Principle 9: Demonstrate American and democratic values through dignified, restrained, and humane leadership at home and abroad.²

In the spring of 1947, the United States faced a choice. Europe lay in ruins after six years of war. The Soviet Union was extending its influence westward. The temptation to pull back, to let Europe solve its own problems, to concentrate American resources at home, was real and politically popular. Instead, Secretary of State George Marshall stood before the graduating class at Harvard University and proposed something historically unprecedented: that the wealthiest nation on earth would spend roughly $13 billion, the equivalent of about $140 billion today, to rebuild the economies of the nations it had just helped defeat, not as a condition of surrender, but as an act of strategic generosity grounded in the belief that stable, prosperous democracies were better neighbors than desperate, unstable ones.¹ The Marshall Plan worked. It rebuilt Western Europe, created the architecture of transatlantic cooperation that endures today, and generated more goodwill toward the United States than any military victory in the preceding century. It worked not because America was the most powerful country in the world, but because it chose to use that power in a way that others found worth following.

What Democratic Theory Says About Leading by Example

Political scientists who study how democracy spreads and survives, have reached a consistent finding: democratic values do not travel primarily through military force. They travel through demonstration. Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” to describe the ability to attract and persuade rather than coerce, and he identified three sources of it: a nation’s culture, its political values as it actually practices them, and its foreign policy when it is seen as legitimate and morally consistent.⁴ When any of those three sources is undermined, soft power erodes, and the burden shifts to harder and more expensive instruments.

Pillar 9 of the nine-pillar framework for democratic governance holds that a consolidated democracy requires the overwhelming majority of citizens, elites, and organized groups to genuinely accept democratic procedures as the only legitimate path to power.³ Linz and Stepan’s formulation is precise: democracy is only truly consolidated when it has become “the only game in town,” not merely as a legal fact but as a behavioral and attitudinal reality. The relevance to global leadership is direct. The United States cannot credibly argue that democracy is the best form of governance while simultaneously undermining the democratic norms at home that give that argument its force. Pillar 6, which covers vibrant civil society and independent information, identifies freedom of expression and access to alternative information as procedural prerequisites for democracy, not optional additions.³ When the United States restricts those freedoms domestically, or tolerates their restriction, it weakens the claim that it stands for anything other than the interests of whoever holds power.

The Data on Where Things Stand

The Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index 2026, which measures the soft power of 193 nation brands across 100 countries, recorded the steepest overall score decline of any nation for the United States.⁵ The U.S. score fell 4.6 points to 74.9 out of 100, with declines across every metric except familiarity. The reputation subcategory fell 11 ranks. Specific attribute scores dropped sharply: generosity fell 68 points, good relations with other countries fell 50 points, friendliness fell 32 points, human rights and rule of law fell 10 points.⁵

The Gallup World Poll for 2025 added a specific data point that had not been recorded in nearly 20 years: China surpassed the United States in global leadership approval.⁶ China’s median global approval was 36 percent; the United States stood at 31 percent. U.S. approval had fallen eight points in a single year, from 39 percent in 2024 to 31 percent in 2025. U.S. disapproval of global leadership reached a record high of 48 percent.⁶ Approval of U.S. leadership declined by 10 points or more in 44 countries between 2024 and 2025. The declines were concentrated among U.S. allies. The Democracy Perception Index for 2025, which surveyed more than 110,000 respondents across 100 countries, found that 55 percent of surveyed nations now hold negative views of the United States.⁷

The foreign aid picture is equally stark. The OECD’s preliminary findings for 2025 document that international development assistance from member nations declined by approximately 23 percent in a single year, the largest annual decline since the OECD began tracking these figures. The United States accounted for three-quarters of that decline. U.S. official development assistance fell from approximately $63 billion in 2024 to just under $29 billion in 2025, a 57 percent drop, following the dismantling of USAID.⁸ The Lancet study that accompanied these findings estimated that current trends in development funding could be associated with more than 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030.⁹

It is also necessary to say plainly that the problem predates any single administration. The Obama administration’s failure to close Guantanamo, despite a public commitment to do so, handed adversaries a decade of ready-made propaganda. The Bush administration’s decision to authorize enhanced interrogation techniques, later documented by the Senate Intelligence Committee, damaged American credibility on human rights in ways that persisted long after the policy ended. The Democratic Party’s tendency to use foreign policy language about values while supporting transactional relationships with authoritarian governments undermines the very argument it claims to make. These are not partisan failures. They are institutional failures that Principle 9 is specifically designed to address.

What the 45 Percent Are Saying

The data on what American voters, and particularly independent voters, actually believe about global leadership is more consistent than the political debate suggests. A 2024 U.S. Global Leadership Coalition poll found that at least 8 in 10 Americans say the United States should play a leading or major role on the global stage.¹⁰ More than 8 in 10 say the U.S. should invest in a smart balance of diplomacy and global development alongside a strong defense.¹⁰

On foreign aid specifically, the Pew Research Center survey from 2025 found that 83 percent of Americans support providing medicine and medical supplies to people in developing countries, and 78 percent support providing food and clothing.¹¹ An Oxfam America survey from the same year found that 2 out of 3 Americans do not support the Trump administration’s 85 percent cuts to aid programs, and more than 95 percent of respondents identified a level of foreign aid spending higher than the administration’s current budget as appropriate.¹² A University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation survey found that solid majorities of Americans, after being informed about specific programs and hearing arguments both for and against, wanted to maintain or increase aid for humanitarian relief (56 percent), global health (64 percent), the environment (65 percent), and democracy and human rights (60 percent).¹¹

Independent voters hold these views with particular consistency. What distinguishes independent sentiment on global leadership from the positions of either party is a specific frustration: they want the country to lead, but they want it to lead in a way they are not embarrassed by. The Independent Center’s 2025 survey found that 77 percent of respondents held a favorable view of politicians willing to work with both sides.¹³ That same instinct applies internationally. They do not want unilateralism or isolation. They want credibility.

The Centercratic Position

Principle 9 commits to a specific, practical approach to global leadership that is grounded in the same standard applied throughout this series: behavior evaluated against evidence, not against ideology.

First, the values demonstrated at home and the values claimed abroad must be consistent. This is not idealism. It is strategic coherence. A country that argues for an independent judiciary while its executive officials publicly attack judicial rulings cannot simultaneously argue that independent judiciaries are a universal good. A country that restricts press access and threatens journalists cannot credibly hold authoritarian governments to account for restricting press access. The Centercratic position is that the domestic and international faces of American democratic governance must be the same face.

Second, humanitarian assistance is a strategic investment, not charity. The original architects of the Marshall Plan understood this precisely: Secretary of Defense James Mattis put it in contemporary terms when he described U.S. foreign policy as resting on both “the power of intimidation” and “the power of inspiration.”¹⁴ Eliminating the instruments of the power of inspiration while expanding the instruments of intimidation is not a strengthened foreign policy. It is a more expensive one. The Centercratic position is that humanitarian and development assistance must be restored to a level consistent with America’s strategic interests and consistent with what the American public actually supports.

Third, diplomacy must be conducted with the professionalism and institutional memory that career foreign service officers provide. The hollowing out of the State Department, the replacement of professional diplomatic channels with personal envoys accountable to no institutional process, and the conduct of sensitive negotiations through informal back channels that bypass congressional oversight are not the practices of a country that expects its word to be trusted. The Centercratic position is that American diplomacy requires a professional, independent, fully staffed foreign service.

Fourth, leadership means accepting constraints on one’s own behavior as the price of asking others to accept those same constraints. The United States cannot expect adherence to international norms on the use of force, on trade, on the treatment of prisoners, or on press freedom while claiming exemptions for itself. The Centercratic position is that the United States should rejoin and lead the multilateral institutions it helped create, not as an act of deference to foreign governments, but as the most effective way to shape the rules of a world order it has an interest in maintaining.

The Stakes of Getting This Wrong

The V-Dem Institute’s 2025 data, which has provided the empirical spine of this entire series, documents that autocracies now outnumber democracies worldwide 91 to 88. Liberal democracies, at 29, remain the rarest form of governance on earth, with less than 12 percent of the world’s population living under what can reasonably be called liberal democracy.³ That ratio has been declining for nearly two decades. It does not decline because authoritarianism is winning arguments. It declines because democracies are failing to make them.

Joseph Nye’s framework is explicit on the mechanism: soft power fails when the product it is selling no longer reflects the reality of the seller.⁴ When the United States cuts aid to countries in crisis and simultaneously requests $200 billion for a military campaign, it is not projecting the image of a country whose power serves a larger purpose. It is projecting the image of a country that has confused force with leadership. China’s five-point advantage in global approval ratings is not primarily the result of China becoming more admirable. It is primarily the result of the United States becoming less so.⁶

The historical lesson is not complicated. The Marshall Plan succeeded because it was genuinely generous, genuinely multilateral, and genuinely tied to American values rather than solely to American interests. The countries it rebuilt became, for the remainder of the twentieth century, the most reliable partners the United States had. The cost was $140 billion in today’s dollars. The return was seventy years of transatlantic stability. That is not sentiment. That is a strategic calculation with a documented return on investment.

The nine principles that this series has examined are not nine separate arguments. They are one argument, made nine ways. Democracy requires structure, accountability, honest deliberation, capable governance, and the willingness to defend it. Principle 9 is the principle that asks whether the United States is willing to be the thing it asks the rest of the world to become.

Notes

1. Brookings Institution, “Applying the Lessons of the Marshall Plan to U.S. Global Leadership Today,” March 8, 2022. The Marshall Plan provided $13 billion from 1948 to 1952, roughly $140 billion in current dollars, through multilateral European-designed recovery programs. Documents five lessons for contemporary U.S. global development engagement.

2. Centercratic Party, Centercratic Party Principles, Version 13, 2026. Principle 9: “Demonstrate American and democratic values through dignified, restrained, and humane leadership at home and abroad.”

3. Paul J. Chapman, The Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic, 2025. Pillar 9 (Shared Commitment to Democracy) and Pillar 6 (Vibrant Civil Society and Independent Information) are the primary pillars for Principle 9. V-Dem 2025 data: autocracies outnumber democracies 91 to 88; liberal democracies total 29; less than 12 percent of world population lives under liberal democracy.

4. Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004). Nye defines soft power as the ability to attract and persuade through culture, political values as genuinely practiced, and foreign policy perceived as legitimate and morally consistent. Referenced in The Hill, “The World Is Watching America Lose Its Moral Compass,” March 5, 2026.

5. Brand Finance, “Global Soft Power Index 2026,” January 19, 2026. The United States recorded the steepest overall soft power score decline of all 193 nation brands measured. U.S. score fell 4.6 points to 74.9 out of 100, with declines in reputation (-11 ranks), generosity (-68 points), good relations with other countries (-50 points), friendliness (-32 points), and human rights and rule of law (-10 points).

6. Gallup, “China Edges Past U.S. in Global Approval Ratings,” April 3, 2026. China’s median global leadership approval was 36 percent in 2025 compared to 31 percent for the United States, the widest gap in nearly 20 years. U.S. approval fell from 39 percent in 2024 to 31 percent in 2025. U.S. disapproval reached a record high 48 percent. Approval declined by 10 points or more in 44 countries.

7. KKRVA Analysis, “The Shifting Sands of Global Perception: America’s Declining Soft Power and China’s Rising Influence,” May 29, 2025. Citing the 2025 Democracy Perception Index (110,000+ respondents, 100 countries): 55 percent of surveyed nations hold negative views of the United States; Trump rated negatively in 82 percent of countries surveyed.

8. Al Jazeera, “US Led ‘Historic’ Foreign Aid Decline in 2025 Amid Trump Cuts: OECD,” April 9, 2026. OECD data: international development assistance declined 23 percent in 2025, the largest annual decline on record. U.S. aid fell from approximately $63 billion in 2024 to just under $29 billion in 2025, a 57 percent drop. The U.S. accounted for three-quarters of the total global decline.

9. CNN, “One Year On From Dismantling of USAID, Study Projects That Global Aid Cuts Could Lead to 9.4 Million Deaths by 2030,” February 4, 2026. Citing The Lancet study on projected mortality from continued aid funding reductions. The Center for Global Development estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 additional deaths attributable to USAID cuts in 2025 alone.

10. U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, “New Public Opinion Poll Shows Overwhelming Majority of Voters Want U.S. to Lead Globally,” September 24, 2024. At least 8 in 10 Americans say the U.S. should play a leading or major role on the global stage. More than 8 in 10 say the U.S. should invest in a smart balance of diplomacy and global development alongside a strong defense.

11. Pew Research Center, “Majorities of Americans Support Several, But Not All Types of Foreign Aid,” May 1, 2025. 83 percent of Americans support medical assistance; 78 percent support food and clothing aid. University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation survey: solid majorities supported maintaining or increasing aid for humanitarian relief (56 percent), global health (64 percent), the environment (65 percent), and democracy and human rights (60 percent) after hearing balanced arguments.

12. Oxfam America polling, cited in Oxfam America, “Aid Funding: Opinion Polling Shows Strong Support for Foreign Aid,” July 8, 2025. Two out of three Americans do not support the Trump administration’s 85 percent cuts to aid programs. More than 95 percent of polling respondents identified a level of foreign aid spending higher than the administration’s current budget as appropriate.

13. Independent Center, “2025 Nationwide Online Governmental Sentiment Survey,” October 16, 2025. Survey of 1,200 adults (margin of error plus or minus 2.8 percent). 77 percent of respondents hold a favorable view of politicians willing to work with both sides. 31 percent identify as moderates or centrists, the largest single political self-identification group.

14. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, quoted in Brookings Institution, “Applying the Lessons of the Marshall Plan to U.S. Global Leadership Today,” March 8, 2022. Mattis described U.S. foreign policy as resting on the “power of intimidation” and the “power of inspiration,” with USAID and diplomatic engagement as essential components of the latter.

Principle 8: Unite with allies to deter aggression and defend free nations against military, cyber, and economic threats.¹

In the autumn of 2024, technicians at a major American telecommunications company noticed something unusual in their network traffic. What investigators found, after months of painstaking analysis, was that Chinese government-linked hackers had been sitting inside the core infrastructure of nine U.S. telecommunications companies for more than a year.² The group, known as Salt Typhoon, had accessed the metadata of over one million Americans’ calls and text messages.³ It had reached the very wiretapping systems that law enforcement agencies use to conduct court-authorized surveillance. In at least one state, it had penetrated the U.S. Army National Guard’s computer network for nine months without detection.⁴ The breach was not discovered by a government agency monitoring for threats. It was discovered by a private company reviewing ordinary network traffic. No alarm had sounded. No warning had been issued. The people whose private communications were exposed did not know, and many still do not.

Why This Principle Comes Eighth

Principle 8 states: unite with allies to deter aggression and defend free nations against military, cyber, and economic threats.¹ It is the second of three principles in the Principled Leadership cluster, and it marks the series’ first sustained turn toward America’s external security environment. The seven principles examined before this one addressed how democracy is built and governed from within: its structural guardrails, its elections, its rule of law, its culture of deliberation, its approach to legislation, and its standards for governing. Principle 8 asks the question that comes next: once that democratic system is built, who defends it from those who would undermine or destroy it from the outside?

The two pillars this principle serves are Pillar 2, Separation of Powers and Institutional Accountability, and Pillar 9, Shared Commitment to Democracy.⁵ These are not accidental pairings. A democracy that concentrates the decision to use military force in a single executive, without genuine legislative oversight, has already compromised one of its own structural safeguards. And alliances among democracies are not merely strategic conveniences. They are, at their foundation, coalitions of states that have agreed to resolve disputes through institutions rather than through coercion. When the United States strengthens those coalitions, it expands the zone in which democratic governance is viable. When it weakens them, it contracts that zone.

Two Threats, One Principle

The Salt Typhoon breach is the most thoroughly documented example of what modern national security failure looks like in practice. It was not a missile strike. It was not a troop movement. It was patient, methodical access to the communications infrastructure that every American uses every day. The hackers did not destroy anything. They read it. They listened. They waited.² That patience is itself a strategic posture. Data exfiltrated from telecommunications networks, stored and analyzed over time, can be used to identify intelligence officers, track diplomatic negotiations, anticipate military movements, and generate leverage over officials. It is the kind of advantage that takes years to fully exploit. The response to such a breach therefore matters as much as the breach itself. In early 2025, the Trump administration disbanded the Cyber Safety Review Board, which had been conducting the formal investigation into Salt Typhoon, before it completed its work.²

The damage to American alliance relationships in this same period has been documented with equal specificity. In January 2026, Gallup published its annual survey of U.S. leadership approval across all 31 NATO member states. The overall approval rating had fallen 14 percentage points from the prior year, settling at 21 percent.⁶ Country-level declines were steep: Germany fell 39 points, Portugal 38, Canada 22, the United Kingdom 16.⁷ For context, U.S. leadership approval among NATO allies averaged 39 percent during the Biden administration and 45 percent during the Obama years.⁷ The decline coincided with renewed presidential statements about potentially withdrawing from NATO entirely and about acquiring Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, by force if necessary.⁶

Both parties carry responsibility for the current state of American security. The Biden administration’s documented slowness in approving weapons transfers to Ukraine during the first months of Russia’s 2022 invasion, and its repeated internal debates about which systems were too “escalatory” to provide, allowed the conflict to widen in ways that a more decisive posture might have deterred. Congress allowed a six-month gap in Ukraine aid funding in 2023 and 2024 that materially affected battlefield outcomes. These were failures of will and process, not of capability, and they belong in any honest account of the period.

