The Work of Democracy

Since its founding in 2020, the United Vision Project has reached more than 1.4 million people across 13 states and engaged in more than 107,000 conversations. Of those conversations, more than 48,000 have continued over days, weeks, or even longer, providing rare insights into what is driving authoritarian drift—and what it will take to reverse it.

Through our Authentic Relational Conversations (ARC) and Authentic Relational Organizing (ARO) models, participants engage across differences while challenging political stereotypes, building trust through genuine curiosity, deepening understanding, and creating opportunities to discover shared interests from which collective action becomes possible. This is the patient work of rebuilding the social fabric upon which democratic life depends.

These conversations reveal that today’s political divisions are rooted not simply in ideology or policy preferences, but in deeper questions of meaning, dignity, recognition, agency, trust, identity, and belonging. Again and again, participants describe feeling invisible, disconnected, and politically homeless. As isolation replaces connection, suspicion replaces trust, and fear replaces curiosity, people begin searching for certainty, community, and someone to blame. That is where authoritarian movements often find their opening—not simply because of what they believe, but because of what they provide.

Civic Abandonment

When communities lose the institutions that connect people to one another, they lose far more than services.

Our research reinforced what organizers, and democratic theorists have long understood: People are not simply searching for information. They are searching for belonging, connection, and purpose. Nearly 58 percent of participants primarily identify with a political or social group they believe is for people like themselves, while only 8 percent identify economic hardship as their primary political motivation. Material hardship matters, but belonging often shapes how that hardship is understood—and where people look for answers.

While rural and conservative communities comprise roughly 20 percent of the country’s population, multiple analyses estimate they receive only 6 to 7 percent of philanthropic funding in a typical year.

These are places that have long experienced a decline in local newspapers, civic associations, labor unions, community organizations, and other institutions that once connected people to one another and to public life. The result has not simply been economic hardship, but civic abandonment. When communities lose the institutions that connect people to one another, they lose far more than services. They lose the capacity to solve problems together. They lose trust. They lose shared identity. They lose confidence that democracy can improve their lives.

And when communities feel abandoned long enough, something inevitably fills the void. People never stop searching for belonging; they simply look elsewhere to find it. Authoritarianism does not emerge in a vacuum. It grows where democratic institutions have slowly disappeared.

Over the past several decades, extremist organizations, White nationalist groups, anti-government movements, conspiracy networks, and increasingly sophisticated ideological ecosystems have stepped into spaces where democratic institutions retreated.

Building Power

Long before much of the country began confronting today’s authoritarian politics, Idaho had become a proving ground for many of the forces now reshaping the nation. White nationalist organizations, anti-government movements, Christian nationalist networks, and ideological institutions spent decades building relationships, leadership pipelines, media ecosystems, and political influence in communities that had been written off by many national organizations.

Lasting political power is rarely built during election cycles. It is cultivated over decades through organizing, leadership development, institution building, and sustained investment—and the battle for American democracy is increasingly being fought through institutions most Americans rarely notice until they are already under extraordinary strain.

As politics has become increasingly nationalized, decisions once viewed as local now carry profound national consequences. Well-funded advocacy organizations, ideological networks, and special interests have spent decades investing in state legislatures, judicial races, attorneys general, governors, secretaries of state, think tanks, litigation, and model legislation because they understand that lasting national power is often built state by state rather than election by election.

But controlling institutions is often more durable than winning individual elections. The goal is not simply electoral victory but the ability to shape the institutions that determine how power is exercised, protected, and transferred. Decisions about voter registration, certification, litigation, ballot access, and election procedures made in a single state can now reverberate across the country.

For example, Christ Church in Moscow, ID, founded by Douglas Wilson in 1975, has grown from a small local congregation into one of the most influential institutions within the modern Christian nationalist movement. What began as a local church has expanded into a sophisticated network of schools, publishing houses, media platforms, churches, leadership development organizations, and affiliated institutions that now reach hundreds of schools and congregations across the US and internationally.

