weaker than they really are: they are all confusion on the surface but have lots of hidden strengths. Being able to install alternative leaders offering alternative policies makes democracies better than autocracies at finding creative solutions to problems and rising to existential challenges, though they often take a while to zigzag to the right policies. But to succeed, both fledgling and established democracies must ensure they are built on firm foundations.

Getting democracy right

THE most striking thing about the founders of modern democracy such as James Madison and John Stuart Mill is how hard-headed they were. They regarded democracy as a powerful but imperfect mechanism: something that needed to be designed carefully, in order to harness human creativity but also to check human perversity, and then kept in good working order, constantly oiled, adjusted and worked upon.

The need for hard-headedness is particularly pressing when establishing a nascent democracy. One reason why so many democratic experiments have failed recently is that they put too much emphasis on elections and too little on the other essential features of democracy. The power of the state needs to be checked, for instance, and individual rights such as freedom of speech and freedom to organise must be guaranteed. The most successful new democracies have all worked in large part because they avoided the temptation of majoritarianism—the notion that winning an election entitles the majority to do whatever it pleases. India has survived as a democracy since 1947 (apart from a couple of years of emergency rule) and Brazil since the mid-1980s for much the same reason: both put limits on the power of the government and provided guarantees for individual rights.

Robust constitutions not only promote long-term stability, reducing the likelihood that disgruntled minorities will take against the regime. They also bolster the struggle against corruption, the bane of developing countries. Conversely, the first sign that a fledgling democracy is heading for the rocks often comes when elected rulers try to erode constraints on their power—often in the name of majority rule. Mr Morsi tried to pack Egypt’s upper house with supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr Yanukovych reduced the power of Ukraine’s parliament. Mr Putin has ridden roughshod over Russia’s independent institutions in the name of the people. Several African leaders are engaging in crude majoritarianism—removing term limits on the presidency or expanding penalties against homosexual behaviour, as Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni did on February 24th.

Foreign leaders should be more willing to speak out when rulers engage in such illiberal behaviour, even if a majority supports it. But the people who most need to learn this lesson are the architects of new democracies: they must recognise that robust checks and balances are just as vital to the establishment of a healthy democracy as the right to vote. Paradoxically even potential dictators have a lot to learn from events in Egypt and Ukraine: Mr Morsi would not be spending his life shuttling between prison and a glass box in an Egyptian court, and Mr Yanukovych would not be fleeing for his life, if they had not enraged their compatriots by accumulating so much power.

Even those lucky enough to live in mature democracies need to pay close attention to the architecture of their political systems. The combination of globalisation and the digital revolution has made some of democracy’s most cherished institutions look outdated. Established democracies need to update their own political systems both to address the problems they face at home, and to revitalise democracy’s image abroad. Some countries have already embarked upon this process. America’s Senate has made it harder for senators to filibuster appointments. A few states have introduced open primaries and handed redistricting to independent boundary commissions. Other obvious changes would improve matters. Reform of party financing, so that the names of all donors are made public, might reduce the influence of special interests. The European Parliament could require its MPs to present receipts with their expenses. Italy’s parliament has far too many members who are paid too much, and two equally powerful chambers, which makes it difficult to get anything done.

But reformers need to be much more ambitious. The best way to constrain the power of special interests is to limit the number of goodies that the state can hand out. And the best way to address popular disillusion towards politicians is to reduce the number of promises they can make. The key to a healthier democracy, in short, is a narrower state—an idea that dates back to the American revolution. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men”, Madison argued, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” The notion of limited government was also integral to the relaunch of democracy after the second world war. The United Nations Charter (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) established rights and norms that countries could not breach, even if majorities wanted to do so.

These checks and balances were motivated by fear of tyranny. But today, particularly in the West, the big dangers to democracy are harder to spot. One is the growing size of the state. The relentless expansion of government is reducing liberty and handing ever more power to special interests. The other comes from government’s habit of making promises that it cannot fulfil, either by creating entitlements it cannot pay for or by waging wars that it cannot win, such as that on drugs. Both voters and governments must be persuaded of the merits of accepting restraints on the state’s natural tendency to overreach. Giving control of monetary policy to independent central banks tamed the rampant inflation of the 1980s, for example. It is time to apply the same principle of limited government to a broader range of policies. Mature democracies, just like nascent ones, require appropriate checks and balances on the power of elected government.

Governments can exercise self-restraint in several different ways. They can put on a golden straitjacket by adopting tight fiscal rules—as the Swedes have done by pledging to balance their budget over the economic cycle. They can introduce “sunset clauses” that force politicians to renew laws every ten years, say. They can ask non-partisan commissions to propose long-term reforms. The Swedes rescued their pension system from collapse when an independent commission suggested pragmatic reforms including greater use of private pensions, and linking the retirement age to life-expectancy. Chile has been particularly successful at managing the combination of the volatility of the copper market and populist pressure to spend the surplus in good times. It has introduced strict rules to ensure that it runs a surplus over the economic cycle, and appointed a commission of experts to determine how to cope with economic volatility.

Isn’t this a recipe for weakening democracy by handing more power to the great and the good? Not necessarily. Self-denying rules can strengthen democracy by preventing people from voting for spending policies that produce bankruptcy and social breakdown and by protecting minorities from persecution. But technocracy can certainly be taken too far. Power must be delegated sparingly, in a few big areas such as monetary policy and entitlement reform, and the process must be open and transparent.

And delegation upwards towards grandees and technocrats must be balanced by delegation downwards, handing some decisions to ordinary people. The trick is to harness the twin forces of globalism and localism, rather than trying to ignore or resist them. With the right balance of these two approaches, the same forces that threaten established democracies from above, through globalisation, and below, through the rise of micro-powers, can reinforce rather than undermine democracy.

Tocqueville argued that local democracy frequently represented democracy at its best: “Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and enjoy it.” City mayors regularly get twice the approval ratings of national politicians. Modern technology can implement a modern version of Tocqueville’s town-hall meetings to promote civic involvement and innovation. An online hyperdemocracy where everything is put to an endless series of public votes would play to the hand of special-interest groups. But technocracy and direct democracy can keep each other in check: independent budget commissions can assess the cost and feasibility of local ballot initiatives, for example.

Several places are making progress towards getting this mixture right. The most encouraging example is California. Its system of direct democracy allowed its citizens to vote for contradictory policies, such as higher spending and lower taxes, while closed primaries and gerrymandered districts institutionalised extremism. But over the past five years California has introduced a series of reforms, thanks in part to the efforts of Nicolas Berggruen, a philanthropist and investor. The state has introduced a “Think Long” committee to counteract the short-term tendencies of ballot initiatives. It has introduced open primaries and handed power to redraw boundaries to an independent commission. And it has succeeded in balancing its budget—an achievement which Darrell Steinberg, the leader of the California Senate, described as “almost surreal”.

Similarly, the Finnish government has set up a non-partisan commission to produce proposals for the future of its pension system. At the same time it is trying to harness e-democracy: parliament is obliged to consider any citizens’ initiative that gains 50,000 signatures. But many more such experiments are needed—combining technocracy with direct democracy, and upward and downward delegation—if democracy is to zigzag its way back to health.

John Adams, America’s second president, once pronounced that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” He was clearly wrong. Democracy was the great victor of the ideological clashes of the 20th century. But if democracy is to remain as successful in the 21st century as it was in the 20th, it must be both assiduously nurtured when it is young—and carefully maintained when it is mature.

This article appeared in the Essay section of the print edition under the headline “What’s gone wrong with democracy”

From the March 1st 2014 edition

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Why Democracy Survives Populism

Kurt Weyland

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Read the full essay here .

This essay suggests that while populism certainly can be a mortal threat to democracy, the worst outcome is less common than observers have feared. The author’s research shows that among forty populist governments in Latin America and Europe from 1985 to 2020, only seven led to authoritarian rule. It concludes that democracy often shows considerable resilience, with most populist leaders failing to suffocate liberal pluralism due to institutional checks, balances, and opposition mobilization. While the threat of populism requires constant attention and energetic countermeasures, there is no need for global alarmism.

About the Author

Kurt Weyland is the Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas–Austin. His books include Assault on Democracy: Communism, Fascism, and Authoritarianism During the Interwar Years (2021).

View all work by Kurt Weyland

Latin America’s Shifting Politics: The Peace Process and Colombia’s Elections

Laura Gamboa

Colombian voters turned against the architects of the peace accord ending the country’s decades-old internal war, while giving the presidency to a lieutenant of ex-president Uribe, the agreement’s leading opponent.

Volume 28, Issue 2

The 2016 U.S. Election: The Populist Moment

William A. Galston

Rising populism in the U.S. and beyond is calling into question the liberal-democratic bargain that has defined the postwar era. What led to Americans’ present revolt against elites, and what are its…

Volume 29, Issue 1

Exchange: How to Tell Nativists from Populists

Takis S. Pappas

Contra Ben Margulies, one can clearly mark the boundaries that separate antidemocrats from democrats (nativists included), and nativists from populists.

Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

Students are often asked to write an essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

The essence of democracy.

Voting is the cornerstone of a democracy. It’s the tool that allows citizens to choose their leaders and voice their opinions on important issues.

Why Voting Matters

The power of each vote.

Every vote counts. In many cases, elections have been decided by just a few votes. Therefore, your vote can make a real difference.

In summary, voting is a crucial component of democracy. So, always exercise your right to vote!

250 Words Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

The role of voting.

Voting is not just a right, but a duty and a moral responsibility. It is the most direct and effective way of participating in the democratic process. The vote of every citizen contributes to the formation of a government and the trajectory of the nation.

Empowering the Masses

Voting gives citizens the power to express their opinion and choose leaders who align with their views. It is a tool to effect change and ensure the government reflects the will of the people. Voting also empowers marginalized groups, providing an equal platform for their voices to be heard.

Accountability and Transparency

Voting ensures accountability and transparency in the democratic system. It acts as a check on the government, reminding them of their responsibility towards the electorate. If the government fails to deliver, voters have the power to change the administration in the next election.

The importance of voting in democracy cannot be overstated. It is the fundamental right and duty of every citizen to participate in this process. It is through voting that we shape our society, influence policies, and ensure the government serves the common good. By voting, we uphold the democratic values of freedom, equality, and justice.

500 Words Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

Introduction.

Democracy is a system of governance where citizens participate directly or indirectly in the decision-making process. At the heart of this system lies the act of voting, an essential tool through which citizens express their will, choose their leaders, and influence public policy. The importance of voting in a democratic society cannot be overstated as it forms the basis for the exercise of political and civil rights.

The Pillar of Democratic Governance

Instrument for social change.

Voting is not only a political act but also a tool for social change. It gives citizens the power to influence public policy and the direction of societal evolution. Through the ballot box, citizens can express their views on critical issues such as education, health, economy, and social justice. Voting, therefore, serves as a peaceful means of effecting change and shaping the society we want to live in.

Equality and Inclusivity

In a democracy, voting underscores the principle of equality. Regardless of social, economic, or cultural backgrounds, every citizen has an equal vote. This inclusivity strengthens social cohesion and fosters a sense of belonging among citizens. Moreover, it ensures that marginalized and underrepresented groups have a voice in the political process, thereby promoting social equity.

Responsibility of Citizenship

Voting is not just a right; it is a responsibility. By participating in elections, citizens contribute to the democratic process and the overall health of the political system. Abstaining from voting leads to a skewed representation, which may not reflect the true will of the people. Therefore, every vote counts, and each citizen ought to take this responsibility seriously.

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Political Scientists Want to Know Why We Hate One Another This Much

Two hands hold up a cellphone capturing an image of Donald Trump standing in front of a large American flag.

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

Who among us are the most willing to jettison democratic elections? Which voters not only detest their political adversaries but also long for their destruction?

These questions are now at the heart of political science.

Five scholars have capitalized on new measurement techniques to identify partisan sectarian voters, a category that they said “does indeed predict antidemocratic tendencies.”

In their recent paper “ Partisan Antipathy and the Erosion of Democratic Norms ” Eli Finkel of Northwestern, James Druckman of the University of Rochester, Alexander Landry of Stanford, Jay Van Bavel of N.Y.U. and Rick H. Hoyle of Duke made the case that earlier studies of partisan hostility used ratings of the two parties on a scale of 0 (cold) to 100 (very warm) but that that measure failed to show a linkage between such hostility and antidemocratic views.

The five scholars wrote, “Partisan antipathy is indeed to blame, but the guilty party is political sectarianism,” not the thermometer rating system:

Insofar as people experience othering, aversion and moralization toward opposing partisans, they are more likely to support using undemocratic tactics to pass partisan policies: gerrymandering congressional districts, reducing the number of polling stations in locations that support the opposing party, ignoring unfavorable court rulings by opposition-appointed judges, failing to accept the results of elections that one loses and using violence and intimidation toward opposing partisans.

Who, then, falls into this subset of partisan sectarians?

The authors cited nine polling questions that asked voters to assess their feelings toward members of the opposition on a scale of 1 to 6, with 6 the most hostile.

The first set of questions measured what the authors called othering. The most extreme answers were:

I felt as if they and I are on separate planets. I am as different from them as can be. It’s impossible for me to see the world the way they do.

The second set of questions measured aversion:

My feelings toward them are overwhelmingly negative. I have a fierce hatred for them. They have every negative trait in the book.

The third set of questions measured moralization:

They are completely immoral. They are completely evil in every way. They lack any shred of integrity.

How, then, to identify voters high in antidemocratic views? Representative questions here were: “Democratic/Republican governors should ignore unfavorable court rulings by Republican/Democratic-appointed judges” and “Democrats/Republicans should not accept election results if they lose.”

The Finkel et al. analysis linking partisan sectarianism to antidemocratic views received strong support but not a wholesale endorsement from Nicolas Campos and Christopher Federico , political scientists at the University of Minnesota, who modified the Finkel approach.

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What Will Become of American Civilization?

Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city

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No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.

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It grew around water. In 1911, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the steps of the Tempe Normal School , which, half a century later, would become Arizona State University, and declared that the soaring dam just completed in the Superstition Mountains upstream, established during his presidency and named after him, would provide enough water to allow 100,000 people to live in the Valley. There are now 5 million.

The Valley is one of the fastest-growing regions in America, where a developer decided to put a city of the future on a piece of virgin desert miles from anything. At night, from the air, the Phoenix metroplex looks like a glittering alien craft that has landed where the Earth is flat and wide enough to host it. The street grids and subdivisions spreading across retired farmland end only when they’re stopped by the borders of a tribal reservation or the dark folds of mountains, some of them surrounded on all sides by sprawl.

Phoenix makes you keenly aware of human artifice—its ingenuity and its fragility. The American lust for new things and new ideas, good and bad ones, is most palpable here in the West, but the dynamo that generates all the microchip factories and battery plants and downtown high-rises and master-planned suburbs runs so high that it suggests its own oblivion. New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.

Growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought, and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence. Democracy is also a fragile artifice. It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls—belief, virtue, restraint. Its durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the Valley. And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.

1. The Conscience of Rusty Bowers

Among the white settlers who rebuilt the Hohokam canals were the Mormon ancestors of Rusty Bowers. In the 1890s, they settled in the town of Mesa, east of Phoenix and a few miles downstream from where the Verde River joins the Salt. In 1929, when Bowers’s mother was a little girl, she was taken to hear the Church president, believed to be a prophet. For the rest of her life, she would recall one thing he told the assembly: “I foresee the day when there will be lines of people leaving this valley because there is no water.”

The Valley’s several thousand square miles stretch from Mesa in the east to Buckeye in the west. Bowers lives on a hill at Mesa’s edge, about as far east as you can go before the Valley ends, in a pueblo-style house where he and his wife raised seven children. He is lean, with pale-blue eyes and a bald sunspotted head whose pinkish creases and scars in the copper light of a desert sunset give him the look of a figure carved from the sandstone around him. So his voice comes as a surprise—playful cadences edged with a husky sadness. He trained to be a painter, but instead he became one of the most powerful men in Arizona, a 17-year state legislator who rose to speaker of the House in 2019. The East Valley is conservative and so is Bowers, though he calls himself a “pinto”—a spotted horse—meaning capable of variations. When far-right House members demanded a 30 percent across-the-board budget cut, he made a deal with Democrats to cut far less, and found the experience one of the most liberating of his life. He believes that environmentalists worship Creation instead of its Creator, but he drives a Prius as well as a pickup.

In the late 2010s, the Arizona Republican Party began to worry Bowers with its growing radicalism: State meetings became vicious free-for-alls; extremists unseated mainstream conservatives. Still, he remained a member in good standing—appearing at events with Donald Trump during the president’s reelection campaign, handing out Trump flyers door-to-door—until the morning of Sunday, November 22, 2020.

photo of man's face in reddish sunlight with water, rocky landscape, and dark clouds behind

Bowers and his wife had just arrived home from church when the Prius’s Bluetooth screen flashed WHITE HOUSE . Rudy Giuliani was calling, and soon afterward the freshly defeated president came on the line. As Bowers later recalled, there was the usual verbal backslapping, Trump telling him what a great guy he was and Bowers thanking Trump for helping with his own reelection. Then Giuliani got to the point. The election in Arizona had been riddled with fraud: piles of military ballots stolen and illegally cast, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and dead people voting, gross irregularities at the counting centers. Bowers had been fielding these stories from Republican colleagues and constituents and found nothing credible in them.

