The Long-Term Futures Work of Building a Better Democracy

As we face ongoing crises in our democracy both at home and abroad, almost everyone I’ve talked to feels that they’ve done good, necessary work, but the field, collectively, still isn’t meeting the moment. From our perspective, that feeling often comes from the tension between short-term urgency and long-term necessity. Even if we all do the right things for the next two to four years, the lingering sense is that we are not getting to the root causes that will ensure we have a democracy over the next 50 years.

In 2025, attacks on our institutions and civil society scaled up significantly.

But that gap—between individual excellence and field-level insufficiency—is an opportunity. Democracy 2076 was launched to step into this gap, identified in the 2022 report Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy, to prioritize long-term future work in the effort to protect democracy.

The Case for Expanding Democracy

In 2023, I made the case for expanding the landscape of democracy work. At that time, I critiqued national progressive organizations for standing up against all parts of the authoritarian playbook, and I critiqued national pro-democracy organizations for not engaging on the issues most critical to voters—leaving grassroots organizers unsupported by both types of organizations.

In 2025, attacks on our institutions and civil society scaled up significantly. Political violence has garnered national attention. National progressive advocacy organizations fully understand the full scope of the authoritarian playbook—those attacks are often directed at them. Even parts of civil society that would not identify as progressive or even political, such as food banks, are feeling the crushing weight. And progressives have organized effectively in response. The “No Kings” protests, for example, have shown strategic discipline and broad appeal.

However, as national progressive organizations have more explicitly used the language of democracy, I have observed that people might not be clear on the distinction between attacks on liberal democracy and policy disagreements.

Democracy is governance by the majority, and liberalism is about protection of individual rights. Attacks on either, such as attacks on elections or attacks on free speech, would be considered attacks on liberal democracy. However, choices about housing, healthcare, and policing would fall more in the realm of policy debate. It is important for us to be clear about these distinctions.

Why? First, if everything is a five-alarm fire and there’s no room for reasonable people to disagree, that could lead to fearmongering and dogmatism, which animates authoritarians. Second, if we lack clarity on the reasons policy issues fail—Is it because our system fails to represent the will of the people? Or because the issue is not popular with the majority of Americans?—how can we make any meaningful progress?

Meanwhile, the pro-democracy ecosystem has not improved at speaking to the issues that matter most to voters. While some funders are issuing specific RFPs on economic justice after the 2024 election, the sector overall is still defined by organizations that care about process over policy.

These are the types of organizations that focus on things like free and fair elections and would push back on Biden’s use of emergency powers for student debt relief on process grounds, whose affirmative agendas would not focus on issue-based policy, such as legislation on student debt relief, and instead would focus on reforming emergency powers.

Only 3.5 percent of voters share this position, saying that they would abandon their policy positions if their party’s candidate were bad on democracy. In other words, the overwhelming majority of US voters will stick with their party’s defined policy issues even if that party is threatening democratic principles. In the absence of leaders speaking to voters on relevant issues and showing how democracy can deliver on those issues, people are open to authoritarian alternatives.

This is further complicated by the fact that voters on all sides of the political divide believe they are pro-democracy. For example, the people who have consistently challenged the 2020 election results and participated in the January 6 attacks believe they were and are defending democracy, not attacking it.

This is why it is increasingly important to talk to voters about specific issues where the divides can be more clearly understood, such as the shooting of civilians in Minneapolis. This takes democracy from an abstract concept or process to a material reality and demonstrates that there are consequences to real people for its erosion. This is also where proactive and affirmative coalitions can be built. Rather than talk in broad concepts about executive overreach, we can be more specific about the appropriate role of federal law enforcement, the tools and tactics they should be allowed to employ for their jobs, and the oversight and accountability needed for their actions.

Building a Lasting Democracy

A challenge for both the national progressive ecosystem and the pro-democracy ecosystem is that both of these movements are primarily reactive and defensive. This intuitively makes sense since the current pro-democracy ecosystem was largely borne out of a defensive reaction to the 2016 election. I find it more surprising that this also seems to be true for issue-based progressive organizations.

