Remember 2008, when we were told banks were too big to fail? Even though they were the ultimate culprits for the financial crisis, generous rescue plans were rapidly drawn. So much for the minimum State and non-interference in the economy.

We are now facing the reality of a democracy that is “too big to fail”, as the prospect of a demented authoritarian in the White House who’s able to disrupt the basic systems that sustain our economies and our lives on this planet warrants a big rescue plan, bigger than the 2008 financial bailout. But what would a democratic rescue plan look like?

It would begin with a simple admission: democracy is not self-sustaining.

For decades, liberal democracies have been treated as if they were naturalised political systems, resilient by default, self-correcting, and somehow immune to collapse so long as elections continued to take place. That assumption now looks not only complacent but dangerous. Democratic institutions do not survive on constitutional text alone. They survive because they are embedded in dense social, institutional, economic, and spatial infrastructures that make collective life possible. When those infrastructures are weakened, sold off, privatised, discredited, or captured, democracy does not disappear overnight. It decays in place.

That is what makes the current moment so dangerous. The threat is not simply the rise of authoritarian personalities, although that threat is real enough. The deeper danger is that democratic life has already been hollowed out to such an extent that increasingly deranged, reckless or openly authoritarian leaders can now operate inside democratic shells while dismantling the substance of democracy itself. This is what political scientists now call democratic backsliding: the gradual erosion of democratic institutions, norms, rights, and accountability from within, often through legal means and with the support, or resignation, of ordinary citizens (Bermeo 2016; Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018). International democracy monitoring bodies have documented a sustained global deterioration in democratic performance, including declines in judicial independence, electoral integrity, press freedom and civic participation 

The lesson of 2008 is not simply that states can intervene massively when they choose to. It is that they will intervene massively when elites perceive systemic risk. The collapse of major financial institutions triggered emergency coordination, public guarantees, central bank activism, and extraordinary fiscal measures because ruling institutions understood that the failure of the financial system would bring down everything else with it. We are now living through an analogous democratic emergency, except this time the system at risk is not credit, but collective self-government.

And yet our political response remains absurdly inadequate.

We continue to treat democratic decline as if it were a matter of political culture, misinformation, bad manners, polarisation, or poor leadership. These things matter, but they are not the whole story. Democracy is also built, maintained, and undermined through very material arrangements: whether people have time to participate; whether they can afford housing near work and public life; whether public institutions still function; whether schools, libraries, parks, and community centres still exist; whether public media can survive; whether social trust is possible; whether political disagreement can occur without fear, humiliation, or algorithmic distortion.

A democratic rescue plan, then, cannot be limited to institutional reform in the narrow sense. It cannot be just a better civics curriculum, more fact-checking, a few electoral safeguards, or another handwringing summit on democratic values. It must be understood as a systemic reconstruction project. If democracy is too big to fail, then it must be rescued at the scale at which it is actually lived.

1. Rebuild the material basis of democratic life

The first task is to recognise that democracy requires social and material preconditions.

A citizen who is permanently exhausted, indebted, overworked, badly housed, commuting for hours, and struggling to access healthcare or childcare is formally free but substantively incapacitated. Democratic participation requires time, energy, stability, and some degree of confidence in the future. Where everyday life is organised around precarity, people are pushed into survival mode. Under those conditions, democratic engagement becomes a luxury good.

This is one of neoliberalism’s most devastating political effects. It did not merely deregulate markets or shrink the welfare state. It reorganised society around competition, insecurity, responsibilisation, and permanent exposure to risk, weakening the solidaristic institutions that once sustained democratic citizenship (Brown 2015; Crouch 2004). It made social life harsher, lonelier, and more fragmented, while hollowing out the public institutions that allow people to see themselves as part of a collective project.

A democratic rescue plan would therefore begin with a social guarantee. It would include robust investment in universal public services: housing, healthcare, transport, education, childcare, libraries, and digital access. Not as technocratic welfare measures, but as democratic infrastructure. These are not side benefits of democracy. They are among the conditions that make democracy viable.

2. Decommodify the public sphere

If the 2008 crash revealed the insanity of allowing financial markets to govern the economy, the current democratic crisis reveals the insanity of allowing markets to govern the public sphere.