“Do you have proof of that?” Bowers asked.

“Yeah,” Giuliani replied.

“Do you have names?”

“I need proof, names, how they voted, and I need it on my desk.”

“Rudy,” Trump broke in, “give the man what he wants.”

Bowers sensed some further purpose to the call. “To what end? What’s the ask here?”

“Rudy, what’s the ask?” Trump echoed, as if he didn’t know.

America’s ex-mayor needed Bowers to convene a committee to investigate the evidence of fraud. Then, according to an “arcane” state law that had been brought to Giuliani’s attention by someone high up in Arizona Republican circles, the legislature could replace the state’s Biden electors with a pro-Trump slate.

The car was idling on the dirt driveway by a four-armed saguaro cactus. “That’s a new one,” Bowers said. “I’ve never heard that one before. You need to tell me more about that.”

Giuliani admitted that he personally wasn’t an expert on Arizona law, but he’d been told about a legal theory, which turned out to have come from a paper written by a 63-year-old state representative and avid Trump partisan named Mark Finchem, who was studying for a late-in-life master’s degree at the University of Arizona.

“We’re asking you to consider this,” Trump told Bowers.

“Mr. President …”

Bowers prayed a lot, about things large and small. But prayer doesn’t deliver instant answers. So that left conscience, which everyone is blessed with but some do their best to kill. An immense number of Trump-era Republican officeholders had killed theirs in moments like this one. Bowers, who considered the Constitution divinely inspired, felt his conscience rising up into his throat: Don’t do it. You’ve got to tell him you won’t do it .

“I swore an oath to the Constitution,” Bowers said.

“Well, you know,” Giuliani said, “we’re all Republicans, and we need to be working together.”

“Mr. President,” Bowers said, “I campaigned for you. I voted for you. The policies you put in did a lot of good. But I will do nothing illegal for you.”

“We’re asking you to consider this,” Trump again told Bowers.

At the end of November, Trump’s legal team flew to Phoenix and met with Republican legislators . Bowers asked Giuliani for proof of voter fraud. “We don’t have the evidence,” Giuliani said, “but we have a lot of theories.” The evidence never materialized, so the state party pushed the theories , colleagues in the legislature attacked Bowers on Twitter, and a crowd swarmed the capitol in December to denounce him. One of the most vocal protesters was a young Phoenix man a month away from world fame as the QAnon Shaman.

On December 4, Bowers wrote in his diary:

It is painful to have friends who have been such a help to me turn on me with such rancor. I may, in the eyes of men, not hold correct opinions or act according to their vision or convictions, but I do not take this current situation in a light manner, a fearful manner, or a vengeful manner. I do not want to be a winner by cheating … How else will I ever approach Him in the wilderness of life, knowing that I ask this guidance only to show myself a coward in defending the course He led me to take?

Caravans of trucks climbed the road to Bowers’s house with pro-Trump flags and video panels and loudspeakers blasting to his neighbors that he was corrupt, a traitor, a pervert, a pedophile. His daughter Kacey, who had struggled with alcoholism, was now dying, and the mob outside the house upset her. At one point, Bowers went out to face them and encountered a man in a Three Percenter T-shirt, with a semiautomatic pistol on his hip, screaming abuse. Bowers walked up close enough to grab the gun if the Three Percenter drew. “I see you brought your little pop gun,” he said. “You gonna shoot me? Yell all you want—don’t touch that gun.” He knew that it would take only one would-be patriot under the influence of hateful rhetoric to kill him. He would later tell the January 6 congressional committee : “The country is at a very delicate part where this veneer of civilization is thinner than my fingers pressed together.”

Emails poured in. On December 7, someone calling themselves hunnygun wrote:

FUCK YOU, YOUR RINO COCKSUCKING PIECE OF SHIT. STOP BEING SUCH A PUSSY AND GET BACK IN THERE. DECERTIFY THIS ELECTION OR, NOT ONLY WILL YOU NOT HAVE A FUTURE IN ARIZONA, I WILL PERSONALLY SEE TO IT THAT NO MEMBER OF YOUR FAMILY SEES A PEACEFUL DAY EVER AGAIN.

Three days before Christmas, Bowers was sitting on his patio when Trump called again—this time without his attorney, and with a strange message that might have been an attempt at self-exculpation. “I remember what you told me the last time we spoke,” Trump said. Bowers took this as a reference to his refusal to do anything illegal, which he repeated. “I get it,” Trump said. “I don’t want you to.” He thanked Bowers for his support during the campaign. “I hope your family has a merry Christmas.”

Kacey Bowers died at age 42 on January 28, 2021. COVID rules kept the family from her hospital bedside until her final hours. Bowers, a lay priest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, gave his daughter a blessing, and at the very end, the family sang a hymn by John Henry Newman:

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom, Lead thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home, Lead thou me on!

The gloom thickened. Bowers’s enemies launched an effort to recall him, with foot soldiers provided by the Trump youth organization Turning Point USA, which is headquartered in Phoenix. The recall failed , but it was an ill omen. That summer, a wildfire in the mountains destroyed the Bowers ranch, taking his library, his papers, and many of his paintings. In 2022, after Bowers testified before the January 6 committee in Washington, D.C., the state party censured him and another stream of abuse came to his doorstep. Term-limited in the House, he ran for a Senate seat just to let the party know that it couldn’t bully him out. He was demolished by a conspiracist with Trump’s backing. Bowers’s political career was over.

“What do you do?” Bowers said. “You stand up. That’s all you can do. You have to get back up. When we lost the place and saw the house was still burning and now there’s nothing there, gone, and to have 23-plus years of a fun place with the family to be gone—it’s hard. Is it the hardest? No. Not even close. I keep on my phone (I won’t play it for you) my last phone call from my daughter—how scared she was, a port came out of her neck, they were transporting her, she was bleeding all over, and she says: ‘Dad, please, help me, please!’ Compared to a phone call from the president, compared to your house burning down? So what? What do you do, Dad? Those are hard things. But they come at us all. They’re coming at us as a country … What do we do? You get up.”

Bowers went back to painting. He took a job with a Canadian water company called EPCOR. Water had obsessed him all his life—he did not want the prophet’s vision to come to pass on his watch. One bright day last October, we stood on the Granite Reef Diversion Dam a few miles from his house, where the two main water systems that nourish the Valley meet at the foot of Red Mountain, sacred to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indians, whose reservation stood just across the dry bed of the river. Below the dam’s headgate three-foot carp thrashed in the turbulent water of the South Canal, and wild horses waded in the shallows upstream.

“What’s the politics of water here?” I asked.

Bowers laughed, incredulous. “Oh my gosh, that question. It’s everywhere. You’ve heard the dictum.”

I had heard the dictum from everyone in the Valley who thought about the subject. “Whiskey’s for drinking—”

“Water’s for fighting,” Bowers finished, and then he amended it: “Water’s for killing.”

2. The Heat Zone

Summer in the Valley for most of its inhabitants is like winter in Minnesota—or winter in Minnesota 20 years ago. People stay inside as much as possible and move only if absolutely necessary among the artificial sanctuaries of home, car, and work. Young professionals in the arts district emerge after dark to walk their dogs. When the sun is high, all human presence practically disappears from the streets, and you notice how few trees there are in Phoenix.

Frank Lloyd Wright disliked air-conditioning . During a visit to Taliesin West, the home and studio he built from desert stone in the 1930s on a hillside north of Phoenix, I read in his book The Natural House :

To me air conditioning is a dangerous circumstance. The extreme changes in temperature that tear down a building also tear down the human body … If you carry these contrasts too far too often, when you are cooled the heat becomes more unendurable; it becomes hotter and hotter outside as you get cooler and cooler inside.

The observation gets at the unnaturalness of the Valley, because its civilization is unthinkable without air-conditioning. But the massive amount of energy required to keep millions of people alive in traffic jams is simultaneously burning them up, because air-conditioning accounts for 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, twice that of all aviation .

One morning last August, goaded by Wright and tired of air-conditioned driving, I decided to walk the mile from my hotel to an interview at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. Construction workers were sweating and hydrating on the site of a new high-rise. A few thin figures slouched on benches by the Valley Metro tracks. At a bus shelter, a woman lay on the sidewalk in some profound oblivion. After four blocks my skin was prickling and I thought about turning back for my rental car, but I couldn’t face suffocating at the wheel while I waited for the air to cool. By the time I reached the Recorder’s Office, I was having trouble thinking, as if I’d moved significantly closer to the sun.

Last summer—when the temperature reached at least 110 degrees on 55 days (above 110, people said, it all feels the same), and the midsummer monsoon rains never came, and Phoenix found itself an object of global horror—heat officially helped kill 644 people in Maricopa County. They were the elderly, the sick, the mentally ill, the isolated, the homeless, the addicted (methamphetamines cause dehydration and fentanyl impairs thought), and those too poor to own or fix or pay for air-conditioning, without which a dwelling can become unlivable within an hour. Even touching the pavement is dangerous. A woman named Annette Vasquez, waiting in line outside the NourishPHX food pantry, lifted her pant leg to show me a large patch of pink skin on her calf—the scar of a second-degree burn from a fall she’d taken during a heart attack in high heat after seven years on the streets.

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It was 115 on the day I met Dr. Aneesh Narang at the emergency department of Banner–University Medical Center. He had already lost four or five patients to heatstroke over the summer and just treated one who was brought in with a body temperature of 106 degrees, struggling to breathe and unable to sweat. “Patients coming in at 108, 109 degrees—they’ve been in the heat for hours, they’re pretty much dead,” Narang said. “We try to cool them down as fast as we can.” The method is to strip off their clothes and immerse them in ice and tap water inside a disposable cadaver bag to get their temperature down to 100 degrees within 15 or 20 minutes. But even those who survive heatstroke risk organ failure and years of neurological problems.

Recently, a hyperthermic man had arrived at Narang’s emergency department lucid enough to speak. He had become homeless not long before and was having a hard time surviving in the heat—shelters weren’t open during the day, and he didn’t know how to find the city’s designated cooling centers. “I can’t keep up with this,” he told the doctor. “I can’t get enough water. I’m tired.”

2 photos: person sleeping on concrete under shade of highway overpass; 4 people around bench on street, 2 wrapped in blankets

Saving a homeless patient only to send him back out into the heat did not feel like a victory to Narang. “It’s a Band-Aid on a leaking dam,” he said. “We haven’t solved a deep-rooted issue here. We’re sending them back to an environment that got them here—that’s the sad part. The only change that helps that situation is ending homelessness. It’s a problem in a city that’ll get hotter and hotter every year . I’m not sure what it’ll look like in 2050.”

The mayor of Phoenix, Kate Gallego, has a degree in environmental science and has worked on water policy in the region. “We are trying to very much focus on becoming a more sustainable community,” she told me in her office at city hall. Her efforts include the appointment of one of the country’s first heat czars; zoning and tax policies to encourage housing built up rather than out (downtown Phoenix is a forest of cranes); a multibillion-dollar investment in wastewater recycling; solar-powered shipping containers used as cooling centers and temporary housing on city lots; and a shade campaign of trees, canopies, and public art on heavily walked streets.

But the homeless population of metro Phoenix has nearly doubled in the past six years amid a housing shortage , soaring rents , and NIMBYism ; multifamily affordable housing remain dirty words in most Valley neighborhoods. Nor is there much a mayor can do about the rising heat. A scientific study published in May 2023 projected that a blackout during a five-day heat wave would kill nearly 1 percent of Phoenix’s population—about 13,000 people—and send 800,000 to emergency rooms.

Near the airport, on the treeless streets south of Jefferson and north of Grant, there was a no-man’s-land around the lonely tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad, with scrap metal and lumber yards, stacks of pallets, a food pantry, abandoned wheelchairs, tombstones scattered across a dirt cemetery, and the tents and tarps and belongings and trash of the homeless. I began to think of this area, in the dead center of the Valley, as the heat zone. It felt hotter than anywhere else, not just because of the pavement and lack of shade, but because this was where people who couldn’t escape the furnace came. Most were Latino or Black, many were past middle age, and they came to be near a gated 13-acre compound that offered meals, medical and dental care, information about housing, a postal address, and 900 beds for single adults.

Last summer, the homeless encampment outside the compound stretched for several desolate blocks—the kind of improvised shantytown I’ve seen in Manila and Lagos but not in the United States, and not when the temperature was 111 degrees. One day in August, with every bed inside the compound taken, 563 people in varying states of consciousness were living outside. I couldn’t understand what kept them from dying.

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Mary Gilbert Todd, in her early 60s, from Charleston, South Carolina, had a cot inside Respiro, a large pavilion where men slept on one side, women on the other. Before that she’d spent four years on the streets of Phoenix. Her face was sunburned, her upper teeth were missing, and she used a walker, but her eyes gleamed bright blue with energy.

“If you put a wet shirt on and wet your hair, it’s gonna be cool,” she told me cheerfully, poking with a fork at a cup of ramen. “In the daytime, you don’t wanna walk. It’s better, when you’re homeless, to find a nice, shady tree and build yourself a black tent that you can sleep in where there’s some breeze. The black, it may absorb more heat on the outside, but it’s going to provide more shade. Here you got the dry heat. You want to have an opening so wind can go through—something that the police aren’t going to notice too much. Because if you’re in a regular tent, they’re gonna come bust you, and if you’re sitting out in the open, they’re gonna come mess with you.” She said that she’d been busted for “urban camping” 600 times.

My guide around the compound was Amy Schwabenlender, who directs it with the wry, low-key indignation of a woman working every day in the trenches of a crisis that the country appears readier to complain about than solve. “It’s America—we don’t have to have homelessness,” she said. “We allow homelessness to happen. We—the big we .” The neighbors—a casket maker, an electric-parts supplier, the owners of a few decaying houses—blamed Schwabenlender for bringing the problem to their streets, as if she were the root cause of homelessness. In the face of a lawsuit, the city was clearing the encampment .

Schwabenlender had come to the Valley to get away from depressing Wisconsin winters. After her first night in a motel in Tempe, she went out to her car and found the window heat-glued to the door by its rubber seal. “What did I just do to myself?” she wondered. Now she lives in North Phoenix in a house with a yard and a pool, but she has seen enough misery to be a growth dissident.

“I don’t know why people want to live here ,” she said, smiling faintly, her pallor set off by thick black hair. “We can’t have enough housing infrastructure for everyone who wants to live here. So why are we celebrating and encouraging more business? Why are we giving large corporations tax breaks to move here? How can we encourage people to come here when we don’t have enough housing for the people who are here, and we don’t have enough water? It doesn’t add up to me.”

While we were talking, a woman with a gray crew cut who was missing her left leg below the thigh rolled up to Schwabenlender in a wheelchair. She had just been released after a long prison term and had heard something that made her think she’d get a housing voucher by the end of the month.

Schwabenlender gave an experienced sigh. “There’s a waitlist of 4,000,” she told the woman.

On my way out of Respiro, I chatted with a staff member named Tanish Bates. I mentioned the woman I’d seen lying on the sidewalk by the bus shelter in the heat of the day—she had seemed beyond anyone’s reach. “Why didn’t you talk to her?” Bates asked. “For me, it’s a natural instinct—I’m going to try. You ask them, ‘What’s going on? What do you need? Do you need water? Should I call the fire department?’ Nothing beats failure but a try.” She gave me an encouraging pat. “Next time, ask yourself what you would want.”

Utterly shamed, I walked out into the heat zone. By the compound’s gate, a security guard stood gazing at the sky. A few lonely raindrops had begun to fall. “I been praying for rain,” she said. “I am so tired of looking at the sun.” People were lining up to spend an hour or two in a city cooling bus parked at the curb. Farther down Madison Street, the tents ended and street signs announced: THIS AREA IS CLOSED TO CAMPING TO ABATE A PUBLIC NUISANCE .

Every time I returned to Phoenix, I found fewer tents around the compound. The city was clearing the encampment block by block. In December, only a few stragglers remained outside the gate—the hardest cases, fading out on fentanyl or alert enough to get into fights. “They keep coming back,” said a skinny, shirtless young man named Brandon Bisson. “They’re like wild animals. They’ll keep coming back to where the food and resources are.” Homeless for a year, he was watering a pair of healthy red bougainvillea vines in front of a rotting house where he’d been given a room with his dog in exchange for labor. Bisson wanted a job working with animals.

“There’s no news story anymore,” Schwabenlender said as she greeted me in her office. The city had opened a campground where 15th Avenue met the railroad tracks, with shipping containers and tents behind screened fencing, and 41 people were now staying there. Others had been placed in hotels. But it was hard to keep tabs on where they ended up, and some people were still out on the street, in parks, in cars, under highway overpasses. “How do we keep the sense of urgency?” Schwabenlender murmured in her quizzical way, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “We didn’t end homelessness.” The housing waitlist for Maricopa County stood at 7,503. The heat was over for now.

