Our unifying focus is on opposing autocracy and helping to build a better democracy in the United States in the years ahead. What this means in practice is that we seek to balance near-term pro-democracy action with longer-term analysis and pro-democracy movement-building. We want to help people find the form of engagement that is best for them, and we want to help Indivisible and other like-minded organizations to build an effective broad-based movement. We think ordinary Americans across the political spectrum have a vital common interest that is far more important than any of our current differences: establishing a government that prioritizes the common good.

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 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.

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?

We believe that America is facing an unprecedented threat that demands an urgent response. This belief is based on four crucial observations:

1. Economic conditions for the majority of Americans have been worsening for multiple decades.

2. Our democratic governmental processes have become increasingly distorted to favor a thriving economic elite.

3. The current administration presents itself as a populist alternative, but it has instead proven to be far worse for the general population: corruption is rampant, the cost of living is soaring, and the lives of many Americans are worsening.

4. We the people can regain control of our government, but only if we band together to reject both the false promises of the MAGA regime and the dysfunctional governmental processes that precipitated the current crisis.

Our most immediate problem is an anti-democratic regime primarily devoted to increasing its own wealth and power, and willing to pursue all kinds of autocratic strategies to achieve its goals.  People sympathetic to this regime defend these strategies as merely “pushing the boundaries” of democracy, but the bottom line is that the current administration is rapidly shifting power further and further away from ordinary Americans and into its own hands.  This is moving us in a direction precisely opposite of where we need to go.  Consequently, before we can focus on building a healthy democracy that cares more about ordinary people than billionaires, we need to focus all of our resources on beating back this attempt to establish authoritarian rule.

Fortunately, we are not the first society to face the threat of authoritarian rule.  There is now a substantial body of research showing that democracies such as ours can be successfully restored.  But this only happens when the populace actively pushes back on the ruling regime.  Three factors in particular have proven essential for a positive outcome.

The first step in resisting authoritarian rule is that the populace must refuse to succumb to fatalism and despair.  Authoritarian regimes invariably seek to promote a sense of helplessness among their citizenry.  They deliberately overwhelm both the legal system and the media with an unprecedented onslaught of ill-conceived decrees and reckless initiatives.  They do this to persuade people that resistance is futile.  In reality, though, resistance is the people’s superpower.

The second step in resisting authoritarian rule is that we the people need to use every legal tool at our disposal to prevent the regime from getting its way.  Illegal actions need to be vigorously contested within the courts.  Also, modern authoritarian regimes almost always preserve at least a semblance of open elections, and this provides a critically important opportunity for the population to vigorously oppose candidates whose primary allegiance is to the regime rather than the people.

The third crucial requirement for resisting authoritarian rule is that the populace must be prepared to actively engage in sustained, nonviolent, mass resistance.  This resistance can take various forms: marching in No Kings protests, participating in boycotts, engaging in public strikes, etc.  The data collected to date suggest that when more than 3.5% of the population is mobilized in this fashion, authoritarian regimes can be overturned.

It feels to many of us like our country is going to hell in a handbasket.  There are two important lessons from history, though, that can help us find our way to a better tomorrow.  First, periods of upheaval and distress are a normal part of the human experience.  It’s just our misfortune to currently find ourselves living through one of these episodes.  Second, we humans have repeatedly responded to these societal breakdowns by rolling up our sleeves and inventing better ways to live together.  We will surely do this yet again, but history has shown that this can be a heavy lift.  To succeed we need two things: (1) each of us has to pitch in and lend support as best we can, and (2) we need to begin with a clear understanding of what has gone wrong.

It’s actually not that unusual for things to get out of whack in a society. This is because humans are inclined to care about two things in particular: (1) our own well-being, and (2) the well-being (and also the approval) of those we care about.  A healthy society needs to balance these two competing drives, but this balance can be easily destroyed.  One reason for this is that people with power in society often want more power and more of the advantages that power can provide.  Another reason is that advances in technology are constantly increasing the complexity of the world around us, and the resulting changes can wreak havoc on societal solutions that were previously serving us well.  In the United States in recent decades, we have fallen victim to both these developments.