What the 45 Percent Are Saying

The 45 percent of Americans who identify with neither major party have been consistent on national security even when their elected representatives have not.⁸ The 2025 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey found that 72 percent of Americans believe security alliances benefit both the United States and its allies, an increase from 64 percent the prior year.⁹ Support for alliances in Europe reached 68 percent, in Asia 72 percent. These are not partisan numbers. The Chicago Council’s 50-year polling record shows that support for an active American role in the world, and for consulting allies before major foreign policy decisions, has been a durable majority position across party lines for decades.¹⁰

Among independent voters specifically, 60 percent said in the 2025 survey that the United States should consult with its major allies before making significant foreign policy decisions, a figure that has risen 10 points since the Council first asked the question in 1974.¹⁰ A separate Gallup survey conducted in February 2026 found that 49 percent of Americans want to maintain the current U.S. commitment to NATO, while 28 percent want to increase it, a figure that had risen eight points in a single year as the withdrawal debate intensified.¹¹ Only 7 percent favor complete withdrawal from the alliance.¹¹

What frustrates independent voters on this issue is not disagreement about the importance of national security or the value of alliances. It is the experience of watching security treated as a political instrument: intelligence agencies deployed for domestic political purposes, foreign policy announcements made on social media before allies are notified, and cybersecurity review boards dissolved mid-investigation for reasons never clearly explained to the public. They want the country defended. They do not want the apparatus of defense used for partisan advantage.

The Centercratic Position

Principle 8 commits to a specific, practical approach to national security that is neither isolationist nor reflexively interventionist. It rests on four concrete commitments.

First, alliances are strategic assets, not negotiating chips. The value of NATO, of the Indo-Pacific security architecture, and of bilateral defense relationships is structural, not sentimental. The United States has not fought a major war on its own territory in more than 160 years in part because its alliances have allowed it to address threats far from American shores, with shared costs and shared intelligence. Treating those commitments as a subscription service to be canceled if payments are late destroys the very credibility that makes the alliance a deterrent. The Centercratic position is that commitments made are commitments honored, and that any renegotiation of burden-sharing within alliances is conducted through diplomatic consultation, not public ultimatums issued to allied heads of state.

Second, cybersecurity infrastructure is a national defense obligation, not a private-sector responsibility. The Salt Typhoon breach succeeded in part because the telecommunications companies it targeted were operating under a regulatory framework that treated their networks primarily as commercial assets.³ The Centercratic position is that critical communications infrastructure requires security standards equivalent to those applied to military networks, that the federal government must fund and enforce those standards, and that when a breach of Salt Typhoon’s magnitude occurs, the investigation must run to completion before the investigating body is dissolved.

Third, national security encompasses economic coercion and information operations alongside military threats. China’s current strategy does not rely primarily on the use of military force. It relies on economic dependency, technology transfer, information manipulation, and infrastructure penetration of precisely the kind Salt Typhoon demonstrated. A defense posture adequate to that strategy requires tools beyond military spending: export controls with consistent enforcement, investment screening that is genuinely independent of commercial pressure, and civic literacy programs that equip citizens to identify and resist foreign influence operations.

Fourth, Congress is a co-equal partner in decisions about the use of force. The Constitution assigns the power to declare war to the legislative branch for reasons the framers understood precisely: concentrated executive authority over the use of force is one of the oldest mechanisms through which republics lose their republican character. The Centercratic position is that the War Powers Resolution means what it says, that authorizations for the use of military force must be specific and time-limited rather than open-ended, and that the practice of conducting sustained military operations under emergency authorities never intended to cover them must end.

What Happens When This Fails

The V-Dem Institute’s 2025 data, foundational to this entire series, documents that autocracies now outnumber democracies worldwide for the first time in two decades. Liberal democracies, at just 29, remain the rarest form of governance on earth. Less than 12 percent of the world’s population now lives under what can reasonably be classified as a liberal democracy, while 72 percent live under autocratic rule.⁵ That ratio is not fixed by history or fate. It responds, directly and measurably, to the choices that existing democracies make about whether to defend themselves and each other.

The historical record on this is not ambiguous. The interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, when the United States retreated into formal isolation and Britain and France concluded that their alliance commitments were too costly to honor, did not produce a generation of peace. It produced a decade of incremental appeasement followed by the most destructive war in human history. The mechanism was not mysterious: authoritarian states expand when the cost of expansion is low, and the cost of expansion is low when democratic states are unwilling to coordinate a response. The lesson is not that the United States should be at war everywhere. It is that the credibility of the deterrent, maintained through consistent and predictable alliance behavior, determines how often the deterrent must actually be tested.

At 21 percent approval among NATO allies, the United States is not projecting strength to the nations it has pledged to defend.⁶ It is projecting uncertainty. Uncertainty is not a deterrent. It is an invitation.

Tomorrow, this series concludes with Principle 9: Exemplify Global Leadership, and the question of what it means for the United States to lead not only through military and economic power but through the example of its own democratic conduct, and why the two have never been separable.

Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.

Notes

¹ Centercratic Party. Party Principles, Version 13, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/

² Wikipedia. “2024 Global Telecommunications Hack.” Updated 2025. Documents nine confirmed U.S. telecommunications companies breached by Salt Typhoon, access maintained for over a year before detection, and the disbanding of the Cyber Safety Review Board before its investigation concluded.

³ New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. “2024: When China’s Salt Typhoon Made Cyberspace Tidal Waves.” October 22, 2025. Describes the Salt Typhoon campaign as targeting ISP-level infrastructure, enabling data exfiltration affecting over one million users.

⁴ Scripps News. “Salt Typhoon Hack Targeted National Guard Computer Networks.” July 17, 2025. Reports that Chinese hackers penetrated U.S. Army National Guard networks in at least one state for nine months in 2024 as part of the broader Salt Typhoon campaign.

⁵ Chapman, Paul J. The Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Pillar 2 covers separation of powers and institutional accountability; Pillar 9 covers the shared commitment to democracy as a prerequisite for democratic consolidation. Drawing on: Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; Dahl, Robert A. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. Yale University Press, 1971. [Thread attachment: The-Nine-Pillars-of-a-Working-Democratic-Republic.docx]

⁶ Gallup. “U.S. Leadership Approval Drops Among NATO Allies.” January 14, 2026. Approval of U.S. leadership across 31 NATO member states fell 14 percentage points in 2025 to an overall rating of 21 percent, coinciding with statements about potential NATO withdrawal and the acquisition of Greenland.

⁷ CTV News. “NATO Members Sour on U.S. Since Trump Returned: Gallup Poll.” January 24, 2026. Documents country-level approval declines: Germany down 39 points, Portugal down 38, Canada down 22, United Kingdom down 16. U.S. approval under Obama averaged 45 percent; under Biden, 39 percent.

⁸ Chapman, Paul J. “I’m Independent! What Does That Mean?” The Center Voter, January 28, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/im-independent-what-does-that-mean

⁹ Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “US Public Support for Alliances at All-Time High.” October 13, 2025. Reports 72 percent of Americans believe security alliances benefit the United States and its allies, up from 64 percent the prior year, with support for alliances in Europe at 68 percent and in Asia at 72 percent.

¹⁰ Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “The American Political Environment, Ripe for a New Foreign Policy.” January 27, 2026. Fifty years of polling data showing 60 percent of independent voters support consulting major allies before significant foreign policy decisions, up from 50 percent when the question was first asked in 1974.

¹¹ Gallup. “Top U.S. Foreign Policy Priority: National Security.” March 4, 2026. Reports 49 percent of Americans support maintaining the current NATO commitment, 28 percent want to increase it (up from 20 percent in 2024), and only 7 percent favor complete withdrawal from the alliance.

¹² The Center Voter. “Congress Pushes Back on Trump’s NATO Withdrawal Threat.” April 3, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/todays-essential-political-news-4minute-b87

Principle 7: Reject both government overreach and government absence. Provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline.¹

In the spring of 2025, the federal agency that administers the nation’s 1.8 trillion in student loan debt lost hundreds of expert staff members in a matter of weeks. The Office of Federal Student Aid, which is responsible for managing repayments for 42 million borrowers, saw its operational capacity deteriorate sharply. Loan servicers began reporting communication failures. Borrowers trying to navigate repayment options found the agency unable to respond. By late 2025, nearly 58 percent of federal student loan borrowers reported they had little trust that the government would help keep their loans affordable, up from lower levels the year before.² The problem was not that the agency had too much money or too many employees. The problem was that the capacity to deliver an essential service had been dismantled faster than any alternative could be built to replace it. That is what government absence looks like in practice.

Why This Principle Comes Seventh

Principle 7 states: reject both government overreach and government absence; provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline.¹ It is the first of three principles in the Principled Leadership cluster, and it marks a deliberate shift in the series. The first four principles established the structural guardrails: democratic institutions, term limits, election integrity, and equal justice. Principles 5 and 6 established how a democracy should deliberate and what it should try to build through that deliberation. Principle 7 asks what the government that emerges from all of that should actually do, and how it should be held accountable for doing it.

The two pillars this principle serves are Pillar 3, Effective Impartial State Institutions, and Pillar 7, Broad-Based Economic Participation.³ Linz and Stepan, in their study of democratic consolidation, identified a “usable state bureaucracy” as one of the five essential arenas of functioning democracy. Their insight is precise: without a state that can actually implement what its legislature decides, democratic governance becomes an exercise in performance. A congress can pass any law it likes, but if the agency responsible for enforcing it has been hollowed out, the law is theater. Acemoglu and Robinson, approaching the same problem from a different angle, argued that democracy is sustained over time when large segments of the population have a genuine economic stake in the system’s stability. When essential services fail the people who need them most, that stake erodes.³

Two Failure Modes, Equal in Danger

American governance in the current era faces both failure modes simultaneously, and it is important to say so plainly, because most political commentary frames the problem as a choice between them.

The first failure mode is overreach: government that expands without accountability, that creates programs it cannot fund, that borrows against the future to avoid difficult decisions in the present. This failure is real, documented, and serious. The Congressional Budget Office reported a 1.8 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2025, a figure that, while 57 billion lower than the prior year, is projected to grow substantially over the next decade. The CBO forecasts cumulative deficits of 24.4 trillion through 2036, driven primarily by entitlement spending on autopilot. Medicaid is projected to grow 47 percent over the next decade. Medicare is projected to grow 105 percent. Social Security, 74 percent. Revenue is projected to grow far more slowly. The gap between what the government has promised and what it is prepared to pay for represents a genuine threat to the country’s fiscal stability, and both parties have contributed to it for decades.⁴

The second failure mode is absence: government that abandons essential functions, that eliminates services before any replacement exists, that treats dismantlement as an accomplishment rather than a transition. The student loan example is one instance of this. The record low legislative output of the 2025 Congress is another: fewer than 40 bills were signed into law in the first year of the Trump administration’s second term, the fewest in the modern era.⁵ Congress held 659 roll-call votes in the Senate in 2025, but nearly 60 percent of them were focused on advancing executive and judicial nominations rather than legislating. The House cast 362 votes, barely half of 2017’s total. Health care subsidy legislation that needed to pass was left unaddressed all year. As Rep. David Joyce of Ohio, a 13-year veteran of the House, put it at the end of the session: “Other than that, I really can’t point to much that we got accomplished.”⁵

Both parties have inhabited both failure modes. Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act without a plan to control the structural cost drivers that made health insurance unaffordable in the first place. Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill while simultaneously allowing government to shut down for 43 days over a spending impasse, a record.⁵ Neither the expansion without discipline nor the disruption without transition is a governing philosophy. They are both failures to govern.

What Independent Voters Are Telling Us

The 45 percent of Americans who identify as political independents have watched both failure modes play out for long enough to have strong opinions about them, even if those opinions do not map neatly onto either party’s narrative.⁶

A 2025 Gallup survey found that 63 percent of Americans believed the federal government was doing too many things that should be left to individuals or businesses, while simultaneously, 61 percent said they were worried the government was cutting services too fast without adequate replacements.⁷ These numbers are not contradictory. They reflect the same underlying demand: a government that does fewer things but does those things well, that is accountable for results, and that does not cut services that real people depend on before anything exists to take their place.

The same Gallup data showed that independent voters were the most likely to hold both views simultaneously. They were more likely than either Democrats or Republicans to say they wanted results over ideology, competence over scale, and fiscal discipline combined with basic service delivery. The student loan data reinforces this. Nearly 42 million Americans carry federal student loan debt.² For most of them, the government’s capacity to administer that debt fairly and competently is not an abstract policy preference. It is a direct, daily economic reality.

The Centercratic Position

The Centercratic Party’s seventh principle draws a clear line between two things that American political debate has often blurred: the question of what government should do and the question of how government should do it.¹

On the first question, the principle is not ideological. It does not presuppose that government should be large or small, activist or restrained. It presupposes that government should provide essential services, meaning those that markets cannot or will not provide to all citizens equitably, and that it should stop providing services that have demonstrably failed or that the private sector can deliver more effectively. This is an evidence standard, not an ideological one. Whether a particular program clears that bar is an empirical question, answerable by data, not a matter of party affiliation.

On the second question, the principle is precise: measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline. These three commitments work together. Measuring results means building into every significant federal program a mechanism for tracking whether it is actually achieving its stated purpose. The student loan program, as documented by researchers at the Institute for College Access and Success, has been expanded and contracted repeatedly by both parties without any systemic mechanism for assessing whether it was helping borrowers build sustainable financial lives.² Ending what fails means that when the evidence shows a program is not working, the response should not be political protection but redesign or termination. Enforcing fiscal discipline means that commitments made in the present must be funded in the present, not deferred to a future Congress that did not make them.

The CBO’s 10-year forecast makes the cost of failing to apply this standard unmistakable. Spending is projected to rise to 24.4 percent of GDP by 2036, well above the pre-pandemic historical average of 20.1 percent, while revenue is expected to average roughly 17.7 percent of GDP over the same period.⁴ Net interest payments are projected to double by 2036. The gap between those two lines is not a partisan talking point. It is an arithmetic reality that neither party has been willing to address squarely.

What Happens When This Fails

Linz and Stepan’s analysis of democratic consolidation was explicit about what happens when a state loses the capacity to perform its essential functions. Their conclusion was that a state without effective institutions does not simply deliver services poorly. It loses legitimacy. Citizens who cannot rely on government to enforce contracts, deliver services they have paid for, or manage resources entrusted to it begin to look for alternatives, whether those are private arrangements that serve only the wealthy, local strongmen who fill the vacuum, or demagogues who promise to burn the whole system down.³

The United States is not at that point. But the indicators are worth watching. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s April 2026 report put the federal debt at 36.2 trillion, equivalent to 106,900 per person.⁴ Acemoglu and Robinson’s framework of inclusive versus extractive institutions offers a precise warning: when a state’s fiscal commitments outrun its capacity to fund them, the adjustment is almost never orderly. It is almost always borne disproportionately by those with the least political power to resist it.³ The students who find their loans in disarray, the veterans whose benefits are the fastest-growing entitlement in the CBO’s forecast, the seniors dependent on Medicare’s long-term solvency: these are the people who pay the price when governing is replaced by performance.

The Stakes

The principle is not about the size of government. It is about the quality and accountability of government. A small government that cannot perform its essential functions is not efficient. It is just broken. A large government that spends without measuring whether its programs work is not compassionate. It is irresponsible. The Centercratic position is that the American people deserve neither variety of failure.

The 2026 midterms offer a test of whether this framing has a political constituency. The evidence suggests it does. The voters who are most frustrated with the current political environment are not primarily asking for more government or less government. They are asking for government that works, that is honest about what it can afford, that stops programs that have failed, and that does not cut essential services faster than alternatives can be built to replace them. That is Principle 7 in plain language.

Tomorrow, this series turns to Principle 8: Defend Our Freedom, and the question of what it means to protect American security in a world of military, cyber, and economic threats.

Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.

Notes

¹ Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/

² Chapman, Paul J. “America’s Student Loan Crisis: How We Got Here and How We Can Fix It Together.” Centercratic Party, January 16, 2026. https://centercratic.party/ [Space file: Student-Loan-Crisis.pdf]

³ Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, Chapter 1, pp. 7-15; Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Crown Publishers, 2012, Chapters 1-3. [Thread attachment: The-Nine-Pillars-of-a-Working-Democratic-Republic.docx]

⁴ Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. “What Washington Won’t Talk About.” The Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2026. [Space file: What-Washington-Wont-Talk-About-WSJ.pdf] See also: Peter G. Peterson Foundation. “The National Debt.” https://www.pgpf.org/national-debt-clock (accessed April 2026).

⁵ Kane, Paul. “Congress Set Records in 2025, Some More Dubious Than Others.” The Washington Post, 2025. [Space file: Congress-set-records-in-2025-some-more…ious-than-others-The-Washington-Post.pdf]

⁶ Chapman, Paul J. “I’m Independent! What Does That Mean?” The Center Voter, January 28, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/im-independent-what-does-that-mean

⁷ Gallup. “Government.” Gallup Poll Social Series, 2025. https://news.gallup.com/poll/27286/government.aspx

Principle 6: Build policies that earn broad, lasting support. Where consensus is out of reach, respect that communities will find their own path.¹

In June 1989, a bipartisan group of senators, environmental advocates, and coal-state Republicans sat down to work out the details of what would become the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. The political obstacles were formidable. Democrats wanted command-and-control regulations. Republicans balked at the costs. The Reagan years had left environmental legislation stalled for a decade. Yet, over the course of the following year, the two sides found a mechanism they could both accept: a market-based system of tradable pollution credits. It was not anyone’s ideal policy. It was a genuine compromise. When the final bill came to a vote, it passed the Senate 89 to 10 and the House 401 to 25. Those margins told a story about what happens when legislation is built to last.² That story is exactly what Principle 6 is about.

