Liberal democracy is in crisis in the United States, and the roots of that crisis go far deeper than any single politician or political party. Almost 70 percent of Americans do not believe our democracy is working well. Governing elites and the institutions they run have lost credibility. Pervasive and justified anger has led many to embrace dangerous alternatives or to sit out the democratic process altogether. Ours is an anti-system age.

But surprisingly, many policymakers and civil society leaders seem to believe that upcoming elections will allow for a return to “normal,” and enable them to work more or less as they always have. Legislative advocates are now sharpening their campaigns, jockeying over which issues—health care, voting rights, housing, child and elder care, and so on—should take priority. Political and communications consultants are parsing which policies might address voters’ focus on the affordability crisis. Some problems are new, as recognized by experts puzzling out how to rebuild federal agencies decimated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But overall, the approach to governance that seeks to make relatively modest change within a broken system has come roaring back. Even recent ideological debates feel like the rehashing of decades-old arguments. We have seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. The gravitational, habitual pull toward familiar ways of working is very strong.

The hard truth is that in the absence of a dramatically different approach to governing, authoritarianism and oligarchy will become even more entrenched, and far harder to uproot. Both have deep roots in the country’s history. These forces will not go away no matter what the next elections bring. Another even more devastating authoritarian breakthrough is the almost predictable result unless future governance makes a break from the past. The stakes are very high.

We are calling for future governance that is affirmatively pro-democracy. This means that it must deliver visibly and effectively, fulfilling people’s material needs in ways that are responsive to what they have been asking for. It means unequivocally upholding people’s fundamental rights and protecting against violations of those rights. And it means building governing institutions that reinforce participatory practices, including voting and other ways of shaping policy.

This is tough. It will require bringing together reforms to the structure of our democracy and reforms to the structure of our economy—even though this isn’t how civil society advocates currently work. It will mean bringing outside movement forces productively into governing, which previous administrations have struggled to do. And it will mean actually countering concentrated wealth and power, something previous administrations have never successfully achieved.

It’s true that supporters of pro-democracy governance today seem well positioned. The current Administration’s governing choices have led to pervasive anxiety about war around the world, the violation of people’s basic constitutional rights, and the effects of rising prices on families’ economic futures.

Meanwhile, a mass pro-democracy movement has changed the terrain. Everyday people are exercising the right to protest at scale, strategically organizing in states like Minnesota, and taking action across the country to protect their neighbors. All these expressions of dissent have delegitimized recent authoritarian actions and policies in the eyes of millions of Americans.

But, as people pivot from “no” to “yes,” counting on a return to the country we had before the authoritarian breakthrough is wish-casting. The United States has endured an onslaught of authoritarian policies not once, but twice over the past decade—precisely because “normal” governance was judged to be a failure by many Americans.

The “normal” approach rests on untenable, and usually tacit, beliefs. First, that public officials will be able to enact policies opposed by finance and tech oligarchs without confronting that power directly or building alternative sources of power. Second, that the good intentions and competence of dedicated policy professionals will translate into viscerally felt improvements in people’s lives that engender more trust in American governance and each other. Third, that the structural obstacles to major change baked into our constitutional order can be overcome through skillful legislating or messaging alone.

In practical terms, the standard-issue playbook assumes that major policy reforms can find a path through a severely gerrymandered Congress and Senate rules requiring supermajorities, and further that muscular use of executive authority will avoid the buzz saw of litigation and adverse rulings from the Supreme Court.

Most importantly, the back-to-normal approach to governance rests on an unspoken belief that authoritarianism is a unique, albeit terrible, aberration in a long arc of progress.

We would not bet on these premises.

Americans deserve—and have been calling for—a complete change of course. We need a new roadmap for governing.

The work must begin with a sober and realistic recognition of the enduring and entwined powers of American oligarchy and American authoritarianism. This is about much more than the ongoing fights around economic inequality and voting rights, as important as those are. Inequality has now morphed into oligarchy—with extremely wealthy people controlling pinch points of the democratic process—and into entrenched minority rule. The rollback of voting rights is now one piece of a systematic authoritarian plan to take us back to a pre-1965 political order. Even our basic First Amendment rights—the freedoms of speech, religion, press, and assembly—are now regularly violated. The promise of equal rights is threatened by racially discriminatory government practices and explicit calls for the restoration of gender hierarchies, including some musings about “household voting,” in which the head of the household, presumably male, would cast a single vote for all.

