Democracy for All 2021 Action is a national campaign committed to building power for the people and making our government work for all of us. Our diverse coalition includes labor unions, think tanks, racial justice, environmental, reproductive health, and community organizations that represent millions of Americans. We are working toward implementing deep reforms in 2021 to unrig our political system once and for all.
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Declaration of Independence
Housefinch1787, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Path to a Fourth Founding
Sep 28, 2026
For centuries, a grim pattern has governed how nations arrive at new political orders. An old order exhausts its legitimacy, the strain builds until it erupts into war, and only afterward do the survivors gather to write the terms of what follows: at Westphalia after the seventeenth-century wars of religion; at Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars; and at San Francisco after the Second World War.¹ In each case, the table was set only after the old world had died. Even then, the terms of the new order were not guaranteed. The liberal order that emerged after the Second World War — a framework of universal rights and democratic governance — was not secure until the Cold War ended forty-five years later, and it is still contested.
Given the current level of polarization and rising political violence in the United States, it is time to ask ourselves a tough question. Can we set the table for renewing our system of self-governance before the catastrophe? I believe the answer can be yes, if we find the will to come together across our lines of difference and excavate our common ground.
I spent my career assessing and supporting democracy abroad. Not long ago, I joined my colleagues — former American diplomats and democracy professionals — to turn our assessment framework on our own country. Our central finding was that the United States faces a consensus crisis: a breakdown in our shared agreement about the role of government, the rules of political competition, and national identity itself.²
What has frayed is our social contract — the agreement beneath all our laws about who holds power and how it is checked, who belongs in our country, and what we owe one another. The Constitution is the written expression of that social contract.
Sadly, our current political system will not repair itself, because these failures are products of its own incentives. In 2024, 87 percent of House races were effectively settled in primaries — decided by just 7 percent of eligible voters.³ The most expensive election in American history — roughly $15.9 billion in campaign spending, with the wealthiest one percent of donors supplying about half of all the money raised — has put the price of being heard beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.⁴ An officeholder’s surest road to defeat is no longer to fail the country but to be challenged from the extreme of his or her own party. Those who hold the privilege of power under such rules will not, of their own accord, surrender the advantages the rules confer.
What is a Founding?
Americans have faced moments like this before — and answered them with what we rightly call our Foundings. By a Founding I mean a two-part test: first, the people renegotiate the fundamental terms of the social contract, in other words we decide to treat each other differently and engage with our institutions in new ways, and, second, they write the result into the Constitution, beyond the reach of any single election to undo. Our First Founding — from the Declaration of Independence through the 1787 Constitution and the Bill of Rights — set the original terms. The Second Founding remade our social contract and system, but only after the Civil War, following the grim pattern of history. The Reconstruction Amendments ended slavery, guaranteed citizenship and equal protection, and forbade denial of the vote on account of race.⁵
Entrenchment in the Constitution is what distinguishes a Founding from ordinary reform. Still, the renewal of a country’s social contract goes deeper than the amendments that anchor it. A social contract is lived in statehouses, city councils, and communities, not only in the Constitution’s text. The Second Founding, for example, also included the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau, civil rights enforcement statutes, and state-level changes. The amendments were the keystone that locked the rest in place.
Which was our Third Founding? There is disagreement on this point. Some scholars point to the New Deal, which recast the relationship between citizen and government.⁶ A rising account — embraced by a bipartisan national commission on our democracy — counts the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.⁷ My own view is that the women’s suffrage movement counts as a Founding. As the legal scholar Reva Siegel has shown, the Nineteenth Amendment “transformed We the People — not simply by adding voters, but by democratizing the family” — a renegotiation of the social contract that was also entrenched in the constitutional text.⁸
We do not need to settle that argument here. Whichever account you hold, the Third Founding is spoken for — it lies in the past. What matters is that, in the twentieth century, Americans renewed our social contract without a civil war. The suffragists won their transformation by amendment, through decades of organizing, and the Civil Rights Movement won through disciplined nonviolence. These examples prove that Founding-scale change without catastrophe is not a fantasy. It is part of our inheritance.
