Rebuilding the Relational Foundations of US Democracy

Long before extremism became a national headline, United Vision for Idaho (UVI) was listening to people in small towns and isolated counties, where authoritarian and extremist groups had been actively organizing for decades. Long before rural communities became the subject of post-election analysis, UVI was doing the work of organizing in places where public institutions had weakened, civic life had frayed, and distrust had become a precondition for authoritarian drift.

We at UVI, a statewide organizing network that I lead, understood that what had been taking shape in Idaho was part of a much larger nationwide strategy already underway.

For nonprofit leaders and democracy practitioners, these current conditions raise an urgent question: Why have communities become so deeply disconnected from the civic institutions meant to serve them?

Much of the nonprofit sector has focused its energy on policy advocacy, electoral mobilization, and organizing in urban areas. While those strategies remain essential, the experience of communities across rural and conservative regions suggests that rebuilding democratic participation requires something deeper: reinvesting in the relational infrastructure that allows people to see themselves as participants in a shared civic system.

The Oversight of Rural Communities

What we have witnessed across the country did not emerge overnight. It’s what happens when democratic institutions lose legitimacy, when entire communities are politically abandoned, and when people searching for belonging, coherence, and power encounter well-organized movements ready to offer all three.

While economic hardship is real…the deeper challenge is a waning belief in democracy itself.

When democratic systems fail to provide that, people do not stop searching for ways to make sense of the world—they find it elsewhere. Increasingly, authoritarian movements are persuasively claiming to provide what people are looking for, and doing so with precision, consistency, and long-term investment.

Despite rural places making up 20 percent of the population, only a small fraction of philanthropic dollars reach them. Social justice movements have left vast portions of the country behind. In practice, democratic outcomes are frequently determined by narrow majorities rather than broad consensus, meaning a small shift in public opinion can determine the result. This is why it is not just a moral failure but a strategic one to write off even 20 percent of the country.

Rural communities and conservative regions are too often cast as inaccessible, politically fixed, or strategically irrelevant, written off as red, rural, and conservative—and thus surrendered. But we should understand these areas as places where democratic fracture has been taking shape for generations, and where the consequences of institutional abandonment are being felt most intensely.

Rural and conservative communities often reveal the contradictions of US democracy more clearly than anywhere else. While economic hardship is real—declining infrastructure, limited healthcare access, persistent poverty—the deeper challenge is a waning belief in democracy itself.

The widespread belief that institutions, political parties, and national leaders have little interest in people’s lives or communities stretches across the political spectrum. But the sense of abandonment people living in rural places across the country feel is a powerful motivator to seek belonging and community from those there to offer it.

For decades, national discourse has treated rural places either as cultural curiosities or a political problem. Rarely have they been treated as critical sites for democratic renewal. That oversight has had profound consequences.

Ignored Signs

The warning signs have been visible for years. Over the past several decades, legal and institutional shifts have steadily reshaped the conditions of democratic participation, including the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which dramatically expanded the role of money in politics. A coordinated wave of state preemption laws beginning that same year enabled legislatures to override local decision-making on issues ranging from labor standards to environmental protections.

What once appeared as localized democratic strain—visible in rural communities for years—is now manifesting as a national condition.

Rulings such as Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) have since allowed extreme partisan gerrymandering to stand, reducing electoral accountability, and the aftermath of the 2020 election revealed unprecedented pressure on election officials as Donald Trump and his allies pushed to overturn certified results.

These developments have been reinforced by deeper structural changes that shape how power operates across the system. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 accelerated the consolidation of media ownership, contributing to the decline of local journalism and weakening shared civic understanding.

State legislatures have increasingly overridden voter-approved initiatives, taken control of local election administration, and expanded executive authority, further concentrating power. At the same time, a coordinated ecosystem of conservative-leaning organizations—including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and aligned state policy networks—has helped translate ideology into policy and scale it across jurisdictions.

Together, these shifts reflect a broader pattern: Participation is constrained, accountability is weakened, and power is increasingly centralized. What once appeared as localized democratic strain—visible in rural communities for years—is now manifesting as a national condition, reshaping political life across the entire country.

Political division today is no longer confined to elections or policy debates. It has seeped into the relationships that hold communities together. Families avoid political conversations. Friendships fracture, and neighbors stop speaking. Over time, these small fractures accumulate into something much larger: a society increasingly unable to deliberate collectively about its future.

