Watch Borgen. Then Get Inspired.

A Danish political drama from 15 years ago turns out to be the most clarifying thing you can watch right now about what American democracy is missing.

We don’t usually do TV recommendations here. But we’re making an exception — because this one (while dating back 2010) is genuinely relevant to everything we work on, and because once you start watching, you’ll understand why.

The show is Borgen. It’s Danish. And it was widely written about when it first started streaming in the U.S. But here we are, 15 years late to the Borgen party, but perfectly timed for the party discussion.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would actually feel like to live inside a political system that wasn’t a binary trap — this is the closest thing to a window into that world that popular culture has produced.

Watch it. You’ll be riveted. And at first you’ll be furious — not at the show, but at the contrast to the American crisis.

Borgen — the word means “the castle,” Danish slang for the parliament building, their version of “the Hill” — follows Birgitte Nyborg, the leader of a small centrist party who unexpectedly becomes Denmark’s first female prime minister.

The show tracks her rise, her coalition negotiations, her compromises, her mistakes, and the very human costs of a life in politics.

It is, in other words, a show about governing. Not campaigning (though there is a little). Not destroying your opponents (though there are some attempts). Governing — the strange, messy, honorable business of building enough consensus among people who disagree to actually solve public problems.

That alone makes it almost science fiction by American standards.

Here’s what hits you almost immediately: in Borgen, no single party has a majority. That’s not a crisis. That’s just how it works. To form a government, Nyborg has to negotiate with parties she disagrees with — parties that have different bases, different priorities, different red lines. She has to give things up to get things done. Her coalition partners push back, defect, threaten, and maneuver. And somehow, out of all that friction, most of the time policy gets made.

Criminal justice. Retirement pensions. The environment. Immigration. All familiar issues. What seems surreal is that these Danes make progress.

Compare that to our system, where the two parties have so thoroughly sorted themselves into opposing camps that compromise has become synonymous with betrayal — where the incentive structure rewards obstruction over governance, and where the only move is to wait until your side has total power and then ram through whatever you can before losing it again.

In Borgen, the parties are supposed to fight. And then they’re supposed to find a way to work together anyway. The conflict is real, but it isn’t existential. Politics is portrayed as a practice, a craft — not a war.

Every episode is, in effect, an advertisement for what it feels like to live in a multiparty democracy.

How do we get there in the U.S.? We’ve argued here (and here and here) that the easiest path is through reviving the American tradition of fusion voting. Proportional representation is another avenue. Both of these reforms create the conditions for viable third parties to form. And that’s essential because the zero-sum two party system is incapable of meeting the moment.

But still the case for election rules reform and multiparty democracy can sometimes feel abstract. Ballot access thresholds, anti-fusion statutes, the mechanics of the Australian ballot — these are important, but they don’t exactly set the imagination on fire.

Borgen does something that policy arguments alone can’t: it makes multiparty democracy legible. It shows you what it looks like on the ground, in practice, in human terms. You see how a smaller party can have real power without winning a plurality. You see how a politician can hold distinct positions rather than having to package herself into one of two pre-set bundles. You see how voters can be represented by parties that actually reflect what they believe, rather than choosing between the lesser of two national brands.

You also see the costs and complications — Borgen is not naive about the frustrations of coalition politics, and it doesn’t pretend that a multiparty system solves every problem. But it shows a political culture oriented, at least in aspiration, toward solving public problems rather than simply defeating the other side.

That is, at its core, what we’re working towards.

It’s worth noting that Denmark is not a utopia. Danish democracy has its own pathologies, its own failures, its own rising pressures from nationalist parties and the strains of coalition governance. The show is honest about that. But it depicts a baseline of democratic health — a system where parties form, compete, negotiate, and sometimes govern responsibly — that feels, from where we sit in 2026, almost unimaginably remote.

That gap is the point. We don’t have to accept our current political reality as permanent or natural. There was another way of doing American democracy, and there could be again. Borgen is a reminder of what we’re actually working toward.

Go watch it. Then come back and help us change things.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.