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President's Letters

President’s Letter: What It Will Take to Protect Democracy

Dear friends,

In just a few months, Americans will head to the polls under conditions that are anything but normal. 

The Department of Justice has demanded sensitive voter data from nearly every state and Washington, D.C. Election deniers have been installed in key oversight positions. Ballots from 2020 have been seized by the FBI in Fulton County, Georgia. The administration has sought to turn the Postal Service against mail-in voting. Earlier this year, the administration refused to rule out sending troops or immigration enforcement officers to polling stations. People and groups exercising their constitutional rights to organize and protest are being targeted for exercising these rights. New tactics to stymie those rights are surfacing nearly every week, and the administration’s actions are likely to escalate between now and November. 

Meanwhile the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais has effectively gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, allowing several Southern states to rapidly redraw congressional districts in order to eliminate majority-minority seats in a blatant and discriminatory gerrymandering effort. 

The stakes in November will be historically high. But I am confident that we know how to respond to this moment — we already know how to uphold our fundamental freedoms when they are at risk.

Early this year, when federal agents were sent to occupy Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesotans responded with organized solidarity in an effort to protect their communities from harm. They dispatched trained constitutional observers to immigration court dates to protect the due process rights of their neighbors. They activated mutual aid networks to feed families too scared to shop for groceries. Small business owners asserted their Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless searches at their front doors. And close to 350,000 people took part in a general strike to oppose the ICE and CBP occupation of their state in the largest citywide nonviolent disruption in the United States since the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the mid-1950s. 

In the end, Minnesotans peacefully mobilized until thousands of federal agents withdrew from the Twin Cities.

I have called for a relearning of the discipline of strategic nonviolence that animated the Bus Boycott and the entirety of the Civil Rights Movement. It is the organizing toolbox handed down to us by abolitionists, labor organizers, and leaders like Dr. King and his colleagues. Minnesota was a powerful signal that this lineage is alive and well. In fact, it has been revived faster than I anticipated. Over one million people have been trained in organizing and nonviolence over the last year. 

Minnesota is not an outlier. It is part of a groundswell of democratic action across the country. Protest activity has risen to generational highs, capped by March’s No Kings protest, the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. There’s also a growing fluency in options that go beyond demonstrations — people are leveraging social media to organize remarkably effective boycotts, buycotts, and sustained pressure campaigns like the one that forced Disney to reverse course after removing Jimmy Kimmel from the air.

Today, I believe the pro-democracy movement is succeeding. We’ve traveled an extraordinary distance over the past 19 months — a fact that remains largely unrecognized, even by many activists themselves. 

For the democracy movement to succeed, we need not only more peaceful disruption, but also to draw more defections. That requires peeling away supporters of the authoritarian coalition and motivating those sitting on the sidelines to join us. 

We’re already seeing how sustained public pressure can broaden the pro-democracy coalition. Pope Leo, Catholic bishops, and some evangelical leaders have broken publicly with the administration over immigration enforcement. Business leaders in industries like agriculture, construction, and healthcare have joined them. Scientists are organizing marches. Lower courts are consistently blocking executive overreach, even as some decisions are reversed on appeal. 

A number of civil society institutions including several major law firms have maintained their independence and successfully sued the administration. Harvard has remained remarkably resilient in the face of threats to its federal funding, despite a great many people expecting it to fold. The university has twice sued the administration and has twice prevailed in court. 

Defections like these are a response to the growing unpopularity of the administration’s policies and actions — driven in no small part by the brave and important work of organizers and protestors. Recent polling finds that signature administration policies are now supported by only 20 to 30 percent of respondents. Declining public support makes it easier for civil society institutions, courts, and former members of the governing coalition to step out and withdraw their own support.

Momentum is growing. As the democracy movement looks toward its next major milestone – ensuring free and fair elections – it’s incumbent to capitalize on the progress we’ve made and reinvest in the tools that have yielded success. 

Given the scale of threats, as Freedom Together’s Managing Director Daniel Altschuler and democracy scholar Javier Corrales recently argued in The Guardian, the standard election playbook of mobilizing voters, staffing legal hotlines, filing lawsuits, and observing the polls will be necessary but insufficient on its own. With many of the guardrails that saved democracy in 2020 no longer in place, organizing must once again serve as democracy’s bulwark. 

Encouragingly, a growing number of charitable foundations are stepping forward. Peers like the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation have announced significant spending to protect democracy and safeguard elections. At Freedom Together, we devoted more than 70 percent of our grantmaking last year to pro-democracy strategies. We expect this percentage to increase this year, representing a greater focus on funding efforts to organize and build long-term, grassroots power for directly impacted communities.

These are meaningful commitments — and yet collectively we as a sector are not yet providing resources commensurate with the crisis before us. We need more funders at every level to invest far more, at a scale that matches the enormity of the threat and sustains both the traditional election protection and the organizing infrastructure on which our democracy depends.

With tragedies mounting around us every day, there is ample reason for sadness and frustration. I grieve for those we have lost. But there is also mounting evidence that organized people can prevail. Together, we are capable of not only defending our democracy in this moment, but building a more sustainable, multi-racial democracy than we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

In solidarity,

Deepak Bhargava
President
Freedom Together Foundation

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