In the face of the decline of democracy in the United States, it is beneficial to look toward other democracies which declined and recovered. This analysis reveals that often recovery takes decades, can remain incomplete, and that it requires the dedication of individuals committed to renewal.
In response to our current moment of public health and democracy crises, the Ad Hoc Committee for 2020 Election Fairness and Legitimacy published this report, detailing fourteen specific recommendations for immediate changes that should be implemented to increase voter confidence in the fairness and legitimacy of the 2020 elections.
Our global community is experiencing similar trends. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk offer a global perspective, demonstrating that declining trust in democracy is a problem around the world. See their findings in The Danger of Deconsolidation.
New America and Over Zero released a report that identifies insights from social science and international peacebuilding to help bolster U.S. resilience to political violence.
In his book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Edward Luce argues that we are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to build the West, arrogance towards society's economic losers, and complacency about our system's durability. Unless the West can rekindle an economy that produces gains for the majority of its people, its political liberties may be doomed.
Ben Wittes and Susan Hennessey describe how to interpret Donald Trump’s behavior as a president in the context of how we understand the presidency as an institution, detailing which aspects of Trump are radically different from past presidents and what aspects have historical antecedents.
Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt show how democracies fall to authoritarianism—and how U.S. democracy can be saved.
Yuval Levin diagnoses our collective social crisis as a debilitating absence of the forces that unite us and militate against alienation, and prescribes that we can renew societal ties to one another through building and rebuilding our collective institutions, from the military to churches and from families to schools.
Jonathan Haidt describes how human beings are designed to create morality and form groups, and how these two trends interrelate to produce different views on politics and religion in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Michael Lewis describes the damage done to the machinery of government by Donald Trump’s botched transition and political appointments, many of whom did not show up, and those who did were critically uninformed about their roles.
Daniel G. Newman presents an intriguing and accessible nonfiction graphic novel about the role wealth and influence play in American democracy. He shows the influence wealthy elites such as CEOs of corporations, billionaires, and lawmakers have over our democratic system, and explores potential solutions.
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided and argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters.
Lee Drutman tells the story of how American politics became so toxic, why the country is trapped in a doom loop of escalating two-party warfare, and why it is destroying the shared sense of fairness and legitimacy on which democracy depends. He argues that the only way out is to have more partisanship-more parties, to short-circuit the zero-sum nature of binary partisan conflict.
Larry Diamond argues we are in a critical moment: the defense and advancement of democratic ideals relies on U.S. global leadership. If we do not reclaim our traditional place as the keystone of democracy, today's authoritarian swell could become a tsunami, providing an opening for Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and their admirers to turn the twenty-first century into a dark time of despotism.
In this 2020 book, election law expert Richard Hasen vividly describes the four factors increasing distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. Hasen goes on to offer concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined.
In a collection of “civic sermons” delivered at gatherings around the nation, popular advocate for active citizenship Eric Liu addresses what it means to be an engaged American in today’s divided political landscape, and provides inspiration and solace in a time of anger, fear, and dismay over the state of the Union.
In The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, Yascha Mounk makes the case that growing dissatisfaction with democratic governance stemming from stagnating living standards, fear of multiethnic democracy, and the rise of social media, are driving people further towards populism.
Astra Taylor shows that real democracy―fully inclusive and completely egalitarian―has in fact never existed, and that realizing one requires grappling with the ideals of democracy and confronting difficult questions about the democratic process the values it’s supposed to protect.
In Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction, discussing how polarization in America happens around identity, and how everything in American politics is “identity politics.”
In her one-volume political history of the United States, Jill Lepore explores the founding truths of the American experiment as articulated by Jefferson ―political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people and seeks to answer the question: has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?
On November 21, 2022, PACE and DFN hosted a webinar to present newly developed evidence from four organizations–three of which were grantees from PACE’s Faith In/And Democracy Fund. During the webinar, each speaker presented evidence from their work and then participants engaged with the speakers in breakout room conversations.
Building a robust, high functioning pluralist democracy in the U.S. capable of ushering in better futures for Americans requires us to think boldly and move away from reaction, apathy, and surrender. The extraordinary times we live in, full of rapid change, uncertainty and possibility, call upon us to identify and lift up positive disruptors who dare to dream and imagine what could be.
DFN’s report Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy is a call to action to imagine what our democracy could become. Informed by dozens of interviews with visionary thinkers and doers from a variety of fields and viewpoints, including futurists, activists, thought leaders, creatives, artists, religious leaders, and funders, the report shares their insights on why positive visioning matters, discusses how those visions of better futures relate to democracy and governance systems, and asks how we can inspire more Americans to dream bigger and develop a sense of agency to bring those ideas to fruition.
Below are the report’s key findings and recommendations:
Findings:
Enthusiastic and emphatic agreement that positive visions of the future matter tremendously because they help us to imagine better alternatives, motivate us, and guide us to achieving positive societal outcomes. They also reinforce the idea that we have agency to shape our individual and collective futures and those of our descendants.