Why This Principle Comes Sixth

This is the sixth article in a nine-part series on the Centercratic Party’s governing principles. Principle 6 states: build policies that earn broad, lasting support, and where consensus is out of reach, respect that communities will find their own path.¹ It is the second and final principle in the Collaborative Governance cluster, and it completes the thought that Principle 5 began. Principle 5 established how a democracy should argue. Principle 6 establishes what a democracy should be trying to accomplish through that argument: not a narrow victory, but a durable agreement.

The two pillars that Principle 6 serves are Pillar 8, a civic culture of tolerance and compromise, and Pillar 5, responsible political parties.³ Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, in their foundational 1963 study of political culture across five democracies, identified what they called the “civic culture” as the essential social substrate of stable democratic governance: a population that participates actively but also accepts that political outcomes require negotiation rather than maximalism. A party system serves democracy, in the analysis of Linz and Stepan, when it channels competition into constructive policy-making rather than zero-sum conflict. The pillar framework that grounds this series is direct on the point: when political parties treat every vote as a weapon and every majority as an unlimited mandate, the civic culture of compromise that sustains democratic governance begins to dissolve.³

The Anatomy of a Policy That Does Not Last

American political history is full of lessons about what happens when one party pushes major legislation through on the narrowest possible majority, with no buy-in from the other side. The lesson is almost always the same: the policy survives until the other party regains power, and then the work of unraveling it begins.

The Affordable Care Act passed in March 2010 without a single Republican vote.⁴ From the day it passed, it was a target. Republicans attempted to repeal it more than 70 times over the following years. In 2017, they came within one vote. The skinny repeal bill failed 51 to 49 only because three Republicans defected. A policy affecting one-sixth of the American economy, touching the health coverage of tens of millions of people, has spent fifteen years as a political hostage because it was passed by one party and opposed by the other from the moment of its birth.⁵

The Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the House in May 2025 by a margin of 215 to 214, is already tracing a similar arc.⁶ Within days of passage, Republican members of the House were telling reporters they had regrets. Several said they had been pressured into voting yes and were uncomfortable with the Medicaid cuts the bill contained. The Senate signaled it would make substantial changes. A bill so narrowly passed, in a chamber so tightly divided, is not a policy accomplishment. It is an opening move in a fight that will continue for years.⁷

Compare those episodes to the 1983 Social Security reforms. In 1982, the Social Security system was months from insolvency. President Reagan appointed a bipartisan commission, chaired by economist Alan Greenspan, that included representatives from both parties. After months of negotiation, the commission produced a package of payroll tax increases and benefit adjustments that neither side loved but both sides could accept. The legislation passed the Senate 58 to 14 and the House 243 to 102 with large majorities from both parties.⁸ More than four decades later, the 1983 reforms still stand. No serious attempt has been made to repeal them. The policy endured not because it was perfect but because it belonged to both parties. Neither side had the incentive to tear down what both sides had built.

The pattern extends beyond any single policy to the structure of congressional behavior itself. Congressional Quarterly has tracked party unity votes, defined as roll calls in which a majority of each party is on opposite sides, since 1953. In 1990, the party unity rate was 54 percent in the Senate and 49 percent in the House. By 2025, the rate had reached 85.3 percent, the highest level ever recorded. Congress in 2025 was the most partisan since CQ began keeping score.² What that number means in practice is that the space for bipartisan policy-making has shrunk to almost nothing. The exceptions, when they happen, have become news.

Both parties share responsibility for this condition. Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act through reconciliation specifically to avoid needing Republican votes. Republicans passed the 2017 tax cuts the same way. Obama governed by executive action on immigration when he could not get legislative agreement. Trump has signed more executive orders in his second term than in his entire first term.² The pattern is bipartisan: when one party cannot persuade the other, it goes around them. The policies that result are always the first target when the other side returns to power.

What Independent Voters Are Telling Us

The 45 percent of Americans who identify as political independents understand this problem viscerally, even if they do not always have the vocabulary for it.⁹

A 2025 survey by the nonpartisan research organization Center Forward found that 72 percent of Americans believe elected officials should prioritize finding common ground over pushing through their party’s priorities. Among independents, that number was 81 percent. The same survey found that 68 percent of Americans believe that major policy changes should require support from both parties to be considered legitimate.¹⁰

A September 2025 poll found that 76 percent of Americans favor compromise from politicians to get things done, including 65 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of Democrats.¹¹ What independents are describing is not a demand for weak or wishy-washy governance. They are describing a demand for governance that can actually last. They have watched too many cycles of one party passing something transformative, the other party spending years trying to repeal it, and nothing getting better in the meantime. They are not asking for less ambition. They are asking for policies that can survive a change in administration.

Pew Research found in October 2025 that 73 percent of Americans want their party leaders to compromise with the other side to get things done, compared to only 24 percent who want their leaders to hold firm.¹² That preference held across both parties and was strongest among political independents. The voters have been saying the same thing for years. The parties have not been listening.

The Centercratic Position

The Centercratic Party’s sixth principle states its requirements with deliberate precision: build policies that earn broad, lasting support, and where consensus is out of reach, respect that communities will find their own path.¹ Both halves of that statement matter equally.

The first half is a standard for governance. It asks legislators and executives to measure the success of a policy not just by whether it passes but by whether it can survive the next election cycle and the one after that. A policy that passes with 51 percent of the vote in a divided legislature and is immediately targeted for repeal has not solved a problem. It has created a new one. The standard for “broad, lasting support” is not unanimity. It is the kind of majority that reflects genuine persuasion rather than pure party discipline.

The second half is a standard for federalism. The Centercratic Party recognizes that on some questions, national consensus is genuinely out of reach. On those questions, the appropriate response is not to force a national solution but to allow communities, states, and regions to find their own paths. That principle is not a concession to division. It is an acknowledgment that a country of 340 million people, spanning enormous geographic, cultural, and economic diversity, will not always arrive at the same answers on every question, and that a governing system which forces identical solutions on communities with different circumstances will generate endless conflict and diminishing legitimacy.

In practical terms, this means that the Centercratic Party commits to three specific behaviors. First, it will seek genuine consultation with the opposing party before advancing major legislation, not as a procedural formality but as a genuine effort to incorporate concerns that might otherwise make a policy vulnerable to repeal. Second, it will use reconciliation and other procedural shortcuts only for genuinely budgetary matters, not as a workaround to avoid the hard work of persuasion. Third, on questions where national consensus cannot be achieved, it will support giving communities the authority to govern themselves, rather than imposing a federal solution that half the country will spend the next decade trying to reverse.

What Happens When This Fails

The political science of polarization offers a precise description of what happens to a democracy that abandons the principle of broad support. Gordon Heltzel and Kristin Laurin, reviewing decades of research, identified a self-reinforcing cycle: as parties pursue narrow victories rather than broad coalitions, citizens perceive the gap between the parties as even wider than it is, which leads them to disengage from anyone on the other side, which increases actual polarization, which makes broad coalition-building even harder.¹³ The researchers concluded that the only way to interrupt the cycle is for political and media institutions to actively combat the misperception that compromise is impossible.

The 1990 congressional session, now viewed as one of the most productive in modern American history, produced the Clean Air Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Immigration Act, and a bipartisan budget deal, all under a divided government.² The lesson its veterans draw is not complicated. Former senator Bob Dole, who championed the ADA and watched a successor treaty to his signature achievement fail in 2012 along party lines, said it plainly before his death in 2021: “If somebody is at a two and you are at four, there ought to be some way to get to three. And you settle on three.”²

The 2026 midterms will test whether the current moment produces any pressure toward that kind of governing. The party unity data suggests it will not happen on its own. It will require leaders, in both parties, who are willing to trade a narrow victory today for a durable agreement tomorrow. The Centercratic Party exists, in part, to make that trade worth making.

Tomorrow, this series turns to Principle 7: Govern with a Balanced Approach, and the question of what effective governance actually requires.

Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.

Notes

¹ Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/

² Rosenwald, Michael S. “How a Historically Bipartisan Congress Gave Way to Partisan Rancor.” The Washington Post, April 2026. [Space file: How-a-historically-bipartisan-Congress-…-partisan-rancor-The-Washington-Post.pdf]

³ Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: Almond, Gabriel A., and Sidney Verba. The Civic Culture. Princeton University Press, 1963; Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

⁴ Brookings Institution. “Republicans Learn the Limits of Reconciliation with Failed ACA Repeal.” July 27, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/limits-of-reconciliation-and-failed-aca-repeal/

⁵ CHEAC. “Senate Rejects Repeal of the Affordable Care Act.” July 2017. https://cheac.org/senate-rejects-repeal-of-the-affordable-care-act/

⁶ Progressive Policy Institute. “House Republicans Pass ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Despite Several Big Red Flags.” May 21, 2025. https://www.progressivepolicy.org/house-republicans-pass-one-big-beautiful-bill-despite-several-big-red-flags/

⁷ New York Times. “After Muscling Their Bill Through the House, Some Republicans Have Regrets.” June 3, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/us/politics/house-republicans-policy-bill-regrets.html

⁸ Social Security Administration. “The 1983 Greenspan Commission on Social Security Reform.” https://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/gspan7.html

⁹ Chapman, Paul J. “I’m Independent! What Does That Mean?” The Center Voter, January 28, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/im-independent-what-does-that-mean

¹⁰ Center Forward. “The American Voter Mindset, 2025 Center Forward Voter Research Journal.” November 5, 2025. https://center-forward.org/voter-research-journal/

¹¹ LiveNow from Fox. “Americans Favor Compromise from Politicians to Get Things Done in Government: Poll.” September 28, 2025. https://www.livenowfox.com/news/americans-compromise-politicians-government-poll

¹² Pew Research Center. “What Americans Want and Expect from Party Leaders.” October 29, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/10/30/what-americans-want-and-expect-from-party-leaders/

¹³ Heltzel, Gordon, and Kristin Laurin. “Polarization in America: Two Possible Futures.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 34 (2020): 179-184. [Space file: Polarization-in-America-two-possible-futures.pdf]

Principle 5: Conduct fact-based debates with respect. Acknowledge disagreements. Prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.¹

On April 7, 2026, Justice Sonia Sotomayor stood at a lectern at the University of Kansas School of Law and criticized a colleague’s opinion in an immigration case. That is normal. Supreme Court justices disagree with each other in writing all the time, and those disagreements are part of how the law develops. What was not normal was what she said next. Referring to Justice Brett Kavanaugh without naming him, she remarked that his opinion reflected the perspective of someone whose parents were professionals, suggesting he could not truly understand people who earn by the hour. Eight days later, she issued a rare public statement. “I made remarks that were inappropriate,” she wrote. “I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.”² The incident would not have made national news if it were unusual. It made national news because it was recognizable. Even at the Supreme Court, the line between disagreeing with an idea and attacking the person who holds it has become harder to hold.

Why This Principle Comes Fifth

This is the fifth article in a nine-part series examining the Centercratic Party’s governing principles. Principle 5 states: conduct fact-based debates with respect, acknowledge disagreements, and prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.¹ It is the first of two principles in the Collaborative Governance cluster, which addresses not what government does but how it deliberates. After four principles about structure, this one is about behavior. The four Democratic Guardrails protect the system from being broken by force. This principle protects the system from being broken by words and the habits of mind that produce them.

Self-governing people cannot decide anything together if they cannot argue productively. The pillar framework that grounds this series identifies two pillars that Principle 5 directly serves: Pillar 6, a vibrant civil society with independent information, and Pillar 8, a civic culture of tolerance and compromise.³ Robert Putnam’s research on civic life in America documented what happens when those conditions erode: citizens disengage, trust collapses, and the networks of association that allow people to solve problems together dissolve. Levitsky and Ziblatt identified the erosion of what they called “mutual toleration” as one of the two primary mechanisms of democratic decay. When political opponents stop treating each other as legitimate rivals with different views and start treating each other as existential enemies to be destroyed, the democratic norm of peaceful competition gives way to something much less stable.³ The Sotomayor moment was a small but vivid example of a very large pattern.

The Numbers Behind the Feeling

Americans are not imagining that political discourse has gotten worse. The data confirms it.

A Pew Research study found that 84 percent of American adults say political debate has become less respectful over the last several years. Only 4 percent say it has become more respectful. And 78 percent say political debate has become less fact-based, while just 5 percent say it has become more fact-based. These findings held across every political and demographic group the researchers measured.⁴

Trust in the information Americans receive has fallen in parallel. A Gallup poll released in October 2025 found that only 28 percent of Americans now express a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. That is down from 31 percent the year before and 40 percent five years ago. Among Republicans, trust in media has been below 20 percent since 2015. Among Democrats, once the most media-trusting group, trust has fallen to just 51 percent. Among independents, it remains well below 50 percent.⁵

Separate Pew research found that overall trust in information from national news organizations fell 11 percentage points between March and October 2025 alone, dropping to 56 percent. Local news fared better at 70 percent, but that too had declined sharply from 82 percent in 2016.⁶

The physical consequences of the rhetoric are not abstract. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated 14,938 threatening statements, behaviors, and communications directed at members of Congress and their families in 2025. That is a 58 percent jump from 9,474 cases in 2024, itself a record. It is the third consecutive year of increases, and the Capitol Police stated plainly that “reducing violent political rhetoric is one of the most effective methods to lower the number of threats nationwide.”⁷ Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed while speaking at a college campus in September 2025. Former Minnesota state House Speaker Melissa Hortman was killed alongside her husband in a politically motivated attack that same summer. The Democratic Party platform analysis published by The Center Voter found that hostile references to Republicans in Democratic platforms quintupled between 1976 and 2024, cooperative language declined by more than half, and opposition-focused content rose from 15 percent to 40 percent of total platform content.⁸ The Republican Party’s rhetorical trajectory has been equally well documented.

Both parties have been complicit in this deterioration. The pattern did not begin with any single figure or any single election cycle. It accelerated with social media, with the donor economics that reward ideological purity over problem-solving, and with a media landscape in which outrage reliably generates more engagement than accuracy.⁹ Pointing to one party as the cause is itself a bad-faith argument. The problem belongs to the whole system.

What Independent Voters Are Telling Us

The 45 percent of Americans who identify as political independents have a specific relationship with this principle. They are not simply frustrated by rudeness in the abstract. They are describing a system that has made it impossible to learn what is true.¹⁰

The Claremont McKenna College Civility Survey, conducted in spring 2025 with 3,000 adults, found that 53 percent of Americans describe society as uncivil, compared to just 26 percent who say it feels civil. Half of Americans believe civility has declined in just the past 12 months. More striking still: 57 percent of respondents said they had held back honest opinions in the past year to avoid conflict, and 35 percent said they do not feel safe sharing their honest opinions on social media. A third of Americans encounter incivility online or in person on a weekly or daily basis.¹¹ When respondents were asked what drives the decline, they identified digital aggression through social media at 28 percent and political polarization at 21 percent.¹¹

Independent voters responded to all of this by disengaging from the partisan debate, not because they have no opinions, but because the format of the debate has been designed to generate heat rather than light. Forty-seven percent of independents describe themselves as moderates. They favor different parties on different issues. They are, by every measure, the voters who are most open to persuasion by facts and most likely to be driven away by personal attacks. They are precisely the voters that fact-based, dignity-preserving debate is supposed to reach. And they are precisely the voters the current style of political combat has most thoroughly alienated.¹⁰

The Centercratic Position

The Centercratic Party’s fifth principle states its requirements plainly: conduct fact-based debates, treat opponents with respect, acknowledge genuine disagreements rather than pretending they do not exist, and prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.¹ Each of those four requirements has practical meaning.

Fact-based debate means that claims made in political argument must be traceable to evidence that can be examined and challenged. It does not mean that facts are never in dispute or that every question has a clear answer. It means that when facts are uncertain, that uncertainty is acknowledged rather than weaponized. A politician who cites studies that support their position and ignores studies that complicate it is not conducting a fact-based debate. A politician who fabricates or misrepresents data to win an argument has crossed from debate into manipulation.

Respectful debate means engaging with the best version of an opponent’s argument rather than the worst. It means disagreeing with the idea rather than attacking the person. Justice Sotomayor understood this when she apologized. The disagreement with Kavanaugh’s legal reasoning was legitimate. The suggestion that his upbringing disqualified him from understanding working people was a personal attack, not a legal argument, and she said so herself.²

Acknowledging genuine disagreements is, paradoxically, one of the most important and least practiced civic skills in current American politics. Many of the hardest policy questions involve real trade-offs where reasonable people disagree. Immigration policy involves genuine tensions between border security and humanitarian obligation. Fiscal policy involves genuine tensions between debt reduction and the cost of cutting services people depend on. Pretending those tensions do not exist, or that anyone who takes the other side is acting in bad faith, does not resolve the disagreement. It makes the disagreement impossible to resolve.

