On 10 May 2026, in the ZDF series „Precht“, Richard David Precht spoke with the writer Juli Zeh about the state of public debate and the role of democracy in the digital age. Precht and Zeh are two of Germany's most prominent public intellectuals, and near the end Zeh asked a question that stayed in the room and prompted this piece: we constantly talk about defending democracy, but can we actually say what we mean by it?
The phrase sounds like consensus. „We must defend democracy“ is one of the few sentences that still draws agreement from every side. That is exactly what makes it suspect. The formula assumes its object is known. We all believe we know what is meant. The moment we are asked to describe it, it becomes hard.
Two Answers That Both Fail
There are two usual responses to the question of what the shared value is.
The first names a content. Freedom, equality, dignity, human rights. Those who reach further back say nation, religion, shared tradition. The German legal scholar Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde coined the famous dictum that the liberal state lives on preconditions it cannot itself produce, and what he meant were sources like faith and a shared lifeworld. This line runs throughout the conversation. The problem: these thick contents bind through sameness. Whoever shares the content belongs. Whoever does not share it falls out. The thesis defended here is that, in a factually plural society, a dense and comprehensive consensus of values can be produced only through exclusion, or else remains a fiction. The denser and more comprehensive the canon becomes, the more sharply the question arises which divergent forms of life it still includes. And the lost sources do not return on command.
The second response retreats to procedure. The shared object is then said to be the rules, the constitution, and constitutional patriotism. Zeh finds an image for this that sticks: a campfire that does not warm. The rules formally remain. They no longer produce any bond. Form without warmth.
So the question stands unanswered. The thick content excludes. The thin procedure does not warm. Neither path leads where the sentence wants to go.
A Third Possibility
What if the shared value is no content at all?
The question assumes the answer must be something one agrees on in substance. A creed, a catalogue, a narrative. Perhaps the error already lies in the form of the question. An orientation toward the conditions under which different contents can coexist may replace agreement on substance.
Three such conditions can be named. That the participants can determine themselves, not be steered from outside. That they can connect with one another without having to become the same. That the whole can sustain itself by changing, rather than by hardening. Self-determination, connection across difference, persistence through change.
This is the uncomfortable point: a society does not need to agree on what the good life is in order to know what it defends. It must protect the conditions under which the question of the good life can be negotiated openly. The shared value consists in keeping open the space in which the answers may contend.
Why Consensus Is the Wrong Goal
This has a consequence that runs against the usual rhetoric of crisis. If difference is a condition of constructive connection, calls for greater substantive consensus can intensify the problem. The target here is not procedural consensus about the rules of disagreement, but the homogenisation of the contents over which disagreement should remain possible.
In the same conversation, Precht describes how the political spectrum once ran broadly from left to right, and how movement arose precisely from that friction. Today a large center stands that largely agrees on the decisive questions and pushes the margins away with contempt. The result is standstill disguised as stability. A society that levels its differences loses precisely what holds it together. Connection lives on difference. Where everyone thinks the same, there is nothing left to connect.
The same holds for the other form of unity currently in vogue: cohesion against a threat. Against an external enemy, against a danger perceived as overwhelming. This unity feels like community, but it binds inward by excluding outward. It differs from the cohesion that arises when people accomplish a shared task and are allowed to remain different while doing so.
What Democracy Actually Lived On
One question lies beneath all of this. If democracy looked so stable for decades, where did that stability come from?
Precht gives a sobering answer. As long as prosperity rose, it was easy to be a good democrat. Growth supplied the feeling of freedom, it generated cohesion through rising consumption, and it carried the bond to the constitution, because the constitution accompanied the ascent. If we follow Precht's diagnosis, one supporting pillar was acting on several dimensions at once. As long as it grew, the construction held. Once it shrinks, more falls away than just prosperity.
This explains a strange double structure in our situation. Most people are personally doing well, fear of losing one's own job is as low as it has ever been, life satisfaction is high. And yet a majority considers the commonwealth endangered. The concern is directed at the whole even while individuals are doing well. This is no contradiction. It is the sound of a supporting pillar giving way long before the house feels it.
What Remains to Be Done
Whoever looks at democracy this way does not search for the lost shared content, nor for the next grand narrative of renewal. They ask more soberly: does this measure strengthen the self-determination of those affected, or replace it with external control? Does it buy cohesion through leveling or through an enemy, or does it let difference stand? Does the system sustain itself through adaptability or through rigidity?
This is less comforting than a warming sense of we. It provides no campfire. Yet it answers Zeh's question without excluding anyone and without pretending that the lost unity can be talked back into being.
→ The full short analysis „What Do We Defend? Democracy and the Common Value“ is available under Downloads, with the figures on the erosion of trust and of the center, the distinction between real and talked-up crisis, and the limits of the approach.