How to bring democracy home

How we speak about the threat matters.

Many political scientists have been voicing their concerns about the telltale signs they’re seeing of democratic decline, from chilling limits on speech, to attacks on law firms and universities, to failures of the legislative and judiciary branches to counterbalance executive overreach, which some are calling a constitutional crisis.

At the FrameWorks Institute, we conduct research on how culture shapes the way people perceive the world. In recent studies, we’ve been exploring what Americans think about the state of our democracy and whether they’re feeling a change. They are, but they don’t always connect what they’re experiencing to the idea of a declining democracy.

In our focus groups, terms such as “civil society,” “competitive authoritarianism,” and “executive overreach” are not on people’s radars. Instead, people speak about their daily experiences: They talk about how things are moving too fast, voice a deep sense of uncertainty, and express a palpable apprehension about how this whiplash could affect their wallets.

We are not the only ones finding that Americans are feeling this sense of unease. A recent New York Times/Sienna poll found that 66% of Americans feel the country is in a “chaotic” state, and 59% say it's downright “scary.”

Focus groups we conducted revealed three major obstacles to communicating about democracy in this moment:

• First, people tend to equate the whole of government with the people in charge.

  People do not talk about systems, laws, or institutions. They focus on individuals in power. If people are dissatisfied with what is going on in government, they see a singular solution: use elections to get the “bad guys” out and better ones in. This makes it difficult to talk about how our nation’s institutions are currently under threat and failing to function in ways that uphold our democracy—and what needs to be done to address that.

• Next, people think democracy is simply whatever the United States does.

  This understanding—combined with a sense of American exceptionalism—makes it impossible to contemplate the idea that what’s happening here isn’t actually democratic or that there’s anything we need to or could do to strengthen our democracy.

• Finally, concepts such as democracy and authoritarianism are abstract and unrelatable.

  People don’t have a deep understanding of these concepts, and, without careful framing, the terms can come across as vague or disconnected from people’s everyday lives. Endlessly repeating them without more context or explanation doesn’t help.

How to break through in a way that hits home

So, what can we do to communicate about those abstract ideas at a time when the slide toward authoritarianism is real and right in front of us? To start, we need to speak to something that surfaced in the focus groups again and again, across party lines: feelings of uncertainty, powerlessness, and being at the whim of others. But don’t stop there.

• Mirror these concerns

  Affirm and acknowledge those feelings of chaos and uncertainty. We all feel them.

• Link the chaos people are feeling to decisions being made and the way they are being made

  We need to make it clear that the fear people are experiencing is the direct result of arbitrary and unilateral executive decisions. The effects of executive overreach are not theoretical, so why make them sound that way? Connect action with outcomes. And repeat.

• Connect feelings of financial precarity to the erosion of the rule of law

  For example, when discussing the effect of tariffs on how much things cost, we need to be clear that tariffs aren’t some force of nature but rather the result of decisions the president made.

Getting a sense right now of how people are seeing the state of our democracy is complicated because most Americans can still vote and speak their minds, which is how people understand and define democracy. From this view, most people don’t connect the changes they’re feeling with the degradation of our democracy.

To build public understanding of and resistance to democratic backsliding, we have to speak to what people feel in their everyday lives. When having these conversations, affirm people’s concerns, confirm that you share them, and give them a way of connecting these experiences to what’s happening in government right now.

Nat Kendall-Taylor is a psychological anthropologist and chief executive of The FrameWorks Institute.

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