3. Democracy and Water

Civilization in the Valley depends on solving the problem of water, but because this has to be done collectively, solving the problem of water depends on solving the problem of democracy. My visits left me with reasons to believe that human ingenuity is equal to the first task: dams, canals, wastewater recycling, underground storage, desalination, artificial intelligence. But I found at least as many reasons to doubt that we are equal to the second.

It’s easy to believe that the Valley could double its population when you’re flying in a helicopter over the dams of the Salt River Project, the public utility whose lakes hold more than 2 million acre-feet—650 trillion gallons—of water; and when Mayor Gallego is describing Phoenix’s multibillion-dollar plan to recycle huge quantities of wastewater; and when Stephen Roe Lewis, the leader of the Gila River Indian Community, is walking through a recharged wetland that not long ago had been barren desert, pointing out the indigenous willows and cattails whose fibers are woven into traditional bracelets like the one around his wrist.

2 photos: aerial view of dam shaped like connected concrete half-circles with dark green water behind; aerial view of emerald and dark green fields with dusty desert roads between

But when you see that nothing is left of the mighty Colorado River as it approaches the Mexican border but dirt and scrub; and when you drive by a road sign south of the Valley that says EARTH FISSURES POSSIBLE because the water table is dropping four feet a year; and when sprinklers are watering someone’s lawn in Scottsdale in the rain—then the prophet’s vision feels a little closer.

American sprawl across the land of the disappeared Hohokam looks flimsy and flat and monotonous amid the desert’s sublime Cretaceous humps. But sprawl is also the sight of ordinary people reaching for freedom in 2,000 square feet on a quarter acre. Growth is an orthodox faith in the Valley, as if the only alternative is slow death.

Once, I was driving through the desert of far-northern Phoenix with Dave Roberts, the retired head of water policy for the Salt River Project. The highway passed a concrete fortress rising in the distance, a giant construction site with a dozen cranes grasping the sky. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s three plants would employ 6,000 people; they would also consume billions of gallons of Phoenix’s water every year. Roberts filled in the empty space around the site: “All this desert land will be apartments, homes, golf courses, and who knows what—Costcos. There’s going to be malls out here. Gobs of people.” As long as people in places like Louisiana and Mississippi wanted to seek a better life in the Valley, who was he to tell them to stay away? A better life was the whole point of growth.

I asked Roberts, an intensely practical man, if he ever experienced apocalyptic visions of a dried-up Valley vanishing.

“We have three things that the Hohokam didn’t,” he said—pumping, storage (behind dams and underground), and recycling. When I mentioned this to Rusty Bowers, I couldn’t remember the third thing, and he interjected: “Prayer.” I offered that the Hohokam had probably been praying for water too. “I bet they were,” Bowers said. “And the Lord says, ‘Okay. I could go Bing! But that’s not how I work. Go out there and work, and we’ll figure this thing out together.’ ”

This famously libertarian place has a history of collective action on water. Thanks to the bipartisan efforts of the 20th century—the federal dams built in the early 1900s; the 330-mile canal that brought Colorado River water to the Valley in the late 20th century; a 1980 law regulating development in Arizona’s metro regions so they’d conserve groundwater, which cannot be replaced—Phoenix has a lot of water. But two things have happened in this century: a once-in-a-millennium drought set in, and the political will to act collectively dried up. “The legislature has become more and more partisan,” Kathleen Ferris, an architect of the 1980 law, told me. “And there’s a whole lot of denial.”

At some point, the civilization here stopped figuring this thing out together. The 1980 groundwater law , which required builders in regulated metro areas like the Valley to ensure a 100-year supply, left groundwater unregulated in small developments and across rural Arizona. In the mid-1990s, the legislature cut loopholes into the 100-year requirement. The God-given right to pursue happiness and wealth pushed housing farther out into the desert, beyond the reach of the Valley’s municipal water systems, onto groundwater. In the unregulated rural hinterland, megafarms of out-of-state and foreign agribusinesses began to pump enormous quantities of groundwater. The water table around the state was sinking, and the Colorado River was drying up.

Ferris imagined a grim future. Without new regulation, she said, “we will have land subsidence, roads cracking, destroying infrastructure, and in some cases people’s taps going dry.” The crisis wouldn’t hit the water-rich Phoenix metroplex first. “It’s going to be on the fringes, and all the people who allowed themselves to grow there are going to be really unhappy when they find out there’s no water.”

Most people in the Valley come from somewhere else, and John Hornewer came from Chicago. One summer in the early 1990s, when he was about 25, he went for a hike in the Hellsgate Wilderness, 75 miles northeast of Phoenix, and got lost. He ran out of water and couldn’t find a stream. When he grew too weak to carry his backpack, he abandoned it. His eyes began to throb; every muscle hurt; even breathing hurt. He sank to his knees, his face hit the ground, and as the flies buzzed around he thought: Just stop my heart . He was saved by campers, who found him and drove him the 20 miles he’d wandered from his car.

Almost dying from dehydration changed Hornewer’s life. “I take water very seriously,” he told me. “I’m passionate about water.”

In the late ’90s, Hornewer and his wife bought two and a half acres several miles up a dirt road in Rio Verde Foothills, a small community on the northeastern edge of the Valley. To the southwest, the city of Scottsdale ends and unincorporated Maricopa County starts where the golf courses give way to mesquite and the paved roads turn to dirt. Over the years, the desert around the Hornewers was filled in by people who wanted space and quiet and couldn’t afford Scottsdale.

Seeing a need, Hornewer started a business hauling potable water, filling his 6,000-gallon trucks with metered water at a Scottsdale standpipe and selling it to people in Rio Verde with dry wells or none at all. What kept Rio Verde cheaper than Scottsdale was the lack of an assured water supply. Wildcat builders, exploiting a gap in the 1980 law, didn’t tell buyers there wasn’t one, or the buyers didn’t ask. Meanwhile, the water table under Rio Verde was dropping. One of Hornewer’s neighbors hit water at 450 feet; another neighbor 150 feet away spent $60,000 on a 1,000-foot well that came up dry.

Hornewer wears his gray hair shoulder-length and has the face of a man trying to keep his inherent good nature from reaching its limit. In the past few years, he began to warn his Rio Verde customers that Scottsdale’s water would not always be there for them, because it came to Scottsdale by canal from the diminishing Colorado River. “We got rain a couple of weeks ago—everything’s good!” his customers would say, not wanting to admit that climate change was causing a drought. He urged the community to form a water district—a local government entity that would allow Rio Verde to bring in water from a basin west of the Valley. The idea was killed by a county supervisor who had done legal work for a giant Saudi farm that grew alfalfa on leased state land, and who pushed for EPCOR , the private Canadian utility, to service Rio Verde. The county kept issuing building permits, and the wildcatters kept putting up houses where there was no water. When the mayor of Scottsdale announced that, as of January 1, 2023, his city would stop selling its water to Rio Verde, Hornewer wasn’t surprised.

Suddenly, he had to drive five hours round trip to fill his trucks in Apache Junction, 50 miles away. The price of hauled water went from four cents a gallon to 11—the most expensive water anywhere in the country. Rio Verde fell into an uproar. The haves with wet wells were pitted against the have-nots with hauled water. Residents tried to sell and get out; town meetings became shouting matches with physical threats; Nextdoor turned septic. As soon as water was scarce, disinformation flowed.

photo of massive construction project with multiple large cranes in background, with tents and desert scrubland in foreground

In the middle of it all, Hornewer tried to explain to his customers why his prices had basically tripled. Some of them accused him of trying to get their wells capped and enrich his business. He became so discouraged that he thought of getting out of hauling water.

“I don’t have to argue with people anymore about whether we’re in a drought—they got that figured out,” he told me. “It would be nice if people could think ahead that they’re going to get hit on the head with a brick before it hits you on the head. After what I saw, I think the wars have just begun, to be honest with you. You’d think water would be unifying, but it’s not. Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting.”

One of Hornewer’s customers is a retiree from Buffalo named Rosemary Carroll, who moved to Rio Verde in 2020 to rescue donkeys. The animals arrived abused and broken at the small ranch where she lived by herself, and she calmed them by reading to them, getting them used to the sound of her voice, then nursed them back to health until she could find them a good home. Unfairly maligned as dumb beasts of burden, donkeys are thoughtful, affectionate animals—Carroll called them “equine dogs.”

After Scottsdale cut off Rio Verde on the first day of 2023, she repaired her defunct well, but she and her two dozen donkeys still relied on Hornewer’s hauled water. To keep her use down in the brutal heat, she took one quick shower a week, bought more clothes at Goodwill rather than wash clothes she owned, left barrels under her scuppers to catch any rainwater, and put double-lock valves, timers, and alarms on her hoses. Seeing water dripping out of a hose into the dirt filled her with despair. In the mornings, she rode around the ranch with a pail of water in a wagon pulled by a donkey and refilled the dishes she’d left out for rabbits and quail. Carroll tried to avoid the ugly politics of Rio Verde’s water. She just wanted to keep her donkeys alive, though an aged one died from heat.

And all summer long, she heard the sound of hammering. “The people keep coming, the buildings keep coming, and there’s no long-term solution,” Carroll told me, taking a break in the shade of her toolshed.

Sometimes on very hot days when she was shoveling donkey manure, Carroll gazed out over her ranch and her neighbors’ rooftops toward the soft brown hills and imagined some future civilization coming upon this place, finding the remains of stucco walls, puzzling over the metal fragments of solar panels, wondering what happened to the people who once lived here.

“If we thought Rio Verde was a big problem,” Kathleen Ferris said, “imagine if you have a city of 100,000 homes.”

An hour’s drive west from Phoenix on I-10, past truck stops and the massive skeletons of future warehouses, you reach Buckeye. In 2000, 6,500 people lived in what was then a farm town with one gas station. Now it’s 114,000, and by 2040 it’s expected to reach 300,000. The city’s much-publicized goal, for which I never heard a convincing rationale, is to pass 1 million residents and become “the next Phoenix.” To accommodate them all, Buckeye has annexed its way to 642 square miles—more land than the original Phoenix.

In the office of Mayor Eric Orsborn, propped up in a corner, is a gold-plated shovel with TERAVALIS on the handle. Teravalis, billed as the “City of the Future,” is the Howard Hughes Corporation’s planned community of 100,000 houses. Its several hundred thousand residents would put Buckeye well on its way to 1 million.

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I set out to find Teravalis. I drove from the town center north of the interstate on Sun Valley Parkway, with the White Tank Mountains to the right and raw desert all around. I was still in Buckeye—this was recently annexed land—but there was nothing here except road signs with no roads, a few tumbledown dwellings belonging to ranch hands, and one lonely steer. Mile after mile went by, until I began to think I’d made a mistake. Then, on the left side of the highway, I spotted a small billboard planted in a field of graded dirt beside a clump of saguaros and mesquite that seemed to have been installed for aesthetic purposes. This was Teravalis.

Some subdivisions in the Valley are so well designed and built—there’s one in Buckeye called Verrado—they seem to have grown up naturally over time like a small town; others roll on in an endless sea of red-tile sameness that can bring on nausea. But when I saw the acres of empty desert that would become the City of the Future, I didn’t know whether to be inspired by the developer’s imagination or appalled by his madness, like Fitzcarraldo hauling a ship over the Andes, or Howard Hughes himself beset by some demented vision that the open spaces of the New World arouse in willful men bent on conquest. And Teravalis has almost no water .

In her first State of the State address last year as Arizona’s governor after narrowly defeating Kari Lake, Katie Hobbs revealed that her predecessor, Doug Ducey, had buried a study showing that parts of the Valley, including Buckeye, had fallen short of the required 100-year supply of groundwater. Because of growth, all the supply had been allocated; there was none left to spare. In June 2023, Hobbs announced a moratorium on new subdivisions that depended on groundwater .

The national media declared that Phoenix had run dry, that the Valley’s fantastic growth was over. This wasn’t true but, as Ferris warned, the edge communities that had grown on the cheap by pumping groundwater would need to find other sources. Only 5,000 of Teravalis’s planned units had received certificates of assured water supply. The moratorium halted the other 95,000, and it wasn’t obvious where Teravalis and Buckeye would find new water. Sarah Porter, who directs a water think tank at Arizona State, once gave a talk to a West Valley community group that included Buckeye’s Mayor Orsborn. She calculated how much water it would take for his city to be the next Phoenix: nearly 100 billion gallons every year. Her audience did not seem to take in what she was saying.

Orsborn, who also owns a construction company, is an irrepressible booster of the next Phoenix. He described to me the plans for finding more water to keep Buckeye growing. Farmland in the brackish south of town could be retired for housing. Water from a basin west of the Valley could be piped to much of Buckeye, and to Teravalis. Buckeye could negotiate for recycled wastewater and other sources from Phoenix. (The two cities have been haggling over water in and out of court for almost a century, with Phoenix in the superior position; another water dictum says, “Better upstream with a shovel than downstream with a lawyer.”) And there was the radical idea of bringing desalinated water up from the Gulf of California through Mexico. All of it would cost a lot of money.

“What we’ve tried to do is say, ‘Don’t panic,’ ” the mayor told me. “We have water, and we have a plan for more water.”

At certain moments in the Valley, and this was one, ingenuity took the sound and shape of an elaborate defense against the truth.

aerial photo of dam across rocky canyon with reservoir behind and river curving away

When Kari Lake ran for governor in 2022, everyone knew her position on transgenderism and no one knew her position on water, because she barely had one. The subject didn’t turn out voters or decide elections; it was too boring and complicated to excite extremists. Water was more parochial than partisan. It could pit an older city with earlier rights against the growing needs of a newer one, or a corporate megafarm against a nearby homesteader, or Native Americans downstream against Mormon farmers upstream. Stephen Roe Lewis, the leader of the Gila River Indian Community, described years of court battles and federal legislation that finally restored his tribe’s water rights, which were stolen 150 years ago. The community, desperately poor in other ways, had grown rich enough in water that nearby cities and developments were lining up to buy it.

As long as these fights took place in the old, relatively sane world of corrupt politicians, rapacious corporations, overpaid lawyers, and shortsighted homeowners, solutions would usually be possible. But if, like almost everything else in American politics, water turned deeply partisan and ideological, contaminated by conspiracy theories and poisoned with memes, then preserving this drought-stricken civilization would get a lot harder, like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube while fending off a swarm of wasps that you might be hallucinating.

4. Sunshine Patriots

They descended the escalators of the Phoenix Convention Center under giant signs— SAVE AMERICA , BIG GOV SUCKS , PARTY LIKE IT’S 1776 —past tables explaining the 9/11 conspiracy and the Catholic Church conspiracy and the rigged-election conspiracy; tables advertising conservative colleges, America’s Leading Non-Woke Job Board, an anti-abortion ultrasound charity called PreBorn!, a $3,000 vibration plate for back pain, and the One and Only Patriot Owned Infrared Roasted Coffee Company, into the main hall, where music was throbbing, revving up the house for the start of the largest multiday right-wing jamboree in American history.

In the undersea-blue light, I found an empty chair next to a pair of friendly college boys with neat blond haircuts. John was studying in North Carolina for a future in corporate law; Josh was at Auburn, in Alabama, about to join the Marines. “We came all the way here to take back the country,” John said. From what or whom? He eagerly ticked off the answers: from the New York lady crook who was suing Donald Trump; from the inside-job cops who lured the J6 patriots into the Capitol; from the two-tier justice system, the corrupt Biden family, illegal immigrants, the deep state.

The students weren’t repelled by the media badge hanging from my neck—it seemed to impress them. But within 90 seconds, the knowledge that these youths and I inhabited unbridgeable realms of truth plunged me into a surprising sadness. One level below, boredom waited—the deepest mood of American politics, disabling, nihilistic, more destructive than rage, the final response to an impasse that resists every effort of reason.

I turned to the stage. Flames and smoke and roving searchlights were announcing the master of ceremonies.

“Welcome to AmericaFest, everybody. It’s great to be here in Phoenix, Arizona, it’s just great.”

Charlie Kirk—lanky in a patriotic blue suit and red tie, stiff-haired, square-faced, hooded-eyed—is the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, the lucrative right-wing youth organization. In 2018, it moved its headquarters to the Valley, where Kirk lives in a $4.8 million estate on the grounds of a gated country club whose price of entry starts at $500,000. In December, 14,000 young people from all 50 states as well as 14 other countries converged on Phoenix for Turning Point’s annual convention, where Kirk welcomed them to a celebration of America. Then his mouth tightened and he got to the point.

“We’re living through a top-down revolution, everybody. We’re living through a revolution that’s different than most others. It is a cultural revolution, similar to Mao’s China. But this revolution is when the powerful, the rich, the wealthy decide to use their power and their wealth to go after you . Instead of building hospitals and improving our country, they are spending their money to destroy the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world.”

Kirk started Turning Point in 2012, when he was 18 years old, and through tireless organizing and demagogy he built an 1,800-chapter, 600,000-student operation that brings in $80 million a year, much of it in funding from ultrarich conservatives.

“The psychology is that of civilizational suicide. The country has never lived through the wealthiest hating the country. What makes this movement different is that you are here as a grassroots response to the top-down revolution happening in this country.”

