Paving the Path for a Third Reconstruction

This article concludes NPQ’s series Toward a Third Reconstruction, co-produced with Dēmos. Authors in this series articulate why we need bold, courageous action to bring a Third Reconstruction within reach—and offer strategies for systemic change that can help us get there.

As the nation’s young, limited, and fragile multiracial democracy is tested, fraying under authoritarian executive actions of the Trump administration, the urgency of now makes it difficult to think expansively about the future.

As serial emergencies threaten to keep Black people and people of color perpetually off-balance—be it ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) terrorizing our communities, extrajudicial “disappearings,” de facto martial law, criminalization of racial equity, and more—history offers grounding by contextualizing the current emergencies. These are all part of a cycle of oppression, progress, and backlash that is the story of the United States.

The constructs of race, racism, and othering—catalyzed by White supremacist ideology, xenophobia, and colonialism—do not just keep us from an expansive vision of liberation. They fuel a perpetual cycle of redefining who the United States is for. Each time progress is made toward an inclusive, just society with a promise of liberty and justice for all, there follows a new season of retraction.

The First Reconstruction was a post–Civil War attempt to rebuild the nation, reclaim and more fully realize the ideals of freedom and liberty enshrined by the Constitution, and provide formal citizenship to Black Americans. But as we know, this inclusion was never fully realized and was largely reversed by Jim Crow in the South and racial discrimination in the North.

During Jim Crow, Black people and their allies fought for civil and human rights. Today…we can do no less than our forbearers.

The Second Reconstruction, also known as the modern Civil Rights movement, was a grassroots response to the authoritarian, oppressive governmental rule of Jim Crow. This movement built a new national consensus around racial justice and economic opportunity, made way for new civil rights laws, and created new tools (such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965) to make that vision a reality.

Since the close of the Civil Rights era 60 years ago, additional progress has been made. More prominent from our current vantage, however, is a protracted backlash that has rolled back those gains.

To escape this cycle, activists must both dream and plan. This is a tall order for those of us whose day-to-day lives take place in an increasingly oppressive and hostile world. In this time of pain, it may even seem impossible. But we do, in fact, possess many tools for liberation.

Those who fought before us beckon us to follow in their footsteps. Indeed, amid the most challenging context of slavery, enslaved people and their allies worked for abolition. During Jim Crow, Black people and their allies fought for civil and human rights. Today, as we face the latest antidemocratic, authoritarian regime, we can do no less than our forbearers. We must embrace and advance bold ideas like an expansive, inclusive participatory democracy.

Below, I lay out a Reconstructionist path forward. Advocates must begin by dreaming, by envisioning what radical citizenship could be. This goes beyond what seems possible at a time when we are struggling to simply defend what we thought we had achieved.

Dreaming

In Imagination: A Manifesto, Ruha Benjamin wrote that “radical imagination…isn’t counter to doing the work of changing our material conditions and improving our quality of life. Rather, radical imagination can inspire us to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is politically possible.”

This underscores that emancipation will only result from creativity—thinking beyond the range of ideas and approaches that we are explicitly and implicitly told are possible choices. We must shake off the constructs that have constrained us and replace them with something bigger, brighter. Something joyous.

Why can’t we believe bigger? Looking back, those who have been marginalized have forged paths of big dreams. Black, Latine, other people of color; young people; people with disabilities; LGBTQ+ people who came before us, all created joyous liberatory movements that insisted on inclusion and, more importantly, liberation.

Their movements challenged those who write the rules, demanding release from their oppressive systems. Today, these groups are growing. To escape minority rule in our country, we must think above and beyond the status quo. We must imagine a truly liberatory society that centers racial justice, one that can stop the cycle of retrenchment in its tracks.

We dream of achieving a world free from want not by way of benevolence by the powerful, but through a shifting of power.

It’s time to imagine a Third Reconstruction that continues the unfinished work of the Reconstructions that came before it, reclaiming and evolving a consensus around racial justice that goes beyond a circumscribed conception of political and civil rights. In this new consensus, all people will be granted radical citizenship.

In his contribution to this series, Peniel Joseph took us back to Dr. King’s “Beloved Community,” a vision of a society that has the things they need to live—affordable housing, freedom from hunger, basic healthcare, income, and safety. But the beloved community can also count on having less tangible, but not less important, things: dignity, agency, compassion, and the spiritual liberation that comes when a chronic fear of wanting for basic needs is eliminated.

The first necessary step toward a Third Reconstruction is ensuring each member of society freedom from want.