Oligarchy, authoritarianism, and hierarchy are not the only notes in the American songbook. But they have always been there and are now the dominant chord. In the face of these dramatic asymmetries of power in our politics, economy, and society, restorationist governance simply won’t get the job done. Before any new governing moment, regardless of party, we must consider and begin to design different kinds of governance.

The good news is that it is not yet too late. Authoritarian rule has proven to be unpopular on a range of issues. Authoritarian governing failures have created a rupture. Abundant anti-system energy can propel change. Prior reformers have seized on comparable openings to remake our democracy and economy. Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the civil rights/Great Society eras were all powered by vibrant movements, transformational visions, and strategies for earning, wielding, and holding power. They showed that power, once legitimately earned, can be used to launch a cycle of transformations, making our economy more equal and our political system more democratic.

Reformers today must be just as audacious.

How We Got Here

The United States over the last two-plus decades has confronted crisis after crisis—a terrorist attack, a financial meltdown, a pandemic. Each administration in place during those crises— Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden—was forced to make difficult and consequential choices, even as our governing system became increasingly dysfunctional. Of course, each of them also fought for their own core policy priorities. For the Bush Administration, it was education reform and tax cuts; for Obama, health care; for Trump, tariffs and tax cuts; for Biden, infrastructure and a green economy.

All of these administrations handled crises and pushed their policies against the backdrop of a growing imbalance between the power of working people and the power of concentrated wealth. Each President handled these forces differently. The Bush Administration talked about compassionate conservatism, but made the power of concentrated wealth worse and turbocharged the surveillance state and the dismantling of civil rights after 9/11. The Obama Administration fought hard and won historic health-care reform, but chose not to confront corporate power or build countervailing power. The Biden Administration regularly supported working people’s right to organize, but also failed to reckon sufficiently with corporate power and the escalating democracy crisis. For its part, the Trump Administration has in both its terms wielded existing executive authorities to consolidate economic power for the wealthiest Americans, limit the institutional checks and balances necessary for democratic accountability, and reverse the civil rights advances of prior decades.

For all the different policy choices each administration made, authoritarian and oligarchic aspects of our society emerged stronger.

Oligarchy

Every modern U.S. President has made economics central to his agenda, pledging to bring more economic stability to working people. But none of the administrations over the past two-plus decades, even those that took inequality seriously, saw that oligarchic power—meaning not only wealth and income gaps, but also the direct capture of decision-making and adjacent systems, like mass communications platforms, by a wealthy few—was becoming the central problem of our time.

The threat of oligarchy runs deep in our history. Since the nation’s founding, American capitalism has both fueled and plagued us. Governing decisions have often determined which side of that ledger we are on. In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used every tool at his disposal, and invented a few more along the way, to break the power of the Gilded Age monopolists, strengthen the power of labor unions, and tame the Supreme Court. The 50 years of working-class and middle-class growth that followed were marred by racial and gender exclusions baked into policy design, but it was a time when many Americans credibly believed that, in David Leonhardt’s words, “Ours was the shining future.”

By the 1980s, the New Deal consensus was battered by oil-shock-driven economic crises and the social and cultural upheavals of the Vietnam War era. This opened the political door for the pro-“free enterprise” thinking long nurtured in the academy. American presidents helped build the neoliberal order. President Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981 and installed pro-management lawyers to lead the National Labor Relations Board. President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, ushering in an era in which hundreds of thousands of union jobs were outsourced and working families’ expectations of a good life were decimated.

Presidents of both parties doubled down on the financial sector. Reagan deregulated the savings and loan industry. Clinton helped usher in “too big to fail” on Wall Street by removing barriers between commercial and investment banking. All of this gave birth to the tech sector, flooding then-young and newly deregulated Silicon Valley with speculative capital. Obama took the side of bankers rather than homeowners facing foreclosure during the financial crisis.

