Our Perspective

Our Problem Statement

Our United States government in 2026 remains a democracy, but it is sliding ever closer to “competitive authoritarianism.” This is a hybrid system of government that is becoming increasingly common around the world. It is a system where democratic institutions (e.g., elections, media, courts) still exist but are systematically manipulated by incumbents to create an uneven playing field, permanently favoring the ruling party. The result is a nation that retains the trappings of a democracy but where meaningful democratic input and debate are substantially suppressed.

Our top priority in 2026 is to help arrest this alarming slide toward autocracy in the United States. Experience has shown that citizens can effectively resist autocracy but only when key societal institutions, together with a significant percentage of the populace, refuse to accept the ruling regime. This refusal can take a variety of forms: massive voter support for opposition candidates, large-scale public protests, mass actions such as strikes and boycotts, etc. The three key requirements are: (1) citizens must understand the threat, and (2) citizens must understand that they have the power to resist, and (3) citizens must stand together to actively resist.

Defeating the competitive authoritarian agenda is an urgent and immediate need. However, we are committed to going further by addressing the problems with our democracy that have made it vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover. In our view, the deeper problem is that our democratic processes have been increasingly corrupted so as to prioritize the interests of large corporations and the wealthy, all at the expense of the common good. We believe that we need to revise these processes with the explicit goal of eliminating the disproportionate influence of Big Money. In addition, we believe the time is ripe to introduce other modern improvements to our democratic system of government. We believe that a government explicitly designed to prioritize the desires and needs of ordinary Americans is the key to a better future for all.

Our Proposed Solution

We are desperately in need of a more responsive democracy, but at the moment we are being forced to channel our energy into rejecting an alarmingly less responsive democracy. In the long run, we need to pursue both these objectives. This, in turn, requires us to pursue two separate but overlapping strategies. This dichotomy is most easily seen in the current state of the Indivisible movement nationwide.

Indivisible National is very clear on the long-term need for a democracy that prioritizes the well-being of the populace. However, Indivisible National in 2026 has explicitly chosen to prioritize resistance to autocracy.  The primary 2026 goal is to build the largest possible coalition of people willing to actively (but nonviolently) oppose our slide toward autocracy. To this end, Indivisible has spawned over 2700 progressively oriented local groups, and many of these groups have formed their own local issue teams to recruit people into activism on a variety of progressive fronts.

Indivisible National has consciously elected to defer most of its work on building a better democracy until at least 2027. But building a People’s Democracy movement is a qualitatively different challenge from that of building an Oppose Autocracy coalition. This is because, rather than uniting a like-minded subset of people against something, a People’s Democracy movement needs to bring together a far more diverse subset of the population in mutual pursuit of a shared objective: a better democracy.

The question for a group like ours is: how can we help, beginning today, to oppose autocracy and to advance the longer-term agenda of creating a better democracy? What are we best suited to contribute, and where will our contributions have the greatest impact? How can we best help to add momentum and coherence to this effort?