Everyone talks about democracy now. Politicians invoke it in every speech. Philanthropists fund initiatives to defend it. Scholars write books diagnosing its decline. But no one seems able to explain what democracy actually means anymore, or why defending it should matter to people whose daily experience suggests it stopped working for them decades ago. We have created a democracy of endurance rather than autonomy, a system that asks citizens to believe in their power while systematically denying them the material stability that makes power meaningful. This is the root cause of our political discontent. When people cannot influence the economic forces that determine whether they have security, they become susceptible to anyone who promises to fight for them, even if that fight is misdirected at the wrong enemies.
Consider Sarah, a registered nurse in Ohio who works three 12-hour shifts at a hospital, then picks up Friday shifts at an urgent care clinic because her wages have not kept pace with her city's cost of living. Last month, her floor went from six nurses to four while patient count stayed at 32. Her health insurance is tied to her employer, which means she cannot quit even as working conditions deteriorate. The math that constrains her life: $1,400 a month for rent, $1,200 for childcare, take-home pay of $3,800. She has saved $8,000 over four years, but a house in her school district requires $60,000 down, which means she is 15 years away from affording a home in the community where she works. She votes in every election, calls her representatives, attends town halls when her schedule permits. Nothing changes. The politicians who promise to fix healthcare never reach her floor, her shift, her patients. When people talk to her about defending democracy, she wonders what exactly they think they are defending.
The economic security that makes political equality real rather than theoretical has been destroyed deliberately over 50 years.
This represents a profound inversion of democracy's original promise. The founders did not conceive of citizenship as something separate from material stability. They understood political equality to require economic autonomy. Not wealth, but independence. Thomas Jefferson imagined a republic of small farmers and artisans, people who owned their tools and their time, who could participate in civic life precisely because they were not dependent on anyone else's permission to survive. James Madison wrote that a republic required citizens who were neither desperate nor dependent, because desperation and dependency make free political participation impossible. If your survival depends on pleasing someone who holds power over you, you cannot freely engage in self-governance. This was the practical foundation of their entire political project. The vision was not egalitarian by our standards. Women, enslaved people, Indigenous nations, anyone without property were all excluded. But the principle underneath contained an insight we have lost: Democracy is not simply procedures for selecting leaders. It is a lived experience of independence that rests on material foundations. When those foundations erode, the procedures become hollow.
We preserved the procedures and expanded them, which represents genuine victories. We universalized suffrage, expanded civil rights, enshrined equality under law. But while we were expanding who could participate, we were simultaneously demolishing the material basis that makes participation meaningful. We achieved universal political equality at precisely the moment when we made economic autonomy nearly impossible for most citizens. The result: Everyone can vote but almost no one feels powerful, rights are universal but agency is scarce, citizens are technically free but structurally dependent on forces they cannot control. This is not the democracy that was promised. It is a performance that asks citizens to believe in their power while the actual decisions that shape their lives are made by forces operating beyond the reach of their vote.
Understanding how we arrived here requires seeing how three transformations compounded one another, each making the next inevitable. The first was the shift from civic independence to wage dependence between 1870 and 1920. In 1900, the average factory worker earned $12.98 per week while Andrew Carnegie's steel profits hit $40 million. This was not just inequality. It was a fundamental alteration of the material basis of citizenship. The founders' citizens owned their means of production. Industrial citizens sold their labor and depended on wages, which meant they depended on employers for survival. Economic liberalism reframed this dependency as freedom. Figures like William Graham Sumner declared the market to be the ultimate democratic institution. Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" portrayed industrial capitalism as natural selection perfected. The market became the site of liberty. Wage labor was recast as the pursuit of happiness. But something crucial was lost. The question was no longer whether citizens had independence. It became whether they had access to jobs. Freedom became employment. Security became a paycheck. And when the economy contracted or industries collapsed, citizens discovered their freedom was conditional, contingent, revocable.
