Friends,

Like many of you, the last few months have been a rollercoaster of emotions for me. We have witnessed disturbing actions and hopeful signs of solidarity. Before I dive into my current analysis of this moment, I want to share three upcoming opportunities to engage with Democracy 2076’s work. 

• On April 29th we’ll be hosting a stakeholder briefing on our Political Coalitions for 2076 program. Register here.

• On May 22nd at 1 PM EST we’ll share the findings of our Imagining 2076 pilot with Harmony Labs (more on this below) and preview the possible axes of political realignment we are identifying through our Political Coalitions for 2076 program at a webinar hosted by the RX Foundation as part of their “Power as A Social Determinant of Health” series. Register here.

• On June 19th, we’ll be at 22CI to lead a workshop on A Constitution for 2076. If you are there, please join us to help shape our strategy.

As we approach Trump’s (second) 100th day in office, it may feel as though the ground is constantly shifting beneath our feet. I have heard from many of you that you are mourning the loss of institutions, supports, and norms you had thought immovable. I know that I am regularly oscillating between feelings of frustration, sadness, anger, and uncertainty. 

Something I have talked to many folks about (and that they seemed to find helpful) is the distinction between being surprised and being sad. There is a lot to be sad about and to dislike at this moment, but sadness doesn’t require a shift in strategy. On the other hand, if we are surprised by what we are seeing, it may mean we need to rethink our approach. 

Even for those who engaged in deep scenario planning before and after the election, some elements of what we are seeing now can seem surprising: Elon Musk’s role, the speed of the dismantling of institutions, the abrupt economic isolationism. The goal of scenario planning is not to precisely predict the future, but rather to be prepared for a variety of possible futures. This time around, the democracy movement is prepared with better coordination, actions and policy responses planned in advance, thoughtfulness about how not to be baited into taking unpopular positions, and support for our physical, digital, and legal security. (To this last point, a number of entities have been set up to support security for different communities who come under attack or want to prepare for and prevent attacks. We are aggregating best practices – please reach out if you’d like them or need an introduction for security support.) 

There is another thing I am seeing emerge: Americans standing up for our democracy and the possibility of a more perfect union. 

The strategy question as I see it is: how do we tap into that so we pressure those in power, whether in law firms, universities, businesses or in Congress, to take the collective action that we so desperately need? The widespread protests on April 5th seemed to do a great job of centering issues such as Social Security and Medicare that affect a wide cross-section of Americans in order to grow the tent of people who stand up for our democracy. A recent More in Common report supports what we know from experience—Americans want to do things together, not talk about their differences. 

These first 100 days give us an opportunity to reassess and revise our strategies to meet the moment. As someone who spends a lot of her time thinking about the future(s) of democracy, I want to share three key trends that Democracy 2076 is observing and responding to. Because now, more than ever, it is critical that we put our limited energy into strategic action.

Trend #1: Institutional collapse facilitating transformation

Experts throughout the pro-democracy ecosystem have rung alarm bells from the very beginning of the first Trump term that our democratic institutions are incredibly fragile because they rely on norms and forbearance. We have seen a decades-long decline in trust in the federal government and we know institutions are failing to deliver for the American people. Concerns about government inefficiencies come from across the political and ideological spectrum—from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance to Stephen Moore’s Govzilla. Our federal infrastructure is in need of thoughtful and evidence-based reimagining. 

But there are smart ways to build something better and then there’s DOGE, which has no legal authority and isn’t a federal agency, yet has dismantled long-standing federal agencies overnight. The speed with which DOGE has worked not only emphasizes the fragility of our institutions, it helps expand our collective imagination about the kinds of government transformations that are possible beyond DOGE. Our strategic task now is to take advantage of this as an opportunity for imaginative processes that lead to more creation than destruction.

We need this long-term reimagining and planning work done for every federal agency, for Congress, and the federal workforce. We must understand how needs have or haven’t been met, where costs outweigh benefits, and what kinds of new models could help us serve the American people better. This is the work DOGE could have undertaken if it were serious about improving how our government works. 

