Rebuilding Democracy Requires Rebalancing Power

What does a power-shifting agenda look like?

Thoughtful policy experts on a range of issues are currently preparing plans to rebuild the federal government in the event that a pro-democracy president is elected in 2028. That planning is essential.

But it will also be wholly insufficient if it does not reckon with the need to rebalance political and economic power: to build the collective power of workers, consumers, tenants, students, and ordinary people, and to reduce the power of the interests that undermine democracy–unscrupulous economic actors seeking to cheat people, oligarchs exercising undue influence in our elections, or groups threatening political violence.

Over the past year, the three of us have been listening to and learning from former government officials, academics, and other policy experts. The lesson we are taking away is this: in a future rebuilding every major policy and institutional design choice should be evaluated not just on what it delivers, but on whose power it builds and whose power it diminishes.

Decades of missed opportunities for power-shifting

This will require a shift in perspective. For many decades, smart progressive policy wonks have designed new policies and programs, thinking carefully about their economic costs and benefits. But–with a few telling exceptions–these discussions have focused far less on how policies foster collective people power, to the detriment of our democracy.

Take discussions over health care, an area in which we have arguably seen some of the most important domestic policy achievements of the past twenty years. In considering health care policies, advocates and lawmakers have largely focused their back-and-forth on the implications for health insurance coverage and costs. Left largely unaddressed is how changes to the system might foster new collective organizations, such as of patients and their families, that could durably represent those members’ interests.

Imagine if we took a page from union law and created a framework for a national patients’ union with the right to enroll Americans as dues-paying members and to bargain with the government, health insurers, and health providers alike. That union might provide a stronger foundation to protect our health care system against efforts to reduce coverage and increase costs, push more states to adopt policies covering low-income families, and bring stronger clout against predatory insurance and provider practices. It might also create more on-ramps for Americans into the everyday practice of democratic life.

This is not the only such opportunity. Consider the failure to update labor law to make it easier for workers to organize and bargain collectively, which would build more durable worker organizations. Or consider the failure to grapple with the concentrated power of billionaires (and now even a trillionaire), some of whom are using their amassed wealth to threaten democracy.

If we are fortunate enough to have a future rebuilding moment with a pro-democracy administration, we cannot make the same mistakes again. Rebuilders need to think about their work through the lens of power-shifting. They need to consider how they can design policy structures that build durable people power and deconstruct the power of the organized interests opposed to a multiracial, egalitarian democracy. We see this effort as being consistent with, and adding to, other important ongoing efforts to learn from the Biden-Harris Administration’s record and assess what a future administration needs to do differently.

The power of a common language and framework for collective power-shifting

When we started talking with policy practitioners and government officials, we heard general interest in the idea of shifting power to support democracy. But we also heard concerns about how practitioners would actually go about doing so if they were serving in government.

A parallel to economic benefit-cost analysis is instructive here. For better or worse, the language of benefit-cost analysis has become the lingua franca of government. Across agencies and programs, government officials instinctively reach for benefits and costs when evaluating a new proposal, even if they have never taken a seminar on the method. Support for and objections to new policy ideas are often leveled on benefit or cost grounds.

What we have realized is that if power-shifting as an approach to policymaking is to stick, practitioners need a framework for designing and evaluating policies on their power-shifting outcomes that is rigorous, intuitive, empirically grounded, and able to be embedded into government processes, building on research from political science, sociology, economics, and law.

Drawing from the “power analysis” approach pioneered by community organizers and from research on how policies can reshape politics, we argue there are clear and intuitive steps that government officials can take to systematically map the key political actors in a policy space (e.g., companies, worker organizations, tenant unions), identify the economic and political power resources each possesses (e.g., mass membership, market clout, narrative advantages), and then craft policy designs that build the resources of pro-democracy groups while diminishing the power of actors who undermine democracy.

We cannot ignore power deconstruction

It can often seem easier–and more comfortable–to talk about building people power than to plan for deconstructing the power of actors who undermine our democracy. This is an understandable but ultimately misguided impulse. Federal rebuilding must include both sides of power-shifting: building and deconstructing.

Without a sustained effort to diminish the political and economic power of business models built on corrupt practices, oligarchs trying to buy elections and reshape the government without any democratic accountability, and powerful economic actors working to stop Americans from organizing collectively to advance their interests, our democracy is at risk of further backsliding.

