“Save Democracy!” an election-season yard sign in my neighborhood proclaims. I am not sure how effective it will be. I doubt many are motivated to go to the polls in November to save democracy. The economy has priority in our politics. But the sign speaks to an anxiety, and a reasonable one, that under a regime that traffics in conspiracy, crazy, and cosplay coups the very assumptions of the democratic system are under threat.
Between now and the midterms Civic Fields is going to focus on the question Why would we want to save democracy in the first place? It may seem like a silly question, but it’s not. There are billions of people in the world for whom democracy is less important than safety, shelter, and a sure-fire job, and there are millions in the United States for whom this is also true. It’s not that democracy is a luxury item. It’s certainly not. It’s that its value is something that cannot be assumed or taken for granted. The value of democracy has to be measured, expressed, articulated, and re-examined.
To think about why we would want to save democracy I am going to start with the work of the late political scientist Russell Hardin. Hardin spent his career asking questions about how it is that citizens come to put their trust in democratic governments and support democracies. In other words, why would people want to live in democracies?
In his book Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy (1999), Hardin argues that people want to live in democracies because of “mutual advantage.” By “mutual advantage” he means that people come to believe it is to their own advantage to be a member of a democracy rather than, say, a monarchy, an oligarchy, or an authoritarian regime. In essence, people conclude: Democracy works best for me . . . and you.
Hardin admits that democracy does not always work best for everyone. Some people or groups of people may find themselves disadvantaged by a democratic order.
On the one hand, we can think of would-be oppressors—greedy ultra-rich men, racists, power-hungry patriarchs, etc. Ideally they should and would not benefit from a strongly democratic order. Typically, therefore, they will not want to live in an effective democracy.
On the other hand, by contrast, we can think of oppressed or subordinated people—marginalized “others”—who should matter in a democratic society but historically haven’t. Persistent subordination may lead these people to conclude that democracy is not best suited to their advantage.
Nevertheless, Hardin believes that in the long run democracy is better for the advantage of most everyone, including the oppressed, than any other governing option. “Save Democracy!” means “Save a political system that works better for us than any other system could.” Democracy is to our mutual advantage.
Hardin’s “mutual advantage” justification for democracy is rooted in an ethic of self-interest. It does not have to appeal to high-minded ideals to make democracy make moral sense. He says, in essence, democracy works best for most people most of the time.
What I like about Hardin’s case for liberal democracy is that it stays close to the actual political ground that most people live in each day. Other moral defenders of liberal democracy, by contrast, have tried to build a case based on ideals of justice: Justice demands democracy! But the problem with a justice-based defense of democracy is that injustice has always been a part of actually existing democratic societies. In truth, democracies remedy some injustices but they have historically supported other forms of injustice. Appeals to justice in a moral defense of democracy are therefore quite vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy—persistent oppression can cause oppressed people to criticize the “tyranny of the majority.” Democracy itself becomes the problem.
Other moral defenders of democracy have appealed instead to quasi-utilitarian reasons. Democracy, they argue, is the best system possible for maximizing social welfare (where “social welfare” is understood economically as standard of living). Those who link democracy to capitalism often suggest as much, as do those who argue for democratic socialism. Both make the end of social welfare their ultimate moral justification for democracy.
If defenses of democracy in the name of justice are vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy, the quasi-utilitarian approach is vulnerable to claims that other governing systems are better at providing for the economic welfare of a population. Indeed, this is a case that non-democratic regimes have made over and over, be they forms of party-controlled capitalism (China), authoritarian guardianships, or technocracies (including now the AI optimists dream of a world where the machines will do all the work and governing for us).
Hardin’s moral defense of democracy is less vulnerable than both justice-based and welfare-based defenses of democracy. He is not arguing that democracy is always just, nor is he arguing that it always produces the highest level of social welfare. Rather, he is arguing that in the long run democracy produces “advantages” for its members that outweigh its disadvantages, and that both the advantages and disadvantages can be “mutual” or traded back and forth. This he thinks is a unique feature of democracy.
What are those advantages? I wish Hardin had said more about this. But one of them is the opportunity to address injustices through a political process. Another is to address inequities or imbalances in social welfare through the same political processes (“It’s the economy, stupid!”). Hardin also suggests that democracy affords individual pursuits in ways that feel satisfying to individuals—for example, freedom of religion, or freedom to choose a romantic partner, or how many children to have.
I think Hardin captures very well why most Americans right now do indeed want to “Save Democracy.” It’s why at the end of the day I like Hardin’s work much better than, for example, that of the famous political theorist John Rawls (who would have us reason behind a “veil of ignorance”) or that of Jürgen Habermas (who would have us, like children, first be rule-followers). Hardin says that the best case for democracy is that it better serves our basic political needs: needs for justice, needs for welfare, needs for individual expression.
Nevertheless, Hardin’s is a thin moral case for democracy because it does not presuppose a strong theory of justice or, crucially, any concept of human welfare or flourishing. It simply says that democracy works better for everybody than any other system when it comes to the opportunity for individual expression and to redress perceived social injustices or discrepancies in social welfare.
This makes Hardin’s moral defense of democracy quite vulnerable to real-world forces. He seems partly aware of this, but is dismissive. His book came out quite some time ago, in 1999, and it communicates some of the “end of history” arrogance of that age. Of course liberal democracy is the best of all possible worlds, it seems to say.
The last decade has upended all of that, and the vulnerabilities of Hardin’s thin moral defense of democracy are more apparent. Two great weaknesses stand out in 2026.
Hardin does not take seriously the fact that humans themselves are morally thick animals. The question is whether a thin moral justification for a political system can withstand morally thick desires and claims. While the culture wars are mostly fluff—the vaporous fuel of demagogues—beneath them is a human reality: we, more than other animals, willingly take actions, even hugely sacrificial actions, for moral reasons. Hardin’s “democracy” can only treat this moral fact about humans as a problem for the state to deal with.
Hardin does not take seriously enough the existential stakes of politics. He talks quite a bit about the great 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but he does not take the basic Hobbesian problem of survival seriously enough. The question in 2026 is whether or not democracy is capable of serving the interests of human survival in its various forms—the survival of ways of life, the survival of whole cultures and civilizations, and the survival of the human species itself.
I think there is a better and thicker moral justification for democracy than Hardin’s “mutual advantage” argument. Like his, it does not rely fundamentally on a theory of justice or on maximizing human welfare (economically understood). Rather, it is centered on a different kind of human welfare: the exercise of human capacities and virtues.
As daunting as it feels to me, between now and the November election I am going to attempt here on the pages of Civic Fields a thicker moral defense of democracy based on the exercise of human capacities and virtues.
Thanks for reading thus far. This week I’ll end with a question for you: “Save Democracy!” Why exactly?