Consider Flint, Michigan in the late 1970s. General Motors employed 80,000 workers. Union wages averaged $28 per hour with full benefits and pensions. Auto workers bought homes, raised families, sent their kids to college. They volunteered at schools, coached Little League, attended town meetings, believed the system was working for them. Then in 1986, GM began closing plants. By 1999, 30,000 jobs had disappeared. The Fisher Body Plant sat empty for 20 years before demolition in 2021. The high school's graduating class went from 450 students in 1978 to 180 in 2008. Workers like Tom, who had spent 30 years at Buick City, found themselves at 53 when the plant closed, too young for full pension, too old to retrain. He worked security for $11 an hour until qualifying for early Social Security at 62, collecting $1,100 a month. The procedures of democracy continued. People could still vote, still petition their government. But their actual power to shape their lives had collapsed. They learned that decisions made in distant boardrooms could destroy everything they had built, and their democratic participation could not prevent it.
The second transformation was the conversion of citizens into consumers during post-war affluence. The 1944 GI Bill provided college funding and guaranteed home loans with zero down payment. This was the closest America came to delivering on democracy's material promise for a broad swath of its population, though subsidized by exclusion. The Federal Housing Administration's 1938 Underwriting Manual explicitly recommended against insuring mortgages in Black neighborhoods, creating the redlining that built white middle-class wealth while denying it to Black families. But even for those who benefited, something fundamental shifted. Civic identity gave way to consumer identity. Participation in democracy became less important than participation in markets. The pursuit of happiness became something you could purchase. Milton Friedman's 1962 Capitalism and Freedom recast the New Deal's social citizenship as government overreach. The 1971 Powell Memorandum laid out a strategy for corporate America to reassert political control. Democracy became a lifestyle choice, a matter of consumer confidence. When the consumer economy stopped delivering, people did not lose faith in capitalism. They lost faith in democracy, because democracy had become synonymous with the promise that you could buy your way to independence.
The third transformation was the replacement of the social contract with the survival contract. It began in 1973, when wages stopped tracking productivity. From 1948 to 1973, productivity grew 96.7% and wages grew 91.3%. From 1973 to 2020, productivity grew 69.6% while wages grew just 11.6%. All the gains went elsewhere, to shareholders and executives, to financial instruments and corporate profits. Under Ronald Reagan, this became explicit policy. His 1981 tax cuts reduced top marginal rates from 70% to 28% by 1986. When over 11,000 air traffic controllers struck in August 1981, Reagan fired them all. The message to corporate America: The era of labor compromise was over. The AFL-CIO organized a Solidarity Day march. Four hundred thousand protesters filled Washington. It changed nothing. By the Clinton years, both parties had accepted the logic. A Democratic president signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992, telecommunications deregulation in 1996, welfare reform ending guaranteed assistance in 1996, and Glass-Steagall repeal in 1999. The 2010 Citizens United decision capped this transformation, declaring money to be speech and corporations to be people.
The practical meaning appears in the dismantling of shared security. Pensions became 401(k) accounts. The 401(k) was created accidentally in 1978 as a tax loophole, but by 1983, companies realized they could shift retirement risk to employees. By 2000, only 20% of private-sector workers had traditional pensions. Healthcare became contingent on employment, turning job loss into a medical crisis. Housing became an asset class for investors, making shelter unaffordable for the next generation. Education became debt, making the credential required for middle-class life a decades-long financial burden.
The 2008 financial crisis revealed the logic underlying all these changes. When the system collapsed because of reckless bank speculation, the government moved with stunning speed to rescue the institutions that had caused it. The Troubled Asset Relief Program authorized $700 billion for banks, but including Federal Reserve lending, the actual total exceeded $7.7 trillion. Meanwhile, 3.8 million homes were foreclosed between 2007 and 2010. American families lost $7 trillion in home equity.
Democracy requires citizens secure enough to participate without fear, autonomous enough to speak without permission, stable enough to think beyond survival.