Prohibiting bad-faith tactics means naming specific behaviors and holding all participants to the same standard: no fabricated statistics, no deliberate misquotes, no guilt-by-association attacks that have nothing to do with the policy at hand, no threatening language toward opponents, and no tactics designed to shut down debate rather than advance it. These are not censorship. They are the rules of a game that can only be played if both sides agree to play it honestly.

What Happens When This Fails

The researchers who study political hostility have found a pattern that is worth stating plainly. Escalating hostile rhetoric moves through distinct stages. It begins with adversarial debate, in which opponents argue hard but still treat each other as legitimate rivals. It progresses to incivility, in which the argument becomes personal and disrespectful. It continues to intolerance, in which opponents begin to question each other’s right to participate. And it ends in belligerence, in which rivals are no longer treated as adversaries to be defeated but as enemies to be eliminated.¹² That last stage is where democratic politics ends.

The United States has not reached the final stage. But the trajectory of the data points in that direction. Threats against Congress have tripled since 2017. Political violence has claimed lives in Minnesota and at college campuses. A majority of Americans report self-censoring to avoid conflict. Trust in the factual basis of public debate has dropped to historic lows. None of this is inevitable. All of it is reversible. But reversal requires more than a wish for things to be different. It requires that the people who participate in democratic debate, from elected officials to journalists to citizens who share information online, choose deliberately to argue by a different set of rules.⁷

An Argument Worth Having

The Centercratic Party does not ask Americans to pretend there are no hard disagreements. There are. It does not ask them to stop arguing. Arguments are how democracies reach decisions. What it asks is that those arguments be conducted in a way that leaves the people who disagree still capable of finding common ground when the argument is over.

Justice Sotomayor’s apology was not a small thing. It was a public acknowledgment that the line between legitimate disagreement and personal attack is real, that crossing it is wrong, and that crossing it reflects poorly on the person who does it regardless of how strongly they believe they are right. That acknowledgment, coming from one of the most visible institutions in American life, is a small but honest example of what this principle looks like in practice. It is also a reminder of how rare that kind of accountability has become, and how much work there is to do.

Tomorrow, this series examines Principle 6: Seek Unity through Broad Support, and why policies built on narrow majorities tend not to last.

Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.

Notes

¹ Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/

² SCOTUSblog. “Justice Sotomayor Apologizes for ‘Inappropriate’ Remarks About Justice Kavanaugh.” April 15, 2026. https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/04/justice-sotomayor-apologizes-for-inappropriate-remarks-about-justice-kavanaugh/

³ Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. Simon and Schuster, 2000; Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown Publishers, 2018.

⁴ Pew Research Center. “Americans’ Feelings About Politics, Polarization, and the Tone of Political Discourse.” September 19, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/americans-feelings-about-politics-polarization-and-the-tone-of-political-debate/

⁵ Gallup. “Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S.” October 2025. https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx

⁶ Pew Research Center. “How Trust in Information from News Organizations and Social Media Has Changed.” October 28, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/29/how-americans-trust-in-information-from-news-organizations-and-social-medias/

⁷ U.S. Capitol Police. “Threats Against Congress Spiked in 2025, Extending a Three-Year Rise.” January 27, 2026. Reported in: NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/threats-congress-spiked-2025-rose-third-year-row-capitol-police-say-rcna256259

⁸ Chapman, Paul J. “The Democratic Party: From Bridges to Walls.” The Center Voter, January 30, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/the-democratic-party-from-bridges

⁹ Chapman, Paul J. “Congress Is Now Irrelevant: What America Can Do About It.” The Center Voter, January 18, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/congress-is-now-irrelevant-what-america

¹⁰ Chapman, Paul J. “I’m Independent! What Does That Mean?” The Center Voter, January 28, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/im-independent-what-does-that-mean

¹¹ IW Group. “The Civility Paradox: A National Survey of 3,000 U.S. Adults.” Claremont McKenna College Dreier Roundtable, October 2025. https://drt.cmc.edu/2025/10/04/civility-survey-3/

¹² Abramowitz, Noam, and Ofer Kenig. “Hostility and Democratic Erosion: Introducing the Political Hostility Scale.” Democratization, November 2025. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2025.2581840

Principle 4: One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.¹

Walk up the steps of the United States Supreme Court building in Washington and look above the main entrance. Carved in marble, in letters two feet tall, are four words: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW. They have been there since 1935. They were chosen deliberately, as a statement of what the building and the institution inside it are supposed to stand for. They are not a description of where American justice began. They are a description of where it was supposed to go. The distance between those four marble words and the justice system that most Americans actually experience is one of the most important questions in American democratic life, and right now, that distance is growing.

Why This Principle Comes Fourth

This is the fourth article in a nine-part series examining the Centercratic Party’s governing principles. The fourth principle is this: the law applies equally to all, and independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.¹ It is the last of the four Democratic Guardrails, the structural protections that must hold for any of the other principles to mean anything at all. You can have free elections, term limits, and protected election integrity, but if the law bends depending on who you are, those safeguards become tools of whoever controls the bending.

The rule of law is the foundational pillar of the nine-pillar framework that grounds this entire series.² Scholars Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, in their landmark work on how democracies consolidate and collapse, identified it as the first and most essential arena: all actors, including the government itself, must be genuinely bound by general laws that protect individual freedoms. When that condition breaks down — when powerful actors can ignore the law with impunity, when courts become instruments of partisan preference rather than impartial arbiters — democratic governance does not just weaken. It becomes theater.² The stage looks the same. The script keeps running. But the thing it was supposed to be is gone.

The Two-Tiered Problem

Most Americans do not need a political science framework to recognize what unequal justice looks like. They have been watching it for years.

The National Center for State Courts has tracked public confidence in the justice system for more than a decade. Its 2025 survey found that the share of Americans who believe courts provide “equal justice to all” has fallen from 62 percent in 2014 to just 44 percent today.³ The most common explanation offered by respondents in focus groups was striking in its consistency: they described a justice system with two tiers: “one for those with influence, connections, and power, and another one for everyone else.”³ That is not a fringe view. It is the majority view, and it has been growing for years.

Meanwhile, Gallup’s global survey found that confidence in the American judicial system dropped to a record low of 35 percent in 2024, one of the largest single-country declines for judicial confidence recorded anywhere in the world since 2006.⁴ And separate AP-NORC polling found that 7 in 10 Americans believe Supreme Court justices are guided more by their own ideology than by the Constitution.⁵ These numbers describe a credibility crisis, not a minor dip in approval ratings. A justice system that most people believe is rigged is not protecting rights. It is providing cover.

What Is Happening Right Now

On January 20, 2025, one of President Trump’s first acts after taking the oath of office was to issue full, complete, and unconditional pardons to nearly all of the approximately 1,600 people charged or convicted in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol.⁶ Among those pardoned were individuals who had pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers, and leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy, planning the forcible obstruction of the peaceful transfer of power. In November 2025, Trump extended pardons to dozens of political allies facing state criminal charges for their roles in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.⁷

The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan election law organization, stated plainly what these pardons communicated: those who helped subvert an election to benefit President Trump would be rewarded rather than held accountable. That signal, the organization noted, did not just erase past convictions. It created an incentive structure for future behavior.⁷

The pardon power is constitutionally granted and has been used throughout American history. But the rule of law depends not just on the existence of legal authority but on whether that authority is exercised in a way that treats all citizens by the same standard. When pardons flow to political allies who attacked the government, and when the stated rationale is that the prosecutions themselves were unjust, the message is not that justice was restored. The message is that justice depends on which side you are on.

The administration’s posture toward the courts has been equally direct. According to a Washington Post analysis published in July 2025, Trump administration officials defied court orders in approximately one-third of more than 160 lawsuits in which judges had made significant rulings against administration policies.⁸ The Protect Democracy Project documented that in the first six months of the administration alone, courts in at least 12 separate cases found that the administration had violated court orders, including cases involving individuals deported without due process, congressionally appropriated funds improperly withheld, and federal employees wrongfully terminated.⁹ In March 2025, Thomas Homan, the administration’s border czar, said publicly of a federal judge’s order: “I don’t care what the judges think.”¹⁰

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his year-end report for 2024, had already warned that “violence, intimidation, and defiance directed at judges undermines our Republic.”¹¹ According to the U.S. Marshals Service, 564 threats against federal judges were logged in fiscal year 2025 alone, surpassing the total for all of 2024. And the number in 2026 was already at 197 by early in the year and still climbing.¹²

In state legislatures, the Brennan Center for Justice documented that in 2025, lawmakers introduced at least 117 bills attacking the independence or powers of state courts, with 15 enacted across six states. Measures included bills that would strip courts of jurisdiction, gerrymander state supreme courts, allow legislators to ignore judicial rulings, and impose civil penalties on judges who apply diversity or equity principles in their decisions.¹³

Both parties deserve honest accounting here. The Democratic Party’s record on equal justice is far from clean. In cities it has governed for decades, the criminal justice system has often applied the law most harshly to the people with the least power and the fewest resources to fight back. Prosecutorial discretion, bail systems, and sentencing practices have created real disparities that progressive governors and mayors have acknowledged but only partially addressed. The principle of one law for all demands honesty about those failures, not just the current administration’s. Equal justice is not a partisan complaint. It is a standard that applies in every direction.

What the 45 Percent Are Saying

Among the 45 percent of Americans who identify as political independents, the largest political identity in the country, the issue of equal justice cuts through the usual partisan noise.¹⁴ Independent voters are not, on balance, either pro-prosecution or anti-prosecution, either reflexively deferential to authority or reflexively suspicious of it. What they are is consistent in their demand that the rules apply the same way regardless of who is involved.

The NCSC survey found that in 2025, even state courts, which outranked all other government institutions in public trust, were trusted by only 62 percent of respondents, and that the two-tiered justice concern was raised as prominently by Republicans as by Democrats.³ Among independents, the polling is even more pointed: 68 percent describe their political independence as a desire to “think for myself, independent of what parties and candidates tell me to think”. And when they apply that standard to the justice system, what they see is a system that thinks about politics first and justice second.¹⁴ A bipartisan majority of Americans, according to the Protect Democracy Project, believe that the president should not be able to ignore court rulings he disagrees with.⁹ That is not a left-wing position. It is the position of citizens who understand, without needing to be told, that a law that applies only when the powerful agree to follow it is not really a law at all.

The Centercratic Position

The Centercratic Party’s fourth principle rests on two sentences: the law applies equally to all, and independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.¹ Those two sentences contain four specific commitments.

The first is equal application. No person, not a president, not a political ally, not a wealthy donor, not a corporation, not a federal agency, is above the law. Pardons, prosecutorial discretion, and enforcement priorities must be exercised in ways that can survive the simplest possible test: would this decision have been made the same way if the person involved had no political connections? When the answer is clearly no, the rule of law has been bent, and the Centercratic position is that bending is not acceptable regardless of which party does the bending.

The second is judicial independence. Courts must be insulated from political pressure, from threats, from attempts to pack or restructure them for partisan advantage, from defiance of their orders, and from the rhetoric that treats judges as enemies when they rule against the current administration. The Centercratic position holds that attacks on judicial independence are attacks on the rule of law itself, whether they come in the form of impeachment threats, funding cuts, legislative court-stripping, or public intimidation.¹⁰

The third is due process for everyone. The administration of justice must provide fair procedures to every person, not just those with resources to hire good lawyers. Deportations without hearings, detentions without charges, and enforcement actions that bypass the procedural protections the Constitution requires are not efficiency measures. They are violations of the equal protection that the rule of law exists to guarantee. The guarantee does not depend on citizenship status, political affiliation, or whether the president likes the outcome.⁹

The fourth is accountability without exception. Those who break the law must face consequences regardless of their relationship to power. This applies to rioters who attack the Capitol, to corporate executives who commit fraud, to law enforcement officers who abuse their authority, and to government officials who defy court orders. Selective accountability, punishment for enemies, pardons for allies, is the most direct possible way to communicate that the law is a tool of power rather than a constraint on it.

What Happens When This Fails

History is not short of examples. The specific feature that distinguishes functioning democracies from systems that look like democracies is not just whether elections are held or whether courts exist. It is whether those courts are genuinely independent and whether those laws apply to everyone. Once a powerful enough actor demonstrates that the law does not apply to them, and faces no consequences for that demonstration, the constraint dissolves for everyone with enough power to follow the example.

The World Justice Project, which tracks the rule of law in 142 countries, has documented that rule-of-law scores decline much faster than they recover. Countries that lose judicial independence typically spend decades attempting to rebuild it, not years.¹⁵ The United States is not in that position yet. Courts are still functioning. Judges are still ruling against the administration. Lawyers are resigning rather than participating in strategies to defy judicial orders. The system is under stress, but it has not broken.

The question the 2026 midterms will begin to answer is whether enough Americans are paying attention to vote for the people who will defend these institutions, not just the ones who will use them.

The Marble Still Means Something

EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW is not a description of where American justice has always been. It is a commitment about where it is supposed to go, a standard that the country has never fully met and has always been obligated to pursue. The gap between the carving and the reality is not a reason to abandon the principle. It is the reason the principle has to be defended, loudly and consistently, by people who are not satisfied with watching it erode.

The 45 percent who belong to neither party have not given up on equal justice.¹⁴ They have given up on the two parties that keep treating it as a partisan weapon rather than a shared foundation. What the Centercratic Party offers on this principle is not a political position. It is a refusal to accept that the rules only apply when they are convenient for whoever holds power. That refusal is not ideology. It is the basic precondition for living in a country governed by laws rather than by whoever can avoid them.

Tomorrow, this series examines Principle 5: Debate with Facts and Dignity, and why the way we argue matters as much as what we argue about.

Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.

Notes

¹ Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/

² Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

³ National Center for State Courts. State of the State Courts: 2025 Public Opinion Poll Findings. December 2025. https://www.ncsc.org/resources-courts/state-state-courts-2025-public-opinion-poll-findings

⁴ Gallup. “Americans Pass Judgment on Their Courts.” December 16, 2024. https://news.gallup.com/poll/653897/americans-pass-judgment-courts.aspx

⁵ Associated Press / NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. “New Poll Shows Majority of Americans Believe Supreme Court Justices Put Ideology Over Impartiality.” PBS NewsHour, June 26, 2024. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/new-poll-shows-majority-of-americans-believe-supreme-court-justices-put-ideology-over-impartiality

⁶ White House. “Granting Pardons and Commutation of Sentences for Certain Offenses Relating to the Events at or Near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” Presidential Proclamation, January 20, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/granting-pardons-and-commutation-of-sentences-for-certain-offenses-related-to-the-events-at-or-near-the-united-states-capitol-on-january-6-2021/

⁷ Campaign Legal Center. “A Stress Test for the Rule of Law: What the Election Subversion Pardons Really Mean.” January 4, 2026. https://campaignlegal.org/update/stress-test-rule-law-what-election-subversion-pardons-really-mean

⁸ Washington Post. “Trump Officials Accused of Defying 1 in 3 Judges Who Ruled Against Him.” July 21, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-court-orders-defy-noncompliance-marshals-judges/

⁹ Protect Democracy Project. “The Trump Administration’s Conflict with the Courts, Explained.” October 2025. https://protectdemocracy.org/work/the-trump-administrations-conflict-with-the-courts-explained/

¹⁰ The Guardian. “Trump’s Defiance of Court Orders Is ‘Testing the Fences’ of the Rule of Law.” March 23, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/23/judges-trump-court-rulings

¹¹ Roberts, John G. “2024 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary.” Supreme Court of the United States, December 31, 2024. Reported in: The Fulcrum. “Retired Federal Judge Warns of Rising Threats to Judicial Independence.” January 10, 2026. https://thefulcrum.us/justice/retired-judge-warns-of-threats-to-judicial-independence

¹² Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Statement for the Record, January 7, 2026. https://www.citizensforethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2026.01.07-Statement-for-the-Record.pdf

¹³ Brennan Center for Justice. “Legislative Assaults on State Courts in 2025.” January 25, 2026. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/legislative-assaults-state-courts-2025

¹⁴ Chapman, Paul J. “I’m Independent! What Does That Mean?” The Center Voter, January 28, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/im-independent-what-does-that-mean

¹⁵ Legal Reader. “Judicial Independence Is at Risk: Why Protecting the Rule of Law Is Critical for Our Democracy.” March 25, 2026. https://www.legalreader.com/judicial-independence-is-at-risk-why-protecting-the-rule-of-law-is-critical-for-our-democracy/

Principle 3: Guarantee transparent, fair, and nonpartisan elections. Uphold certified results and let voters decide outcomes through lawful processes.¹

In the spring of 2013, a man in Johnson County, Kansas, went to his local election office to register to vote. He was a United States citizen, born and raised. He had a driver’s license, a Social Security card, and a permanent address. What he did not have was a copy of his birth certificate, which had gone missing during a recent move, and a passport, which had expired years before. Kansas had just passed a new law requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register. He was turned away. He was one of more than 31,000 eligible Kansas voters turned away under that law before federal courts struck it down in 2018. Across those same years, Kansas election officials found fewer than 30 instances of noncitizens attempting to register. More than a thousand legitimate voters were blocked for every single improper registration the law prevented.²

That story is not a Kansas story. It is the story of what is happening right now, across the entire country, on a much larger scale.

This is the third article in a nine-part series examining the Centercratic Party’s governing principles. The third principle is this: Guarantee transparent, fair, and nonpartisan elections. Uphold certified results and let voters decide outcomes through lawful processes.¹ It is the principle on which all the others depend, because a country whose citizens cannot trust how their votes are counted has no reliable way to hold anyone accountable for anything. When elections stop working, everything else stops working with them.