Why do reforms struggle to hold?
Despite these achievements, the twentieth century also carries a warning. Much of what the New Deal and the civil rights revolution built lived in statutes and reversible court rulings rather than in the Constitution’s durable architecture. In recent years, the Supreme Court has narrowed the Voting Rights Act and ended race-conscious admissions, dismantling by reinterpretation what was never anchored in the country’s foundational text.⁹ The result is an exhausting pattern: reforms are won and unwon as power changes hands, with no endgame in sight.
Meanwhile, the one instrument our country has for making change durable has seized up. Members of Congress have introduced more than ten thousand constitutional amendments since 1789; only twenty-seven have ever been ratified, and only one since 1971.¹⁰ The Equal Rights Amendment demonstrates the challenges: Congress passed it in 1972, the thirty-eighth state voted to ratify it in 2020, and the amendment still failed — a process fumbled across five decades of missed deadlines, rescinded ratifications, and court rulings. Amid today’s polarization, the Constitution has become, in practice, unamendable — so change migrates instead to the courts, whose reinterpretations, unlike amendments, can always be undone.
The need for a Fourth Founding
This is why I believe the work of our generation is a Fourth Founding. I am not the only one. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ bipartisan Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship — launched at the challenge of Stephen D. Bechtel Jr., a Republican philanthropist — reached the same conclusion. Its 2020 Our Common Purpose report found that the conditions of the twenty-first century “pose an urgent threat to the future of our democratic way of life” and therefore require a fourth founding.¹¹
A Fourth Founding would mean renewing our social contract — finding new ways of living together across our lines of difference — and entrenching the deepest common-ground reforms into the Constitution before a significant violent rupture rather than after one. Let me manage expectations clearly: a Fourth Founding would not entail enshrining one faction’s agenda as the will of the whole. What a genuine consensus process settles on would look less like any party’s platform than like the sober center — and that is the point. Although there is research demonstrating that Americans have plenty of common ground, we should not presume the answers. To determine the national consensus on what kind of country Americans want to live in moving forward, we propose to co-create a legitimate, lawful process that lets the American people deliberate on this question.
That raises an important question: by what process could a free people renegotiate its social contract in peace — with everyone at the table and legitimacy no one can deny? That is the subject of my next essay: the Great American Deliberation.
Danielle M. Reiff is a retired American diplomat, peacebuilder, and writer.
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A personal 9/11 reflection on American resilience — how ordinary kindness, community, and quiet strength endure amid political noise and division.
Jacob Wackerhausen/Getty Images
America’s Quiet Strength: Rising Above Power, Chaos and Cruelty
Sep 28, 2026
As Americans look back on 9/11 in this 250th year, we remember a nation shaken — yet rising, again and again. America is cracked, but Americans are not broken. Our resilience is the quiet force holding this country together.
Today, we find ourselves in a moment thick with noise — global conflicts, corruption, rising prices, healthcare struggles, and political division designed to exhaust us. Every day brings a new headline, a new crisis, a new attempt to distract or divide. The chaos, fatigue, and uncertainty are real. Yet even in this noisy, chaotic time, Americans continue to rise — not because life is easy, but because rising is who we are.
Across the country, Americans are searching for ways to survive the noise — corruption, turbulence, and dysfunction. They are navigating an affordability crisis dismissed as a “hoax,” a healthcare system buckling under pressure, a measles outbreak, and rising global instability, including the Iran war. They are watching unqualified people confirmed to positions of national importance while an election-denying president dominates the news cycle, abuses the office, and evades accountability. They see institutions strained, rights challenged, and democratic norms tested. Many are simply trying to hold on — to their peace, their sanity, their hope.
