Shoppers stand in line at a Nike outlet store on May 3, 2025 in San Diego, California.
In the late 1980s, the Harvard Alcohol Project did just that. By embedding the term designated driver into prime-time television—from Cheers to L.A. Law—they didn’t just coin a phrase. They changed people’s behavior. The campaign was credited with helping reduce alcohol-related traffic fatalities by nearly 30% over the following decade. President George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, along with organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, endorsed the movement, amplifying its reach.
They made sober driving socially admirable, not awkward. And they proved that when language meets culture, norms shift.
A well-orchestrated communications campaign can seed a term into the national consciousness and catalyze behavioral change. It’s a strategy we must revisit in this era of deep civic fragmentation.
Nike’s Just Do It campaign followed a similar path. It wasn’t about sneakers—it was about identity. It told millions of Americans that athleticism wasn’t reserved for Olympians. It was for anyone willing to move. To try. To act.
Television sitcoms of the past played a similar role, entertaining us while holding up a mirror to society. Archie Bunker, from All in the Family (1971–1979), is a quintessential example. His bigoted, close-minded views were never celebrated; they were humanized. Audiences saw a man clinging to outdated beliefs, yet loving his family, fumbling through change, and occasionally revealing unexpected tenderness. That complexity made him relatable, even lovable, and it allowed viewers to confront their own biases without defensiveness.
It’s this understanding of America’s contradictions—its flaws and its potential—that we need to reclaim today.
As Norman Lear’s groundbreaking sitcom tackled racism, gender roles, and generational divides, Archie became a cultural touchstone. He didn’t preach progress but paradoxically helped create it. His flaws weren’t just punchlines—they were invitations for Americans to reconsider what they laughed at, what they tolerated, and what they believed.
We need that same energy now for Democracy.
At The Fulcrum, we’ve seen how pop culture can be a civic catalyst. One of our most-read sections this past year wasn’t policy analysis—it was music, poetry, and dance. Pop culture is the heartbeat of a nation searching for connection. Its popularity confirmed what we’ve long believed: culture isn’t a distraction from Democracy—it’s the gateway to it.
Actual change requires more than infrastructure—it requires inspiration. It requires a new kind of campaign that doesn’t just inform but moves.
History offers us a blueprint for remixing the civic narrative. Imagine a phrase like Just Show Up—a call to action, not for the gym, but for the town hall, or United We Band—a movement where music becomes the medium for civic renewal.
Other iconic slogans could be reimagined:
· A Diamond Is Forever becomes Democracy Forever—If We Can Keep It
· Got Milk? Becomes Got Democracy?
These campaigns didn’t just sell—they shifted. They used metaphor, emotion, and repetition to make language sticky and behavior malleable. If we want to seed terms like civic renewal or democracy ecosystem into public consciousness, we must reverse-engineer these strategies to build a new cultural imprint.
Art breaks boundaries. It overcomes distances. It multiplies energy. And it reminds us that democracy isn’t just a system—it’s a song we all contribute to.
So let’s think outside the ballot box. Let’s make civic engagement not just a duty but exciting. Because for true change to happen in our democratic republic, Americans must realize they already hold the mic. We’re just here to turn up the volume.
David Nevins is publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Steph Martinez and Rachel Ramirez with their mothers after their last performance
When Northwestern theater and creative writing junior Lux Vargas wrote and brought to life La Ventanita, she created a space of rest and home for those who live in the grief of not belonging anywhere, yet still yearn for a sense of belonging together. By closing night, Vargas had mothers and daughters, once splintered by politics, in each other's arms. In a small, sold-out theater in Evanston, the story on stage became a mirror: centering on mothers who fled the country and daughters who left again for college.
Performed four times on May 9 and 10, La Ventanita unfolds in a fictional cafecito window inspired by the walk-up restaurant counters found throughout Miami. “The ventanita breeds conversations and political exchange,” said Vargas.
At the center of the play is Renata, a longtime Cuban immigrant who owns the ventanita. The story follows Ines, her college-bound niece who wants to leave Miami behind, and Genesis, a newly arrived immigrant from Cuba struggling to find her place in the U.S. Their lives intersect as the real-life Patria y Vida protests erupt in South Florida and across Cuba, forcing each woman to confront the ghosts of displacement, the cost of political detachment, and the emotional burden of leaving home behind. As the protests escalate, the play turns surreal — a dreamlike sequence filled with music, dance, and protest, revealing Renata’s internalized grief and guilt for staying silent. Meanwhile, Genesis wrestles with survivor’s guilt and ultimately accepts that she may never return to Cuba. Her small act of adding mango coffee to the café’s menu becomes a quiet but powerful gesture: a way of honoring the past while carving a new future. At its core, La Ventanita is about what it means to grieve a country you can’t return to — and the uneasy peace that comes with trying to move forward not despite that loss, but because of it.
The song, Patria y Vida, released in 2021, replaced Fidel Castro’s slogan Patria o Muerte (“homeland or death”) with a call for “homeland and life.” That summer, the soundtrack became a route for Cubans to protest, a defiant anthem against food shortages, censorship, and repression. This song served as a rallying cry, giving voice to years of frustration for Cubans both on the island and in exile. In the play, this protest surfaces in the living rooms and kitchens – in mothers who still defend the revolution as survival and daughters who see Patria y Vida as the urgency of demanding more.
