Vanessa Williamson on Plan C: Building Blocks of Redemocratization

Philanthropic funders and nonprofits anxious about democratic backsliding are ramping up their efforts to prevent it as the 2024 election approaches. Many are seeking to do whatever they can to bolster and protect the Democratic vote while observing the letter if not always the spirit of the ban on electioneering by 501(c)3s. We might call this “Plan A.” 

Others are planning for a scenario like the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Donald Trump and his most inveterate supporters sought to deny and overturn the results. We might call their preparations to ward off a similar attempt in 2024 “Plan B.” 

But what happens if Donald Trump wins the election outright? We can’t ignore this question. The odds of this are now the same as a flipped coin turning up heads. If Trump wins, will the malevolence and plans for retribution that he and his acolytes have developed once again be tempered by their incompetence and our constitutional checks and balances? I have suggested here (and still think) they would be. But I could be wrong. In that case, we will need a “Plan C.” 

Vanessa Williamson, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, has been working through this last scenario, that of “redemocratization” and the forms it might take. I find Vanessa’s thinking especially helpful because she looks beyond the philanthropists and DC-based nonprofits that have sought to serve as the vanguard of the pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian resistance to date. She looks instead to more fundamental building blocks in society: trade unions, local party organizations, civic media, and the business sector. 

I recently caught up with Vanessa to get her perspective on what the journey back to democracy could look like and what it would take for us to be able to make it. The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Daniel: What has led you to focus on Plan C? Are you by nature a pessimist? 

Vanessa: Actually, I'm a natural optimist, which maybe makes it easier for me to think about what happens if Trump wins. It’s important to be prepared for the worst cases and what we need to do in them. We can’t in that instance just throw up our hands and say the end has come. We need to think not just about protecting an election, which is vitally important, and ensuring that the votes are counted and protected, but we also need a Plan C. You don't want to have to develop it in a moment of crisis.

Daniel: What reactions have you gotten to your work on Plan C so far? I am wondering if there is an analogy with climate change. When people talk about adapting to climate change versus mitigating it, there can be an intense backlash among advocates. 

Vanessa: Climate change is a very good comparison.  People don't want to think about adapting to it–they just want to stop it. We all sort of know that climate change is inevitable and that there are real threats and dangers to prepare for, but we don't necessarily want to confront them. So yes, my wanting to talk about this has generated a fair amount of irritation and subject-changing. But my response is the same as it would be on climate, which is to say that climate change is not a future problem–it is a now problem. If you start thinking about hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy, this is not something our kids are going to be dealing with. It's something we're dealing with now. In the same way, when we think about strengthening American democracy, whether things get worse in the future, this work needs to happen because the problem is already here.

Daniel: What lessons can we learn from other democracies that have managed to recover from authoritarian impositions? 

Vanessa: There certainly are lessons from places like Poland and Chile, but let me answer your question with an American example. The U.S. has had authoritarian enclaves at the subnational level as recently as the 1960s in the ex-Confederate states. In theory, all citizens could vote in them, but of course, African Americans could not. When we think about democratization in the U.S., we are a republic of a very long standing but a relatively new democracy. 

We need to consider how we got to a political moment in which the Civil Rights Movement could succeed. In particular, we need to ask why it was the Democratic Party that became the party of civil rights. Now is a time that seems quite gloomy for our politics. The same would have been true if you go back to say, 1925, and considered the cause of racial justice. That too was a grim time. The Klan had re-emerged as a national force, especially in the Democratic Party. The Southern states, controlled by Democrats, had consolidated the Jim Crow system. In 1925, it would have been inconceivable to think that in just four decades, African Americans would receive their full civil rights and that the Democratic Party would be the one taking the lead to grant them. And yet it happened. Why? 

You can't tell the story without the social transformation set in motion by the Great Migration. It brought 6 million black Americans out of the South into the North. They move into the cities, start working in industrial jobs, and become incorporated into northern politics. The beginning of this almost unimaginably large shift in our politics was not because of an ideological commitment to racial justice on the part of most participants. If you're looking at the Democratic Party machines, like in Pittsburgh, they were not dedicated crusaders for racial justice. 

Nor for the most part were the unions. There were a few radicals in the CIO who were committed to racial justice and saw racial hatred as undermining working-class solidarity. But plenty of other people who worked to build unions in our industrial base looked out at the shop floor and recognized that 25 percent of the people were black. They wanted their union to succeed and knew they would need to have a very practical, material-oriented policy that cut against racism.

Black Americans were not, for very good reasons, particularly confident in the union movement. Unions traditionally had been whites only. But when the CIO demonstrated they were actually willing to unionize on conditions that were far closer to equality than anything else that was being done at the time, they got on board. 

And so on both sides, people were making practical decisions because they're looking at points of shared interest that are local and substantive. The Democratic Party machines and labor unions–not for reasons of justice, but for concrete material considerations–saw that it was in the interest of their institutions to bring in African Americans versus continuing to exclude them. That set in motion ripple effects in the national Democratic Party that got us to the point where the Civil Rights Movement could succeed. 

Daniel: What lesson should we take from this story? 

Vanessa: We want politics to be ideologically pure. We want people to be doing everything with the right motives. And we want our stories to be full of heroes. But the reality is that you can't eat democracy. I'm not sure that people are going to line up to defend it indefinitely without concrete gains in the quality of their lives. At the same time, one of the things democracy does is allow people to advocate for what they need. So recognizing that there is room for marriages of convenience, for concrete materialist goals, can be a really helpful starting point when people are coming from ideologically very distant places. We don't need a perfect meeting of the minds before we can make politics happen that achieves the ends of a more inclusive democracy.

