Perhaps the only thing that Americans, left, right and center, can agree on these days is the belief that democracy faces an existential threat in our time. We hear such dire warnings from politicians and political figures of all political persuasions. It has become a clarion call in both major political parties that support for their candidate is necessary to “save democracy.”
And while we don’t yet know the motive of former President Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, chances seem pretty good that we will soon be adding his assassination attempt to an ongoing list of political violence, such as the storming of the Capitol, inspired by the belief that democracy is under direct attack.
The tragic irony of all of this is that this existential dread demonstrates a distrust of democracy, a lack of faith in the American system and a departure from critical aspects of what democracy actually is. Because democracy isn’t just filling out a ballot; democracy involves a broader application of civic virtue and civic trust. It is an ongoing process of debate, deliberation, searching out the issues, developing convictions, and finding and supporting candidates that reflect such convictions.
When we allow our democratic participation to be subverted by existential dread, we stop debating, we stop deliberating, we come to care very little about the issues and we develop no core convictions beyond what we fear. When we come to think that any given candidate is a direct threat to our way of life, we stop vetting the alternative and cease to concern ourselves with questions of representation. We may believe that we’re trying to save democracy by setting aside all other concerns to defeat some terrible political foe, but in so doing, we have killed democracy in our hearts because we have ceased to engage in the democratic process as a democratic process.
And, even more crucially, when we come to believe that the future of America rests upon a single election, we surrender a fundamental article of faith in the American Republic: that no victory and no defeat is permanent. The surety that there will always be another election, that there can always be another appeal to the people, and that no electoral result is final is, at the end of the day, what keeps us trusting ballots over bullets. The peaceful transfer of power relies exclusively on our belief that there will always be another opportunity for that transfer of power.
The only way to save democracy is to believe in democracy, to believe in a process where we engage as diligently as possible in favor of what we believe, not what we fear, and then to cultivate grace and humility in both victory and defeat, remembering that our form of democracy is an ongoing debate with no permanent winners or losers.
We can only lose democracy if we give up on it and relinquish our trust in it. The democratic spirit of America does not live or die at the ballot box. It does not hang in the balance of a single election. It cannot be destroyed by any single political figure. The spirit of American democracy resides in and endures through where it always has: the hearts and minds of its people.
Justin Stapley is a political theorist and constitutional scholar. He is the state director of the Utah Reagan Caucus and Executive Director of The Freemen Foundation. He currently studies Constitutional Governance, Civics, and Law as a graduate student at Utah Valley University.