Democracy SOS

Today, the space in which U.S. civil society operates is closing in — thanks to polarization, not a ruling party. Illiberals on the far right and far left have decided that it’s not enough to persuade: They must eliminate undesirable ideas — and organizations — using whatever power is at hand, their tactics pulled straight from those used by anti-democratic regimes abroad.

States have passed 38 new anti-protest laws. Free speech is being throttled by universities firing tenured professors for their words and by gag-order bills introduced in 36 states such as Florida. Businesses have faced state retaliation for offering customers desired products such as investment funds that employ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) screening. U.S. House of Representative committees have investigated mainstream environmental groups for failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Fifty-year-old church ministries are suddenly facing state lawsuits.

When I looked for examples of “closing space,” I ended up with six pages. Since illiberals on the right wield more political power than those on the left, they are more likely to use governmental regulatory, legal, and oversight agencies to silence their critics. Illiberals on the left exercise more power in universities, schools, and cultural institutions; they are largely working through private regulation of speech and funding. Unprosecuted violence also plays a role in shutting down the civic sphere. Threats and violence are already terrifying many nonprofits, voter-registration efforts, and religious institutions.

Illiberals often target the other side of the political spectrum, of course: The illiberal right is harassing environmental groups and organizations pursuing LGBTQ+ rights, among others; the illiberal left has made conservatives an endangered species on college campuses. But both also obstruct the work of the liberals on their side of the partisan divide.

In fact, classical liberals on the right were the first to feel the full force of the illiberal right’s power. Powerful public leaders whose ideas may be quite conservative but who believe in the free exchange of ideas were caught unprepared. Pastors like Russell Moore were forced out. Magazines like the Weekly Standard were defunded. Intellectuals such as David French faced unrelenting, ugly, violent threats directed at themselves, their children, and their families.

Why target one’s own side? By closing space, illiberals eliminate the middle ground and reduce competition for their extreme views. That expands their power as people grudgingly accept more anti-democratic action from their own side, believing it is necessary to prevent similar actions by their opponents.

U.S. philanthropists are addressing the problem quietly and in piecemeal fashion. When grantees are targeted by cyberthreats, seven-figure lawsuits, or an attorney general’s investigation, they respond to the individual incident, with as little attention as possible.

Overseas, such a limited response failed. More organizations faced restrictions. Philanthropy itself was targeted.

In the United States, philanthropy does not have to look overseas — we can recall our own history. Space for civil society was constricted during the Jim Crow South: In Birmingham, Ala., a Junior League could operate — but an interracial league for checkers players couldn’t. In Mississippi, there was a free press, but it was illegal to publish anything supporting social equality between whites and Blacks. Groups promoting disapproved ideas might have their private insurance denied, be closed for regulatory violations, or face vigilante violence that would go unpunished.

Overseas, after a decade, philanthropists learned to band together. They set up pooled funds to defend their grantees. They supported lawyers, crisis communications, and created physical and cybersecurity programs. Programs began to whisk activists to safety if danger arose.

Luckily, we are at the early stages of closing space in the United States. And groups like the Democracy Funders Network are learning from overseas to help nonprofits and philanthropies across the political spectrum find solutions. Liberals — whether conservative or progressive — should join the effort to protect the national treasure that is America’s vibrant civil society.

Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she researches democracies under pressure and how they can rebound. This is drawn from her latest paper, “Closing Civic Space in the United States.”

As I encourage foundations and donors to use their resources to heal, I highlight the importance of reparative philanthropy, which calls for that acknowledgment of past oppression and steps to repair it through redistribution of resources. This model requires collaboration, accountability, and mutually respectful relationships. It is drawn from the Indigenous tradition that practices the principle known as “All My Relations.” In short, it is the idea that we have all been harmed by oppressive systems, and we all have a role to play to secure collective healing.

The last part is key. Often, when you hear about societal problems, it’s easy to look the other way if you are not directly affected. And it can be easy to find reassurance in the list of reasons why you will not be similarly victimized. In psychology, this tendency is considered a cognitive bias called the “fundamental attribution error.”

Such mental gymnastics, however, give us false hope. And they create distance between us and those directly impacted. I want us all to appreciate that when a group is hurt, all are affected. What ails one, ails us all.

