Escaping the Democracy Death Spiral

Waiting for the grownups to save us is a bad plan.

Progressives are betting that Trumpism will prove nothing more than a brilliant but quick fireworks display and that, with the 2028 election, the grownups will be back in charge. And, if truth be told, traditional Republicans are, too.

They’re sure to be disappointed. There’s no going back to politics-as-usual, because it was dead long before Trump. As I show in my new book, The Right-Wing Idea Factory, the rise of dark money and, even more, social media put new forces in charge of American politics.

The grownups aren’t in charge, and there’s no chance that they will be any time soon. In the wild-west rodeo that defines American politics, the top job goes to whoever can stay on top of the bucking bull for at least an election cycle or two. But no one is going to stay there for long.

That’s because of two things. One is that Americans don’t trust any grownup for very long, because we quickly become convinced that they won’t deliver. The other reason rests in the new technology. Some analysts have held out hope that social media can bring people together. It’s become instead a wedge driving us farther apart.

Let’s look at each of these reasons in turn.

No president can deliver on big economic promises

At the core of most elections are big promises on the economy, as James Carville preached to Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election. “It’s the economy, stupid,” he said. He could add, “It’s always the economy, stupid.”

But the simple fact is that no president can truly deliver on promises about the economy. It’s become global, beyond anyone’s control, as Trump has discovered about the price of gas at the pump. The Federal Reserve is the closest thing we have to a steering wheel, but the president doesn’t rule the Fed, and the Fed itself is frank about the limits on its own power.

Promising to bring down the high price of eggs and beef and beef is tempting. So, too, is the pledge to put people to work. The president can’t really do much about that, however—except screw it up, with decisions that drive inflation up and employment down. And that’s driven trust in government on a steady downward track. From a high point following the 2001 terrorist attacks, trust in government to do what is right, always or most of the time, has slid from 60 percent to 17 percent at the end of 2025.

In February, Gallup found in February that people ranked government as the country’s biggest problem. Confidence in the presidency is embarrassing at 30 percent, but Congress is at the bottom of confidence in American institutions, at just 10 percent.

A little more than a decade ago, a poll found that Congress was less popular than a root canal, colonoscopy, head lice, and Genghis Khan. Nothing has changed since. It’s hard to see how any grownups can turn this around any time soon.

That translates into growing gloom about the future. Gallup found in February that 59 percent of Americans anticipate high-quality lives in five years, the lowest in the survey’s 20-year history.

The false promise of the social media bridge

The unifying promise of social media as a virtual town square, if it ever really existed, has been dashed.

Consider the most popular podcasts, for example. Of the top five on Spotify, three lean to the right, with The Joe Rogan Experience consistently at the top. One is news, produced by The New York Times, though many on the right would suggest it’s left-leaning. Of course, almost no one listens to the other side.

Those on the right, on the other hand, are sure they know what the left is up to: pushing their values down Americans’ throats, in ways that run against traditional American values. One group on the left has started a podcast listening club to tune in to what the right is saying, but as co-founder Nina Harris told an interviewer, “I’m really, really scared, and I just want to figure out what’s happening.” With a gulf that large, it’s little wonder that true crime podcasts are the only safe middle ground.

The sad fact is that Americans don’t much like each other. Among more than two dozen countries in a recent Pew Research Center survey, the US was the only country where a majority of people (53 percent) saw their fellow citizens as morally bad. Compare that with Canada, where 92 percent of the people saw others as morally good.

In a different Pew survey, a growing number of Republicans saw Democrats as immoral (an increase from 47 percent in 2016 to 72 percent in 2022). Democrats felt the same way about Republicans (with an increase from 35 percent to 63 percent). A majority of people who identify with each party saw those in the other party as close-minded, dishonest, and unintelligent.

Media floods Americans with choices, and they choose to go their own very different ways. The closest thing to a unifying social event is the Super Bowl but, in 2026, it only brought about a third of Americans to their televisions, and the Bad Bunny half-time show became a partisan spark point.