One of my favorite examples of this kind of work is Unlock Aid. In 2023, they organized a global listening tour to understand what a US global development approach might look like if it were being built today. This wasn’t just an exercise in modernizing an aging system, but rather exploring how we might truly reimagine how we do development work by asking those who that work is supposed to serve. Their takeaways, which are ready now, could provide the foundation for filling the void left by the decimation of USAID. When Unlock Aid took on that work in 2023, it wasn’t clear that there was any possibility for the agency to change. That possibility now exists.

This is also the approach of our Constitution for 2076 program. In 2023, we brought together organizers from across 43 states to imagine different scenarios of the next 50 years of American democracy and consider challenges we are likely to face—from the aging of the U.S. population and climate change to income inequality and technological change. Together they sought to answer one question: how do we ensure the US Constitution will provide for a representative, effective, and responsive democracy in the long-term? In 2024, we reconvened state-based organizers along with national partners to co-create a strategy of the size and scope we need to pass the Constitutional amendments identified as priorities at our 2023 gathering.

If you’ll be at 22CI, join us on June 19th for a pre-conference workshop on A Constitution for 2076 to help shape this strategy.

In the midst of the current shift in the scope of what is possible, we will reconvene our group of partners this June to revise our strategy and make sure they have what they need to implement it. We are working to develop a plan with phases that could be accelerated in alignment with growth in Americans’ political will. Historically, we have seen that Americans demand big, structural changes after big moments of upheaval—whether that’s post-Civil War Reconstruction, from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era, or after Watergate. We are preparing to meet the potential for transformation that this moment of upheaval could bring. 

Trend #2: “Democracy-speak” has entered our cultural vernacular. Now we need to meet it there. 

If the past eight years are any indication, political will may change at a rapid clip over the next four years. 

When the pro-democracy movement was organizing and advocating in 2017, it was controversial to use the word “authoritarianism” for fear of being alarmist. I remember in 2019 it was a huge deal that Congress held hearings on the Constitutional role of the pardon power and was considering how to prevent executive abuses of power. We spent a lot of Trump’s first term trying to get those in the political space to see the battlefield as authoritarianism vs. democracy, not left vs. right. 

In many ways, this work has paid off. Exit polling showed that roughly three in four voters in the 2024 election said that democracy is threatened and over half of Harris voters said that democracy was the issue that mattered most to them. 

We see evidence for how democracy issues have infiltrated our culture and the vernacular even outside of traditional political spheres. Astrologers are talking about fascism and multi-party systems in their monthly readings; beauty influencers are talking about misinformation and disinformation in marketing and how it relates to our political moment; fashion influencers describe the impact of tariffs on businesses and authoritarianism on the trend cycle. This shows us the tantamount role that culture and media have in the rebuilding and perfecting of our democratic systems by meeting people where they are and talking to them about these issues in contexts they’re already interested in. 

The way our culture shapes our politics is why Democracy 2076 invests in understanding depictions of democracy and the future in film and television through our Imagining 2076 program––see our pilot findings released earlier this year. Based on the input we received, we have launched the next phase of our research to make our findings more actionable and to better understand which stories move audiences who have core values around autonomy and authority—stories that weren’t identified in our initial research. Additionally, we will be working to provide guidance on how to overlay our values-based audience segmentation on voter files to make this work more actionable for democracy advocates.

Trend #3: New political realignments creating opportunities for unlikely coalitions 

The third major trend I’ve observed are the deepening shifts of our political coalitions. You may remember that after the election, Democracy 2076 sent an email articulating how our long-held understandings of voting blocs and political demographics no longer make sense in this particular political moment. I encouraged us all to be compassionate and curious about the complexity of voting decisions. This is harder than ever now that we are seeing the consequences of those decisions come to bear. It is painful and terrifying to watch people kidnapped off the street, friends and colleagues lose their jobs, and businesses destroyed. It is natural to be angry. 

