How are we working to set our nation on a better path?
The silver lining in our intensifying societal crisis is that it is motivating more and more people to play a more active role in charting a more promising course for our country. Our Promoting Democracy team is a prime example of this phenomenon. This is good news for all of us because there is no limit to what a truly mobilized population can accomplish when our goals and activities are adequately aligned. But developing this alignment requires two crucial steps:
We need to establish a widely shared understanding of where things have gone wrong, and of what changes will be most effective.
We need to collectively develop experience and competence in stepping outside our established comfort zones, in collaborating with people from different walks of life, and in taking shared responsibility for our future well-being.
For our team, both of these activities are ongoing and continuing to evolve. This website is intended, in part, to share this journey. Our goal is to document and consolidate our progress and also to provide a resource for others with similar interests.
Promoting a Shared Understanding
As suggested by our team’s name and as explained elsewhere, our team believes that the primary challenge we must work together to confront is the deteriorated state of our American democracy. In order to make progress, though, we need to popularize this perspective so that people begin to routinely employ it in making sense of their own lived experience, and so that people also begin to share our sense of urgency about reclaiming popular power in the interest of the common good. To this end, we need to be able to tell a clear and compelling story about why all these bad things are happening to us. The following paragraphs provide an example of the kind of narrative we are working to develop.
When a country is facing a host of simultaneous challenges, it can be difficult to know where to begin in attempting to address these. Reasonable people can differ in their beliefs about what is most important and most desirable. Some people may be most focused on economic issues, others on cultural issues, others on citizenship questions, yet others on how the government operates, etc. History has shown that, in a healthy democracy, people can sort through these differences and arrive at acceptable solutions.
In our view, though, the fundamental problem facing us today is that the United States in recent decades has moved further and further away from being a healthy democracy. Governmental decisions in the U.S. today predominantly reflect the interests of large corporations and wealthy individuals, independent of the needs and desires of our population as a whole. To be sure, we still have elections, but the candidates of both major parties end up being most responsive to wealthy donors, lobbyists, and the increasingly powerful financial sector. Consequently, even when large majorities of our citizens have clear preferences for specific governmental actions, these preferences are now routinely ignored.
It’s no coincidence that this shift away from a healthy democracy has coincided with an enormous increase in economic inequality in our country. This is part of a vicious cycle in which increasingly unequal control of resources translates into increasingly self-interested control of governmental decision-making. From this perspective, differences of opinion across the population are of little consequence because many of the most important governmental decisions are being made without our input. This is why our team believes that the path toward a better future necessarily begins with the hard work of building a better democracy in which the voices and needs of the people are truly front and center. This, in turn, implies that we need to help build a movement, with associated candidates and initiatives, that directly addresses the issue of excess wealth and the associated tactics that have been deployed to distort and subvert our democracy.
Next Steps
We believe that there are at least three different kinds of steps that we need to pursue in parallel: (1) time-critical initiatives to prevent the damage to our democracy from growing even worse and harder to recover from, (2) more future-oriented initiatives that begin building a broad-based coalition with sufficient mass and commitment and shared experience to impact societal decision-making, and (3) support for specific candidates and laws that promote a truly meaningful democracy.
In 2025, we opportunistically focused on supporting a time-critical initiative in California: Proposition 50 was specifically designed to counteract an anti-democratic measure that was instituted in the state of Texas. Proposition 50 deviated from our baseline opposition to gerrymandering (which, itself, is an anti-democratic tactic), but it did so with the explicit guarantee that this was a time-limited exception that was restricted to counter-balancing the Texas maneuver, and that it would do so only if directly approved by a majority of voting Californians. We showed up at local college campuses to encourage and assist students in voting for this proposition.
In 2026, we are looking to expand our efforts across all three of the above categories.