The Power of Ideas - Igniting a Bold New Democracy
Part 1 - The Power of Ideas: Why Democracies Decay Long Before They Collapse
The podcast episode, The Power of Ideas was released in May, 2023 without an accompanying blog post. Given the current state of geopolitics and the continued erosion of Democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere, I thought now would be a good time write the post and to draw listeners and readers attention back to the ideas discussed in the podcast episode and in Dr. Ruth Backstrom’s book, “Igniting a Bold New Democracy: Empowering Citizens through Game-Changing Reforms”
We tend to talk about democracy as if it were a machine. If something goes wrong, the instinct is to reach for policy fixes, institutional reforms, or procedural tweaks. Tighten this rule. Adjust that process. Replace one leader with another.
But democracies rarely fail because the machinery suddenly breaks. They fail because the ideas that give the machinery meaning quietly erode.
Long before constitutions are threatened or elections are contested, something subtler happens. Shared assumptions weaken. Norms lose their force and language becomes thinner, louder, more cynical. What once felt unacceptable starts to feel normal. What once felt important starts to feel naïve.
That is the deeper argument at the heart of a recent conversation on For What it’s Worth with Dr. Ruth Backstrom, author of “Igniting a Bold New Democracy, not as an abstract theory, but as a lived diagnosis of how democratic cultures drift when ideas are neglected.
Ideas as invisible infrastructure
Ideas are often treated as optional - interesting, but secondary to “real” political work. Yet ideas are the operating system of public life. They shape how we understand responsibility, legitimacy, fairness, and truth, long before those concepts are ever translated into policy.
When the ideas underneath democracy are healthy, disagreement can be sharp without becoming destructive. Institutions can absorb stress. Compromise feels difficult but possible. When those ideas weaken, the same institutions begin to feel hollow, even when they remain formally intact.
This is why democratic decay is so often misdiagnosed. We look for a dramatic rupture and miss the slow cultural corrosion that precedes it. Democracies do not usually just collapse, they thin out. They become procedural shells animated by habit rather than belief.
The myth of sudden collapse
A persistent myth in political life is that democratic failure arrives suddenly as a result of a crisis, an election, a single bad decision. That story is comforting because it suggests clear villains and clean turning points.
The reality is far more subtle. Democratic erosion is gradual, cumulative, and largely voluntary. It happens when bad ideas are repeated often enough to feel reasonable. When good ideas are dismissed as impractical or elitist. When complexity is treated as weakness and certainty is rewarded, regardless of accuracy.
In the podcast conversation, this emerged not as alarmism, but as recognition: the most dangerous moments are often the least dramatic. They are the moments when citizens stop expecting coherence, when media ecosystems perpetuate and reward outrage over understanding, and when leaders learn that symbolism matters more than substance.
By the time institutions are visibly strained, the intellectual groundwork has already been laid.
Why ideas matter now
It is tempting to think of this as an academic concern, detached from everyday politics. It is not. Ideas shape what we expect and tolerate, what we excuse, and what we demand. They determine whether we see democratic citizenship as a responsibility or a performance, a shared responsibility, or a competitive sport.
The podcast conversation matters because it resists the easy explanations. It does not pretend that better policies alone will save democratic life, nor does it indulge in nostalgia for a golden age that never really existed. Instead, it asks a harder question: what kinds of ideas are we allowing to structure our public life, and which ones are we abandoning because they require patience, humility, and effort?
That question does not have a easy answer. But avoiding it guarantees the wrong ones.
If democracy is to be more than a set of procedures, it must be sustained by ideas that are taken seriously. Ones that are argued over honestly, defended carefully, and rejected or renewed deliberately. That work is slower and less satisfying than outrage or certainty. It does not trend and It does not resolve itself.
But without it, no amount of institutional engineering will hold.
(The full conversation that sparked these reflections is available on the podcast, for those who want to hear the ideas worked out in real time.)
For What it’s Worth.
Part 2 - Bad Ideas Don’t Win by Accident
In the first part of this post, I argued that democracies decay long before they collapse, not because institutions suddenly fail, but because the ideas that underpin them quietly erode. When seriousness thins out, when meaning gives way to performance and cult of personality, democratic life is slowly hollowed out, even while its forms remain intact. The question that follows is unavoidable: what fills that hollow space? The answer is not neutral. When citizens retreat from sustained participation in the democratic process, influence does not disappear, it concentrates in the hands of those that seek power and influence. bad ideas do not spread because they are inevitable or irresistible. They spread because the structures meant to challenge them weaken, and the voices best positioned to exploit that weakness move in. In other words, bad ideas, don't win by accident. This is a comforting story we like to tell ourselves. We blame misinformation, manipulation, or bad actors. We imagine democratic decline as something imposed from the outside, but as our podcast conversation, and Ruth Backstrom's book make clear, democracy erodes just as often through absence as through attack. It weakens when citizens quietly withdraw from the intellectual and civic participation and responsibility it requires.