What a Real Election Requires

Most Americans think of election integrity as a question about fraud: are people voting who should not be? That is a legitimate concern, and it deserves an honest answer. But it is only one piece of what makes an election genuine. A real election also requires that every eligible voter can cast a ballot without unreasonable obstacles, that the people running the election have no stake in its outcome, and that when the votes are counted, every candidate and every party accepts the result.

Remove any one of those conditions, and you do not have a flawed election. You have something that looks like an election but does not function like one.

Robert Dahl, one of the most respected democratic theorists of the twentieth century, argued that free and fair elections are not one feature of democracy among others. They are the central mechanism by which a self-governing people holds power accountable. His research identified several conditions required for elections to serve that purpose: the rules must apply equally to all voters, the institutions running the elections must operate free from partisan control, and losers must accept the results.³ Those three conditions are exactly what the Centercratic principle is designed to protect.¹

Researchers at the Varieties of Democracy Institute, which tracks democratic health in more than 200 countries, have been watching the United States closely. Their 2026 report stated plainly that the 2026 midterm elections will be a critical test for this country, and that if election-specific indicators continue to decline, the United States’ already diminished standing as a functioning democracy will fall further still.⁴

What Is Happening Right Now

In October 2025, the Trump administration began filling federal election security positions with individuals who had previously worked to overturn the certified results of the 2020 election. According to reporting by ProPublica, CNN, and NBC News, at least 75 career officials with expertise in election security were dismissed, and nearly a dozen of those roles were filled with appointees who had actively challenged the legitimacy of the 2020 results.⁵ The people whose job is to protect the integrity of our elections were replaced by people who had publicly argued that a recent election should not have been certified.

That is a structural problem regardless of party. The integrity of any process that requires impartiality depends on the people running it having no stake in the outcome.

The administration has also issued executive orders that reach directly into the mechanics of voting. A March 2026 order directed the U.S. Postal Service to process mail-in ballots only for individuals on a federally verified citizenship list, an action that election law experts across the political spectrum described as unconstitutional, because the authority to administer elections belongs primarily to the states, not the White House.⁶ Multiple states filed legal challenges immediately, and federal courts were engaged on several fronts as this article was written.⁷

In Congress, the SAVE America Act passed the House in February 2026 and came to the Senate floor in March. The bill would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan legal research organization, found that more than 21 million Americans do not have ready access to the documents the bill would require, that roughly half of all Americans do not have a valid passport, and that millions more lack access to a certified copy of their birth certificate.⁸ The bipartisan Bipartisan Policy Center acknowledged that while noncitizen voting is already illegal under federal law and documented instances are rare, the bill as written could block large numbers of legitimate voters from participating if implemented without significant safeguards.⁹ The Kansas experience showed exactly how that plays out in practice. Now Congress is proposing the same approach for the entire country.²

It is worth saying directly: neither party has a clean record on this principle. Democrats have, in various states, supported redistricting arrangements drawn to protect incumbents rather than fairly represent voters. They have also, on occasion, resisted election security measures that had genuine merit, allowing the issue to become more politically divided than the evidence requires.¹⁰ Honest election integrity policy does not belong to either party. It belongs to the voters.

What Americans Are Actually Saying

Forty-five percent of American adults identify as political independents, the largest political identity in the country.¹¹ Among that group, confidence that the November 2026 elections will be run fairly has fallen sharply.

A March 2026 NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that overall voter confidence in fair and accurate elections dropped 10 percentage points since October 2024, falling from 76 percent to 66 percent.¹² A separate survey of more than 11,000 eligible voters found that only 60 percent of Americans now believe their votes will be counted accurately in the 2026 midterms, with independent voters expressing even lower confidence at 57 percent.¹³

What independent voters cited as their primary concern was not noncitizen voting, and it was not voter suppression. It was misleading information. They did not know what the rules were, who was in charge of enforcing them, or whether the people running the elections could be trusted to do so impartially.¹² That is not apathy. That is a rational response to a system in which the rules are simultaneously being contested in Congress, in the courts, and in the executive branch, while the officials responsible for running the elections have been replaced at the federal level with people who have a documented preference for a particular outcome. When voters cannot tell whether the game is being played straight, they stop believing the results. And when they stop believing the results, the elections stop doing the one thing they exist to do.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party’s third principle rests on four concrete commitments, not talking points.¹

The first is nonpartisan election administration. The people who run our elections, at every level of government, must have no stake in who wins. That means restoring the career election security professionals who were dismissed and replacing politically motivated appointees with individuals whose only qualification for the job is competence and impartiality.⁵

The second is defending the constitutional design. The Constitution gives primary responsibility for running elections to the states, not the federal executive branch. That division was deliberate. It ensures that no single administration can control the entire electoral system. Federal involvement in elections should be limited to providing resources, security support, and uniform rights protections, not to dictating who is eligible to vote or how states must process ballots.⁶

The third is an evidence standard for any restriction on voter access. Any law that makes it harder to vote must be justified by documented evidence of a real and significant problem, must be the least restrictive way to solve that problem, and must treat all eligible voters equally regardless of their income, age, or documentation status. The systematic review of noncitizen voting claims conducted by the Center for Election Innovation and Research found that the overwhelming majority of such claims, when properly investigated, turn out to be data errors rather than intentional fraud.¹⁴ Policy that restricts access for millions of legitimate citizens in order to address a problem that the evidence does not support is not election integrity. It is a different kind of problem.

The fourth is unconditional acceptance of certified results. A candidate or party that refuses to accept a certified election result, unless a court finds actual fraud sufficient to change the outcome, has not simply lost an election it disagreed with. It has broken the foundational agreement that makes democratic governance possible at all. The Centercratic standard applies in both directions, without exception, regardless of which party is doing the refusing.¹

What Happens When This Fails

Countries do not typically lose free elections in a single dramatic moment. What the historical record shows, from Hungary to Venezuela, is a gradual process: first, doubt is planted about whether elections can be trusted. Then, the people responsible for running elections are replaced with loyalists. Then, the rules are changed in ways that make it harder for opposition voters to participate. Each step is defended as a reform. Each step makes the next step easier.¹⁵

The Varieties of Democracy Institute’s data shows that the United States’ score on the Clean Election Index, which measures whether elections are actually free and fair rather than just formally held, has been declining since 2016. The primary driver of that decline is not an increase in actual fraud, which remains rare, but an increase in political pressure on election administration.¹⁶ The 2026 midterms will be the first real test of whether that trend continues, levels off, or begins to reverse.¹⁷

A Vote That Means Something

There is a version of this debate in which election security and voter access are treated as opposing goals, where protecting the ballot means restricting it. That version of the debate is wrong, and the evidence says so. The goal is an election system in which every eligible voter can participate easily, every fraudulent vote is prevented, and the people running the process answer to no one except the law. Those three things are not in tension. They are the same goal, described from three different angles.

The 45 percent of Americans who belong to neither party understand this, even if they do not always have the language for it.¹¹ What they want, and what they have never fully received from either major party, is an election system they can trust. Not one designed to help their side win. One designed to let the voters decide.

That is not a radical idea. It is the only idea on which democratic self-government can stand.

Tomorrow, this series examines Principle 4: One Law for All, and why equal justice under the law is inseparable from the question of whether elections, once held, actually mean what they are supposed to mean.

Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.

Notes

¹ Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/

² Associated Press. “Kansas Once Required Voters to Prove Citizenship. That Didn’t Work Out So Well.” December 29, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/kansas-noncitizen-voting-proof-of-citizenship-50d56a0b8d1f0fde15480aab3db67f4f

³ Dahl, Robert A. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. Yale University Press, 1971. Discussed in: Democracy Paradox. “Thoughts on Robert Dahl’s Polyarchy.” May 2021. https://democracyparadox.com/2021/05/29/thoughts-on-robert-dahls-polyarchy/

⁴ Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute. “Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline Unprecedented.” Press Release, March 16, 2026. https://www.v-dem.net/news/press-release-democratic-backsliding-reaches-western-democracies-with-us-decline-unprecedented/

⁵ ProPublica / CNN / NBC News. “Trump Elevates Election Deniers to Positions with Key Roles in 2026 Midterms.” April 14, 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-elevates-election-deniers-positions-183108906.html

⁶ Lawfare Media. “What Is Trump’s ‘Election Integrity’ Order Even Trying to Achieve?” January 3, 2026. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-is-trump-s-election-integrity-order-even-trying-to-achieve

⁷ Chapman, Paul J. “Today’s Essential Political News.” The Center Voter, March 31, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/todays-essential-political-news-4minute-8e8

⁸ Brennan Center for Justice. “New SAVE Act Bills Would Still Block Millions of Americans from Voting.” February 2026. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting

⁹ Bipartisan Policy Center. “Five Things to Know About the SAVE America Act.” April 6, 2026. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/five-things-to-know-about-the-save-act/

¹⁰ Bipartisan Policy Center / R Street Institute / Institute for Responsive Government. “United in Security: How Every State Protects Your Vote in 2026.” February 2026. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/united-in-security-how-every-state-protects-your-vote-2026/

¹¹ Gallup. “New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents.” January 11, 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx

¹² American Democracy Minute. “A March 2026 Poll Shows an Erosion of Voter Confidence in Elections.” March 17, 2026. https://www.americandemocracyminute.org/wethepeople/2026/03/18/a-march-2026-poll-shows-an-erosion-of-voter-confidence-in-elections

¹³ The Hill. “60 Percent Say They’re Confident Midterms Will Be Counted Fairly.” February 17, 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5742131-voter-confidence-decline-midterms/

¹⁴ Center for Election Innovation and Research. “Update: Review of Claims of Noncitizen Registrants and Voters.” February 2026. https://electioninnovation.org/research/noncitizen-analysis-update/

¹⁵ TODA Institute. “Electoral Integrity and the 2026 United States Midterm Elections.” January 22, 2026. https://toda.org/publications/policy-briefs-and-reports/report-267-full-text/

¹⁶ Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute. “The US Elections and Democracy: Election Intimidation and Violence.” November 2024. https://www.v-dem.net/news/the-us-elections-and-democracy-election-intimidation-and-violence/

¹⁷ Brennan Center for Justice. “The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election.” August 2025. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/trump-administrations-campaign-undermine-next-election

They are not imagining it. And the reason most political commentary fails to explain it to them is that most political commentary is focused on the wrong level of analysis. It focuses on politicians, parties, personalities, and the latest outrage of the week. It almost never focuses on the architecture beneath all of that, the specific structural conditions that make self-government possible in the first place.

This article is about that architecture. And what it reveals should concern every American who still believes that what we built here is worth protecting.

That architecture is the Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. I spent years synthesizing decades of comparative political science scholarship into a single coherent framework, and my conclusion is this: every functioning democracy in history, to take root and survive, requires nine specific structural conditions. Think of them as seeds. Each one must be planted. Each one must grow into something strong. Together, the nine form a forest, and it is only within that forest that self-government can live. Remove enough trees, and the forest does not thin. It collapses.

A critical distinction deserves emphasis here: these nine pillars are not the same as the nine governing principles of the Centercratic Party. The pillars are universal. They were identified not by any one thinker or political movement but by a generation of scholars, among them Robert Dahl at Yale, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan at Johns Hopkins, Seymour Martin Lipset, and the researchers at the Varieties of Democracy Institute, working independently across many decades. They describe what democracy requires everywhere and always, regardless of culture, history, or political tradition.

The Centercratic Party’s nine governing principles are derived directly from these pillars and form the blueprint for how the party will campaign, legislate, and govern.

Democracy Has Never Been the Default

Here is the piece of context that almost never appears in political coverage, even though it changes the entire frame. For the overwhelming majority of recorded human history, power was concentrated in monarchs, emperors, military strongmen, landed oligarchies, or some combination of all of them. The democratic republic, in which political authority derives from the governed and is exercised through accountable institutions constrained by law, is not the natural or inevitable condition of civilized society. It is, in the strictest empirical sense, an anomaly.¹

The data behind that statement are not abstract. As of 2025, the Varieties of Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research institution at the University of Gothenburg, reports that autocracies now outnumber democracies worldwide for the first time in two decades, 91 to 88. There are just 29 liberal democracies in the entire world. Less than 12 percent of the global population lives under what can reasonably be classified as a liberal democracy, while approximately 5.8 billion people live under autocratic rule. Freedom House, in its 2025 report, documented a nineteenth consecutive year of global decline in political rights and civil liberties, with 60 countries deteriorating and only 34 improving.¹

Nineteen consecutive years of global democratic decline. The great expansion of democracy that political scientist Samuel Huntington called “the third wave,” a period in the mid-1970s when more than thirty countries moved toward democratic governance, has not only stalled but is being actively reversed.¹

The United States has not been watching this from a safe distance.

The Warning That Should Stop Us Cold

In March 2026, the V-Dem Institute published findings that deserve far more attention than they received. Within a single year, the United States score on the Liberal Democracy Index declined by 24 percent. The country’s global ranking fell from 20th to 51st out of 179 nations. Professor Staffan I. Lindberg, the project’s lead researcher, stated plainly: “The speed with which American democracy is currently being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.” Six of the ten countries newly identified as autocratizing in 2026 are located in Europe and North America, and among them is the United States.²

Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan project that surveys political scientists at American universities, assessed U.S. democracy at 57 out of 100 in early 2026, down sharply from assessments taken before the current administration began. The V-Dem report describes America as slipping toward a “democratic grey zone,” the precarious boundary between electoral democracy and electoral autocracy, for the first time in fifty years.²

These are not partisan talking points. They are rigorous, independent measurements from institutions that have no stake in any American election outcome.

What Most Americans Get Wrong About Democracy

Ask the average American to define democracy and the answer is almost always some version of the same thing: free elections, majority rule, the right to vote. That answer is not wrong, but it is dangerously incomplete. It describes one feature of democracy while ignoring the eight or nine others that make that feature meaningful.²

The comparative politics literature, developed over decades by scholars including Robert Dahl at Yale, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan at Johns Hopkins, and Seymour Martin Lipset, has established a finding that is as important as it is underreported. Democracy is not a thing that simply happens when elections are held. It is not a natural byproduct of economic growth or cultural affinity or good intentions. It is, in the words of Linz and Stepan, “more than a regime.” It is an interacting system. Remove one of its structural components, and what you have left is not a democracy with a flaw. What you have is a democracy in the early stages of becoming something else.¹

This insight produced what is now called the nine-pillar framework, an empirically grounded synthesis of the conditions that the comparative politics literature has identified as necessary for genuine, durable democratic governance. It was developed not as a political agenda but as a diagnostic instrument: a way to assess, in any country at any point in time, which conditions are sound, which are under stress, and which are failing before the failure becomes irreversible.¹

The Nine Pillars: What Democracy Actually Requires

The framework organizes these conditions in a deliberate sequence, moving from the most foundational structural requirements through the institutional mechanisms of governance to the social and cultural conditions that sustain democracy over time. The pillars are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Weakness in one affects the viability of the others.¹

Pillar One: Rule of Law and Equal Rights. All actors, including the government itself, must be genuinely bound by laws that protect individual freedoms. When any government can exempt itself from the law, or enforce it selectively against political opponents, equal rights become a legal fiction.

Pillar Two: Separation of Powers and Institutional Accountability. Governmental authority must be divided among independent branches, with effective checks and balances, so that no single institution or officeholder can concentrate power unchecked. Levitsky and Ziblatt documented in their widely cited research that modern democratic breakdown typically occurs through the gradual dismantling of institutional checks, not through dramatic military coups.¹

Pillar Three: Effective, Impartial State Institutions. A capable, professional, reasonably nonpartisan state bureaucracy must be able to enforce laws, maintain order, and deliver public services without being used as a weapon by any one political faction. Without an effective state, there is neither effective citizenship nor the delivery of what democratic government promises.

