Newsletter #389 — October 3, 2025 

Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess

An obvious first step in any effort to defend democracy and renew the civic culture upon which it depends is a shared understanding of what democracy is and why it is worth defending. This, we think, requires much more than a simple understanding about the three branches of government, checks and balances, the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, and elections that we should have learned about in school. People also need to understand the critically important role that a healthy democracy plays in the lives of everyday citizens — and how it protects us against tyranny. Democracy can't be seen as one of those highfalutin concepts that, for their own reasons, learned experts impose on everyone else. In addition, we have to go beyond politically motivated definitions of democracy that now dominate political discourse — ones that try to score political points by branding the other side as anti-democratic. (This is why so many people think that the key to "saving democracy" is simply to defeat the other side.) Having said this, it is also true that there are times when political parties really do things that do threaten democracy — things that need to be opposed.

We think the best way to understand the meaning and importance of democracy is to focus on its principal alternative — the dystopias of chaos, civil strife, and tyranny that have plagued humanity throughout its existence. While democracies have seldom come very close to living up to their lofty ideals, they have always (at least when they have not been hopelessly corrupted) been vastly better than these dystopian alternatives.  

It is critically important that we find much better ways of cultivating deep public understanding of the critical role that democratic norms and institutions play in protecting vital citizen interests. Citizens also need to understand that democracy doesn't work if they aren't actively involved in it. As we have often said, "democracy is not a spectator sport." We all have a role to play in making it work, and staving off corrupting influences that would rather reinstate IFYFI rules and use those rules to overpower us all. This essay, the larger Great Reframing series, and the Beyond Intractability project constitute our contribution to this effort. 

Dystopian Alternatives to Democracy

"I'll Fight You for It" Rules

Whenever we try to explain what we see as the nature of these dystopian alternatives, we start with this poem by Carl Sandberg.

Get off this estate.
What for?
Because it's mine.
Where did you get it?
From my father.
Where did he get it?
From his father.
And where did he get it?
He fought for it.
Well, I'll fight you for it.

Virtually all of human history has been governed by some variation of what we call, based on this poem, "I'll Fight You For It" (or, for short, IFYFI) rules — you can have whatever you have the power to take, and you can keep whatever you have the power to defend.

"Survival of the Fittest" and the "Invisible Hand"

Those who have spent time studying the natural (nonhuman) world and contemplating the ways in which it has been shaped by evolutionary dynamics will, of course, be correct in noting that the competition implicit in IFYFI rules governs interactions within and between all species.  While the effect of this competitive "survival of the fittest" process on individuals is often quite harsh, the larger process is what enables the overall ecosystem to evolve in ways that successfully adapt to ever-changing and often difficult circumstances. Like it or not, this is the way complex ecosystems work.

The same principles apply within human societies. Competition, what Adam Smith called the "invisible hand," pushes us all to do our best and to find a niche in which we can thrive — generally by adding value to the larger community by producing some useful and specialized product that we can trade with others for the things we need.

The Matthew Effect

In the natural world, and in relatively primitive human communities, IFYFI rules have this relatively local and generally positive effect on the larger ecosystem or community. This is because individual winners of specific fights have limited ability to accumulate power and store any resources they might acquire beyond the here and now.

This all changed when humans, with their inventive brains, figured out how to accumulate and use power over time and space. This meant that those who won IFYFI power contests were able to use their winnings to accumulate knowledge, tools, and weapons that enabled them to more easily win future fights. This, in turn, allowed them to accumulate ever more power. Over time, this resulted in, first modest, and then extreme concentrations of wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. This "power begets more power" effect is so long-standing and so pronounced that there is even this widely cited line from the Biblical Book of Matthew documenting this effect.

