The Collective Defense Imperative – the Only Way to Defend Ourselves against Bad Faith Actors

6. Civic Knowledge and Skills

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
For more information

June 25, 2026

Democracy cannot be defended by one party, one leader, one institution, or one social movement acting alone. It requires a broad willingness to protect the rules that make peaceful self-government possible. This is the collective defense imperative. Citizens who disagree deeply about policy must still be willing to defend elections, civil liberties, courts, free speech, the peaceful transfer of power, and the rule of law. If each side protects democracy only when doing so helps its own partisan cause, then democracy becomes vulnerable to bad-faith actors who are willing to break the rules in order to win.

Bad-faith actors exploit the fact that democratic citizens often distrust one another. They tell their own supporters that the other side is so dangerous that ordinary democratic restraints no longer apply. They encourage people to excuse voter suppression, intimidation, corruption, disinformation, or political violence when it helps “our” side. They may also portray independent courts, professional election officials, journalists, civil servants, and watchdog organizations as enemies of the people whenever those institutions limit their power. Freedom House has warned that political rights and civil liberties have been declining globally, with authoritarian practices spreading in many settings. Such trends rarely advance because everyone openly rejects democracy. More often, people tolerate anti-democratic behavior because they think it will protect them from their opponents.

Collective defense begins with self-restraint. Citizens and leaders must resist the temptation to use anti-democratic tactics for short-term advantage. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their work on How Democracies Die, emphasize the importance of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. Mutual toleration means recognizing political opponents as legitimate participants in democratic life, not as enemies who must be destroyed. Institutional forbearance means refusing to exploit every legal loophole or procedural weapon simply because one can. These norms are especially important when passions are high, because that is when people are most likely to justify behavior they would condemn if the other side did it.

Collective defense also requires active protection of democratic institutions. Citizens can support trustworthy election administration, independent journalism, judicial independence, legislative oversight, professional public administration, and accountable law enforcement. They can refuse to spread claims they cannot verify, defend the rights of unpopular speakers, and insist that allegations of misconduct be handled through evidence-based procedures. International IDEA describes democratic resilience as the ability of democratic systems to adapt and recover when challenged. That resilience depends not only on formal rules, but also on courageous citizens who are willing to defend those rule,s even when the immediate political benefits are uncertain--or clearly harmful to "their side," at least over the short run.

This does not mean that citizens should be neutral between democracy and authoritarianism, or that they should treat all political behavior as equally legitimate. Bad-faith actors must be exposed, resisted, prosecuted when they break the law, and defeated politically when they seek power. Still, defense of democracy must itself remain democratic. If pro-democracy citizens rely on lies, intimidation, lawless retaliation, or suppression of opponents, they help destroy the very norms they claim to defend. The challenge is to build cross-partisan and nonpartisan coalitions strong enough to stop anti-democratic behavior, while still preserving the rights and procedures that make democracy worth defending. In the end, democracy survives only when enough people decide that protecting the system is more important than winning any single fight.

—————————

This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.