Want to fight Trump? Then act now to strengthen democracy

While a post-election CBS News poll found majority support for Donald Trump’s promise to deport all undocumented immigrants, a more nuanced and less noticed poll from Data for Progress in late October showed exactly the opposite: Mass deportation is highly unpopular when you shift the question from an abstraction to specific details, such as asylum seekers or DACA recipients brought here by immigrant parents. Deporting members of these groups was opposed by more than three to one. 

Deporting the Haitian immigrants demonized by Trump, who have temporary protected status, was also overwhelmingly opposed, 62 to 21 percent. So standing up for those folks and pushing back, as Springfield’s Republican mayor did, was broadly popular as well as morally righteous. If the Harris campaign had been anywhere near as competent as its top operatives believed, they would have focused on this disconnect like Luke Skywalker on the Death Star.

That missed opportunity could have rescued the Democrats this year, but only temporarily, given the global trends and underlying forces I explored in my previous article on the Harris defeat. I bring that up here to make clear that even in our current perilous state progressives can find multiple paths forward, with enough fearlessness and determination.

We can’t turn the clock back and alter the 2024 outcome, but these contrasting polls reveal important truths. First, Donald Trump’s toxic ideas are far less popular than the media would have us believe, and should be combatted vigorously. Second, that in fighting the authoritarian threat Trump represents we need to strengthen democracy, to make facts matter, and to draw people into serious deliberation about the future.

The best-developed tool we have for that in America is the state initiative process, as highlighted in Amanda Marcotte’s recent article on “America's political discordance,” where she noted, "In state after state, voters backed both Trump and ballot initiatives that advanced and protected progressive goals." That partly reflected the failure of Kamala Harris’ campaign, but also a long-term disconnect that Democrats have never seriously dealt with. 

It doesn’t have to be that way. We can make democracy work much better than it now does, and that’s integral to fighting against the attacks a second Trump term will bring. One way we can do this represents a road not taken 30 years ago, one that could have helped us mitigate the climate crisis and avoid the crisis of democracy we find ourselves in today. 

In my earlier article, I referred to a "politics of care and deliberation." The first part of that phrase describes how Democrats responded to the Great Depression under FDR, how they tried to respond to the COVID and climate crises under Joe Biden (with only partial success) and how they could still reshape society, based on the lessons laid out in Jessica Calarco’s "Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net" (Author interview here.)

I’ll have more to say about the politics of care in my next article. But the "politics of deliberation" speaks to why Democrats only partly succeeded under Biden: They were pushing for policies that most people support, but were largely blocked or watered down due to the power of wealthy elites and special interests. When it comes to electing the candidates people want, democracy more or less succeeds. But when it comes to delivering the policies people want, it largely fails, further eroding the public's faith in democracy. 

That’s what we must fight to restore, alongside all the specific battles that lie ahead. To restore that faith we must advance new ways for democracy to deliver on its promises. Here are four such approaches, which cannot be realized overnight but provide a crucial framework of possibility.

Four forums for deliberative democracy

In my previous story, I wrote about citizens assemblies, which function similar to juries, but deal with making policy rather than civil or criminal law. Similar assemblies were at the core of Athenian democracy more than 2,000 years ago, and they’ve been revived recently across the world, mostly in Europe. These forums are run in a nonpartisan manner, even though more progressive parties have tended to propose them. Democrats and their allies could take the same approach here.  

But citizens assemblies aren't enough to address the deep deficit of public trust. People need more direct experience in public affairs, as well as a better-informed sense of the issues and how they can be addressed and resolved. We need to forge stronger connections between people’s everyday lives and the decisions that affect them. 

There are three other forums in which deliberation can be significantly strengthened: opinion polling, mainstream or public media and social media. Reforms to the first two draw on models that go back to 1992, when Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy exposed the same disconnect we struggle with today. 

“Public interest polling,” a concept developed by Alan Kay, uses iterative and highly specific questions to clarify options and lead the way to hidden consensus. One 1994 poll found strong support for such polls in guiding congressional legislation. It would be sensible for Democrats and their progressive allies to push for using such polls in a nonpartisan manner, as Kay did originally.

Similarly, the “citizens agenda” approach to campaign journalism, pioneered by the Charlotte Observer in 1992, systematically uncovered voters’ key concerns and built the paper’s coverage around clarifying them and where candidates stood on them. This de-emphasized both horse-race journalism, which treats politics like a football game, and the related tendency to report from the position of insider strategy, rather than from the viewpoint of voters whose lives will be affected. 

Models for social media reform are more recent and still evolving, but build on observations about online interactions that go back decades, as well as traditions of public discourse stretching back to antiquity. Above all, they focus on fostering deliberative public engagement rather than rewarding performative conflict.

Taken together, we already possess the tools to begin solving the problem we face. We just need to develop our ability to use them. Let’s take a close look at each of these to figure out how and why it works. 

Citizens assemblies

Athenian-style citizens assemblies, which I wrote about in my previous story, provide the purest, richest and clearest example of high-quality deliberative democracy in action, and also serve as focal points for the other three examples to interact with and support. I’ve written previously about their use at a national level (here and here), as well as their global spread and a project to develop such an assembly in Los Angeles. 

