While questions about the size and role of government are highly politicized, most Americans are united in a desire for our government to be effective and efficient. Despite this, our national governing institutions are weakened by years of neglect and underinvestment. The federal government is beset with outdated systems ill-equipped for the twenty-first century and a demoralized and shrinking expert workforce. Partisan gridlock and insufficient resources perpetuate a vicious cycle in which national governing institutions struggle to deliver the results they aspire to, eroding public trust and therefore making it harder to secure the political support and resources they require to succeed. The historical lack of diversity in the senior federal workforce has led to programs failing to meet the needs of populations who are not represented in decision making processes. This lack of perspective in the design and implementation of programs not only limits their effectiveness, but also leads large swaths of the public to believe the federal government is not serving them or their families.

Highly functioning national governing institutions are more likely to restore the public’s trust and faith in democracy’s ability to deliver for all Americans. The effectiveness of our governing institutions matters on a basic level for making good use of public resources, delivering essential services, and ensuring that citizens experience the value of civic institutions. On a more existential level, our governing institutions need to be equipped to respond to the increasingly complex challenges of our time, including battling a global pandemic, managing a rapidly changing climate, modernizing our nation’s infrastructure, and mitigating the impacts of phenomena like inflation. Michael Lewis, author of The Fifth Risk, has noted that the “United States government manages the biggest portfolio of [catastrophic] risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world.”

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On November 21, 2022, PACE and DFN hosted a webinar to present newly developed evidence from four organizations–three of which were grantees from PACE’s Faith In/And Democracy Fund. During the webinar, each speaker presented evidence from their work and then participants engaged with the speakers in breakout room conversations.

VIEW HERE>

Building a robust, high functioning pluralist democracy in the U.S. capable of ushering in better futures for Americans requires us to think boldly and move away from reaction, apathy, and surrender. The extraordinary times we live in, full of rapid change, uncertainty and possibility, call upon us to identify and lift up positive disruptors who dare to dream and imagine what could be.

DFN’s report Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy is a call to action to imagine what our democracy could become. Informed by dozens of interviews with visionary thinkers and doers from a variety of fields and viewpoints, including futurists, activists, thought leaders, creatives, artists, religious leaders, and funders, the report shares their insights on why positive visioning matters, discusses how those visions of better futures relate to democracy and governance systems, and asks how we can inspire more Americans to dream bigger and develop a sense of agency to bring those ideas to fruition.

Read the full report here>

Below are the report’s key findings and recommendations:

Findings:

• Enthusiastic and emphatic agreement that positive visions of the future matter tremendously because they help us to imagine better alternatives, motivate us, and guide us to achieving positive societal outcomes. They also reinforce the idea that we have agency to shape our individual and collective futures and those of our descendants.

• Several points of disconnection – 

  • Few interviewees saw governance as critical to achieving the better futures they articulated, or had thought about how to improve and reimagine democracy.  

  • The future-oriented community seldom connects with the democracy community.

  • America lags in experimenting with new forms of future-oriented governance models and thinking.

  • The people we interviewed are also disconnected from each other, although there are some hubs and communities of practice that provide connective tissue that some interviewees are a part of.

• Many obstacles (e.g., complex problems from the local to the planetary, conflict-driven media and political environments, dystopian narratives, racism and othering) currently stand in the way of positive visions of the future emerging at scale.

• Positive stories about the future and narratives of mutuality and abundance exist but are barely breaking through in mass culture.

Recommendations:

While we have a strong foundation on which to build – great ideas, visionary leaders, real-world experiments, powerful stories about better futures, and media campaigns – we need more infrastructure and connective tissue to gain traction and impact.  Accordingly, we recommend three types of strategies:

Strengthen the positive visioning ecosystem by investing in infrastructure and relationships 

There are numerous ways to build and support an emerging ecosystem and to create connections between those broadly engaged in positive visioning and those working specifically on democracy issues. We recommend more networking, collaboration, and mapping, more productive chances to convene donors and working groups around the future of democracy, and greater use of futures thinking tools to change mindsets.

Model what’s possible and fund experimentation

We want to explore how to adapt governance innovations from outside the U.S. that incorporate a futures orientation, a longer planning horizon, and an intergenerational fairness lens. We also see promise in funding innovative efforts to strengthen and invigorate democracy in the U.S., especially at the state and local level, by using technology, engaging youth, creatives, game designers, and speculative fiction writers, and tapping into collective imagination exercises.

Strengthen narrative systems & amplify positive, futures-oriented content 

We need strategies that elevate and sustain narratives of abundance, interdependence, and mutuality and that amplify current bright spots for greater impact. Content also matters. We need more of it that’s positive, inspiring, and hopeful about what we can build together. That means influencing which stories are told, by whom, and how.

Read the full report here>

The Constitution Drafting Project brings together three teams of leading constitutional scholars—team libertarian, team progressive, and team conservative—to draft and present their ideal constitutions. Team libertarian was led by Ilya Shapiro, then of the Cato Institute, and included Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute and Christina Mulligan of Brooklyn Law School. Team progressive was led by Caroline Fredrickson of Georgetown Law School and included Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School and Melissa Murray of New York University School of Law. Team conservative was led by Ilan Wurman of Arizona State University College of Law and included Robert P. George of Princeton University, Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School, and Colleen A. Sheehan of Arizona State University.