When the young leader of the grassroots counterrevolution visited college campuses to recruit for Turning Point and record himself baiting progressive students, Kirk sometimes wore a T-shirt that said THE GOVERNMENT IS LYING TO YOU , like Mario Savio and Jerry Rubin 60 years ago, demonstrating the eternal and bipartisan appeal for the young of paranoid grievance. His business model was generational outrage. He stoked anger the way Big Ag pumped groundwater.

“This is a bottom-up resistance, and it terrifies the ruling class.” Kirk was waving a finger at the students in the hall. “Will the people, who are the sovereign in this country, do everything they possibly can with this incredible blessing given to us by God to fight back and win against the elites that want to ruin it?” Elites invite 12,000 people to cross a wide-open border every day; they castrate children in the name of medicine; they try to put the opposition leader in jail for 700 years. “They hate the United States Constitution. They hate the Declaration.”

The energy rose with each grievance and insult. Kirk’s targets included Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (“that go-go dancer”); LinkedIn’s co-founder, Reid Hoffman; Laurene Powell Jobs, the majority owner of this magazine; Senator Mitt Romney; satanists; “weak beta males” on campus; and even the Turning Pointers who had come to the convention from Mexico and Honduras (“I’m told these people are here legally”). Kirk is an accomplished speaker, and his words slide out fluidly on the grease of glib hostility and grinning mockery. But standing inside the swirl of cross-and-flag hatreds whipped up by speeches and posts and viral videos is a 6-foot-4 son of the Chicago suburbs with a smile that exposes his upper gums and the smooth face of a go-getter who made it big and married a beauty queen—as if the hatred might just be an artifice, digitally simulated.

“Elon Musk liberating Twitter will go down as one of the greatest free-speech victories in the history of Western civilization,” Kirk said. “We can say that ‘January 6 is probably an inside job; it’s more of a fed-surrection than anything else.’ And that ‘99 percent of people on January 6 did nothing wrong.’ That we can go on Twitter and say, ‘George Floyd wasn’t a hero, and Derek Chauvin was targeted in a Soviet-style trial that was anti-American and un-American.’ One of the reasons why the powerful are getting nervous is because we can finally speak again online.”

The other good news was that American high-school boys were more conservative than they’d been in 50 years —Turning Point’s mass production of memes had given a sense of purpose to a generation of males known for loneliness and suicidality. Kirk is obsessed with their testosterone levels and their emasculation by elites who “want a guy with a lisp zipping around on a Lime scooter with a fanny pack, carrying his birth control, supporting his wife’s career while he works as a supportive stay-at-home house husband. He has a playlist that is exclusively Taylor Swift. And their idea of strength is this beta male’s girlfriend opening a pickle jar just for him.”

Kirk erected an index finger.

“At Turning Point USA, we resoundingly reject this. We believe strong, alpha, godly, high‑T, high-achieving, confident, well-armed, and disruptive men are the hope, not the problem, in America.”

The picture of the American experiment grew grimmer when Kirk was followed onstage by Roseanne Barr. She was dressed all in beige, with a baseball cap and a heavy skirt pleated like the folds of a motel-room curtain, chewing something in her hollowed cheeks.

She could not make sense of her laptop and shut it. “What do you want to talk about?”

Without a speech, Barr sank into a pool of self-pity for her canceled career, which reminded her of a quote by Patrick Henry, except the words were on her laptop and all she could remember was “the summer soldier,” until her son, in the front row, handed her a phone with the quote and told her that it was by Thomas Paine.

“I’m just all in for President Trump, I just want to say that. I’m just all in … ’cause I know if I ain’t all in, they’re going to put my ass in a Gulag,” Barr said. “If we don’t stop these horrible, Communist—do you hear me? I’m asking you to hear me!” She began screaming: “ STALINISTS—COMMUNISTS—WITH A HUGE HELPING OF NAZI FASCISTS THROWN IN, PLUS WANTIN’ A CALIPHATE TO REPLACE EVERY CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY ON EARTH NOW OCCUPIED. DO YOU KNOW THAT? I JUST WANT THE TRUTH! WE DESERVE TO HEAR THE TRUTH, THAT’S WHAT WE WANT, WE WANT THE TRUTH, WE DON’T CARE WHICH PARTY IS WRONG, WE KNOW THEY’RE BOTH NOTHIN’ BUT CRAP, THEY’RE BOTH ON THE TAKE, THEY’RE BOTH STEALIN’ US BLIND. WE JUST WANT THE TRUTH ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT WE FOUGHT AND DIED AND SUFFERED TO PROTECT! ”

The college boys exchanged a look and laughed. The hall grew confused and its focus began to drift, so Barr screamed louder. This was the pattern during the four days of AmericaFest, with Glenn Beck, Senator Ted Cruz, Vivek Ramaswamy, Kari Lake, Tucker Carlson, and every other far-right celebrity except Donald Trump himself: A speaker would sense boredom threatening the hall and administer a jolt of danger and defilement and the enemy within. The atmosphere recalled the politics of resentment going back decades, to the John Birch Society, Phyllis Schlafly, and Barry Goldwater. The difference at AmericaFest was that this politics has placed an entire party in thrall to a leader who was once the country’s president and may be again.

I wanted to get out of the hall, and I went looking for someone to talk with among the tables and booths. A colorful flag announced THE LIONS OF LIBERTY , and beside it sat two men who, with their round shiny heads and red 19th-century beards and immense girth, were clearly brothers: Luke and Nick Cilano, who told me they were co-pastors of a church in central Arizona. I did not yet know that the Lions of Liberty were linked to the Oath Keepers and had helped organize an operation that sent armed observers with phone cameras to monitor county drop boxes during the 2022 midterm election. But I didn’t want to talk with the Lions of Liberty about voter fraud, or border security, or trans kids, because I already knew what they would say. I wanted to talk about water.

No one at AmericaFest ever mentioned water. Discussing it would be either bad for Turning Point (possibly leading to a solution) or bad for water policy (making it another front in the culture wars). But the Cilano brothers, who live on five acres in a rural county where the aquifer is dropping, had a lot to say about it.

“The issue is, our elected officials are not protecting us from these huge corporations that are coming in that want to suck the groundwater dry,” Nick said. “That’s what the actual issue is.”

“The narrative is, we don’t have enough water,” Luke, who had the longer beard by three or four inches, added. “That’s false. The correct narrative is, we have enough water, but our elected officials are letting corporations come in and waste the water that we have.”

This wasn’t totally at odds with what experts such as Sarah Porter and Kathleen Ferris had told me. The Cilano brothers said they’d be willing to have the state come in and regulate rural groundwater, as long as the rules applied to everyone—farmers, corporations, developers, homeowners—and required solar panels and wind turbines to offset the energy used in pumping.

“This is a humanity issue,” Luke said. “This should not be a party-line issue. This should be the same on both sides. The only way that this becomes a red-blue issue is if either the red side or the blue side is legislating in their pocket more than the other.” And unfortunately, he added, on the issue of water, those legislators were mostly Republicans.

As soon as a view of common ground with the Lions of Liberty opened up, it closed again when the discussion turned to election security. After withdrawing from Operation Drop Box in response to a lawsuit by a prodemocracy group, Nick had softened his opposition to mail-in voting, but he wanted mail ballots taken away from the U.S. Postal Service in 2024 and their delivery privatized. He couldn’t get over the sense that 2020 and 2022 must have been rigged—the numbers were just too perfect.

Before depression could set in, I left the convention center and walked out into the cooling streets of a Phoenix night.

The Arizona Republican Party is more radical than any other state’s. The chief qualification for viability is an embarrassingly discredited belief in rigged elections. In December 2020, Charlie Kirk’s No. 2, Tyler Bowyer, and another figure linked to Turning Point signed on to be fake Trump electors , and on January 6, several Arizona legislators marched on the U.S. Capitol. In the spring of 2021, the state Senate hired a pro-Trump Florida firm called Cyber Ninjas to “audit” Maricopa County’s presidential ballots with a slipshod hand recount intended to show massive fraud. (Despite Republicans’ best efforts, the Ninjas increased Joe Biden’s margin of victory by 360 votes .) After helping to push Rusty Bowers out of politics, Bowyer and others orchestrated a MAGA party takeover, out-organizing and intimidating the establishment and enlisting an army of precinct-committee members to support the most extreme Republican candidates.

In 2022, the party nominated three strident election deniers for governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. After all three lost, Kari Lake repeatedly accused election officials of cheating her out of the governorship , driving Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder, to sue her successfully for defamation. This past January, just before the party’s annual meeting, Lake released a secret recording she’d made of the party chair appearing to offer her a bribe to keep her from running for the U.S. Senate. When she hinted at more damaging revelations to come, the chair, Jeff DeWit, quit, admitting, “I have decided not to take the risk.” His successor was chosen at a raucous meeting where Lake was booed. Everyone involved—Lake, DeWit, the contenders to replace him, the chair he’d replaced—was a Trump loyalist, ideologically pure. The party bloodletting was the kind of purge that occurs in authoritarian regimes where people have nothing to fight over but power.

Read: In Kari Lake, Trumpism has found its leading lady

In April Arizona’s attorney general indicted 11 fake Trump electors from 2020, including two state senators, several leaders of the state Republican Party, and Tyler Bowyer of Turning Point, as well as Giuliani and six other Trump advisers. The current session of the legislature is awash in Republican bills to change election procedures; one would simply put the result of the state’s presidential vote in the hands of the majority party. I asked Analise Ortiz, a Democratic state representative, if she trusted the legislature’s Republican leaders to respect the will of the voters in November. She thought about it for 10 seconds. “I can’t give you a clear answer on that, and that worries me.”

Richer, the top election official in Maricopa County, is an expert on the extremism of his fellow Arizona Republicans. After taking office in 2021, he received numerous death threats—some to his face, several leading to criminal charges—and he stopped attending most party functions. Richer is up for reelection this year, and Turning Point—which is trying to raise more than $100 million to mobilize the MAGA vote in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—is coming after him.

Election denial is now “a cottage industry, so there are people who have a pecuniary interest in making sure this never really dies out,” Richer told me drily. “Some of these organizations, I’m not even sure it’s necessarily in their interest to be winning. You look at something like a Turning Point USA—I’m not sure if they want to win. They certainly have been very good at not winning. When you are defined by your grievances, as so much of the party is now and as so much of this new populist-right movement is, then it’s easier to be mad when you’ve lost.”

Richer listed several reasons MAGA is 100 proof in Arizona while its potency is weaker in states such as Georgia. One reason is the presence of Turning Point’s headquarters in Phoenix. Another is the border. “The border does weird things to people,” he said. “It contributes to the radicalization of individuals, because it impresses upon you the sense that your community is being stolen and changed.” A University of Chicago study showed that January 6 insurrectionists came disproportionately from areas undergoing rapid change in racial demographics. And, Richer reminded me, Phoenix “contributed the mascot.”

Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman, sat waiting at a table outside a Chipotle in a northwest-Phoenix shopping mall. He was wearing a black T-shirt, workout shorts, and a ski hat roughly embroidered with an American flag. Perhaps it was the banal setting, but even with his goat’s beard and tattoos from biceps to fingernails, he was unrecognizable as the horned and furred invader of the Capitol. For a second, he disappeared into that chasm between the on-screen performance and the ordinary reality of American life.

The Shaman was running as a Libertarian in Arizona’s red Eighth Congressional District for an open seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. “Can you imagine the kind of statement it would send to the uniparty in D.C. to send me back as a congressman?” Chansley wouldn’t be able to vote for himself—he was still on probation after serving more than two years in a federal prison. It was hard to tell to what extent his campaign actually existed. He was accepting no money from anyone, and when I asked how many signatures he’d collected for a petition to get on the ballot, he answered earnestly, “Over a dozen.” (He would ultimately fail to submit any at all.) That was how Chansley talked: with no irony about circumstances that others might find absurd. There was an insistent strain in his voice, as if he had spent his life trying to convince others of something urgent that he alone knew, with a stilted diction—“politics and the government and the legislation therein has been used to forward, shall we say, a less than spiritual agenda”—that seemed familiar to me.

photo of bearded man in black beanie and black shirt talking and making an "air quote" gesture with heavily tattooed hands

Why was he running for Congress? Unsurprisingly, because politicians of the uniparty were all in the pocket of special interests and international banks and did not represent the American people. His platform consisted of making lobbying a crime, instituting term limits for congresspeople and their staff, and prosecuting members engaged in insider trading. Meanwhile, Chansley was supporting himself by selling merch on his website, ForbiddenTruthAcademy.com, and doing shamanic consultations.

Why had he gone to the Capitol in regalia on January 6? He had a spiritual answer and a political answer. The Earth’s electromagnetic field produces ley lines, he explained, which crisscross one another at sacred sites of civilizational importance, such as temples, pyramids, and the buildings on the National Mall. “If there’s going to be a million people assembling on the ley lines in Washington, D.C., it’s my shamanic duty, I believe, to be there and to ensure that the highest possible frequencies of love and peace and harmony are plugged into the ley lines.” That was the spiritual answer.

The political answer consisted of a long string of government abuses and cover-ups going back to the Tuskegee experiment, and continuing through the Warren Commission, Waco, Oklahoma City, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Hillary Clinton’s emails, COVID and the lockdowns, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and finally the stolen 2020 election. “All of these things were like a culmination for me,” he said, “ ’cause I have done my research, and I looked into the history. I know my history.” Chansley’s only regret about January 6 was not anticipating violence. “I would have created an environment that was one of prayer and peace and calm and patience before anything else took place.” That day, he was at the front of the mob that stormed the Capitol and broke into the Senate chamber, where he left a note on Vice President Mike Pence’s desk that said, “It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.”

As for the conspiracy theory about a global child-sex-trafficking ring involving high-level Democrats: “Q was a successful psychological operation that disseminated the truth about corruption in our government.”

One leader had the Shaman’s complete respect—Donald Trump, who sneered at globalists and their tyrannical organizations, and who, Chansley said with that strain of confident knowing in his voice, declassified three vital patents: “a zero-point-energy engine, infinite free clean energy; a room-temperature superconductor that allows a zero-point-energy engine to function without overheating; and what’s called a TR3B—it’s a triangular-shaped antigravity or inertia-propulsion craft. And when you combine all these things together, you get a whole new socioeconomic-geopolitical system.”

When the Shaman got up to leave, I noticed that he walked slew-footed, sneakers turned outward, which surprised me because he was extremely fit, and I suddenly thought of a boy in my high school who made up for awkward unpopularity by using complex terms to explain forbidden truths that he alone knew and everyone else was too blind to see. Chansley was a teenage type. It took a national breakdown for him to become the world-famous symbol of an insurrection, spend two years in prison, and run for Congress.

5. The Aspirationalist

“Can the American experiment succeed? It’s not ‘can’—it has to. That doesn’t mean it will.”

Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, wore two watches and spoke quickly and unemotionally under arched eyebrows without smiling much. He was physically unimposing at 68, dressed in a gray blazer and blue shirt—so it was the steady stream of his words and confidence in his ideas that suggested why several people described him to me as the most powerful person in Arizona.

“I am definitely not a declinist. I’m an aspirationalist. That’s why we call this the ‘new American university.’ ”

If you talk with Crow for 40 minutes, you’ll probably hear the word innovative half a dozen times. For example, the “new American university”—he left Columbia University in 2002 to build it in wide-open Phoenix—is “highly entrepreneurial, highly adaptive, high-speed, technologically innovative.” Around the Valley, Arizona State has four campuses and seven “innovation zones,” with 145,000 students, almost half online; 25,000 Starbucks employees attend a free program to earn a degree that most of them started somewhere else but never finished. The college has seven STEM majors for every one in the humanities, graduating thousands of engineers every year for the Valley’s new tech economy. It’s the first university to form a partnership with OpenAI, spreading the free use of chatbots into every corner of instruction , including English. Last year, the law school invited applicants to use AI to help write their essays.

Under Crow, Arizona State has become the kind of school where faculty members are encouraged to spin off their own companies. In 2015, a young materials-science professor named Cody Friesen founded one called Source, which manufactures hydropanels that use sunlight to pull pure drinking water from the air’s moisture, with potential benefits for the world’s 2.2 billion people who lack ready access to safe water, including those on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. “If we could do for water what solar did for electricity, you could then think about water not as a resource underground or on the surface, but as a resource you can find anywhere,” Friesen told me at the company’s headquarters in the Scottsdale innovation zone.

But the snake of technology swallows its own tail. Companies such as Intel that have made the Valley one of the largest job-producing regions in the country are developing technologies that will eventually put countless people, including engineers, out of work. Artificial intelligence can make water systems more efficient, but the data centers that power it, such as the new one Microsoft is building west of Phoenix in Goodyear, have to be cooled with enormous quantities of water . Arizona State’s sheer volume and speed of growth can make the “new American university” seem like the Amazon of higher education. Innovation alone is not enough to save the American experiment.