Like juries, these assemblies comprise ordinary citizens called to a public duty, who tend to demonstrate a remarkable ability to reason together. They hear evidence, take expert testimony, are presented with alternative views and then, more often than not, come to significant consensus, often on issues where politicians have repeatedly failed. 

They have been introduced to deal with specific challenging issues: Abortion in Ireland (where it was completely banned for decades) was one prominent and consequential example. Climate assemblies have also proliferated at both national and local levels. Some permanent bodies are now being established, such as climate-specific assemblies in Brussels and Milan, and general-purpose ones in Paris and the German-speaking zone of eastern Belgium.

In the U.S., citizens assemblies could help fortify state and local governments in opposing Trump’s efforts to enforce harmful policies on them. For example, Los Angeles could benefit from a citizens assembly on immigration to reinforce its 40-plus-year tradition as a sanctuary city, going back to conservative police chief Daryl Gates. Public opinion in L.A. still supports that tradition, but the history and logic of the practice isn’t widely understood. 

A citizens assembly could redress that ignorance, resurfacing conservative arguments in favor of sanctuary while, of course, allowing those who feel harmed by it present their points of view. Everyone would benefit by hearing their views represented and responded to respectfully. The result of a well-publicized citizens’ assembly would carry the kind of weight that no elected politician or political body could match. If city government then decided to confront the Trump administration directly on the issue, it would have a body of representative citizens already staking out the position that elected leaders were defending.

It would be even better if multiple jurisdictions engaged in a similar process at the same time — and believe it or not, something similar happened more than 40 years ago. Early in the Reagan administration, there was open talk about fighting and winning a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. That sparked a massive grassroots backlash, fueled by public demonstrations and support in a series of New England town meetings. That led to a wave of state initiatives in 1982, which effectively shut down the warmongering. While that mobilization has been virtually wiped from public memory, it may well have altered the course of history. A similar coordinated effort, channeled through citizens assemblies in Democratic cities and states, could have a comparable impact. 

Abortion rights, the climate crisis and health care access would be other prime topics for citizens’ assemblies, especially since each city or state faces its own set of challenges in dealing with those issues. But immediate mobilization to combat the Trump administration is only the beginning of what’s possible. 

Ancient Athens developed a democratic system based on an entire ecosystem of assemblies devoted to different tasks, which essentially created a separation of powers such that no faction of the citizenry could take control over the whole.  A 2013 paper on the lessons of Athenian democracy, describes how that system worked could be adapted for the age of modern mass democracies today, describing six distinct functions that separate deliberative bodies could fulfill: setting the agenda, drafting bills and then reviewing them, voting on legislation, setting the overall rules of the process and, lastly, enforcing them. 

As the Trump administration intensifies its efforts attempts to impose a more authoritarian system on government at all levels, the best defense is not just more reactive defense of the flawed status quo. It’s a proactive counteroffensive, built on showing that democratic alternatives exist and can work both to identify and solve real problems, and to bring people together. 

Public interest polling

Another way to develop factually-informed consensus that goes beyond elite-dominated politics comes from the public interest polling practices developed and refined by Alan Kay in a series of more than 30 polls in the 1980s and ‘90s. I've written about this before:

As Kay explained the concept in 1999, “Public-interest polling is about issues — resolving community, regional, state, national and international problems. What is needed is governance that will help make the world, or our part of it, work with consensus support as easily realizable as a small town-meeting can find a consensus should it wish to.” Although it doesn't engage participants in back-and-forth discussions with one another, it does include methods for exposing people to different arguments and discovering if they significantly change people's views. And it doesn't require any higher levels of political sophistication or commitment. Like the jury system, it's open to one and all.

Public interest polling can work together with citizens assemblies, and can also be used to improve the quality of deliberation in existing legislative bodies, giving them a more precise and nuanced understanding of what the public actually wants.

This kind of deliberative polling can surface often-surprising bipartisan consensus on that’s directly opposed to existing elite consensus, which can sometimes be wildly out of touch with reality. 

Among the significant examples Kay found were a preference for multilateralism over unilateralism after the end of the Cold War, for investments in renewable energy over fossil fuels and nuclear energy and for proactive democratic reforms rather than business as usual. Two of of the most popular proposed reforms involved using public interest polling to inform congressional decision-making and developing a scorecard of GDP-like indicators to hold politicians responsible for their progress in meeting established goals. 

If the wider world had paid attention to these kinds of polls, we might have avoided the worst dangers of the climate crisis, decided not to invade Iraq after 9/11 (and perhaps avoided 9/11 altogether), and done a better job of persuading Americans that government could work to their benefit, thus avoiding the current crisis.

Public interest polling isn’t a substitute for citizens assemblies, and it can't provide the kinds of individual and group interactions that produce bonds of trust and understanding and develop unforeseen agreement. But the impact of both these deliberative innovations will depend, in large part, on rehabilitating the media.

