Messy is good
By Eli Lehrer
Editor’s note: Perhaps the messiness of the U.S. democracy space is a good thing?? And maybe we’re at risk of mistaking legibility for strength, writes Eli Lehrer, President of the R Street Institute.
We’re thrilled that this piece is the first in response to Democracy Notes 2025 Trends! Read on!
Democracy Notes’ 2025 Trends Report offers a candid self-portrait of the field: fragmented, uncertain of its boundaries, under legal threat, and—above all—anxious about the absence of a shared center of gravity. Read alongside critiques like Scott Warren’s argument that the “big tent” strategy isn’t working, the diagnosis feels familiar. The disorder the report describes—the “weird, misshapen protozoa”—may not be evidence of failure so much as a reflection of democracy’s own messy, protean nature. The real danger may lie in the impulse to treat coherence as a primary measure of either democracy or the civil society ecosystem that helps protect it.
Democracy is never an orderly enterprise; indeed, authoritarians often point to its intrinsic disorder as evidence that it “doesn’t work.” No democracy can or should resolve every disagreement. Instead, democratic systems channel conflict and allow competing visions to coexist and peacefully contend for power. As such, much of what now appears as fragmentation in the democracy ecosystem reflects that same logic: overlapping organizations, contested boundaries, and even contrasting conceptions of the good. In a moment of legal pressure and political threat, it is understandable to desire the security a more coherent order might bring. But a democracy field optimized for coordination risks mistaking legibility for strength.
None of this is to deny that disorder can shade into dysfunction. Fragmentation becomes a problem when institutions lose legitimacy, incentives reward political power rather than process, and groups with similar agendas attack one another. The report documents real warning signs: burnout and a sense that effort is not adding up to impact. These are symptoms of strain and point to an erosion of confidence in shared rules, procedures, and democracy itself.
The greatest risks, then, do not come from a lack of a center but from a loss of confidence in institutions and the rules that govern democratic contestation. Coherence and order can even become liabilities under severe threat, creating single points of failure rather than resilience. The more a field depends on a single center of gravity, the more an attack on one node is likely to have implications for others. Specific agendas, organizations, theories of change, and policy proposals can be defeated entirely. But ideas with deep, messy social roots—from monotheism to capitalism—never disappear quickly and rarely vanish entirely once embedded. A democracy field that pathologizes disorder might win more short-term victories, but it will be less resilient over time. The most important task is learning to distinguish between chaos that can corrode and a pluralism that will sustain.
Eli Lehrer is the President of the R Street Institute.
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