‘Saving American democracy’ sounds nice. But what does that actually mean?

The last time you heard the phrase “saving American democracy,” it’s fairly certain you were listening to a political leader insisting on how important it was to vote for them in the next election.
Outside of this partisan glare, it’s not always clear what exactly “saving democracy” means — sounding a bit abstract, akin to “fighting for love” or “empowering people.” That all sounds good. But what does that actually look like, especially in today’s trembling American republic?
When a sports team struggles, a good coach says “time to get back to the fundamentals.” When you hear national leaders in preserving democracy talk, that’s kind of what they sound like. Take Melody Barnes, executive director at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, who describes democracy in a recent interview with Deseret News as a “living breathing organism.”
Like any living thing, democracy depends on an interplay of many factors to sustain it, she explains, rather than only one thing. For good human health, that’s good nutrition, sleep and physical activity. For good football, that’s solid tackling, excellent ball control, and limited turnovers. What are the fundamentals that a healthy democracy depends on?
UVA is a good place to find out, since U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe presided over the laying of its cornerstones in 1817. “I don’t have to explain to anyone why we’re doing this work here,” Barnes says. Another major player in democracy scholarship, Vanderbilt’s Project on Unity and American Democracy, is housed in a Nashville community that served as both a source of unity after the Civil War and nearly a century later, an incubator for the civil rights movement.
Barnes describes “big pillars” of democracy as including cultural norms, responsive and effective democratic institutions and accessible, reliable information. John Geer, director of the Vanderbilt project, emphasizes nurturing a public discourse grounded in evidence rather than ideology alone, while strengthening unity around democratic ideals.
“I wake up every day and I’m deeply fearful,” Barnes admits. “We’re watching before our very eyes the signs of a democracy that is struggling.”
“At the same time,” she adds, “I get up every day excited to do this work,” alongside many others at Karsh who are “deeply committed” to the work of strengthening democracy — all of whom believe they have the “the opportunity to make a significant difference.”
The work of preserving and strengthening democratic institutions obviously includes many other civic organizations that support individual citizens. According to these experts, the effort to preserve democracy moves forward on at least three concrete fronts:
It was Thomas Jefferson who wrote repeatedly about how crucial an “informed citizenry” was to a “dynamic democracy” — stating that “a well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny.”
Yet in the U.S. today, the Vanderbilt project writes with concern about “rhetorical jousting matches, whether in 280-character tweets or split screen soundbites,” which “elicit emotional outrage” and “elevate platitudes of polarization above informed discourse.”
Geer shares his concern at how many political actors today are “untethered by evidence” — where candidates “make stuff up” in a media ecosystem waning in its desire to hold them accountable. “The country has become disconnected from evidence and reason,” the project website states.
If the voters don’t hold leaders accountable for departures from reality, Geer says, the lesson becomes: “you don’t have to stick to the truth.”
Barnes points out 2.5 newspapers were lost every week in 2023 across local U.S. communities, leading to 200 counties in the nation that are “news deserts.”
“If people don’t have access to good, reliable information,” she adds, “they will rely on their Facebook feed” — highlighting the importance of good, reliable journalism for democracy. The Karsh Institute has been working on an effort to map the “media ecosystem” in Virginia, appraising everything from newsletters to large media outlets, in a way that can inform efforts to strengthen that network over time.
In previous eras of American life, there wasn’t abundant data to check deceptive claims made by leaders, Geer notes. Yet even in the face of reams of data in our day, “partisan warfare has supplanted evidence-based problem-solving in our public life,” the institute continues,” asserting that “the engines of perpetual conflict are overwhelming the classic work of politics: the mediation of differences.”
Compared with enormous efforts invested in the preservation of our fragile physical habitats, far less attention goes to our civic ecosystem — ranging from the strength of our democratic institutions (“which are made up of humans” Barnes reminds people) and our willingness to engage with fellow citizens across differences.
“America has been perennially shaped by argument and by divisions,” emphasizes the Vanderbilt center. “Disagreement, after all, is the oxygen of democracy.” Yet Americans today, Geer says, hold such “radically different views, not just about politics but of reality itself.”
More than that, both experts emphasize the consequences of our failure to navigate political differences skillfully, and “in a way that doesn’t undermine and further fracture our society,” Barnes says.
The Karsh Institute has been investing more in student opportunities to learn “engaged dialogue,” including through fellowships to different students. They also host a Democracy 360 conference every two years, with the next one being planned for 2025.
James Lambert, provost at Southern Virginia University, describes a flurry of efforts at their own school to proactively nurture more peacemaking on campus — connected to an observation that younger students were coming into the university with “such bad experience wading into difficult topics” in the public square, that it left them “very hesitant to weigh in” about most anything.
In addition to creating a general education course on peacemaking in its final stages of testing, the university is having regular Braver Angels style debates and more public events focused on civic discourse.
“We don’t want people to agree,” Geer underscores. “If we disagree on whatever subject that is, that clash actually generates better outcomes.” If any of us look back at the most influential persons in our lives, the professor suggests, “it wasn’t the person who said ‘you’re brilliant, don’t change anything.’”
“It was that person who took you to task, to say you’re just not doing as well as you could, and who proceeded to tell you all the problems that were wrong. It wasn’t fun to hear that, but guess what? It made you better.”
Any given idea needs to be “put into a zone of criticism” in order to “push it around and make it better, because then you’re going to be able to think through the arguments,” Geer says.
“That’s what democracy does at its best.”
In order for democratic institutions to function effectively, they need to be “trusted,” Barnes adds, while staying “consistent with core democratic principles like rule of law and pluralism.”
“In a democracy, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose,” Barnes says, but you can still trust that “your voice has been heard in a way you believe in.”
But why would you want to maintain healthy pluralism involving relationships with those who disagree with you so much?
Geer references former Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, who responded to being asked why he was willing to work with the other side by saying, “Well, you know, they might be right.”
“As shown over our country’s history, no one ideology — whether liberal or conservative, populist or nationalist, progressive or puritan — has all the answers.”
“In a time of tension, it is more important than ever to unite this country,” President John F. Kennedy said at Vanderbilt University in 1963. “So that all of our people will be one.”
This isn’t a simple unity of agreeing on policy, Geer clarifies, as much as reinforcing a shared commitment across the fabric of American society around the “rules of the game” in American institutions —aiming, as Vanderbilt says, to “shine light on what binds Americans together allowing it to illuminate the path toward that more perfect union.”
We live in a time, of course, where leaders on both sides of the political spectrum see the other party’s policy agenda as a danger to democracy. Geer and his graduate students launched in 2022 a “unity index” bringing together five reliable measures tracked since 1981 — including Presidential approval ratings, surveys of ideological extremism, social trust measured by the General Social Survey, Congressional polarization (based on roll call votes), and polling questions about protests and civil unrest.
In the 40 years of work retrospectively reviewing these data points, these researchers found an “all time low” in national unity during the Trump administration, followed by a moderate stabilizing of unity in recent years. More recently, they’ve found evidence that citizens resist the same political extremes evident in Congress.
None of this will stop these institutions, or the many other organizations and individuals working to preserve and protect American democracy. The signs of danger appear to be motivating them to fight even more.