As it rose to power, neoliberalism disguised itself as neutral economic theory. But in reality, it was a deeply anti-democratic and racialized project. Neoliberalism was not just about lower taxes and less regulation, though it was certainly that. Neoliberal thinking also meant that all of our social institutions, from schools to families, conditioned Americans to believe that they should make choices through the lens of individual responsibility and individual freedom. Neoliberals said that under market freedom, racism would compete itself away. But this of course ignored our country’s deep history of structural bias and racial repression, and market freedom instead ultimately deepened both racial and gender wealth disparities. There was always an authoritarian substrate in neoliberalism’s real-world effects. An embrace of hierarchy and yawning inequality in the economy inevitably erodes democratic culture and practice.

Today, the tech and finance industries and their leaders have become politically dominant. The evidence is everywhere, from donor-driven political appointments to record political giving to pay-to-play personal enrichment at the uppermost echelons of leadership. The evisceration of government at the hands of tech executives, with whole agencies eliminated and federal workers laid off en masse, has resulted in clear public harms, from a global health crisis to massive cuts in federal scientific research. Challenging oligarchy, and weakening its power to uphold authoritarianism, must be a central goal of future governance.

Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism also has deep roots in our nation’s history. For the last decade, scholars and practitioners have vibrantly debated the reasons for the rise of modern authoritarianism. (By authoritarianism, we mean the use of state power to repress dissent, intimidate or capture civil society institutions, and rig the rules of the political system to keep power for a minority faction.)

One take is that the movement is the latest expression of a hierarchical project—both racist and sexist—that is as old as the country, reanimated by backlash in recent decades to the growing population, rights, and political power of people of color, as well as to changing gender roles and the expansion of rights for women and LGBTQ+ people.

Another view is that contemporary authoritarianism is the political project of an increasingly wealthy oligarchy, especially in Big Tech, that sees democracy as incompatible with its vision for the future of the world and our species.

Many argue that deeper social trends fostered by neoliberalism—especially the erosion of civic and membership institutions, from public libraries to bowling leagues—have created fertile soil for authoritarianism’s growth. The demise of unions, which provide vehicles for working people’s day-to-day practice of democracy, is strongly correlated with the rise of authoritarians.

And democracy advocates argue that the very structure of our constitutional order enables authoritarianism by allowing parties with minorities of the popular vote to capture the presidency, Senate, and House, and by enabling these minorities to block popular policies through the filibuster and the courts.

We see evidence for all these explanations.

Authoritarianism’s power lies precisely in its multiple origins and stakeholders. It is an elite project and a mass movement, a grift and a plan based on a real vision for remaking society. It feeds on popular resentment of the outcomes of neoliberal policies, and it supercharges inequality, oligarchy, and corporate power.

We can argue about the relative importance of different causes of the authoritarian turn. But the reality is that authoritarianism has been the default setting for long periods of our history, in large parts of the country, and for large numbers of people—especially Black Americans and Indigenous peoples, people of color and immigrants, women and LGBTQ+ people. Recent leaders’ failure to proceed from that premise—their embrace of a naïve story of American progress with the occasional wrong turn—has near-fatally compromised democratic strategies for governing.

Taking authoritarianism to be a chronic condition in American history, as many Black activists and scholars do, has profound implications for how we think about the project of pro-democratic governance.

Three Failures

All of our twenty-first century presidential administrations inherited both the consequences of neoliberal thinking—weakened unions and strengthened financialized capitalism—and the country’s deep authoritarian roots. This set of beliefs, institutions, and norms constrained decision-making for the Bush, Obama, and Biden Administrations in ways that led millions of working-class Americans to lose faith in the democratic system. The critical question before us now is whether future administrations will try to chart a different course.

Building the Surveillance State

President George W. Bush’s embrace of the “War on Terror” was a reaction to 9/11, the defining crisis of his presidency. But it was also built on a long history of conservative agitation for a more muscular, neoconservative foreign policy, which proceeded alongside conservatism’s embrace of neoliberalism. After 9/11, Bush’s policies did not narrowly respond to specific terrorist networks, but instead made a civilizational argument. The President’s declarations discouraging anti-Muslim bias in the immediate days after the attack notwithstanding, the Bush policy agenda targeted millions of Muslims, Arabs, Middle Easterners, and South Asians as threats and suspects. This created a discriminatory infrastructure—most prominently in the form of the massive new Department of Homeland Security—to consolidate and expand surveillance, detention, and deportation powers.