Pillar Four: Free, Fair, and Decisive Elections. Regular, competitive elections with universal suffrage and honest administration are a procedural prerequisite of democracy. But this pillar is only meaningful when the others exist alongside it. Elections held without rule of law, an independent judiciary, and a free press are not genuinely democratic regardless of what they look like on the surface.²

Pillar Five: Responsible, Competitive Political Parties. Stable parties must compete hard and yet accept the rules, accept each other’s legitimacy, and be capable of governing rather than treating every interaction as total war. When parties refuse to accept election results, refuse to negotiate in good faith, or prioritize the destruction of their opponents over the governance of the country, this pillar has begun to fail. The evidence that it is currently failing in the United States is difficult to dispute. Congressional passage rates have fallen from 54 percent of introduced bills becoming law in 1956 to 1.2 percent in 2025.²

Pillar Six: Vibrant Civil Society and Independent Information. Dense networks of independent associations alongside plural, reasonably independent media allow citizens to organize, deliberate, and check power. Freedom of expression, the V-Dem Institute notes, shows the most drastic global democratic decline and is the most common target of autocratizing leaders over the past twenty-five years. This is not a coincidence. It is a strategy.²

Pillar Seven: Inclusive, Moderately Equal Economic Order. An economic system must produce enough broad-based opportunity that most citizens feel they have a genuine stake in the stability of the system. Lipset’s landmark 1959 research demonstrated that democratic stability correlates powerfully with the size and security of the middle class. When a growing portion of the population feels permanently excluded or economically desperate, the social contract that sustains democratic commitment begins to erode.¹

Pillar Eight: Civic Culture of Trust, Tolerance, and Compromise. The widespread belief that opponents are fellow citizens rather than enemies, that procedures deserve respect even when outcomes disappoint, and that compromise is a legitimate way to resolve disagreement, is not a soft cultural extra. It is a structural requirement. When one side of a political debate comes to believe the other side is not merely wrong but illegitimate, the civic culture necessary to sustain democratic institutions has been critically damaged.¹

Pillar Nine: Shared Commitment to Democracy Itself. Perhaps the most important condition, and the one most easily taken for granted, is the broad, cross-party agreement that democratic rules and institutions are the only legitimate way to gain and use political power. Linz and Stepan defined a consolidated democracy as one in which democracy has become “the only game in town,” meaning that no significant group seeks to overthrow it, and the overwhelming majority views democratic procedures as the only legitimate path to power. When that commitment weakens, everything else becomes fragile.¹

Nine Pillars Of A Working Democratic Republic

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The Diagnostic We Are Not Running

What makes the nine-pillar framework so consequential is not that it identifies new problems. It is that it offers a coherent way to see the problems we already sense as interconnected rather than isolated. The family in Columbus does not need to be a political scientist to understand that something structural is wrong. They just need someone to explain what structure actually means.¹

The United States is not failing all nine pillars simultaneously. Several remain relatively strong. But multiple pillars are under measurable, documented, and worsening stress at the same time. The rule of law is deteriorating according to V-Dem data. Institutional checks are under sustained pressure. The civic culture of trust and compromise has been replaced, in far too many corners of public life, by the belief that the other side is not just wrong but an active threat to the country.²

And 45 percent of American adults, the largest political identity in the country, larger than either major party, are registering their discomfort with exactly this pattern by refusing to align with either party. They are not apathetic. They are observant. They can see that the system is not performing the way it should, even if the dominant political conversation offers them no vocabulary to explain why.²

What the Evidence Requires

Democracy does not defend itself. It requires active, organized, principled defense, and that defense must begin with a clear-eyed understanding of what democracy actually needs in order to function.²

The nine pillars are that understanding. They are drawn from political science’s most durable scholarship. They are measured, year after year, by independent institutions. They apply not to a party’s agenda but to the structural requirements of self-government itself, requirements that belong to every American regardless of how they voted last November.

The family in Columbus is not asking for a party platform. They are asking for a political system that works, that applies the law equally, that can actually pass legislation that addresses the issues in their lives, that respects the results of elections, that treats them as citizens rather than as a demographic to be mined for turnout. What they are asking for, in other words, is a political system that takes all nine pillars seriously.

The question now is whether enough Americans, in enough places, will demand exactly that before the architecture weakens further. The data say the window for that decision is narrower than most people realize.

Paul J. Chapman is a political scientist, the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party, and the author of Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.

References

1. Chapman, Paul J. “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic” Foundations, Centercratic Party, 2026.

2. Chapman, Paul J. “What’s the True Foundation of All Democracies?” Foundations, Centercratic Party, 2026.

This is the second article in a nine-part series examining the governing principles of the Centercratic Party and the conditions that make American self-government possible. Each article is part of Foundations, the Centercratic Party’s publication. Yesterday’s article examined Principle 1: Safeguard Our Democratic System. Today, we examine the mechanism that gives that safeguard its teeth.

Principle 2: Impose term limits on public office to prevent entrenchment and ensure representatives remain accountable to voters.

In January 2026, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 85 years old and in her 38th year in Congress, announced she would not seek another term. Her longtime deputy, Representative Steny Hoyer, 86, made the same announcement. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, 83, had already stepped down from leadership. Their departures were treated as historic. They were not treated as what they actually were: a reminder that American democracy had, for decades, built no systematic mechanism to ensure that any of them had to leave at all.¹

This is the second article in a nine-part series examining the Centercratic Party’s governing principles. The second principle is this: impose term limits on public office to prevent entrenchment and ensure representatives remain accountable to voters.² It is, by a wide margin, the most broadly popular structural reform in American political life. It is also, by a similarly wide margin, the reform that both major parties have done the least to advance. The distance between what Americans want and what Congress is willing to do on this question is itself a case study in exactly the problem term limits are designed to solve.

What Term Limits Are Actually About

The case for term limits is sometimes reduced to a complaint about old politicians, and that framing does the argument a disservice. Term limits are not primarily about age. They are about power structures, accountability mechanisms, and the structural conditions that make democratic representation genuine rather than nominal.

The pillar framework that grounds this series identifies two primary scholarly pillars that this principle serves: Pillar 2 (Separation of Powers and Institutional Accountability) and Pillar 5 (Responsible, Competitive Political Parties).^3,4 Both pillars share a common concern: when power concentrates without structural check, it tends to serve those who hold it rather than those who are supposed to be served by it.

Guillermo O’Donnell’s research on what he termed “delegative democracies” documents precisely what happens when institutional checks on power grow weak. In these systems, elections are held but genuine horizontal accountability is absent. Elected leaders, even those initially chosen in legitimate elections, gradually govern unconstrained by the institutional checks that make their authority genuine rather than merely formal.³ Term limits are one of democracy’s most direct mechanisms for ensuring that the act of winning an election does not become a license to hold power indefinitely.

The Founders were not unanimous on this question. Jefferson favored rotation in office as a fundamental democratic principle. Hamilton was less certain. What the historical record makes clear is that the constitutional architecture they designed contained one deliberate term limit: the presidential two-term norm, later formalized in the 22nd Amendment. They did not extend that logic to the legislative branch, on the theory that voters would serve as the natural check.⁵ That theory has not performed as anticipated.

Why This Pillar Is Under Stress Right Now

The data on congressional tenure and incumbency redefine what “voter accountability” means in practice. As of January 2025, the average House member had served 8^.6 years and the average Senator had served 11^.2 years.⁶ The current Congress is the third-oldest in American history, with an average age of 58.⁹ years, which is more than 19 years older than the median American.¹ Twenty-four members of Congress are 80 years of age or older, and of those, more than half have announced plans to seek re-election in 2026.¹

Those numbers describe a static legislature. What drives them is the mechanics of incumbency advantage, which are not a function of popularity but of structural barriers to competition. According to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, fewer than 4 percent of members of Congress who sought re-election in 2023 lost to a challenger.⁷ Incumbents enjoy compounding advantages that have nothing to do with performance: name recognition built over decades, established fundraising networks that outspend challengers by ratios that can reach 10 to 1, franking privileges and free travel that allow them to maintain constituent contact at taxpayer expense, and committee chairmanships that give long-tenured members leverage over legislation that newer members simply cannot match.⁸

The result is what political scientists call “careerism,” the phenomenon in which elected officials, rationally responding to the incentives of the system, devote increasing proportions of their time to securing their next election rather than governing. Research cited by the St. Mary’s University Law Journal found that the preoccupation with re-election can cause incumbents to devote up to half of a two-year House term to campaigning rather than legislating.⁸ This is not a character failure. It is a predictable output of a system without structural accountability mechanisms.

The downstream consequence is the legislative collapse documented in yesterday’s article in this series. Congress passed 64 bills into law in 2025, a 93 percent decline from the average of the 1950s, in a year when a single party controlled both chambers and the presidency.⁹ When legislators are primarily oriented toward re-election rather than governance, and when the seniority system rewards longevity over effectiveness, the capacity to build the governing coalitions necessary to legislate erodes. Gridlock is not a malfunction of this system. It is the system operating exactly as its incentive structure dictates.

It is also worth being precise about which party has failed here, because the honest answer is both. The Senate last held a floor vote on a constitutional term limits amendment in 1995, when it failed to reach the two-thirds threshold required for a constitutional amendment.⁵ In the 31 years since, neither party has brought the question back to the floor when in the majority. Republicans have introduced the Cruz-Norman resolution in each of the last five Congresses without advancing it to a vote.¹⁰ Democrats have not introduced a companion proposal at all. Both parties benefit from incumbency, and incumbency protects itself.

What the 45 Percent Are Saying

The polling on this question is among the most consistent in American political life. A January 2025 McLaughlin and Associates survey found that 83 percent of Americans support congressional term limits, including 85 percent of Republicans, 85 percent of independents, and 79 percent of Democrats.¹¹ A Pew Research survey found even higher support at 87 percent nationally.¹² The University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which surveys registered voters after presenting them with the strongest arguments on both sides, found that 83 percent favor a constitutional amendment, and that support has remained steady since the first survey on this question in 2017.¹³

Among independent voters, the 45 percent of American adults who identify with neither major party, support for term limits has polled consistently above 84 percent across multiple methodologies and survey organizations.^11,13 The issue cuts across every demographic division: age, income, geography, and education. The five values that the Independent Center identified as consistent priorities for unaffiliated voters are pragmatism over ideology, accountability to constituents rather than donors, structural reform of the rules that enable dysfunction, civic seriousness, and problem-solving that produces real outcomes. Each of those values maps directly onto the term limits argument.¹⁴ Term limits are not a left or right position. They are the position of a majority of every measurable political group in America.

The frustration that drives this support is specific. Seventy-five percent of Americans say they are frustrated with both parties.¹⁵ But the frustration around term limits is more pointed than general cynicism. It is the frustration of people who understand, even without the language of political science, that a system in which fewer than 4 percent of incumbents lose re-election is not a system in which elections function as the accountability mechanism they are supposed to be. Voters can feel the gap between the rhetoric of representation and the reality of an institution where the same names appear on ballots year after year, decade after decade, insulated by structural advantages that have nothing to do with performance. That gap is not apathy. It is a correct observation about a broken mechanism.

The Centercratic Position

The Centercratic Party’s second principle states the solution plainly: impose term limits on public office to prevent entrenchment and ensure representatives remain accountable to voters.² In practical terms, this aligns with the most widely supported proposal currently before Congress. The Cruz-Norman constitutional amendment would limit House members to three terms (six years) and Senators to two terms (twelve years), and it carries the support of 151 current members of Congress across both parties. The Centercratic position is not defined by the specific numerical limits in any one bill but by the underlying principle: no person should treat a seat in Congress as a permanent possession.^10,11

A legislature designed to represent the full breadth of American life should reflect that breadth in its composition. Sixteen states currently operate with term limits for their state legislators, covering roughly 28 percent of all state legislative seats. In 2026 alone, 219 state legislators across 11 chambers will be termed out, creating open seats, new candidates, and genuine competitive elections in districts that might otherwise be permanent incumbencies.^16,17

The Centercratic position also holds that term limits must be understood as one structural reform among several rather than a complete solution in isolation. Term limits address entrenchment. They do not automatically address the donor influence, committee power structures, or seniority systems that currently reward longevity over effectiveness. A genuine accountability agenda would combine term limits with campaign finance transparency, independent redistricting commissions, and reforms to committee assignment processes that currently make a 30-year incumbent more powerful than a 6-year member regardless of the evidence of governance.

The argument against term limits deserves an honest answer. Critics note that term limits can shift power from elected officials to unelected staff and lobbyists who retain the institutional knowledge that term-limited members will lack.⁸ This is a real risk and the Centercratic position takes it seriously. The answer is not to abandon term limits but to couple them with reforms that rebuild nonpartisan institutional knowledge through a professional congressional research and support infrastructure that serves members without serving any party. The problem is not that institutional knowledge exists. It is that institutional knowledge currently flows through channels controlled by those who benefit from entrenchment.

What History Teaches About the Alternative

The United States has one term limit with a documented record: the two-term presidential norm, codified into law by the 22nd Amendment in 1951 after Franklin D. Roosevelt won four consecutive elections. The amendment passed with broad bipartisan support. Its sponsors included both Democrats and Republicans who had watched power concentrate in a single executive for thirteen years and concluded that the Founders’ norm of voluntary retirement was insufficient structural protection against indefinite tenure.⁵

The presidential example is instructive in two directions. First, it demonstrates that term limits on high office are constitutionally achievable and politically durable. No serious movement to repeal the 22nd Amendment has emerged in 75 years. Second, it demonstrates that the voluntary norm of rotation requires structural enforcement to be reliable. Washington’s two-term precedent held from 1796 to 1940 because each president chose to honor it, not because any mechanism required them to. When circumstances changed, the norm yielded.

The congressional case is more instructive still. Robert Byrd of West Virginia served 51 years in the Senate. John Dingell of Michigan served 59 years in the House.¹⁸ These were not ineffective legislators. Both were by many measures consequential figures. But the system that produced their tenures also produced, as a structural output, institutions in which the accumulation of personal power became an end in itself, seniority determined influence regardless of merit, and the pathway to leadership ran through longevity rather than effectiveness. The citizens of West Virginia and Michigan had the theoretical ability to remove Byrd and Dingell. In practice, the structural advantages of incumbency made that accountability essentially nominal. The accountability mechanism that the Founders trusted had been captured by the very system it was supposed to check.

At the state level, the evidence from the 22 states that have implemented term limits is cautiously positive. Research consistently finds that term limits increase electoral competition and legislative turnover, reduce the dominance of seniority-based committee structures, and produce more diverse legislative bodies.¹⁹ The effects on legislative productivity are more mixed and depend heavily on whether complementary reforms to staff and research infrastructure accompany the limits. That finding reinforces exactly why the Centercratic position frames term limits as one component of a broader accountability agenda rather than a stand-alone cure.¹⁹

Time-Limited by Design

The path to congressional term limits runs through the Constitution, and constitutional amendments are deliberately difficult. The Cruz-Norman resolution would require two-thirds of both chambers of Congress to send it to the states, and then ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures (38 of 50) to become law.¹⁰ An alternative route under Article V of the Constitution allows 34 state legislatures to call a convention limited to this single subject, bypassing Congress entirely. As of early 2026, 13 states have passed the U.S. Term Limits organization’s single-subject application for that convention, with active resolutions pending in at least 15 additional states.²⁰

What the Centercratic Party asks of the 45 percent, the politically independent majority who support term limits by a margin that dwarfs support for any other structural reform in American politics, is to treat this as a project rather than a wish. The polling is not the obstacle. The will of the American people on this question has been clear and consistent for more than a decade. The obstacle is that the people who would have to vote for this reform are the people who benefit most from its absence. That conflict of interest is not a reason to abandon the project. It is the most precise possible description of why the project is necessary.

A legislature that cannot impose term limits on itself is a legislature that has, at least on this question, placed institutional self-preservation above the democratic accountability it exists to provide. That is, in the most fundamental sense, exactly what this principle was designed to prevent.

Tomorrow, this series examines Principle 3: Protect Election Integrity, and why the question of who counts the votes is inseparable from the question of whether elections are genuine.

Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.

Notes

¹ NBC News. “24 Members of Congress Are 80 or Older. More Than Half Are Running for Re-election.” January 15, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/congress-oldest-members-run-reelection-80s-rcna249479

² Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/

³ Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: O’Donnell, Guillermo. “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies.” Journal of Democracy 9, no. 3 (July 1998): 112-126; Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown Publishers, 2018; Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. The Federalist Papers, Nos. 47-51.

⁴ Chapman, Paul J. “What’s the True Foundation of All Democracies?” Foundations, Centercratic Party, 2026.

⁵ Foreign Policy Journal. “Why Are There No Term Limits for Congress: Court Ruling and Incumbency Advantage.” March 24, 2026. https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2026/03/25/why-are-there-no-term-limits-for-congress/

⁶ Congressional Research Service. “Service Tenure and Patterns of Member Service, 1789-2025.” January 21, 2025. https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/2025-01-22_R41545

⁷ Everything Policy. “Would Term Limits Impact Congressional Careers?” October 1, 2025. https://www.everythingpolicy.org/policy-briefs/would-term-limits-impact-congressional-careers

⁸ St. Mary’s University Law Journal. “Congressional Reform: Can Term Limitations Close the Door on Careerism?” https://commons.stmarytx.edu/thestmaryslawjournal/vol24/iss4/13/

⁹ Chapman, Paul J. “Congress Is Now Irrelevant: What America Can Do About It.” The Center Voter, January 18, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/congress-is-now-irrelevant-what-america

¹⁰ Cruz, Ted, and Ralph Norman. Senate Joint Resolution 1 / House Joint Resolution 12, 119th Congress. January 7, 2025. https://www.cruz.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sen-cruz-rep-norman-colleagues-introduce-constitutional-amendment-to-impose-term-limits

¹¹ U.S. Term Limits / McLaughlin and Associates. “New Poll: 83% of Americans Support Term Limits for Congress.” February 10, 2025. https://termlimits.com/new-poll-83-of-americans-support-term-limits-for-congress/

¹² Pew Research Center / KPQ Radio. “Term Limits for Congress is Easier Said Than Done.” October 15, 2025. https://kpq.com/public-support-term-limits/

¹³ Program for Public Consultation, University of Maryland. “Five-in-Six Americans Favor Constitutional Amendment on Term Limits.” March 20, 2023. https://publicconsultation.org/united-states/congressional-term-limits/

¹⁴ Independent Center. “Why More Americans Are Choosing to Stay Politically Independent in 2026.” April 5, 2026. https://www.independentcenter.org/articles/why-more-americans-are-choosing-to-stay-politically-independent-in-2026

¹⁵ Chapman, Paul J. The Centercratic Party Business Case. Centercratic Party, February 2, 2026.

