A DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACY: LIBERALISM AND THE CRISIS OF AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURE

One of my earliest childhood memories is of staying up late with my father on a school night in the autumn of 1992, watching the presidential election unfold. I was six, nearly seven, and although much of the campaign has faded from memory, a handful of images and moments have remained remarkably clear. Bill Clinton playing the tenor sax on the Arsenio Hall Show, an appearance that presented a presidential candidate in a setting far removed from the usual rituals of American political life. Watching re-runs of George H.W. Bush from 1988, asking his fellow Americans to “read my lips...” that there would be “…no new taxes”. The charts and infomercials of billionaire businessman Ross Perot lamenting the national debt and deficit. And Vice President Dan Quayle miscorrecting a child about the spelling of potato, an event which would enter the national political folklore and something my mother would jokingly quote on occasion over the next forty odd years, turning a fleeting campaign embarrassment into a small, recurring joke in our family.

Looking back, those fragments offer more than a child's recollection of an election. They capture a political era before the rise of the internet and social media, in which television personalities, economic anxieties, campaign promises, and public gaffes all competed for the attention of an electorate deciding who should lead the country. Personally however, something which didn’t occur to me until much, much later in life, was that as closely as my parents had followed American politics over the years, no one in my household on that fall evening could vote.

My father immigrated to the United States from West Africa three or four years prior and would not become a citizen for another sixteen years. Like many of the hundreds of thousands immigrants to the U.S., my parents had decided to leave our home country for economic opportunity elsewhere. Their decision, however, also reflected a deeper concern about their home country's political trajectory and the deterioration of its social fabric after independence. At home, political instability, corruption, and authoritarian rule was steadily weakening public institutions and undermining the conditions necessary for a stable democratic society. As a college student in the 1970s, my father was involved in student protests against what was widely seen as a corrupt and self-interested government already engaged in various forms of political repression; shutting-down media/press outlets and violence against the political opposition. As he describes it now, my father believed events had come to a head when after a major nationwide protest and boycott, students were violently beaten and a gun was pointed at him by government-backed thugs ordered to clear demonstrations. Not long after the country would descend into an effective one-party state where dissent was criminalized and political participation required the consent of the government. By the time my parents and I were in the U.S. watching Bill Clinton win the 1992 election, our home country was embroiled in a civil war which would last over a decade.

For many immigrant families like ours, the United States represents more than economic opportunity. It offers the possibility of living in a political system where disagreements do not end in violence, where government officials remain subject to legal constraints, and where citizens can challenge those in power without placing their safety at risk. The contrast between this promise and their experiences “back home” shaped how I came to understand American democracy. This contrast is steadily disappearing. Over the last ten years, there have been recognizable parallels between the forces that weakened my home country's political institutions, and developments in the United States under both Trump administrations. Circumstances differ considerably and the United States retains the institutional safeguards of an established tradition of competitive elections and a civil society capable of resisting abuses of power. Yet when a government loses the capacity to serve its public fairly and when citizens come to regard public institutions as instruments of partisan power, the foundations of democratic government begin to weaken and lose legitimacy. Understanding what liberalism stands for, why its principles matter, and how they protect people against arbitrary power is therefore essential to understanding what Americans stand to lose when these principles come under attack.

Liberalism begins with the simple but demanding proposition that every person possesses a moral worth that no government, political movement, or leader can usurp. From this premise, liberal societies derive their commitment to individual liberty, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, and open political competition. These principles place boundaries around political power. They deny the state an unlimited claim over the lives of its citizens and reject the notion that any ruler can demand obedience merely because the ruler commands the machinery of government. Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty illuminates this proposition ^[1]. Negative liberty protects the space in which individuals can think, speak, associate, and act without coercive interference, while positive liberty concerns the capacity to direct one’s own life. Together, these ideas expose a central question in political life: how can a society exercise collective authority without turning the individual into an instrument of the state? The answer requires more than elections and written guarantees.

Liberalism establishes rules through which people with conflicting beliefs can share a political community without surrendering their independence. A religious minority can reject the convictions of the majority; a journalist can investigate officials who would prefer silence; an opposition party can challenge the government and seek power through lawful means. These activities create friction, sometimes fierce and exhausting, but they also prevent political authority from hardening into an unquestioned command. The rule of law gives this arrangement practical force by requiring public officials to answer to standards that apply beyond their own preferences ^[2]. When a government investigates its critics, manipulates legal procedures against opponents, or treats dissent as disloyalty, it weakens the principle of rights possessed independent of political favor. Liberalism therefore asks citizens to accept the difficult discipline of  defending the rights of others with views they consider mistaken, offensive, or dangerous.