In 2026, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth invited Douglas Wilson to lead a Christian worship service at the Pentagon. Reporting by The Washington Post and Military.com noted Hegseth’s longstanding relationship with Wilson’s work and highlighted the growing ties between Christian nationalist networks and federal power.

While places like Idaho are often dismissed as too conservative, rural, or politically inconsequential to justify significant investment, these movements made a different calculation. They listened, organized, recruited, and built institutions. And that turned into power that now reaches from rural communities into the highest levels of American government.

Authentic Relational Organizing

If authoritarianism is built through relationships, then rebuilding democracy must be as well.

Political identity increasingly functions as social identity. People are often motivated less by policy preferences than by questions of status, recognition, community, and belonging. These are not fringe dynamics but are the very dynamics through which movements are built. Human beings are social creatures—wired for connection, shaped by the communities to which we belong and wounded by the communities we lose.

What happened—and continues to happen—in Idaho should not be viewed as an anomaly. It should be understood as a warning.

When lived experiences are validated and people feel seen, heard, and valued, they are more likely to form trust with one another and develop the ability to work together across differences for their shared interests—and are far more likely to participate in civic life.

We repeatedly encounter people searching for purpose, agency, recognition, and belonging. That does not mean all grievances are equal. It does not mean all beliefs are equally valid. But it does suggest that if democratic movements hope to compete with authoritarian movements, we must become better at meeting the human needs those movements have learned to exploit.

We’ve found that when people are approached authentically and with genuine curiosity, personal and political transformations are within reach. UVI’s research in a study of 6,500 conversations shows a 32.7 percent sentiment shift across extreme political differences after conversations occur. This work shows that beneath the noise of our politics, most people are carrying stories of fear, loss, hope, and contradiction that rarely fit neatly into the categories we assign them.

Statistics tell us what people believe. Relationships help us understand why.

The Work of Democracy

Several years ago, a potential funder came to Idaho to learn about our work. About 50 miles outside Boise, we stopped at an old gas station that sold fresh produce, local goods, antiques—and Confederate flags.

I introduced myself to Randy, the owner, and told him what I did.

He looked at me and smiled. “Well,” he said, “I guess we’re on different sides of the political aisle.”

“Maybe,” I replied. “Let’s find out.”

What followed was a 45-minute conversation about healthcare, family, agriculture, economic change, community decline, and political division. At one point, Randy’s wife spoke through tears about losing loved ones while struggling to access affordable healthcare.

“People don’t understand,” she said. “It’s not that we don’t believe everyone should have healthcare. It’s that the insurance companies are getting richer and richer while we are all getting sicker and sicker.”

Randy told us how they had restored the old station to help support their daughter after her husband was paralyzed in a trucking accident and denied compensation. He talked about young people leaving town, family farms disappearing, rising political hostility, and his fear that the divisions consuming the country were destroying the sense of community that had once defined their town. He talked about his fear that disputes were no longer being settled with words, but with guns or knives.

None of these concerns fit neatly into the caricatures we often construct about one another. They were deeply human concerns.

As we prepared to leave, I asked Randy a question, mostly for the benefit of my colleague because I already knew what his answer would be. “What would happen if we walked out to my car and it wouldn’t start?”

He looked genuinely puzzled. “Well,” he said, “I’d call my friend who’s a mechanic. He’d come down here, we’d figure out what’s wrong, and we’d get you on your way.”

That answer captured something I have encountered repeatedly in rural communities. Beneath all our political conflict, Randy’s first instinct was community. His first instinct was still to help.

Months later, I returned with 15 national leaders during a rural democracy tour. We spent another hour and a half talking with Randy. Before leaving, I asked about the Confederate flags he had been selling when I first visited.

He looked down for a moment, then he said quietly. “Since the last time you were here, we don’t sell those anymore.”

What made that moment meaningful was not simply the outcome. It was what the process revealed.

The change did not emerge from public shaming, social pressure, or an argument that proved him wrong. It emerged through authentic dialogue that led to relationship. Through trust and genuine curiosity, moments like these create the space for reflection, for grappling with the complexities that shape people’s beliefs, and for finding the grace to reconsider them.