The Patriot Act, passed a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, created baseless government authorities and empowered actions in violation of constitutional, civil, and human rights on everything from domestic surveillance, detention, and deportation to interrogation and torture. This weaponized Americans’ fear and grief, justifying xenophobia and paranoia about Black and brown people and immigrants generally. The U.S. Treasury—the backbone of global finance—and the U.S. banking system gained vast powers to surveil and, often, to cut off capital based on discriminatory “terrorist watch lists” and investigations of nonprofits that never established guilt. Decades of hard-fought civil rights protections crumbled swiftly under this assault.

The growing national security state after 9/11 depended on a supercharged financial system and in turn benefitted that system. Investment banks and venture capital poured billions of dollars into national security tech startups, defense contractors, and privatized military ventures. National defense itself became even more of a privatized commodity as the surveillance state grew. This amplified the power of the oligarchic elite and the instruments of authoritarian control simultaneously. The symbiosis of a corporation such as Palantir and the surveillance bureaucracy is but one example.

The Party of FDR Becomes the Establishment

President Barack Obama also faced a crisis from the beginning of his presidency. Progressives have long criticized his response to the global financial meltdown he inherited on economic grounds, as too small and with benefits that weren’t visible enough. Whether Obama ever could have done more remains the subject of fierce debate, given that the 60-vote Democratic majority in the Senate in his first term was undermined by fiscally conservative Democratic senators and a unified Republican bloc. But governance failures in the Obama years were a turning point. The backlash that emerged in 2009-12 led to tectonic shifts in our culture and politics.

For hundreds of millions of people, the Great Recession years were a major part of a long-term decline—a deep, resounding loss of faith in the American promise. The federal government provided close to $250 billion to Wall Street, many times what it provided to homeowners. Banks returned to profitability, while an estimated ten million mortgage holders lost their homes. Despite clear evidence of criminal wrongdoing, no big bank executives in the United States were prosecuted or went to jail. For the vast majority of Americans, this was when the government that was supposed to fight for working people’s interests in an economic crisis became the establishment.

Overall, the Obama Administration focused squarely on moving policy within existing strictures rather than on making new rules that would change power structures. Health-care reform was the top policy priority, and Obama expended Herculean energy mobilizing Congress, especially the critical handful of conservative Democrats who always threatened to vote against the White House. This approach worked to pass the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which helped tens of millions of Americans afford health care but left the power of the health insurance industry intact. More generally, this approach proved insufficient to achieve structural reforms that would have changed the balance of power itself, such as strengthening union rights or reforming the immigration system.

At the same time, conservative movement energies were massing. The Tea Party’s founding in February 2009 with Rick Santelli’s on-air rant against Obama’s support for homeowners was the beginning of the public declaration of a new iteration of right-wing populism in the United States. By April of that year the movement had become nationalized, with an estimated 750 rallies across the country. A significant number of the Tea Party’s economic populists were also “birthers” who falsely claimed that the nation’s first Black President was ineligible for office because he was not born in the United States. In uniting neoliberal and authoritarian tropes, the movement gave permission for outright racists to become ever louder within conservative popular culture and its increasingly powerful media and social media platforms.

In 2008, Obama won the presidency because he had built an inspirational nationwide movement. But his team chose not to continue to support outside movement power once in office. White House officials instead worried that movement forces—a “living, fire-breathing entity,” as one adviser later put it—could turn against the Administration if not controlled. The movement Obama built was deliberately demobilized, while other forces, such as labor, got weaker without help from the White House.

Obama’s approach to governing—push within the existing system, demobilize movements, accommodate corporate power, and deprioritize countervailing power—left the field open for a resurgent right wing and a return of the oligarchs who were briefly humbled during the financial crisis. Newly energized conservative populists had plenty of room to push their own narrative about who was to blame for working-class people’s falling economic prospects. They marshaled many working- and middle-class white Americans’ energies and resentments against elites of all stripes—but also, perversely and bitterly, against homeowners of color and immigrants, who were the hardest-hit victims of the Great Recession and the jobless recovery.

