The National Civic League and the Bridge Alliance are proud to announce the “The Healthy Democracy Project. This joint effort will work with two communities to build the skills of civic leaders and equip them with the tools they need to address important civic challenges. Through one year of work, these communities will have increased capacity for solving community problems through inclusive civic engagement.
Background
People have the capacity to work together, address their differences, make good public decisions, develop plans, and solve problems. This fact is not always apparent in the national headlines, but it is clear to many people who are active in their communities, and it is on display in the presentations every year at the All-America City Awards.
Unfortunately, our systems of governance currently make it harder, not easier, for people to work together, and they typically fail to engage all populations. Civic health is based on the quality of civic opportunities and the strength of civic infrastructure. When these supports are weak, people of different backgrounds and political perspectives are less likely to communicate or work together, which exacerbates partisan polarization. When these supports are distributed inequitably, they deepen economic and social inequities.
Civic health matters in other ways, too. Strong, ongoing connections between residents, robust relationships between people and public institutions, and positive attachments between citizens and the places they live are highly correlated with a range of positive outcomes, from better physical health to higher employment rates to better resilience in the face of natural disasters. In most places, there are a range of opportunities for people to engage, but they are often undervalued, overlooked, and disconnected from one another.
Many kinds of democracy innovations have emerged to transform systems of governance and, improve civic health, and engage a wider range of people. But most of them are temporary, ad hoc efforts – even when they are supported by public institutions, they are seldom incorporated into the official, ongoing ways that those institutions interact with citizens. In the world of civic innovation, a thousand flowers have bloomed; now, we need to do some gardening.
Project Components
The Healthy Democracy Project, which builds on the infrastructure provided by the Healthy Democracy Ecosystem Map, will support this civic gardening in communities across the country. Starting in two pilot communities, the Bridge Alliance and National Civic League will:
- Help identify and convene a set of civic leaders in that community, including people already in established decision-making positions and new leaders who are just starting to step forward. Each community cohort should be diverse in terms of age, race and ethnicity, sector, and political affiliation, with a particular emphasis on inclusion of underrepresented populations
- Conduct Civic Infrastructure Scans, using the Healthy Democracy Map as a starting point, to help leaders take stock of the history of engagement, levels of social capital and inclusion, and civic assets of their communities.
- Support skill development in collaborative leadership, deliberative dialogue, digital engagement, facilitation, civic measurement, relational organizing, cultural competence, outreach throughout the community, and other civic competencies.
- Provide training on and access to tools such as the Map, Engagement Scorecard, Text Talk Act, Civic Index, Perfect City’s participatory theater process, Better Neighbors Better Neighborhoods, Civic Health Action Guide, Guide to Local Civic Measurement, and other resources that help leaders understand their communities and engage fellow community members and regional partners.
- Assist leaders as they develop large-scale civic engagement processes that:
- Tackle a major local problem or policy decision – creating agency and power for citizens on the issues that most impact them.
- Build civic infrastructure and equity in the process.
The pilot communities will be chosen through a collaborative process, focusing on diverse mid-sized cities that offer the opportunity to engage distinct groups.
Outcomes
Through the Healthy Democracy Project, each community will have a stronger civic infrastructure, with a diverse cadre of community leaders who are better able to:
- Form and maintain cross-sector, multicultural leadership groups.
- Create investment strategies for sufficient local and national resources to scale and sustain the work in their community.
- Understand how media organizations can best engage and inform the public and reach all populations, and how the public can best support and engage media organizations ▪ Use the Healthy Democracy Map and other approaches to identify allies, survey their community’s civic infrastructure, and find compelling examples in other places
- Use attitudinal research tools to understand citizens’ preferences on ways to strengthen inclusive democracy.
- Engage large, diverse numbers of people in the development and implementation of plans to strengthen civic infrastructure and local democracy, with a particular emphasis on involving underrepresented populations.