This commitment also distinguishes liberal equality from the empty promise that everyone already enjoys the same freedom. A person may possess the legal right to speak, vote, pursue an education, or seek public office, and yet poverty, discrimination, or poor schools can narrow the practical use of those rights. The distance between a right on paper and a right exercised in daily life can resemble the distance between a road marked on a map and one blocked by rubble. Liberal democracy must therefore protect individual choice while building conditions in which people can make meaningful choices. That task does not require the state to guarantee identical outcomes or erase every difference in talent or circumstance. It does require public institutions to apply rules fairly, preserve access to political participation, and resist arrangements that allow entrenched power to determine whose interests count. A society that celebrates freedom while tolerating the systematic exclusion of whole communities risks turning equality into a ceremonial phrase ^[2].

The strongest case for liberalism rests on the kind of political life it makes possible. It allows citizens to disagree without treating every dispute as a struggle for survival, to replace governments without civil conflict, and to challenge authority without first securing permission from those who hold it. These protections benefit the entire political community, including people who rarely think of themselves as liberal, because no faction can reliably control the state forever. The same legal safeguards that protect one group today may protect its opponents tomorrow. Robert Person’s argument for a renewed American grand strategy likewise points toward the importance of political principles in defining the country’s role and identity ^[3]. A liberal society gains strength when citizens understand liberty as a shared inheritance, equality as a standard for public conduct, and constitutional government as a restraint that applies even when their own side holds power. The central test comes when these commitments impose a cost. When leaders must accept an unwelcome judgment or when voters must tolerate an opponent’s victory. Liberalism earns its value in those moments when principle competes with convenience and the limits of power matter most.

A constitution can establish the architecture of a democracy, but it cannot compel a society to preserve one. Written laws define the powers of government, establish procedures for transferring authority, and protect citizens against arbitrary rule. Yet those provisions depend on ordinary citizens who accept constraints even when compliance threatens their interests. Democratic stability therefore rests on a combination of formal institutions and unwritten norms, including mutual toleration and political restraint. A majority leader in the Senate might seek to deny the sitting President a Supreme Court pick but toleration and respect for the constitutional order require more than exploiting procedural powers to secure partisan advantage. When these norms weaken, constitutional safeguards can remain intact on paper while losing their force in practice. The machinery still stands, the chambers still convene, and the courts still issue rulings, but the political culture that gave these institutions authority begins to erode. A constitution can mark the boundaries of power but only a society willing to enforce those boundaries can prevent political ambition from sweeping them aside.

Authoritarian drift seldom begins with dramatic spectacles of tanks surrounding a parliament or soldiers dragging elected officials from their offices. More often, leaders weaken accountability through a succession of actions that appear isolated, defensible, or temporary. They question the legitimacy of electoral results, portray independent journalists as enemies, pressure oversight bodies, attack judges who obstruct their objectives, and recast political opponents as threats to the nation itself. Each confrontation tests the public's tolerance for executive power, while each institutional retreat teaches ambitious leaders that they can push further next time. As these practices accumulate, conduct that once provoked public outrage becomes familiar, and conduct that once seemed unthinkable enters the ordinary vocabulary of political life. Institutions may continue to operate, yet their capacity to restrain the executive gradually diminishes. Democratic erosion advances through this process of normalization, turning exceptional behavior into routine government and converting constitutional limits into obstacles that officials expect loyal institutions to disregard.

Political culture develops through daily experience, long before a constitutional crisis forces citizens to confront its importance. Families, schools, political parties, religious communities, workplaces, news organizations, and public agencies all teach people how authority operates, whose interests government serves, and whether disagreement deserves protection or punishment. When citizens encounter corruption, unequal treatment, failing public services, or officials who answer to powerful patrons rather than the public, they may begin to regard democratic institutions as instruments of private advantage. My West African home country offers an example of how predatory governance and economic exclusion undermines the legitimacy of the state. Although its history differs substantially from that of the United States, such comparisons reveal a broader danger. Citizens who lose faith in democratic government may become more receptive to leaders who promise order through concentrated power, especially when established institutions appear unable to solve immediate problems. A durable republic must therefore accomplish two tasks simultaneously. It must restrain those who govern, and it must demonstrate through competent, impartial administration that constitutional democracy can improve people's lives without demanding their submission to a ruler.

