November 13, 2020 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Nonprofits and their philanthropic donors have stood up in unprecedented ways this past year to save our democracy under the most dire and challenging circumstances. Hundreds of millions of new dollars entered the philanthropic space through individual and institutional giving to ensure that a diverse, representative electorate could vote safely and that the American people could have faith in the election’s outcomes.
This influx of nonpartisan support enabled nonprofits nationwide to advocate for important ballot-access reforms, recruit more than 700,000 new poll workers, support drastically underfunded election administrators, fight voter suppression, and combat election-related misinformation.
Together, civic-oriented nonprofits, with the support of a bolder philanthropic community, helped more Americans participate in our election than ever before despite a pandemic and attempts to suppress the vote. The dedication of the democracy champions who led this fight and the philanthropic leaders who supported their work have been inspiring. I am grateful to be in fellowship with a community of patriots who responded with energy and action to this year’s unprecedented needs.
But the results of this election have not brought our democratic crisis to an end. If anything, they have revealed its true depths as millions of voters, fueled by falsehoods from the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress, question the legitimacy of the election results. Despite our fatigue, the task before us is to build a democracy that lives up to our founding ideals. Starting now, we need to begin the work of reforming the toxic, underlying conditions that brought our democracy to the brink.
Most immediately, that means doing all we can to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition of power even as the president continues to sow doubt about the process and engages in spurious legal challenges to the election. These challenges are unlikely to change the outcome, but they will do tremendous damage to the country’s ability to move on and could have long-term consequences for the health of our democratic institutions.
Restoring Public Confidence
The nation will need civil society to play a pivotal role during this tumultuous transition period. The Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition is already laying the groundwork to support the mechanics of this process, while government watchdogs such as the Project on Government Oversight and the Government Accountability Project are implementing plans to mitigate the risk of the Trump administration inflicting irreparable damage to our government on its way out the door.
Beyond the next few months, our focus must shift toward the bedrock efforts that can restore public faith in our system. We will need to begin by repairing the damage done by an administration bent on tearing down the norms and institutions of our democracy. From the federal government to the local level, we must undertake a new era of reforms to foster effective, trustworthy government institutions able to deliver for the public. And with a divided government, we’ll need to find a way to do it across partisan divisions. We can start by focusing on areas that both sides have an incentive to get behind, such as reducing the power of the executive branch to prevent future abuses that trample on our democratic system.
At the same time, the past four years have made clear that we can’t simply return to a pre-2016 status quo. Rather, we must continue pushing for fundamental reforms that unrig a system badly out of sync with democratic principles. A republic cannot survive if power is held by a shrinking, unrepresentative minority.
Long-Term Effort
Over the past four years, we’ve found hope in the growing enthusiasm for civic engagement among ordinary Americans who for too long felt alienated from the political process. In the coming years, we must channel and expand this enthusiasm and eliminate barriers throughout our democracy to achieve full participation. This is closely tied, of course, with the imperative to continue growing the movement for racial justice and eliminating white supremacy.
After years of deepening hyper-partisanship and the rise of white-grievance politics, a shared sense of what unites us as Americans is, at best, elusive. Philanthropy will need to promote efforts to reweave our social fabric — not just mending tears but reimagining a tapestry that better lives up to our collective values. We must rebuild the media, in particular the decimated landscape of local journalism, to earn the trust of the communities they serve. And we must hold social–media platforms accountable for the role they have played in spreading hate, misinformation, and division.
This extensive agenda will take time to further develop, and its boldness will likely be dampened by government gridlock and the many opponents of reform in the Senate. But after spending the past several years defending our system against authoritarianism, we cannot stop now. Nor can we become complacent and allow our progress to slip away.
Philanthropy must sustain and expand the new commitments made this year to protecting American democracy. Let’s take a moment to celebrate our successes. But after we have caught our breath, it will be time to mobilize behind the next phase of this critical work: building an open and just democracy that makes all of us proud.
