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Organizing for collective impact & the democracy principle

The Fulcrum
By The FulcrumJan 04, 2023
The Fulcrum
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Welcome to The Fulcrum’s daily weekday e-newsletter where insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk, and act to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives.

Organizing for collective impact: Prepared for anything, more effective at everything

On March 31, 2022, not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, attendees at a Unite America Brewer Fellows reception were asked to discuss how partner nations were able to respond so quickly and effectively to help Ukraine. The conclusion was that the relationships that had been formed between Ukraine and partner nations through joint capacity building and rehearsed interoperability enabled them to be prepared for the invasion.

The question then is how can these lessons learned from Ukraine be applied to promoting democracy and civic health in the U.S.?

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Democracy means more than just holding elections

Democracy means more than just holding elections. And, “the people” are more than just voters. Yet, “we, the people,” have allowed our role as popular sovereigns to be reduced to benchwarmers.

Democracy is supposed to be a system through which “the people” exercise power. That power appears to have been lost. We have effectively made “the people” the equivalent of designated hitters -- we participate sparingly (every two years); give our best go at having an impact (casting votes in elections decided by other factors--namely, money); and, spend the rest of our time cheering for our respective teams.

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Video: The number that will shape Republican politics in 2023

Winning just nine more House seats than Democrats in the 2022 midterms means the Republican caucus has very little room for error.

Watch.

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two Black people wrapped in an American flag
Raul Ortin/Getty Images

July Fourth: A bittersweet reminder of a dream deferred

Juste is a researcher at the Movement Advancement Project and author of the report “Freedom Under Fire: The Far Right's Battle to Control America.”

“Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.”
— Langston Hughes, I Too

On the Fourth of July we celebrated many things: our nation’s independence, our democracy and the opportunity to gather with loved ones who, ideally, embrace us for who we are. Yet, this same nation does not always make room for us to live freely for who we are, who we love, what we look like and how we pray. And it is this dissonance that renders the Fourth of July’s celebration a bittersweet reminder of a dream deferred for many of us.

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Joe Biden on stage
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

The speech Joe Biden won’t give, Part II

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. His monthly column, Brash Tacks,offers insights into 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.

After the debate on June 27, it seems like the Democratic Party consultant class is starting to catch up with the American people on the question of whether President Joe Biden should run for reelection.

The concern has focused on his debate performance and his physical and mental capacities. But the American people — particularly independent voters who swung to Biden in 2020 — have been expressing a deeper concern for some time: “Hey, Joe, we voted for you to get Trump out of office and take a break from the drama. Your job was to stabilize things and then turn it over to the next generation. We don’t need you to be a transformational president. Are you listening to us?”

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Trump and Biden at the debate

Donald Trump and Joe Biden met for the first debate of 2024 last week.

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

How Democrats' defense of Biden reminds me of Republicans' rallying around Trump

Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

The fallout from President Biden's miserable debate last week is giving me deja vu.

In the political right's intramural arguments over Donald Trump, I got some things correct and some incorrect. But I believe I was indisputably right in one respect: From the outset, I argued that Trump's presidency would end badly because, to echo Heraclitus, character is destiny.

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Gift box with an American flag sticking out
Fernando Trabanco Fotografía/Getty Images

A birthday gift for America

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”

This is the latest in “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”

Coming together in shared purpose and mutual celebration is decidedly cheugy (meaning “uncool”… for those of us who are). Americans can hardly agree that 2+2=4 or that Taylor Swift is somewhat popular at the moment. To put it mildly, we are struggling to find common ground.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Voters should be able to take the measure of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., since he is poised to win millions of votes in November.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty Images

Kennedy should have been in the debate – and states need ranked voting

Richie is co-founder and senior advisor of FairVote.

CNN’s presidential debate coincided with a fresh batch of swing-state snapshots that make one thing perfectly clear: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be a longshot to be our 47th president and faces his own controversies, yet the 10 percent he’s often achieving in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and other battlegrounds could easily tilt the presidency.

Why did CNN keep him out with impossible-to-meet requirements? The performances, mistruths and misstatements by Joe Biden and Donald Trump would have shocked Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, who managed to debate seven times without any discussion of golf handicaps — a subject better fit for a “Grumpy Old Men” outtake than one of the year’s two scheduled debates.

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