Skip to content 
Life is full of choices, and many of them carry significant political weight, even the ones that don’t look political at first glance. Nevertheless, it shapes our lives and how we choose to engage with the government, as well as the degree to which we are allowed to do so. However, democracy is not a label a government chooses at its inception and keeps by default. It’s an ongoing project that both the government and its citizens are responsible for maintaining.
That maintenance work starts with a balancing act familiar from Karl Popper’s tolerance paradox, applied here to freedom rather than tolerance itself. We must always be searching for freedom and protecting it as much as we can. But we must also restrict actions that infringe on others’ freedom — even when that restriction makes the perpetrator “less” free. This tension is what underlies the perennial debate over big versus small government. We should, for instance, pursue a free press, which — while not part of the government — is instrumental to democracy through its watchdog function. But a press that is perfectly free and a public that is perfectly tolerant of anything published under its name open the door to rampant misinformation. Freedom needs guardrails, or it cannibalizes itself.
But balancing freedom is only half the equation. Political scientists like Catharine MacKinnon have argued that formal access to choice means little if we ignore the sociopolitical context surrounding it. MacKinnon developed this critique most famously in the context of abortion rights, but it applies just as well to nearly any political debate today. Americans technically have the “choice” to pay for their own healthcare — yet nearly a quarter avoid calling ambulances during emergencies because they can’t afford to. Anyone technically has the “right” to apply for a home loan — yet Black and Hispanic applicants are disproportionately denied. The choice exists on paper. The capacity to make it does not.
So democracy requires more than balancing freedoms against each other. It requires the individual capacity to actually act on the choices freedom makes available — to get on the ambulance, to get the loan. And that capacity depends on long-term sociopolitical conditions that both the government and the public have to actively address. Without that work, democratic choice remains superficial, no matter how free it looks on paper.
Taken together, these two ideas point to the same conclusion: democracy is not a fixed state but a continuous negotiation. It means having a voice and fighting to keep it in the conversation, even when things seem to be going well. It’s a standing condition that the government will uphold its end of the bargain, and that constituents will hold it accountable. Neither side can do this alone — neglect from either party risks tipping into authoritarianism or into anarchy.
The most common definition of democracy people fall back on is simply the capacity for free and fair elections, a bar the United States still clears. But democracy depends on more than elections. It also requires respect for democratic institutions and the conditions described above, and on these counts, the U.S. has fallen short in recent years. Political scientists have a term for this gap: an “illiberal democracy,” a system in which elections still occur but the institutional checks, rule of law, and civil liberties that define a true liberal democracy have eroded.
That erosion is visible in the Trump administration’s approach to the checks built into the U.S. government specifically to prevent a seizure of unilateral power. The White House has repeatedly bypassed Congress on military matters, from strikes and operations in Venezuela that culminated in the capture of Nicolás Maduro to broader military action concerning Iran, conducted without congressional authorization. The administration has also floated suspending habeas corpus, a constitutional right, for undocumented immigrants. Detainees held by ICE over the past year have drawn scrutiny for their treatment by federal agents, and in a number of cases, those detained have turned out to be U.S. citizens.
None of this means democracy is over. It means the work isn’t finished — and may never be. The solution is the same conversation that builds democracy in the first place: a constituency engaged enough with government to challenge those in power, and self-aware enough to keep asking what’s actually good for them and their neighbors, not just for themselves. This is where journalism’s function becomes most critical — asking those questions and surfacing the information that makes the asking possible. It’s exactly why politicians work to discredit the media: a weakened press means fewer checks on power, and fewer checks on corruption.
Democracy, in the end, isn’t something a country has. It’s something a country keeps doing — or stops doing, one quiet negligence at a time. Whether it survives depends less on any single administration than on whether enough people keep insisting on the conversation at all.
Isabel Papp is a student at Northwestern University, double‑majoring in Journalism and Political Science. A bilingual journalist, she is a proactive, equity‑centered storyteller committed to elevating underrepresented voices.
Subscribe to The Fulcrum and be part of the conversation.
