American Democracy’s Forgotten Institution:
Why the health of our republic may depend less on politics than on friendship
Justin S. Vaughn, Ph.D.
Culture & Society
The United States has hit the skids, so to speak. Or at least that is what you may conclude based on many recent semiquincentennial national reflections (see, for example, the ominously titled essay “American Dream, American Nightmare,” published a week before July 4, 2026). If you dare, engage with political commentary on X and you will find many such opinions: America’s best days are behind her, in short. And in fairness, not all of these sentiments are without merit. The nation is rife with challenges, from staggering national debt to a largely dysfunctional national government to an extremely polarized electorate that all too often seems focused on what divides, rather than unites, us.
This is not a novel observation, of course. There is no shortage of analyses that either diagnose what ails the body politic or provide a prescription to cure the nation’s fever. Despite the surfeit of such work—much of it analytically sound and strategically wise—our country does not appear to be getting any healthier. In fact, if the chorus of democratic renewal voices were serving as America’s care team, we would likely be looking up contact information for civic hospice units.
We Keep Looking for Solutions in the Wrong Places
It seems as if nearly every conversation about our decline sounds roughly the same: we need to address One Big Thing—say, polarization, misinformation, distrust, institutional failure, or civic apathy—and the way to do so is by One Big Solution—say, electoral reform, media reform, more civic education, different civic education, campaign finance, constitutional change. Those problems are important and the proposed solutions are often prudent. And yet this focus hasn’t gotten us anywhere—because they are second-order problems and solutions.
So, then, what is the first-order problem? While the United States has developed these increasingly acute (and second-order) political symptoms, the Americans who populate it have been growing increasingly isolated, experiencing what Carolyn Bruckmann has referred to elsewhere in this journal as a friendship recession. In my view, this crisis is the understudied problem worth addressing, especially as it relates to the health of our republic.
The so-called “friendship recession” matters a great deal, not only because, as former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has shown, loneliness and isolation have major adverse health effects, but also because friendship is one of the primary ways citizens acquire the skills, dispositions, and habits necessary for democratic engagement and self-rule. Democracies are not simply sustained by their rules, systems, and processes. The relationships citizens develop with one another allow them to live together despite disagreement. Political disagreement has always existed, and so eliminating disagreement is a misguided approach. Democracies become more vulnerable when citizens stop knowing one another, stop working together, and eventually stop believing they share a common life.
We often think democracy is learned in classrooms, through the news media, by examples set by our elders, and from interaction with political campaigns and governing institutions. Often, however, it is learned in the ordinary school of friendship, where people acquire the habits of cooperation, forgiveness, loyalty, and trust that self-government requires. And yet, modern life treats friendship as a private good, if not a luxury.
In reality, friendship is an essential civic institution. As Yuval Levin has argued, institutions are key because they shape character, and fostering renewal means rebuilding those institutions. But this isn’t enough: it seems to me that rebuilding our culture therefore requires recovering friendship as both a personal and a public good. Modern institutions assume citizens already possess the fundamental traits necessary for governance. But the friendship crisis in the United States means that one of our most formative institutions where we learn and practice these qualities has, for many Americans, started to disappear. Thought of this way, American democracy’s greatest challenge may not be institutional decay or affective polarization, but rather our growing inability to form and maintain personal relationships. Friendship is democracy’s forgotten institution.
Friendship Was Once Considered a Public Good
It was not always that way, of course; conceiving of friendship as something akin to a public good is an idea older than modern democracy itself. Classical philosophers, particularly Aristotle, understood friendship as such. For Aristotle, friendship served as a source of companionship, personal happiness, and a primary institution of moral formation. As he put it, “Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves.” He believed the highest form of friendship was grounded in mutual recognition of one another's character and a shared commitment to living well. These kinds of friends help each other become more virtuous by offering support, accountability, and examples worthy of imitation. True friends challenge and inspire one another to become better.
Of course, Aristotelian friendship is not all pep talks and accountability sessions. At the core is shared activity. Friendship is sustained by doing things together, not just sharing mutual affection and overlapping interests. Pursuing common endeavors builds up interpersonal social capital while enabling individuals to pursue that which could otherwise not be achieved alone. Many virtues cannot be achieved individualistically but rather require relationships where they can be strengthened and refined. In this sense, friendship is simultaneously relational and civic, as friends bind themselves together in ways that yield both individual and communal flourishing. Contemporary political theorists have extended this Aristotelian insight to democratic life. Sibyl Schwarzenbach, for example, argues that civic friendship rests on reciprocity and equality and can be cultivated by institutions without requiring the intimacy of personal friendship.
