Burnout: We Talked Democracy to Death

Walk across Amherst’s campus on any given afternoon, and you’ll find that nothing looks out of place. Students still rush to class, Frost Library is crowded at the usual busy times of the week and semester, and even Val’s meal rotations are the same. Life still moves predictably. And this normalcy, I’m beginning to believe, is precisely why furthering democracy here has become so difficult.

It’s not that Amherst students don’t care about democracy. If anything, we care intensely. We follow the news, worry about constitutional rights being taken away, debate how a country backslides into authoritarianism, and know exactly which absurd, unconstitutional executive order President Donald Trump most recently signed. The problem is not apathy at the level of worldview but in action. When pro-democracy events are held on campus, the same few and familiar faces attend. They don’t change. The circle barely widens. And the golden question is why?

Daily life on campus remains strikingly insulated. For many students, the American democratic downfall feels morally influential, obviously bad, but … remote. Yes, some communities in Amherst feel the consequences of national politics far more viscerally, and everyone — student government, staff, and administration —  must address this with seriousness and all available resources. But for many others, the “crisis” feels eerily compatible with everyday life. 

Normalcy, after all, may not always signal indifference; it may be our act of defiance against the evil impositions or a protection from the broader turmoil beyond Amherst. However, often, it means the fight against Trumpian abuse is happening out of view. In previous statements, President Michael Elliot has noted that Amherst collaborating with other colleges to lobby in Congress and advocating against an increased endowment tax. Additionally, they have enhanced data privacy practices regarding students’ immigration and citizenship status, and reviewed protest policies in light of the national context, among other measures. 

Still, that strange compatibility creates an illusion. What’s being said simply doesn’t coincide with what students see. And because nothing in daily life feels disrupted, the urgency begins to dissipate. Students subconsciously conclude that if things truly were collapsing, I imagine, something in their everyday environment would look or feel different. They’d feel it in their schedules, their routines, their stress. But they don’t. And so the crisis becomes ambient noise. If anything, these conditions make it easy for many students to reflexively think that if everyone is already part of the fight, even those not actively involved, then continuing with what they’re already doing is working. On the other hand, for those students who believe they have been apart from the cause, yet assume everyone around them is contributing to it, they may dangerously conclude that there are enough people doing one job and that their efforts would be atomized.

This gap between doom-filled messaging on one side and utterly normal lived experience on the other is precisely where democratic withdrawal seeds. Authoritarianism often grows not through spectacle but through the quiet normalization of disengagement. On a campus like Amherst, intellectual analysis has, or at least begun to, supplant participatory action, to the extent that the withdrawal can go unnoticed. Students move through their full, admittedly busy schedules with little disruption, while democratic habits wane — we’ve come to describe democracy as defensible, yet expected at the end of it all. And so, more active forms of civic engagement, such as phone banking, working on campaigns, and attending community dialogues, feel distant, maybe unnecessary, or ineffective in student life.

Part of the answer is that the word “democracy” has lost its weight. It has been invoked so often — by administrators, news outlets, and every social media account — that it now conveys almost nothing, even as the content related to it emanates its doom. Consider Democracy Day’s incessant promotion across campus, celebrated as the apex of discussion about democratic life here on campus. Yet, in conversations with my own friends, nearly no one could identify where it was happening and what events even took place. The efforts were obviously well-intentioned and rallied several departments, but they relied on a strategy of American patriotism that no longer resonates. Democracy has been emailed, branded, tweeted, postered, newslettered into abstraction.

And at Amherst, abstraction is something we are very good at. We intellectualize everything, including civic decline. We analyze polarization, historical failures, and institutional design — all at a safe distance. That couldn’t be us, right? We discuss democracy far more than we practice it. Democracy becomes a seminar topic more than a conscious practice.

Democracy, however, is a practice that depends on visible participation. Not everyone needs to be loud, but everyone should be showing up — that’s part of the work.

As someone working on democracy initiatives at Amherst, that gap between observation and practice is becoming increasingly harder to ignore. And there’s something almost existential in that realization — because it exposes a campus that genuinely believes in democratic values, yet doesn’t quite know how to translate them into practice.

The solution is not to shame students, nor to blame the administration or any single entity. We do not yet know the full shape of what’s not working. What we do know is that our current approach to promoting, advertising, teaching, and encouraging democracy no longer resonates with the public. If the word “democracy” no longer rings the bell it once did, then those of us committed to protecting it need to find what does. 

Because democracy isn’t only practiced in Washington, D.C., or in elections. It’s practiced in who shows up in rooms, who speaks for you, and who decides that silence has ceased to be the safer option. If Amherst is struggling to practice democracy, it’s not because students don’t care. It’s because we haven’t yet found the frame that makes democracy feel like part of their everyday world.