And in the middle of all this, Americans turn toward one another — toward kindness, community, faith, humor, and resilience — because that is where real care still exists. In the absence of compassion from the top, they make the most of what they have.
But chaos is not the whole story. Noise is not destiny. And noise is not who we are. Through it all, Americans continue to rise. I saw that resilience on 9/11. Living in California, my husband — who worked in aerospace — narrowly missed his flight to New York. My cousin’s subway train in Manhattan stalled underground. One of my Muslim teachers told me her husband did not want her to come to work because he feared she would be mistreated. She said, “My principal values diversity — she will keep me safe,” and she came anyway. My niece in northern Virginia watched military planes fly overhead. In those hours, Americans of every background prayed together, comforted one another, and showed extraordinary courage. I remember asking my entire school to pause for a moment of silence. Even in unimaginable grief, America rose.
Hard times do something unexpected: they make love stronger. Couples hold each other closer. Friends become anchors. Communities tighten their circles. Look at the neighborhoods surrounding Haitian families and other immigrants — people who came to America, built lives, contributed to their communities, and helped make those communities stronger, only to find themselves facing fear, uncertainty, and political hostility. Yet communities stepped in. Neighbors share food. Families donate to food banks even when their own budgets are thin. People with almost nothing find ways to give. My mother used to say, “You can’t miss what you have never had.” And she was right. Americans know what it means to depend on one another. They rise through empathy, connection, sacrifice, and love.
There is also a striking contradiction. The president is the son of an immigrant, and he has married two immigrant women: his late first wife, Ivana Trump, who was born in Czechoslovakia, and his current wife, Melania Trump, who was born in Slovenia and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Both are white European immigrants. Yet Haitian and other immigrants of color can find themselves facing fear, uncertainty, and political hostility. America is not strengthened by deciding who is worthy of belonging. It is strengthened when people see one another as human beings worthy of dignity.
Just today, my nephew sent me pictures and videos from Symphony in the Park in Atlanta — a huge crowd of diverse people gathered under the open sky. “Everybody is here,” he said. And he was right. People of every background were talking, laughing, sharing food, and enjoying the evening together. Strangers spoke with strangers. Families relaxed side by side. Here they were, choosing joy over noise, community over cruelty, and connection over division.
Even now, Americans continue to show quiet acts of goodness. My sister in Virginia found herself part of a “pay it forward” chain at Walmart. I experienced it myself in a fast-food drive-through — someone paid for my order. I watched a man in a grocery store hand a woman two dollars when she was short on her bill. “Take the $1.67 and keep the change,” he said. No politics. No division. Just humanity.
A grieving mother adopted a five-year-old girl her late daughter had planned to adopt, carrying forward her daughter’s love. A waitress patiently read a menu to a confused customer, restoring their dignity. An older man paid for another person’s groceries and simply said, “Been there, kid.” These moments are not small. They are evidence of who we are.
America may feel far from the country many of us remember. This administration has cast a cloud over that spirit — a cloud of cruelty, division, intimidation, and corruption. But resilience remains the quiet force holding this country together. Americans are struggling to endure an affordability crisis and a political crisis at the same time. Yet they smile. They rise.
My mother taught my siblings and me something simple that stayed with me throughout my life: Don’t look down. Keep your head up. Look toward the heavens and smile.
I did just that.
Years later, I had a supervisor whose tactics seemed designed to break people. I watched adults under his supervision cry, quit, give in, or become loyal to him simply to survive. He once asked me why I was always smiling. He told me people were suspicious of me because I was always smiling.
I looked at him, smiled, and walked away.
He could not break me. He did everything he could to keep me from being promoted, but his tactics did not work. Thank goodness I had learned something long before I entered that workplace: another person does not get to decide whether I surrender my spirit.
People need to remember that inner strength now. Resilience is not pretending hardship does not hurt. It is knowing that hardship does not have to define you. Sometimes strength is simply keeping your head up, looking toward the light, and refusing to let someone else take your joy.