From their apartment window in Las Vegas, Maria and James could see their old house across the street. They watched the grass die that first summer of 2009. They watched neighborhood kids break windows. They watched the Wells Fargo "For Sale" sign fade in the desert sun for 26 months. They had bought the house in 2006 for $285,000 with a 5-1 adjustable-rate mortgage, putting down their entire $20,000 in savings. When James lost his construction job in late 2008, they fell behind on payments. The bank foreclosed in April 2009. They moved into a rental that cost $1,750 a month, nearly as much as their mortgage, watching as their former house sat empty while the bank waited for the market to recover. Their 7-year-old daughter asked why they could not go home, why their house was right there but they could not live in it. They voted in every election. They called their representatives. Nothing changed. The lesson millions learned: Democratic participation was irrelevant to the forces shaping their lives, the government would move mountains to save banks but would not prevent their foreclosure.
This is the democracy of endurance. Democracy in this form does not ask citizens to flourish. It asks them to persist, to absorb market shocks, to manage precarity as if it were a personal failing, to accept that lifelong security is impossible and that resilience is the new civic virtue replacing independence.
The psychological toll accumulates across generations. The Pentagon Papers revealed the government had lied about Vietnam: 58,220 Americans died based on those lies. Richard Nixon resigned after Watergate confirmed that the powerful operated by different rules. The PATRIOT Act authorized warrantless surveillance. The Iraq War began based on weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. The 2008 crisis taught that the system would not protect citizens even when they played by its rules. The pandemic taught that collective action was impossible in America, that survival was an individual responsibility even in a collective catastrophe.
By 2025, Americans live inside the democracy of futility. The defense budget stands at $886 billion while life expectancy fell from 78.9 years in 2014 to 76.4 in 2021, three consecutive years of decline even before Covid-19. Over 100 million Americans carry $195 billion in medical debt, the leading cause of personal bankruptcy. The median home price rose from $329,000 in 2020 to $417,000 in 2024, a 27% increase. The fertility rate dropped to 1.6 children per woman, below replacement level for the first time in recorded history. Young people cannot afford children. Democracy has inverted its moral logic. Citizens exist to sustain the system rather than the system existing to sustain them. They are told to be resilient when they cannot afford healthcare, entrepreneurial when the gig economy pays below minimum wage with no benefits, optimistic when every measure of stability is declining.
Some would argue this diagnosis is too bleak. Poverty rates are lower than in the 1960s. Technology is universal. Life expectancy increased before its recent decline. Perhaps the founders' vision was always mythological. These points miss something fundamental. The question is not whether material conditions are better than 1800 or 1960. The question is whether citizens possess the economic independence necessary to participate meaningfully in self-governance. Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a $1,000 emergency expense. The algorithms that govern what we see and earn are controlled by five companies. Life expectancy decline is unprecedented among developed nations. The founders' vision was exclusionary, but the principle was sound: Democracy requires citizens secure enough to participate without fear, autonomous enough to speak without permission, stable enough to think beyond survival.
The authoritarians understand this in ways defenders of democracy often do not. They do not win by attacking democracy directly. They win by speaking to what people actually feel: abandoned by systems that claim to represent them, ignored by institutions that ask for their participation but never respond, betrayed by promises that work and responsibility will lead to security. They offer concrete emotional promises. Safety through control. Belonging through exclusion. Pride through domination. Revenge against elites who rigged the system. They name enemies and promise someone will finally fight for you, even if that fight requires destroying the institutions that failed to protect you. Here is what makes this dangerous: Authoritarians are not wrong about the diagnosis, only the cure. They correctly identify that democracy has failed to deliver economic stability, that institutions serve the powerful, that citizens have been abandoned. Where they diverge is in attributing this to immigrants rather than to the systematic dismantling of economic security, to cultural elites rather than to decisions that prioritized capital over people. They promise to restore independence through dominance rather than shared security, through destruction rather than reconstruction. In a nation where security has been made deliberately scarce, that promise has terrible power because it offers at least the possibility of change, even if that change comes through destruction.
