Mutually Assured Democracy

The Constitution of the United States is a piece of paper. It doesn’t – and can’t – enforce itself. The ink can’t magically leap off the parchment and stop a president who’s decided that the document is nothing more than a nuisance to his goals. For most of American history, that didn’t matter because the people running the system agreed (more or less) to play by the same rules; like when Nixon lost to Kennedy in 1960 and, despite rumors of vote manipulation, conceded and said, "our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.^[1]" That agreement was the republic. Not the document.

That agreement is dead.

The Republican Party has spent the past three decades learning that there’s no penalty for breaking it. They stole a Supreme Court seat and faced no consequences ^[2]. They gerrymandered so much that nationwide House races are basically graded on a curve benefitting them the most ^[3]. They incited an insurrection ^[4] and attempted to subvert the will of the people with a fake elector scheme ^[5] in the 2020 election and faced no consequences ^[6]. They are, right now, defying court orders. They’re purging the civil service. They’re dismantling federal recognition of entire classes of Americans. And the cost? Basically nothing. The rational move is to just keep on pushing. 

Meanwhile, the Democrats have largely done what Democrats do: they’ve written strongly-worded letters^[7], wagged their fingers, and appealed to norms that the Republican Party abandoned years ago. They tell themselves that if they just model good behavior hard enough, eventually the fever will break and we’ll be able to get back to normal. It hasn’t broken because it wasn’t a fever in the first place. It’s a cancer that’s metastasized.

The Democratic Party needs to adopt a doctrine of deterrence.

No more empty rhetoric and constantly turning the other cheek. They need to make the concrete and credible promise that if Republicans keep trying to operate outside of the rules of the system, Democrats will not only match, but exceed that escalation. With court packing, abolishing the filibuster, hyper-partisan redistricting, and aggressive prosecution of corruption. Not because it’s a “good” thing to do, but because mutually assured destruction can only ever work when both sides actually believe the other will follow through.

Now, I really do think the system can be saved. I don’t consider myself a nihilist or “black-pilled.” But I also know that “returning to norms” is naïve, because the norms are long gone. My position demands emergency action to force the other side back into the system by making the cost of leaving it so high that their only other choice is Civil War.

I’m not being hyperbolic. The V-Dem Institute downgraded the United States from a liberal democracy to an electoral democracy ^[8]. It was a 24% drop in a single year. We went from 20th globally to 51st. That number terrifies me because when an authoritarian state decides to test just how far it can push, it tests on people like me first. I’m a trans woman whose identity is being systematically erased from federal recognition ^[9]. I’m an immigrant and citizen who grew up believing in the American dream, but who now has to worry about being denaturalized for speaking out against the administration ^[10]. I’m a Marine Corps veteran who served honorably, but who is now considered a national security threat ^[11]. I’m a mom in constant fear about what kind of country my son is going to grow up in and inherit.

The steps authoritarians take when trying to consolidate power are deliberately designed to make the stakes feel abstract to most people until it’s too late. It’s time to wake up to the reality of the moment.

The asymmetry.

In their essay titled "Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball"^[12], Professors David Pozen and Joseph Fishkin argued that, since around the mid-1990s, Republicans have engaged in more frequent and more intense norm-breaking to maximize power. Meanwhile Democrats have more often played by the spirit of the rules. Thirty years later, the result is about what you’d expect. One party treats democracy like a strict rulebook to abide by while the other treats it like a sandbox.

An immediate objection you could make is that politics is inherently messy, and political maneuvering will always necessitate trying to nibble around the edges of the rules to strategically defeat your opponents. Fair enough. But deterrence still works in environments like these. Institutions always respond to expected costs, and right now the expected cost for Republican escalation is effectively zero.

Norms only deter behavior when violating them actually hurts. Democrats have long confused unilateral disarmament with institutional stewardship. The result is an executive branch that now governs by fiat. 251 executive orders in fourteen months ^[13], many of them doing work that would normally require legislation ^[14]. The Schedule Policy/Career rule is expected to strip away protections from around 50,000 federal workers ^[15]. It’s going to convert the civil service into nothing more than an apparatus for loyalty to the executive. The Supreme Court was reshaped through a stolen seat and rushed confirmation that produced a 6-3 supermajority that may very well outlast every senator that enabled it.

And when the courts actually do push back? The executive just shrugs. This administration has defied or manipulated court orders in 57 out of 165 adverse rulings . More than a third. They lose under one statute, jump to the next, and keep repeating it faster than any court can hope to keep up with them. Just like parking tickets when you’re wealthy, adverse rulings are treated like a cost-of-doing-business rather than consequences. As I wrote about in my Constitutional Arbitrage piece, we’re watching the emergence of a decorative judiciary ^[16].

V-Dem says freedom of expression is at its lowest point since the end of World War II. So the truth is that we’re way past normal democratic friction. To borrow from Ezra Klein, “the emergency is here“^[17].

Proof of concept.

California already ran the experiment on deterrence.

When Trump publicly pushed (read: ordered) Texas to deliver him five more Republican House seats through a mid-decade gerrymander, Gavin Newsom didn’t wring his hands. He pushed through the Election Rigging Response Act, which replaced California’s independent redistricting maps with partisan ones designed to offset the Texas power grab^[18]. Then he put it up to the voters. Prop 50 passed with about 64% of the vote.

