A Personal Note: Introducing Lyceum Labs
1 Big Thing: A New Nonprofit to Help Americans Lead and Party Better
As some readers of The Art of Association will know, last spring I wrapped up my fixed-term appointment as director of the U.S. Democracy Program at the Hewlett Foundation. For the past six months, I have been working to start up a new nonprofit, Lyceum Labs, where I am serving as executive director. I wanted to fill you in on what I am up to.
Lyceum Labs is based on a simple premise: the health of democracy in America depends more than we like to admit on the quality of our politicians and political parties. We have plenty of room to improve in both areas. Whatever your views, recent years have likely given you ample opportunity to see what bad leadership and partisanship look like. But what does good look like with respect to these essential components of democracy–especially in one as disputatious and diverse as ours? How can we get politicians and parties better suited for the roles we need them to play? These are the big questions we are setting out to answer.
Why it matters: Most civil society groups seeking to improve democracy focus on the demand-side: e.g., mobilizing citizens, voting, elections, and electoral reforms. It is easy to forget, however, that democracy is an interplay, with politicians and parties serving as entrepreneurs on the supply-side. They respond to public opinion, voters, and elections, of course, but that is not all they do. At their best, political elites inform, shape, elevate, and reconcile input from the demand-side; at their worst, they dumb down, distort, inflame, and tribalize it. Hence our focus on improving the supply-side of U.S. democracy.
Go Deeper: You can learn more about why we are focused on leaders and parties here, and the three counterintuitive propositions that drive Lyceum Labs here.
Follow our work: You can sign up for periodic updates from Lyceum Labs via the “newsletter” button in the upper right-hand corner of each page on our website.
2. What’s in Our Name?
We draw our inspiration from Abraham Lincoln and his 1838 speech on “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions” to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln argued it was up to his and each new generation of Americans to defend the timeless principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the rule of law. This meant standing up to threats posed by excessive political passions, mob violence, and would-be dictators.
Labs for collective experimentation and learning. We recognize the need for revitalization and innovation in the American political tradition given the challenges our country faces. Our approach will be experimental and collaborative, as befits a new venture in which we do not presume to have everything figured out. We will pose big questions, seek answers with blue-chip partners in a series of projects, and develop practical solutions for U.S. democracy.
3. The Work We Are Tackling First
Leading to Govern. The goal of this project is to explore and clarify how up-and-coming politicians can best navigate the tradeoffs, dilemmas, and balancing acts they will encounter once they have been elected and turn to the tasks of representation and governance. We are undertaking this project in partnership with Emily Cherniack, Founder and Executive Director of New Politics.
Toward a Pluralistic Party System. We are serving as a center-right anchor for a coalition seeking to assess and advance the prospects for multiparty democracy in the U.S. Our partners in this effort include the Center for Ballot Freedom, New America’s Political Reform Program, Protect Democracy, and scholars at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
We are also in active discussions with prospective partners on projects that will focus on revitalizing democratic statesmanship and associational party building. Stay tuned for more on these fronts.
4. A Different Approach
We’re not a conventional think tank. We won’t have specialized programs or fellows. We are determined to stay lean and nimble. Our team even when fully built will consist of just a few talented generalists. Our affiliation with our fiscal sponsor, the Defending Democracy Together Institute, gives us access to stellar and scalable communications, legal, finance, and administrative support we can rely on as needed.
Our theory of change is to reimagine political leadership and parties and the contributions they could and should make to U.S. democracy by rallying a coalition of like-minded organizations dedicated to these goals. The task is too big to attempt on our own. But together with the allies we enlist and join forces with, we can seed and cultivate powerful ideas and examples of what good looks like for these essential but much-maligned components of our democracy.
Ultimately we seek to weave a network of political leaders, partisans, advocates, think tankers, scholars, and funders who share these goals. We will be guided in this task by the principles for successful collaboration in networks developed by Jane Wei-Skillern and Nora Silver, which I have written previously about here.
5. Looking Ahead
With the launch of Lyceum Labs, I will be collecting and sharing my ongoing writing on political leadership and parties that previously I would have posted here as “Lab Notes” on the Lyceum Labs website. If you want to track what I am learning and thinking on these topics, sign up to receive Lyceum Labs’ periodic newsletters here.
I’ll keep up with The Art of Association, posting regularly on topics at the intersection of civil society, philanthropy, and U.S. democracy. I plan to alternate posts of my own reflections with posts that convey my conversations with civic leaders whose work I find especially innovative and instructive. Next up in this series will be a fascinating discussion I had recently with Eboo Patel of Interfaith America.
Until then, thank you for reading!