Resisting authoritarianism therefore begins long before an election.

The lesson is larger than one conversation. Democracy survives or declines through the choices ordinary people make every day.

We each bear some responsibility for the moment we are living through and how we choose to move through it. It is tempting to locate responsibility somewhere else—to place it entirely on politicians, political parties, media companies, billionaires, corporations, extremist movements, or institutions. But democracy has never been something that happens outside of us.

Power is not only taken. It is also given—surrendered when we disengage, when we stop participating or retreat from public life because we decide politics has nothing to do with us or that our actions don’t matter.

Authoritarianism depends on that surrender, on people believing they are powerless. It depends on isolation, exhaustion, and the conviction that someone else will fix what is broken—or that nothing can be fixed at all.

Resisting authoritarianism therefore begins long before an election. It begins in how we show up for one another, whether we choose curiosity over certainty, inclusion over exclusion, or courage over cynicism. And whether we continue to believe that ordinary people can shape the future of their communities.

Democracy will not be sustained by spectators. It will be sustained by millions of ordinary people willing to protect it, practice it, and continually reimagine it.

Civic Institutions

Democracy depends not only on individual participation but on the institutions that help people participate together. Throughout American history, civic organizations, local nonprofits, congregations, unions, neighborhood associations, independent media, and community groups have served as the connective tissue of democratic life. They develop leaders, cultivate trust, convene neighbors, and create opportunities for ordinary people to exercise collective power.

If democratic resilience depends upon strong civic institutions, then the conditions facing those institutions should concern us all. Today, that civic infrastructure is under extraordinary strain.

The question, then, is not simply why authoritarianism is growing. It is whether democracy is still investing in the institutions capable of competing with it.

Many philanthropic foundations that have long anchored and sustained the civic work upon which democracy depends have become increasingly cautious, slowing and reducing grantmaking or ending their support entirely. Across the nonprofit sector, foundation and nonprofit leaders increasingly describe a climate of uncertainty unlike anything they have experienced.

While many of these foundations often espouse values rooted in expanding freedom, justice, and opportunity—and possess the resources to support organizations working toward those ends—their retreat has left countless nonprofits facing unprecedented demand with fewer resources.

The consequences reach far beyond the organizations themselves. Every nonprofit that closes, every organizer who leaves the field, every local institution that loses the capacity to bring together neighbors or develop new leaders weakens civic infrastructure. The loss is cumulative, measured not simply in programs or budgets, but in relationships, leadership, trust, and the ability of communities to resist authoritarian movements already investing heavily in those same places.

Civic organizations are facing what many leaders describe as an existential crisis. Many are reducing staff, scaling back programs, exhausting reserve funds, contemplating mergers to survive or simply shuttering.

Extending beyond the fate of any individual nonprofit, the cumulative effect is profound. As civic institutions recede, movements dedicated to exclusion, grievance, and authoritarian politics continue investing in recruitment, leadership development, communications, training, and community formation.

Perhaps the greatest asymmetry between authoritarian and democratic movements is not ideology but time. One invests for generations. The other increasingly operates one election, one grant cycle, one campaign, and one news cycle at a time.

Organizing for Structural Change

The responsibility of our movements wasn’t to function as an extension of any political party, but to build the independent power of ordinary people capable of holding every political party accountable to the people we claim to stand for and with.

Increasingly though, mobilization has supplanted organizing. The authentic relational organizing work at its heart—the slow work of building trust, developing leaders, and cultivating community—is too frequently displaced by reward for pursuing impermanent and incremental short-term or electoral victories, which make transformational change much more difficult to achieve.

The crisis we face is not only about what has happened to our orientation around this work but, what has happened to organizing in this country. The exclusive nature of prodemocracy organizing, despite the claims of inclusiveness and “talking to people across difference” (which rarely means what it purports) reveals deep cracks in our own movements. Purity tests, ideological litmus tests, increasing sensitivity to personal comfort, and an aversion to complexity and conflict are not preparing us for the work before us. Instead, they are too often deepening our divisions while weakening our collective ability to build the broad movement this moment requires.