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In this moment of crisis, donors must use all the tools available to protect American democracy. Tax-deductible philanthropy alone is insufficient.

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In case you missed DFN’s The Role of Faith Communities in Preserving Democracy program, PACE provided a summary of the webinar.

In this meeting, DFN explored key questions around the role faith communities can play in preserving American democracy: What can faith communities contribute to a pro-democracy movement? How can faith leaders and communities be mobilized to act in defense of democracy and resist embracing extremist and anti-democratic viewpoints? What are the potential benefits of faith engagement in the pro-democracy movement, and what do we risk by failing to engage religious communities?

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Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, Senior Advisor to DFN and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, authored a U.S. Democracy Funding Strategy report laying out a comprehensive strategic approach to the set of challenges facing our democracy and what we might do at scale to solve them. She lays both long-term and short-term critical strategies and offers pictures of 3 possible futures we might achieve through them.

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The Repub­lican Party’s trans­form­a­tion under Donald Trump may have seemed sudden, but it was decades in the making. From acclaimed New York Times polit­ical reporter Jeremy Peters, Insur­gency: How Repub­lic­ans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted, is a compel­ling look at the frac­tur­ing of the GOP and how party lead­ers misun­der­stood their own voters. Peters argues that by abandon­ing long-held pillars like small-govern­ment and fiscal respons­ib­il­ity, the party’s embrace of Trump­ism, along with its imper­vi­ous­ness to moder­at­ing forces, has exten­ded the life of the Amer­ican Far Right well into the next century.

Join us for a live conver­sa­tion between MSNBC polit­ical contrib­utor Yamiche Alcindor and Peters, as they discuss how ideo­logy and aggres­sion came to take hold of the Repub­lican party, and changed the course of Amer­ican polit­ics.

ViEW HERE>

Here at IP, we’ve been thinking a lot about democracy funding lately. We marked the one-year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection last week, and it’s the start of another election year (hooray!). But that’s only part of it. Over the longer term, the heated debate around our imperiled democracy is unraveling closely held preconceptions about nonprofit funding, sending civil society into terra incognita.

The federal workforce includes about 4,000 political appointees who are selected by the president, 1,200 of whom require Senate approval. Despite presidential interest in filling positions across government to advance political and policy objectives, the number of Senate-confirmed positions, along with the complexity of the appointment process, has resulted in a slowdown of confirmations and an increase in vacancies. This situation limits agency operations and reduces the president’s capacity to govern and the Senate’s power to hold officials accountable. This new report from the Partnership for Public Service offers seven potential approaches to streamline the political appointment process for positions requiring Senate confirmation. READ MORE>

Democracy is under severe threat in the United States and around the world, but figuring out how to use your financial resources to protect and sustain American democracy is no easy feat. For one thing, the decline of democracy is an incredibly complex challenge with a multitude of domestic and global drivers. Not only is the problem multi-causal, but the potential solutions are manifold as well. Finally, there are dozens of organizations in the field—many with similar-sounding names—and a plethora of networks, pooled funds, and other resources designed to engage donors on this issue.

What is an aspiring democracy funder to do? READ MORE>

At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. READ MORE>

Melissa Spatz of the Piper Fund makes the case for sustained investments at the state level to stop the further degradation of American democracy and begin to build a truly inclusive, multiracial democracy. READ MORE>

Unite America’s report The Primary Problem explores the many problems with our partisan primary system and explains why nonpartisan primaries give every voter an equal voice, have higher voter participation rates, produce more representative outcomes, and improve governing incentives by ensuring elected leaders are accountable to a broader swath of the electorate. READ MORE>

Bright Line Watch shares key findings from expert and public surveys on the state of American democracy. READ MORE>

A layman’s guide to understanding what the For the People Act is and why America needs it. READ MORE>

Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism--Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times.

But we've been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became--slowly, unevenly, but steadily--more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society on the upswing, more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. Sometime during the 1960s, however, these trends reversed, leaving us in today's disarray.

In a sweeping overview of more than a century of history, drawing on his inimitable combination of statistical analysis and storytelling, Robert Putnam analyzes a remarkable confluence of trends that brought us from an "I" society to a "We" society and then back again. He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community. READ MORE>

This outline from Bridge Alliance provides anoverview of the democracy field -- i.e. the current work to promote healthy self-governance. This co-created and community updated outline document combines civic engagement, electoral reform, policy and issue work of the many unique organizations and funders working within the political and civic reform sectors. READ MORE>

For two hundred years, the grand project of liberal internationalism has been to build a world order that is open, loosely rules-based, and oriented toward progressive ideas. Today this project is in crisis, threatened from the outside by illiberal challengers and from the inside by nationalist-populist movements. This timely book offers the first full account of liberal internationalism's long journey from its nineteenth-century roots to today's fractured political moment. Creating an international "space" for liberal democracy, preserving rights and protections within and between countries, and balancing conflicting values such as liberty and equality, openness and social solidarity, and sovereignty and interdependence--these are the guiding aims that have propelled liberal internationalism through the upheavals of the past two centuries. G. John Ikenberry argues that in a twenty-first century marked by rising economic and security interdependence, liberal internationalism--reformed and reimagined--remains the most viable project to protect liberal democracy. READ MORE>

Sonal Shah and Hollie Russon Gilman on three co-governance models the new administration can use to genuinely empower people, create more-equitable policies, and rebuild trust in democratic institutions. READ MORE>