The Administration’s failure to address economic inequality meant that the ardent hope of 2008 had by 2016 curdled into a sour anti-system cynicism, paving the way for an authoritarian upsurge. The United States has never been the same.

Paradigm Shift, But Not for the People

President Biden came into office promising to “shift the paradigm” on working-class economics. The COVID-19 pandemic gave permission for more spending, and the Biden team drove the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was both bigger and more directly distributed to working people than the 2009 stimulus. Some Biden appointees had a laser focus on fighting the stranglehold of corporate power. On climate, the Biden team took cues from the climate and justice movements pushing for a Green New Deal.

For a brief moment, it seemed that an administration understood that fighting against corporate extraction could be a powerful tool. Market-first, neoliberal thinking could not tackle COVID-19 and climate change, the biggest problems of our age.

But in the end, Biden-era economic initiatives—limited by an even thinner congressional majority in Congress than during the Obama Administration—were ambivalent about both power and populism. The Biden Administration, on balance, cut both corporate and individual taxes despite its promise to make the wealthy “pay their fair share,” and it did not try to reverse wholesale the tax cuts passed into law in 2017. The Administration’s tentative relationship to union power showed up in divergent responses to worker actions. Biden weighed in against the full package of worker demands in the railway strike of 2022, but he did walk the picket line for auto workers a year later.

Flawed policy design and communications mistakes didn’t help build popular trust in governance. The stimulus’s child tax credits just showed up in people’s bank accounts without any explanation. The Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) “green credits” were technocratic and confusing. Of course, in the end, inflation was the weighted anchor on the Administration’s ambitions, and the Administration handled rising public anger at prices badly.

But in retrospect, public anger at Biden’s economic efforts was also based on the priorities themselves. The policies that made it through Congress were climate, transportation infrastructure, and industrial policy investments—important for our long-term economic and planetary health, but not the health-care, child-care, and elder-care investments that support the personal and family well-being, and time, of the American people. More on care, and a more direct, less distant set of climate and infrastructure investments—money to offset people’s rising energy bills, for example—could have met the public moment in a way that the IRA did not.

Already saddled with decades of deep public distrust and facing a country furious and fearful about COVID-19, by the end of his presidency, the visibly older Biden could not respond to or channel public anger. Terrible foreign policy choices, especially with respect to Israel, and a confused and confusing immigration and border policy only contributed to public ire. This reflected the widening gulf between the interests of working people and what policymakers understood about their concerns and their lives. If the battle was really about a paradigm shift for the people, authoritarian populists won the fight handily.

Governance in an Anti-System Age: Matching Power With Power

Almost 20 years after the financial crisis, most Americans are disillusioned and jaded. The number of people who say they hate both political parties has doubled since 2020. Most people do not trust the federal government or see it as helpful to their lives.

This is fuel for authoritarianism. Large numbers of people may not be ideologically committed to strongman rule, but they see that existing economic and political systems are failing them. For many working people, elected officials and leaders on both sides of the aisle, along with educated elites more broadly, are the problem. They designed, benefit from, and now uphold a system that only works for them.

But this also means that some people who have supported authoritarianism may hold their allegiance lightly and be open to new ideas. And a far bigger group of people who don’t currently participate at all can perhaps be persuaded to engage.

What does all of this say about an effective approach to governance that will strengthen democracy today? We see four critical shifts from what has come before.

1. Our Democracy Needs New Rules

Even before we get to specific policies, we must consider the system in which those policies are made. By design, our constitutional order prevents majorities from translating their preferences into action. The undemocratic structure of our political system has helped enable the authoritarian turn. Multiple veto points thwart popular will, including the Electoral College, the filibuster, and the unrepresentative structure of the Senate. Add to that the recent wave of Supreme Court decisions, like the undercutting of voting rights, that weaken democratic participation. When popular demands are dismissed or defeated, cynicism grows, and authoritarian leaders who promise to break the rules to get things done gain genuine appeal.

