We Need to Start Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy

In recent years I have often felt a sense of unease that I am too focused on what is or could go wrong with U.S. democracy in the near term. I recognize there is an opportunity cost to this focus. It leads me to pay insufficient attention to what good would look like for democracy in America in the long term. But I have found it difficult to break free of this mode of thinking. 

I was thus happy to learn that my friend Suzette Brooks Masters has written a compelling handbook meant to help us to elevate the time horizons and hopefulness of our perspectives. It’s entitled, “Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy.” (Masters wrote the paper with support from Ruby Hernandez under the auspices of the Democracy Funders Network). 

The Network is sharing the report as “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.”

I recently caught up with Suzette to learn more about what prompted her to undertake this timely project and how her own thinking evolved during the course of it. The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Suzette, you worked for many years in the field of immigration policy. How did you end up writing a white paper on the futures of democracy?

It seems like a big leap, but it actually had a logic to it. I spent 20 years working within organizations and as a funder trying to promote more open immigration policy and more rights for immigrants. I steadily saw the potential for change diminish. An issue where there had been consensus became a political football. Each side was reflexively using it for their advantage. Even the pro-immigrant side became much more ideological and much less pragmatic. Then came the huge wake up call of 2016. The issue I'd been working on all those years became one of the main ways Trump was able to win. 

I’ll admit I was flummoxed. But if something doesn’t work, I'll try to figure out why it didn't. I am willing to revisit my assumptions and admit that I'm wrong. I went on a journey of research and reflection to try to understand what happened and how I missed it. I realized that immigration was one small piece of a much bigger puzzle around status and identity and democracy. I also realized that if our democracy fell–and it was clearly under threat–then all the things that I cared about on immigration would also fall. I reoriented my pyramid of what was important. Democracy became the most important issue, and immigration became subsidiary.

Many of us have similar stories. But we have hunkered down and sought to prevent bad things from happening in the near term. What led you to think about better futures over the long term ? 

After the January 6th insurrection, I felt such despair. I had kind of given up on America. No one wanted to talk to me because that was all I was thinking about. But I started noticing stories about people that weren't giving up. I started asking, who are those people who are not feeling despair, who are inspiring other people with the goals they're trying to achieve? Not negative goals, but positive ones. It was not just, “I want to win this lawsuit to prevent election subversion!” They were truly interested in building something new.  

I started collecting all of these stories in a Google doc. It quickly became quite a list. I noticed some common themes. People were using their imagination. They were engaging in participatory processes with others to shape their future visions together. These were bottom-up, not top-down efforts. That led me to think, maybe we should talk to a bunch of these people and see what they can teach us about getting out of this doom and gloom moment we are in. That was the genesis of “Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy.”

Say more about the blind spots that come with an excess of pessimism. 

Let’s start with the nonprofits whose mission it is to strengthen our democracy. There is a problem if you focus only on playing defense, and you are constantly triggered by threats you are trying to mitigate. There are limits to the amount of motivation, energy, excitement, and frankly new thinking that can come when everything by definition is a reaction to a perceived threat or a salvo in response to what the other side–your perceived enemy–is doing. You are seeing our democracy as a static thing you're trying to preserve, not a dynamic entity that has to keep evolving to meet new needs. When you're constantly in a defensive crouch, your thinking ossifies. That is essentially what's happened with many organizations.

Of course too many people had previously been taking democracy and its health for granted. The renewed focus on the threats to it and the need to defend against them was a good correction.  But everyone ended up making that shift to playing defense at the same time and has stayed in that mode. The correction has become an overcorrection. 

This brings me to the broader ecosystem. If everyone is focusing on the next election cycle, and the particular risks and fragilities in the short term, who is thinking about what our democracy needs to become in the longer term? Organizations were understandably following the money, and they saw the money was going to defense–that’s what was urgent and got everybody's juices flowing. There wasn't a lot of room for looking ahead, thinking about how things might evolve, asking whether our assumptions were correct. All that got crowded out.

Philanthropy played a big role in this. Funders were signaling an overriding concern about the fragility of the system. There wasn't enough diversification in what people were being funded to think about and do. Sure, some people have to play defense. But who's playing offense? Who's thinking bigger and bolder about what can and should happen?

Let’s turn to that now. I love your description of our capacity to imagine the future as "humanity's super power." What do you mean by that?