Do not give in to the noise. Weed through lies and conspiracies. Do your research. Seek the truth. Remember the past, especially when leaders claim they “did right by you.” Make a plan to vote. And vote.
Don’t get sidelined by party loyalty, election interference, or intimidation. Protect your voice. Protect your power. Protect the Republic.
Protect something else, too: your inner strength. Step away from the noise when you need to. Look up. Smile. Breathe. Stay connected to people who remind you of hope and possibility. Believe that your effort matters.
My mother used to say, “No one can take your joy. You can give it away, but no one can take it.”
She was right.
We may not be able to control every storm around us. But we can decide whether we will surrender our humanity, our hope, our voice, or our joy to it.
America’s quiet strength has always lived in its people.
And still, we rise.
Carolyn Goode is a retired educational leader and former principal who has spent her career advancing civic responsibility, equity, and public engagement. She writes about democracy, leadership, and the values that strengthen American communities.
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A theological look at addiction recovery: why faith communities matter alongside treatment, and how loneliness fuels dependence in America.
Luis Alvarez/Getty Images
Recovery Is Sacred Work: Faith, Belonging, and the Crisis of Dependence
Sep 28, 2026
September’s observance of National Recovery Month gives us a chance to celebrate people rebuilding their lives after substance use and mental health challenges. It should also force us to ask an uncomfortable question: What kind of society leaves so many people desperate to escape their own lives?
Addiction is often described as an individual disorder. Clinically, that description matters: substance use disorders affect the brain, behavior, judgment, and physical health. Yet addiction does not develop in a vacuum. It can take root in grief, trauma, chronic pain, economic insecurity, family rupture, social isolation, or a loss of purpose. Recovery therefore requires more than abstinence. It requires a life in which connection, dignity, responsibility, and hope become possible again.
Faith-informed support can make a real difference because recovery is both personal and communal. Faith communities are often among the few institutions that can accompany people for years rather than weeks. Treatment programs may end. Insurance coverage may run out. Caseworkers change, and friends sometimes disappear. A healthy congregation can remain present through relapse, reconciliation, job searches, court dates, funerals, and ordinary Tuesday evenings when loneliness becomes especially dangerous.
That presence is not a substitute for professional treatment. Prayer does not replace medication, psychotherapy, detoxification, harm-reduction services, or emergency care. The strongest faith-informed response respects clinical evidence and understands spiritual care as one part of a wider network. It does not ask people to choose between God and medicine. It recognizes that healing may arrive through physicians, counselors, peer specialists, family members, support groups, and communities of worship.
For many people, spiritual practices contribute something clinical systems are not designed to provide: a moral and spiritual language for suffering. It allows a person to say, “My life has meaning beyond what I have done or what has happened to me.” It offers rituals for grief, practices of confession and forgiveness, opportunities for service, and a story large enough to hold both failure and hope. At its best, faith insists that no human being can be reduced to a diagnosis, criminal record, relapse, or worst decision.
That conviction is urgently needed in an era marked by loneliness, dependence, and fractured belonging. Our culture celebrates independence, but many people experience it as abandonment. We are connected to devices and detached from neighbors. Work is often insecure. Families are geographically scattered. Public spaces where people can gather without spending money have dwindled. Digital platforms promise community while training us to perform, compare, consume, and remain online. The result is a society crowded with communication but starved of dependable presence.
Co-dependence takes many forms. Some people depend on alcohol, opioids, stimulants, gambling, pornography, or compulsive shopping to quiet distress. Others become trapped in digital habits that provide stimulation without intimacy. These behaviors are not morally or medically identical, and careless comparisons can trivialize the lethal reality of substance use disorders. Still, they share a social context: a growing struggle to tolerate pain, form durable bonds, and find meaning outside consumption.
