Author and policy expert Robert Kagan drew broad notice with his Washington Post essay declaring that the nation is "already in a constitutional crisis" and may be on the cusp of "mass violence," but he is hardly the first to forecast democracy's demise.
Headlines like "Will 2024 Be the Year American Democracy Dies?" and books with titles like "How Democracies Die" and "Twilight of Democracy" have become commonplace in the post-Trump era.
The apocalyptic tone of much democracy writing is unsurprising given the magnitude of the crises facing the nation and world. But there is a danger that bleak alarmism can itself corrode democracy still further. The "genre of disaster prediction," as newsletter writer Robert Hubbell dubbed it in his response to Kagan, tends to stoke paralysis and despair.
This very demoralization is toxic to democracy. When the Economist Intelligence Unit first downgraded the United States from a "full" to a "flawed" democracy in 2017, it was because public trust in political institutions had tanked. "Popular confidence in government and political parties is a vital component of the concept of democracy" embodied by the index, the report noted.
When journalists, thought leaders and even democracy advocates harp exclusively on the ways government and institutions have failed, citizens lose faith. And without at least some faith in the system, Americans drop out. If all is lost in any case, why vote, speak up, follow the news, or engage in community and civic life?
That's why democracy advocates must go beyond prophesying doom and do the hard work of envisioning, and championing, a path forward. It's not that dire warnings aren't called for, or threats not real. It's that raising the alarm is not enough. Indeed, relentless doomsaying risks obscuring the opportunities that can arise from moments of disruption.
This column, The Civic Voice, will spotlight civic solutions and success stories as an antidote to 'round-the-clock bad news. As solutions-focused sites like the Solutions Journalism Network, the Good News Network and the new online magazine Reasons to Be Cheerful attest, Americans are thirsty for a bit of hope.
The value of good news goes beyond spreading cheer. Publishing a story about what's working "is the ultimate form of holding power to account," said Reasons to Be Cheerful co-editor Christine McLaren in an interview. That's because "it's giving people a story to point to and say, 'Look! It doesn't need to be this way! There are people doing it differently and here's how.'"
Spreading good news may sound "corny," acknowledged journalist Roxanne Patel Shepelavy, writing about "Where to Find Hope" in The Philadelphia Citizen. But hope is more important than ever, "because we can't heal what ails us if we don't think a cure exists."
So where can democracy advocates find hope? Here are a few signs that American democracy, while buffeted on many fronts, has as much (if not more) potential to revive and thrive as to collapse with a whimper.
Voting Rights. The unprecedented state-level assault on voting rights since the 2020 election, stoked by Donald Trump's "Big Lie," constitutes perhaps the most direct threat to American democracy today.
Yet on the good-news front, Arizona Republicans' highly criticized 2020 vote audit reaffirmed that "truth is truth,"and gave President Biden an even bigger win. And the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore key Voting Rights Act protections, is winning serious attention on Capitol Hill.
A surprising number of states, moreover, are making it easier to vote, not harder. While 19 states have enacted 33 laws that limit voting since the 2020 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, the number of laws that expanded voter access is actually far larger, totaling 62 in 25 states.
These laws to facilitate voting, with measures like expanded early nd mail-in voting, "do not balance the scales," the Brennan Center asserts. But according to The Washington Post's Perry Bacon Jr., the voting rights expansion is one of several "groundbreaking initiatives" in blue states, from "Baby Bonds" in Connecticut to greenhouse gas cuts in Oregon, that offer "a vision for a better America."
Constitutional Reforms. On Capitol Hill, as breathless reports remind us daily, partisan and intraparty disputes have stalled infrastructure legislation and placed the nation at risk of default. But such congressional stalemates themselves may usher in important constitutional changes, argued John F. Kowal and Wilfred U. Codrington III recently in Politico.
Constitutional amendments tend to come in waves and "typically have followed periods of deep division and gridlock like ours," wrote Kowal and Codrington, who authored a book on the topic. "In fact, history suggests that periods of extreme political polarization, when the normal channels of legal change are blocked off due to partisan gridlock and regional divides, can usher in periods of constitutional reform to get the political system functioning again."
People Power. Election law expert Richard Hasen's law review article warning that partisans in state legislatures, election offices and even the Supreme Court may usurp voters' choices in 2024 was plenty sobering.
But Hasen's article also emphasized that voters have a way of having the last word. He noted that public pushback helped defeat some of the worst elements of recent state-level voting restrictions, and that organizing and political action "will be needed to reinforce rule-of-law norms in elections." He also suggested "preparing for mass, peaceful protests in the event of attempts to subvert fair election outcomes."
Hasen's article prompted yet another flurry of articles on democracy's possible collapse. But Hasen's analysis spoke not just of gloom, but also hope. Democracy will be stronger if the hopeful side of the story gets out as well.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.