Read: AI is taking water from the desert

For Crow, new technology in higher education serves an older end. On his desk, he keeps a copy of the 1950 course catalog for UCLA. Back then, top public universities like UCLA had an egalitarian mission, admitting any California student with a B average or better. Today they compete to resemble elite private schools—instead of growing with the population, they’ve become more selective. Exclusivity increases their perceived value as well as their actual cost, and it worsens the heart-straining scramble of parents and children for a foothold in the higher strata of a grossly unequal society. “We’ve built an elitist model,” Crow said, “a model built on exclusion as the measurement of success, and it’s very, very destructive.”

This model creates the false idea that certain credentials are the only proof of a young person’s worth, when plenty of capable students can’t get into the top schools or don’t bother trying. “I’m saying, if you keep doing this—everyone has to be either Michigan or Berkeley, or Harvard or Stanford, or you’re worthless—that’s gonna wreck us. That’s gonna wreck the country,” Crow said, like a Mad Max film whose warring gangs are divided by political party and college degree. “I can’t get some of my friends to see that we, the academy, are fueling it—our sanctimony, our know-it-all-ism, our ‘we’re smarter than you, we’re better than you, we’re gonna help you.’ ”

The windows of his office in Tempe look out across the street at a block of granite inscribed with the words of a charter he wrote : “ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed.” Arizona State admits almost every applicant with at least a B average, which is why it’s so large; what allows the university to educate them all is technology. Elite universities “don’t scale,” Crow said. “They’re valuable, but not central to the United States’ success. Central to the United States’ success is broader access to educational outcomes.”

The same windows have a view of the old clay-colored Tempe Normal School, on whose steps Theodore Roosevelt once foresaw 100,000 people living here. Today the two most important institutions in the Valley are the Salt River Project and Arizona State. Both are public enterprises, peculiarly western in their openness to the future. The first makes it possible for large numbers of people to live here. The second is trying to make it possible for them to live together in a democracy.

In 2016, the Republican majority in the Arizona legislature insisted on giving the university $3 million to start a School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. SCETL absorbed two earlier “freedom schools” dedicated to libertarian economics and funded in part by the Charles Koch Foundation. The new school is one innovation at Arizona State that looks backwards—to the founding principles and documents of the republic, and the classical philosophers who influenced them. Republican legislators believed they were buying a conservative counterweight to progressive campus ideology. Faculty members resisted this partisan intrusion on academic independence, and one left Arizona State in protest . But Crow was happy to take the state’s money, and he hired a political-science professor from the Air Force Academy named Paul Carrese to lead the school. Carrese described himself to me as “an intellectual conservative, not a movement conservative,” meaning “America is a good thing—and now let’s argue about it.”

I approached SCETL with some wariness. Koch-funded libertarian economics don’t inspire my trust, and I wondered if this successor program was a high-minded vehicle for right-wing indoctrination on campus, which is just as anti-intellectual as the social-justice orthodoxy that prevails at elite colleges. Yet civic education and civic virtue are essential things for an embattled democracy, and generally missing in ours. So is studying the classics of American history and thought in a setting that doesn’t reduce them to instruments of present-day politics.

As we entered the campus building that houses SCETL, a student stopped Carrese to tell him that she’d received a summer internship with a climate-change-skeptical organization in Washington. On the hallway walls I saw what you would be unlikely to see in most academic departments: American flags. But Carrese, who stepped down recently, hired a faculty of diverse backgrounds and took care to invite speakers of opposing views. In a class on great debates in American political history, students of many ethnicities, several nationalities, and no obvious ideologies parsed the shifting views of Frederick Douglass on whether the Constitution supported slavery.

Crow has defended SCETL from attempts by legislators on the right to control it and on the left to end it. Republican legislatures in half a dozen other states are bringing the model to their flagship universities, but Carrese worries that those universities will fail to insulate the programs from politics and end up with partisan academic ghettos. SCETL’s goal, he said, is to train students for democratic citizenship and leadership—to make disagreement possible without hatred.

“The most committed students, left and right, are activists, and the center disappears,” Carrese said. This was another purpose of SCETL: to check the relentless push toward extremes. “If students don’t see conservative ideas in classes, they will go off toward Charlie Kirk and buy the line that ‘the enemy is so lopsided, we must be in their face and own the libs.’ ”

Turning Point has a large presence at Arizona State. Last October, two Turning Point employees went on campus to get in the face of a queer writing instructor as he left class in a skirt, pursuing and filming him, and hectoring him with questions about pedophilia, until the encounter ended with the instructor on the ground bleeding from the face and the Maricopa County attorney filing assault and harassment charges against the two Turning Point employees . “Cowards,” Crow said in a statement . He had previously defended Kirk’s right to speak on campus, but this incident had nothing to do with free speech.

Leading an experiment in mass higher education for working- and middle-class students allows Crow to spend much less time than his Ivy League counterparts on speaker controversies, congressional investigations, and Middle East wars. The hothouse atmosphere of America’s elite colleges, the obsessive desire and scorn they evoke, feels remote from the Valley. During campus protests in the spring, Arizona State suspended 20 students—0.0137 percent of its total enrollment.

6. The Things They Carried

Two hours before sunrise, Fernando Quiroz stood in the bed of his mud-caked truck in a corner of Arizona. Eighty people gathered around him in the circle of illumination from a light tower while stray dogs hunted for scraps. It was February and very cold, and the people—men with backpacks, women carrying babies, a few older children—wore hooded sweatshirts and coats and blankets. Other than two men from India, they all came from Latin America, and Quiroz was telling them in Spanish that Border Patrol would arrive in the next few hours.

“You will be asked why you are applying for asylum,” he said. “It could be violence, torture, communism.”

They had been waiting here all night, after traveling for days or weeks and walking the last miles across the flat expanse of scrubland in the darkness off to the west. This was the dried-up Colorado River, and here and there on the far side, the lights of Mexico glimmered. The night before, the people had crossed the border somewhere in the middle of the riverbed, and now they were standing at the foot of the border wall. They were in America, but the wall still blocked the way, concealing fields of winter lettuce and broccoli, making sharp turns at Gate 6W and Gate 7W and the canal that carried Mexico’s allocated Colorado River water from upstream. Quiroz’s truck was parked at a corner of the wall. Its rust-colored steel slats rose 30 feet overhead.

2 photos: a pile of passports from various countries; a top-bound spiral notebook with "DIOS TE AMO" in large print followed by a handwritten prayer

Seen from a distance, rolling endlessly up and down every contour of the desert, the wall seemed thin and temporary, like a wildly ambitious art installation. But up close and at night it was an immense and ominous thing, dwarfing the people huddled around the truck.

“Put on your best clothes,” Quiroz told them. “Wear whatever clothes you want to keep, because they’ll take away the rest.” They should make their phone calls now, because they wouldn’t be able to once Border Patrol arrived. They would be given a gallon-size ziplock bag and allowed into America with only what would fit inside: documents, phones, bank cards. For all the other possessions that they’d chosen out of everything they owned to carry with them from all over the world to the wall—extra clothes, rugs, religious objects, family pictures—Border Patrol would give them a baggage-check tag marked Department of Homeland Security . They would have 30 days to come back and claim their belongings, but hardly anyone ever did—they would be long gone to Ohio or Florida or New York.

At the moment, most of them had no idea where they were. “This is Arizona,” Quiroz said.

As he handed out bottled water and snacks from the back of his truck, a Cuban woman asked, “Can I take my makeup?”

“No, they’d throw it out.”

A woman from Peru, who said she was fleeing child-kidnappers, asked about extra diapers.

“No, Border Patrol will give you that in Yuma.”

I watched the migrants prepare to abandon what they had brought. No one spoke much, and they kept their voices low. A man gave Quiroz his second pair of shoes in case someone else needed them. A teenage girl named Alejandra, who had traveled alone from Guatemala, held a teddy bear she’d bought at a Mexican gas station with five pesos from a truck driver who’d given her a ride. She would leave the teddy bear behind and keep her hyperthyroid medicine. Beneath the wall, a group of men warmed themselves by the fire of a burning pink backpack. In the firelight, their faces were tired and watchful, like the faces of soldiers in a frontline bivouac. A small dumpster began to fill up.

For several years, Quiroz had been waking up every night of the week and driving in darkness from his home in Yuma to supply the three relief stations he had set up at the wall and advise new arrivals, before going to his volunteer job as a high-school wrestling coach. He had the short, wiry stature and energy of a bantamweight, with a military haircut and midlife orthodontia installed cheap across the border. He was the 13th child of Mexican farmworkers, the first to go to college, and when he looked into the eyes of the migrants he saw his mother picking lettuce outside his schoolroom window and asked himself, “If not me, then who?”

He was volunteering at the deadliest border in the world. A few miles north, the wall ended near the boundary of the Cocopah reservation, giving way to what’s known as the “Normandy wall”—a long chain of steel X’s that looked like anti-craft obstacles on Omaha Beach. Two winters ago, checking his relief station there, Quiroz found an old man frozen to death. Last summer, a woman carrying a small child crossed the canal on a footbridge and turned left at the wall instead of going right toward Gates 6W and 7W. She walked a few hundred yards and then sat down by the wall and died in the heat. (The child survived.) Afterward, Quiroz put up a sign pointing to the right.

Over time, he began to find heaps of discarded objects in the dirt—clothing, sleeping bags, toiletries, a stroller. Border Patrol didn’t have a policy of confiscating migrants’ possessions—if anything, this violated official policy—but the practice was widespread, varying from post to post and day to day depending on the volume of influx and the mood of agents. So mounds of what looked like trash piled up at the wall, and right-wing media portrayed the sight as the filth and disorder that migrants were bringing into the country. Through a collaboration with Border Patrol and Yuma County, Quiroz set up dumpsters, toilets, and shade tents at his relief stations. He was also spending his own money, sometimes $200 a day, and his house filled up with migrants’ lost property—hundreds of abandoned Bibles and rosaries, and backpacks that he emptied, cleaned, and donated to migrant shelters.

East of Yuma, near a remote border crossing called Lukeville, I met a man with a plastic bag and a trash-picker walking alone on a dirt track along the wall. He was a retired public historian named Paul Ferrell, and he was collecting what migrants had left behind: brand-new backpacks, prescription medicine, silk saris, Muslim prayer rugs, a braided leather waistband from West Africa, money in 13 currencies, identity cards from dozens of countries. Ferrell intended to throw away or sell some items, and donate others to the University of Arizona—as if here, a few miles from the reservation of the Tohono O’odham Nation, believed to be descendants of the vanished Hohokam, he’d stumbled on the relics of another civilization, a recent one spanning the entire world, but already abandoned: a notebook from Delhi filled with a young person’s fantasy story, handwritten in English, called “Murder in Paradise”; pages of notes in Punjabi detailing the writer’s persecution; a notebook with a Spanish prayer titled “God I Love You”:

Please help me fulfill my American dream I ask you my saint God that I can stay working there God I need you so much heavenly father without you I am nothing … I feel fear that they will return me to my country there I don’t have anything but debts except my family loves me so much they with so much pain help effort gave me money heavenly father I ask you to help me heavenly father.

Like the things you would try to save from a fire, migrants’ possessions are almost by definition precious. Having already left nearly everything behind, at the wall some lose their contacts’ information, some their evidence for asylum, some their money, and some their identity. Quiroz was trying to bring these indignities to the attention of officials in Washington, but the border seems designed more for posturing than for solutions.

His daily efforts didn’t win him universal admiration. A couple of years ago, self-described patriots drove along the wall and trashed his water stations, threw away bananas and oranges, and harassed him and other volunteers. After that, he kept his coolers padlocked to the wall, and on the morning in early February of this year when a gun-carrying convoy that called itself God’s Army rolled through Yuma, he stayed home, not wanting a confrontation. The migrant numbers had grown so high that public opinion was moving against them. “It’s going to be what wins the election: Where do you stand on the border?” Quiroz said. “Politicians will throw everything out of our faith and humanity to get leverage. It’s sad—I see it in my friends, good people, the children of immigrants. It breaks my heart. My wife kicks me under the table: Don’t say anything .”

Even the most sympathetic humanitarian knew that some asylum seekers were gaming the system. One morning, at a Spanish-speaking church in Mesa that receives migrants from the border every Thursday, I watched 24 single men emerge from a Border Patrol bus holding ziplock bags; one of them, a 20-year-old from India, told me that he had left his father’s car-parts yard and traveled nine months to start his own business in Indiana.

I went to the border believing that any country has to control whom it admits; that 2.5 million apprehensions in a single year are a crisis; that an overwhelmed asylum system intended for the persecuted is being exploited by the desperate; that the migrant influx shows this country’s enduring appeal while undermining it by inflaming extremism and convincing less advantaged Americans that the government and the elites don’t care about them.

A few hours at the wall didn’t change these beliefs. But the immeasurable distance between the noise in Washington and the predawn hush around Quiroz’s truck reminded me, not for the first time in Arizona, that our battles royal take our attention from the things that matter most—a human face, a lost notebook.

The sun’s yellow rays in the east were beginning to pierce the slats when Gate 6W slid open and a Border Patrol van appeared. The agent had the migrants line up, women and children first, and, one by one, he photographed them and their passports. A light rain fell, and the arch of a rainbow rose over the invisible border in the riverbed. People began removing their shoelaces as Border Patrol required and Quiroz had instructed, presumably to prevent suicide attempts. They would leave their belongings at the wall and then be taken to the Yuma Sector, where they would be held for a day or two, or longer, some to be sent on to an immigration detention center, some to be deported, while others—the ones who convinced an official in a hurried interview that they might face danger if forced to return home—would be put on a bus to Phoenix, clutching their ziplock bag.

photo of group of people standing next to border wall with "Caution/Cuidado" sign and dumpster

But Phoenix was almost never their ultimate destination. Phoenix was an overnight church shelter, a shower and a meal, a set of used clothes, a call to someone somewhere in the country for an onward ticket—then the Greyhound station or Sky Harbor Airport, the longest journey’s second-to-last stop for an Indian traveling from Gujarat to Fresno, an Ecuadorean from Quito to Orlando, a Guinean from Conakry to the Bronx. The drama at the border kept Arizona’s political temperature near boiling, but otherwise it left little impression on the rest of the state. The latest immigrants to the Valley are engineers coming from California and Seattle. Those who arrived speaking other languages have already been here long enough to have changed the place forever.

7. American Dreams

My traveling companion to the border was a young man named Ernie Flores. He had spent his childhood on both sides, waking in darkness at his mother’s house in San Luis, Mexico, and crossing over every day to attend school in Yuma. He had been a troublemaker, always tired and angry, but he grew up with a kind of mystical optimism. “I remind myself constantly: If I’m suffering, I like to be present,” he said, “because that’s my life.”

Tall and husky, with a fade haircut and a reserved face under heavy black brows, Flores was canvassing for Working America, an organization that connected nonunion households to the labor movement. As the sun set, he went door-to-door in the city’s poorer neighborhoods like his own in South Phoenix, informing residents about the power company’s price gouging; asking their views on health care, jobs, education, and corporate accountability; and collecting their email addresses on his tablet. He would stand back from the doorway and speak quietly, neither presenting nor inviting a threat. It was slow, unglamorous work on issues that mattered to everyone and resisted hot takes, and Flores was good at it. He relished these brief encounters, windows into other people’s lives, hearing them out even when he knew they wouldn’t give him their email.

On his own time, he ran a small business helping migrants start their own, so that they would contribute to the American economy rather than burden it. At the wall, he advised a tailor from Ecuador. Gate 6W of the Yuma Sector reminded Flores of Ellis Island. He wanted the border where he’d spent his childhood to be a highway someday, with off-ramps into both countries, integrating their economies. Right now the border seemed to exist so that political parties could exploit it. There were all kinds of people, he said, and everyone had to be represented, including Trump supporters. Education and information would gradually lead voters like the ones he met at front doors to make better demands of their leaders. “Everything has a cycle, I guess,” he said. “This division that we have because of Trump will fade away as it usually does.”

His long, calm, generous view was rare in this Year of American Panic. It escaped the gravity of polarization. In a way, it made Ernie Flores someone Charlie Kirk should fear.

P hoenix is only slightly more white than Latino, and carne asada joints and the sound of Spanish are so ubiquitous that it feels less like a divided city than a bicultural one. “Ethnic politics are not as strong here as in the East,” Joaquin Rios, a leader of Arizona’s teachers’ union, told me. Michael Crow, the Arizona State president, went a step further and called Phoenix “a post-ethnic city.” He added: “It didn’t grow up around ethnic communities that then helped to define its trajectories, with a series of political bargains along the way. It was wide open.”

But for much of the 20th century, the city restricted its Latino and Black populations to the area below the Salt River , and South Phoenix remains mostly working-class. When newer waves of immigrants from Mexico began coming in the 1980s, many settled in a neighborhood of modest single-family houses in West Phoenix called Maryvale, a postwar master-planned community—Arizona’s first—that white families were abandoning for gated swimming pools in North Phoenix and Scottsdale.

To call Phoenix wide open—a place where people from anywhere can arrive knowing no one and make their way up and leave a mark—is truer than to say it of Baltimore or Cleveland or Dallas. But the fault lines around a lousy school district are just as stark here as everywhere else in America, and white professionals’ children are just as unlikely to be trapped inside one. Our tolerance of inequality is bottomless, but sunshine and sprawl have a way of hiding it. You can drive the entire length of the Valley, from Queen Creek to Buckeye, and start to feel that it all looks the same. Only if you notice the concentration of vape and smoke shops, tire stores, panhandlers at freeway entrances, and pickups in the dirt yards of beige stucco houses do you realize you’re passing through Maryvale.