Several points of disconnection –
Few interviewees saw governance as critical to achieving the better futures they articulated, or had thought about how to improve and reimagine democracy.
The future-oriented community seldom connects with the democracy community.
America lags in experimenting with new forms of future-oriented governance models and thinking.
The people we interviewed are also disconnected from each other, although there are some hubs and communities of practice that provide connective tissue that some interviewees are a part of.
Many obstacles (e.g., complex problems from the local to the planetary, conflict-driven media and political environments, dystopian narratives, racism and othering) currently stand in the way of positive visions of the future emerging at scale.
Positive stories about the future and narratives of mutuality and abundance exist but are barely breaking through in mass culture.
Recommendations:
While we have a strong foundation on which to build – great ideas, visionary leaders, real-world experiments, powerful stories about better futures, and media campaigns – we need more infrastructure and connective tissue to gain traction and impact. Accordingly, we recommend three types of strategies:
Strengthen the positive visioning ecosystem by investing in infrastructure and relationships
There are numerous ways to build and support an emerging ecosystem and to create connections between those broadly engaged in positive visioning and those working specifically on democracy issues. We recommend more networking, collaboration, and mapping, more productive chances to convene donors and working groups around the future of democracy, and greater use of futures thinking tools to change mindsets.
Model what’s possible and fund experimentation
We want to explore how to adapt governance innovations from outside the U.S. that incorporate a futures orientation, a longer planning horizon, and an intergenerational fairness lens. We also see promise in funding innovative efforts to strengthen and invigorate democracy in the U.S., especially at the state and local level, by using technology, engaging youth, creatives, game designers, and speculative fiction writers, and tapping into collective imagination exercises.
Strengthen narrative systems & amplify positive, futures-oriented content
We need strategies that elevate and sustain narratives of abundance, interdependence, and mutuality and that amplify current bright spots for greater impact. Content also matters. We need more of it that’s positive, inspiring, and hopeful about what we can build together. That means influencing which stories are told, by whom, and how.
The Constitution Drafting Project brings together three teams of leading constitutional scholars—team libertarian, team progressive, and team conservative—to draft and present their ideal constitutions. Team libertarian was led by Ilya Shapiro, then of the Cato Institute, and included Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute and Christina Mulligan of Brooklyn Law School. Team progressive was led by Caroline Fredrickson of Georgetown Law School and included Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School and Melissa Murray of New York University School of Law. Team conservative was led by Ilan Wurman of Arizona State University College of Law and included Robert P. George of Princeton University, Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School, and Colleen A. Sheehan of Arizona State University.
With U.S. democracy in crisis, guest contributors Mike Berkowitz and Rachel Kleinfeld argue that philanthropy cannot stick to its usual playbook. They outline five ways funders can improve how they approach this work.
In this moment of crisis, donors must use all the tools available to protect American democracy. Tax-deductible philanthropy alone is insufficient.
In case you missed DFN’s The Role of Faith Communities in Preserving Democracy program, PACE provided a summary of the webinar.
In this meeting, DFN explored key questions around the role faith communities can play in preserving American democracy: What can faith communities contribute to a pro-democracy movement? How can faith leaders and communities be mobilized to act in defense of democracy and resist embracing extremist and anti-democratic viewpoints? What are the potential benefits of faith engagement in the pro-democracy movement, and what do we risk by failing to engage religious communities?
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More in Common’s newest survey, Parties and Politics, focused on Americans’ attitudes towards the 2022 midterm elections and their feelings about how to best influence politics. It was developed in collaboration with the national NBC broadcast & streaming network, LX News, as well as our polling partner YouGov.
The top findings are :
Americans across party, race, and generations overwhelming see voting as the most effective way to influence politics. However, Gen Z Americans are much more likely than other generations to also see protesting as an effective way to influence politics.
Democrats and Republicans are much more likely to want more moderate candidates in the other party than in their own party. In contrast, Independents want more moderate candidates in both parties. Republicans and Democrats who want more moderate candidates in their own party were less ideologically extreme and more likely to say they belonged to their party because of their family or friends, as opposed to how their party aligned with their values.
Registered voters are ten times more likely to say they will vote in the 2022 general election compared to Americans who are not registered to vote.
As cases of political violence rise in America, PACE reviews five strategies for funders interested in preventing political violence to implement.
There is no shortage of headlines about the grim state of our democracy. Many forces are to blame: leaders who flout democratic norms and spout “us vs. them” rhetoric, a political system that fuels polarization, growing threats of political violence and election interference, and the divisive and distorting effects of social media. The list goes on. Another factor, frequently left out of the picture, is loneliness – often defined as the discrepancy between one’s desired and actual levels of social connection.
We see every day how local news strengthens democracy. People rely on local news to figure out who to vote for, how to speak up at school board meetings, how to run for local office, where to find vaccines, when to organize for change, and more. From daily reporting that equips people to act, to huge investigations that reveal corruption, the health of local news is bound up with the health of our democracy.