Religion has lost its bridging role. In 1952, 75 percent of Americans said that religion was “very important” in their lives, according to Gallup. In 2025, it was 47 percent. Over the same period, the number who said it was “not very important” grew from 5 percent to 28 percent. Now, even among those who are within the same religious denomination, there is partisan disagreement, as a Catholic vice-president entered a war of words with the first American pope.

Even families have become less important as social anchors. The marriage rate has declined, from 69 percent of those over 18 who are married to 50 percent in 2021. Pew concluded a decade ago, “As a result of these changes, there is no longer one dominant family form in the U.S.”

Instead, we increasingly choose to live with others who mirror our views and take our cues from others with whom we already agree. Most Americans live in bubbles, “with virtually no exposure to voters from the other party,” Jacob R. Brown and Ryan D. Enos found. It isn’t necessarily that people check the party registration of neighbors before they move in, but people with similar views tend to seek out similar homes and amenities.

As a result, in terms of where we live and what we listen to and what we believe, Americans are becoming increasingly segregated—by political party. That’s one of the reasons that so many incumbents hail from safe state legislative and congressional districts. Their party leaders draw boundaries to protect their members, and the clumping of the party faithful is making that easier.

Over the last dozen years, Republican state legislative chambers have tended to stay red. The same is true for the Democrats, although they’ve been locked out of more states. That’s one of the big reasons why presidential elections have increasingly boiled down to a small handful of swing states. And all of that will increase with the great redistricting war of 2026, aimed at gerrymandering congressional district boundaries.

So we can’t count on grownups to rescue us. Social media is uber-powerful, but it’s only widening the problem of polarization.

Who can trust those who don’t deliver?

And then there is the problem deeply embedded in the way Republicans and Democrats both approach government itself. Democrats dream big, but they typically fail to think through how to deliver. That was the problem with the launch of Obamacare, where only six people were able to enroll on the first day. The Obama administration eventually straightened out the problems, but not before the problems of the launch became an anchor that dragged the program down.

And, convinced that government has gotten way too big, Republicans have devoted their energy to bulldozing programs and people. The Trump administration DOGEd its way through government. Elon Musk’s grand experiment slashed more than 400,000 jobs and left the government down 272,000, after federal agencies discovered they needed to refill the positions that had been eliminated.

But cutting government doesn’t deliver the things that people want government to do, from delivering weather warnings on time to making TSA checkpoints run smoothly to catching terrorists before they can act. In fact, the director of the US Office of Personnel Management, Scott Kupor, admitted that “sometimes you over-restructure,” and that the administration now needs to hire people back to fill some of the jobs it eliminated. It’s hard to rebuild on the rubble of what’s been destroyed.

In fact, Trumpism has turned the administration of government upside down. For my take on this, see Trumpism and the Future of Public Administration (Cambridge University Press, 2026), which is available as a free download from May 8 through May 20.

The one thing that progressives and conservatives share is a blind spot for actually making government work. That, as it turns out, not only drives the public’s distrust of government but also points the most important way out of this mess.

In a July 2024 survey by the Partnership for Public Service, “corrupt” was the most common word that respondents used to describe the federal government. And among 18-34 year-olds, the fast-growing and increasingly critical swing vote, just 15 percent trusted the federal government. That’s lower than any other age group. And it’s a worrying sign that the future will be even worse than our present moment.

Escaping the death spiral

The way out of this mess, message-meister Frank Luntz found in a June 2024 collection of focus groups and surveys, begins by recognizing that people want a government that is honest, trustworthy, transparent, in touch, accountable, and respectful, without excuses for why things go wrong.

Of those Luntz surveyed, 24 percent thought that the government did an “inadequate job” of serving the people; 18 percent thought the job was “terrible”; and 16 percent believed that the government was “simply incapable of doing anything at all.”

That’s why we neither grownups nor social media can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. It’s hard to trust a government that people don’t believe is working for them.