The Cortez family—Fabian, Erika, and their four daughters—lives in a tiny two-room apartment just outside Maryvale, with less space than a master bathroom in one of the $6 million Paradise Valley houses whose sales are reported in The Arizona Republic . The girls—Abigail, Areli, Anna, and Arizbeth, ranging from 18 to 10—sleep in the back room, and their parents sleep in the front, where there’s a sofa, a small kitchen, a washer-dryer, and a partly inaccessible table pushed into a corner.

Erika—a former athlete, tall, with a round face and large glasses—first came to the U.S. on a visa from Mexico in 2004, to see her mother and give birth to Abigail. Then they went back to Juárez, where Fabian was working in a warehouse and Erika attended college. But a few months later, when Erika tried to reenter the U.S. to have Abigail vaccinated, an immigration officer at the border in El Paso demanded: “Why is she a citizen and you’re not? If I see you again, I’ll take away your visa.” Afraid of being separated from her mother forever, a day later Erika was in Phoenix with the baby. That was the end of her education. After a month, Fabian joined them and found work as a maintenance man. They began to raise an American family: the children as citizens, the parents, in Erika’s word, “illegal.”

Mixed-status families are common in Maryvale. Analise Ortiz, who represents the area in the state legislature, told me, “It’s not so much the everyday flow of traffic over the border that impacts my district—people come to Phoenix and then they leave. It’s immigration policy on the federal level.” The country’s failure year after year to address the dilemma of its millions of undocumented residents shapes every aspect of the Cortez family’s life. When Fabian spent weekends doing landscape work for a man who then refused to pay what he owed him—saying, “I’ll call immigration; get off my property”—he had no recourse. In 2006, he fell from the second floor of a job site onto a concrete slab and fractured his back. Fabian spent a year in bed recovering while Erika sold tamales from their kitchen to make ends meet. He still feels pain today, but the company paid him no compensation.

In 2010, a punitive state law known as S.B. 1070—nicknamed the “Show Me Your Papers” law, and enforced by the rabidly anti-immigrant sheriff of Maricopa County at the time, Joe Arpaio—instituted a reign of terror for people in the Valley with dark skin. Every day, the Cortezes risked a police check that might break up the family, and Erika was afraid to go outside. Once, two policemen stopped Fabian when he was driving a friend’s car—one cop wanted to take him in, but the other, seeing two child seats in the back, let Fabian go and impounded the car. (S.B. 1070 significantly reduced the number of undocumented immigrants in Arizona ; it also galvanized Latinos to vote Democratic and helped turn the state purple.)

Several years ago, Erika became diabetic, and she’s been plagued ever since by serious illnesses and chronic fatigue. But with Fabian’s minimum-wage pay and no health insurance, she’s limited to a discount clinic where the wait time is long and the treatment is inadequate. In 2020, amid the depths of the pandemic, the owner of the four-bedroom house they were renting near the interstate broke the lease, saying that he was going to sell, and gave the family a month to leave. They had no choice but to put most of their furniture in storage and squeeze into the two cramped rooms. The girls made their mother weep by saying, “Don’t be sad. We’re together, we have a ceiling, we have food. If we’re together, we’re happy—that’s all that matters.”

Arizona ranks 48th among states in spending per student, ahead of only Utah and Idaho, in spite of poll after poll showing wide support for public education. A universal-voucher law is sending nearly $1 billion annually in tax money to the state’s private schools . With little regulation, Phoenix is the Wild West of education—the capital of for-profit, scandal-plagued colleges and charter schools, many of them a mirage, a few of them a lifeline for desperate parents.

The Cortez girls attended Maryvale public schools, where Erika and Fabian always volunteered. The girls were studious and introverted; the classrooms were often chaotic. When Areli was in fifth grade, her teacher warned Erika that the local middle school would be a rough place for her, as it had been for Abigail. The teacher recommended a Maryvale charter school that was part of a network in the Valley called Great Hearts. Its curriculum was classical—essentially a great-books program, with even geometry taught using Euclid’s Elements —and its mission was education through “truth, beauty, and goodness.” Erika didn’t know any of this when she toured the school, but she was impressed by the atmosphere of discipline and respect. Children were learning in a safe place—that was enough for her and Fabian. Areli got in off the waitlist, Abigail was admitted into the school’s first ninth-grade class, their younger sisters entered the elementary school, and the girls began their education in Latin, Shakespeare, van Gogh, and Bach.

photo of standing woman kissing child on side of head with other family members smiling in tiled room with refrigerator, washer, and dryer

The family’s life revolved around school. Erika woke before dawn and drove Fabian to his job at 5:30 a.m., then returned home to take the girls to Great Hearts. She was the classic Team Mom and spent hours every afternoon driving her kids and others to basketball games and track meets. Unlike Maryvale’s Great Hearts, which is overwhelmingly Latino and poor, most schools in the network are largely white and middle-class, and the Cortez girls weren’t always made to feel welcome at away games. But Erika loved that her daughters were studying books she’d only heard of and learning to think more deeply for themselves. The family never gathered at home before eight at night, when Erika was often exhausted; the girls—straight‑A students—did homework and read past midnight. Their mother lived with the fear that she wouldn’t see them all grown. She wanted “to give them wonderful memories. I don’t want to waste time.”

I spent a morning at Great Hearts in Maryvale, where hallways displayed replicas of paintings by da Vinci, Brueghel, and Renoir. A 12th-grade class in “Humane Letters” was studying The Aeneid , and on the whiteboard the teacher had written, “To whom or what is duty owed? Can fate and free will coexist?” Students were laboring to understand the text, but Aeneas’s decision to abandon Dido for his destiny in Rome sparked a passionate discussion. “What if Aeneas, like, asked Dido to come with him?” one boy asked.

If you accept the assumption that children won’t learn unless they see their own circumstances and identities reflected in what they’re taught, then the pedagogy at Great Hearts must seem perverse, if not immoral. I asked Rachel Mercado, the upper-school headmaster, why her curriculum didn’t include the more “relevant” reading now standard at most schools in poorer districts. “Why do my students have to read that?” she demanded. “Why is that list for them and not this list? That’s not fair to them. I get very worked up about this.” Her eyes were filling. “They deserve to read good things and have these conversations. They’re exposed to all that”—the problems of race and gender that animate many contemporary teen novels. “Why is that the only thing they get to read? You saw them reading The Aeneid . These books are about problems that humans relate to, not just minority groups.”

Like SCETL at Arizona State, classical education at Great Hearts runs the risk of getting caught in the constantly grinding gears of the culture wars. The network was co-founded by a Republican political operative, and sponsors of its annual symposium include the Heritage Foundation and Hillsdale College. Great Hearts’ leaders worry that some people associate classical education with the right. “But teachers don’t think about it,” Mercado said. “This whole political thing is pushed by people who don’t think about what to do in the classroom.”

Great Hearts has made it difficult for students to change their gender identity in school. For some progressives, this is evil, and, what’s more, the Cortez girls only appear to be thriving in an inequitable education that marginalizes them. For some conservatives—Charlie Kirk, for example, and Kari Lake, now running for the U.S. Senate—the girls’ parents are criminals who should be sent back to Mexico, destroying everything they’ve sacrificed to build, and depriving America of everything they would contribute.

In a place like Maryvale, you realize how righteously stupid the culture wars make both sides. There’s no reason to think that great books and moral education have anything to do with MAGA. There’s no reason reading Virgil should require banning children from changing names. There’s no reason to view Western civilization as simply virtuous or vicious, only as the one that most shaped our democracy. There’s no reason to dumb down humanistic education and expect our society to become more just. If we ever do something about the true impediments to the Cortez family’s dreams—if Fabian could earn enough from his backbreaking work for the six of them to live in four rooms instead of two; if insurance could cover treatment for Erika’s illnesses so she doesn’t have to delay seeing a doctor until her life is threatened; if the local public schools could give their daughters a safe and decent education; if America could allow the family to stop being afraid and live in the sunlight—then by all means let’s go back to fighting over name changes and reading lists.

8. Campaigners

Ruben Gallego was hopping up and down in the middle of the street in a tie-dyed campaign T-shirt and shorts and a pair of cheap blue sunglasses. The Phoenix Pride Parade was about to start, and everyone was there, every class and color and age: Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, NASCAR, McKinsey, the Salt River Project, Gilbert Fire & Rescue, Arizona Men of Leather. Gallego, the U.S. representative from Arizona’s Third District (and the ex-husband of the mayor of Phoenix), is running for the U.S. Senate against Kari Lake.

Gallego grew up in a small apartment outside Chicago with his mother, a Colombian immigrant, and his three sisters after their Mexican father abandoned the family. Ruben slept on the floor, worked in construction and meatpacking, got into Harvard, was suspended for poor grades before graduating in 2004, and enlisted with the Marine reserves. In 2005, he was sent to Iraq and fought for six months in the hardest-hit Marine battalion of the war. His deployment still haunts him . He looks more like a labor organizer than a congressman—short and bearded, with the face and body of a middle-aged father who works all the time but could have taken care of himself on January 6 if an insurrectionist had gotten too close.

Radio Atlantic : “He doesn’t understand war”

The Third District includes South Phoenix and Maryvale, and Gallego was campaigning as a son of the working class on behalf of people struggling to afford rent or buy groceries. The Third District borders the Ninth, whose median income is not much higher, and whose congressman, Paul Gosar, inhabits the more paranoid precincts of the Republican Party . The district line might as well be a frontier dividing two countries, but some of the difference dissolves in the glare of sunlight hitting the metal roof of a Dollar General. Three-quarters of Gallego’s constituents are the urban Latino and Black working class. I asked him if his message could win over Gosar’s rural white working class.

“You can win some of them—you’re not going to win them all,” he said. “They hate pharmaceutical companies as much as I do. They hate these mega-monopolies that are driving up the cost of everything as much as I do. They worry about foreign companies sucking up the water as much as I do.”

In 2020, Gallego received national attention when he tweeted his rejection of the term Latinx . He criticizes his own Democratic Party for elitism. “We should not be afraid to say, ‘You know what—we messed up,’ ” he told me. “ ‘We lost our focus on working-class issues, and we need to fight to get it back.’ ” I asked Gallego about the recent turn of Latino and Black Americans toward the Republican Party. He was more concerned that sheer cynicism would keep them from voting at all.

The parade started up Third Street, and Gallego went off looking for every hand he could shake. In the first 10 minutes, he counted 86.

It struck me that a parade for the child tax credit would never draw such a large, diverse, and joyous crowd, or any crowd at all. Even with a resurgence of union activism, “We are wage workers” doesn’t excite like “LGBTQ together.” When the Arizona Supreme Court voted in April that a Civil War–era ban on almost every abortion should remain state law , the dominant theme of Gallego’s campaign became that familiar Democratic cause, not the struggles of the working class.

Americans today are mobilized by culture and identity, not material conditions—by belonging to a tribe, whether at a Pride march or a biker rally. Political and media elites stoke the culture wars for their own benefit, while government policies repeatedly fail to improve conditions for struggling Americans. As a result, even major legislation goes unnoticed. Joe Biden’s infrastructure, microchip, and climate bills are sending billions of dollars to the Valley, but I hardly ever heard them mentioned. “Right now they are not a factor in my district,” Analise Ortiz, the state representative, told me. When she went door-to-door, the bills hardly ever came up. “Honestly, it’s rare that Biden even comes up.”

The professional class has lost so much trust among low-income voters that a Democratic candidate has to be able to say: “I don’t despise you. I talk like you, I shop like you—I’m one of you.” This was the approach of Bernadette Greene Placentia.

S he started working as a long-haul trucker in 1997, became the owner of a small trucking company, and at age 50 still drove one of the three rigs. She grew up in rural Nebraska and Wyoming, the daughter of a union railroader who was a conservative Democrat and National Rifle Association lifer—a type that now barely exists. She’s married to the son of a Mexican American labor leader who worked with Cesar Chavez, and together they raised an adopted daughter from China. She’s a pro-union, pro–death penalty, pro-choice gun owner—“New Deal instead of Green New Deal.” She struggles with medical bills and rig payments, and she was running for Congress as a Democrat in Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District, which encompasses the heavily Republican suburbs northwest of Phoenix.

The open seat in the Eighth was more likely to go to the Republican speaker of the Arizona House, Ben Toma; or to Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel disciple who lost his run for U.S. Senate in 2022; or to Anthony Kern, a state senator and indicted fake Trump elector who joined the mob outside the Capitol on January 6 ; or to Trump’s personal choice , Abe Hamadeh, another election denier who was still suing after losing the attorney-general race in 2022. But I wanted to talk with Greene Placentia, because she confounded the fixed ideas that paralyze our minds with panic and boredom and deepen our national cognitive decline.

We met at a Denny’s next to the interstate in Goodyear. She was wearing an open-shoulder cable-knit turtleneck sweater with crossed American and Ukrainian flag pins. Her long hair was pulled back tight, and her eyes and mouth were also tight, maybe from driving 3.5 million miles around the country. As soon as I sat down, she said, “The Democratic Party purports to be the party of the working class. Bullshit.”

2 photos: 2 firefighters and a white hearse shrouded in smoke by fence with palm trees in background; woman with long hair in black sweater in parking lot in front of truck with hood raised

When she knocked on doors in her district and introduced herself, the residents couldn’t believe she was a Democrat. “We need to get rid of the political elites; we need to get rid of the multimillionaires,” she would tell them. “We need representative democracy. That means people like you and me.” And they would say, “Yeah, you’re not like the other Democrats.”

The image is a caricature, and unfair. The Republican Party is dominated by very rich men, including its leader. But populist resentments in America have usually been aroused more by cultural superiority than by great wealth. In 2016, Greene Placentia knew that Trump would win, because she worked every day with the targets of his appeal. “As rich as that fucker is, he stood up there and said, ‘You know what? It’s not your fault; it’s their fault. They don’t care about you—I care about you. I will fight for you. They’re busy fighting to get guys in dresses.’ Crude, but that’s what he said. And when your life has fallen apart, when you’re not making shit, and somebody stands there and says, ‘I will help you. I believe in you,’ you’re gonna go there. We gotta belong to a pack. If that pack isn’t paying attention to us, you’re gonna go to another pack.” The pack, she said, is Trump’s, not the Republican Party’s, and its bond is so strong that a road-rage encounter between two members will end in apologies and bro hugs.

For nearly a decade, journalists and academics have been trying to understand Trump’s hold on white Americans who don’t have a college degree. Racism, xenophobia, economic despair, moral collapse, entertainment value? Greene Placentia explained it this way: The white working class is sinking, while minority groups, with the support of Democrats, are rising—not as high, but getting closer. “When you’re falling and the party that built its back on you isn’t there, and you look over and they’re busy with everybody else and the environment and all this shit, and your life is falling apart, and all you see is them rising, it breeds resentment.”

She wasn’t justifying this attitude, and she despised Trump (“a con man”), but she was describing why she was running for Congress. “The reason they don’t listen to us—it isn’t because of the message we’re saying; it’s because of the messenger. They don’t trust any establishment Democrats. You’re gonna have to start getting people in there that they believe in and trust, and it has to be people that’s more like them and less like the Gavin Newsoms and the Gretchen Whitmers that grew up in the political world. Otherwise, every presidential election is gonna be on the margins.”

Stashed under her car’s dashboard was a pack of Pall Malls along with a “Black Lives Matter / Women’s Rights Are Human Rights / No Human Is Illegal …” leaflet. In a sense, Greene Placentia was trying to do for the Democrats what Sarah Palin had done for the Republicans. She was trying to make working-class into a political identity that could attract voters who seemed to belong to the other party or neither.

“The problem is, both the establishment Republicans and the establishment Democrats are gonna fight like hell against that person,” she said, “ ’cause that kind of person isn’t for a party; it’s for the people.”

The Arizona Democratic Party ignored Greene Placentia. In the end, like the Shaman, she didn’t gather enough signatures to get on the ballot.

J eff Zink drove around South Phoenix wearing a black Stetson, stitched boots, and a Love It or Leave It belt buckle, with a pistol holstered on his right hip—as if to say, That’s right, I’m a Second Amendment guy from Texas , which is what he is. Zink was campaigning for Gallego’s seat in the Third Congressional District on a Republican brand of identity politics—an effort at least as quixotic as Greene Placentia’s in the Eighth, because South Phoenix, where Zink lives, is solidly Democratic and Latino. Like her, he didn’t have much money and was spending down his retirement funds on the campaign. He was betting that his surname and party wouldn’t matter as much as the area’s crime and poverty and the empty warehouses that should have been turned into manufacturing plants with good jobs by the past three congressmen with Hispanic surnames—that his neighbors were fed up enough to vote for a white MAGA guy named Zink.