“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”
Matthew 13:12 (KJV)

Lord Acton's Law

The Matthew Effect is further amplified by the boundless greed of a relatively few, but enormously consequential, individuals who focus all of their energies on ruthlessly accumulating as much wealth and power as possible — what they have is never enough. They always want more.  Fierce competition among such individuals inevitably escalates into an all-out battle for social dominance that almost always winds up selecting the most extreme and ruthless individuals (and the groups that support them) over everyone else. This struggle for power and societal control is never fought under anything resembling "Marquis of Queensberry" rules that assure that contenders fight fairly and that the competition is constructive for society as a whole. In the real world of such struggles, any strategy that works, no matter how insidious and morally abhorrent, is likely to be used. The endpoint of such struggles is most accurately summarized by Lord Acton's famous observation that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

If you have any doubts about the horror that this unleashes, think about the lives led by the countless people who built, without modern mechanized equipment, history's great imperial palaces and monuments. Or, consider history's more recent and infamous empires: Napoleon's France, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China or the somewhat less brutal European colonial empires of Spain, Britain, and France that, together, conquered most of the world. More immediately worrying are the many places in which we see such all-out struggles for power operating today — Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China's suppression of the Uyghurs, and civil wars such as the ones in Sudan, Yemen, and Syria.  There are also numerous smaller scale but equally terrible (for those unfortunate enough to live under them) tyrants — people like Joseph Kony, Charles Taylor, and Bosco Ntaganda.

The Grand democratic Bargain — Humanity's Best Defense Against "I'll Fight You for It" Rules

It is not surprising that those who have been forced to suffer under the yoke of this kind of oppression through the ages have devoted considerable amounts of attention to finding a way of escaping the grasp of Lord Acton and the dystopias produced by all-out IFYFI power contests.  In almost all cases, the answer has been some sort of "democratic" government. 

While differing individual histories, cultures and traditions have produced different types of democratic societies, they are all built around some variation on the same Grand democratic Bargain — everyone agrees to work together to prevent extreme concentrations of power by enforcing strict prohibitions on the use of IFYFI rules to resolve internal disputes. In its place, they establish a complex, rule-of-law-based process for wisely and equitably resolving disputes while, at the same time, encouraging mutually beneficial economic exchanges and, where possible, joint problem-solving. This process is designed to take advantage of the constructive "invisible hand" of competition, while at the same time, limiting the kind of "invisible fist" competition that degenerates into the dystopia of all-out IFYFI power contests. (We call this the "Grand democratic Bargain," with a small "d," to emphasize that this refers to the governance system of democracy, as opposed to the big "D" Democratic Party. We also want to be clear that this is not at all related to the Grand Bargain Project, which uses a similar term for a much narrower concept.)

The Grand democratic Bargain stipulates and regulates fair mechanisms for handling disputes and making joint decisions (e.g. private contractual agreements, legislative action, elections, and judicial review). It simultaneously prohibits other effective but, under the Grand democratic Bargain, illegitimate tactics like libel, slander, lawfare, bribery, intimidation, and violence.

Bottom line, in democratic societies organized under the Grand democratic Bargain, citizens agree to grant one another the freedom to live life as they choose, provided that they grant and help defend the rights of their fellow citizens to do the same.

Not surprisingly, implementing this simple principle in the context of a complex modern society is extraordinarily challenging (and is the principal reason why it has been so hard to build a democracy that truly lives up to its ideals).

Majority Rule / Minority Rights

Successful democratic societies cannot be libertarian free-for-alls. People and parties do still fight over policies, and they fight to win elections. But limits are placed on individual and partisan behavior using the rule-of-law-based processes mentioned above. This rule-making power is, in turn, constrained by rights and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution that protect individuals and minorities from the "tyranny of the majority."  People can't be counted upon to do the right thing, unless there is a civic culture and a supporting legal system that encourages them to do so.

Most everyone understands the majority rule component of democracy. It is, after all, the focus of our great political hobby — cheering for our side as we try to assess the impact of each day's news on our side's prospects of winning the next big electoral, legislative, or judicial fight. What is almost never talked about is the obligation that we should all feel to protect the rights and interests of those who come out on the losing side of those fights. Instead, we tend to make the mistake of thinking that the winners, if they can win big enough, are entitled to "take all."  