One of the most corrosive developments of the past four decades has been the steady conversion of collective life into a field of extraction. Housing became an asset class. Universities became firms. News became content. Public space became branded experience. Social media became the de facto architecture of political communication. And politics itself became increasingly subordinated to investor confidence, market discipline, and public relations.

This is not a peripheral issue. A democracy cannot survive if the arenas where citizens form judgement, encounter difference, and deliberate about common affairs are continuously privatised, monetised, and manipulated. Jürgen Habermas’s great insight was that democracy depends on a functioning public sphere: a social space in which matters of common concern can be discussed, contested, and judged beyond both state domination and market imperatives (Habermas 1989). That sphere was always imperfect and exclusionary, of course, and feminist and postcolonial scholars have rightly exposed its limits (Fraser 1990). But the answer to an exclusionary public sphere is not no public sphere. It is a more democratic one.

A democratic rescue plan would therefore include serious anti-monopoly action against platform monopolies, stronger public interest media, the taxation of speculative digital advertising economies, and the active rebuilding of non-commercial spaces for civic life. That means funding local journalism, public broadcasting, libraries, cultural centres, neighbourhood forums, and institutions where political disagreement can happen without being gamified for profit.

In blunt terms: democracy cannot be subcontracted to billionaires and apps.

3. Treat information systems as democratic infrastructure

If electricity grids, water systems, and roads are treated as critical infrastructure, then the systems through which societies know, interpret, and debate reality must also be treated as critical infrastructure.

The digital public sphere is now one of the primary terrains through which democratic erosion unfolds. Platform architectures reward outrage, speed, tribalism, and simplification. They fragment publics into parallel realities and incentivise epistemic chaos. They do not simply host democratic discourse; they actively shape its form, tempo, and emotional tone.

This is not a call for censorship. It is a call to stop pretending that privately owned attention machines are neutral communication environments. They are political infrastructures with enormous democratic consequences. Shoshana Zuboff has shown how surveillance capitalism turns behavioural data into a mode of prediction and control (Zuboff 2019). Others have documented how digital platforms accelerate disinformation, polarisation, and the erosion of shared factual worlds (Benkler et al. 2018).

A democratic rescue plan would include public regulation of algorithmic amplification, transparency requirements, bans on certain forms of manipulative political microtargeting, and public alternatives to extractive communication systems. The goal is not to create perfect consensus. Democracy does not require agreement. But it does require some minimum shared conditions for intelligibility, trust, and contestation.

A polity cannot govern itself if it can no longer distinguish between evidence, propaganda, spectacle, and coordinated lies.

4. Rescue public institutions from managed decay

Authoritarians rarely begin by abolishing the state. More often, they inherit institutions that have already been weakened by decades of austerity, managerialism, outsourcing, and distrust. They then capture, weaponise, or hollow them out further.

This is one reason why the current authoritarian turn is so dangerous. It is not occurring against a background of robust public institutions. It is unfolding in societies where many institutions have already lost legitimacy, capacity, or coherence. Public bureaucracies are underfunded. Regulatory agencies are politically vulnerable. Courts are overloaded. Schools are uneven. Municipal governments are overstretched. Civil services are demoralised. In some countries, even the basic administrative state has been recoded as an enemy of freedom.

A democratic rescue plan would therefore involve a serious project of institutional repair. This means funding and protecting independent public administration, rebuilding professional ethics in the civil service, strengthening local government, insulating key institutions from partisan capture, and re-legitimising the idea that the state can be a vehicle for collective action rather than merely an obstacle or a market facilitator.

This is not romantic statism. States can be violent, exclusionary, racist, colonial and authoritarian. We know this. History has been unambiguous on the subject. But democratic life without capable, accountable public institutions is fantasy. The answer is not less state. It is a more democratic state.

5. Rescue democracy spatially

One of the least understood dimensions of democratic crisis is that democracy has a spatial form.

Democracy depends on spaces where strangers can encounter one another, where grievances become visible, where collective claims can be articulated, and where the city functions as more than a logistics platform for consumption and extraction. Public squares, streets, schools, parks, transit systems, libraries, council chambers, neighbourhood centres, even the ordinary sidewalk, all of these are part of democracy’s physical architecture.