Zink believed that his background as an NFL trainer and ordained Christian minister showed that he couldn’t be the racist some called him because of January 6. That day, he and his 32-year-old son, Ryan, had crossed police barriers and joined the crowd on the Capitol steps, though they hadn’t entered the building itself. Zink wasn’t charged, but Ryan—who had posted video on social media of himself cheering the mob as it stormed the doors—was found guilty on three counts and faces up to 22 years in federal prison. Zink complained to me that a rigged court in Washington had convicted his son for exercising his First Amendment rights. He also believed that the 2020 presidential and 2022 state elections in Arizona had been fraudulent , and he’d participated in “recounts” of both. Even his own congressional-race loss to Gallego in 2022, by a 77–23 margin, had left him suspicious. Nothing was on the level, evil was in control—but a heavenly God was watching, and soon America would be governed biblically by its true Christians of every color.

Zink drove along Baseline Road, the main east-west drag through South Phoenix. He wanted to show me crime and decay, and it didn’t take long to find it. A fire truck with lights flashing was parked outside a Taco Bell in a shopping center. “I guarantee you we have a fentanyl overdose,” Zink said—but the man lying on the floor inside had only passed out drunk. The next stop was a tire shop in the same mall. Zink had already heard from the store manager that drug dealers and homeless people from a nearby encampment had broken in dozens of times.

The manager, Jose Mendoza—lean, with a shaved head and a fringe of beard along his jawline, wearing his store uniform, jacket, and cap—seemed harassed. The local police force was understaffed, and he had to catch criminals himself and haul them down to the precinct. After a break-in at his house while his wife and kids were there, he had moved out to Buckeye. On the long commutes, he listened to news podcasts. Standing by the store counter, he had a lot to say to Zink.

“My biggest thing, the reason I don’t like Trump, is because he politically divided the nation,” Mendoza said. “If he wins, I am leaving, I’m going back south, I’m selling everything I have and getting out of here. I am 100 percent serious, brother, because I’m not going to be put inside a camp like he threatened to do already. I’m not going to stand for any of my people being put inside of a camp.” Mendoza was furious that Trump had pardoned Joe Arpaio, who had treated Latinos like criminals for two decades.

“Right,” Zink said. “These are the things where that division that has happened and—”

“I don’t see Biden coming in here and getting the sheriffs to start profiling people,” Mendoza said.

“Right, right.”

The candidate kept trying to agree with Mendoza, and Mendoza kept showing that they disagreed. He ended the conversation in a mood of generalized disgust. “You know what? Get rid of both of ’em. Put somebody else,” he said. “Put Kennedy, shit, put somebody’s Labrador—I’ll vote for a Labrador before I’ll vote for any of those two guys.”

Zink had neglected to tell Mendoza that he and his gun had just been at the border in Yuma with the anti-migrant God’s Army convoy. Or that the friend who’d first urged him to move to the Valley was one of Arpaio’s close aides. But back in his truck, Zink said, “My father told me this: ‘Until you’ve walked a mile in somebody’s shoes, you don’t know where they’re coming from.’ It’s going to take me a long time to listen to Jose, with all of the things that’s gone on.”

A warmer reception awaited him from Dania Lopez. She owned a little shop that sold health shakes in the South Plaza mall, where her husband’s low-rider club gathered on weekends. She had been raised Democratic, but around 2020 she began to ask herself whether she agreed with what she’d watched all her life on Univision. She and her husband, an auto mechanic, opposed abortion, worried about undocumented immigrants bringing fentanyl across the border, and distrusted the notion of climate change (“It’s been hot here every year”). Their Christian values aligned more with the Republican Party, so they began listening to right-wing podcasts. But the decisive moment came on Election Day in 2020, when a voting machine twice rejected her husband’s ballot for Trump. The paper size seemed too large to fit.

“If that happened to me, how many more people that happened to?” Lopez asked me in the back of her shop. “It really raised those red flags.” This procedural mistake was enough to make her believe that the 2020 election was rigged. Now there was a Zink for Congress sign in her store window. “I think that God has opened my eyes to be able to see something that I couldn’t see before.” A lot of her friends were making the same change.

Lopez and her husband are part of a political migration among working-class Latino and Black voters, especially men. The trend might get Trump elected again this year. Biden’s margin of support among Black voters has dropped by as much as 28 percent since 2020, and among Latino voters by as much as 32 percent, to nearly even with Trump’s. Attendance at the Turning Point USA convention was overwhelmingly white, but outside the center I met a Black woman from Goodyear, in a red America First jacket, named Christy Kelly. She was collecting signatures to get her name on the ballot for a seat on the state utility commission, in order to block renewable energy from causing rolling blackouts and soaring prices, she said. She called herself a “walkaway”—a defector from a family of longtime Democrats, and for the same reason as Dania Lopez: She was a conservative.

I asked if she didn’t regard Trump as a bigot. “Absolutely not,” Kelly said cheerfully. “Trump has been one of the No. 1 names quoted in rap music going back to the ’80s, maybe the ’90s. Black people have loved Trump. Mike Tyson loved him.” Republicans just had to learn to speak with more sensitivity so they didn’t get automatically labeled racist.

Kelly and Lopez defied the rules of identity politics. They could not be counted on to vote according to their race or ethnicity, just as Greene Placentia could not be counted on to vote according to her class. Whether or not we agreed, talking with these women made me somewhat hopeful. Identity is a pernicious form of political division, because its appeal is based on traits we don’t choose and can’t change. It’s inherently irrational, and therefore likely to lead to violence. Identity politicians—and Trump is one—don’t win elections with arguments about ideas, or by presenting a vision of a world more attractive than their opponent’s. They win by appealing to the solidarity of group identity, which has to be mobilized by whipping up fear and hatred of other groups.

photo of bearded man on side of street holding blue and red "Don't Blame Me I Voted for Trump" flag

Unlike identities, ideas are open to persuasion, and persuasion depends on understanding and reaching other people. But when partisanship itself becomes a group identity, a tribal affiliation with markers as clear as Jeff Zink’s handgun, dividing us into mutually unintelligible blocs with incompatible realities, then the stakes of every election are existential, and it becomes hard to live together in the same country without killing one another.

9. The Good Trump Voter

Bernadette Greene Placentia’s account of Trump voters wasn’t completely satisfying. Resentment of elites is a powerful motive in democratic politics, and so is the feeling—apparently universal among long-haul truckers—that the economy was better under Trump. But that disregards the moral and psychological cesspool himself: a bully, a liar, a bigot, a sexual assaulter, a cheat; crude, cruel, disloyal, vengeful, dictatorial, and so selfish that he tried to shatter American democracy rather than accept defeat. His supporters have to ignore all of this, explain it away, or revel in displays of character that few of them would tolerate for a minute in their own children. Now they are trying to put him back in power. Beyond the reach of reason and even empathy, nearly half of my fellow citizens are unfathomable, including a few I personally like. The mystery of the good Trump voter troubled me.

From the January/February 2024 issue: Trump voters are America too

Most people are better face-to-face than when performing online or in an anonymous crowd. At the Turning Point convention, where four days of rage and hatred spewed from the stage, everyone I spoke with, my media badge in full view, was friendly (other than 30 seconds of scorn from Charlie Kirk himself when I tried to interview him). Did this matter? I didn’t want to live in a country where politics polluted every cranny of life, where communication across battle lines was impossible. It was important to preserve some civic ties for the day after the apocalypse, yet the enormity of the threat made it hard to see any basis for them.

A man was attending the convention with the pass of a friend who had recently lost his wife during the coronavirus pandemic. The friend had been invited to speak about the staggering losses of the pandemic and the reasons for them, but some days were still bad, and he had skipped the day’s session. His name was Kurtis Bay. I wanted to meet him.

Bay lived in a gated subdivision in Mesa at the eastern edge of the Valley, three miles from Rusty Bowers. Bay’s house, like all the ones around it, was beige, stucco-walled, and tile-roofed, with a small desert yard. A Toyota Tacoma was parked in the driveway and an American flag hung from a pole on the garage wall. The rooms inside were covered in pictures of a middle-aged blond woman with a warm smile and, occasionally beside her, a man with the silvering goatee and easy, sun-reddened face of someone enjoying his late 50s with his wife.

This was the man who greeted me in a half-zip windbreaker. But all the pleasure was gone from his blue eyes, and his voice easily broke, and the house felt empty with just him and his dog, Apollo, and an occasional visit from the housekeeper or the pool guy. His sons and grandsons couldn’t bear to come over since Tammy’s death, so Bay had to get in his truck to see them.

He had come up in Washington State from next to nothing, deserted by his father, raised by his mother on food stamps in Section 8 housing, leaving home at 15 and boxing semi-pro. Though he never forgot the humiliations of poverty and the help of the state, his belief in personal responsibility—not rugged individualism—led him, in the binary choice, to vote Republican. Kurtis and Tammy married when they were in their early 20s and raised two boys in the Valley, while he ran a business selling fire and burglar alarms and started a nonprofit basketball program for disadvantaged youth that was later taken over by the Phoenix Suns. A generation or two ago, the Bay family might have been an ad for white bread, but one of the sons was gay and the other was married to a Black woman, and the two grandsons were growing up, Bay said, in a society where “they will never be white enough or Black enough.”

These themes kept recurring with people I met in the Valley: mixed-race families, dislike of political extremes, distrust of power, the lingering damage of COVID.

The coronavirus took Tammy’s mother in the early months of the pandemic. Kurtis and Tammy had moved back to Washington to be near her, but after her death they returned to the Valley, where their married son had just moved his family so that the boys could attend school in person. Kurtis and Tammy didn’t get vaccinated, not because they were anti-vax but because they’d already had COVID. “We are not anti-anything,” he said, “except anti-evil, anti-mean, anti-crime, anti-hate.”

The year 2021 was golden for them: projects on the new house in Mesa, their sons and grandsons nearby, Kurtis retired and golfing, Tammy starting a business restoring furniture. “We got back to running around chasing each other naked, living our best life in the home of our dreams,” he said. “We’d witnessed the worst and seen the best. We were together 39 years.”

Tammy came down with something after a large Christmas party at their son’s house. By early January 2022, she was so exhausted that she asked Kurtis to drive her to the nearest hospital. A COVID test came back negative, while chest X-rays showed pneumonia. Still, the doctors brought Tammy up to the COVID unit, where the staff were all wearing hazmat suits and next of kin were allowed to stay only an hour. The disorientation and helplessness of a complex emergency at a big hospital set in, nurses who didn’t know the patient’s name coming and going and a doctor with the obscure title “hospitalist” in charge, needing immediate answers for alarming decisions and insisting on treating a virus that Kurtis was adamant Tammy didn’t have. When he refused to leave her side, a nurse called security and he was physically escorted out, but not before he wrote on the room’s whiteboard: “No remdesivir, no high-flow oxygen, no sedation, no other procedures without my approval. Kurtis Bay.”

To the hospital, Bay was a combative husband who was resisting treatment for his extremely sick wife. To Bay, the hospital was slowly killing his beloved and recently healthy wife with antiviral drugs and two spells on a ventilator. The ordeal lasted 15 days, until Tammy died of sepsis on January 20, 2022.

Bay told me the story with fresh sorrow and lingering disbelief rather than rancor. “I have a lot of pain, but I’m not going to be that person that’s going to run around with a sandwich board and stand in front of the courthouse and scream, ‘You murdered my wife!’ ” He believed that federal agencies and insurance companies created incentives for hospitals to diagnose COVID and then follow rigid protocols. The tragedy fed his skepticism toward what he called the “managerial class”—the power elite in government bureaucracy, business, finance, and the media. The managerial class was necessary—the country couldn’t function without it—but it accumulated power by sowing conflict and chaos. Like the hospital’s doctors, members of the class weren’t individually vicious. “Yes, they are corrupt, but they’re more like AI,” Bay said. “It’s morphing all by itself. It’s incestuous—it breeds and breeds and breeds.” As for politicians, “I don’t think either political party gives a shit about the people”—a dictum I heard as often as the one about whiskey and water.

Bay saw Trump as the only president who tried to disrupt the managerial class and empower ordinary citizens. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would do it too, but voting for him would be throwing his vote away. If Trump loses this year, the managerial class will acquire more power and get into more wars, make the border more porous, hurt the economy by installing DEI algorithms in more corporations. “I’ll vote for Trump,” Bay said, “but that’s, like, the last thing I think about in terms of how I’m going to impact my neighbor, my friend, my society.” Everyone wanted clean air, clean water, opportunity for all to make money and raise a family. If the extremes would stop demonizing each other and fighting over trivia, then the country could come together and solve its immense problems—poverty, homelessness …

I listened, half-agreeing about the managerial class, still wondering how a man who dearly loved his multiracial family and cared about young people on the margins and called his late wife “the face of God on this Earth” could embrace Trump. So I asked. Bay replied that good people had done bad things on January 6 but not at Trump’s bidding, and he might have gone himself if the timing had been different; that he didn’t look to the president for moral guidance in raising children or running a business; that he’d easily take “grab her by the whatever” from a president who would end the border problem and stop funding wars. All of this left the question unanswered, and maybe it was unanswerable, and I found myself looking away from his watery eyes to the smiling woman in the large framed picture behind his left shoulder.

“There are no good days,” Bay said.

10. Dry Wells

In the spring of 2023, Governor Hobbs convened an advisory council to find solutions to the two parts of the water problem: how to allow urban areas to keep growing without using more groundwater, and how to prevent rural basins from running out of water altogether. The council began to meet in Room 3175 at the Arizona Department of Water Resources, two blocks north of the homeless compound in the heat zone, and a dozen blocks west of the convention center’s noise and smoke machines. Around a long horseshoe table sat every interested party: farmers, builders, tribal leaders, politicians, environmentalists, experts, and the state’s top water officials. The Salt River Project was there; so were Kathleen Ferris and Sarah Porter; so was Stephen Roe Lewis, the leader of the Gila River Indian Community, who had secured federal funding to install experimental solar panels over the tribe’s canals to conserve water and power. At one end of the table, frown lines extending from the corners of her mouth, sat Gail Griffin, the diminutive and stubborn 80-year-old Republican chair of the House committee on natural resources. Rusty Bowers, working as a lobbyist for the water company EPCOR, listened from the back of the room.

photo of side view of man in glasses with long dark ponytail wearing blue blazer with dry grasses and mountain ridge in background

They studied documents and took turns asking questions, challenging proposals, seeking consensus on the Rubik’s Cube of water. They had until the end of the year. Maybe it was the heat, but I began to think of Room 3175 as one of the places where the fate of our civilization would be decided. These people had to listen to one another, but that didn’t guarantee any agreement. Developers remained unhappy with the governor’s halt to building on groundwater in the Valley’s edge towns, like Buckeye. In October, two women quit the council, complaining that farm interests were going unheard. They were replaced by a farmer named Ed Curry, who grew chili peppers down in Cochise County.

Cochise interested me. It is one of the most conservative counties in Arizona. Last November, two county supervisors were indicted for refusing to validate votes without a hand count and delaying certification of the 2022 midterms, which elected Hobbs governor over Kari Lake. Cochise was also the county most threatened by the depletion of groundwater. Its Willcox Basin had lost more than 1 trillion gallons since 1990 , at least three times the amount of water restored by rain or snowmelt, and the water table was now below the reach of the average well. Cochise was where you saw a road sign that said Earth Fissures Possible .

The convergence of these two extremes—MAGA politics and disappearing water—made for unusual alignments in rural Arizona. As the Lions of Liberty told me at Turning Point’s convention, water didn’t divide strictly red and blue—the issue was more local. Rural groundwater in Arizona was left unregulated by the 1980 law, and around the state, some conservative county supervisors whose constituents’ wells had gone dry were urging the legislature to impose rules. In some places, the crisis pitted homesteaders against large agribusinesses, or a retiree against a neighboring farmer, with Republicans on both sides. I sometimes thought the problem could be solved as long as Turning Point never hears about it.

Cochise County is a three-hour drive southeast from Phoenix. Its flat expanse of land ends at distant ranges made of rock formations in fantastic shapes. The Willcox Basin has a sparse population and little in the way of jobs other than farming. In the past few years, retirees and young pioneers looking to live off the grid have begun moving to Cochise. So have agricultural businesses—wineries, large pecan and pistachio growers from California, and Riverview, a giant Minnesota cattle operation with some 100,000 heifers , known locally as the Dairy. The Willcox Basin has no reservoirs or canals; almost all of the available water lies hundreds of feet below the dry ground. The Dairy drilled more than 100 wells, some 2,500 feet deep , to suck out groundwater and irrigate 40,000 acres of corn and wheat, heavy water-use crops, to raise the heifers before shipping them back north for milking. Cochise County simply provided the water, for free. Ferris predicted how the story would end: “The water will dry up and Riverview will leave town and take their cows and go. And all the people that love it down there because it’s so gorgeous are going to run out of water.”

Last July, a retired construction worker from Seattle named Traci Page, who had 40 acres near the Dairy, turned on her tap to wash the dishes and got a lukewarm brown stream. Her well had gone dry. In a panic, she called the Dairy and was offered a 3,000-gallon tank so she could replace her well with expensive hauled water. “Thanks,” she said, “but will you please deepen my well? You’re out here drilling these holes.” Page’s state representative was Gail Griffin, from the governor’s advisory council—a devout believer in property rights and an adamant opponent of regulation. Griffin never replied to her appeals. Page ended up selling her tractor to cover part of the $16,000 it cost to have her well deepened.