The ancient Greeks were not alone in this sentiment. Classic liberals such as Alexis de Tocqueville also acknowledged the public value of personal relationships. While Tocqueville did not believe that Americans learned democracy only through associations, he did believe it depended upon the everyday habits citizens develop through participating in civil society. He observed throughout his American sojourn that Americans routinely formed voluntary associations to accomplish goals that individuals could not achieve alone. “[Citizens] become powerless,” he wrote, “if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another.”
And how did 19th century Americans do so? Tocqueville described a litany of “associations”—churches, charitable organizations, civic clubs, and countless other groups—which served as what he described as “large free schools” of democracy. (Although the transactional dimension of some of this associational activity may not fully reconcile with the selfless nature of Aristotelian friendship, both perspectives place emphasis on shared activity.) The political significance of these organizations comes not through their engagement in politics (most of these examples, in fact, did not do so). Instead, they had profound civic impact because they accustomed citizens to working collaboratively in pursuit of common purposes.
Tocqueville’s account demonstrates that democracy must be learned socially before it can be practiced functionally, and relationships are where that happens, whether individually or through associational life. Civic health depends on the relationships between people as much as, if not more than, electoral or governance structures. The relationships formed through churches, volunteer organizations, neighborhood associations, and other relational organizations precede and create the civic foundations upon which governing institutions depend. First citizens learn to be together, then they learn to govern one another.
The Friendship Recession is a Civic Recession
Today, we continue to invest enormous energy in designing, defending, and reforming institutions while paying far less attention to the relationships that once sustained them. We inherited constitutional structures built for a society in which civic associations and friendships helped cultivate democratic habits. As those relationships have weakened, we increasingly expect electoral and governing institutions to perform work they were never designed to do. It should not be a surprise that they cannot.
The so-called friendship recession is usually discussed as a crisis of loneliness, happiness, or mental health. That is understandable—it is all of these things. Moreover, its direness cannot be overstated, not only because of the scope of the societal problem but also because of the size of the hole it leaves in its victims’ lives. Friendship is one of the basic goods of human life, and its decline leaves people less rooted, less known, and less able to flourish.
But if friendship is a human good, it is also a civic one. Critically, however, as Bruckmann notes, Americans are not simply reporting fewer friends; many have also lost some of the habits and practices by which friendships are formed and sustained. Moreover, as David Brooks observes in How to Know a Person, one of the defining challenges of contemporary America is that we are becoming less practiced at the difficult work of truly seeing and knowing one another. Friendship, in this sense, is not merely something we possess. It is a skill we cultivate.
In recent years, our friendship crisis has started to receive the public attention it deserves. Journalists, physicians, social scientists, and politicians have documented and discussed declining friendship networks, increasing social isolation, and the emotional and physical costs that accompany them. Former Surgeon General Murthy deserves particular credit for elevating loneliness from a private concern to a national public health issue. Harvard’s Leadership & Happiness Laboratory, whose important work has now moved to Vanderbilt, has likewise helped shift attention from simply counting friends to understanding the practices that enable friendships to flourish. Together, this work has significantly advanced our understanding of what friendship contributes to individual well-being.
Yet friendship’s importance to civic life has remained comparatively underexplored. There are important exceptions: Adam Carrington, for example, has drawn on Aristotle to argue that America’s growing friendlessness is a political problem as well as a personal one. Less attention, however, has been devoted to what contemporary patterns of friendship can tell us about democratic attitudes and dispositions.
That question motivated the American Civic Friendship Survey, which I conducted alongside colleagues Gbemende Johnson and Saladin Ambar. Rather than asking only who is lonely and why, we wanted to know whether Americans' friendship contexts were associated with the civic attitudes and dispositions that healthy self-government requires. We found troubling connections between Americans who suffered from what we call a “dire friendship context” (i.e., significant levels of loneliness, no or few friends, dissatisfaction with quantity and quality of friendships, etc.) and their responses to questions that gauged their sentiment toward democracy.
For example, this group demonstrated less optimism, as they were more likely to believe the United States’ best days were behind it and to view the American Dream as difficult or impossible to achieve. They also exhibited reduced feelings of efficacy, underscored by comparatively low rates of believing that engaging with the political system is worthwhile or believing they could make a difference politically. Finally, they expressed greater dissatisfaction with democratic representation and performance, with higher rates of believing that neither political party represented them and lower levels of satisfaction with democracy overall.