But amid this boiling cauldron of problems, there’s one silver lining. Overall, 78 percent of Americans want a federal government that functions effectively, and that’s one thing on which Democrats (89 percent) and Republicans (82 percent) agree. Luntz found that people wanted a government that made them feel respected, appreciated, valued, safe, and secure. People trust a government that convinces them that policymakers have their interests at heart—and that they’re working to produce results that matter to them.

A March 2026 survey reinforces that conclusion. Americans worry most about “the cost of housing, groceries, electricity, and everyday expenses” (79 percent) and are concerned that “political division and dysfunction in Washington” are keeping us from getting there (62 percent). At the top of those they blame: “politicians who’d rather fight than fix problems” (69 percent). What they want: “honesty and integrity” (76 percent) along with “a determination to get things done—even when that means working with the other party” (72 percent). This is precisely the strategy that Francis Fukuyama is leading with a team through Reform for Results. (Full disclosure: I serve on the executive committee of that group.)

And that suggests part one in the escape from democracy’s death spiral: building a government focused laser-like on producing results that matter to people, not entangled in self-aggrandizing politics. That’s a tall order, of course, but we do know how to do it. Luntz found that people like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the TSA, FDA, SNAP, and roads and bridges, because they see—and appreciate—the results.

But delivering them in the era of mega-change is an even taller order, with everything changing at the speed of AI and with government lagging in the tech revolution.

That leads to part two: instead of relying on the grownups, we need to bring in the young ‘uns. We need fresh energy, fresh ideas, fresh technological skills, and fresh ideas about weaving networks.

The Pentagon, for example, for the last decade has run a “Hack the Pentagon” competition, where ethical hackers are turned loose on the department’s IT systems to find vulnerabilities. In the first competition, one hacker found a problem in just 13 minutes. Many of the most successful players had little or no college education.

But many of these successful players don’t have the standard credentials to check off the boxes in the federal government’s hiring process, so they drift off to the private sector. This is starting to change, with the federal government relaxing educational credentials for tech workers.

Uncle Sam is saying, “I want you!”—but “I can’t get you.” These are precisely the people the federal government needs to build a government that produces results, but it struggles to lure them in, especially because the federal government’s hiring system is in desperate need of repair. It takes three times longer for the federal government to hire than a typical private company, and in that time, smart young ‘uns, especially those weighed down by student loans, get snapped up before the federal government can grab them.

Uncle Sam, though, has an even bigger problem. The Partnership for Public Service found that two-thirds of 18-34 year-olds believed that a federal job “is an opportunity to have a positive impact on my community”—but an equal number reported they never considered a federal position. The more politicians trash the government we elect them to lead, the harder it’s going to be to convince ambitious young ‘uns to come to work for the feds.

So we know that it’s foolish to wait for grownups to save us, or to expect that social media will suddenly start drawing us together instead of splitting us apart. But we also know that if the government focuses more on producing results in a trustworthy way, it can draw in the young ‘uns who are the key to escaping the democracy death spiral.

The first step is to stop demonizing the very government we want. It’s an easy, tempting target. But the more we take aim and fire at it, the more we tighten democracy’s death spiral.

Each party, in its idea factory, is producing new ideas and ideologies. The ideas are pushing the parties—and the country—apart, and there’s no question that the right is far better at this than the left, which is having a hard time generating ideas on which anyone agrees. That’s sure to make the death spiral worse.

But there’s hope, captured in an exchange of letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who had the fiercest, ongoing political battles in American history. In their last years, however, they came to a consensus around the basic values of America and their hopes for its future.

Jefferson wrote a late-night letter to Adams. “What a Colossus shall we be. I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night!” Adams replied, “May we be a Barrier against the Returns of Ignorance and Barbarism. What a Colossus Shall We Be!” Their agreement on the goals for the future, Adams concluded, led to a prophecy that “you and I Shall Soon meet and be better Friends than ever.” Meet again they did, when they both died on the same day, 50 years after America’s first Independence Day.

Their shared search for America’s promise pushed aside the differences that had divided them for decades. That’s not a bad thought, as we near the 250th anniversary of that day.

Donald F. Kettl is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He’s the author of the new book, The Right-Wing Idea Factory (Oxford University Press).