For as much as some would like to deny, American identity has historically rested on a political commitment, not blood and soil. This distinction matters because civic nationalism defines belonging through citizenship, adherence to constitutional principles, and participation in public life. Whereas ethnic nationalism treats ancestry as a measure of national authenticity. The former invites people into a common political project, while the latter places an invisible border around the nation and asks citizens to prove they belong. The United States has never fully resolved this contradiction. Its founding language proclaimed liberty and equality while slavery, indigenous dispossession, and racial exclusion denied these principles to millions. Yet these ideals gave later generations a vocabulary with which to challenge the country’s own institutions. Reformers like Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to confront a republic that repeatedly failed to honor its stated commitments. American identity therefore carries a difficult inheritance. The country must acknowledge its historical failures without surrendering the principles that make reform possible.

A durable national identity requires more than a shared flag, a common language, or reverence for the past. Citizens must also believe that public institutions recognize their equal standing and offer a reasonable chance to participate in the nation’s economic and civic life. When conditions deteriorate, national unity turns brittle ^[4]. A worker who watches public resources flow toward politically connected interests, a family that encounters arbitrary treatment from government agencies, or a community that sees its needs disappear beneath the calculations of distant officials may begin to regard national promises as hollow rhetoric. These experiences do not automatically produce authoritarianism, and economic disadvantage does not erase civic responsibility. However, persistent exclusion can weaken the trust that democratic institutions need to function. Equity, understood as a serious effort to remove unjust barriers and widen meaningful opportunity, strengthens the foundations of equal citizenship. Shared responsibility completes this relationship: citizens must accept common obligations, while government must demonstrate that it exercises public power for the public good.

The Trump administration’s challenge to democracy is most visible in how the president treats the institutions designed to limit executive power. After the 2020 Presidential Election, when voters rejected his bid for a second consecutive term, Donald Trump continued to publicly claim the election had been stolen, despite repeated court defeats and the absence of substantive evidence ^[5]. On January 6, he addressed supporters near the White House as Congress prepared to certify the electoral vote, and fomented an insurrection, watching as a mob spurred on by his lies breached the Capitol, smashed windows, ransacked offices, and drove lawmakers into hiding ^[6]. The images exposed a constitutional crisis in physical form. Police officers struggled to control the narrow corridors, legislators fled through the building, and rioters hunted for elected officials like Vice President Mike Pence, all while the machinery of peaceful succession ground to a halt. Trump’s conduct that day, including his prolonged delay in urging the attackers to leave, raised a fundamental question about whether the president would defend constitutional process when it produced a result he refused to accept.

Another challenge to democracy was on display before the events of January 6, when Trump attempted to make public institutions serve his private political objective. In a January 2 phone call, he pressed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes,” the precise number that would have reversed his narrow defeat in the state ^[7]. Georgia officials had already conducted a hand recount and found no widespread fraud capable of changing the result. Trump nevertheless pressed Raffensperger and questioned whether he and his lawyer might face criminal consequences if they failed to act. The House committee investigating the events of January 6 later documented a broad campaign to pressure state officials, enlist the Justice Department, and submit false electoral certificates. These actions struck at the rule of law, seeking to replace established procedures with personal demands from the nation’s most powerful elected official.

Trump’s second term has intensified a constitutional crisis over executive power, as his administration pushes the presidency toward personal rule and tests how far a would-be strongman can bend democratic institutions to his will. In February 2025, Trump issued an executive order requiring independent agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission, to submit draft regulations for White House review and to align their priorities with presidential direction ^[8]. The administration presented this change as a way to make unelected officials answer to voters through the office of the president. Critics, however, warned that concentrating control over regulatory bodies can weaken the institutional independence that helps restrain political interference. In January 2026, U.S. forces entered Venezuela and seized President Nicolás Maduro, transporting him to the United States to face criminal charges ^[9]. The administration defended the operation as a law-enforcement mission, yet military force exercised in the arrest of a foreign head of state raised the larger question of how far can a president act before Congress exercises its authority over war? The Justice Department argued that Trump could order the operation without prior congressional approval, while legal experts challenged its compatibility with international law.