The failure of seriousness and the vacuum it creates
Democracy depends on friction, not constant conflict, but sustained intellectual resistance. Ideas are meant to be tested, argued over, and refined. When that friction disappears, ideas do not improve; they metastasize.
One of the clearest failures in contemporary democratic life is the collapse of seriousness. Public debate increasingly rewards performance over coherence and certainty over understanding. Arguments are judged not by whether they hold together, but by whether they land.
In that environment, policy does not simply drift, it tilts. When citizens disengage, organized interests do not. While it is tempting to believe that lobbyists are an aberration in democratic systems; They are not, they are a predictable response to absence of citizen engagement. Power flows toward those who show up consistently, speak fluently in institutional language, and understand how to navigate the machinery.
Backstrom’s argument in Igniting a Bold New Democracy is not that lobbying exists because democracy is broken. It is that lobbying becomes dominant when democracy thins out.
Influence fills the space participation leaves behind
Citizen disengagement is not neutral. It actively reshapes who governs. When public participation is reduced to episodic voting or reactive outrage, policymaking becomes increasingly insulated. Decisions are informed less by public reasoning and more by private access. Over time, this produces a politics that feels distant and unresponsive — not because institutions have failed outright, but because they are listening to a narrower set of voices.
When people sense that policy no longer reflects public will, trust erodes. But the remedy is not to reject expertise or institutions, it is to reconnect them to democratic participation that is ongoing, informed, and expected.
As Backstrom argues, “rule by the people” does not mean rule by impulse. It means rule by engaged citizens who understand that democratic authority carries responsibility as well as rights. Framed this way, citizen participation is not symbolic. It is corrective.
Citizen involvement as democratic counterweight
Well-designed civic engagement, deliberative forums, participatory policy processes, sustained local involvement reintroduces positive friction into decision-making. It forces ideas to be explained rather than asserted. It exposes policy choices to lived experience rather than narrow interest.
What this looks like in practice matters. Participation only mitigates the control of special interest groups, when it is designed to matter. A useful example is Backstrom cites is Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly, which brought randomly selected citizens together to deliberate on complex and contentious issues, including climate policy, with access to expert testimony, structured debate, and time to think.
The Assembly did not replace elected officials, nor did it bypass expertise. What it did was force policy ideas back through public reasoning. Lobbyists still existed. Political interests still competed. But proposals emerging from the Assembly carried a different kind of legitimacy, one grounded in informed citizen judgment rather than power and institutional access.
The outcome was not perfect policy. It was better process. Ideas had to be explained, defended, and revised in the presence of those who would live with the consequences. That alone changed what could plausibly be proposed. This is the kind of civic infrastructure Ruth Backstrom points toward. Participation here is not theatre, rather it is structural. It alters the balance of influence by widening the informational ecosystem policy depends on.
From spectatorship back to authorship
One of the most damaging assumptions of recent decades is that ordinary citizens are incapable of meaningful engagement with complex policy. This belief flatters technocrats, empowers lobbyists, and excuses disengagement, all at once.
Backstrom rejects this premise. A bold democracy assumes competence can be cultivated. It invests in civic capacity rather than managing around its absence. It treats citizens not as noise to be filtered out, but as authors of the collective future.
This does not mean everyone weighs in on everything. It means democratic systems are built with the expectation that public reasoning will shape priorities, inform trade-offs, and challenge captured assumptions. Without that expectation, “for the people” becomes rhetorical, a phrase attached to decisions made elsewhere.
What ignition actually demands
The word igniting is easy to misread. It suggests passion, energy, spectacle. But in Backstrom’s work, ignition is not about intensity, it is about re-engagement.
Igniting a bold democracy means:
- Treating citizen participation as infrastructure of the democratic process, not performance
- Designing policy processes that expect public reasoning
- Narrowing the distance between lived experience and decision-making
- Accepting that democracy is slower and stronger, when more voices are heard
The podcast conversation reinforced this quietly. Its most revealing moments were not prescriptive, but clarifying. Democracy fails fastest when people stop believing it belongs to them.
A final challenge
Lobbyists will always organize. Power will always seek efficiency. The democratic question is whether citizens are present enough, informed enough, engaged enough, to counterbalance that gravitational pull. If democracy is to return to something resembling rule by the people, for the people, it will not come from nostalgia or institutional tinkering alone. It will come from rebuilding participation as a civic expectation and responsibility rather than a personal preference, and from designing systems that take citizen reasoning seriously enough to let it shape policy. That is not a romantic vision. It is a demanding one.
And it is the one both the podcast conversation and Igniting a Bold New Democracy ultimately point toward.
...For What it’s Worth.
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