A pro-democracy media

Media reform, and specifically reform that strengthens democracy and deliberation, is vital for the future. The current stenographic style of political reporting, followed up by fact-checking and inside-baseball analysis, is entirely at odds with the supposed purpose of journalism in a democracy, which is to make a society’s choices legible to itself. There are no easy answers about how to make such changes in reality, but guidelines and models exist. 

In the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote a now-legendary article that listed six principles the press should adopt: in favor of participation, verification, deliberation and accountability; against opacity and demagoguery. 

Since the ‘90s, Rosen has been advocating for a model mentioned above: the “citizens agenda” approach to campaign journalism pioneered by the Charlotte Observer in 1992. In a 2010 article, Rosen lays out that approach in 10 key points, which can be summarized this way: Ask the electorate what they want candidates to discuss, using every possible form of outreach. Compose an initial draft of six to 10 questions of 50 words or less and, after feedback from advisers, publish them as a ranked list three months before the election. Repeat the feedback and advice process twice more, publishing a revised list a month later and a final list a month after that. 

Journalists then use the citizens agenda as the “working template and master narrative for election coverage,” to track what candidates say, pose questions and direct issue coverage. "Background pieces and in-depth reporting should build upon the citizens agenda. Decisions to make about where to put your resources? Consult the citizens agenda, a set of instructions for the design of campaign coverage in all its forms."

Coverage based on the citizens agenda should achieve “serious discussion” of the issues listed, and would succeed if it "raises awareness, clarity, knowledge and the overall quality of discourse around the various items on the citizens agenda." It fails, on the other hand, "when it permits confusion, ignorance, neglect, demagoguery and silence to prevail on those same items."

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This approach substitutes for the default agenda of horse-race journalism, not necessarily by eliminating all such coverage but decentering it. Journalists must be prepared for pushback and conflict with candidates and staffs, of course, but that comes with the job. Finally, Rosen says:

In order for the citizens agenda to work, you have to get it right. You have to be authoritative. The 6 to 10 items on the citizens agenda have to resonate with most voters, and actually reflect what’s on their minds…. The citizens agenda needs constant testing and adjustment until you are confident that you’ve nailed it. Even then, ways for minority concerns to be heard and for items not on voters minds but still important to their future have to be worked in. This is a pragmatic exercise, a sophisticated form of listening, adjusting and feeding back what is heard. 

This model can clearly be applied beyond coverage of political campaigns, for example, by combining it with public interest polling on important issues along the lines described above. Such polling can be done at national, regional, state or local levels and can be tailored to focus on the issues in the citizens agenda, which in turn can help shape the agenda for the next political campaign. Using all these deliberative tools synergistically will be the key to unlocking their greatest power. 

Restoring the "social" to social media

Social media reform is arguably the most challenging and difficult task on this list. Describing the problem is easy enough: Social media incentivizes performative conflict rather than deliberative dialogue, and that incentive structure is profoundly damaging to democracy. Such conflict favors the spread of disinformation, and even good-faith actors can fall prey to it when drawn into this dynamic.

As sociologist Chris Bail explained in his 2021 book "Breaking the Social Media Prism" (review and author interview here), the echo-chamber metaphor is misleading in understanding political polarization, which happens more in free-for-all debate spaces where performative conflicts escalate, while less polarized individuals fall silent or tune out. (Such conflicts are driven by "status-seeking extremists" rather than “strong partisans,” as Bail puts.).

Until the 2020 election, some degree of platform responsibility existed, but there was no active promotion of real deliberation. Bail pointed toward ways of enabling such deliberation, but many of the tools Bail and his team developed have been disabled in the Elon Musk era of X (formerly Twitter). Alll bets are off in most social media contexts, with the limited but notable exception of Bluesky. 

There’s a significant difference between the self-defined emerging Bluesky community and the top-down model Bail suggests for political discussion. But there’s a certain kinship in orientation, and it’s not necessary for such a platform to appeal to everyone. "Most people get their opinions about politics from friends, family members or colleagues” who proactively seek out information, engage with others and care deeply about issues, Bail writes. 

Perhaps an online platform devoted to political discussion could be built that creates synergy with citizens assemblies, public interest polling and journalism based on the citizens agenda model. Users could scale their participation to whatever areas most engage them. Civic assemblies could create online forums that allow the broader public to engage in the deliberative process. Media entities that develop citizens agendas can create complementary online forums and integrate them into the process. Public interest polls could use such forums in multiple ways, from generating ideas at the beginning of the process to sustaining ongoing dialogue after poll results are released. 

Summing up: Beginning to build the path

There are multiple pathways toward improving the quality of fact-based, solution-seeking deliberation, and opening it up to everyone in our society, not just the tiny slice of elected representatives and paid professionals who play such a disproportionate role today. Of course liberals and progressives will be forced to fight back against Trump and his allies in the years ahead. But we can also work to build a more vibrant, more inviting and more effective democracy, rather than defending a status quo that almost everyone agrees has been found wanting. There are dark days ahead — but that’s all the more reason to let in as much light as possible. I’ll have more to say about that in my next article.