Vargas began writing the play two years ago after finishing her first quarter. Missing home, she started to write characters who reminded her of the community she left behind.
“I wanted to make sure that people understood that you can't just generalize a group of people under the umbrella of where they come from. We are American too, like we were living these different experiences, and we Latinos come in multitudes,” said Vargas. “I really wanted people to understand that. Despite how conflicted I felt knowing the majority of Cubans had voted for Trump, or that Miami-Dade County had turned red, I knew that I still wanted to tell this story, and I know that there were people who wanted to be heard and wanted their story to be told.”
In the hands of the student cast, these characters became family. For Cuban-American Northwestern students Rachel Ramirez and Steph Martinez, the roles made them — and more importantly, their mothers and Steph’s grandmother — feel seen in an institution that has long overlooked their stories.
For parents and grandparents, the revolution is as real today as it was in the past — many remember when Fidel Castro’s rebels overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and Cuba became a communist state. That shift forced thousands into exile, including the families whose daughters now wrestle with how to carry both their parents’ trauma and their own sense of belonging.
As liberal daughters of Cuban Republican mothers since they were 11 years old, Ramirez and Martinez have held a friendship that has carried them through college and helped them build communities that feel like home. Ramirez and Martinez became my friends and later my roommates after our own long search to find familiar faces in a predominantly white institution with few spaces for Hispanic students.
Senior Communications major Ramirez connected deeply with Renata’s quiet ache — the experience of building a new life in a new country while still mourning what was left behind. Resonating with Renata’s grief over Cuba and her complicated Americanness helped Ramirez feel less alone. The play made it easier for her mother to understand that she carries Cuba — and her mother’s story — with her, wherever she goes.
“It's hard to disagree with the play, it's saying people are dying, people are hungry, the dictatorship is restricting our freedom of speech,” said Ramirez. “In terms of her political views, it's remembering that she's been through a lot. She didn't have a good experience growing up. She was very poor; communism affected her insanely. And then in terms of how she handles that, and addresses me about it, it's remembering that she has her own trauma that she hasn't overcome, and like in her way of expressing her emotions, and she really just wants to be heard, and I don't think she was very heard growing up.”
Learning and Organizational Change major Martinez, who played Ines, added that the way her mother talks about those issues stems from unprocessed trauma and a deep desire to be heard — something she likely wasn’t afforded as a child.
“Trauma takes over knowledge,” said Martinez. “I have to remember that my mom is not a bad person, and that's honestly it. She's done everything for me.”
At a time when Cuban-American identity is often reduced to voting patterns, La Ventanita dares to be messy, tender, and human. It doesn’t ask for resolution — it asks for recognition. In a cultural landscape that often flattens or romanticizes the Hispanic experience, Vargas’s play pushes back.
“Cuba is not a tourist destination. That’s not what our families fled,” said Martinez. Cuba is not a Caribbean paradise — it’s a dictatorship where everyday people can’t access basic necessities. Tourism dollars don’t reach families; they fuel the regime.
La Ventanita offers a return. In a world that flattened Cuban identity into red and blue, the play became a place where mothers and daughters could finally see and hear each other again.
Maria Jose Arango Torres, a student at Northwestern University and an intern with the Latino News Network.
Beyonce fans, also known as the "BeyHive", queue in the rain for entry at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium ahead of her second performance on June 7, 2025 in London, England.
When you walk out of a Beyoncé show, especially one like the record-breaking July 14 run in Atlanta, you don't just leave with a T-shirt and some grainy iPhone or Android footage for Instagram. You emerged from a three-hour-plus experience awe-inspired and different. And if you're paying attention, you realize you've just witnessed one of the realist, most radical forms of democratic resistance we have in American pop culture.
My wife and I have attended plenty of sports and entertainment events, from Broadway to the Super Bowl in Vegas. But nothing comes close to the communal, transformative energy that filled the Mercedes-Benz Stadium when Beyoncé took the stage. Cowboy Carter wasn't just another concert. It was a cultural event, a political rally, a spiritual experience, and a masterclass in creative sovereignty, all rolled into one.
The Cowboy Carter tour is the work of a mastermind. Beyoncé doesn't just perform. She constructs worlds. The stage was less a platform than a living, breathing canvas—part Afro-futurist utopia, part Southern Black church, part underground ballroom, all seamlessly woven together with the kind of precision and intentionality most directors can only dream about. Every visual, every transition, every note was a nod to Black artistic traditions, reimagined for a new era.
She moved through her catalogue with the sort of athletic dominance you see in the GOATs—MJ, Serena, Simone Biles. But what set this performance apart was how she bent the arena to her will. The transitions weren't just musical; they were narrative. Each song, each costume change, was another chapter in the ongoing story of Black resistance, Black joy, and Black love.