“During this dry-up, I feel like I’m sprinting up a gravel hill and it’s giving way under my feet. I can’t get ahead,” Page told me. “And this economy, and the corruption on both sides, and the corrupt corporations coming in here—can we just catch a break? Can you stop a minute so we can breathe?”

The sinking aquifer and relentless pumping by agribusiness led some locals to put an initiative on the ballot in 2022 that would have required the state to regulate groundwater in the Willcox Basin much as it did in the Phoenix area. The initiative set neighbor against neighbor, just like the water cutoff in Rio Verde, with rumors and falsehoods flying on Facebook and the Farm Bureau advertising heavily against it. A retired feed-store owner named Lloyd Glenn, whose well had dropped sharply, supported the initiative and found himself on the opposite side of most people he knew. “I guess I’m not a good Republican anymore,” he told me.

“That’s the thing—they’ve gone a bit radical,” his wife, Lisa, a retired schoolteacher, said. “It’s lent itself to the disbelief. We can’t get the same information and facts.” She added, “And Gail Griffin has not let anything come forward in 10 years. She shuts down legislation and is thick as thieves with the Farm Bureau. If the water goes, there will be no more life here.”

The initiative was overwhelmingly defeated. I talked with several farmers who argued that it was appropriate for an urbanizing area like the Valley but not for the hinterlands. One of them was Ed Curry.

His 2,000-acre farm has sat alongside Highway 191 for 43 years. Curry was 67, white-haired and nearly deaf in one ear, a religious conservative and an agricultural innovator. His farm produced 90 percent of the world’s green-chili seed and experimented with new genetic strains all the time, including one that had signs of success in arresting Alzheimer’s. To save water, Curry used drip irrigation and planted 300 acres of rosemary. He wanted to hand the farm down to his kids and grandkids, and that meant finding ways to use less water.

Curry was always hugging people and saying he loved them, and one person he loved was Gail Griffin. They had a special relationship that went back 30 years, to an incident at a community musical program in a local public school, where Curry told a story about Sir Isaac Newton that seemed to insist on the existence of a Creator. When the local “witchcraft group” called the American Civil Liberties Union on him, he told me, Griffin contacted a lawyer from the Christian Coalition in Washington and rescued him, and ever since then Curry had put up Griffin signs at election time. But he hated the labeling and demonizing by the right and the left. In Sunday school, he taught the kids that “the ills of society are because we’ve forgotten we belong to each other.”

When the governor’s water advisers asked Curry to join the council in November, he took the chance, and went up to Phoenix to meet with the people in Room 3175 and try to work something out. As a farmer who practiced sustainability, who understood property rights but also obligations to your neighbors, he believed that he could reach both sides, including his old friend Griffin. “Guys, we can’t get nothin’ done, because we got the far right over here scared of the far left,” Curry told the governor’s people. “It’s all this new sexual revolution of the transgender stuff. Country people deal with cows, bulls—we know better than all this crap. God didn’t make us goofy. So you’ve got the far right taking this stand against the far left because they see ’em as way out there. And yet the far left says the far right are a bunch of bigots. None of that affects this water deal—none of it! Doesn’t matter.”

O n my way back to Phoenix from Curry’s farm, I stopped in the town of Willcox to see Peggy Judd, one of the county supervisors indicted for election interference. By then it was dark, and the front door opened into the small living room of a very small house decorated for Christmas. Judd sat on the sofa, a heavyset woman with flat hair and a tired smile. Her husband, Kit, who had bone cancer, lay under a blanket in a recliner, wearing a Trump cap and taking Vicodin. He was a mechanic and had once installed Curry’s irrigation engines.

I sat beside Peggy on the sofa and we talked about water. She had opposed the initiative, but she had come to realize the urgency of acting to save the county’s groundwater. Griffin, with whom she’d once been close, for a time stopped talking to her. “Representative Griffin wants water to be free. We can’t fix that. She is a private-property-rights, real-estate-broker person, and her brain cannot be fixed.”

In Arizona, I hoped for surprises that would break down the hardened lines of politics, and here was one. Gail Griffin, a traditional conservative, remained an immovable champion of the farm lobby, but Peggy, a MAGA diehard, wanted action on water because her neighbors’ wells were going dry. In this one case, partisanship mattered less than facts. Disinformation and conspiratorial thinking had no answer for a dry well.

photo of aerial view of valley at dawn or dusk with light reflecting off the river running through it

We talked for an hour, and the whole time, the threat of prison hung in the room unmentioned. Suddenly Peggy brought up politics. She had loved being a county supervisor, passing budgets, solving local problems—until COVID. “It wasn’t political ’til then,” she said, when mask mandates and vaccines set people against one another.

“COVID flipped us upside down,” Kit said in a faint, throaty voice. “People don’t know how to act anymore.”

Peggy had driven with her daughter and grandkids to Washington for January 6, to let the president know how much they loved him and would miss him. It was a beautiful day of patriotic songs and prayer, but they got cold and headed for the Metro before things turned ugly. Then came the midterm election of 2022, when she ignored the Cochise County attorney’s opinion and refused to validate the votes without a hand count. She told me that she just wanted to help her constituents get over their suspicion of the voting machines: “I’m surprised I’m being indicted, because I was election-denier lite.”

She didn’t consider that she was part of a wider effort, going back to that beautiful, patriotic day in Washington, to abuse the public trust and take away her fellow citizens’ votes. In three days she would be arraigned in Phoenix.

Peggy had received a lot of ugly messages. She played a voicemail that she’d saved on her phone. “You’re a fat, ignorant cunt. You’re a disgrace and embarrassment to this country,” said a man’s voice. “At least you’re old as fuck and just look unhealthy as hell and hopefully nature wipes you off this planet soon. From a true American patriot. Worthless, ignorant scum of the planet … All because of you fucking scumbags on the right just don’t understand that you’re too psychologically weak and damaged to realize that you are acting against this country … Again, from a true American patriot, you fucking fat cunt.”

Peggy wiped away tears. A week ago, she said, she had woken up at four in the morning and couldn’t face another day as county chair, because of the comments that came her way at public meetings. Then she made some fudge and ate it off the spoon and felt better. She texted a woman out east who worked for Mike Lindell, the right-wing pillow salesman, who was going to help pay Peggy’s legal bills. “I’m miserable,” she told the woman. “Things are not going to be okay. I don’t even know if I can go to work today.” But she made herself drive down to the county seat.

When she returned home that evening, a sheriff’s sergeant was waiting at her house. Someone had reported comments Peggy made while waiting to be fingerprinted at the county jail. A suicide-prevention lady gave Peggy a little pamphlet that she now took with her everywhere. She had learned a lesson: If you feel like you’re going to kill yourself, tell someone.

“I pray, I pray that Trump comes back,” Kit moaned from the recliner. “There’ll be nothing left of this country if we have to go through another bout of the Democrats.” He had just two months to live.

“There, see, you want to know why we’re divided?” Peggy said to me. “Because people that believe that believe that . And people that believe the opposite believe that . It’s all in their heart.”

I had the sense that she would have talked until midnight. But it was getting late, and I didn’t want to feel any sorrier for her than I already did, so I drove back to Phoenix with a plate of Peggy’s Christmas cookies.

11. Epilogue

“I’m going to do something weird,” Rusty Bowers said. Seated at the wheel of his truck in his dirt driveway, he uttered a short prayer for our safety. Then we drove out of the Valley east into the Sierra Ancha mountains.

The fire that took his ranch and studio had burned over the escarpment and left behind the charred stumps of oak trees. The air tankers’ slurry spray had just missed his house, and most of the nearby forest was gone. But a stand of ponderosa pines had survived, and the hillsides were already coming back green with manzanita shrubs and mountain mahogany. Up here, the Salt River was a narrow stream flowing through a red canyon. From the remains of the ranch, we climbed the switchbacks of a muddy road to almost 8,000 feet. On Aztec Peak, we could see across to the Superstition range and over a ridge down into Roosevelt Lake, cloud-covered, holding the water of the Salt River Project. The Valley that it fed was hidden from view.

It was just before Christmas, the start of the desert winter. A few weeks earlier, the governor’s water council had released its recommendations: Where rural groundwater was disappearing, the state should regulate its use, while giving each local basin a say in the rules’ design. Ed Curry, the chili farmer, considered this a reasonable approach, but he was unable to move Gail Griffin, who blocked the council’s bill in her House committee and instead proposed a different bill that largely left the status quo in place. The logic of partisanship gave Griffin full Republican support, but Curry warned that she was losing touch with her constituents, including some farmers. “We’re two friends in desperate disagreement about water,” he told me. In February, 200 people—including Traci Page, whose well had gone dry— crowded a community meeting near Curry’s farm . Many of those who spoke described themselves as conservatives, but they denounced the Dairy’s irresponsible pumping, the state’s inaction, and Griffin herself, who was in the room and appeared shaken by their anger. Groundwater continued to disappear much faster than it could be restored, but something was changing in people’s minds, the wellsprings of democracy.

Peggy Judd’s voicemail had reminded me of the abuse directed at Bowers from the other extreme. As he drove, I asked what he thought of her. “Zealously desirous to follow the cause, but not willfully desirous,” he said, distinguishing between true believers like Judd and power-hungry manipulators, like Charlie Kirk, “cloaked in Christian virtue and ‘We’re going to save America.’ And that is a very dangerous thing.” He went on, “You will push her into the cell and then use her as a pawn for fundraising.” Bowers believed that Satan seared consciences with hate like a hot iron until people became incapable of feeling goodness. He also believed that faith led to action, and action led to change—“even if it’s just in your character. You may not be able to change the world. You may not be able to change a forest fire. But you can act. You can choose: I will act now .”

Bowers wanted to show me a ranch that he was fantasizing about buying. We drove on a forested mountain road that ran along a stream and came to a metal barrier. On the other side, in an opening of pine trees, was a small meadow of yellow grass, an apple orchard, and a red cabin with a rusted roof and a windmill. In the sunlight, it looked like the setting of a fairy tale, beautiful and abandoned.

“Hellooo!” Bowers called three times, but no one answered.

He had an idea for what to do with the ranch if he bought it. He would build a camp for kids in the Valley—kids of all backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, but especially ones with hard lives. They would leave their phones behind and come up here in the mountains with proper chaperoning—no cussing or spitting—and learn how to make a bivouac, cook for themselves, and sit around the campfire and talk. The talking would be the main point. They would discuss water and land use, the environment, “all the things that could afflict us today.” It would be a kind of training in civil discourse.

“Point being, division has to be bridged in order to keep us together as a country,” Bowers said. “One at a time. That’s why you get a little camp. Can I save all the starfish after a storm? No. But I can save this little starfish.”

We got in the truck and started the drive back down to the Valley. It was late afternoon. We’d been alone in the mountains all day, and I’d forgotten about the 5 million people just west of us. It had been a relief to be away from them all—the strip malls, the air-conditioned traffic, the swimming-pool subdivisions, the half-built factories, the pavement people in the heat zone, COVID and January 6, the believers and grifters, the endless fights in empty language over elections and migrants and schools and everything else. But now I realized that I was ready to go back. That was our civilization down in the Valley, the only one we had. Better for it to be there than gone.

This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “The Valley.”

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A democracy is a form of governance characterized by power sharing. The implication of this is that all the citizens have an equal voice in the way a nation is governed. This often encompasses either direct or indirect involvement in lawmaking. "Democracy" can be a very delicate subject for any writer. Get a custom Essay on Democracy as the ...
The Importance of Democracy in Today's World
Conclusion. In conclusion, democracy is inherently valuable and essential to the well-being of societies. Its historical roots, principles, advantages, challenges, and case studies demonstrate the significance of democracy in today's world. To ensure the sustainability of democracy, it is crucial to address the challenges and criticisms it faces, promote civic engagement and awareness, and ...
Democracy
Democracy - Equality, Representation, Participation: Why should "the people" rule? Is democracy really superior to any other form of government? Although a full exploration of this issue is beyond the scope of this article (see political philosophy), history—particularly 20th-century history— demonstrates that democracy uniquely possesses a number of features that most people, whatever ...
Democracy
Normative democracy theory aims to provide an account of when and why democracy is morally desirable as well as moral principles for guiding the design of democratic institutions and the actions of citizens and representatives. ... The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority", in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics ...
By the People: Essays on Democracy
The basic terms of democratic governance are shifting before our eyes, and we don't know what the future holds. Some fear the rise of hateful populism and the collapse of democratic norms and practices. Others see opportunities for marginalized people and groups to exercise greater voice and influence. At the Kennedy School, we are striving ...
Democracy: The Influence of Freedom
Democracy: The Influence of Freedom Essay. Democracy is the basis of the political systems of the modern civilized world. Democratic countries, with rare exceptions, are by far the most economically developed, and citizens' standard of living is the highest in them. Whether freedom is a necessary and sufficient condition for well-being has ...
Democracy
democracy, literally, rule by the people. The term is derived from the Greek dēmokratia, which was coined from dēmos ("people") and kratos ("rule") in the middle of the 5th century bce to denote the political systems then existing in some Greek city-states, notably Athens. (Read Madeleine Albright's Britannica essay on democracy.)
Essay on Importance of Democracy
250 Words Essay on Importance of Democracy Introduction to Democracy. Democracy, derived from the Greek words 'demos' (people) and 'kratos' (power), signifies the rule of the people. It is a form of government where power is vested in the hands of the citizens, allowing them to participate in the decision-making processes that shape ...
Essay on Democracy
500 Words Essay on Democracy Introduction to Democracy. Democracy, derived from the Greek words "demos" (people) and "kratos" (power), is a political system that places power in the hands of the people. It is a system where citizens participate in decision-making, either directly or through elected representatives. Democracy is often ...
Why the Future Is Democratic
The reason why democracy is so tightly tied to the mass-level enabling conditions generated by modernization is simple: Democracy is a demanding system that requires of its citizens certain cultural qualities. People need to endorse the values that safeguard the freedoms to which democracy entitles them. ... 5-17; and their follow-up essay ...
Democracy Essay for Students in English
The guiding principles of democracy such as protected rights and freedoms, free and fair elections, accountability and transparency of government officials, citizens have a responsibility to uphold and support their principles. Democracy was first practised in the 6th century BCE, in the city-state of Athens. One basic principle of democracy is ...
Democracy Essay
Democracy Essay. Democracy is derived from the Greek word demos or people. It is defined as a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people. Democracy is exercised directly by the people; in large societies, it is by the people through their elected agents. In the phrase of President Abraham Lincoln, democracy is the ...
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Arguments for Democracy. One of the arguments is that democracy is important because it can be embraced and made deliberative. This implies that deliberation of a dialogical nature is vital to the democratic society. When democracy is made deliberate in a given society, instead of people's mere adaptation to circumstance, their preferences ...
Why Is Voting Important: [Essay Example], 591 words
One of the primary reasons why voting is important is that it is a way for individuals to exercise their civic duty and participate in the political process. By casting a ballot, individuals are able to have a direct impact on the policies and laws that govern their communities, states, and countries. This is a powerful way for citizens to have ...
The Case Against Democracy
In a new book, "Against Democracy" (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown, has turned Estlund's hedging inside out to create an uninhibited argument for epistocracy.
Why Democracy is the Best Form of Government Essay
As quoted by Winston Churchill, democracy is the best form of government that has existed. This is true because the heart of democracy is reliant, dependent, and thrives on the populaces desires; which gives them the ability for maintaining the right to choose, over time it adjusts and fixes itself to engulf the prominent troubling issues, and ...
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Democracy was the most successful political idea of the 20th century. Why has it run into trouble, and what can be done to revive it? | Essay
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Why Democracy Survives Populism. Read the full essay here. This essay suggests that while populism certainly can be a mortal threat to democracy, the worst outcome is less common than observers have feared. The author's research shows that among forty populist governments in Latin America and Europe from 1985 to 2020, only seven led to ...
Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy for Students
500 Words Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy Introduction. Democracy is a system of governance where citizens participate directly or indirectly in the decision-making process. At the heart of this system lies the act of voting, an essential tool through which citizens express their will, choose their leaders, and influence public ...
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Guest Essay. Political Scientists Want to Know Why We Hate One Another This Much. June 19, 2024. ... While most voters voice support for democracy and fair elections, there are nuances to this ...
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From the start of the investigation into Donald Trump's mishandling of classified documents, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon has seemed inclined to act in favor of the president who ...

Why Democracy is the Best We've Got

Alexandra Mork

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Bibliography

1. Democracy Defined

4.2.5 The Division of Democratic Labor

2. The Justification of Democracy

2.1 Instrumentalism

2.2 Non-instrumentalism

3. The Authority of Democracy

3.2 Intrinsic Conceptions of Democratic Authority

3.3 Limits to the Authority of Democracy

4. The Demands of Democratic Participation

4.2 Proposed Solutions to the Problem of Democratic Participation

4.2.4 The self-interest assumption

4.3 The Moral Duties of Democratic Citizens

5. Democratic Representation

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