Power deconstruction has also been at the heart of strategies to undermine our democratic norms and institutions. Consider the Trump Administration’s ongoing campaign against universities. Whatever you think of higher education’s flaws, the campaign has had little to do with actual civil rights protection. It is a sophisticated strategy for deconstructing the power of a major pillar of civil society. The administration ran the same play against major law firms, using executive orders stripping security clearances and threatening clients’ federal contracts to extract roughly a billion dollars in pledged pro bono work from firms that chose to settle rather than fight.

None of this should surprise us. The anti-democracy movement has spent five decades deliberately attacking the organizational pillars that give power and voice to ordinary people: right-to-work laws and collective bargaining rollbacks to weaken unions; tort reform to weaken the trial bar that enforces consumer, workplace, and environmental laws when government cannot; and now the assault on universities, law firms, and the nonprofit sector. In short, opponents of a multiracial, egalitarian democracy have long understood that policy is a tool for durably restructuring politics.

To be clear, the lesson we should take from the Trump Administration’s assault on civil society is not that we need to adopt the authoritarian playbook.

De-powering authoritarian power centers has to be done through general, publicly defensible standards rather than enemy lists; through transparent legal processes that can survive public scrutiny; through criteria focused on protecting the social and institutional foundations of inclusive democracy rather than punishing political opponents; and through consistent rules that apply to allied as well as adversarial actors. This is a stringent test, but democratic rebuilders have to be stringent, because the alternative would be to legitimize, by example, the very tactics used to undermine democracy.

If the deconstruction side of this agenda sounds challenging, remember that every major democratic advance in American history has paired power-building with power deconstruction, often requiring what David Bateman has called “democracy-reinforcing hardball”.

Reconstruction paired the extension of rights to freedpeople with federal troops, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and military governance aimed at breaking the political power of slaveowners. The New Deal paired economic relief with an assault on concentrated corporate power: financial regulation, the breakup of utility holding companies, and a labor law that ended employers’ unilateral control of the workplace. The Great Society’s Civil Rights Act created levers to withhold federal funds from segregating institutions, defunding the organized infrastructure of Jim Crow. In each case, the durability of the democratic gains tracked the thoroughness of the deconstruction.

What we’ve been learning about power-shifting — and where we go from here

How do we make power-shifting a tangible framework for governing? We asked academics, former government officials, and policy experts to write up key lessons for designing and implementing power-shifting policies. Together, these papers, commissioned through our Empowering Democracy Initiative, draw on academic research and firsthand experience in government to spell out how policymakers should approach building pro-democracy power and deconstructing anti-democratic power in a future administration.

• Medicare policy: For example, Sam Bagenstos, a law professor and former general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, reflected on the costs associated with not considering entrenched power when making Medicare policy.

• Civil society: Raj Nayak, a former senior Department of Labor official, explored how partnerships between government and civil society can offer more opportunities for expanding government capacity and people power at the same time (a joint effort with Workshop, a community of labor policy experts).

• Social movements: Political scientist Mallory SoRelle laid out how different policy designs embedded in federal programs can make it easier or harder for social movements to organize.

• The Federal budget: Former Office of Management and Budget official Michael Linden argued that the White House-led budget planning process could offer a place to embed power-shifting in a future federal administration.

• Breaking entrenched power: Political scientists Jamila Michener and Aubrey Hall explored tactics for attacking entrenched power threatening everyday peoples’ lives.

Together, these ideas start the process of mapping out a reconstruction of government that takes power seriously. The throughline is that every policy fight is also a fight over the future distribution of power, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Authoritarians are executing on this insight now with discipline against universities, law firms, unions, and the other civic infrastructure of American democracy. A future pro-democracy government that responds by restoring the status quo ante, putting back the old programs and restoring the old approaches, will simply be setting the table for the next, more competent authoritarian.

The alternative is to treat policy as an opportunity to build organized civil society constituencies whose power makes democratic backsliding harder to attempt and easier to resist, and to dismantle, lawfully and through general standards, the concentrations of power that undermine our democracy. Rebuilding the federal government is inseparable from rebuilding the political and economic landscape on which it stands.