A socio-theological response begins by challenging the fantasy of the self-sufficient individual. Human beings are dependent creatures. We enter life dependent on care, remain dependent on relationships and institutions, and often leave life dependent once more. The problem is not dependence itself. The question is what—or whom—we depend upon, and whether those relationships lead toward freedom, responsibility, and mutual care.
Faith traditions have long taught that people belong to one another. In Christian language, the community is a body whose members cannot dismiss one another as unnecessary. Jewish teaching binds love of God to justice, memory, and communal obligation. Islamic practice joins worship with charity, discipline, and care for the vulnerable. Across traditions, the person is not imagined as an isolated consumer but as a neighbor, kinsperson, worshiper, and moral agent.
These teachings carry social consequences. If recovery is treated solely as a matter of private willpower, society can congratulate the successful and condemn those who struggle. A theological view of human interdependence tells a different story. It asks whether communities provide housing, health care, meaningful work, transportation, food, safety, and companionship. It examines how racism, poverty, incarceration, disability, and untreated trauma shape exposure to addiction and access to recovery. It calls for personal responsibility, but refuses to use that phrase as an excuse for public indifference.
Faith communities must also examine their own failures. Some have treated addiction as evidence of weak belief or secret sin. Some have pressured people to disclose painful histories without protecting their privacy. Shame has driven people away from congregations at precisely the moment they needed trustworthy support.
A recovery-centered theology must reject these patterns. It should understand relapse not as proof that a person is beyond hope, but as a serious event requiring renewed care, assessment, boundaries, and treatment. It should train clergy to recognize overdose risk, suicidal behavior, trauma, and domestic violence. Congregations should keep naloxone available where appropriate, build relationships with local treatment providers, support families, and create pathways into peer-led recovery groups. Good intentions are not enough; compassion needs competence.
Intervention also needs care. Families and clergy may feel compelled to confront someone whose substance use is placing lives at risk. Such action can be necessary, but it should not become an ambush built around humiliation. Effective intervention protects safety, names specific harms, offers realistic treatment options, and sets clear boundaries. Qualified professionals should guide it whenever possible. The goal is not to win an argument. It is to open a door while refusing to cooperate with destructive behavior.
Most of all, people in recovery should not be treated merely as recipients of charity. They are leaders, mentors, parents, workers, ministers, artists, and neighbors. Their experience gives them knowledge that institutions often lack. Any serious recovery ministry should include them in designing programs, shaping language, training volunteers, and evaluating results—nothing about people without them.
National Recovery Month celebrates progress, but recovery is rarely a clean ascent. It is usually built through small acts repeated over time: making a call, attending a meeting, taking prescribed medication, telling the truth, repairing a relationship, surviving a craving, finding safe housing, or returning after a setback. Faith-informed communities can honor this slow work by remaining steady when dramatic testimonies give way to ordinary life.
The deepest promise faith can offer is not that suffering will disappear. It is that suffering need not sever a person from human dignity or communal belonging. Recovery becomes possible when people encounter treatment that respects their bodies, relationships that survive honesty, and communities that expect responsibility without withdrawing love. In that shared work, healing is not only personal; it is communal and enduring.
September should remind us that recovery is more than a personal victory. It is sacred social work. When a person finds a path out of dependence, the whole community receives an invitation: to become less judgmental, more truthful, better trained, and far less willing to let anyone heal alone.
Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson is a spiritual entrepreneur, author, and scholar-practitioner whose leadership and strategies around social and racial justice issues are nationally recognized and applied.
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Faith leaders can help renew America's social and civil contracts by protecting every eligible vote and honoring lawful results. Here's how to get involved.
adamkaz/Getty Images
Dignity, Democracy, and the Courage to Stay Engaged
Sep 28, 2026
Crises are arriving faster than we can absorb them: climate, loneliness, artificial intelligence, housing, addiction, debt. In communities across Washington state, what I see is not mainly anger. It is a sense of being overwhelmed.
