We Need a Bigger Boat to Revitalize U.S. Democracy—Here Are Three Ways We Can Start Building It

In less than a year, Americans appear likely to elect either Joe Biden or Donald Trump to a second term as president. To be sure, a lot could happen in the meantime, especially with an 81-year-old tackling the world’s toughest job and a 77-year-old facing ninety-one felony counts in four different trials. But we may re-do the nail-biting 2020 election. 

We could get a different outcome this time. Polls indicate that, were the election held today, it would effectively be a coin flip. Donald Trump may even be opening up a lead in several battleground states that could pull the odds in his favor. 

The state of the horse race blows the minds of philanthropists, think tankers, and advocates working in civil society to strengthen U.S. democracy. Myself included. How could Donald Trump, after attempting to overturn the last election, once again be the Republican nominee, let alone the favorite to win the next one?

Thus many democracy grant makers and grant seekers alike are heading into 2024 driven by the same urgent question they first asked themselves in 2016 and then again in 2020. How can we keep Donald Trump away from the levers of power so he does not debase our democracy?

This is a clarifying and legitimate question for the political parties, candidates, factions, operatives, donors, activists, and voters who oppose Donald Trump. But it is the wrong question for charitable funders and the nonprofits they support to be asking themselves.

It is wrong partly because the law bars organizations regulated under section 501(c)3 of the tax code from supporting or opposing particular candidates or parties. Of course, some philanthropic funders and the organizations they support attempt to exploit loopholes that honor the letter but not the spirit of this provision. (The relative political efficacy and cost-effectiveness of these workarounds, however, is another question.)

More importantly, the frantic, all-hands-on-deck focus in the charitable sector on stopping Trump is counter-productive. It distracts philanthropists and grantees from the fundamental question we should be asking ourselves: what would it take to alleviate the deep-seated problems bedeviling U.S. democracy?

These problems, after all, are what have enabled a shameless demagogue like Trump to gain political prominence and retain his appeal despite the havoc he has wrought. The problems include, for example, the polarization of our politics and the disparities of status, security, and opportunity in our society and economy. These problems took root decades before Trump came down the escalator in 2015. They will take decades to resolve.

Focusing on the immediate symptoms rather than the longer-term causes of our democracy’s faltering has, in turn, produced looming opportunity costs. It is increasingly hard to ignore our depleted civic infrastructure and fractured civic culture. Replenishing and repairing them will take sustained investments over time. Philanthropy is uniquely positioned to provide this funding, but cannot if it is always transfixed by the next election.

The early 2024 head-to-head polls will no doubt continue to shift and evolve as we approach the vote itself. But they already indicate that democracy’s defenders may have lost as much ground as we have gained in the Trump Era.

We can’t whistle past this reality. We can’t assume that, if we just keep doing what we have been, only with more urgency and funding, we will succeed.  It is time for a new theory of change.

To paraphrase Chief Brody in Jaws after his first glimpse of the massive shark, we are going to need a bigger boat to revitalize U.S. democracy. How can we build a larger and more seaworthy vessel? Let me suggest three ways philanthropic funders and nonprofits in the democracy field can help lay the keel for one.

1. Start Seeing “Them” as Our Fellow Citizens

Let’s begin by recognizing that the labels we insist on applying to our political opponents are orienting us in precisely the wrong direction. Such labeling merely serves as a precursor for dismissal. It has us adopting the strategies of Donald Trump, i.e., a politics of “us” vs. “them, of subtraction and division vs. addition and multiplication. 

For example, one of the democracy listservs I subscribe to recently had a flurry of posts on what drives Trump’s supporters and how best to describe them. I was struck by the terms bandied about to categorize a broad swath of the American electorate: National populists. Christian nationalists. White supremacists. Conspiracists. Authoritarians. Bigots. Fascists.

I know such people exist and Trump appeals to them. But I also have family members, friends, colleagues, and neighbors–perhaps you do too–who have voted for Trump before and may well again, despite my best efforts to convince them otherwise. These abstract and pejorative labels utterly fail to describe them.

It was thus all I could do to keep from sarcastically suggesting we should just call them deplorables. After all, that proved to be a winning strategy in the past! Mind you, the listserv members are friends and colleagues. I know to a person they have been working tirelessly to defend democracy. But this is not how we are going to build a bigger boat.

We cannot presume that the worst beliefs and actions of truly bad actors reflect what everyone else in that general vicinity of the political spectrum believes, has done, or endorses. 

We shouldn’t hesitate to castigate Donald Trump and the hundreds of sycophants who continue to surround and enable him. And the 2,000+ members of the mob and militia groups who ransacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 should have the book thrown at them. (Which, by and large, they are, in the largest criminal investigation in the history of the Justice Department.)

However, we can’t readily label and dismiss from what we have taken to calling “our democracy” the tens of millions of people who have voted for Trump, and may again. It is their democracy too. If we want the boat to stay afloat amid the current storm, we have to learn how to sail it together.

We can start to make room for these shipmates by regarding and actually referring to them as—wait for it—our fellow citizens. As the late Henry Kissinger might say, this particular label has the added advantage of being true. Using it might even dispose us to listen to and learn from each other more, and to identify the values and principles most of us still share as Americans. These elements that we hold in common are what will ultimately sustain our democracy.

2. Recognize–and rein in–the shadow parties

Funders and advocates in civil society also have to tackle a pressing problem we have unleashed upon ourselves, imperiling U.S. democracy in the process, namely, the shadow parties. 