Twice in the last 25 years, the person who lost the popular vote has become President. The Supreme Court has upheld unpopular and anti-democratic policies on issues from civil liberties to civil rights. The Senate is heavily weighted to rural, whiter states—dramatically diminishing the voting power of people of color and others who live in more densely populated regions. These anti-democratic rules are compounded by state legislatures’ gerrymandering, money in politics, and laws that suppress voting.

Any advocate who has pursued change on any issue in the last three decades, from gun control to health care, has their own story of how these systemic government failures have blocked reforms that have majority support. Some issues, like immigration reform, have fallen victim to different traps at different times. “Deliverism” isn’t enough, but certainly democracy must function well enough to deliver benefits for working people.

Reformers have a long list of potential fixes: abolishing the Electoral College via the National Popular Vote, eliminating the filibuster, developing a multi-party system and proportional representation, adding additional states to the union, significantly reforming the Supreme Court, amending the Constitution itself. All are worth exploring seriously. The point here is not to present a fully formed strategy for renovating our democracy. It is to say that governing will require that such a strategy be a top priority.

In addition to pursuing structural democracy reforms, pro-democracy advocates must take building levers of governing power for the public—and against private concentration—seriously. We need to develop a new constitutional politics. Under the “unitary executive theory,” authoritarians are claiming powers to tax and spend, to police and deport, to investigate and terrorize, that are illegitimate and, often, violate existing rights. The pro-democracy response must be a comprehensive and lucid approach to using governmental power, restoring checks and balances, and at the same time delivering for the American people.

Who should legitimately wield governmental power, and on what terms? When and how should pro-democracy reformers use the powers of the presidency—more imperial now than ever—to oppose authoritarian policies, and instead promote ones backed by democratic claims of justice? When and how should pro-democracy efforts remake the Supreme Court, which, in a historical first, a majority of Americans now view as biased? Court reform is central to any reconstruction project. And how should pro-democracy forces reform Congress, which is now so broken as to be unable to govern in any meaningful way?

These are not questions that any governance experts had to address even a few short years ago. Answering them well will be a monumental and consequential task. Perhaps the solution for now is, as Cornell Law’s K. Sabeel Rahman argues, that pro-democracy forces must use all tools at their disposal—even the expanded powers of the executive—while at the same time working towards legislative primacy and court reform and maintaining the authority of courts that have not been corrupted. The purpose must always be to restore public trust, with a rebalancing across all three branches of government as the North Star.

2. Policies Must Matter to Working People

In addition to truly democratic systems, we also need policies that are popular, tangible, and meaningful to regular people. This is not about policy lists. It is about having a strategic approach to policy prioritization and design.

The first step is picking policies that can build public trust. This will require more than tweaking around the edges of private-sector domination. Especially in our highly financialized economy, market forces will never provide, universally and at reasonable prices, what people need to live a good life, especially care, education, and housing. Delivering for working people will mean public action, public options, and public funding.

Affordability—the ability to pay for life’s necessities, and a few extras too—will doubtless be critical to any agenda. Fixing housing will require everything from eviction moratoriums and rent freezes to more public financing dedicated to building. Addressing health care, now so radically underfunded that more than five million people lost Medicaid or ACA coverage in 2025, will clearly require more federal funding, but also the revival of “Medicare for All” and perhaps the direct delivery of care through publicly funded clinics. The same is true for child care and elder care—think Head Start at scale, as well as guaranteed, affordable care that ensures that care workers can organize.

We will need not just public funding of existing programs, but also brand-new ideas. Promising ideas include some that are familiar, like tuition-free public colleges, and some that are fresh, like a People’s College that would guarantee every adult a fully paid-for two-year college degree, or making school lunch free for all kids. We also need more people-focused policies. Imagine national service or jobs programs wherein benefits arrive in a matter of days or months, as New Deal programs did. Imagine accessing public benefits without degrading or Rube Goldberg-like application procedures. Imagine programs where beneficiaries see themselves as deserving claimants—as the elderly feel about Social Security. Government policy can honor social identities like being a parent, worker, or student, just as it has done for older Americans.