This is the crisis we are facing. But it is a misdiagnosis to treat it solely as a problem of ideology, misinformation, or partisanship. At its core, this is a crisis of relationship.

The Willingness to Remain in Relationship

Our crisis of relationship is not theoretical. Today, nearly one in four people in the United States says political violence may be justified to “save the country.”

At the same time, many people report having few or no close relationships with people who hold opposing political views and avoid those conversations altogether. Research by the Pew Research Center and Public Religion Research Institute finds that many Americans have limited cross-party social networks and express discomfort discussing politics with those they disagree with. This is social fragmentation at a level that places democratic stability at risk.

A society that cannot sustain relationships across difference cannot sustain democracy. What makes this moment so consequential is that we are not witnessing a sudden rupture—we are witnessing the culmination of decades of strategic investment, institutional erosion, and relational breakdown.

Moments like this can be turning points that determine whether democratic systems are renewed or whether their erosion accelerates. The question is whether we are up to the challenge. Rebuilding democracy requires defending institutions, but it also requires rebuilding the relationships that make those institutions possible.

No political party will save democracy. No single leader will save democracy. And no election alone will save democracy.

Democracy will survive—if it does—because millions of ordinary people choose to stand together in defense of a shared future.

That work begins with something both simple and profound: the willingness to remain in relationship with people whose experiences, identities, and beliefs differ from our own. But most of our current strategies were not designed to rebuild relationships. They were designed to win outcomes.

We generally measure success through what is easiest to count—doors knocked, calls made, voters reached—while the deeper work of building trust, understanding, and shared purpose has been sidelined.

Organizing at the Edge of Democracy

This moment demands more than analysis. It demands honesty. We must be relentlessly critical of our own movements. What have we been getting wrong?
What have we failed to see? And what would it mean to organize in a way that actually meets this moment?

To organize at the edge of democracy is to work in places where hope often feels brittle. It means showing up in communities that have not seen meaningful investment for decades—if they have seen it at all. It means engaging in conversations across political divides that many consider unbridgeable. And it means recognizing something fundamental: Democratic erosion rarely begins in the places receiving the most attention. It begins in the places that have been abandoned.

Authoritarian movements understand this. Where institutions withdraw, they move in. Where communities feel ignored, they offer belonging. And where democratic movements fail to show up, they build relationships.

This is why rural and conservative communities are not peripheral to the future of democracy. They are central to it.

What often appears as ideological rigidity is frequently something else: the result of systemic neglect, fractured institutions, and the absence of meaningful engagement across difference. These are not communities beyond reach; they are communities that have too often been left out of the work of democracy itself.

If polarization is rooted not only in disagreement but in disconnection, then rebuilding democratic culture requires repairing relationships.

It requires a different approach than our current time-bound, scripted, and transactional persuasion tactics. This work demands curiosity, listening, and engaging in authentic dialogue through sustained human connection and relationship building.

Learn Directly from People

This is the premise that led us at United Vision for Idaho to launch the United Vision Project—a national organizing training and outreach initiative designed to engage people across extreme political divides through authentic, relational conversation. Since our launch in early 2021, we have reached 1.4 million people across 12 states, had 107,000 authentic conversations, discovered insights into the primary drivers of political behavior, and produced work that has shifted sentiment across division at a rate of 32.7 percent, according to United Vision for Idaho’s 2026 reporting.

Rather than assuming what drives polarization, or relying on polls, surveys, or secondhand accounts, the project set out to learn directly from people themselves through direct outreach: how they understand their experiences, what shapes their beliefs, what motivates their political behavior, and what opens—or closes—the possibility of deepening dialogue.

Through this work, we dispel many of the myths surrounding organizing in rural places. The program provides comprehensive training and opportunities for people and democratic practitioners to build skills to navigate complexity across any issue, find commonality, build trust and rapport in unlikely places—and transition their experience to their own communities.

What has emerged is a different way of organizing, with a proven record of effectiveness.

Democracy is not a static condition. It is a practice: one that requires ongoing participation, negotiation, and renewal. It is built through the everyday interactions that shape how people see one another, understand difference, and imagine a shared future.

When the cultural and social conditions that bind us together break, we need to look deeper than winning the next election; we need to find the will to rebuild the relational foundations that democracy requires—and invest in them again, intentionally, at scale, and in the places we have too often left behind.

That work is already underway. The question is whether we are willing to support a different kind of organizing that makes democracy possible and sustainable for generations to come.