Mario H. Lopez is president of the Hispanic Leadership Fund, an advocacy organization that promotes liberty, opportunity, and prosperity for all in public policy. The interview is part of a collaboration between Bridge Alliance and CityBiz entitled Repairing America's Broken Democracy.
creative image of Chantal
In 1972, I taught at a Boston prep school where one of my students, Chantal, had been sent from Haiti by her privileged family to complete her secondary education. She was poised, serious, and ambitious. But what I remember most was her fear — and her warning.
"You Americans don't know how lucky you are," she would say, speaking in hushed tones about people who disappeared without warning under Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's brutal regime. She'd describe how neighbors would simply vanish. Not political activists, just ordinary people who'd said the wrong thing to the wrong person.
"The smart ones learn to be quiet," she'd say, "but quiet people can't save a country." Even the privileged, she explained, were not immune when danger lived in silence.
Fifty years later, watching American democracy strain under unprecedented pressures, I finally understand what Chantal knew instinctively: that constitutional protections mean nothing without the institutional will to enforce them, and that authoritarianism rarely announces itself with jackboots. It arrives quietly, through normalized corruption and rewritten rules.
The Supreme Court's July 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States granted presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official acts, a dramatic expansion of executive power. Combined with the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which the ACLU describes as authored by "140 former Trump staffers" as "a roadmap for how to replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals," and research showing the US is on track to lose its democracy status within six months, we're witnessing a fundamental challenge to American democratic institutions.
This moment feels unprecedented to many Americans. But Chantal would recognize it immediately, and so should we if we remember our own history correctly.
The Gilded Age We Never Fully Left Behind
Americans often invoke the Gilded Age as a period of entrepreneurial greatness, but we rarely reckon with its systematic brutality. From 1870 to 1900, government wasn't captured by wealthy interests — it was designed by them, for them. Railroad barons wrote transportation policy. Steel magnates controlled labor law. Political machines brokered democracy behind closed doors while children lost limbs in unregulated factories.
The parallels to today are instructive. According to inequality researchers, the top 0.01% of families now control 10% of the country's wealth, surpassing even Gilded Age levels. More concerning is institutional capture—contemporary movements systematically placing allies throughout the federal judiciary, election systems, and regulatory agencies.
The difference is scale and sophistication. Where Gilded Age corruption was often transactional---direct bribes, patronage jobs---today's influence operates through legal structures: dark money networks, regulatory capture, and constitutional interpretation that
This is what Chantal recognized instinctively. The real danger isn't dramatic coups, but the quiet rewriting of rules. In the 1970s, Haiti's Duvaliers maintained a constitutional facade while ruling through fear and patronage, illustrating how formal protections can be meaningless without genuine institutional safeguards.
Unlike the original Gilded Age's limited voting rights, today's crisis unfolds within the context of universal suffrage. This makes the current moment both more concerning and more hopeful—democratic tools are accessible to far more people than robber barons ever faced.
But there's a crucial lesson from that earlier era: what feels permanent can change rapidly when enough people refuse to accept it as usual.
When Silence Broke
The Progressive Era didn't begin with Theodore Roosevelt's "Square Deal" or with landmark legislation. It started with journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens who refused to accept that inequality was natural or that corruption was inevitable. Ida Tarbell exposed Standard Oil's monopolistic practices through rigorous investigation. Jane Addams created models for how government could serve public welfare rather than private interests.
These reformers understood something crucial: democracy isn't a system you inherit. It's something you build, continuously, through institutions that distribute power rather than concentrate it. Their innovations laid the foundation for 20th-century American governance, including antitrust law, workplace safety regulations, public health systems, and civil service reforms.
What We're Building Now
Today's democratic innovations are emerging at the state and local level, where federal gridlock has created space for experimentation. From ranked-choice voting to participatory budgeting to proportional representation, communities are testing reforms that distribute power more broadly and create incentives for coalition-building rather than polarization.
More significantly, a new generation of reformers is tackling structural problems the Progressive Era left unfinished, developing frameworks for constitutional democracy and building movements that don't rely on traditional party structures.
Chantal would have understood the fragility of these experiments. In Haiti, she'd seen how quickly democratic innovations could be dismantled when power was concentrated in the wrong hands. "It's not enough to build good things," she might have said, "you have to build them strong enough to survive the people who want to tear them down."
But unlike the Progressive Era's reforms, which ultimately required federal legislation and presidential leadership, today's innovations face a more challenging landscape. The Supreme Court's current composition appears hostile to voting rights and campaign finance reform. Congressional gridlock makes it nearly impossible to pass major legislation. And the information environment makes building consensus around shared facts increasingly difficult.
