In early 2025, crews removed the seal from the headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Within weeks, the administration had gutted USAID, frozen the National Endowment for Democracy, and sent officials, backed by police, into the U.S. Institute of Peace to clear out its staff. For six decades, America had helped people abroad resist strongmen, run honest elections, and rebuild trust after conflict. We shut that work down — even as, in those same weeks, federal workers who guard our own elections were placed on leave.
Over the past year, I worked with cohension organizers to fuse these global democracy veterans with America’s homegrown democracy organizers — the faith leaders, election workers, civic groups, and cross-partisan reformers already in the ecosystem. The Democracy Renewal Group led the effort to conduct non-partisan assessment. We pressure-tested the results through consultations with hundreds of organizations. The product, the Renew American Democracy strategy released this month, is, I believe, the most comprehensive plan yet offered — not to merely defend what remains of our democracy, rather to build something stronger than we have ever had. It rests on four commitments, four B’s, and a fifth word that makes them real.
Block the abuse of power
Independent courts and honest elections are a democracy’s circuit breakers, and they are straining under load. The warning signs are not abstract: the Capitol Police logged a 58 percent rise in threats against members of Congress in a single year, and political violence has crept from the fringe toward the mainstream of our civic life. Citizens can reinforce the breakers — safeguarding the 2026 and 2028 votes, defending free speech and peaceful assembly, exposing corruption in both political parties, and refusing to let intimidation become ordinary.
Bridge the divides every autocrat exploits
Strongmen rise by persuading neighbors to see one another as enemies, and Americans have drifted dangerously far down that road: roughly seven in ten partisans on each side now call the other party “immoral,” a sharp jump from a decade ago. The antidote is ordinary people — left, right, and center — relearning how to disagree, serving alongside one another, and solving local problems together until the caricature dissolves.
Belong in your community
The school board meeting, the volunteer fire company, the congregation, the civic club. Those habits are withering. The U.S. Surgeon General has declared an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, affecting about half of adults — and isolation is the soil in which resentment and extremism take root. We rebuild belonging the only way it has ever been built: block by block, town by town.
Civil society’s vibrance can emerge from the initiative of common citizens who join together to improve their communities in a wide variety of ways. To nurture this initiative, the democracy renewal movement should support the emergence of local and state civic hubs, which provide infrastructure for civic engagement and contribute to community resilience.
Build a government worthy of trust
Guarding the old system is not enough, because it stopped working for most Americans long before this crisis. The remedy is to let citizens themselves draft the repair, and the method already has a track record. When a representative cross-section of Americans gathered for a deliberative experiment called America in One Room, polarization fell across five contested issues and the share who believed democracy was “working well” doubled.
In 2024, fifty New Hampshire residents drawn across party and background convened a statewide citizens’ assembly and, over a single weekend, produced concrete proposals to rebuild trust in elections. Americans are already taking up this work at national scale through efforts like the People’s Bill of Rights 250, where citizens propose, refine, and vote on the rights they believe the country should guarantee. Through a nationwide deliberation, with citizens’ assemblies and not donors holding the pen, Americans can produce a people’s proposal to make government finally accountable.
Political Power
None of this happens without political power from a newly forming cross-partisan political movement. Here is the strategy’s central bet, and the numbers back it: a record 45 percent of Americans now identify as independents, the largest bloc in the country, rejecting both parties. A movement that crosses party lines — gathering in those independents, the disillusioned, and the tens of millions who have quit on politics altogether — is the only force large enough to win reforms no faction can deliver alone. History favors that approach. After studying hundreds of uprisings, the political scientist Erica Chenoweth found that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent ones, precisely because they draw far broader participation. Breadth, not rage, is what topples autocrats.
Skeptics will call a cross-partisan movement naive at a moment this raw — and they have the causation backwards. Polarization is not a fixed feature of the American character; it is what rushes in to fill the space when citizens share no project bigger than defeating the other side. Give them one — a common stake in honest elections, accountable government, and communities that function — and the animosity recedes. The experts who watched democracies recover abroad will tell you the same: nations heal not by waiting for the rival tribe to disappear, rather by building something across the divide that both sides would sooner protect than destroy.
Re-founding Patriotism
What could bind a coalition that wide — independents and evangelicals, union members and veterans, the disaffected left and the disillusioned right? The honest answer is an old word we have allowed others to define down: re-founding patriotism. Not the patriotism of fealty to a leader or nostalgia for a frozen past, rather the patriotism of the refounder — the love of country that shows up as the will to renew it. The framers did not finish their work; they handed us a Constitution they expected each generation to improve. To pick up that pen now, together, is the most patriotic act available to us. A movement that asks Americans to be refounders rather than partisans offers what neither party does: a shared identity rooted in the country’s founding promise instead of in the defeat of fellow citizens.
This is the lesson every returning expert already carried home. Autocracy is not defeated by one party out-shouting the other; it falls to a coalition broad enough, and determined enough, to refuse to let its country slip away. We spent six decades teaching that truth to the world. The fusion now underway gives us the chance, at last, to live it.
The blueprint exists. What it needs next is you. Join the RAD Communtity!
Dr. Paul Zeitz, is a preventive medicine physician, epidemiologist, ordained Song of Songs Rabbi, and founder of #unifyUSA and co-coordinator of Renew American Democracy (RAD) platform. He is the author of Hit Refresh on the U.S. Constitution and Revolutionary Optimism: Seven Steps for Living as a Love-Centered Activist. He delivered the TEDxPrinceton talk “Peacecrafting: From Conflict to Collaboration” in February 2026.
Dr. Zeitz, Like you, I deplore the heavy handed authoritarian style and content of the Trump regime. However, to think that recent behavior of USAID and NED is benign is very naive. They have stepped into the role once occupied by the nefarious CIA, who current stench has limited its capacity to foment opposition to legitimate people oriented governments that even timidly curtail the capacity of giant corporations to sabotage their local economies and political processes. THAT is their recent role, not at all "strengthen democratic institutions." despite flowery language to the contrary! But you are on the right track to issue the call to mobilize the citizenry itself to rise up decisively and to sweep away the rot, corruption, and money-domination.