Will you join the supermajority for constitutional democracy?

During 2023, I laid out a plan for renovating American democracy. Our society groans under the strain of population growth and massively scaled-up institutions. Rising diversity brings magnificence but also challenges. We are frustrated by ever-increasing tech-induced opacity in our organizations and reigning practices. We resent an economy that appears to many of us to function like a spoils system for the few, while ruining the climate for all.

Our creaky institutions seem frozen in the face of these challenges. So, last year, I proposed a lot of big, institutional changes to unstick the gears. I expect they might feel overwhelming and out of reach. I suspect that many of you, reading my columns, have carried along the nagging question: This talk of big institutional change might be all well and good, but where in this grand scheme is the place for me?

We can make forceful arguments for all the structural solutions we want — a bigger House of Representatives, abolishing party primaries, term limits for Supreme Court justices — but there are still questions. How can any of us actually live out the spirit of democracy renovation?

For me, the single bleakest data point about the health of our society concerns a difference across generations in that sense of attachment to democracy. As political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa have reported in a few different guises, there has been significant generational decline in how people value democracy. In the starkest formulation, made in 2016, roughly 70 percent of Americans in the generation born before World War II consider it very essential, while not quite 30 percent of Americans who are now about 40 and younger do so. This finding occasioned controversy, but the points about decline of young people’s attachment to democracy are robust.

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