Transformational policy design will also have to tackle people’s fears about the near future, which are in large part driven by worries about artificial intelligence. A much more robust social safety net—from unemployment insurance to job training—is table stakes. We should also work now to build jobs that are pro-worker and “double-dignity,” providing dignity both to the worker and those their work serves. Tech worker organizing, various efforts to slow or put moratoriums on AI development, and building public checks on AI using all government tools—from comprehensive safety regimes to equity stakes to national ownership of AI companies to public options—should all be on the table.

The proposals that leaders put forward can’t be symbolic, incremental, or weak gestures in the face of titanic problems. We need transformational policies that speak to the core of the pain people are experiencing and that an everyday person would understand to be an effective response that would actually fix the problem. Governance in an anti-system age requires honesty and directness about the level of change required—and about who and what stand in the way.

3. Power-Shifting Must Be a Central Metric of Policy

Pro-democracy efforts must also use policy to tame power at the top and build countervailing power for working people. That power-building must be sufficient to contain and oppose extractive corporate power and its authoritarian allies.

Some power-shifting priorities are age-old. Taxation is of course important as a matter of federal revenue. But it is also a critical tool for blunting the power of corporations and oligarchs. We know that taxing wealth and power is politically very difficult—most recent tax legislation has in fact moved in the opposite direction—but the status quo is dire and may be unsustainable. Wealth is skyrocketing, and the ultrawealthy, using perfectly legal “buy, borrow, die” strategies, often pay absolutely nothing in income or estate taxes. The untaxed accumulation of income and assets has worsened significantly over the last 20 years. Many ideas should be in the mix: raising the current tax rates, focusing on wealth taxation, taxing inheritance and capital gains, or something even more far-ranging, like a global wealth tax. This will be an ongoing struggle, but it must be central.

Directly strengthening working people’s civic power is also essential. Unions and other institutions that create solidarity among working people are a crucial antidote to both authoritarianism and oligarchy. Labor law has been made into a tool of anti-union employers; rewriting it so that the record numbers of workers who want a union can have one should be a cornerstone of economic policy. And it’s not just workers. The federal government could also actively support organizing and social bargaining by other groups, such as tenants, consumers, patients, parents, and students. More agency for everyday people in the economy supports democratic vitality.

Breaking corporate monopolies and confronting oligarchic rule must be part of the plan. The concentration of media ownership as well as the outsize power of AI, crypto, and social media companies must be confronted directly. Solutions will require federal action: putting AI under federal control, including through public ownership. Breaking up media conglomerates. Chartering large corporations so they are accountable to the public and required to balance profit-seeking with worker empowerment, limit executive compensation, place limits on political spending, and reverse environmental harms. Breaking the power of corporate behemoths isn’t optional if we wish to live in a democratic society.

Deconstructing the massive surveillance and carceral state is another necessity. Its exponential growth further strengthens the hand of industries and oligarchs predisposed to support authoritarian policies. The growing (and increasingly privatized) workforce of people whose job is to arrest and incarcerate others—the majority of whom are people of color and immigrants—creates a powerful voting bloc for authoritarianism.

Federal action will not be easy given the roadblocks to sweeping change—even change supported by majorities—that are baked into our political system. That is why making structural changes that enable the government to serve the public interest is an essential first step.

A final and controversial element of power-shifting involves honestly reckoning with hard truths about our past. Lawmakers must not avoid the difficult but essential work of remembrance, accountability, and repair that is necessary to prevent future authoritarian upsurges. This story has replayed itself over and over throughout American history. Premature reincorporation of former Confederates undermined the first Reconstruction. Policymakers of both parties failed to take decisive action after the January 6 insurrection. Finding the form that accountability takes will not be easy and demands deliberation—but we cannot afford to make the mistake of willful forgetting.

4. Successful Governance Needs Strong Movements

Outside agitation has always been fundamental to social change. Our country has had only three periods in which democratic rights, economic equality, and social and cultural belonging all expanded: Reconstruction, the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and the civil rights movement. The common factor in each era was nonviolent movements featuring massive popular protest and nonviolent, constitutionally protected actions like strikes and boycotts. Broad-based organizing by Black people, pastors and faith leaders, workers, tenants, committees of the unemployed, women, and LGBTQ+ people created a climate of urgency that led leaders to embrace bold and transformative policies once seen as far outside the mainstream. Abolition of slavery. Women’s suffrage. The right of working people to form a union. The income tax, meaning taxing the wealthy. Voting rights.