The Work of Democracy
Chantal understood that democracy isn't passive; it's something you do continuously. Progressive Era reformers created new forms of democratic accountability for industrial capitalism; however, we now need innovations designed to address today's challenges, including global capital flows, digital systems, and political polarization.
What Chantal Would Say Now
I think Chantal would recognize both the danger and the opportunity in this moment. She understood that authoritarianism succeeds not only through dramatic coups but through the gradual normalization of corrupt practices, and that it can be stopped by people who refuse to accept that normalization.
I wonder what Chantal would make of Americans who dismiss concerns about democratic backsliding as "alarmist." She'd recognize that dismissal. It's precisely what privileged Haitians told themselves right up until the moment their privilege couldn't protect them anymore.
She also understood that privilege provides no protection when institutional guardrails collapse. In Haiti, wealth and status held little value when the rule of law was absent. In America, constitutional rights mean nothing without institutions willing and able to enforce them.
But Chantal also knew something else: that people who understand the fragility of democracy can become its most effective defenders. She didn't flee Haiti because she was powerless. She was sent away precisely because her family understood how quickly any remaining freedoms could vanish entirely.
That's the choice facing Americans now. We can assume our democracy is self-sustaining, or follow the example of Progressive Era reformers and people like Chantal, who understood that democracy is something you build, not inherit.
The work begins with refusing normalized corruption. Support the Fair Representation Act, proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, and participatory budgeting. Contact your representatives about the Freedom to Vote Act. Join organizations like FairVote, RepresentUs, or the Participatory Budgeting Project. The innovations essential to preserving democracy are happening now. The question is whether we'll scale them fast enough.
You Americans, Chantal might say today, still don't know how lucky you have been, but you might be starting to learn.
Edward Saltzberg is the Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum and writes The Stability Brief.
The administration’s deployment of the military in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., on a limited basis tests using the military to overthrow a loss in the midterm elections. A big loss will stymie Project 2025, and impeachment may perhaps loom.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the president have said L.A. is “prelude to what is planned across the country,” according to U.C. Berkeley law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. Chemerinsky reports that on June 8, “Trump said, ‘Well, we’re gonna have troops everywhere.’” The Secretary of Homeland Security recently announced that in L.A., “Federal authorities were not going away but planned to stay and increase operations to ‘liberate’ the city from its ‘socialist’ leadership.”
Additional Democratic-controlled cities appear to be targeted.
The president claims that protestors “hate” America. He inveighs against an “enemy within,” including accusing former President Barack Obama of treason. The president roused soldiers at Fort Bragg against his political opposition. MAGA hats were sold on the base. In renaming bases, he seeks to honor Confederate generals who rebelled against the Constitution. The president attacks and demeans the judiciary.
Congress has ceded its power to check the president. The Speaker of the House has declared that California’s governor should be tarred and feathered, a process that can cover a person with hot tar.
Here’s how the election might be undermined.
The president’s executive order on elections, among other provisions, bars counting absentee and mail-in votes that arrive after election day, greatly increases proof of citizenship requirements, and limits permissible voting systems. At least two courts have so far invalidated a number of the requirements, including that absentee and mail-in ballots not be counted after election day. The president now threatens another executive order that would bar mail-in voting altogether.
Confusion, delay, and disorder can arise with the legal status of his executive orders, having them potentially tied up in court or subject to conflicting or unclear court rulings. The president’s call for an atypical reapportionment in Texas can trigger reapportionments in red and blue states that may be tied up in court, adding to the disorder. The Justice Department’s threats of criminal charges against election workers add to the disruption.
Claiming a failed election, red state legislatures or the president, purportedly exercising emergency powers, throw out some or all of the opposition’s votes for U.S. representatives and senators. This way, they install a large Republican majority. The Supreme Court rules these actions unconstitutional. The president and his supporters defy the Court’s orders. As massive protests erupt, the administration completes the overthrow with in-place and additional military under the Insurrection Act, potentially supplementing it with a Brown Shirt-like army of newly recruited 18 to 25-year-old purported ICE agents. Some 15 to 18 million people, who were seemingly willing to support a coup if the president had lost the 2024 election, stood by.