We live in a time when many celebrities dip a toe into activism, drop a hashtag, and call it a day. Beyoncé, though, doesn't just make statements—she builds worlds where those statements come alive and are inherently political. From the start, with "American Requiem," she establishes the tone for not just herself but for everyone in the building. And when she sang "Ya Ya," it wasn't just a club banger—it felt like a generational call to arms. You could see it in the faces of the women of color dancing in the aisles, the LGBTQ+ fans who found sanctuary in the ballroom vignettes, and the parents holding their daughters a little tighter during "Protector." The message landed: This country might try to break us, but we're still here. Still dancing and still loving ourselves.
I've been around long enough to know the difference between a moment and a movement. What Beyoncé did in Atlanta, across the U.S., England, and France was both. Her entire career has been a case study in how women of color, particularly Black women, shape, define, and sustain American culture—often without getting their due.
The Cowboy Carter tour wasn't just the thousands of fans, or the celebrities in the VIP section, or the TikTokers live-streaming every second. It was the sense that, for one night, Atlanta and every city visited was the center of the universe. Beyoncé made sure of it by honoring the host cities—its music, its politics, and its role as a hub for beautifully diverse brilliance and resistance. She contextualized the event, inviting relevant legends and making stadiums feel like the world's biggest family reunion.
But the proper flex? She made inclusion the main event. Ballroom culture, again, wasn't a sideshow. Black Southernness wasn't background—it was foreground. In a country still obsessed with erasing, ignoring, or co-opting Black culture, Beyoncé made it impossible to look away. She forced the mainstream to meet her, not the other way around.
I think it's important to note that Beyoncé’s tour isn't just about music. Instead, it just might be a suggestive blueprint for the next wave of democratic resistance. Cowboy Carter, from my perspective, is about agency. It's about the right to take up space, to demand more, and to refuse to shrink. The concert felt like it provided insight into the potential of untapped collective power.
She didn't preach, yet she didn't have to. Resistance was embodied in the choreography, poignantly seen throughout set designs, and in the unapologetic Blackness of it all. Beyoncé presented us with how freedom looks, how it moves, how it sounds. And she did it while staying in complete control of her narrative—a feat that's as rare in pop culture as it is in politics.
Personally, walking out into the Atlanta summer night, we could feel the aftershocks rippling through the city. People weren't just buzzing about the show; they were talking about what it meant. For Black and brown people, it was validation. For queer fans, it was a safe haven. For everyone else, it was a reminder—Black women are the architects of cool, the custodians of truth, the keepers of the flame.
Beyoncé's creative genius, her political sharpness, her cultural gravity—they're not just entertainment. They're a roadmap. Outlining a way to resist, build, and love ourselves when the world tells us not to do so. You can call it pop culture if you want. But make no mistake—what happened on the Cowboy Carter tour was democracy in motion, resistance in real time, and a reminder that the most radical thing you can do in America is demand joy and justice, all at once.
Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson is a spiritual entrepreneur, author, scholar-practioner whose leadership and strategies around social and racial justice issues are nationally recognized and applied.
File: ICE agents making arrests
The poem you’re about to read is not a quiet reflection—it’s a flare shot into the night. It emerges from a moment when the boundaries between surveillance and censorship feel increasingly porous, and when the act of reading itself can be seen as resistance. The poet draws a chilling parallel between masked agents detaining immigrants and the quiet erasure of books from our schools and libraries. Both, he argues, are expressions of unchecked power—one overt, the other insidious.
This work invites us to confront the slippery slope where government overreach meets cultural suppression. It challenges us to ask: What happens when the stories we tell, the knowledge we share, and the communities we protect are deemed threats? And who gets to decide?
As you read, consider not just the words on the page, but the freedoms they represent—and the vigilance they demand.
We wait. In freedom, we read:
Some history, some fiction, some memoir.
The bus is late; but we don’t heed
Since we have our devoir to complete:
Books, our trusty companions, they are.
-
Screeching to a stop, a Hummer unloads
Masked men in lumpy uniforms, batons
At the ready to bruise us, this bodes
Ill for our library, for our printed icons.
-
“Hand it over!” they shout, pointing
At History, at Fiction, at Memoir.
Confiscating all in a smelly black trash bag
Already torn, too full with the harvest
From other bus stops, like us left sad.
-
On board, bookless, we are reduced
To reading bus ads for crypto, red headwear,
Pushed by the huckster-in-chief.
Many of us barely afford bus fare.
-
Seizing these wordy companions
Incites a flame, an anger that burns
Like Sahara hot dunes, a Grand Canyon
Of loss, an empty desert that spurns
Intelligent life for the wasteland.
-
There is horror over coward leaders
Bent on squelching anything green.
No fresh shoots allowed, all sparks
Are snuffed to repeating brainless
MAGA lies about the doddering king.
-
One day the dunce will expire
And all of his commands wither.
Anew we will again rise higher
To craft new tomes of how
People, born free, can throw off
Groupthink shackles, to celebrate
Swelling reason to rise from the trough.
-
Yes, they may burn our books.
Yet, our stories live inside us,
Our minds cannot be enslaved.
Our minds crave what’s righteous.
Michael Varga is the author of “ Under Chad’s Spell." He was a Foreign Service officer, serving in Dubai, Damascus, Casablanca, and Toronto
