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democracy | 2026-06-28 | economyforeveryone

The state of our democracy on the eve of our 250th anniversary.

One small action: Find out who controls redistricting in your state and whether the process is independent of the legislature.

The founders weren’t naive about power. They had watched it corrupt, concentrate, and escape limits. The system they built was based on one hard truth: sooner or later power would test this country too.

Ambition was expected to be self-serving and power was expected to test every boundary. The system was supposed to survive that by dividing authority, protecting rights, and making abuse harder.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we’re preparing to celebrate that design. Celebration is part of it and it should be, this country is worth loving.

The anniversary is also a maintenance check. We need to be honest about whether the thing we inherited still works, where the guardrails have held, where they have failed, and whether we’re willing to repair them before the next collision.

That’s the state of our democracy on the eve of our 250th anniversary: still standing, badly stressed, and ours to repair.

What Hungary showed

What I started writing about five posts ago was Hungary. A government that had spent 16 years methodically capturing every institution that might check it (courts, media, prosecutors, electoral maps) lost a supermajority election. A man who’d been part of the regime defected, organized 50,000 volunteers, and ran a campaign that flipped rural towns Orbán had won by 23 points.

I started there because it was the clearest available example of what capture looks like when it fully hardens, and because something interrupted it.

What I found looking at it closely was a sequence, not a miracle. The system could be challenged again because the economics eventually failed in ways people lived in their bodies: wages at half the EU average, the highest inflation on the continent, healthcare spending the lowest in the EU. Then the moral credibility cracked: the Novák pardon broke the family-values story from the inside. Then someone showed up with documented evidence and a message that didn’t require Fidesz voters to feel like fools for believing the old one.

When you watch a capture system operate, the instinct is fury at the people who believed it, still believe it, or are helping it along. That fury is understandable. I feel it, and most people I know do too. But it doesn’t work.

Why shaming doesn’t work

When a belief becomes an identity marker, when accepting a fact means losing your place in a community, people don’t process the evidence the way they would otherwise. They process it to protect the group. And the effect runs the wrong way: people with more analytical ability are more entrenched on questions where their identity is at stake: they’re better at building arguments for the position they already hold.

If you’re trying to get someone out of a movement their identity is bound up in, attacking them just confirms the story they’ve already been told.

Which means the fury makes sense, but aimed at someone whose identity is inside the movement, it pushes them further in. If leaving feels humiliating, people stay longer.

Magyar demonstrated the other path. His victory speech in April: “From today, there are no better or worse Hungarians, only Hungarians.” He narrowed the target to the regime’s inner circle, the people who built and ran the capture, and left the door open for the people who’d voted for it, deliberately lowering the cost of walking away.

The economics had to fail first, and there had to be documented corruption to point to. Dignified exits work alongside those conditions. You need them in place first.

What the guardrails were for

I keep coming back to the founders alongside all of this, which I didn’t expect.

The design they built was explicitly against concentrated power: separation of powers, independent courts, civilian control of the military, press freedom. The Bill of Rights reads like a list of ways power goes bad: government-backed religion, punished speech, censored press, raids without cause, forced confession, punishment without trial, courts bent toward the state. The founders weren’t guessing. They were naming the abuses they knew governments reach for when power stops being restrained. They were building constraints on themselves and their successors, because they assumed their successors would eventually include people who’d abuse whatever wasn’t constrained.

The test I wrote about in the last post is this one: does a reform bind the next government, or only the current one? That’s the founding logic. The rules are supposed to work regardless of who’s in power, which means you build them when you have power, and you build them to constrain you too.

That’s the hard part. Building institutions that would restrain your own successors, including someone like you, someone you’d vote for, requires believing the system is worth protecting above what any particular government would produce. The founders held that. It wasn’t perfect and had serious moral failures on slavery and indigenous peoples. But structurally, in the design, they held it.

