What problem are we solving?

On November 8, 2025 some seven million people across the United States participated in the “No Kings” public protest organized by a coalition of progressive groups including Indivisible.  The goal for 2026 is to keep growing these protests so as to ultimately involve 3.5 percent of our nation’s population; this percentage has historically been a tipping point for achieving transformative political change.  But a far larger portion of our populace remains fundamentally unsympathetic to these protests – they dismiss the autocratic aspirations of the current administration as merely “pushing beyond conventional limits” in a much-needed effort to “shake things up.”  These people have grown so unhappy and disillusioned with our deteriorating democracy that they are ready to try virtually any alternative that presents itself.

The fundamental problem that our team feels compelled to confront is that these people have good reason to feel a sense of desperation: our nominally democratic government over the past 45 years has increasingly been co-opted to predominantly serve the interests of corporations and the wealthy.  The threat of autocracy is only the most dramatic symptom of this fundamental breakdown of our mid-twentieth-century social contract.  Even if we avoid autocracy in the years immediately ahead, the threat will remain ever-present until we address the underlying suppression of the public interest.  To do this, we need to institute fundamental changes in our democratic system and in the kinds of candidates we support.

In turn, for this transformation to be successful, we need to build a far more widely inclusive and community-based movement to make our government responsive to the interests and needs of ordinary citizens.  From this perspective, the “No Kings” theme is far too narrow in its appeal and far too limited in its objectives.  Indivisible plans to expand its focus in 2026, but our team is ready to focus today on what we see as the key question of our time: how can we build a better democracy and empower ordinary Americans to live better lives?  This is ambitious, but we believe it is the only realistic cure for what ails us.  Achieving this objective will take, not months, but years, and it will ultimately take many tens of millions of Americans working together.  On the bright side, though, this is an agenda that people across the political spectrum can unite around, and it is one that we believe will ultimately create better lives for all.