In 2021, the US was designated a backsliding democracy for the first time in International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy Report. In 2026, Gothenburg’s V-DEM Institute concurred, calling backsliding in the US “unprecedented.” Both organizations associate backsliding mainly with institutional breakdowns, yet the erosion of democracy lies also within the citizenry. Among US citizens, confidence in government is in decline, as is our trust in one another. We are increasingly inclined to believe the worst about perceived political opponents. In fact, the US appears to be unique among 25 countries in that most of us regard our fellow citizens as immoral. Recent polling shows that a significant number of citizens across the partisan spectrum believe the country would be improved if their political opponents “just died.”
Meanwhile, a majority of citizens say they want a more civil democracy. Yet we lay the blame for toxicity nearly exclusively with our political rivals. We want more compromise, but mostly from the other side. We tend to see no need for our side to cooperate. What’s more, data suggest that animosity towards citizens with whom we disagree is positively correlated with political knowledge. It seems that even our desire for a better politics is contaminated by democracy’s underlying pathologies.
Surely something’s amiss. But what? There’s plenty of room for disagreement. Yet the findings suggest clearly enough that our democracy needs repair.
A puzzle emerges. Something must be done, but how shall we decide what to do? Who will determine what reparative steps to take? Given that the problem largely has to do with citizens’ distrust, we can’t simply take a vote. The result of any such referendum will likely be dismissed by the losing side as a further democratic breakdown. And for similar reasons, the reparative steps cannot simply be dictated. Democratic repair must emerge democratically. And that’s the problem. When democracy is profoundly broken, it cannot put itself back together.
We may call this the paradox of democratic repair. Some will recognize it as a cousin to the demos paradox. The latter notes that before the People can govern, there must first be a determination regarding who the People are. Yet there’s no way for that issue to be decided democratically, so it seems that all democracy rests on an initiating collective decision that violates democracy’s own conception of what makes such decisions legitimate.
The paradox of democratic repair is similarly structured. Repairing democracy calls for sustained collective effort. But when democracy is severely degraded, there’s no basis for directing and mobilizing such effort. Put bluntly: When democracy is broken, we must work together to fix it. But before we can work together, we need to decide together how democracy is broken and what steps to take. Where democracy’s brokenness involves the corrosion of civic relations among citizens, repair efforts can’t get off the ground.
Maybe the best response is to start small. After all, our problem is backsliding, not total dissolution. Perhaps, then, the first step towards democratic repair is to reduce tensions among citizens. Before we can fix democracy, we must restore a civic baseline.
This seems within reach. It takes a lot of cooperative work to sustain a flourishing democracy, but perhaps a functional democracy can be restored with modest effort. We might start by devising initiatives designed simply to achieve a minimal standard of democratic decency: citizens listening, discussing, and disagreeing without demeaning, dismissing, and degrading one another. Once that baseline is restored, the paradox of democratic repair is eased. Progress could be made towards determining larger repair efforts.
This line of thinking is understandably popular among those working to fix democracy. Colleges and universities, nonprofits and NGOs, corporations, state governments, and even the United Nations have committed to improving democratic relations among citizens. A sizable industry has emerged offering training for better citizenship. Typically, these efforts deploy the term “civility” to capture their aim of rebuilding decent democratic habits. These habits are frequently construed along the lines suggested above: more listening, greater mutual understanding, less aggression and demonization, enhanced effort to find common ground, and a greater willingness to accept democratic losses.
There’s some reason for optimism. When these interventions go well, they can reduce hostility, enhance understanding, and change minds. However, not everything is sweetness and light. Civility initiatives can also leave participants more assured of their antecedent negative attitudes toward their opponents and less inclined to participate in politics. Some research shows that even when interventions succeed at turning down the temperature on our political divides, they do not significantly reduce participants’ willingness to deploy anti-democratic means to achieve their political ends.
Unsurprisingly, the results are mixed. Yet the task of figuring out what precisely to make of the findings is complicated by a sampling concern. Our understanding of the impact of these efforts draws mainly from experiments involving voluntary participants. That is, these data capture the impacts of civility efforts on citizens who already embrace the aim of rebuilding civic relations. Citizens most firmly in the grip of the dysfunctions that the interventions are meant to address are also the least likely to participate.
So it’s not yet clear what to think about the civility initiatives. Perhaps more experimentation will clarify these matters. However, an additional complication looms. Lurking within many restorative initiatives is a line of reasoning that is unreliable.
In my recent book and an article co-authored with Scott Aikin, I have discussed what I call the curative fallacy. Roughly, this is the error of presuming that measures that would have prevented a bad outcome from arising can be applied as a curative after the bad outcome has occurred.
The curative fallacy is common in prescriptive reasoning. To be clear, sometimes the preventative is a reliable guide to the curative. For example, imagine that Abby’s high sodium intake has caused an unhealthy rise in blood pressure. Typically, a subsequent reduction of sodium in her diet can restore it to a healthy level. But not all problems are like that. To see this, consider two additional examples. While it may be true that had Bill not been a chain-smoker for the past 20 years, he would not now have lung cancer, it does not follow that quitting smoking now will treat his cancer. Quitting smoking is advisable, but it’s surely not cancer treatment. Next, suppose that had Cara been engaged in routine exercise for the past decade, she would not now have a heart disease. We should not conclude that Cara should start jogging. Indeed, in contrast with Bill, Cara definitely shouldn’t engage in the behavior that would have prevented her heart disease.
It turns out that preventative and curative measures can be related in varied ways. Often it’s difficult to know, exactly, what kind of case one is dealing with. So the curative fallacy lies with the presumption that a given case is structured like Abby’s high blood pressure.
Much of our thinking about fixing democracy is caught up in the curative fallacy. We see that democracy is faltering at least partly because citizens have adopted habits of animosity, incivility, and distrustfulness. We next note that had they never embraced those habits, our democracy would not now face its difficulties. We then draw the prescriptive conclusion that we must devise occasions where citizens can interact in the ways they should have been interacting all along. Yet we really don’t know whether the troubles we face are structured like Abby’s, Bill’s, or Cara’s (importantly, there are additional kinds of cases). We’ve seen that sometimes the preventative can succeed as a curative, but it can also be inert or even counterproductive. And when we turn our attention away from simplified examples and towards complex social phenomena, it only becomes more difficult to discern the structure of the problems we’re attempting to address. The matter of restoring a civic baseline seems no less vexed than that of initiating large-scale democratic repair.
In thinking about how to respond to current political dysfunctions, we encountered the paradox of democratic repair. That led us to consider the piecemeal approach of restoring a civic baseline before trying to fix democracy. New troubles associated with the curative fallacy then emerged.
Can democracy be fixed? I don’t know. This is a dispiriting result. But a slightly less bleak upshot is available. We might resolve to see democracy’s future as bound up with our capacity to give up on the project of returning it to some prior, healthier condition, and instead direct our energies towards imagining it anew.
Editor’s note: This is an extra edition of the Perspectives on Democracy series for October 2026.
Robert Talisse
Robert B. Talisse is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, where he has taught since 2001. A native of New Jersey, Talisse earned his PhD in Philosophy at CUNY in 2001. He specializes in political philosophy, democratic theory, and political epistemology.