¹⁶ Ballotpedia. “Impact of Term Limits on State Representative Elections in 2026.” https://ballotpedia.org/Impact_of_term_limits_on_state_representative_elections_in_2026

¹⁷ Everything Policy. “Term Limits and Legislative Productivity.” November 19, 2025. https://www.everythingpolicy.org/policy-briefs/term-limits-and-legislative-productivity

¹⁸ Wikipedia. “List of Longest-Serving Members of the United States Congress.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-serving_members_of_the_United_States_Congress

¹⁹ U.S. Term Limits. “The Fix for Entrenched Incumbents Who Dominate Congress.” November 19, 2025. https://termlimits.com/the-fix-for-entrenched-incumbents-who-dominate-congress/

²⁰ U.S. Term Limits. “Term Limits Convention Progress.” Updated March 2026. https://termlimits.com/progress/

In 2025, a record 45 percent of American adults identified as political independents, more than either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.¹ These are not people who have given up on democracy. They are people who have given up on the current vehicles for defending it. Most of them share a growing unease that is hard to name but impossible to shake. Something has changed. The rules do not seem to apply the same way anymore. That unease has a name, and understanding it is the purpose of this series.

This is the first article in a nine-part series examining the Centercratic Party’s governing principles. The first principle is this: Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.² It sounds, on the surface, like a reasonable request. It sounds, in the current moment of American political life, like an act of defiance.

What “Safeguard Our Democratic System” Actually Means

Most Americans, if asked what makes a democracy work, will point to elections. Vote, count the ballots, swear someone in. That description is not wrong, but it is dangerously incomplete. A country can hold elections while systematically dismantling every other condition that makes those elections genuine. When that happens, voting becomes theater. Democracy becomes a hollow form of something else.³

What the Centercratic Party means when it says “safeguard our democratic system” is considerably more demanding than protecting the right to vote. It means defending the full architecture of self-government: the separation of powers, the independence of institutions, the equal application of the law, and the core commitment that no single faction uses the machinery of the state to make itself permanent. Democracy, in this understanding, is not a destination you reach on election night. It is a system you maintain every day, through deliberate choices about how power is sought, exercised, and constrained.^{3 4}

The political science literature that underpins this principle is not new, and it is not partisan. Scholars Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan spent decades studying why democracies succeed and fail, and their central finding is worth stating plainly: democracy requires not one institution but five interconnected conditions, including the rule of law, effective state institutions, a free civil society, legitimate political competition, and a broad commitment across all factions to democratic rules as the only acceptable way to gain and hold power.⁴ Remove even one of those conditions, and what remains is not a democracy with a flaw. What remains is a democracy in the early stages of becoming something else.³

The Centercratic principle translates that scholarly framework into plain civic terms: govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics. Defend the Constitution for everyone, meaning not as a weapon for one faction, but as a shared foundation that protects all citizens equally, regardless of who holds power at any given moment.²

Why This Pillar Is Under Stress Right Now

The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg releases an annual assessment of democratic health in 202 countries. Its 2026 report, published in March, contains a finding that deserves far more attention than it has received in the daily churn of American political news. Within a single year, the United States’ score on the Liberal Democracy Index declined by 24 percent, dropping the country’s global ranking from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.^{5 6} The speed of that decline, the report’s lead researcher stated plainly, is “unprecedented in modern history.” What took Hungary over four years, Serbia eight years, and Turkey nearly a decade, the United States experienced in twelve months.⁶

To understand what that number means in daily American life, consider the mechanics. A democracy erodes not through dramatic announcements but through the gradual shifting of institutional weight. Congress, which is constitutionally the first branch of government, passed just 64 bills in all of 2025, when one party controlled the House, the Senate, and the presidency.⁷ That is not a record of governance. That is a record of institutional collapse. In 1956, 56 percent of introduced bills became law. In 2025, the number was 1.2 percent.⁷ When the legislative branch loses the capacity to legislate, power does not disappear. It migrates. And it migrates to the executive.

That migration has been documented in detail. The Trump administration has, through executive orders, personnel replacements, agency restructurings, and funding redirections, initiated or completed 53 percent of the Project 2025 domestic policy agenda within twelve months of taking office.⁸ Many of these actions did not go through Congress. Many bypassed the standard public comment process required under the Administrative Procedure Act.⁹ Federal inspectors general, who serve as independent watchdogs over executive agencies, were fired early in the term.¹⁰ The balance of power within the executive branch has shifted markedly toward absolute presidential authority as democratic safeguards within the executive branch have been purged or co-opted.¹¹

To be precise about what this means: none of this is the failure of a single person or a single party. Congressional productivity has been declining for seventy years, across both Republican and Democratic administrations.⁷ Presidents from both parties have expanded executive power when Congress failed to act. The Biden administration used executive orders on student loans. The Obama administration used them on immigration. The difference in 2025 and 2026 is the scale, the speed, and the combination of executive expansion with a Congress that has, by most independent measures, essentially abdicated its constitutional role as a check on the executive branch.^{12 13} When Congress stops checking executive power regardless of which party controls it, the separation of powers that Madison designed stops working regardless of which party benefits from it.

The result, measured rigorously by organizations with no stake in partisan outcomes, is that the United States has lost its classification as a liberal democracy for the first time in more than fifty years.⁵ It is now classified as an electoral democracy, meaning it still holds elections, but the institutional conditions that make those elections genuinely democratic have been measurably weakened.¹⁴

What the 45 Percent Are Saying

Forty-five percent of American adults identify as political independents, the largest political identity in the country, larger than either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.^{1 15} These are not people who have given up on democracy. They are people who have given up on the current vehicles for defending it.

The polling tells a consistent story. Only 17 percent of Americans now say they trust the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time,” a five-decade low.¹⁶ Two-thirds of Americans describe the federal government as corrupt.¹⁷ Sixty percent say a third major party is needed.¹⁸ Seventy-five percent say they are frustrated with both parties.¹⁸

But the independent voter’s frustration is more specific than general cynicism. Research published in April 2026 by the Independent Center identifies five values that independent voters express consistently, regardless of geography or background: pragmatism over ideology, accountability to constituents rather than donors, structural reform of the rules that enable dysfunction, civic seriousness that treats voters as capable adults, and problem-solving that produces real outcomes rather than partisan messaging wins.¹⁹ Those are not left-wing values or right-wing values. They are democratic values, the values of citizens who understand that the system is supposed to work for them, and who have watched it stop doing so.

The particular frustration that connects to this first Centercratic principle is the sense that the rules no longer apply equally. A survey by the Partnership for Public Service found that two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government is corrupt, but a strong majority also said that “a nonpartisan civil service is important for having a strong American democracy.”¹⁷ Independent voters pointed to misleading information as their primary concern in a March 2026 election-confidence poll, while confidence that elections would be conducted fairly dropped 10 percent in the eighteen months since late 2024.²⁰ What these voters are describing is not a preference for one party over another. They are describing a loss of faith in the institutional architecture that is supposed to hold the whole system together. That is what it feels like when a democratic system is not being safeguarded.

The Centercratic Position

The Centercratic Party’s first principle begins with three words that carry a great deal of weight: “Govern through compromise.” Not “consider compromise” or “embrace compromise when convenient.” Govern through it. That word choice reflects a clear-eyed understanding of what democratic governance actually is. It is not the imposition of one faction’s preferences on everyone else. It is the construction of outcomes that enough people can accept to give those outcomes lasting legitimacy.^{2 3}

In practical terms, the Centercratic position on safeguarding the democratic system translates into several specific commitments. The first is the restoration of genuine legislative function. A Congress that passes 64 bills in a year is not a functioning legislature. It is a decorative institution. Restoring congressional authority means rebuilding the capacity for deliberation, compromise, and binding legislative action, including restoring civil service protections that keep professional expertise independent of partisan loyalty, rebuilding independent oversight of executive agencies, and using the power of the legislative branch to check executive overreach regardless of which president is responsible for it.^{7 21}

The second commitment is the rejection of domination tactics. The Centercratic Party defines this as a nonpartisan standard. Special interest tactics that bypass democratic deliberation, whether they come from the ideological right or the ideological left, undermine the legitimacy of the system that protects everyone. Project 2025 represented one such set of tactics, systematically designed to use the executive branch to entrench a specific ideological program before democratic accountability could respond.^{8 22} But the progressive infrastructure being built for a counter-movement in 2028 represents the same temptation from the other direction. The Centercratic standard is consistent: tactics that bypass the democratic process do not become acceptable because your side is the one employing them.²¹

The third commitment is the defense of the Constitution for everyone. This phrase in the Centercratic principles is not rhetorical. It refers to the condition that political scientists call “shared democratic legitimacy,” the bedrock agreement across all factions that democratic rules are the only acceptable way to gain and use power.^{3 4} When that agreement weakens, when some participants in the democratic process begin to treat electoral loss as an illegitimate outcome to be overturned rather than a result to be accepted, the deepest foundation of self-government has been compromised. Defending the Constitution for everyone means that your commitment to democratic rules does not depend on who wins.

What History Teaches About the Alternative

The comparison that V-Dem researchers made in March 2026 between the United States’ rate of democratic decline and that of Hungary and Turkey is instructive, and not because those countries provide a precise blueprint for what will happen here. They are instructive because they show what the early stages of democratic erosion actually look like from the inside, while it is happening.^{23 6}

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party won a parliamentary majority in 2010 and used it to rewrite the constitution, redraw electoral districts, and restructure the judiciary. None of these steps, taken individually, appeared to be a coup. Each was clothed in legal process. The opposition was not banned. Elections continued. But the rules were changed in ways that made future elections progressively less competitive, and the institutions that were supposed to check executive power were progressively rendered incapable of doing so.^{24 25} By the time most Hungarians recognized what had happened, the institutional conditions for a meaningful correction had already been dismantled. On April 12, 2026, Hungarian voters handed Orbán’s Fidesz party a decisive defeat, with challenger Péter Magyar’s Tisza party winning a two-thirds supermajority in parliament, ending 16 years of authoritarian rule and offering what may be a rare and genuine signal that democratic erosion, even when it has gone far, is not always irreversible.^{26 27}

In Turkey, the process took longer but followed a similar logic. The governing party consolidated control over the judiciary, captured the media, weakened civil society, and used legal mechanisms to neutralize political opposition, all while maintaining the formal apparatus of elections.²³ The result was not the dramatic end of democracy. It was its gradual replacement with something that looked like democracy on the outside and functioned like concentrated personal power on the inside.

The scholars who study these cases are consistent in their conclusion: the most dangerous phase in democratic backsliding is the period when citizens believe that normal politics will correct the problem. It rarely does without organized, principled resistance that operates within democratic rules and insists that those rules apply to everyone equally.²⁵ That is precisely what the Centercratic Party’s first principle calls for.

A System That Does Not Defend Itself

What the Centercratic Party asks of the American electorate on this first principle is not radical. It does not require choosing a side in the existing partisan war. It requires choosing democracy over faction. It requires holding every actor in the political system, regardless of party, to the same standard: govern through the rules, accept outcomes you do not like, and use institutional power only in ways that the rules authorize. That is what it means to safeguard a democratic system. It is also, as the history of every democracy that has ever failed makes clear, the only thing that makes the other eight principles in this series possible.^{3 4}

A democratic system does not defend itself. It requires citizens who understand what it is, what it needs, and what is at stake when those things are not provided. The 45 percent who have no institutional home are, by the evidence, exactly those citizens.^{1 18} They are not waiting for a revolution. They are waiting for someone to govern the way the system was designed to work: through compromise, not domination, with the Constitution as everyone’s protection and no one’s exclusive weapon.

Tomorrow, this series examines Principle 2: Limit Terms for Accountability, and why the most effective instrument of democratic safeguard may be one that both parties have conspired to avoid for decades.

Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.

Notes

¹ Gallup. “New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents.” January 11, 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx

² Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/

³ Chapman, Paul J. “What’s the True Foundation of All Democracies?” Foundations, Centercratic Party, 2026.

⁴ Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; Dahl, Robert A. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. Yale University Press, 1971; Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown Publishers, 2018.

⁵ Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute. Democracy Report 2026. University of Gothenburg, March 2026. https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026_lowres.pdf

⁶ Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute. “Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline Unprecedented.” Press Release, March 16, 2026. https://www.v-dem.net/news/press-release-democratic-backsliding-reaches-western-democracies-with-us-decline-unprecedented/

⁷ Chapman, Paul J. “Congress Is Now Irrelevant: What America Can Do About It.” The Center Voter, January 18, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/congress-is-now-irrelevant-what-america

⁸ Center for Progressive Reform. “Project 2025 Executive Action Tracker.” Updated February 2026. https://progressivereform.org/tracking-trump-2/project-2025-executive-action-tracker/

⁹ Ballotpedia News. “Checks and Balances, May 2025.” May 14, 2025. https://news.ballotpedia.org/2025/05/14/checks-and-balances-may-2025/

¹⁰ NPR. “How President Trump Has Challenged a Constitutional Foundation.” January 22, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/g-s1-106562/trump-democracy-constitution-executive-power

¹¹ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “U.S. Democratic Backsliding in Comparative Perspective.” August 2025. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/08/us-democratic-backsliding-in-comparative-perspective

¹² Democratic Erosion Consortium. “Democracy in America in Historic Decline: What’s Next for the USA?” April 2, 2026. https://democratic-erosion.org/2026/04/03/democracy-in-america-in-historic-decline-whats-next-for-the-usa/

¹³ ICONnect Blog. “Oversight Erosion and Democratic Backsliding.” February 27, 2026. https://www.iconnectblog.com/oversight-erosion-and-democratic-backsliding/

¹⁴ Reddit/V-Dem Institute. “V-Dem Institute: The US No Longer Functions as a Liberal Democracy.” March 17, 2026. https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1rwcabv/vdem_institute_the_us_no_longer_functions_as_a/

¹⁵ New York Times. “Independents Reach New High as Young Voters Avoid Labels.” January 14, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/polls/gallup-independent-voters.html

¹⁶ Pew Research Center. “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2025.” December 3, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust-in-government-1958-2025/

¹⁷ Partnership for Public Service. “The State of Public Trust in Government 2025.” November 2025. https://ourpublicservice.org/publications/the-state-of-public-trust-in-government-2025/

¹⁸ Chapman, Paul J. The Centercratic Party Business Case. Centercratic Party, February 2, 2026.

¹⁹ Independent Center. “Why More Americans Are Choosing to Stay Politically Independent in 2026.” April 5, 2026. https://www.independentcenter.org/articles/why-more-americans-are-choosing-to-stay-politically-independent-in-2026

²⁰ American Democracy Minute. “A March 2026 Poll Shows an Erosion of Voter Confidence in Elections.” March 17, 2026. https://www.americandemocracyminute.org/wethepeople/2026/03/18/a-march-2026-poll-shows-an-erosion-of-voter-confidence-in-elections

²¹ Chapman, Paul J. “How the Center Can Own Tomorrow’s Agenda.” The Center Voter, April 10, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/how-the-center-can-own-tomorrows-163

²² whitehousereportcard.com. “Project 2025 Implementation Analysis.” May 30, 2025. https://whitehousereportcard.com/project-2025-implementation-analysis

²³ Kettering Foundation. “What Should We Be Watching For? Lessons from the Playbooks of Turkey and Hungary.” January 2025. https://kettering.org/what-should-we-be-watching-for-lessons-from-the-playbooks-of-turkey-and-hungary/

²⁴ American Progress. “Hungary’s Democratic Backsliding Threatens the Trans-Atlantic Security Order.” January 2024. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/hungarys-democratic-backsliding-threatens-the-trans-atlantic-security-order/

²⁵ Vanguard Think Tank. “Competitive Authoritarianism in Practice: Democratic Backsliding in Turkey, Hungary, and Tunisia.” https://vanguardthinktank.org/competitive-authoritarianism-in-practice-democratic-backsliding-in-turkey-hungary-and-tunisia

²⁶ BBC News. “Orbán Era Swept Away by Péter Magyar’s Hungary Election Landslide.” April 12, 2026. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9vg782kx7o

²⁷ Al Jazeera. “Peter Magyar Wins Hungary Election, Unseating Viktor Orbán After 16 Years.” April 12, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/12/hungary-election-early-results-show-magyars-tisza-ahead-of-orbans-fidesz

There is a number that rarely makes the front page, yet it captures something profound about the state of our nation. As of 2025, a record 45 percent of American adults identify as political independents, the largest political identity in the country.¹ More than the Democrats. More than the Republicans. The two parties that have governed this nation for more than 160 years now each claim the allegiance of just 27 percent of the public.¹ Nearly half of America is standing outside looking in, not because they are apathetic, but because neither party speaks for them any longer.

We are the politically homeless. But we are not without purpose.

This publication, Foundations, exists because political homelessness is not a permanent condition. It is a starting point. And this first article exists to establish one thing above all others: before we can build anything lasting, we need to agree on what we are trying to preserve. Not a party platform. Not a policy agenda. Something more fundamental than either of those.

We need to understand what democracy actually is, and what it requires to survive.

Democracy Is Not What Most People Think It Is

Ask the average American to define democracy and you will almost certainly get some version of the same answer: free elections, majority rule, the right to vote. That answer is not wrong, exactly, but it is dangerously incomplete. It describes one feature of democracy while ignoring the eight or nine others that make that feature meaningful.

This is not an abstraction. History has shown, repeatedly, that a country can hold elections while systematically destroying every other condition that makes those elections genuine. When that happens, the elections become theater, and democracy becomes a shell. What is left looks like self-government but functions like something else entirely.