After the 2024 election, I reached out to a few progressive organizations working on universal basic income (UBI) and immigration to ask how they were thinking about opportunities to work with the Trump administration. I was hearing from more centrist colleagues that Elon Musk was interested in UBI as a way of mitigating concerns about job losses due to technology and Trump might be open to this approach given that he’d sent checks out in the first term with his name on them as part of pandemic relief. I had also heard from people on the center-right that perhaps after deportations, political space would open for comprehensive immigration reform and they were working to be prepared for such an opportunity.

By contrast, the general consensus from progressive organizations was that no one was thinking about working with Trump—people didn’t want to legitimize the administration or give them their support.

On the one hand, this makes sense—if you value democracy, then you shouldn’t work with an authoritarian. On the other hand, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of political reality. Trump’s administration does not need nonprofits to give it legitimacy; the election did that. Furthermore, they don’t need the endorsement of progressive organizations to enact policy; they have the requisite power in Congress to do that. The question is whether there is opportunity to influence the administration’s policy agenda in a way that we would prefer and, ideally, in ways that are pro-democracy.

So, how do we decide how much to engage? And how do we ensure that engagement doesn’t equal endorsement?

These questions are complicated if you believe that democracy delivering results for voters is part of what makes voters believe in democracy. If we want to ensure democracy delivers results so that voters believe in it, then we need to engage with power structures as they exist in order to deliver results. Many organizations are getting around this dilemma by focusing their attention on the state and local levels where the choices aren’t so stark. However, in a national news environment, it is challenging for state and local examples to break through and impact voters’ opinions of democracy.

One notable example where local politics did break through was Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City. Mamdani’s subsequent White House appearance clearly demonstrates that it is possible to engage the president without endorsing his approach or policies. Importantly, Mamdani had to have amassed enough power that Trump was willing to meet with him without the promise of an endorsement.

Another path forward is to ensure our work is not solely reactive and defensive. While it can be challenging to identify opportunities to be proactive and offensive, I think this is where long-term futures work can be helpful—by extending the timeline beyond one administration, or even one decade, we can begin to get clarity on what “good democracy” looks like for the long-term future and build a proactive, affirmative agenda that addresses the challenges of the future, not just the problems of the past.

In 2023, Democracy 2076 convened organizers from 43 states to consider how the country might evolve over the next 50 years and what changes to the Constitution we will need to ensure a democracy that is responsive, representative, and effective in light of those changes. At the start of our process, only 7.5 percent of participants had confidence that we are prepared for the challenges of the next 50 years; by the end, 75 percent were confident that a set of solutions existed.

Long-term futures thinking offers a way to break out of reactive habits and align around the democracy we actually want to build.

We can also use a longer timeline to test our choices, not only to examine whether a reform helps us win now, but also to determine whether it creates a system we can live with later, regardless of who is in power. For example, just five years after the start of Biden’s presidency, it seems obvious that he should have done more to constrain executive powers. His reluctance to constrain his own powers to achieve his policy agenda looks short-sighted in light of Trump’s attacks—especially given that some of Biden’s biggest priorities, like student debt relief, were ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court anyway.

The Potential of Long-Term Futures

While preserving executive powers might feel advantageous when “your side” holds the office, those same powers will be available to an authoritarian successor. But this is also why it’s important to build constituencies for pro-democracy reforms by tying them to issue areas. Biden could decide not to constrain executive power in part because voters were not demanding that he do so. Voter constituencies allow reforms not only to pass but also be sustained. In this vein, the question for progressive and pro-democracy organizations must shift from “What can we get done now?” to “What reforms would be optimal over the next century?”

This does not mean that we shouldn’t take big swings. In fact, I’d argue that we’re not taking enough big swings. The Democracy 2076 convening on constitutional change surfaced ideas like getting rid of elections in lieu of sortition, abolishing the Senate, and a right to health. These ideas may seem impossible right now, but we cannot assume that what is politically possible is fixed; in reality, these boundaries shift over decades. Instead, we should be intentional in identifying where incrementalism could be prudent versus where it becomes a form of slow death—and how this could push us to imagine solutions that match the scale of the challenges ahead.

Ultimately, both progressive and pro-democracy organizations are doing meaningful work, but there are still opportunities to improve. Long-term futures thinking offers a way to break out of reactive habits and align around the democracy we actually want to build. If we can widen our horizon, distinguish real threats from policy disagreements, tie democracy reforms to issue-based fights, and take bolder, better-aimed swings, we can ensure we have a democracy that is effective, responsive, and representative—not just for the next election cycle, but for the next generation.