The move was deliberate. It was reactive, proportional, and transparent. California’s maps will revert to an independent commission the moment Congress does its job and passes federal redistricting standards. It wasn’t imposed by executive fiat the way Donald Trump rules. It was a democratic response to antidemocratic escalation.

And it worked. Before Prop 50, a nationwide redistricting war was brewing. But after Democrats actually fought back, Republicans de-escalated. Indiana’s redistricting efforts were blocked by Republicans themselves because the party doesn’t want to fight this war ^[19].

That’s what deterrence looks like. You punch the bully back and the bully thinks twice before punching you again. When the bully believes escalation leads to mutual destruction, the bully hesitates even further.

How you punch back.

Courts. The Garland blockade and Barrett acceleration gave one party unilateral control over the judiciary for a generation ^[20]. The response must be to expand the Supreme Court from nine to thirteen. We should push for staggered term limits; around eighteen years long. The off-ramp is structural reform that includes term limits, fixed appointment calendars, and supermajority confirmation thresholds that make future expansion unnecessary. You build the case and sell it to the American people by showing the breach it answers.

The filibuster. Republicans spent years chipping away at procedural norms to pack courts and ram tax cuts through reconciliation ^[21][22]. The minority veto over basic voting rights legislation can’t survive that precedent any longer. Kill the filibuster for legislation aimed at democracy-protection. Pass a federal democracy package that includes voting rights, independent redistricting standards, and anti-corruption laws. Things that should have been passed decades ago.

Representation. Senate malapportionment has been weaponized for decades. Allow D.C. and Puerto Rico to vote on statehood. Pursue retaliatory redistricting in blue states following the California model. Tether both to an off-ramp just like California: nationwide redistricting standards and automatic voter registration. Prop 50 proved that this works, especially if your messaging brings the American people along for the ride and explains the why, not just the what.

Enforcement. This is the one that matters most, because without it nothing else really means anything. Trump’s border czar took a $50,000 bribe in an undercover FBI operation ^[23]. The President grew his net worth by billions through crypto schemes and patronage ^[24]. Pretty much every American already believes the political establishment is corrupt. So prove them right and then prove you’ll do something about it.

The next Democratic administration’s Justice Department should launch aggressive corruption task forces without any Biden-esque hand-wringing about “perceived partisanship.” Investigate and prosecute crimes committed in office. Hold members of Congress accountable. If the outcome disproportionately affects Republicans, that says something about the Republican Party, not about the investigation.

The media landscape too. Media outlets that march in lockstep with the state have spent years laundering propaganda. Algorithmic feeds have fragmented our realities into mutually exclusive universes. Reform in this domain is paramount. How can you sustain a democracy when the information environment is designed to destroy any semblance of shared truth?

Now the sequencing here is important. You can’t just open with court expansion. You have to open with the democracy-protection legislation that’s being made impossible by the filibuster. And you build the political case for each step by pointing to the specific breach it answers. Let the opposition’s own behavior make the argument for you, because the Republican party will publicly oppose efforts to legislatively strengthen democracy.

“You’re no different from them.”

Here’s the problem: if we don’t take extreme measures – like chemotherapy targeting cancerous cells – we’re taking an even bigger risk. Donald Trump is a symptom of the malignant authoritarian cancer that has been infecting the Republican Party for the better part of the last three decades. And if you just hope for the best and do nothing, the authoritarian will come back. And next time it won’t be headed by a narcissistic buffoon. It’ll be a charismatic bureaucrat with an actual ideology, using the same holes Trump created, except he’ll use them efficiently.

There’s a massive moral chasm between democratic self-defense and authoritarian capture. Every escalation I’ve described so far comes with an explicit off-ramp. California’s maps revert when federal standards pass. Court expansion becomes unnecessary once the judiciary is reformed. Emergency executive measures expire just as soon as statutes are passed to replace them. The goal isn’t to lock in a permanent partisan advantage for the Democratic Party. It’s to restore mutual constraints and force a truce with a faction that has stepped outside of constitutional bounds uncontested for the last thirty years.

Sometimes emergency actions are the only things that can restore normalcy. It’s how you save a system that’s being destroyed by people who have wagered everything that their opponents would never fight back.

The choice.

So we’re back where we started. Rights on paper and democratic hollowing aren’t mutually exclusive. You can have a constitution and still live in a managed autocracy. Russia’s constitution is lovely on paper, but no one would ever mistake Putin’s Russia for a free country ^[25].

The Democratic Party has two options. Send a credible shot across the bow — a promise of mutually assured destruction if this illiberal trajectory continues — or accept the slow decline we’ve watched unfold in Hungary, Turkey, and Russia.

Unilateral restraint has failed. Demonstrably, repeatedly, and spectacularly across every domain where it’s been tried. Our institutions can recover. But only if breaking them actually costs something again.

Vote for Democrats in the 2026 midterms. Demand that Democratic politicians and would-be presidential candidates commit to this doctrine of deterrence. Hold them to it. Because without real deterrence against authoritarians, democracy cannot survive.