I get that such a mind-set isn’t easy. The world can be frightful, with its deepening inequity, widespread resistance to racial equity, and fierce commitment to the status quo. There is also fear that helping others is a zero-sum proposition that means harming one’s self. It may feel good psychologically to look for safety, but I believe true safety lies in working toward healing.

In recent years, we have seen significant moments of progress but also retrenchment. Most notably, the killing of George Floyd prompted a professed commitment to equity. Corporations, philanthropy, and others declared a desire and drive to tackle racial justice. Horrified by the blatant disregard for Black life, philanthropists and grant makers made small and large donations. Black activists were finally being heard, and everyone knew it.

Next, however, came the expected, but no less distressing, backsliding on funding and commitments. The retreat was sparked by fear — fear of campaigns demonizing the teaching of race in schools, fear of attacks on critical race theory, and fear of efforts to squelch programs ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion. Last summer’s U.S. Supreme Court decision banning race-based affirmative action in higher education fueled the attacks. Following the decision, a wave of lawsuits hit entities such as the Fearless Fund, which is being sued over its support of Black-owned businesses. Anxiety is growing in some parts of the philanthropic sector along with trepidation about funding anything explicitly in service of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, or other people of color. This is an affront to us all.

We cannot heal divides without a steadfast and unbreakable commitment. It is pointless for philanthropists or advocates to search for common or safe ground if they do not agree on the fundamentals of racial equity. It is pointless to think that pluralism will lead to safety. In fact, no one should embrace pluralism as a solution for issues that have plagued the nation for centuries. Pluralism does not lift up and empower the marginalized; to the contrary, it works in service of the oppression of those who have always struggled to be seen and heard.

This is not the time to play it safe; it is time to double down. Philanthropy may not be driving the attacks on communities of color, but it cannot afford to be silent in the face of them. To heal divides, we must, as a field, adopt reparative philanthropy as a central approach to our work — both taking responsibility for our contributions to division and unapologetically committing to address the need to redistribute resources to communities of color.

Edgar Villanueva is the founder and principal of Leverage Philanthropic Partners and Decolonizing Wealth Project.

I also am deeply concerned about how America’s toxic political conflict erodes our leadership in the world. Over the past year, I’ve had conversations with two former secretaries of defense and numerous diplomats from the United States and our allies. They all tell me that polarization is undermining our ability to influence world events. As partisan animosity and political violence rise at home, we simply have less credibility modeling democracy and encouraging good behavior abroad.

How do we promote healthy conflict? Structural changes to our electoral system like ranked-choice voting and other innovations are worth considering but aren’t enough. Nor is it enough to encourage candidates for office to avoid negative campaigning or divisiveness out of a sense of civic responsibility. We have to demonstrate that it’s also good politics — that there is indeed an “exhausted majority” of Americans who want something different and will reward candidates and elected officials who treat their opponents respectfully. Studies by More in Common and the Polarization Research Lab, among many others, prove this idea.

Lots of well-meaning conservatives and liberals are skeptical of efforts focused on civility, bridge-building, or depolarization. My friends on the right greet my descriptions of Disagree Better with an eye-roll (sometimes rhetorically). They perceive it as a naive effort to “go along to get along,” yet one more example of a RINO (Republican in Name Only) preaching compromise as cover for capitulating to the left.

From the left, I most frequently hear that promoting healthy conflict unfairly expects people who feel marginalized to treat their political opponents with dignity. These advocates believe their power imbalance comes with moral permission to be loud and militant. Furthermore, they see someone concerned about surgeries for transgender youth, DEI initiatives on campus, or other progressive priorities as inherently bad or at least operating in bad faith.

Yet the concerns from both sides are genuine — and important to understand if we are to reduce partisan animosity.

To my friends on the right: I hear you. I, too, am leery of efforts that imply I must ignore my beliefs or suppress my concerns with progressive policies. Disagree Better is not that. My focus is on conflict but the right kind of conflict. I want to give people permission to express strong ideological views but without hatred and contempt.

To my friends on the left: I understand your concern, but you will never persuade anyone or open their mind by telling them they’re a terrible person.