Meeting this moment requires us to recognize it soberly for what it is and to organize in every place. It requires building alignment across a broad spectrum of people stretched throughout this country. Millions of Americans are ready and willing to fight for something larger than themselves if we are willing to invite them into a movement rooted in courage, accountability, belonging, and shared purpose rather than perpetual conflict.

People across the political spectrum are searching for something our movements have too rarely offered: a credible path toward structural change.

In thousands of conversations, people from every background have expressed to us their desire for legislation that would hold our systems and our elected officials to account. Given the invitation and opportunity to explore their ideas, people are much more united around structural reforms that would produce meaningful change and restore trust in our institutions. In our work, we find universal agreement from Democrats, Republicans, Independents, or disaffected voters alike that they want actionable, systemic change that holds elected officials accountable. They enthusiastically embrace ideas to implement reasonable term limits, end lifetime judicial appointments, impose codes of ethics, ban private profiteering from lobbyists and corporate influencers and uphold serious consequences for violations. They agree that an overhaul of national budgetary priorities is necessary to reverse the extraction and concentration of wealth by corporations and billionaires, and that wealth should instead flow to services and institutions that provide opportunity and support for the people who fund them.

Frustration that meaningful change is out of reach often gives way to the seduction of a
burn-it-down mindset. People are looking for movements willing to champion real structural reform and radical transformation. And this should serve as a warning, because if progressive movements are not unified and prepared to meet that need, people will seek it elsewhere.

History and Collective Action

Building on generations of struggle, people organized. They built trusted relationships and alliances. Leaders rose up from every community, formed coalitions, and connected them. They kept organizing, building, and harnessing power until they mobilized it into realities that no administration could ignore—winning the rights, freedoms and liberty that we have come to understand as the American identity.

The Civil Rights Movement did not succeed because any administration wanted to expand civil liberties and freedoms. Administrations were forced to deliver them by the actions of millions of people who united and harnessed their power. Those gains were not made because of a single leader, a single organization, or a single moment of moral awakening—and certainly not by a political party. The movement succeeded because a vast network of people and organizations spent decades building the relationships, leadership, and civic infrastructure necessary to sustain collective action.

The victories we celebrate—the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Freedom Rides, voter registration campaigns, Freedom Summer, the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act—were not spontaneous events. They were the result of years, and often decades, of relationship building, community organizing, leadership development, training, fundraising, coalition building, and coordinated action.

The Work Before Us

Democracy survives because people participate in collective life. It survives because communities possess the relationships, trust, leadership, and institutions necessary to solve problems together. And yet much of our political culture today behaves as though change happens differently. We invest enormous attention and resources into elections while underinvesting in the organizations that help people participate between them.

Perhaps more than any other time, our democratic institutions are being tested and dismantled, and consolidation of authoritarian power will take decades, if not lifetimes, to remedy. These are perilous times. Democratic institutions matter enormously—and they only exist because ordinary people build, sustain, defend, and renew them.

For some, that work will look like organizing and activism. For others, it will mean mentoring young people, supporting local journalism, participating in mutual aid, serving on community boards, helping neighbors, or simply refusing to retreat from civic life.

It may mean supporting nonprofits, local institutions, independent media, and community organizations that strengthen civic life; donating money, time, skills, passion, or labor on a regular basis. It may mean paying closer attention to the information we consume, where it comes from and what motivations underlie every message. It may mean being conscious about where we spend our money, and refusing to reward businesses, institutions, or leaders who profit from division or undermine democratic norms. It will mean staying endlessly curious and refusing to let others divide us, seeing one another as our power, not our problem.

History rarely remembers those who protected themselves from risk. It remembers those who accepted responsibility for the moment they were living through and rose to meet it. Every democratic expansion in this country’s history was built by people who refused to believe they were powerless or that history’s trajectory was inevitable. They found one another. They organized. They built communities of belonging. Together, they changed what was possible.

That remains the enduring lesson of democracy. Its story has never been one of perfect agreement. It has always been the story of imperfect people choosing, again and again, to build a future together despite their differences.

That is the work before us now.