These findings represent just the tip of the iceberg and underscore my argument that the broader crisis of social disconnection extends beyond public health and human flourishing to the health of our democracy. It is also—and especially—a democratic problem.
Friendship Helps Form Democratic Citizens
Friendship is civic infrastructure; as it weakens, the democratic culture and governing institutions it bolsters become more susceptible to collapse. The findings of the American Civic Friendship Survey demonstrate that friendship context and democratic attitudes are connected. This supports the Aristotelian notion that through shared activity we develop characteristics essential for participating in society.
This is quite distinct from modern conceptions of friendship, where default assumptions posit that relationships emerge from shared interests and values. Aristotle would suggest that people do not become friends because they like the same rock band or sports team but rather because they repeatedly listen to that rock band’s album or cheer for that sports team together. People become friends when they repeatedly do meaningful things together, from coaching youth sports or singing in a choir to volunteering, providing service to a charity or one’s church, or even being active members of a book club. Repeated interactions with a purpose build trust; fulfilling one’s shared responsibilities—even trivial responsibilities, such as bringing a dish to a monthly potluck—strengthens that trust.
Contemporary evidence suggests Aristotle may have been right. Researchers at More in Common and Fox Sports have produced a fascinating report that yields insight into the nexus between shared activity, friendship, sports, and democratic citizenship. Building on Ben Valenta and David Sikorjak’s earlier finding that sports fans tend to have more friends than non-fans, the More in Common/FOX Sports research finds that fans also exhibit higher levels of civic engagement, stronger democratic norms, greater rates of volunteering, and more generous patterns of charitable giving. This, of course, is not about sports, per se. Sports simply happen to be one of the few remaining institutions where Americans regularly practice shared activity with people they choose to be around. Fandom facilitates friendship, which helps drive these pro-social and pro-democratic attitudes and behaviors. Sports doesn’t make you a better citizen, but it does provide the setting through which you can develop the moral and civic proclivities necessary to become one.
That’s because friendship teaches citizens to maintain bonds despite conflict or disagreement. Friends argue and disappoint one another all the time, and yet usually remain friends. The characteristics that make us interpersonally resilient are precisely what citizenship requires. Democracy depends on citizens who know how to remain connected after disagreement.
The virtuous cycle between friendship and civic connection should no longer seem so surprising. It follows that if friendship forms democratic habits, people with impoverished friendship contexts would be more likely to harbor anti-democratic dispositions. The narrative revealed by the More in Common/Fox Sports survey illustrates today what Aristotle explained more than two millennia ago.
Civic Friendship is More than Civility
Democracies need disagreement; they also need relationships capable of tolerating disagreement without retreating into ideological silos or treating political opponents as enemies. At the same time, we should not expect that renewed commitments to civility alone will cure what ails our republic.
Healthy democracies require both civility and civic friendship, but we should not mistake one for the other. Civility asks citizens to treat one another with respect despite differences, but civic friendship asks something deeper still: that citizens remain invested in a shared life despite those differences. It extends beyond respect and good manners to include reciprocity and mutual obligation, even when disagreements become profound. This does not mean that democratic citizenship requires personal friendship among all citizens. Danielle Allen, in Talking to Strangers, describes a related ideal of ‘political friendship’: habits of reciprocity and trust that allow citizens to share a democratic life even when they remain strangers.
Civility matters, absolutely. Societies benefit from respectful speech, attentive listening, restraint, and courtesy. Civility can reduce unnecessary conflict or at least dull its sharpest edges. However, it cannot make strangers care about one another, feel accountable to a shared community, or continue investing in a relationship after conflict arises. Friendship can because it creates the relational capital that allows disagreement without dissolution.
Much of today's civic reform movement understandably focuses on improving the quality of public discourse. Organizations promote respectful dialogue, conflict resolution, bridge-building, and depolarization. David Brooks, for example, has argued that America has become increasingly characterized by contempt rather than grace, humility, and mutual regard. He is right to worry about the coarsening of our civic culture. But contempt is not, I would suggest, our deepest problem. It is a symptom of something more fundamental: the erosion of the friendships and shared relationships that once made disagreement more bearable.
Too many civic initiatives implicitly assume that better conversations create stronger relationships. I contend the causal arrow more often runs in the opposite direction. Relationships make difficult conversations possible more often than difficult conversations create relationships. Robert Talisse reaches a related conclusion in Overdoing Democracy, arguing that the capacities necessary for civic friendship can be cultivated through cooperative activities in which political identities are largely beside the point. We frequently ask dialogue to generate trust when, in reality, trust is what makes meaningful dialogue possible in the first place. That trust is rarely produced in a single conversation. It is cultivated over time through shared activity, shared responsibility, and ultimately, friendship.