James G. Blaine, the Speaker of the House of Representatives between 1869-1875, observed that by 1869, “Those who anxiously and intelligently studied the political situation in the South could see how unequal the contest would be and how soon the men who organized the rebellion would again wield the political power of their States—wield it lawfully if they could, but unlawfully if they must; peaceably…but violently if violence in their judgment became necessary.” The like-minded progeny of these people and that of other like-minded people now control the national government. They are relentless. They view their opposition as spineless cowards.
In 1875, General of the Army William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to his senator brother, “Outside help sooner or later must cease, for our army is ridiculously small, in case of actual collision. It is only the Memory of the War Power that operates on the Rebel Element now. They have the votes, the will, and will in the End prevail.”
Today, our army is not “ridiculously small.” Its oath is to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. If the administration issues unconstitutional orders to the military, generals, judges, and the American people must be decisive and relentless in defending the nation’s Constitution. As Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, we must “highly resolve…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Daniel O. Jamison is a retired attorney.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any law.”
In February 2025, Donald Trump posted a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte on Truth Social, generating alarm among constitutional experts.
“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible,” the Wizard of Oz declares from behind his curtain.
“In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets.” And, “I never grant favors without some return.” Is this the president speaking? It’s certainly rhetoric we have heard before. No, it is the Wizard in L. Frank Baum’s book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”—which was published in 1900.
Before the 1939 film, “The Wizard of Oz,” starring Judy Garland, and before Gregory Maguire wrote “Wicked”—igniting a phenomenon in the theatre world and now in film, begging the question, was the “Wicked Witch” really wicked—there was Baum’s series of fourteen books about Oz.
So, what of this Wizard? What of this President? Are they as great and powerful as they claim? Or are they both charlatans, great pretenders who claim to have special powers to govern, to grant, to rule?
Yet—and this is a critical point—they have been ordained with this power by their citizens.
President Trump was voted into office a second time, taking the “swing states” to win the Electoral College. And the inhabitants of Oz, seeing a seemingly miraculous flying balloon descend on their city, declared the man in it a wizard.
Of course, there are other players afoot. Oz has witches, Munchkins, and most importantly, Dorothy and her companions, who ultimately challenge and expose the Wizard.
And we have a legislative and judicial branch, and most importantly, our Constitution. In this country, we are governed by a system of checks and balances. It is up to us all to remind each other, and the world, of that fact.
So, what is it that the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion want? And what does Dorothy want? They want the same things we do.
The Scarecrow wants a brain. We might wish for a more discerning one lately, one that will not capitulate to fear-mongering and rumor.
And the Tin Man wishes for a heart, presumably an “open” heart, encompassing more than his own small circle. Without such, life in Oz, in the U.S., or anywhere, becomes a cruel, joyless competition, devoid of true meaning.
The Lion needs courage. Don’t we all? Living is not for the faint of heart, in any age. Courage is the difference in every situation. Brains and a heart are essential, but without the courage to use them, they merely fester.
“My life is simply unbearable without courage,” the Lion declares. So are our own.
And of course, Dorothy’s greatest wish is to go home. It is Glinda, the Good Witch, who ultimately grants her wish. “Your silver shoes will carry you…. If you had known their power, you could have gone back the very first day.” (The “ruby” slippers were originally “silver” slippers in the book, but were changed to ruby to take advantage of the new color film in the movie version.)
So, Dorothy had it in her power all along to go home.
As we too, have it in our power to defend and protect our principles, our home. We may begin on the yellow brick road or the wrong road, and we may encounter wicked witches or be imprisoned, but we must keep going on our journey.
Lately, it does seem that our politics are swinging terrifyingly right, and there are those who act as the Winged Monkeys in Oz, willing to “obey any order” they are given. But the pendulum swings, and it will again. It always does.
We have all heard of rose-colored glasses, and there is justification in accusing the MAGA movement of refusing to remove theirs, instead of ordaining all that their “leader” does.
In Oz, the Emerald City was not even green. The Wizard confesses, “I put green spectacles on all the people, so everything they saw was green.”
But we cannot wear rose-colored glasses, or green ones. No distortion of facts, no fairy tales, will work in the end. We must envision our destiny, and live it out in the bright, clear light of day.
“What a world! What a world!” the Wicked Witch of the West screeches in the 1939 film, after Dorothy has thrown a bucket of water on her, and the witch melts.
Many would say the same regarding the state of our country and the world. Others would claim that we are at last approaching justice and common sense.
We must agree to disagree. But we do have a plan that has now stood the test of time, a map that can direct our path. What we cannot ever do is linger long in those intoxicating fields of scarlet poppies. We must not fall asleep.