We know that authoritarians seek to sow divisions and make us angry and afraid. I have been encouraged over the last few months to hear more people discuss the need to resist these  efforts to divide and instead grow the tent for pro-democracy actors. However, we are not always practiced at collaborating across these divisions and often assume that those on the other side hold the most extreme version of their party’s beliefs. The truth, of course, is much more nuanced. We are mis-perceiving what others believe, in part, because we are so ideologically sorted—we tend to live, work, and socialize with people who share our ideological beliefs. It is part of what is making us so polarized. To win against authoritarianism, we have to overcome these barriers to build a broad coalition and engage authentically with all allies of democracy. 

One way to move forward is by acknowledging that the ideological differences between left and right that have defined the post-New Deal order are ceding to new divisions and opening the door to new coalitions. The last 100 days have laid bare how vital it is that as we move forward, we work to ensure that commitment or lack thereof to democracy does not continue to be a dividing issue between coalitions. 

To that end, in January of this year we launched our project on Pro-Democracy Political Coalitions to:

• Understand how US political alignments may be reshaped over the next 30 years in terms of who is in them, the ideologies that underlie them, and what their wedge issues are;

• Identify where there is the possibility for unexpected coalitions and collaborations —including on improving our democracy; and 

• Pinpoint opportunities for and support implementation of interventions to ensure all parties are committed to democracy.

Our initial work has uncovered eighteen new possible axes of political polarization that do not fall on the traditional left vs. right spectrum. For example, those who seek to preserve  institutions vs. those who want to dismantle them can be found within communities across the political spectrum. We also see that as the spectrum of political coalitions shifts, people’s beliefs become increasingly heterodox. What someone believes about one thing is no longer a reliable indicator of their beliefs on other topics (think climate-warrior moms who are anti-vaccine or queer conservatives). We are currently in the process of refining scenarios for how these new axes of division could reshape our politics in the decades to come. We have brought together organizers who run membership-based organizations, individuals tracking violent extremism, and scholars studying authoritarianism. The cohort itself is an example of overcoming ideological barriers to collaboration, as it includes everyone from people who left the MAGA coalition as recently as 2024 from Leaving MAGA to the San Francisco-based Asian American Futures. 

We will be previewing this work and asking for feedback at our stakeholder briefing on April 29th. Register to join us here.

At a recent pro-democracy gathering, this kind of strategic collaboration was named as a best practice about how to do effective work at moving people—a practice that won’t be a surprise to the organizers amongst us. Go in and listen rather than setting an agenda. Ask what people need and how you can help make it happen. Set the agenda together. In this regard, we have been inspired by projects like One America’s Matthew 5:9 Fellowship, which is connecting Christian leaders and supporting their efforts to shepherd their communities above partisanship. Another example is the work of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, which has engaged in a variety of projects on “relational state capacity” or the idea that “the quality of citizen-state relationships” is directly relevant to the capacity of the state. This includes Scott Warren’s work to identify key recommendations for engaging with pro-democracy supporters across the aisle. 

At Democracy 2076, co-creation is a core value. Our Constitution for 2076 work developed the slate of amendments and implementation strategy by facilitating co-designing sessions with our partners. It is also what is shaping the next phase of research on Imagining 2076 and how we will begin our advocacy work. Democracy 2076 is already laying the foundation to bring together creatives and other advocacy organizations to co-develop a set of shared recommendations for creators based on our research and we are expanding  our programs based on the needs they express to us.

By structuring our programs in this way, Democracy 2076 aims to infuse our work with the values, learnings, and skills from a host of perspectives. Together, we can and must become practiced at imagining a better future and believing that what we imagine can be made real. If we don’t grow in these ways, we concede the future to those who aim to maximize on our divisions to design an authoritarian future. But a big enough prize can motivate us to engage in the imagining and building work necessary to avoid those authoritarian futures, and at Democracy 2076, we believe the future of our democracy is a worthy prize. 

Onwards, together,

Aditi