Think clearly. ✔️
Challenge yourself. ✔️
Be ready for democracy. ✔️
The Center trains the habits that make democratic participation possible. We help you develop the discipline to come up with versions of opposing arguments that you yourself can’t dismiss. Because this is how disagreement doesn’t destroy the shared political community.
Three Kinds of Rules
Legal Rules - the laws that keep order
Don't steal. Pay taxes. Don’t commit fraud.
Democratic Rules - the norms that protect the system itself
Social Rules - the habits that keep us seeing one another as legitimate participants
Accept elections. Resolve disputes without violence.
Grant fellow citizens moral legitimacy by default.
Today, the right more often breaks legal and democratic rules. The left more often breaks social ones. Focusing only on the first two while ignoring the third has left democracy fatally exposed. Yes, visible threats are urgent. But invisible ones are foundational.
Moral legitimacy means treating those you disagree with as full participants in the democratic project—even when you think their ideas are wrong. Without it, contempt replaces trust, and democracy collapses. If opponents truly are irredeemable, democracy can’t work. But if they’re not—and you treat them as if they are—you’ve dealt democracy a blow it can’t survive.
Are you ready?
We tend to think democracy is about being willing to talk it out with people on the other side. It’s not. That matters, but it comes later. Democracy requires its citizens to have the ability and willingness to construct the reasoning behind views we reject. Not by asking others to explain it to us, but by working it out ourselves. [If you’re wondering why this is so important, go here.]
Dialogue and bridge-building can only go so far. Because they assume we already have the capacity to treat opposing views as legitimate starting points. We don’t.
Take a position you strongly oppose. Without anyone explaining it to you, can you build a version of the argument that you think a reasonable person could hold? If not, that’s the skill to practice.