We dream of achieving a world free from want not by way of benevolence by the powerful, but through a shifting of power. Where everyday people hold and exercise power to say what their wants are and then to satisfy them.

We dream of a world where the government protects the public good and, even more, supports flourishing communities. We dream of a world where corporations hold less power, where the interests of the wealthy and corporate interests are not permitted to constrain the self-determination of everyday people, where they are not allowed to extract and must instead invest.

We dream of a world where private philanthropy is no longer necessary, because public goods are so expansive that the needs of people, the needs for material and spiritual sustenance, for food and shelter and for joy and frolicking, are met.

As King noted, “Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose.” Radical citizenship and radical power mean that everyone thrives, not merely survives, that everyone lives in their purpose, and that self-determination is fully realized for everyone.

Allowing ourselves to dream despite the pain is our first step. But how do we live into the dream? This is where planning comes in. Institutions must foster and bolster that dream. They must transform.

Transforming Social Norms for Inclusion

Transforming social norms is the most important and most difficult task required to bring about a lasting Reconstruction. Norms undergird policies, institutions, and daily practices. Yet, as evident during this period of retrenchment, they are also oddly ephemeral.

The nation is undergoing a seismic shift in understanding what behavior is appropriate for leaders, government, and individuals in society. This shift is terrifying, but it is also an opportunity. In moments of upheaval and discontent, there is space for new narratives to settle in as truths, and for those truths to take hold as new norms. We must shape our truth definitively and speak it loudly and repeatedly for it to take root in the cracks that have and will continue to emerge.

What is that truth? That truth is unapologetically centered around the imperative for racial justice. In this moment of intensified White supremacy, some shy away from explicit discussion of race and racial justice. But there can be no inclusive multiracial democracy without a commitment to rewrite our society’s racist rules.

This means sharply rejecting White supremacy and the anti-Blackness that animates it. Unless and until we have truly embraced a more expansive vision of who the United States is for, White supremacy’s reign will continue.

Since the nation’s founding, White supremacy has effectively divided people—extracting resources from them while preventing an expectation of shared prosperity from taking root. But escaping the trap of White supremacy lays the foundation for other norm shifts. On this foundation, a culture of collective responsibility that makes the beloved community a reality can be built.

A Third Reconstruction must introduce a social contract that says that all people have—by right of their innate humanity, not false constructs of deservingness—freedom from deprivation and the ability to experience dignity, peace, and joy.

Transforming Institutions

The nation’s institutions—and its bodies of government, learning, and commerce—are entangled in systemic racism, neoliberal ideologies, and other myths. To liberate ourselves, a Third Reconstruction must transform institutions and free them from these constraining frames.

Time and again, the US government has enacted policies that systematically exclude Black people and people of color from even limited democratic rights. The change needed in government institutions requires restructuring so that everyday people—their needs, their priorities, and their wants—are shaping policy decisions. That means getting money out of politics, co-governance strategies, expansive voting rights, and ultimately a more representative and accountable government.

Corporations hold outsized power in US society. A Third Reconstruction must transform the relationship between corporations and government so that those institutions serve citizens and consumers, not the other way around. Unless and until the nation changes who is valued in this economy, inequity will persist.

Building Power for the Demos

We will not realize a multiracial democracy if we do not shift the nexus of power, using what King called “the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change.”

To generate this strength we must build new forms of economic, political, and grassroots power. These three constituent forms of power reinforce one another. Economic power allows the people—the demos—to meet their basic material needs and fully participate in the political process. Political power means that government institutions are responsive to and representative of the needs of the people and thus ensure people’s economic needs are met. And grassroots power is the saving grace, the check, the balance, when these other forms of power break.

In a 2021 paper entitled “Introducing radical democratic citizenship: from practice to theory,” Zaunseder, Woodman, and Emejulu called for power that is organic, that is reactionary, that is insurrectionary, that we see in the streets and in the press and on the ballot, that is signed in ink on petitions demanding what is needed. This grassroots power holds all other power accountable.

We must understand the past to build a durable Reconstruction. The Third Reconstruction must go far beyond narrow policy prescriptions to pursue an inclusive vision that confers, by right, a set of material and moral benefits to everyone.

For the last 25 years, my organization has held a vision of a just, inclusive multiracial economy and democracy as our North Star. To achieve that vision, movements must dream boldly, plan wisely, and manifest a Third Reconstruction.

To be sure, the United States has long fallen short of its promise. But together, everyday people—the demos—can reset norms, rebuild institutions, shift power, and make good on the nation’s potential.