With populism rising and an aspiring autocrat occupying the White House, threats to democracy proliferate: rampant corruption, assaults on the rule of law, sabotage of the administrative state, a politicized Justice Department waging a protracted campaign of political retribution, a cowed Congress that struggles to legislate and oversee, and a president who governs nearly exclusively through unilateral action. These are not ordinary times, and champions of democracy quite rightly look for ways to resist and obstruct strongman power.

Many such checks can be found within the government's constitutional design—in its separation of powers and the distributed authority that makes it difficult for presidents to dictate from on high. Though each check, individually, won’t stop a strongman in his tracks, collectively they challenge any politician seeking to wrap their arms around the state and deploy it for their own purposes. So doing, they function as bulwarks of democracy.

Embedded within this system of government, meanwhile, are other, more troublesome sources of resistance. For those looking to advance a bold policy agenda, vested interests lie in litigious wait. An excessive preoccupation with procedural compliance  slows the pace of policy change. Within the “kludgeocracy” and rampant minoritarianism that characterize so much of the American state, well-funded agencies and departments routinely fail to deliver on their missions.

Eventually—perhaps in 2029, perhaps later—we may move past the daily struggle of blocking an elected strongman. We then will need to repair our Republic. A substantial amount of this work necessarily involves restoring the rule of law and building defenses against future strongmen—tasks that the Biden Administration, when it had the chance, refused to meet with adequate urgency.

More than that, though, we also will need to contend with the vested interests, excessive proceduralism, and organizational dysfunction that temporarily frustrate the ambitions of a strongman, but that also degrade the government's capacity to act in ways that are timely, responsive, and effective. For unless we build institutions that are capable of actually solving public problems, our democracy will remain in a perpetual state of precarity.

How so? Consider, to begin, the willingness of capable individuals to serve in public office—a basic prerequisite for democratic flourishing. Already, much pushes them away: the weight of fundraising obligations, the blinding light of public exposure, and the character abuse and even violence that can follow for both candidates and members of their families. Add to all this an inability, once elected, to actually accomplish something worthwhile—to deliver on campaign promises, to translate effort into outcome—and pragmatically oriented people with attractive outside options turn away from public service. Those who come to politics will do so for other reasons: vanity, grievance, or the sheer pleasure of combat.

In a recent study with my former colleagues at the University of Chicago, we investigated what draws more moderate and more qualified citizens to consider running for office. Using a conjoint experiment that varied features of a hypothetical city council position, we found that the opportunity to wield meaningful authority and thereby make a difference in the world was the single institutional factor that differentially attracted ideological moderates. Extremists, by contrast, appeared largely indifferent to whether the office allowed them to do so. We also found that more qualified individuals—those with greater managerial experience, cognitive ability, and political knowledge—expressed significantly more interest in running when the office came with greater authority, adequate staff support, and easier pathways for enacting legislation. The people we most need in office are precisely those most sensitive to whether the office enables them to govern.

Beyond selection, incentives also are at work. In formal work with Stefan Krasa and Mattias Polborn, we show that when the probability of policy implementation is low—when gridlock predominates and campaign promises rarely become law—voters are more inclined to indulge their baser impulses. If nothing is going to happen anyway, why not vote for the person who most satisfies their appetite for antagonizing the opposition? Candidates oblige. They stake out extreme positions, stoke inter-group animosities, and treat elections less as contests over governance than as occasions for tribal display. Cruelty, we have grown accustomed to seeing, becomes the point.

Recognizing these dynamics, a deep irony in our constitutional inheritance comes into view. In Federalist 10, James Madison confronted the “propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities” and the factions that arise from them. Unable to extinguish these passions, he sought to control their effects through institutional design—separation of powers, staggered elections, and all the rest. Ambition would check ambition, and the threats posed by any single demagogue would attenuate.

At one level, Madison's design plainly succeeds. It remains genuinely difficult for any single individual, however malign his intent, to consolidate power and govern by decree. But at another level, the very features that constrain an autocrat also degrade democratic governance. And the dysfunctions that have grown up within this constitutional structure—dysfunctions that also frustrate autocratic ambition—only compound the problem.

A political system incapable of accomplishing anything meaningful will fail to attract talented and public-spirited leaders. Instead, it will encourage extremism and reward demagoguery. And in the failures that inevitably follow, democracy's defenses become democracy's undoing.

Such is the story of Trump's rise to power. It also explains much of the democratic backsliding in Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez—a pattern that numerous comparative politics scholars have documented and dissected. In each case, elected leaders leveraged popular frustration with institutional dysfunction to consolidate power and dismantle democracy. The autocrat does not create all the failures he decries. He exploits them. And the institutions designed to check his power are often the same ones that produced those failures in the first place.

This may be the central political dilemma of our time. Strengthen the capacity to govern, and you hand tools to those who would abuse them. Weaken that capacity, and you feed the disillusionment on which autocracy thrives. There is no straightforward way out.

This much, though, is clear: Madison's machinery and all that has grown up within it may temporarily restrain a demagogue, but they cannot redeem a democracy. The checks that protect us from autocracy cannot, by themselves, sustain it. For that, we need institutions that do more than block and constrain. We need governing institutions that are capable of solving public problems, and a politics that draws capable and committed people into public service.