John Opdycke is the founder and president of Open Primaries, a national advocacy organization working to enact and protect open and nonpartisan primaries and enhance the visibility and power of independent voters. This monthly column will offer John’s insights about how a people-powered, non-ideological democracy movement can be most effective in revamping our political process and culture to meet the needs of a complex and ever changing 21st century landscape.
“Oh and by the way, that’s the magical key to democracy. It’s talking to people you don’t necessarily agree with.” — Paul Johnson, former mayor of Phoenix
Welcome to Brash Tacks, a new monthly column I’m writing for The Fulcrum. Brash in that I will try my best to ruffle a few feathers and not to be predictable. Tacks in the nautical sense of navigating shifting winds. I’ve been an independent democracy activist for 30 years and have learned a bit about both.
My goal with this column is to offer notes about how a people-powered, non-ideological democracy movement can be most effective in revamping our political process and culture to meet the needs of a complex and ever changing 21st century landscape. Despite the best efforts of an increasingly unhinged partisan establishment to limit our growth and our impact, we are in a great position to punch above our weight in 2024. While the media will be obsessed with the presidential horse race (okay, most of us will be obsessed with the horse race) there are going to be so many opportunities to change the rules of the game in 2024. And changing the rules of the game has never been more important.
I had a great discussion last week with Paul Johnson, the former mayor of Phoenix. Paul is the co-founder of Save Democracy Arizona and Make Elections Fair Arizona, a left/center/right campaign to enact nonpartisan open primaries in Arizona via ballot referendum. Paul and his growing team have raised $5 million and are laser focused on gathering the 400,000-plus signatures they need to appear on the 2024 ballot. They are putting forth a bold and innovative policy that combines nonpartisan primaries for state and federal primaries with a “no more taxpayer funding for presidential primaries unless independents are allowed to participate” clause. It’s a very innovative approach.
Paul hosts a podcast called the Optimistic American – and that’s what he is. If you are ever feeling glum just listen to him for 15 minutes and you’ll want to hug your family, read up on Abraham Lincoln and start a business! He is also one of the most articulate spokespeople in the country for open primaries and responsive government. He’s so good because he’s run for office in a nonpartisan open system (Phoenix city council and mayor) and in a partisan system (governor of Arizona) and he knows intimately how the rules of the system impact how candidates campaign and how they govern. He’s a fan of open primaries because they force politicians to campaign to all the voters, not just their fellow partisans. That’s the magic of an open system, as opposed to the illusion of choice and participation in a closed system.
Watch our full conversation:
Can Arizona Lead the Way on Democratic Reform?www.youtube.com
Paul said two things in our discussion that really made me think. First, the way to mobilize and inspire Americans to vote “yes” on reform is to talk about values, not procedure. People respond strongly and positively when you talk about fairness, equality, a level playing field, inclusion, one set of rules for everyone – but they glaze over when you talk about technicalities. Second, why are so many Americans leaving the political parties, even liberals and conservatives who still believe in much of the parties’ platforms? Because people don’t want to be associated with a group, not in this era of “blame the other side for everything” toxic division and partisanship.
You know, Paul said, many independents look a lot like Democrats or Republicans. So why bother registering as an independent at all? Because they don’t want to be locked into a group. They want politicians to work for their vote and not take it for granted. They want agency. Independents feel strongly that the parties misuse their power and abuse the voters. They don’t want to join an organization that abuses and divides voters, even one that they agree with on many issues.
We all know the statistics: Forty-nine percent of Americans now identify as independents including 55 percent of young voters and 49 percent of veterans. But the statistics don’t tell the whole story. They don’t capture the motivations behind this expansion. Maybe the rise of political independence is an expression of support for the core American values of fairness and democracy as well as dissatisfaction with the way both major parties fail to protect those values.
We face some tough democracy battles in 2024. Partisan zealots are seeking to enact closed primaries in a dozen states and restrict the ability of citizens to use the referendum process in a dozen more. Reformers are advancing nonpartisan or open primaries in Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Rhode Island, D.C., New Mexico, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Montana, New York City and Florida. All of us can learn something from Paul about how to make these campaigns as appealing as possible to the voters. Focus on the core values of fairness and inclusion. And connect with the growing desire voters have to be taken seriously as individuals. Collective values, individual agency. Sounds like magic to me.
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.