As 2022 draws to a close, The Fulcrum has invited leaders of democracy reform organizations to share their hopes and plans for the coming year. This is the sixth in the series.
Santana is the director of the Boston Mayor’s Office of Civic Organizing. Chang is the co-founder and CEO of GenUnity, a civic well-being nonprofit.
We feel unbridled hope for our democracy heading into 2023.
The fissures in our democracy – from state voter suppression and gerrymandering to growing polarization – are urgent and existential. But, our 2022 elections showed us that people – from voters to poll workers to those working at NGOs – are willing to fight for democracy. Their efforts have given us an opportunity to not only repair the cracks of our democracy, but to build beacons of hope – shining examples of how our communities flourish when everyone is involved in the decisions that shape our lives. We are starting to build this beacon in Boston and invite you to join us.
Our urgent and existential democratic issues are deeply rooted, intertwined with history, culture and the ever-present challenge of who we share power with. Rising inequality, digital and physical segregation, and distrust have not only exacerbated these issues but challenged our fidelity in democracy itself.
Yet, our last election showed us that Americans are rising to meet the moment. The young people that polls said are disillusioned with democracy showed up and were critically influential in key races. People may be disillusioned with our democracy today, but they have hopes for what it could be and energy to not just survive but build a democracy that thrives.
Imagine a community built by everyone, for everyone. One where residents who want to drive change beyond Election Day can find pathways to do so. One where residents can come together across differences to share their lived expertise and learn from each other. One where the residents most impacted by an issue – like health equity – are collaborating with institutions – like local governments, health care providers or health insurers – to co-create better solutions. A community like this would be a beacon of hope, showing us that democracy can deliver our ideals of equal opportunity and helping us discover the path to get there.
We are building this beacon in Boston, a city emblematic of our ideals and the deeply entrenched issues we still need to address. From being the birthplace of U.S. democracy to the historic election of Mayor Michelle Wu, Boston has been a trailblazer for freedom and justice. At the same time, Boston’s distribution of power, resources and opportunities still falls along stark racial lines. Boston is the country’s 15th most segregated city, where the net wealth of the average white household is $247,500 compared to $8 for the average Black household.
Embracing the possibilities of Boston’s future begins with embracing the power of our residents and neighborhoods. To realize this bold vision for the city, Wu created the Office of Civic Organizing, which reduces barriers and expands opportunities for residents to be active citizens. Programs like the City Hall on the Go Truck bring City Hall services straight to residents in all of Boston’s 24 diverse neighborhoods. OCO supports community beautification projects through its Love Your Block neighborhood cleanup initiatives as well as through small grants to community organizations for projects like transforming a graffiti-covered bridge into a neighborhood art display and revitalizing a neighborhood park to include a lending library and climate-resilient plants. OCO encourages all kinds of community engagement and collaboration, including promoting neighborhood block parties and offering free Block Party Kits to residents including games, chalk and signage. Most recently, OCO launched a Civic Power Pledge to inspire and support residents and businesses to take everyday actions that build community and improve quality of life for all Bostonians.
In the coming year, OCO will collaborate with local nonprofits to create new opportunities for residents to build their civic agency. For example, GenUnity will launch its community leadership programs where both “proximate experts” experiencing local issues and “siloed experts” working in the public and private organizations meant to address them share their expertise, develop new ideas and execute on action plans. Over time, we plan to launch a collaborative ecosystem of partners to democratize, elevate and build the civic power of everyday residents to unlock transformational change. Critically, we will only succeed collectively, so we invite friends, neighbors and all others to join us.
Many might point to Massachusetts’ historic 2022 election as a sign the state’s democracy is strong and that we should focus instead on where democracy is most fragile. We strongly challenge this scarcity mindset that asks us to choose between providing emergency care to our democracy and treating the root-cause ailments. Today, philanthropy invests only 0.1 percent in democracy-strengthening work. Corporations are ncreasingly recognizing and embracing their role in promoting civic and community engagement. We can and should marshal the resources to do both.
If we do, local communities like Boston can become spotlights that guide our country toward its long-deferred promise of freedom and justice by means of democracy. So in this new year, we invite you to join us in Boston to build a beacon of hope for what our city and country can become.
Learn more about the City of Boston’s Office of Civic Organizing an d GenUnity, a nonprofit organization. Are you interested in making your city a better place? Sign up for the City of Boston’s Civic Power pledge here.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.