F ew presidents talk about democracy around the world as much as George W. Bush has. So it is striking that Bush’s presidency has so degraded America’s instruments of democracy at home: the political process, the legislative process, and the sheer competence and legitimacy of government itself. In myriad ways, the Administration has bristled with contempt for accountability and simple democratic norms. But the democracy legacy of the Bush years will not only be that of hanging chads, Jack Abramoff, or the "K Street Project." For the Bush years have also seen a growing public backlash, the resurgence of participation marked by new voters, new sources of campaign cash, and the rise of online activism.

For most of our history, democracy has evoked more poetry than proces. This intense strain of American thought holds that the "distributed intelligence" of the public is better than the blinkered resolve of the "decider." When progressives tap that notion of citizens as the agents of their own progress, we touch hearts–as the response to the Obama campaign, and especially his victory, shows.

A central premise of any long-term progressive strategy must be to renew the very system of democracy that empowers ordinary citizens, amplifies their voices, and makes all other changes possible. If we do this, we will permanently enlarge the constituency and coalition for progressive politics and make it far easier to realize vital legislation such as universal health insurance, a fair tax system, modernized financial rules, and a shared responsibility for national security. At the very least, renewing the systems of democracy will mark a fundamental shift away from the entrenched and well-funded interests which still dominate governance. If the Bush Doctrine led to a botched push for democracy abroad, the Obama Doctrine should be a commitment to the renewal of democracy at home.

The problems of American democracy are hardly new. Mark Twain, not Jon Stewart, quipped that "there is no distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress." Voter participation rates have sagged for decades. The turnout rate in the 1996 presidential election was 49 percent of voting age population, the lowest since the 1920s. Campaign finance had grown gaudily corrupt, too, long before Bush took office.

Yet in basic ways, the long-standing decay of America’s democratic institutions worsened markedly in the past decade. Consider voting, the heart of democracy. From the republic’s earliest days, we have waged long and often fierce struggles over who could vote and how. The right to vote expanded, first to white men without property, then to former slaves (a right that was effectively wrenched away), then to women, then, finally, to African Americans through the Voting Rights Act. As America prepared for Election Day in 2000, it seemed votes would be cast and counted in a neutral, precise way.

Instead, of course, that election was a strobe-lit tableau of everything sordid and inept about voting in America. We learned that elections were run by fiercely partisan officials who wrongly purged tens of thousands of voters from the rolls. We learned, too, that Florida was one of five states to permanently disenfranchise one million voters with a past felony conviction. Nationwide that year, voting machines and problems with lists cost at least four million votes. Former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter concluded, "The registration laws in force throughout the United States are among the world’s most demanding . . . [and are] one reason why voter turnout in the United States is near the bottom of the developed world." Disenfranchisement, it turned out, was still widespread–enforced not by billy clubs but by onerous rules, incompetent administration, and partisan chicanery.

Congress did try to help, in its way. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 included new funding and modest reforms, and most significantly, it pushed states to move to electronic voting. (A decidedly mixed result: States are now jettisoning the new equipment, or at least making sure there is a paper record to prevent error or fraud.) Still, in 2004 Ohio proved a petri dish for all that ailed America’s elections, with inner-city residents standing 10 hours in line in the rain to vote. Those problems could well have tilted a state where a switch of 60,000 votes would have made John Kerry president. Republican partisans mounted an increasingly fierce drive to disenfranchise voters, especially minorities, by forcing purges of lists and challenging voters’ legitimacy. This continued in 2008, when Senator John McCain made demonizing the voter registration drive by ACORN a central theme of his campaign. The conservative crusade persisted even though statistically a voter is more likely to be killed by lightening than to commit voter fraud.

And yet Bush’s presidency also triggered an awakening, a surge in civic engagement and participation. Some 130 million Americans voted in 2008, up from 105 million in 2000. Prodded by voting rights groups, states began to shed felony disenfranchisement laws. Even Florida’s new Republican governor, Charlie Crist, followed suit. Twelve new secretaries of state, the officials charged with overseeing voting, won office in 2006 on voter protection platforms.

In 2008, the election system was strained, but it did not break. Most efforts to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands were beaten back. Fewer votes were lost. Long lines on Election Day did not infuriate; they inspired. These very waves of voters, inspired by Bush and Obama, create the conditions for the next great wave of voting reform.

Consider, too, campaign finance and Washington’s culture of influence–a major obstacle to any needed policy change. Here, again, gross dysfunction–followed by a halfway reform–has created the possibility for a real leap forward.

The American campaign finance system is notoriously distorting, often shady, and more than a little absurd. Many candidates now spend most of their time raising funds. Incumbent legislators can be found a few blocks from the Capitol, sitting in carrels, dialing for dollars in party campaign offices in a scene more resembling Glengarry Glen Ross than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Under the leadership of Representative Tom DeLay, the nexus between cash and policy reached a level of vulgar explicitness not seen since the Gilded Age. The number of registered lobbyists tripled during that time, almost all of them representing business. Fully half the senators who left Congress in 2004 promptly became registered lobbyists themselves.

Money and democracy always compete. For a time, campaign finance rules had succeeded in boosting equality and curbing the worst abuses. After Watergate, a reform law imposed spending limits and created a system of voluntary public financing for presidential campaigns. But the Supreme Court vivisected the law. In the misshapen Buckley v. Valeo decision, it barred mandatory spending limits, thus sentencing candidates to compete raising endless sums in relatively small amounts. In the decades since Buckley, spending has increased fivefold, even accounting for inflation.

The one part of the system that has really worked was presidential public financing. In the first five elections, challengers defeated incumbent presidents three times. But beginning in 1988 and reaching a flood tide by 1996, "soft money" overwhelmed the "hard money" limits imposed by federal law. Parties and candidates found they could raise huge sums if funds were funneled through state parties, or used for purportedly independent expenditures, or used for "issue ads" that were little more than thinly disguised campaign commercials. Public officials once again sought hefty corporate contributions, a practice banned since 1907. The McCain-Feingold campaign finance law was the product of eight years of organizing by citizen groups. Passed in 2002, it banned soft money, with a goal of pushing campaigns and parties toward smaller, disclosed funds.

But the broader system began to break down in the last decade. Presidential public financing proved rickety, with the dollar amount having been set too low back in the 1970s. (Adjusted for inflation, it is two thirds of the amount spent by the McGovern campaign, the least successful in history.) In its first three decades, only one major candidate refused public funding. In 2008, in the Democratic primary, only one took it. (John Connally, meet John Edwards.) When Barack Obama, a progressive supporter of public financing, shrugged it off for the general election, it became much harder to be sanguine about traditional campaign finance reform. The project of crafting ever more precise rules to govern varying kinds of campaign contributions began to look increasingly fruitless, as Mark Schmitt has argued in these pages ["Mismatching Funds," Issue #4].