Communicating About Democracy Under Threat

Three insights about the “common beliefs and assumptions” people in the US hold about “democracy, authoritarianism, and the rule of law”, and how to make them “feel real and relevant to people’s everyday lives” to resist attacks on democratic institutions. We learn that people equate ‘government’ with (swappable) individuals, rather than durable institutions; that people think ‘democracy’ is “simply whatever the US does;” and that concepts like ‘democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism’ are too abstract for most people to relate to. We’re encouraged to “make explicit the connections between the rule of law and the experiences of arbitrariness and uncertainty… affirming and acknowledging people’s feelings and then tracing one of their root causes”, and put a name to it: “executive overreach, the erosion of the rule of law”, grounding the abstraction “in the very real, very felt experience of uncertainty that people are living through.”