Unlike a liquidated bank, democracy can be rebuilt. The question is whether we will choose to rebuild it on foundations that can actually support what we claim to value.
Defenders of democracy respond with process and principle. Rule of law. Constitutional norms. Institutional integrity. These are not wrong, but they are insufficient. In a nation where most people have never felt the law was on their side, where the Constitution seems to protect everyone's freedom except theirs, these responses sound like requests to protect a system that has already abandoned them. Telling people to trust institutions when those institutions have spent 50 years demonstrating they will prioritize capital over people, rescue banks before homeowners, bail out corporations while letting citizens drown in debt, is not persuasive. It is insulting.
The question is not whether American democracy will survive. Institutions persist long after they stop serving their stated purpose. The question is whether what survives deserves to be called democracy at all. A republic where citizens have suffrage but not independence, rights but not stability, participation but not power, is not government of the people, by the people, for the people. It is a performance that maintains procedures while ensuring actual governance happens elsewhere, in boardrooms and markets and algorithms beyond democratic accountability.
We are living through an unprecedented moment of government stepping back from its responsibilities and direct attacks on democratic institutions. The Trump era will end, no matter how much it feels like it cannot or will not. History teaches us that no political moment lasts forever. When this moment passes, we cannot proceed with the old normal, cannot return to the arrangements that produced this crisis. We cannot rebuild a democracy of endurance and call it restoration. We must make good on the promissory note that King described, must finally cash the check for all citizens, not just in political rights but in material security.
This means universal policies that guarantee the material foundations of democratic citizenship. Medicare for All that severs the link between employment and healthcare, eliminating the structural dependency that makes workers afraid to organize or leave bad situations. Affordable housing policies that recognize shelter as a human need rather than an asset class. Universal childcare that allows parents to participate in civic life. Strengthened labor rights and higher minimum wages that give workers genuine bargaining power. Student debt cancellation and free public college. These are not radical proposals. They are completions of the New Deal project abandoned before full realization, an acknowledgment that political democracy requires economic security. Other developed democracies provide these securities and remain capitalist economies. What makes them radical in America is that they would actually address the root cause of our democratic crisis, would restore the material foundations that make democratic participation more than performance.
The resistance will be fierce because these policies threaten arrangements that have made some people very rich while making most people precarious. But the alternative is continuing to pretend that democracy can function without material security, that citizens can govern themselves when they cannot govern their own lives, that political equality means anything when economic inequality makes it purely formal. The alternative is watching democracy become an increasingly hollow performance, watching polarization deepen as people search desperately for someone to blame, watching authoritarian movements grow stronger because they at least promise change even if destructive. The alternative is discovering that you cannot maintain the fiction indefinitely, that eventually people stop believing in promises never kept, that a democracy of insufficient funds will eventually run out of credit entirely.
Martin Luther King's insufficient funds metaphor continues to resonate because it names not just a failure of inclusion but a betrayal of promise. The check did not just bounce because the bank refused to honor it for certain customers. The check bounced because the bank itself was liquidated. The material basis for democracy's promise has been systematically dismantled and sold for parts. The economic security that makes political equality real rather than theoretical has been destroyed deliberately over 50 years.
But unlike a liquidated bank, democracy can be rebuilt. The question is whether we will choose to rebuild it on foundations that can actually support what we claim to value. The check marked insufficient funds was returned to the idea of democracy itself, to the promise that political equality could exist without material security, to the belief that we could preserve the forms of self-governance while abandoning its foundations. We have yet to reckon with what we owe. But reckoning is possible, reconstruction is possible, if we are willing to admit what has been lost and commit to building something more honest, more just, more capable of delivering on the promises democracy makes.
The democracy of insufficient funds does not have to be permanent. It is a choice we have made collectively over 50 years. We can make different choices. But first we have to acknowledge what democracy actually requires: that you cannot ask people to govern themselves when they cannot govern their own lives, that political equality without material security is not democracy but its opposite, and that a check returned for insufficient funds will keep bouncing until the account is finally funded with something real.