Amy Lockard is an Iowa resident who regularly contributes to regional newspapers and periodicals. She is working on the second of a four-book fictional series based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice."
US Capitol
Imagine being told from a young age that your life is already written: the jobs you’ll hold, the obstacles you’ll face, the limits you’ll never cross. What you’re born into is what your life will be. For millions of Americans making a low wage, that’s the reality. Democracy, in theory, is supposed to offer a way out — a chance to shape your own future. That’s the “American dream.” But for too many, it remains just a promise, out of reach. When children grow up believing their circumstances are permanent, they inherit a cycle instead of a chance.
I know this tension firsthand. On paper, I might look like I fit the mold of opportunity: white-passing, educated, and building a career. But beneath the surface, my story goes beyond that. I grew up in a low-income, mixed-race household with a Hispanic father and a white American mother. In my family, the paths laid out were often blue-collar jobs, teen pregnancy, addiction, incarceration, or worse. None of my three sisters graduated from high school, and no one in my immediate family attended college. I became the exception — not because the system was designed for me but because I found a way through it.
I easily could have accepted my situation, which involved living paycheck to paycheck and witnessing close family members enter the criminal justice system. Based on the saying “History repeats itself,” I should have done just that. But education was the key for me. I relied on school to distract from a tough home life. I’m not sure what drove me to invest so much time into studying, but I was determined to finish high school and attend college. Now, I hold two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree, with plans to obtain a law degree. I overcame my circumstances; I didn’t become them.
But hard work and determination can only get a person so far. My path wasn’t easy, and neither is the path for the 36.8 million Americans living in poverty. We need an institutional framework in place to prevent a socioeconomic hierarchy that would relegate an entire “class” of people to the bottom. True democracy should not just leave room for outliers; it should make success attainable for anyone. It should uplift those who start with the least, turning what is often called the “American dream” into an American reality.
The problem is that our government too often fails to reflect the communities it serves. When elected officials don’t share the lived experiences of everyday people, they miss what matters most.
Congress is overwhelmingly composed of representatives and senators from upper-class or highly educated backgrounds. In 2023, fewer than 2% of federal legislators came from working-class backgrounds, despite the fact that 27% of the U.S. workforce holds blue-collar jobs.
Wealth disparities are stark. The median U.S. household net worth is $192,700, while Congressmembers’ median net worth in 2020 was over $1 million. The net worth of the wealthiest lawmakers, like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is in the hundreds of millions.
Ninety-six percent of the 118th Congress have college degrees, with the majority coming from white-collar professions, though a few have backgrounds as ride-share drivers, electricians, and carpenters. In 10 states, no lawmaker works or has worked in a working-class job, according to researchers at Duke University and Loyola University Chicago.
“These estimates illustrate the striking disparity between Americans and the people who represent them in elected office,” said Nicholas Carnes, a political scientist at Duke University. “In principle, anyone can run for office, but in practice, the people who are running and serving are overwhelmingly drawn from America’s professional classes.”
Some, however, come from humble beginnings. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., for example, “pulled extra shifts as a waitress and bartender to support her family,” her House biography says. I, too, have worked in restaurants to support myself and my family. My first job was at the age of 16 as a hostess at a Mexican restaurant called Sticky Cactus in McDonough, Georgia, and later I became a waitress there. I remember smiling with pride after receiving a $50 tip, which would go toward my University of Georgia admission fee. My parents couldn’t afford the $500 to secure my spot for freshman year.
An elected official’s economic background shapes their policymaking. Officials from affluent backgrounds may prioritize lowering taxes for high earners or enhancing business incentives. In contrast, officials from working-class backgrounds may focus on raising the minimum wage or expanding affordable healthcare. The former is not inherently wrong; Congress needs members of all socioeconomic backgrounds, and that’s the point. Greater economic diversity is needed.
Representation isn’t about identity politics. It’s about ensuring that policy is shaped by people who understand, from their lived reality, what it means to break a cycle — what it means to overcome your situation, rather than become it. Poor people, to put it bluntly, deserve a seat at the congressional table to bring firsthand understanding of financial insecurity and systemic barriers so many face.
We should elect leaders who reflect the diversity of our communities, not just in terms of race and gender, but also in background, socioeconomic class, and life experiences. For me, democracy means having the chance to turn rejection into redirection and to overcome a situation rather than become it. It means transforming lemons into limonada. And it means ensuring the promise of an “American dream” isn’t reserved for the lucky few but built into the American structure.
Ashley N. Soriano is a graduate student at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism in the Politics, Policy and Foreign Affairs specialization.
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