In response to Josh Marshall’s question about what kind of political world I want to strive for, I thought I would produce a few statements of value that I have been working out for myself. I hope to present these from time to time over the next months. They may be of no value to anyone besides me; I engage in the exercise primarily to explain a way forward to myself and to make my allegiances public. But if these little value commitments inspire one of my students or readers or friends to do the same for themselves, so much the better.

The first value, and the one I find myself most surprised to have to articulate, is a commitment to democracy. Life in an open, democratic society is one of those baseline assumptions that I grew up with, and until recently, I assumed that all of us in the United States were basically talking about the same thing when we spoke of democracy. One of the great disillusionments of my life has been to learn how many of my compatriots mean something very different than I do when they speak of democracy. Worse still has been to learn how many Americans are out and proud about their hostility to the entire American democratic experiment, from race war accelerationists to Christian nationalist theocrats in search of their “Protestant Franco” to e/acc techbros who believe that democracy is an inconvenience that will wither away like a vestigial tail once the singularity of artificial general intelligence arrives.

To be clear, I am not arguing here for the relative merits of direct democracy vs. a democratic republic, or a presidential system vs. a parliamentary one. While these are interesting questions for defenders of democracy to argue, all of these models depend on free and fair elections, a free press, and the rule of law. Rather, defenders of the American experiment must argue for the virtues of democracy relative to undemocratic forms of government like authoritarianism, dictatorship, oligarchy, and what jurist Wojciech Sadurski terms “plebiscitarian authoritarianism” (a term I prefer to Fareed Zakaria’s confusing “illiberal democracy”).

While I find myself surprised at having to articulate my support for democracy, I suppose I shouldn’t be–I mounted such a defense for my students in the days after the January 6 coup attempt in 2021. And I am reminded of Peter Beinart’s essay in Slate during the second Iraq War in which he said that “American virtue must be proved, not asserted.” Beinart’s statement is truer today than it was when he wrote it in 2006, and in fact the starting point for this blog post is that democracy is worth defending and working for regardless of the path that the United States is taking as a country.

If I take as a starting point the claim that the virtues of democracy must be proven and not simply asserted, here’s my argument for democracy: whatever its many follies, democracy is civilization’s best attempt so far at broadly shared, pluralistic governance. This approach to governance is the best safeguard–maybe the only safeguard in the long term–against exploitative and extractive social structures where people in power maintain themselves by excluding some segment of the population from political participation, usually with the goal of exploiting that segment’s economic production. This exclusion and exploitation can take many forms–slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, apartheid, caste systems–but at the root of all these systems is the oppression of some members of society for the benefit of other, more dominant members.

The only real remedy for such exploitation is a political process where power and participation are broadly shared. At this point, one might respond that given such a definition, the US was rarely if ever a democracy to begin with. What should we expect today, some might argue, of a country that began as a slave society and that derived its territory by dispossessing, and often exterminating, the natives that lived here before? My answer to this line of argument is the same, I think, as Barack Obama’s (and Abraham Lincoln’s) position that whatever our many failures in living up to American democratic ideals, the ideals remain worth following. That canny, curious phrase from the preamble to the Constitution, “in order to form a more perfect union,” captures our condition: at best, we can only improve on what came before. But we can, through deliberative, democratic processes, form a union that is more open and pluralist than our society’s prior attempts.

It’s pluralism, which depends on power sharing, compromise, and some degree of turn-taking, that protects the vulnerable and marginalized far more reliably than the noblesse oblige of elites or the tender mercies of some techbro-fantasy philosopher king. Without the pluralism that democracy protects, we have nothing but cynicism and exploitation and plunder.

This argument owes a great deal to Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s brilliant book Why Nations Fail. The heart of their book, as I understand it, depends on two central observations of human behavior. The first is economist Joseph Schumpeter’s principle of creative destruction: the idea that technological advances and discoveries of new resources are inherently destabilizing to the status quo because these discoveries shuffle existing power relations. For instance, a new invention that improves productivity in a certain field (e.g. the spinning jenny during the early Industrial Revolution) creates opportunities for new market participants even as it reduces economic power for others (even to the point of immiseration for some). There is a natural tendency for beneficiaries of the status quo to resist these changes: To take just one simple but telling example from the book, it’s no coincidence that on the eve of the American Civil War, the US Patent Office granted a dozen patents per year for technologies related to corn production (a staple of the free North) and only one per year for cotton production technologies (the cash crop of the slave South). In other words, northerners who had to pay field hands for their labor had far more incentive to innovate and improve productivity than did southern planters who were extracting the labor from slaves for free.

Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s second observation relates to the Iron Law of Oligarchy. This is the natural tendency for those in power, no matter their stated political values, to seek to perpetuate their power and to extract wealth from the system for their own benefit. It is this ossification of political power that explains everything from the corruption endemic to undemocratic states to the dismal observation that every successful Marxist revolution in history has ended with a governing elite that betrays its revolutionary principles and in many cases becomes even more autocratic and self-serving than the regime they replaced. Without the power-sharing, compromise, and political turn-taking inherent in democracy, anti-democratic states seem trapped in amber: resistant to innovation, ruled by an elite whose entire focus is the extraction of wealth from the system through the exploitation of people and resources.

Donald Trump is working hard, to the extent that he works hard at anything, to extract revenge from his political enemies and to eliminate the inconvenience of democracy. If he succeeds, he and his family and cronies may rule over us for a very long time: witness the staying power of leaders he admires, from Putin to Xi, to Erdoğan to Orbán. Trump and Trumpism could, through gerrymandering, bullying of once-independent media companies, and the compliance of a corrupt Supreme Court, remain in power almost without any regard for public support or even consent to be ruled.

In the end, the only way for America to survive as a democracy is for Americans to insist on its survival. How we do that is an interesting question: like many of you, I am looking for avenues to rebuild and strengthen civil society. There remain tools at our disposal: in many places, state and local governments; organized labor; civil society organizations; and a vibrant remnant of independent press, as expressed in Substacks and scrappy little journals of ideas. I hope to say more on these tools in months to come.

In the struggle against authoritarianism and anti-democracy, lots of people around the world have gone before us: Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, Nasrin Sotoudeh, Lech Walesa, Narges Mohammadi, Ai Wei Wei. Some, like Alexei Navalny, have paid with their lives and their efforts have not yet borne fruit. But, rather than viewing these people as I once did–as heroic outsiders struggling for freedom in far-away places–I see them now as models to study. There is a worldwide conspiracy against democracy today, and the struggle against Putin’s or Xi’s or Erdoğan’s regime is not so different from the struggle against Trump’s unmaking of the American experiment.