When cities are reorganised around privatised enclaves, hostile design, policing, long-distance commuting, displacement, and the erosion of public space, democratic capacity is weakened. When planning becomes a servant of real estate speculation, when urban development is reduced to asset inflation, and when ordinary people are pushed ever further from the places where political and economic life is concentrated, democracy is not merely inconvenienced. It is spatially thinned out.

This is why any democratic rescue plan must include a rescue of the public realm. We need planning systems oriented toward public value rather than exchange value. We need affordable housing in central locations, strong tenant protections, public transport, walkable cities, non-commercial gathering spaces, and public institutions embedded in everyday life. We need to stop treating urban form as politically innocent.

Democracy needs somewhere to happen.

6. Build counter-power, not just participation

One of liberal democracy’s favourite evasions is to confuse participation with power.

Inviting people to workshops, consultations, and feedback sessions is not meaningless. But participation without redistributive consequences, institutional leverage, or epistemic recognition can easily become democratic theatre. It can produce the appearance of inclusion while leaving decisions untouched.

A democratic rescue plan must therefore move beyond procedural inclusion and address the actual distribution of power. That means stronger labour rights, sectoral bargaining, tenant unions, civic associations, neighbourhood assemblies with real influence, and institutional channels through which citizens can genuinely shape budgets, land use, infrastructure, and public priorities.

It also means confronting the concentration of wealth as a democratic emergency. Extreme inequality is not just an economic problem. It is a constitutional one. A society in which billionaires can shape media systems, fund political capture, distort housing markets, influence regulation, and effectively buy access to public decision-making is not politically equal in any meaningful sense (Piketty 2014; Gilens & Page 2014).

If democracy is rule by the people, then concentrated oligarchic power is not a side issue. It is a direct contradiction.

7. Internationalise democratic defence

Finally, a democratic rescue plan cannot stop at national borders.

The institutions, narratives, technologies, and financial systems that now undermine democracy are deeply transnational. Authoritarian techniques travel. Disinformation networks travel. Culture-war scripts travel. Financial capital travels. Political consultants, platform infrastructures, dark money, and reactionary media ecosystems all operate across borders. Yet democratic defence remains oddly provincial, as if each country were facing its own little isolated nervous breakdown.

We need democratic coordination at a global scale: stronger protections for journalists, civil society, election monitoring, platform accountability, labour rights, tax justice, and climate governance. We also need to stop pretending that democracy can survive in a world structured by obscene global inequality, ecological collapse, and permanent geopolitical humiliation. A planet governed by extraction, militarisation, and abandonment will not somehow produce stable democratic futures by accident.

Democracy cannot be rescued in one country alone while the rest of the world burns, floods, starves, or is bombed into “security”.

The political question we have avoided

The real obstacle to a democratic rescue plan is not lack of knowledge. We already know a great deal about what is corroding democratic life. The obstacle is political will.

In 2008, states moved heaven and earth to rescue finance because the system that was threatened was one elites were deeply invested in preserving. Today, democracy is under systemic stress, but many of the most powerful actors in our societies have adapted quite comfortably to democratic decline. Some profit from it. Some weaponise it. Some believe they can ride it out from behind walls, algorithms, and investment portfolios.

That is the illusion we must break.

Democracy is too big to fail not because it is morally sacred, though there are good moral reasons to defend it. It is too big to fail because every other collective challenge we face depends on it. Climate breakdown, inequality, housing collapse, technological domination, war, migration, public health, social fragmentation, none of these can be addressed in durable and legitimate ways without institutions and publics capable of collective judgement, conflict, accountability, and action.

If we lose democracy, we do not just lose elections. We lose the political capacity to govern a shared world.

And that, unlike a bank, cannot simply be recapitalised after the collapse

Photo: Nelson Mandela casting his vote in the 1994 multi-racial elections in South Africa. It was the first time he had voted in his life.Photo by Paul Weinberg – direct donation from Author14 October 2009, 19:07:42 (original upload date), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26754876