Beginning in the 1970s, many corporations and wealthy individuals launched a sustained and highly successful campaign to tilt the balance of power exclusively toward the financial elite.  Over the ensuing decades, first Reagan Republicans and then Clinton Democrats fell in line and started catering more and more to the interests of Big Money at the expense of ordinary Americans.  Not coincidentally, our country experienced a staggering escalation of income and wealth inequality, as societal wealth that had previously been employed to advance the common good was increasingly siphoned into the pockets of the wealthy.  Worse, a political system that had previously been responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans became increasingly corrupted by wealthy donors and lobbyists.

There are two essential steps for building a better United States democracy: (1) we need the power to pursue solutions that prioritize the well-being of all Americans, (2) and we need the wisdom to distinguish between solutions that will accomplish their intended goal and those that won’t.  This second requirement can’t be overlooked.  In parallel with the Big Money power grab, our country has also been changing in other important ways.  As population has continued to grow and as our rapidly evolving technological capabilities have led to an increasingly complex and interconnected world, many of our 20th century “solutions” have become increasingly less effective.  This trend has been easy to overlook, and this has contributed to our ineffectual responses to emerging global phenomena such as our globalized economy, global climate change, and global population flows.  We have similarly dropped the ball in our response to changing domestic conditions in areas such as housing, education, health, and government bureaucracy and oversight.  Worse, our debates over these issues have been repeatedly framed as a choice between continuing to pursue outdated policies and simply abandoning our efforts.  Neither of these two options will produce the future we desire and deserve.

The point of the above paragraphs is that our current predicament is the consequence of two perfectly ordinary developments.  This is good news because people throughout history have repeatedly dealt successfully with this kind of challenge.  However, we can only replicate this success if we: (1) get the diagnosis right, and (2) work together to ensure effective treatment.   This means that we need to restore power to ordinary Americans, but we also need to do a better job of identifying and instituting pro-democracy processes that will enable us to use our collective power wisely.  We will continue to have disagreements, but the key difference will be that these will be productive disagreements about how we should best govern ourselves.  The role of our team in promoting this outcome is twofold: (1) help establish this more accurate (and more empowering) understanding of our current reality, and (2) help bring people together to respond effectively.  In our view, the key lies in uniting around a shared long-term commitment to achieve a U.S. democracy that prioritizes the interests of ordinary citizens and promotes a more effective, resilient, and participatory government.

There are three crucial steps in any repair operation: (1) figure out what has gone wrong, (2) figure out what we need to do immediately to improve things, and (3) start developing a more effective longer-term solution.  For societal repairs, though, we need a large fraction of our populace acting in unison.  This, in turn, requires that we focus less on our differences and more on our common interests.  We can do this, but we are all going to have to put some effort into listening to one another and collectively evolving our ideas about how to move forward together.  This kind of repair operation is a lot like assembling a puzzle: we need to work as a team to fit the pieces into a picture that makes sense to all of us.

Most people agree that the lives of ordinary Americans have been growing more difficult for many decades now.  Income and wealth inequality have skyrocketed, good jobs have been disappearing, wages have been stagnant, health care has become increasingly expensive and restrictive, and young people in pursuit of higher education and potentially better jobs have been increasingly driven into debt.  To be sure, we have gained access to some incredible new consumer technology.  However, some of this technology is introducing new problems, and none of it compensates for people’s mounting financial insecurity.  For the first time in our history, parents no longer expect their children to have a better quality of life than they did.  Most people agree that something needs to change ,but the current administration shows us that some changes can actually make things worse.

Different people have different ideas about what has gone wrong in America in recent decades.  One subset of our population attributes our nation’s economic problems primarily to weakening of a traditional, predominantly white, predominantly conservative culture.  These people see a strong authoritarian leader as a necessary antidote to what they view as our moral decline.  Another, partially overlapping, perspective places the blame on what is seen as an out-of-control, self-serving, liberal-oriented "administrative state."  These people don’t necessarily want an authoritarian leader, but they welcome a powerful leader willing to “break a few eggs to make an omelet.”  A third and significantly different perspective sees our dysfunctional economy and the disconnectedness of the administrative state as symptoms of a more fundamental problem: a government that has been captured by, and is prioritizing the interests of, corporations and the wealthy.   The key distinction here is that, from this perspective, the solution lies not in expanding the power of the president but in making our government more responsive to the expressed interests and everyday needs of the American people as a whole.

After Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024, it quickly became clear that the second Trump administration was a radical departure from the first.  This time, Trump took care to surround himself exclusively with people whose sole qualification was their unfailing loyalty and subservience to him. Individuals and even corporations who continued to prioritize the rule of law and the well-being of the American people were subjected to unprecedented attack, and decision-making was increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small set of unscrupulous individuals.  Corruption became rampant, and quality of life for most Americans continued to decline.

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, and where the ruling regime increasingly employs tactics drawn directly from the autocrat’s playbook.  In America today, protesting citizens have been assaulted as “domestic terrorists,” news organizations and reporters who refused to mindlessly echo government propaganda have been subjected to all manner of threats and reprisals, law firms that dared to confront the administration’s lawlessness have been similarly attacked, favored criminals have been protected and even casually pardoned, and instances of shameless corruption and staggeringly brazen self-enrichment have become utterly routine.  The model for Trump’s efforts to create autocracy in the United States has been the nation of Hungary, which experienced a 16-year slide in this direction. In 2026, the Hungarian people were able to stop this slide through a landslide election in which the authoritarian party was soundly defeated. Citizens in America can copy Hungary and unite to overthrow a competitive authoritarian government, but it will take a mass mobilization and a recognition of the autocratic intent of the ruling party.

Indivisible, as an organization, is deeply committed to building a better democracy than the one we have been living with in recent decades.  A better democracy will ensure that decisions are made in the interests of all Americans rather than a select few.  This is a nonpartisan agenda that we all can work together to achieve.  However, Indivisible also recognizes that we need to begin by rolling back the rapidly encroaching autocracy that is currently confronting us.  This is an emergency that is placing all of our lives at risk, and it is therefore incumbent on all of us to get off the sidelines and become actively involved in ensuring that our democracy endures.  This too should be a nonpartisan pursuit: no matter what voters may have hoped for in 2024, the reality of the current administration is that it has shown itself to be incredibly corrupt and willing to exploit every available stratagem to increase its own unilateral authority over the rest of us. Technically, we still have a democracy, and Trump is not a king. However, Trump frequently acts as though he is a king, and this is the behavior we all need to rise up and put an end to.

We strongly believe that our top priority in 2026 thru 2028 is to resist our nation’s current slide toward autocracy.  We are committed to working with anyone and everyone who shares this agenda – the current administration is pursuing a massive power grab that is weakening the very foundations of our democracy, and we can’t allow this to succeed.  The reason our nation was susceptible to this power grab, though, is that it has, in recent decades, fallen prey to a more surreptitious power grab: our democratic processes have been increasingly corrupted in the interest of large corporations and wealthy individuals.  For many Americans, this has led directly to a serious decline both in quality of life and in trust in our government.  Our work will not be complete until we have successfully banded together to reverse this more deep-seated power grab as well.

A political movement is an organized, collective effort to introduce a fundamental societal change. Often, a key step in this process involves changing how people think about a certain issue and updating people’s shared expectations for how our society should function.  For example, separate movements in the 20th century radically revised our basic assumptions about how workers should be treated, how people of color should be treated, how women should be treated, etc.  Now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we believe America is overdue for a new movement that dramatically expands our expectations for, and the performance of, our democratic system of government.  We can no longer accept a government that merely offers us an occasional “voice.”  We need, and we demand, a new and improved set of governmental processes designed to wrest control of our government away from the economic elite and to ensure that our democracy operates instead to directly address the interests and needs of the American people.

Too many Americans today experience “the government” as a highly unsatisfactory and self-interested service provider.  This makes it easy for people to think of “big government” itself as the cause of our unhappiness.  The real problem, though, lies in the specific voices our current governmental system is privileging.  Our elected representatives seem to care most deeply about our concerns when they are campaigning for our votes.  This is a highly transactional conception of the governing process where ordinary citizens are reduced to powerless consumers choosing between Product A and Product B.  In contrast, building a movement is all about bringing people together to give them a meaningful voice in their own future.  We no longer want to be mere bystanders to decisions that affect us – rather, we want governmental processes that prioritize our input and our well-being.  Most importantly, we want to engage with citizens across the political spectrum not because we want their vote, but because we want to work with them in jointly pursuing this common agenda.

