Across the globe, contempt for democracy is growing, and not just from one side of the political spectrum. On the right, we’ve seen increasing alignment with autocratic regimes in countries like the United States, Hungary, and Austria. Meanwhile, many on the left blame democracy itself for enabling the rise of these very regimes, faulting the electorate for being undereducated, apathetic, or simply misaligned with their values.
In the U.S., public disapproval of Congress remains persistently high, yet most incumbents win re-election with ease. Democratic governments are often blamed for being slow, ineffective, and lacking vision. The criticism is clear: democracy is not delivering, or at least not in a way people can perceive.
This three-part series aims to explore some of the fundamental tensions at the heart of democratic governance and how democracies can continue to thrive despite them.
The Problem of Invisible Success
Consider two hypothetical brothers who were both very successful in school growing up, and both decided to go into medicine. The first, James, became a heart surgeon. His successes are dramatic and visible: when a patient survives cardiac arrest on his table, the life he saved is immediately evident to both him and the patient. The second brother, Scott, went into vaccine research, working on the development and improvement of the measles vaccine. His work has likely saved millions of lives, but those saved will never know it. The alternative future—the one where they died—is invisible. Scott will know he saved lives, but will never be able to internalize that like his brother.
This is a fundamental problem in political decision-making: preventing disaster rarely feels like success. And in democracies, where public perception drives policy, that matters a great deal.
The primary role of a government, at its most essential, is to shield its people from disaster. This is becoming increasingly important in the modern, more complex world as the challenges faced are harder to detect, explain, and localize. But in doing so successfully, governments receive little to no credit.
Take the Clean Air Act: it’s estimated to save roughly 200,000 lives annually in the U.S. alone. Yet the number of people who attribute their life being saved to the Clean Air Act is probably 0. Who will then properly remember this legislation at the ballot box?
Even worse, the government might solve the problem so well that the public asks whether the threat was even real. For example, in the mid-1980s when it was discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were tearing a hole in the atmosphere, international cooperation led to sweeping bans. This has slowly but surely led to the recovery of the Ozone layer (which will be complete by 2070). But today, some people mock it, saying, “Remember when they lied about the ozone layer?” They see the absence of disaster not as proof of foresight, but of deception. This demonstrates how it’s hard to sustain support for air quality or safety rules because the public doesn’t directly experience the tragedies that were averted by those policies.
The consequences of dismantling preventative systems eventually reveal themselves. We’ve seen recent outbreaks of measles in communities with low vaccination rates. In these moments, the value of vaccines becomes painfully clear, but at a terrible cost. Even then, these tragedies often become politicized. Vaccination rates, once a matter of public health consensus, are now sharply divided along partisan lines.
We’re learning, over and over again, that waiting for disaster to prove the value of prevention is a dangerous and costly approach.
The Case for Independent Institutions
So what can be done? In my view, the only sustainable path forward is to safeguard certain risk prevention measures from direct political influence. The general public, without domain knowledge, is simply not calibrated to perceive long-term or abstract risks.
Monetary policy, for instance, is best left to an independent Federal Reserve. Scientific research should be shielded from political gamesmanship. Yet, we’re seeing erosion in these safeguards.
During the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed was pressured to bail out failing banks—decisions that many economists viewed as compromising long-term stability for short-term political relief. More recently, Trump has pressured Fed Chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates.
Scientific institutions have fared no better. In recent years, scientists report spending up to half their time just writing grant proposals, a process increasingly shaped by political trends rather than scientific merit. The Trump administration actively undermined science through politically motivated grant cancellations, attacks on meteorological agencies, the appointment of pseudoscientific figures to key positions, and much more.
These moves erode our collective capacity to identify and mitigate risk, precisely the capacity that modern democracies need most as the world grows more complex and interdependent.