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.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.