In these polarized times, it is more important than ever for citizens to become engaged and feel they can make a difference. The Healthy Democracy Project will not only provide the tools needed to help civic leaders affect key issues facing their communities, it will also provide the inspiration, purpose, and belief they need to energize their fellow citizens.
Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber at the Capitol on Feb. 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump delivered his address days after the Supreme Court struck down the administration's tariff strategy, and amid a U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf threatening Iran.
Some MAGA loyalists have turned on Trump. Why the rest haven’t
I recently watched "A Face in the Crowd" for the umpteenth time.
I had a better reason than procrastination to rewatch Elia Kazan’s brilliant 1957 film exploring populism in the television age. It was homework. I was asked to discuss it with Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz at the just-concluded TCM Film Festival in Los Angeles. As a pundit and an author, I do a lot of public speaking. But I don’t really do a lot of cool public speaking, so this was a treat.
With that not-very-humble brag out of the way, I had a depressing realization watching it this time.
"A Face in the Crowd" tells the story of a charming drifter with a dark side named Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, played brilliantly by Andy Griffith. A singer with the gift of the gab, Rhodes takes off on radio but quickly segues to the brand-new medium of television. He becomes a national sensation — and political kingmaker — by forming a deep connection with the masses, particularly among the rural and working classes. His core audience is made up of people with grievances. “Everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle,” as Rhodes puts it.
The film’s climax (spoiler alert) comes when Rhodes’ manager and spurned lover, Marcia, turns on the microphone while the credits rolled at the end of “Cracker Barrel,” his national TV show. Rhodes tells his entourage what he really thinks of the “morons” in his audience. “Shucks, I can take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them for caviar. I can make them eat dog food, and they’ll think it’s steak. … Good night, you stupid idiots.”
It was a canonical “hot mic” moment in American cinema. But the idea that if people could glimpse the “real person” behind the popular facade, they’d turn on them is a very old theme in literature — think Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (1782) or Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s "The School for Scandal" (1777), in which diaries and letters do the work of microphones.
Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg were very worried about the ability of demagogues to whip up populist fervor and manipulate the masses through the power of TV, in part because everyone had already seen it happen with radio and film, by Father Coughlin in America and Hitler in Germany. But as dark as their vision was, they still clung to the idea that if the demagogue was exposed, the people would instantly turn on their leader in an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment for the mass media age.
And that’s the source of my depressing realization. I think they were wrong. It turns out that once that organic connection is made, even a shocking revelation of the truth won’t necessarily break the spell.
In 2016, a lot of writers revisited "A Face in the Crowd" to understand the Trump phenomenon. After all, here was a guy who used a TV show — "The Apprentice" — and social media to build a massive following, going over the heads of the “establishment.” Trump’s own hot mic moment with "Access Hollywood," in which he boasted of his sexual predations, proved insufficient to undo him. That was hardly the only such moment for him. We’ve heard Trump bully the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes.” He told Bob Woodward he deliberately “played down” COVID-19. After leaving office, he was recorded telling aides he shouldn’t be sharing classified documents with them — then doing it anyway. And so on.
Trump’s famous claim that he could “shoot somebody” on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters may have been hyperbole. But it’s not crazy to think he wouldn’t lose as many voters as he should.
In the film, Lonesome Rhodes implodes when Americans encounter his off-air persona. The key to Trump’s success is that he ran as his off-air persona. Why people love that persona is a complicated question. Among the many complementary explanations is that he comes across as authentic, and some people value authenticity more than they value good character, honesty, or competence.
This is not just a problem for Republicans. Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner once had a Nazi tattoo and has said things about women as distasteful as Trump’s “grab them by (the genitals)” comments, and the Democratic establishment is rallying around him because he’s authentic — and because Democrats want to win that race.
Many prominent MAGA loyalists are turning on Trump these days. They claim — wrongly in my opinion — that he’s changed and that the Iran war is a betrayal of their cause. But if you look at the polls, voters who describe themselves as “MAGA” still overwhelmingly support Trump. In short, he still has the Fifth Avenue voters on his side.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.