If civic friendship is indeed more fundamental than civility, then democratic renewal requires more than teaching citizens how to speak differently to strangers. It requires creating more opportunities for citizens to work together, serve together, build together, worship together, celebrate together, even cheer together. Democracy depends less on finding new ways to talk across our differences than on creating more occasions to share a common life before those differences become politically salient. Constitutions can distribute power and elections can determine who governs, but friendship teaches citizens why a shared life is worth sustaining in the first place.
Recovering Friendship as Civic Infrastructure
If friendship really is democratic infrastructure—and our infrastructure is, indeed, showing signs of serious deterioration and dilapidation—what should we do about it? Unfortunately, there’s no easy policy fix to this problem like there is for damaged roads and rotting bridges. Governments cannot mandate affection, and even if they could, forced shared activity is antithetical to the Aristotelian notion of friendship. That said, governments can create conditions under which friendship becomes more likely. The task, then, is to cultivate the environments in which friendship naturally develops. Emerging work on "social prescribing" makes a similar point. Rather than attempting to manufacture relationships directly, physicians increasingly connect patients with opportunities for movement, art, volunteering, nature, and community life. Julia Hotz argues that these activities matter not because they force friendship, but because they create the conditions in which belonging naturally develops.
“What we need, then, are the places where these activities can take place. Eric Klinenberg has described such settings as ‘social infrastructure’: the libraries, parks, schools, and other shared spaces that create opportunities for people to encounter one another and form relationships. Robert Putnam decades ago documented the decline of associational institutions. His work has recently found new audiences through the documentary Join or Die, suggesting that Americans can recognize the civic costs of social disconnection. Experts have also become increasingly aware of the growing dearth of third places. These places matter a great deal because they provide the shared setting individuals can return to again and again, initially as strangers and someday as friends.
Encouragingly, a growing “joiners” movement has begun urging Americans to participate more intentionally in clubs, associations, volunteer organizations, and other forms of civic life. Filmmakers Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis have been particularly thoughtful advocates of this effort, reminding us that joining is valuable not only because organizations accomplish important work, but because they create the repeated shared experiences through which friendships develop. In many respects, the Joiners movement is a contemporary expression of Aristotle's ancient insight that friendship grows through shared activity directed toward common goals.
Thus, civic leaders who want to revive civic friendship would be well advised to focus their energies on creating opportunities for sustained shared experiences. The purpose of civic institutions is not simply to solve collective problems, after all. They should also help create the relationships that make solving collective problems possible. Institutions ranging from universities to libraries to religious communities and clubs can thrive when they do so. Universities are a particularly potent opportunity source here, because (a) college-aged students are in the prime part of their political socialization, and (b) the setting provides countless venues to embed the already robust civic dialogue programs into situations where students could engage in repeated interactions and shared activity. From residential life to student organizations to campus athletics, college campuses may be the best positioned spaces in the United States to make this expansion from fostering civil discourse to facilitating civic friendship.
The Way Forward
Today, civic leaders and reformers expend enormous energy and considerable resources attempting to repair weakened governing structures and trying to teach good civic behavior. Stronger institutions and enhanced civility matter, but neither can substitute for the potential of friendship. Successful democracies require effective constitutions that distribute power equitably, free and fair elections that determine leaders, and laws that establish rules. They also require friendship so that citizens can learn how to share a common life.
We often ask our formal institutions to produce trust, cooperation, and civic responsibility. Historically, though, those qualities preceded institutions, but only because they were cultivated by relationships. As a result, today we increasingly ask our institutions to accomplish what previous generations expected friends, families, congregations, neighborhoods, and voluntary associations to do. It is no surprise that it is not working. Conversely, we often speak as though friendship is the reward for a healthy society. The older civic tradition understood something closer to the opposite. Friendship is one of the practices through which healthy societies are built.
It is time to embrace friendship as civic infrastructure, for it is one of democracy’s formative institutions. Aristotle taught us that friendships form virtue. Tocqueville showed that associations form citizens. Today, the rise of our friendship recession and the decline of the quality of our civic life demonstrate that friendship is still one of the most important schools in which democratic character is learned, but too many Americans have been cutting class. As a result, they are lonely, desperate, and craving connection and meaning. Our renewal ultimately depends less on winning arguments than on recovering the civic art of knowing one another.
Justin S. Vaughn, Ph.D. is a Professor and Director of the Center for Applied Civic Leadership at Coastal Carolina University.
September 2026