Perhaps the most difficult part of practicing healthy conflict is distinguishing between policies or arguments that are bad faith and ones we believe are merely wrong.

Constitutional scholar Tara Leigh Grove beautifully describes the importance of pluralism and persuasion.

Society and our legal system can work better if there is a background assumption that most people are operating in good faith and from sincere belief, even if they hold beliefs that you don’t share. This idea will lead to compromise and mutual understanding. I think many people in our society don’t think that’s a good thing. It’s about my side should win, your side should lose. I see this on both the left and the right. A broader functioning society recognizes, Let me be understanding toward one political faction knowing that I may not always win elections, and I would like to be treated with some good faith and understanding when I lose.

So how do we promote this “assumption of good faith” toward the other side? In our effort, we are inviting governors and other public officials to prominently model the right kind of conflict. Twenty governors have recorded Disagree Better ads, with most of those featuring a Republican and a Democrat standing side by side, acknowledging their friendship despite their disagreements. We believe, based on Stanford’s Strengthening Democracy Challenge's study and loads of anecdotes, that the ads do in fact reduce partisan animosity.

Beyond these ads, we’re thrilled to support the thriving ecosystem of scholars and practitioners working to reduce partisan animosity through evidence-based tactics. Governors, through Disagree Better, are helping these organizations expand in their states, exposing high-school students to those who are different, teaching college students the right way to debate tough issues, helping faith communities navigate divisive matters, instructing activists on both sides how to persuade rather than vilify, and much more.

Former World Bank economist William Easterly has suggested that grand plans to end poverty usually accomplish nothing, while smart investments in solving discrete problems can be quite effective. He’s right, and his lesson should guide our efforts to tamp down partisan animosity and return America to solving problems. Lofty plans will be less effective than our collective efforts to build the institutions in our communities, police the rhetoric of our own side, engage others with curiosity rather than contempt, reward the elected officials who defend our preferred policies respectfully, and help Americans emphasize identities other than their political identities.

Human history is replete with tyranny and violence. It would be a needless tragedy if we let America — the greatest idea and experiment in history — obsess over our differences while ceding our global leadership. The world needs America to show that our messy form of democracy is still the best system to solve problems, produce human prosperity, and protect freedom.

Spencer Cox, a Republican, is governor of Utah and chair of the National Governors Association, the public-policy arm of the 55 state and territorial chief executives.

The answer, however, is bigger than that, because if you encourage people to participate in something broken and dysfunctional, the result just deepens cynicism. We see this in research on the impact of corruption in developing democracies.

To earn the allegiance of rising generations to our form of government, political institutions need to be worthy of their time and effort. Redoubling efforts in civic education must go hand in hand with investments of time, treasure, and talent in renovating our democracy so it can live up to its promise of offering all citizens voice and choice as well as institutions responsive to our participation.

The 2020 “Our Common Purpose” report from the American Academy of Arts and Science lays out 31 recommendations to renovate our democracy. The goal is to deliver responsive governance supported by civil-society organizations that help people build bridges and that deliver a healthy media ecosystem. Those organizations in turn sustain — and are sustained by — a rich and nourishing civic culture.

Recommended structural reforms include: expansion of the U.S. House of Representatives in alignment with the growth and evolution of the population; term limits for U.S. Supreme Court justices to lower the political stakes of those appointments; voter-registration options on Election Day; ranked-choice voting to give candidates incentives to campaign in bridge-building ways instead of negative attacks; independent redistricting commissions that would end gerrymandering; and taxes on social media and revenue to sustain local journalism.

Yet the report left out two important themes: the importance of parties to the American system and the destructive consequences of how they currently operate.

As Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, argues eloquently in his new book, The Primary Solution, reforms to the party primary process in the 20th century have unintentionally radicalized our politics. Party nominating processes were brought out of smoke-filled back rooms and put on the public ballot, courtesy of taxpayer dollars. The goal was laudable — a transparent process. But unintended results followed. Fewer and fewer people vote in those public primaries. Now only small minorities of voters — and mainly those with the most intensely held views — participate.