When everything feels urgent, people are tempted to withdraw. And when enough of us quietly withdraw, we can begin to believe that nothing works anymore and the rules no longer apply.
In moments like these, we need to return to essential questions: Who counts as fully human? What respect do we owe one another? And how will we put those answers into everyday practice?
Our religious and ethical traditions carry generations of reflection on these questions. In my Christian tradition, every human being bears the image of One Creator. Every one. That conviction challenges every attempt to reserve dignity for the powerful, the familiar, or our own group. My belief in One Creator commands me to recognize all people as human beings—joined in a dignity and identity that transcends our differences.
Jesus spoke of “another commandment like” belief in One Creator: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” It refuses to let us love only our own group, for we are part of a larger one: human.
Apply this to elections: The right to vote is based on the dignity of every person and the worth of every group.
Other traditions offer their own understandings of compassion, reciprocity, responsibility, and accountability. Their differences matter. And yet even though our beliefs are very different, the basic moral agreements in these traditions are strikingly similar.
Call this our social contract: the commitment to treat one another as people whose dignity and well-being matter. We inherit this contract, but each generation must decide whether to practice it.
Our civil contract gives the social contract a public framework: constitutions, laws, courts, elections and terms of office. It establishes how we exercise power, resolve disputes and hold leaders accountable at scale.
The Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” named a promise the nation’s founders did not fully achieve. Slavery, the treatment of Indigenous peoples, and exclusion of women were embedded in our beginnings. Yet, inspired by the founders’ vision, generations of Americans have worked to make equality a reality. The response to a broken promise is not to abandon it, but to make changes to fulfill it.
Our traditions don’t just carry values; they remind us that multiple values inform our actions. The prophet Micah calls us to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. Justice and kindness, love of self and neighbor belong in the same life.
Apply this to elections: Only eligible voters should vote. Every eligible voter should be able to vote safely and have that vote counted accurately. These commitments support each other. Together, they protect our shared ability to choose our leaders.
Free, fair, and safe elections also require a commitment that lasts beyond Election Day: honoring the lawful outcome. Recounts and legal challenges have their place. We must examine evidence and correct errors through established processes. Our willingness to accept the result cannot depend on whether our preferred candidate wins.
That is where our two contracts become personal. Can I recognize my neighbor’s equal standing when their vote helps defeat my candidate? Can I remain committed to our shared rules when I am disappointed or afraid?
Faith communities can help us practice those commitments. Congregations, synagogues, mosques, temples, and sanghas ground people in the deep values of the social contract. They offer places to grieve, examine our conduct, repair harm, and begin again.
The work is ordinary and concrete. Help people register and vote. Encourage people across political differences to serve as poll workers. Check rumors before forwarding them, starting with the ones that flatter your side. Pray publicly for an honest count and for the losing side’s dignity. Commit in advance to nonviolence. When something goes wrong, pursue accountability through lawful means.
This is the purpose of Faith in America, a partnership that includes Paths to Understanding, Braver Angels, and Interfaith America. We are inviting people across religious and political differences to support free, fair, and safe elections. We provide resources to help leaders in doing so. www.braverangels.org/faith-in-america.
Online prayer gatherings are planned for October 11 and November 1. The invitation also includes recording a one-minute video explaining why these elections matter, ideally alongside someone with whom you disagree.
These actions make a public promise: We will stay engaged. We will protect one another’s participation. We will hold ourselves to the commitments we ask others to keep.
An election cannot resolve every crisis. But how we conduct it — and how we respond afterward — helps determine whether we retain the capacity to face those crises together.
We inherit teachings about our obligations to one another. We write rules for our common life. In this anxious moment, we must renew both contracts through what we do and how we respect each other.
That is how we build a country where we can belong and thrive together.
Rev. Terry Kyllo is a Lutheran pastor and directs Paths to Understanding, a Washington State organization working to gather neighbors and grow trust, and a leadership partner in Faith in America.
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