In my research paper, Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic, I set out to answer a question that surprisingly few people ask plainly: What does a democracy actually need in order to work? Not in theory, not in aspiration, but structurally, in practice, in the real world? What I found, drawing on decades of comparative political science from scholars like Robert Dahl, Juan Linz, Alfred Stepan, Seymour Martin Lipset, and the contemporary research of the Varieties of Democracy Institute, is that a working democratic republic is not a single institution. It is an interconnected system of nine distinct conditions, all of which must be present, and all of which must be actively maintained.²

Remove even one of them, and what you have left is not a democracy with a flaw. What you have is a democracy in the early stages of becoming something else.

The Rarity of What We Take for Granted

Self-government, the idea that political authority derives from the people and is exercised through accountable institutions constrained by law, is not the natural condition of human civilization. It is, in the strictest empirical sense, an anomaly. For the overwhelming majority of recorded human history, power was concentrated: in monarchs, emperors, military strongmen, landed oligarchies, priestly castes, or some fusion of all of them.² The democratic republic represents a narrow and precarious band in the full spectrum of political possibilities that human history has produced.

The data make this point with uncomfortable clarity. As of 2025, the Varieties of Democracy Institute reports that autocracies outnumber democracies worldwide for the first time in two decades.³ Liberal democracies, the kind most of us picture when we say the word “democracy,” number just 29 in the entire world. Less than 12 percent of the world’s population now lives under what can reasonably be classified as a liberal democracy, while approximately 5.8 billion people live under autocratic rule.³ Freedom House, in its most recent assessment, documented a nineteenth consecutive year of global decline in political rights and civil liberties, with 60 countries deteriorating and only 34 improving.³

Read that again: nineteen straight years of global democratic decline. The great expansion of democracy that political scientist Samuel Huntington called “the third wave,” a period beginning in the mid-1970s when more than thirty countries transitioned from authoritarian to democratic governance, has not only stalled but is being actively reversed.²

This is the world we live in. Democracy is not advancing. Democracy is retreating.

And the United States is not exempt.

The Warning That Should Stop Us Cold

In March 2026, the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg published findings that no American who loves this country should be able to read without pausing. Within a single year, the United States’ score on the Liberal Democracy Index declined by 24 percent. The country’s global ranking dropped from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.⁴ The report’s lead researcher, Professor Staffan I. Lindberg, stated plainly: “The speed with which American democracy is currently being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.”⁴

Six of the ten countries newly identified as autocratizing in 2026 are located in Europe and North America. Among them is the United States. For the first time in fifty years, the V-Dem report describes America as “slipping toward a democratic grey zone,” the precarious boundary between electoral democracy and electoral autocracy.⁵

Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan project that surveys political scientists at American universities, assessed U.S. democracy at 57 out of 100 in early 2026, down sharply from before the start of the current administration.⁶ These are not partisan talking points. These are rigorous, independent measurements from institutions with no stake in the outcome.

None of this means American democracy has already fallen. But it means something that the comfortable center of American politics has been slow to accept: democracy does not defend itself. It requires active, organized, principled defense. And that defense must begin with a clear understanding of what democracy actually needs in order to function.

The Nine Pillars: A Framework for What We Are Defending

What does a working democratic republic actually require? The nine-pillar framework I developed synthesizes the most rigorous and durable work in comparative political science into a single coherent architecture. These pillars are drawn from the Linz and Stepan framework for democratic consolidation, Robert Dahl’s institutional guarantees for polyarchy, Lipset’s socioeconomic correlates of democratic stability, and the contemporary literature on democratic backsliding.²

The framework is organized in a deliberate sequence, from the most foundational structural conditions through the institutional mechanisms of governance to the social, cultural, and attitudinal conditions that sustain democracy over time. The pillars are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Weakness in one affects the viability of the others.²

Pillar One: Rule of Law and Equal Rights. All actors, including the government itself and the security forces that serve it, must be genuinely bound by general laws that protect individual freedoms. When the government can exempt itself from the law, or enforce the law selectively against its opponents, equal rights become a fiction.²

Pillar Two: Separation of Powers and Institutional Accountability. Governmental authority must be structurally divided among independent branches, with effective checks, balances, and oversight mechanisms, so that no single institution or officeholder can concentrate power unchecked. This insight runs from Montesquieu through Madison and Hamilton in The Federalist Papers through to the most current research on how democracies die, which documents that modern democratic breakdown typically occurs through the gradual dismantling of institutional checks rather than through military coups.²·⁷

Pillar Three: Effective, Impartial State Institutions. A capable, professional, reasonably nonpartisan state bureaucracy must be able to enforce laws, maintain order, and deliver public goods across the territory without being weaponized by any one party. Without an effective state, there can be neither effective citizenship nor the delivery of the services that democratic government promises.²

Pillar Four: Free, Fair, and Decisive Elections. Regular, competitive elections with universal suffrage, honest administration, and real uncertainty about outcomes are a procedural prerequisite of democracy. But this pillar is only meaningful if the others exist alongside it. Elections held in the absence of rule of law, an independent judiciary, and a free press are not genuinely democratic, no matter what they look like on the surface.²

Pillar Five: Responsible, Competitive Political Parties. Stable parties must aggregate interests, compete hard, and yet accept the rules and each other’s legitimacy. They must be capable of bargaining and forming governing coalitions rather than treating politics as total war. When parties refuse to accept election results, refuse to negotiate in good faith, or prioritize the destruction of their opponents over the governance of the country, this pillar has begun to fail.²

Pillar Six: Vibrant Civil Society and Independent Information. Dense networks of independent associations, alongside plural and reasonably independent media and information flows, allow citizens to organize, deliberate, and check power. Freedom of expression, as the V-Dem Institute notes, shows the most drastic global democratic decline and is the most common target of autocratizing leaders over the past twenty-five years.⁴ This is not a coincidence. It is a strategy.

Pillar Seven: Inclusive, Moderately Equal Economic Order. An economic system must produce enough broad-based opportunity that most citizens feel they have a genuine stake in the stability of the system. Seymour Martin Lipset’s landmark 1959 research demonstrated that democratic stability correlates powerfully with socioeconomic conditions, not because wealth mechanically causes democracy, but because economic development tends to generate a larger middle class, greater educational attainment, and a more pluralistic civil society.²·⁸ When a growing portion of the population feels permanently excluded or economically desperate, the social contract that sustains democratic commitment begins to erode.

Pillar Eight: Civic Culture of Trust, Tolerance, and Compromise. Widespread norms that treat opponents as fellow citizens rather than enemies, that respect procedures even when outcomes disappoint, and that regard trust and compromise as normal ways of resolving conflict, are not soft cultural extras. They are structural requirements.² When one side of a political debate comes to believe that the other side is not merely wrong but illegitimate, the civic culture necessary to sustain democratic institutions has been fatally compromised.

Pillar Nine: Shared Commitment to Democracy Itself. Perhaps the most important pillar, and the one most easily taken for granted, is the broad, cross-party agreement that democratic rules and institutions are the only legitimate way to gain and use political power. In the formulation of Linz and Stepan, a consolidated democracy is one in which democracy has become “the only game in town,” not merely in the sense that it wins elections, but in the deeper sense that no significant group seeks to overthrow it, and that the overwhelming majority of citizens view democratic procedures as the only legitimate path to power.² When that commitment weakens, everything else becomes fragile.

Why These Nine Pillars Matter Right Now

These nine pillars are not historical curiosities. They are a diagnostic instrument for the present moment in American political life. Consider what our current landscape looks like when measured against each one.

Congressional passage rates have fallen from 54 percent of introduced bills becoming law in 1956 to 1.2 percent in 2025.⁹ That is not a statistic about partisan dysfunction. That is a statistic about institutional collapse. Responsible, competitive political parties that can actually govern have been replaced, in large measure, by factions that treat every negotiation as a threat to their identity rather than an opportunity to serve the public.

Independent checks on executive power are under sustained pressure. The rule of law is deteriorating, according to V-Dem data, in 22 countries including the United States.⁴ The civic culture of trust and compromise, already strained for decades, has been replaced in far too many corners of public life by the assumption that the other side is not just wrong but an active enemy of the country. And the shared commitment to democratic legitimacy itself, the deepest and most foundational of the nine pillars, is being tested in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

This is why the center must act. Not to oppose the left. Not to oppose the right. But to defend the nine conditions without which American self-government cannot function, regardless of which party holds power.

The Pillars and the Principles: A Critical Distinction

Here is where it is important to be precise, because the two frameworks that will anchor this publication are related but distinct, and confusing them would undermine the clarity that Foundations is designed to provide.

The nine pillars of a working democratic republic are universal. They describe what every functioning democracy in the world, regardless of its history, culture, or political tradition, must have in order to operate as a genuine democracy. They are drawn from the global comparative politics literature. They belong to no party, no ideology, and no country alone. They are what democracy requires everywhere and always.

The nine governing principles of the Centercratic Party are different. They are our answer to a more specific question: given that we understand what democracy requires in order to survive, how should Americans who believe in principled, evidence-based, nonpartisan governance organize themselves, advocate, and eventually lead? The Centercratic principles, organized under Democratic Guardrails, Collaborative Governance, and Principled Leadership, are a practical framework for American political action, built on the foundation of what the nine pillars require.¹⁰

Think of it this way: the nine pillars tell us what the building must have in order to stand. The Centercratic principles tell us how we, the 45 percent, intend to build it.

What Comes Next

Over the nine coming days, each article in this publication will take one of the Centercratic Party’s nine governing principles and examine it carefully: what it means in practice, why it matters at this particular moment in American history, and what it would look like if we actually put it into action.

But all of that analysis rests on what has been laid out here. Before we can build anything, we have to understand what we are defending. Before we can advocate for specific principles, we have to be honest about the structural conditions that make democratic governance possible at all.

The nine pillars are that foundation.

They are not a partisan document. They are not a critique of any one administration or party. They are an empirically grounded account of what democracy requires. And by any honest measure, several of those pillars are under serious and worsening stress in the United States right now.⁴·⁶

That stress is why we are here. That stress is why Foundations exists. That stress is why 45 percent of the American public, the largest political identity in this country, is waiting for something more principled and more serious than what either major party has been willing to offer.¹·¹¹

We are politically homeless. But tomorrow morning, we begin building.

Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.

References

1. Gallup. “New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents.” January 11, 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx

2. Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; Dahl, Robert A. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. Yale University Press, 1971; Lipset, Seymour Martin. “Some Social Requisites of Democracy.” American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959): 69–105; Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown Publishers, 2018.

3. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute. Democracy Report 2025. University of Gothenburg, 2025. https://v-dem.net

4. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute. “Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline Unprecedented.” Press Release, March 16, 2026. https://www.v-dem.net/news/press-release-democratic-backsliding-reaches-western-democracies-with-us-decline-unprecedented/

5. Verfassungsblog. “Losing Liberal Democracy.” March 17, 2026. https://verfassungsblog.de/losing-liberal-democracy/

6. The Guardian. “US Democracy Has Settled into Diminished State, Experts Find.” March 24, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/24/us-democracy-health-research

7. Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown Publishers, 2018. ISBN 978-1-5247-6293-3.

8. Lipset, Seymour Martin. Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Doubleday, 1960. Expanded edition, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

9. Chapman, Paul J. “Congress Is Now Irrelevant: What America Can Do About It.” The Center Voter, January 18, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/congress-is-now-irrelevant-what-america

10. Centercratic Party. Party Principles. 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/

11. Independent Center. “Record 45% of Americans Now Identify as Independents: A Turning Point in America.” January 11, 2026. https://www.independentcenter.org/press-releases/record-45-of-americans-now-identify-as-independents–a-turning-point-in-america

Over the past two weeks, we have published detailed accounts of two governing blueprints that every American who cares about the future of this country should understand.

The first, Project 2025 Status Report: We Centrists Should Be Alarmed, documents how a 920-page conservative roadmap has reshaped the executive branch at a speed most citizens never saw coming. More than half of its proposals have already been initiated or completed, and a significant portion of what has been done cannot be reversed without an act of Congress.

The second, The Far Right’s Blueprint Is Underway. What Is the Left Planning?, walks through the architecture of a hypothetical progressive counter-effort being discussed in left-leaning organizations, one that would use the same tools, the same executive power, and the same four-year window to push the government just as far in the opposite direction.

Both blueprints share a common philosophy: use the full power of the executive branch to transform government as rapidly as possible, replace career professionals with ideological loyalists, and move faster than the opposition can organize a legal response. The spoils system, it turns out, has no party affiliation.

The question for the 45 percent of Americans who consider themselves politically independent is not which blueprint is more dangerous. The question is what comes after, and whether anyone has a plan that does not involve swinging the pendulum as far in the other direction as it has already swung in this one.

What Can Actually Be Undone

Not everything Project 2025 has built is permanent, but the distinction between what is reversible and what is not matters enormously. USAID, the foreign aid agency shuttered on July 1, 2025, cannot be reopened without an act of Congress, years of institutional reconstruction, and the rebuilding of thousands of international partner relationships. The 260,000 federal workers who left government service in 2025 carried decades of institutional knowledge with them that no executive order can restore. The 8,000 federal web pages and 3,000 government datasets that were removed, including most of the government’s publicly available climate science resources, are gone.

What is reversible requires two things working together: the right election outcomes in November and the deliberate, disciplined use of legislative and executive authority to rebuild what was taken apart. Reversing the Schedule Policy/Career rule that stripped civil service protections from 50,000 federal employees is achievable through the regulatory process, but it requires a president willing to prioritize it and a Congress capable of supporting it. Restoring independent oversight at agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau requires legislation. Rebuilding the civil service as a merit-based institution, insulated from the ideological demands of whichever party holds power, requires a genuine commitment to the principle that government employees serve the public, not a political movement.

None of this happens automatically. And none of it can be accomplished by a political party that wins power and immediately begins loading the government with its own loyalists, which is precisely what a hypothetical Project 2028 would attempt to do from the opposite direction.

The Safeguard the Country Needs

Here is the structural problem that neither party has been willing to address honestly: the tools that made Project 2025 possible are not unique to the right. Executive orders, agency rulemaking, personnel appointments, and the federal budget are available to any president. If the only answer to one ideological blueprint is a counter-blueprint from the other side, the country will spend the next generation watching government lurch from one extreme to the other, with ordinary citizens absorbing the damage each time the pendulum swings.

The safeguard is not a particular party. It is a set of governing principles that hold regardless of which party is in power. Governing through compromise rather than domination. Guaranteeing transparent, fair, and nonpartisan elections with results that are accepted and upheld. Applying the law equally to everyone, with independent courts that are not stacked in any movement’s favor. Conducting the public’s business through fact-based debate, not personal attacks and bad-faith tactics. Providing essential government services while measuring results, eliminating what fails, and enforcing the kind of fiscal discipline that does not mortgage the country’s future on any single administration’s ambitions.

These are not abstract ideals. They are the specific, practical conditions under which a government of 340 million people can actually function. And they are precisely the conditions that both extreme blueprints, from the right and from the left, are designed to circumvent.

What the 2026 Elections Actually Decide

The November midterms are not simply a referendum on the current administration. They are a decision point about which portion of the Project 2025 agenda advances further, and whether the progressive infrastructure for a 2028 counter-movement gets the political oxygen it needs to accelerate. Republicans currently hold a 218 to 214 majority in the House. Expanding that majority would give the administration a realistic path to the statutory elimination of the Department of Education and the abolition of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, two proposals that executive orders alone cannot accomplish. Losing either chamber would largely end the legislative phase of the agenda.

For the center, the midterms are an opportunity to elect the kind of pragmatic, accountability-minded representatives who can put the brakes on both extremes. That means supporting candidates, in both parties and outside of them, who are willing to restore civil service protections, rebuild independent oversight of executive agencies, and use the power of the legislative branch to do what it was designed to do: check executive overreach regardless of which president is responsible for it. Term limits, transparent and fair elections, and a legislature that actually legislates are not partisan demands. They are basic requirements of a functioning democracy.

What Comes Next

The damage from Project 2025 that can be undone will take years of sustained, principled effort to reverse. The damage that cannot be undone is a permanent reminder of what happens when citizens treat elections as entertainment rather than governance decisions. And the threat from a hypothetical Project 2028 is a reminder that the problem is not one party or one movement. The problem is a political system that rewards ideological capture over genuine problem-solving, and an electorate that has not yet demanded better loudly enough.

We do not have to accept this. The future is not something that happens to us.

Which brings us to what begins on Monday.

Starting April 13, The Center Voter is launching a new publication called Foundations. Every article in this series builds the case for a principled, enduring framework to govern America, one grounded in nine guiding principles that the Center Voter community believes in and lives by. Those principles rest on three unshakeable foundations. The first is Guardrails, the structural protections that safeguard our institutions, ensure equal justice under law, and protect every vote. The second is Collaborative Governance, which replaces partisan warfare with fact-based debate and policies built to earn broad, lasting support. The third is Principled Leadership, which restores America’s role as the moral and strategic leader of free nations.

Over ten days, we will introduce each of the nine principles in depth, not as talking points, but as a genuine governing framework for a country that is ready to stop being defined by its divisions and start being built by its common ground. This is not a response to Project 2025. It is not a counter to Project 2028. It is something neither of those blueprints can offer: a foundation designed to outlast any single election, any single administration, and any single political movement.

We are 45 percent of this country, politically homeless but not without purpose, and the work of building something worthy of this nation begins Monday morning. We hope you will be there.