This is the first 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.
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