<aside> ℹ️ Civics Unplugged is obsessed with the question of how to build a healthy, thriving democracy. But why does the health of democracy matter? This document helps answer that question.

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When it's healthy, a democracy is a system through which a nation's people works collectively to efficiently address issues of importance to the nation's people. The problem is, when a nation's democracy isn't healthy, you end up with a scenario that looks a lot like America's right now: a broken political system where the nation's most powerful actors are not willing or able to serve the interest of ordinary people and properly address America's many mounting problems.

What problems do we face today?

• A pandemic that has destabilized all sectors of society
• Record-high levels of economic inequality
• Middle-class wage stagnation that has wreaked havoc on families across the country
• An opioid addiction crisis that reflects a sense of spreading hopelessness
• A global climate crisis, which looms with menacing uncertainty about the devastating consequences for coastal populations and threats of major droughts and food shortages
• Social media that has hijacked our brains and turned people against each other
• A fracturing US-led geopolitical order that is being challenged by authoritarian global powers
• The list goes on.

The challenges are real and complex. Any of them could stand in as the most important problem our country faces and the one true challenge we must solve immediately. But here’s why we should focus on political institutions first: All of these problems will require some kind of government action.

They will require the kind of creative leadership, nuanced thinking, and hard trade-offs that binary, toxic politics subverts. They will require a political system that supports competing partisans making complicated, multidimensional compromises. A nation divided against itself cannot solve these big problems. If we don’t get the politics right, it’s really hard to get the policy right.

As political reform expert Lee Drutman once said: "America’s winner-take-all electoral rules are the antiquated and cracking levees of a political system that is flooding with toxic conflicts. If we don’t fix these underlying structural issues and channel conflict better, everything else is just taking buckets to a flood."

To further illustrate how shortcomings in democracy affect how much progress we can make on big issues, we compiled a few examples below.

How Democracy Work Intersects with Other Issues

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