When combined with gerrymandering that creates congressional districts dominated by one party, this results in very small percentages of voters electing the so-called representatives. Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene won her primary with votes from 8 percent of her district’s electorate. She then faced a noncompetitive general-election race. New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won with support from just 5 percent of the electorate in her district.

As primary winners increasingly reflect the radical views of their party, moderate voters cease participating. Just over half of American voters are now enrolled in political parties, down from a high of about 70 percent in the 1990s. And as those numbers decline and fewer voters participate in primaries, elected officials have ever more to fear from being “primaried” if they seek compromises or cross-partisan solutions once in office. Their ability to govern declines because of a set of perverse incentives.

To restore functional institutions — and healthy incentives for elected officials — we should adopt a single primary in which candidates from all parties run on the same ballot. The top four or five vote-getters would then move on to a general election with an instant runoff, ensuring that the winner will represent the majority of voters.

The renovations described above aren’t easy for people to get their heads around. Yet popular support is necessary to get the reforms off the ground. I recommend significant and sustained philanthropic investment in voter education and engagement around democracy renovation.

My organization, Partners in Democracy, runs democracy-renovation learning communities in Massachusetts, and we’re about to start in Ohio. We find it takes up to a dozen deliberative sessions for even highly informed civic participants to think through the pros and cons of potential reforms and come to firm and stable conclusions. You can’t get democracy renovation on the cheap, in the same way you can’t build your dream house with cut-rate materials. For decades, we have underinvested in the innovations that could help us newly realize democracy’s promise in rapidly changing conditions.

We have a long way to go on educating adults about what is possible in our democracy if we are going to be able to deliver to the kids a set of institutions worthy of their hearts, hands, and minds.

Danielle Allen is director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard, president of Partners in Democracy, and author of several books, including Justice by Means of Democracy.

But we are wrong to discount love. Love is not saccharine. It is not mere preamble to the “real” work of philanthropy. Love is the real work of philanthropy, and if what you’re doing is not loving, it is not philanthropy.

This is easier to see, perhaps, in direct-service efforts that feed the hungry and clothe the poor. Yet it is also true for civic philanthropy and philanthropic efforts aimed at knitting our country together.

We think love is too soft to effect change in a politics of power. We think the problems in our country are too hard, too big, too technical, for love. But love, according to Aquinas, is the “will to good” — to be committed to others and their well-being. If we are not doing that, if we are not willing the good of the people, communities, and societies we serve, what are we doing?

Too often in philanthropic work and democracy at large, we seek to influence people we do not love. This is dangerous. People are right to be suspicious of those who have the audacity to try to change them and shape their communities without the audacity to love.

Suzette Brooks Masters of the Democracy Funders Network has called for funders and nonprofits to reflect on how their work might fuel division and polarization — indeed, even when that work is done under the very banner of countering polarization and reducing divisions. Brooks Masters, who previously spent nearly a decade as a grant maker focused on immigration, describes how she oversimplified the opposition in her determination to "win" for immigrants suffering hardship. Focused on the importance of rejecting and undermining antisocial forces like nativism, she did not consider and respect that people might disagree for reasons that aren’t reducible to the most malignant forms of opposition.

While we must be clear-eyed about threats to our democracy, we must be clear-eyed enough not to make strident, “with us or against us” distinctions solely because we are confident that our distinctions are born of positive intentions. Our principles, our funding priorities, must derive from a care for the people we are serving and affecting, and they must be kept in subordination to those people. We must care more for people than our ideologies. If we are to act in philanthropy, we must do so out of love: our will to good.

There is no policy, no technique, to overcome a lack of love. This is inescapable. We cannot reliably build a democracy in which people will the good of others without love, because willing the good of others is what love entails. We cannot pursue social cohesion or building bridges or knitting people together as a means to some other end but because we believe it is good for people to be knit together. People can partner out of self-interest, but only love will knit them together.

This must be ever at the forefront of our minds, especially as our efforts grow in scale and ambition, from serving individual persons to “culture change” and political influence. Our politics requires reform, yes, but our politics needs most a new heart out of which good and just reforms can emerge. There is no plan or system that will make our democracy whole without love. Without it, our work is but a vain conceit.

Michael Wear is the founder, president, and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life. He is the author of the recently published The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.