Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Reform in 2023: The challenge to our democracy – 2012, 2022 and beyond

challenges for democrzcy
Valentyn Semenov/EyeEm/Getty Images

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 fifth in the series.

Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

As we approach the end of 2022, I reflect on my journey that started 10 years ago to repair the political culture and political processes in our country. As I reflect, I realize how much has changed during that decade, unfortunately not for the best.

Ten years ago, I spoke at public events about the need for civil political discourse and a problem-solving approach to governance. In 2012, the unbridled lack of civility, crippling partisanship and dysfunctional gridlock that were preventing our country from solving the serious problems we were facing on a daily basis was top of mind for me.

Those problems of course still exist today and are certainly an important component of the work I do through The Bridge Alliance, The Fulcrum, and Citizen Connect but something else has changed dramatically. Today, almost two years after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on our democracy, I am now also focused on the need to protect and defend democracy to ensure its survival. And I’m not alone.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter


This is a major shift in thinking.

As recently reported in The Fulcrum, While partisan divides may keep Americans from agreeing on much, post-election polling by Georgetown University found that three-quarters of Americans agree that "democracy is under attack.”

While we agree that our democracy is under attack, the extent of the divide is so great that we can’t even agree as to the root causes. If we can’t agree on the causes, finding a solution to the threat becomes yet another unsolvable problem that is the result of our nation's partisan divide. For example, many more Democrats than Republicans are worried about election deniers threatening democracy while Republicans think voter fraud and the impact of “woke culture'' are the greatest threats to our democracy. Each claims the other is invoking authoritarian measures through election-rigging, infringement of free speech and abandoning the U.S. Constitution.

The impact of social media in the last 10 years is one of the greatest threats that must be addressed. The extent in which social media encourages division, facilitates confirmation bias and weakens the institutions needed to uphold our democracy is increasing at an alarming rate. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the case eloquently in his writing in The Atlantic titled, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Haidt is clear as to the impact of social media upon our democracy:

A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.

While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive. He continues:

When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.

Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: The rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

While it is tempting to just give up given the complexities of the problem facing our democracy, my belief in the ability of We, the People, drives me to work with others to find a better way.

We must create a new vision of what democracy is that includes a robust role for citizens.

I recently was inspired by a project titled, “Imagining Better Futures For American Democracy.” It was “born of a desire to gain succor and inspiration from those within and outside the democracy space who not only aren’t giving up, but instead are moving beyond critique and reaction to creation, who are inspiring those around them, generating abundant visions of better futures ahead, and laying the groundwork for achieving them.”

This is the role of Bridge Alliance, The Fulcrum and Citizen Connect. A place where people come to meet, talk and act into our future, to engage citizens and empower democracy. We lay the groundwork, along with others we know and have yet to meet, for the citizens of the United States so we can reclaim our rightful place of power and set our nation on the course towards a future we co-create.

And so I look to the future with hesitation but with hope – the hope as stated in the Better Futures report: A community “will emerge with a wide range of civil society actors who want to become part of a burgeoning positive visioning community – one capable of mobilizing and engaging growing numbers of people to realize better futures, including a robust, effective and healthy democracy.

I end with this inspiring song of democracy that hopefully will inspire you as well – well worth two and a half minutes to remind us what we have and what we could become.

"Democracy (Reprise)" from SOFT POWER | The Public Theaterwww.youtube.com

Read More

Complaint Filed to Ethics Officials Regarding Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
red and white x sign

Complaint Filed to Ethics Officials Regarding Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick

On Friday, March 21, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) related to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick urging the purchase of Tesla stock on March 19th.

CLC is a nonpartisan legal organization dedicated to solving the challenges facing American democracy. Its mission is to fight for every American’s freedom to vote and participate meaningfully in the democratic process, particularly Americans who have faced political barriers because of race, ethnicity, or economic status.

Keep ReadingShow less
Understanding the Debate on Presidential Immunity

The U.S. White House.

Getty Images, Caroline Purser

Understanding the Debate on Presidential Immunity

Presidential Immunity: History and Background

Presidential immunity is the long-standing idea that the president of the United States has exemption from liability or legal proceedings for acts related to the duties of presidential office. Contrary to popular belief, presidential immunity is not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution; only sitting members of Congress are explicitly granted judicial immunity through the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. Rather, the concept of presidential immunity has arisen through the Department of Justice’s longstanding policy against prosecuting presidents in office and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Article II, which has developed through a number of Supreme Court cases dating back to 1867.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donald Trump
President Donald Trump.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Trump 2.0: Navigating the New Political Landscape

With Trump’s return to the White House, we once again bear daily witness to a spectacle that could be described as entertaining, were it only a TV series. But Trump’s unprecedented assault on our democratic norms and institutions is not only very real but represents the gravest peril our democratic republic has confronted in the last 80 years.

Trump’s gradual consolidation of power and authoritarian proclivities, reminiscent of an earlier era, are very frightening on their own account. But it is his uncanny ability to control the narrative that empowers him to shred our nation’s fabric while proceeding with impunity. His actions not only threaten the very republic that he now leads but overturn the entire post-WWII world order, which is now in chaos. Trump has ostensibly cast aside the governing principle with the U.N. Charter of Sovereignty. By suggesting on multiple occasions that the U.S. will “get Greenland one way or another,” and that Canada might become our 51st state, our neighbor to the north is now developing plans to protect itself from what it views as the enemy across the border.

Keep ReadingShow less
Free Speech and Freedom of the Press Under Assault

A speakerphone locked in a cage.

Getty Images, J Studios

Free Speech and Freedom of the Press Under Assault

On June 4, 2024, an op-ed I penned (“Project 2025 is a threat to democracy”) was published in The Fulcrum. It received over 74,000 views and landed as one of the top 10 most-read op-eds—out of 1,460—published in 2024.

The op-ed identified how the right-wing extremist Heritage Foundation think tank had prepared a 900-page blueprint of actions that the authors felt Donald Trump should implement—if elected—in the first 180 days of being America’s 47th president. Dozens of opinion articles were spun off from the op-ed by a multitude of cross-partisan freelance writers and published in The Fulcrum, identifying—very specifically—what Trump and his appointees would do by following the Heritage Foundation’s dictum of changing America from a pluralistic democracy to a form of democracy that, according to its policy blueprint, proposes “deleting the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), plus gender equality, out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation and piece of legislation that exists.”

Keep ReadingShow less