This past June, my husband and I found ourselves in a small Shenandoah town in western Virginia. As dusk approached, we wandered into a tavern where locals had assembled to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. As I enjoyed the band, I observed the crowd: old and young, black and white, gay and straight.
Despite their differences, these neighbors clearly knew one another and had chosen to gather for a shared historic purpose that evening. They greeted each other with warmth and familiarity, chatting about local matters and recognizing the veterans in the crowd. Their conversations indicated a diversity of political opinions, yet they equally demonstrated respect and care for the members of their community. It was a striking everyday example illustrating the strength and resilience of American democracy, which often goes unnoticed in today’s discourse.
Everywhere, pundits, pollsters, and talking heads are telling us that our democracy is failing, and the situation certainly appears bleak. Dysfunction and polarization have frustrated governing. Confidence in Congress, the presidency, and the courts has plummeted. Partisan rancor infects even the most innocuous public discourse, including how we preserve history at our nation’s cultural institutions and how we will celebrate America’s 250th birthday in 2026.
Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at Americans’ ability to form meaningful bonds through community association. While our national institutions are not having their finest hour, we are living in a Tocquevillian moment—citizens are coming together, solving problems through local groups and restoring democracy from the ground up.
The brilliance of the American experiment, however, is that its success never depended on top-down governance. The opinions and actions of everyday Americans, like the ones I encountered in the Shenandoah tavern, indicate that while the federal government flails, Americans are still trying to live up to the ideals enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. A 2025 Cato Institute survey showed that 73 percent of Americans believe the founding principles of the United States are still relevant today, and 92 percent feel these principles have primarily been a force for good in the world.
Tocqueville would have agreed. A French aristocrat and thinker, he traveled to the United States in 1831, officially to study the prison system. Instead, he explored the nation’s political institutions, culture, and civic habits and then wrote a two-volume masterpiece.
In Democracy in America, he argued that the genius of American democracy lay not only in its Constitution and leaders, but equally in the everyday associations citizens form to solve problems. Schools, churches, charities, and ad hoc volunteer organizations train people in the habits of self-government. This made Americans a uniquely capable people, unusually suited for democratic governance, even in a large republic. “In democratic countries,” Tocqueville observed, “the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made.”
Instead of condemning American democracy as broken, we should ask whether Americans remain the problem solvers he admired. If we look closely, the answer is yes. Citizens haven’t given up on democracy. Instead, they are putting the “self” back in self-government.
Consider how parents and educators responded to school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic. Fearful of students missing out on critical social interaction and educational structure, parents and educators formed microschools and learning pods. Many were organized through online forums or neighborhood text-message chains. Today, these alternative models continue to grow and evolve because they meet some families’ needs better than traditional schools. Accreditation organizations and philanthropies are stepping in to ensure they have what they need to stay open.
Instead of condemning American democracy as broken, we should ask whether Americans remain the problem solvers Tocqueville admired.
This is exactly what Tocqueville would have expected. If a problem presents itself, he wrote, “the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body. . . which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned.” Americans don’t need formal institutions or politicians to tell them what to do or how to accomplish something.
The same Tocquevillian instinct emerges when disaster strikes. Community resilience in Vermont mitigated damage after the 2023 floods. In a StoryCorps oral history, one resident recalled that people “dug themselves out of the mud and then brought the shovel over to their neighbors.” Community-based “good neighbor funds” distributed relief with no red tape or waiting. In Maui, locals ferried food and supplies to neighborhoods cut off by the 2023 wildfires. After Hurricane Maria, the Puerto Rican mountain town of Adjuntas created its own solar microgrid for businesses to store electricity for the community in case the island’s grid fails again. During the recent federal government shutdown, there were attempts across the country to feed those in need—locals partnering with food banks, houses of worship, restaurants, and schools to help their neighbors.
Such efforts are not only charitable, they are also profoundly democratic. They exemplify trust, reciprocity, and the belief that challenges can be resolved collectively without relying on distant authorities. While such actions do not negate the necessity of federal disaster assistance, they serve as a reminder that democracy in America thrives at the grassroots level.