There is a literature on this that I was completely unfamiliar with. A number of people in cognitive science, anthropology, and philosophy study what makes humans unique relative to other species. It’s not so much our cognitive ability to be analytical, but to imagine worlds that don’t already exist and then to rally other people around those visions to make them happen. This resonated with me–our ability to see beyond the present, and to imagine how the present could be different. It is really tied to our ability to bring about collective action of a grand sort to change our worlds, far beyond building an ant hill or a beaver dam. It was a really wonderful way of remembering that we all have within us the capacity to imagine something that's better. It's just that we don't use those capacities very often–especially not when we're feeling down or scared, as so many of us have been when it comes to our democracy.

What are 2-3 ways in which those of us seeking to improve U.S. democracy can start to cultivate and apply this super power in our work?

Many of the futures techniques are meant to enable you to step back and question your assumptions and be more open to uncertainty. We live in a time of incredible uncertainty, but we don't operate as if we are. That was one of my biggest epiphanies from this project, getting some perspective on the moment of flux we're in as a civilization right now. Whether you're in a foundation, nonprofit or a business, you can't behave as if it's business as usual when it's not. That's taking a huge risk–bigger than the ones that might be right in front of us.

If you are leading a philanthropy at this moment of flux, it's incumbent on you to really think through the next 20 to 30 years, stress test all of your assumptions about how you think the world is going to evolve, and consider how that's going to affect your issues. The first thing to do is some intense scenario planning over a longer term horizon. When you're in a short-term mindset, you're not going to question assumptions that are unlikely to change in a one or two year period. But if you keep having this rolling period as your time horizon, when are you going to let in the fresh air needed to ask questions about what the key trends might be and whether your strategy still makes sense given how the world could be evolving. 

The second thing is to get concrete about envisioning better futures. What we tend to do in this negative moment is focus on lifting certain constraints or ameliorating bad situations. We think a great outcome would be if the piece of legislation we've been working on for 25 years finally passes.These are not aspirational ways of thinking! We're not allowing ourselves to step back and say, well, if 30 years from now we're gonna have immense disruption because of climate change or technology, or maybe borders won't matter anymore, or much less than they do today, how does that affect the way we're thinking about our issues? We need to lead in ways that create space to ask these questions.

One of the key concepts developed by futures thinkers is called backcasting. You identify and articulate a North Star for the future, a clear destination you want to get to, and then you work backwards from it to the present. Doing it that way, you end up with a very different perspective about the path forward than if you start with the present as your point of departure. You might still do similar things, but they're tied and aligned to achieving your better future as opposed to simply being incremental steps that you take today without any particularly clear direction. 

Another important concept involves thinking like an ancestor rather than a descendant, something that is especially important when you're doing mission-driven work in a nonprofit or a philanthropy. Hopefully, that's why people are doing this work, to leave a legacy of a better world for future generations. But then we have to ask ourselves, well, how are we making sure we're actually doing that?When and how do we check in with ourselves and assess whether we've become complacent, whether we're on autopilot, whether we're really putting our investment in the right places? Developing practices for this can help you cultivate the sense of humility you need to actually leave such a legacy. 

Are there some organizations or leaders exemplifying the kind of fresh and futures oriented thinking that we might look to and learn from?

One organization that really reflects the spirit of what we're talking about is the School of International Futures. It’s a global and virtual organization that's thinking deeply about the future of governance, intergenerational fairness, how to equip policymakers and citizens with the tools to imagine better futures for themselves, and how to do it collectively.  Everything they write is so spot on, and it's so different from anything I've encountered, it's led me to want to bring those ideas to the United States. They've helped a lot of European and Asian governments and International NGOs to adapt their work in response to the uncertainty we've been talking about, to make the best of the moment that we're in. We need more of this type of thinking here.

Another group that has impressed me is the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. It is a fascinating hub that was created about 10 years ago to lean into this moment that we're in, and to try to tap technology, innovation, science fiction, including speculative fiction, and connect them to each other. This is not something you'd immediately think of doing, but they see and are tracing all these connections. A lot of things that science fiction writers have written about have come to pass!

For example, Kim Stanley Robinson’s book, The Ministry for the Future, put forth a way of addressing the climate crisis on a global scale. Some people may agree with it, some people don't. But policymakers across the globe have trotted this sci-fi author into their offices to learn from him how to talk about the issue and mobilize people around it.  There's something powerful about using our imaginations to create new connections, new ways for people from different disciplines to learn from each other, and unlock different kinds of thinking. So those are three examples of what we need more of!

That’s a good place to wrap. I’m grateful, Suzette, for how you have elevated my perspective, and I expect that of others, with “Imagining Better Futures.”