The New Deal policy revolution was made possible by highly disruptive outside movements: tenants fighting evictions and workers going on strike. The Voting Rights Act came only after Selma and Bloody Sunday. Movements create moral, economic, and political crises that force politicians to choose sides, which many hate to do. Movements always engender backlash from those benefiting from the status quo they challenge, but they are essential for expanding the terrain of what’s possible.

Success in pro-democracy governance demands an inside-outside strategy. People in office can’t will movements into being, but they can encourage and validate them. FDR famously said, “If I went to work in a factory, the first thing I’d do is join a union.” President Lyndon B. Johnson used the language of the civil rights movement—“We shall overcome”—to show his support. Public officials should accept that movements will often frustrate them. They will make big demands and criticize elected leaders; this is necessary to the messy process of governing. Emancipation needed Abraham Lincoln, but equally Frederick Douglass and a broad-based, boisterous abolitionist movement that sometimes criticized Lincoln to make it possible.

Outside groups must also shift their orientation. They will need to build new habits and strengths. Organizing muscles have atrophied in the age of online organizing and social media, which has made fast but shallow mobilization easier. Too many groups talk to shrinking numbers of the already converted rather than reaching out to the millions of people who are not yet activists, but who might join because they, too, seek community, agency, and the outcomes born of solidarity.

And pro-democracy movements’ policy demands must be bolder, in line with the ideas we outline above. Too many groups have defaulted to highlighting the abuses of authoritarianism or rehashing incremental policy proposals developed in another era. The moment now is different. They should be making more ambitious demands of our entire governing system and speaking to their members’ hunger for a vision for our shared future.

An American Strategy

A new approach to governance would challenge undemocratic rules that are unfair and unrepresentative, rebalance power in society and the economy, and invite popular movements into an ongoing conversation. This playbook would be a dramatic break with the overly technocratic, insider-oriented governance of prior administrations and with the imperial approach of the current one. This is not a fantasy. It is an approach that has long been central to our American story. While oligarchy and authoritarianism are as old as the country, so too are reform movements that have enhanced our democracy and made our country more equal.

Radical Republicans and a grassroots Reconstruction movement of formerly enslaved people enacted three amendments to the Constitution and created and then used the Freedman’s Bureau to deliver material benefits and political rights to formerly enslaved people—and also to disrupt, for too short a time, racial hierarchies in the South. The New Dealers inside and outside the government made unions central to the lives of American working people and forged a national liberal coalition that included Black Americans and Catholic and Jewish immigrants. The civil rights movement continued that tradition, winning landmark legislative victories and making racial equality the new common sense.

This deeply American lineage of reformers working both inside and outside the system has overcome challenges worse than what we face. They can inspire and instruct us today.

Even a fresh approach to governance will not succeed, however, in the absence of a compelling vision—a deep, broadly appealing, and solidaristic story of what makes for a good life and how we should live with each other in this new era. Authoritarianism’s current cruelties have weakened its appeal, but authoritarians still have a vision of the good life that is emotionally compelling. Their vision of a life that purports to “overthrow elites”; centers family, neighbors, religion, and virtue; and provides order and safety will remain a source of power, no matter how hypocritical it may be.

But that is not the only plausible vision for a post-neoliberal order. We believe that the coming years are a crucial opportunity for moral and prophetic leadership focused on justice and equality to invite us into a new American story of who we are and can be.

We understand the temptation to “restore” rather than ask for more, especially since authoritarianism has brought so much pain and fear. And we also understand the inclination to prepare for the future based on what we know about the past, have trained for our whole lives, and are good at.

But the strange paradox of our times is that only by pursuing changes that seem impossible can we realistically avoid the entrenchment of authoritarianism and oligarchy for decades to come. Playing incremental small ball is the real risk. People want new policies and systems that work for them, not small improvements. The viable path, both practical and inspirational, requires a new worldview and strategy for governing that reconstructs our society in service of human flourishing.