Democracy: a Formula for Coexistence

In today's context, we need to remember that democracy is not, for example, a process for determining whether or not there are just two genders. It is a system that enables people who believe that there are just two genders to coexist in a climate of mutual respect (though not agreement) with those who do not. It is a system that enables people who believe that climate change constitutes an existential emergency sufficient to justify the full range of green energy projects to coexist with people who challenge that view. It is a system that allows those who believe that poverty is primarily the result of societal exploitation to live with those who believe that a lack of hard work plays a bigger role. It is a system that allows those that believe we have an obligation to accept immigrants seeking asylum and those who do not.

Above all, it is a system that allows and encourages constructive debate on these and countless other important and controversial issues — the kind of debate that, over time, can move society toward something closer to a consensus based on objective truth and humanistic values.  It is, of course, also a system that has to make inevitably controversial policy decisions regarding these issues — policy decisions in which one side is likely to win, while the other side loses. However, the "win" cannot be so big that the losing side feels that they no longer have a livable and respected place in society. 

The key to democracy's success is its ability to make these decisions and still retain the support of those who disagree. This is done by assuring those who lose that the process through which these decisions were made was fair, that their fundamental individual rights will continue to be protected, and that they will have a realistic opportunity to persuade society to reverse what they see as unwise decisions at a later time.

The Grand democratic Breakdown

When these assurances, which are critical to the Grand democratic Bargain, break down, people are likely to start questioning their commitment to democracy and start thinking about abandoning the constraints that democracy imposes on their use of more extreme, but potentially effective, IFYFI tactics.

When people begin to use IFYFI tactics again, such behavior can quickly escalate, as both sides feel compelled to resort to increasingly extreme tactics. The result is the erosion of democratic norms and institutions to the point where, in effect, society reverts to all-out, IFYFI rules. The only difference is that this time, the fights are sugarcoated with the language of democracy to make them appear more legitimate.

When this happens, political factions begin to see democracy as a contest in which they need to accumulate a slim majority of voters, and then impose all their preferred policies on the losing side in a winner-take-all manner. By not giving the losing side what they regard as a livable future, this undermines the coexistence formula that enables people with deep disagreements to live peacefully together. (See our essay on the 51% hammer effect.) In short, they see democracy as a kinder, gentler form of old-fashioned fights for dominance and control. Once the Grand democratic Bargain is abandoned, society finds itself on a fast track toward the IFYFI dystopias that Lord Acton warned us about. Sadly, this is where the United States is now.

Rediscovering the Grand democratic Bargain

The only way to escape our current predicament is by mobilizing a large-scale political movement capable of helping our society rediscover the reasons why the United States and so many other countries established themselves as democracies — to preserve individual liberties, prevent grotesque concentrations of wealth and power, and avoid the kind of terrible violence that comes from continuing struggles among competing authoritarian wannabes. We also need to help people recognize the many ways existing democratic institutions have already been hijacked by IFYFI actors as part of their ruthless and continuing quest for power.

Above all, we need to help people understand that democracy's ongoing struggles do not mean that democracy is a bad idea that should be discarded as part of the general reversion to "I'll Fight You for It" rules. It means that we need to set about the hard work of reforming democratic institutions so that they truly live up to Grand democratic Bargain. And that, unfortunately, means that the good-faith actors who want to make democracy work will have to either convert bad-faith actors who are currently acting in ways that undermine democracy to their cause, or defeat them.

Given the many acknowledged flaws in past versions of democracy, this movement will have to go beyond the simple restoration of past democratic norms and institutions. It will have to build a new and better 21st-century democracy — one that comes closer to living up to its ideals. We need to think of our current troubles as the start of a "new beginning" in which we get to imagine and then work together to create a world in which we all want to live.

The remainder of this Great Reframing newsletter series will examine what it will take to move us toward this vision. 

Lead Graphic Photo Credit: San Romano Battle -- Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASan_Romano_Battle_%28Paolo_Uccello%2C_London%29_01.jpg; By: Paolo Uccello; Permission: Public Domain; Date Acquired: September 29, 2025