A president may have compelling reasons to oppose an abusive foreign government, but those reasons cannot settle every argument on the lawful use of American power. This  shadows the war with Iran, which began with joint U.S.-Israeli strikes in February 2026 ^[10]. Trump’s consideration of further attacks on deeply buried nuclear facilities illustrates how decisions with potentially enormous regional consequences can rest heavily on presidential judgment. When military action outruns meaningful public scrutiny and congressional debate, the executive branch risks turning constitutional restraint into an obstacle that it can simply explain away.

Democratic decline rarely requires the dramatic destruction of a legislature, the abolition of elections, or the suspension of a constitution ^[11]. Political leaders can hollow out a democracy while leaving its familiar structures in place. They can weaken oversight, intimidate independent institutions, portray political opponents as enemies of the nation, and teach their supporters to regard legal restraints as obstacles to a righteous cause. Each act may appear manageable when viewed in isolation. Together, however, these actions can alter the character of a political system, transforming institutions that once constrained power into instruments that help concentrate it. The danger lies partly in the gradual nature of this process. Citizens may continue to see courts, legislatures, and election offices operating around them even as those institutions lose their independence and their capacity to hold powerful officials accountable.

Political norms provide the unwritten rules that allow constitutional government to function beyond the narrow language of statutes and judicial decisions. Mutual toleration requires political factions to recognize their opponents as legitimate participants in public life, even when they consider their opponents' policies misguided or dangerous. Institutional restraint asks leaders to distinguish between powers they can legally exercise and powers they should exercise without undermining the republic's long-term stability. These norms impose costs, particularly when political competition rewards aggression and punishes compromise. A leader may gain an immediate advantage by attacking a judge, discrediting an election official, or pressuring a public agency to serve partisan objectives. The institutional damage can persist long after that leader leaves office. Once political actors discover that they can violate established expectations without suffering meaningful consequences, they may repeat the behavior, while their opponents may eventually abandon restraint in response. The resulting cycle erodes public confidence and changes the incentives that govern political conduct. Over time, the extraordinary becomes routine, accountability begins to look like persecution, and loyalty to a leader can displace loyalty to the constitutional order ^[12].

These political habits develop through social experience, long before citizens cast their first ballots or assume positions of public authority. Families, schools, political parties, religious communities, workplaces, civic organizations, and news media all shape how people understand power, obligation, citizenship, and disagreement. A society that teaches citizens to regard public office as a means of private enrichment will struggle to sustain impartial government. A society that rewards patronage, excuses corruption among political allies, and treats state institutions as spoils for the victorious faction can gradually weaken the distinction between public service and personal advantage. My birth country offers a sobering illustration of how these forces can interact. For decades, patronage, corruption, economic exclusion, and weak state institutions contributed to widespread alienation, particularly among young people who saw few reliable routes to security or advancement. In such circumstances, government can become a distant apparatus that extracts loyalty and resources while offering little protection or opportunity in return. These conditions did not, by themselves, make civil war inevitable, and no single explanation can account for conflict. They nevertheless help explain how political institutions lose legitimacy when citizens experience them as instruments of elite survival rather than as common structures of public life.

The lesson for the United States demands neither a simplistic comparison nor the comforting assumption that American institutions possess some permanent immunity to decay. Different histories produce different political crises, but democratic systems share a fundamental vulnerability. Citizens must believe that public institutions serve a legitimate purpose, and those institutions must demonstrate that belief through their conduct. Liberalism provides the principles that should guide this relationship, recognizing individual liberty, the rule of law, the equal moral worth of every person, and open political processes that allow citizens to challenge authority without fear of arbitrary punishment. When government applies laws selectively or tolerates corruption or allows powerful interests to escape accountability, the distance between constitutional promise and daily experience grows. That distance creates an opening for political movements that offer belonging, certainty, and decisive leadership while directing public anger toward convenient enemies. Competent administration alone cannot secure liberty since an efficient state can also impose arbitrary rule. But constitutional safeguards lose public support when democracy repeatedly fails to deliver fair treatment or meaningful opportunity. A durable republic must therefore cultivate both institutional restraint and public competence. Its citizens must reject the idea that victory grants unlimited authority, while its leaders must show that a lawful government can improve ordinary lives without demanding personal submission in return. A constitution can describe the republic that a people intend to govern. Only their conduct, repeated across generations and tested under pressure, can keep that republic alive.