The term “democracy” means different things to different people.  Winston Churchill is famously said to have remarked that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.  What Churchill’s statement ignores, though, is that every democracy is different, and some democracies indisputably serve their citizens much better than others.  Rather than quoting Churchill, we should be asking ourselves: what do we want our democracy to accomplish, and how can we revise our democratic processes to achieve this outcome?  These are questions that have been sitting unanswered in the United States for many decades.

The problem with our current democracy is that it’s not the democracy we need or deserve.  It is a kind of “separate but equal” democracy that uses superficially democratic processes to achieve results that favor the select few.  In 20th century America, it was widely assumed that simply having regular elections and being committed to the rule of law would automatically ensure shared prosperity and happiness.  Not only did this fail to occur, but there are now numerous “democratic” countries around the world that are firmly under the control of tyrants.  What we failed to anticipate is that powerful subgroups within each country would find ways to rig their democratic processes to produce outcomes that preferentially served their own interests.  In light of this development, we need to update our expectations for a democracy.  Rather than simply having “democratic” processes, we need processes that are continually being optimized to serve a specific, agreed-upon, overarching agenda.  What most of us want is a society in which we can all live fulfilling lives.  It follows that the democracy we should be seeking is one in which the underlying processes are delivering on this promise. 

Few of our elected representatives enter office intent on making life worse for workers and families.  Our current democratic processes however force them to spend long hours appealing to wealthy donors for campaign funds, meeting with well-heeled lobbyists, and taking direction from party leaders who are themselves beholden to the wealthy and the powerful.  Gradually, our supposed representatives find themselves focusing less and less on the needs of the many and more and more on the interests of the few (sometimes disguised as “the need for a healthy economy”).  Today, after decades of this misdirection, the populace has had enough.

The good news is that we are eminently capable of instituting the necessary changes to our democracy.  For example, we can elect a new generation of representatives who understand what has gone wrong, who are determined to challenge the established power centers, and who will introduce the appropriate revisions to our democratic system.  In order to do this, though, we need to stop thinking of “democracy” as a generic set of standard processes that automatically lead to societal well-being.  Rather, we should think of democracy as a set of tools that we can use in pursuit of a specific result: a society in which we all can thrive.  As with any tool set, though, democracy will only deliver on this promise if the tools are well maintained and skillfully wielded.

We think there are three essential requirements that an effective democracy must satisfy.  First, and perhaps most obviously, the democratic processes must be designed to prioritize the common good over all else.  This is not true of our current democracy because there are far too many opportunities for the wealthy and the powerful to put their fingers (and even their entire hands) on the scale.  Fortunately, we can readily address the defective processes that are allowing this to happen by electing representatives and enacting initiatives focused on instituting appropriate legal reforms.

The second essential requirement for an effective democracy is somewhat less obvious and more challenging to promote: competent execution.  The key point here is that good intentions alone are not sufficient to ensure good results.  For one thing, the government must have sufficient access to our societal wealth to be able to make the necessary investments in our collective well-being.  In contrast, if wealth is being hoarded by an economic elite, then there is no way for the government to adequately promote the common good.  For another thing, government representatives and civil servants must have the competence to recognize when conventional solutions are no longer proving effective and when their quest for better solutions is being hamstrung by the limitations of their own entrenched perspectives.  Lastly, there must be a widely shared commitment to identifying and removing corrupt and incompetent performers from government service.  Our current democracy has fallen flat on its face in all of these respects.

The third and final essential requirement for an effective democracy may be the least obvious: the government must earn and retain the trust of the populace as a whole.  Democratic governance inevitably entails trade-offs and compromises, and people need a good reason to accept these.  Specifically, they need to trust that everything will ultimately work out well.

The only way to refocus our government on continually improving our collective quality of life is to explicitly establish this as the top priority of our democratic governing mechanisms.  This is not at all a partisan issue – rather, it is an existential one.  Our current societal problems are eminently solvable, but the only way to accomplish this is to reclaim control of our government from the privileged few.  This is the challenge our group is focused on, and it is a challenge that our nation is fully capable of addressing.  Until we commit to doing this, though, we will be merely rearranging deck chairs on a gradually sinking ship.