I take this phrase and concept from an important new book by my friend Ruy Teixeira and his co-author John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Reflecting on our broken politics, the authors observe that,

“The underlying divisions are economic, but the political battles between the parties now manifest themselves as a continuation of the culture wars that began in the late 1960s. In the 2020 and 2022 elections, for instance, Democrats and Republicans fought over abortion rights, crime and police, voter fraud and suppression, critical race theory, sexual education, and border security. These differences between the parties and their candidates have been hardened by what we call ‘the shadow parties.’ These are the activist groups, think tanks, foundations, publications and websites, and big donors and prestigious intellectuals who are not part of the party organization, but who influence and are identified with one or the other of the parties.”

The problem with the shadow parties that have taken up residence on both the right and the left is that they pull the two major parties away from the median voter. Driven to extremes by their shadows, neither party can win stable majorities and advance an agenda responsive to the concerns of the exhausted majority of voters that lies between them. 

Our political stalemate, and the opening it provides to authoritarian impulses, are thus partly rooted in the externalities of civil society. Foundations and individual donors should not fund unstinting advocacy without accounting for its impact on their overall goals, the coalition needed to realize them, and–not least–the health of the polity.

It is important to note that the democracy field itself is not immune from shadow partisanship. For example,  the belief that voter fraud is a widespread problem is baseless, but it is nonetheless broadly shared among GOP activists and policymakers. Meanwhile, activists and politicians on the left allege that electoral laws like voter ID requirements amount to voter suppression that changes election outcomes, but these claims also dissolve under scrutiny.

As critical friends of the Democratic Party, Teixeira and Judis lament how its ability to win and sustain a majority has been hamstrung by the zeal of its shadow partisans. Because of the party’s drift to the left on social and cultural issues, more progressive college-educated voters are flocking to it. Meanwhile, working-class voters, who tend to be more conservative on these same issues, and are more focused on economic concerns, have been leaving the party in droves. The defectors increasingly include people of color in the working class.  

In a country where those without a post-secondary degree still outnumber those who have one by nearly a 2:1 ratio, this pattern will erode rather than lead to a majority. An enthusiastic supporter of Adlai Stevenson once reportedly gushed to him at a campaign stop, “Every thinking person in America will be voting for you!” He is said to have replied, “I am afraid that won’t do. I need a majority.” The same holds true for a party that has taken on the mantle of countering authoritarianism. It needs an enduring majority to realize such a critical purpose. To establish one, it will need to bring its shadow party to heel.

Progressive philanthropists ready to take responsibility for and internalize the externalities of the advocacy they have been underwriting in the shadow party of the left could learn from their nemesis, Charles Koch. He and his colleagues came to realize that many of the relentless forms of advocacy they had been funding undermined the very principles Koch et al. sought to realize. I’ve posted previously about how Charles Koch has candidly acknowledged as much and wisely adjusted his network’s course, despite howls of protest from shadow partisans whose work they previously supported. Funders on the left should follow Koch’s lead.

3. Focus on 2044, not 2024 

Philanthropic funders and the organizations they support in civil society are not in a position to save democracy in America in the next year. However, if they take the appropriate long-term view, they could revitalize it over the next two decades.

For many readers, this will be the hardest of the red pills I am suggesting we all need to swallow. They see Donald Trump as nothing less than an existential threat to U.S. democracy. In their view, if Trump is elected again, we will lose the republic. Therefore, we must put prudence and concern with subsequent elections and civic health to one side. Our political life is no longer a recurring contest; it is now an apocalyptic showdown from which we cannot shrink.

I understand why many philanthropists and nonprofits feel this way. I’ll just note this is the same logic that Donald Trump’s most zealous supporters in civil society resorted to in what they called “The Flight 93 Election” of 2016. Here again, we should avoid the pathologies of democratic politics to which the actors whose influence we seek to counter have succumbed. 

Judging by the past three years, a narrow Joe Biden victory in 2024 does not mean U.S. democracy would suddenly be back on track. At its current course and speed, and as an octogenarian president ages in place, we should expect to be buffeted by stiff headwinds. 

Conversely, if Donald Trump is elected in 2024, it will not mean the end of democracy in America. The malevolence of a second Trump Administration would continue to be tempered by its incompetence. Trump would still be checked and balanced by the federal courts, opponents in Congress, and blue states (though again perhaps not as much as we might like). We have continued to incrementally improve our election systems and make them more resilient with each election cycle. Via a bipartisan reform effort, we fixed the flaws in the Electoral Count Act that Trump sought to exploit in the 2020 election. The press and opponents in civil society are no more likely to roll over for a second Trump Administration than they were in the first.

I harbor no illusions that a second Trump presidency would be anything other than bad for democracy. In my personal capacity, as a stalwart Never Trump Republican, I will work against its occurrence. Let me tell you about Nikki Haley and what she has to offer the country!

However, as the leader of a 501(c)3 project working alongside nonprofit partners, and as an advisor to philanthropic funders, I operate with a different perspective and timeline. I keep reminding myself, my colleagues, and my clients that our work will yield its real dividends (if it does pay off) over five, ten, or even twenty years. Our share of the task is thus different from that of political operatives.

I am encouraged by the growing set of funders and nonprofits that share this outlook. Consider just a few examples. Some are preparing for the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence as a moment to renew our country’s narrative in ways that reflect–and balance–pride, reckoning, and aspiration. Others are civically educating K-12 students to play their part in American democracy in ways designed to foster a sense of reflective patriotism. Still others will join in a new Trust for Civic Infrastructure to build up places, institutions, and programs that community members can use to solve problems and realize opportunities together.  

These and myriad other efforts will help us build a bigger boat for democracy in America. As with planting a tree, the best time to build a boat was twenty years ago. The next best time is this morning. So let’s get started!