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Some scholars argue that democratic stability requires political elites to practice forbearance: roughly speaking, 鈥渞estraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives鈥� (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). The paper proposes a novel account of forbearance and the mechanism by which it stabilizes democracies. Public officials exercise forbearance when they refrain from actions of 鈥渄ubious legitimacy,鈥� actions that, while in fact compatible with democracy鈥檚 constitutive rules, are not commonly known to be. The argument is that such actions gradually undermine citizens鈥� ability to coordinate their responses to genuine abuses of power because they create uncertainty about the extent to which other citizens are willing to condone breaches of democracy鈥檚 rules. The article concludes with observations about the normative implications of the theory, introducing the concept of the 鈥渄emocrat鈥檚 dilemma鈥� to illustrate the practical difficulties of knowing when democrats ought to exercise forbearance.