The series I’ve been writing is about what happens when that belief erodes. The exportable playbook (insecurity into grievance into identity lock-in into institutional capture) doesn’t need American branding to run. Germany’s AfD, Portugal’s Chega, France’s National Rally, the UK’s Reform party: none of them are copying MAGA. They’re running the same playbook on local conditions. Because the inputs are there: housing costs that consume most of what people earn, wages that haven’t kept pace, institutions that feel remote and captured long before any particular party does the capturing. That’s what the democratic crisis runs on.

The work now

This isn’t the 250th birthday I wanted. But maybe it’s the one that asks the right thing of us: to be honest about what the design was for.

The playbook is in the previous post and the mechanisms are in the case studies, but one thing was clear through all of it: the shaming doesn’t work. The anger is earned - the things being done are worth being furious about. But fury aimed at the people who believed the story confirms what they’ve already been told about you, and pushes them further in.

That means telling the truth clearly and leaving the door open. Name the people who built and ran the capture, without making everyone who believed the story pay for having believed it.

That’s not amnesty. The people who used captured institutions to do real harm face accountability; that’s a separate track from getting people to walk away from the movement. They don’t have to happen on the same timeline.

Keeping your anger aimed at the system while leaving the door open for people who believed it is harder than it sounds. It’s also the path that keeps repair possible.

We’ve had 250 years to study what the founders were trying to prevent. We know what it looks like when it works and when it doesn’t. The guardrails they built were the lesson of history encoded in law. The work now is defending those guardrails, rebuilding the ones that have eroded, and building new ones tight enough that the next government, whoever wins it, can’t undo them in a term.

That’s what I mean by work.

One steady action to take this week

Find out who controls redistricting in your state and whether the process is independent of the legislature. If it isn’t, find the organization in your state working to change that and sign up for their list. You don’t have to do anything else yet. Just know who’s building the infrastructure.

Action ladder

Short term

If you’re a voter: Choose one elected official you have access to - city council, state representative, anyone, and ask them one specific question about institutional independence: Who appoints your inspector general? Is your redistricting commission independent of the legislature? What would make it harder to remove? The question lands even when the answer isn’t there yet.

If you’re a community member who’s been angry: Try one conversation with someone who voted differently than you did. Ask what they’re worried about, genuinely. You might find the underlying concern is closer than the surface suggests.

Medium term

If you work in civic advocacy or policy: The unglamorous structural fights are the ones that bind future governments: independent redistricting commissions, inspector general protections with enforcement teeth, civil service rules that outlast administrations, public broadcaster governance set by statute. These don’t trend. They’re the infrastructure everything else depends on. Pick one and stay on it.

If you’re an organizer: Build or sustain a face-to-face organization that does community work alongside political work and isn’t dependent on any single election or candidate. The Tisza islands model - locally organized, meeting in person, doing visible work in the community - is worth studying. It takes years. Start before you need it.

Long term

Legislative and constitutional: Supermajority thresholds for changes to electoral rules and independent institutions. Statutory funding for courts, inspectors general, and election administration not subject to annual pressure. Civil service protections written to outlast administrations. The goal is making the system harder to capture by anyone, including people you’d vote for.

How to talk about it

What it is: The democracy problem and the economic squeeze problem are the same problem. Fear and scapegoating take hold when the monthly costs of housing, healthcare, childcare, and education eat everything - when people have no margin to question who’s actually to blame. Reducing the squeeze and defending independent institutions are the same project.

What the evidence shows: What interrupted Hungary’s capture was structural: face-to-face organizing that worked around captured media, corruption framing that crossed partisan lines, and deliberately lowering the cost of switching sides. The same playbook runs in Germany, Portugal, France, and the UK, under different flags, without coordination, because the inputs are local and nobody imported it from anywhere.

Bridge language:

  • “Shaming people into agreement doesn’t work, and we need them to be able to leave.”
  • “The guardrails the founders built were for hard moments, when someone with power decided the normal rules didn’t apply.”
  • “The question is whether the rules would protect you from a government you didn’t trust.”

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