Daniel: Private sector labor unions seem to have a newfound power and momentum, especially with the UAW’s recent big wins. Could that help with redemocratization?

Vanessa: Yes, absolutely. Historically, trade unionism is very important for the development of democracy. It plays multiple roles. First, it builds a middle class, which is one of the most important things you can do to create and maintain a stable democracy. In addition, unions provide issue-specific education on things that matter to working people–pensions, health care, etc. Unions are also traditionally a way that working class people can enter political life. For leaders, rising within your union, from the local up through the ranks, used to be a route to running for office. And unions provided an important form of political education for all members. That is a serious missing piece of democracy right now, political education for working people.

Daniel: What are other ways in which these less heroic and more prosaic patterns of organizing in civil society, the economy, and politics could help re-democratize a country after an authoritarian shift? Where should we look for this to occur?

Vanessa: Local settings will really matter–not only because the national level may not be looking good, but also because pragmatic, concrete things can get done comparatively easily at a local level. If you put a speed bump in front of the school, that counts for something. I'm not saying that this is a panacea, but concrete victories can happen locally on subjects with enough immediate and material effects that it can take people out of their ideological silos and give them a sense of agency. The local level has the added advantage of being where people can actually work face to face. A challenge we have in our politics is that things are always mediated. Not interacting with people does not play to our strengths and our ability to compromise.

Daniel: You have previously joined forces with other leading scholars in exploring what it would take to reboot local party organizations. Is that part of the answer here? If so, what is the pathway through which that could take shape?

Local parties are absolutely crucial to the story. They get a lot of neglect. People have imagined that we could somehow have a democracy that didn't have parties, but political scientists know that that's not possible. That's not how democracies work. The thing that parties do when they are healthy is seek to win most of the votes. The driving purpose of a party is to create the compromises necessary to get to 50% plus one, and that drive is essential to the functioning of democratic politics. The weakening of the parties has occurred in all different ways. They have become more ideological nationally while having basically no functioning local affiliates or local institutions. That doesn't transfer any influence from election to election. That is really bad for preserving that incredibly critical local space for organizing and compromising in order to get concrete things done in a democracy.

Daniel: In addition to trade unions and local party organizations, are there other institutions and sectors that will be essential for redemocratization? 

Vanessa:  One critical sector is the media–but we need a model of journalism that is sustainable, that is not beholden to profit-making. And there's a lot of experimentation out there right now with what form that should take–you talked about this for example in your last interview. Here too, local matters. Local journalism can support local politics in a way that nothing else can. We can also begin to imagine media institutions doing instruction on the “how to” of democracy. We are used to media that presents the issues. But what we need at this point is media that presents the institutions.

This is an area, by the way, in which highly educated, upper income people are not particularly on top of things. These are people who are very good at talking about all the different issues nationally, and the trivia of national politics in the news cycle, but they know relatively little about how the mayor's budget moves. We need more media that does this basic civic education to help you organize and forge compromises so you can engage with the levers of government where you live instead of just voting in a national election every four years.

The other sector I've been thinking a lot about is business. Historically, how business orients itself in politics is decisive for democracy. We know that from Daniel Ziblatt’s work on conservative parties. The center-right, which represents business interests, typically is critical to whether a democracy consolidates or falls apart. But in the U.S. right now, business is largely captured by an ideological right that does not consistently represent the interests of all businesses. It can get business to fall in line on tax cuts and deregulation, the lowest common denominator stuff, but it's hard for them to mobilize business as a force for infrastructure improvements, even though they are definitely going to make businesses more profitable. 

To represent the business community we have professionals running lobbying shops in DC that are not beholden to a local membership in any meaningful way. It’s the story of other interest groups as well, but I think it's not told enough when it comes to business. If businesses can't advocate for public goods that are good for the economy, that is a problem–and one of those public goods is democracy. Democracy demonstrably increases economic growth, but business, because of how it is organized, can't serve as a functioning advocate for that goal. We need an organizing framework to help business navigate the new political landscape. I have some research coming out soon that explores this problem and what solutions could look like. 

Daniel: That is clearly a common theme running across your reflections on trade unions, parties, local journalism, and business – the need for a civic enabling and education function. As you continue your work on the factors and organizational forms that could support redemocratization, what are the big questions you will be turning to next?

Vanessa: One big question is what is the motivation for democracy movements? I have touched on this in a few places so far in this conversation. To what extent are people motivated to defend democracy as democracy, at theoretical level? How does that relate to the concrete victories of democracy, like getting that stop sign on your corner that you wanted, or much bigger ones, like getting a union in your shop? What have been the central mobilizing goals of anti-authoritarian movements, beyond simply “let's get rid of that jerk!” 

Daniel: Would it be fair to say that the pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian message has thus far been anchored in abstractions about our system of government, presidential norms, the rule of law, etc.? Put another way, it hasn’t focused on the kind of material, nuts-and-bolts concerns and practical considerations you've been talking about here. Should it?

Vanessa: That's definitely my concern. It's very easy to get yourself wrapped up in an ideological commitment to democracy, the “bald eagles” approach to it, so to speak. But democracy has to be a mass movement, by definition. So you need to think about what that means for everyone, not just the people who are very concerned about being able to express themselves. Maybe that's a motivation that everyone shares. Maybe it's not. But we need to think about that more broadly, because there's no democracy done by some.