Revitalizing A Democratic Civil Society

How can we strengthen the broader democratic civil society in the United States, including its ties with the Democratic Party? The election of Donald Trump has caused me, as a retired political scientist, to re-examine the relevance to the United States of my own work on civil society and democracy in two struggling democracies and one authoritarian regime. Suddenly, and sadly, we are not so different from the rest of the world.

Eleven years ago I published Importing Democracy: The Role of NGOs in South Africa, Tajikistan, and Argentina, available here in a complimentary e-copy.

I used Marcos Perez Diaz’s definition of civil society as “markets, associations, and a sphere of public debate.” Within that definition are organizations promoting democracy locally or nationally, as well as an emerging media, increasingly online, that support discussions of democracy. And, not to leave out markets, If the Trump economic agenda increasingly focuses on support for large corporations and the oligarchs who lead them, it may be that smaller independent businesses will also become attracted to supporting democracy through civil society networks. They, as well as civil society organizations and the media, should be a target of outreach by the Democratic Party as it enlarges and re-thinks its mission.

I begin with the associational heart of American civil society. After the election, I heard Dr. Ruth Ben Ghiat, a historian at NYU who has written about autocracy, describe how the opposition to Trump since 2016 had helped create a massive pro-democracy movement in the United States, something that did not, she pointed out, arise in response to Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s.

In a conversation with former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who is running for DNC Chair, Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles focused on the need for the Democratic Party to be connected to this wider democratic civil society. This should not mean, however, that everybody be connected to everybody. That would be a recipe for confusion and even failure. The Never-Trump Republicans, for example, may not want or need to connect with the Democratic Party. But networking does require greater awareness and strategic thinking about the most powerful and effective ties and alliances within this larger arena that wants to protect democracy.

There are hundreds of nonprofit organizations, both national and local, either more or less partisan, that are involved in promoting, and, now, trying to save democracy. Not all of them are effective, and not all use their online donations wisely, so the job of researching what they can achieve becomes more and more crucial.

Public Citizen, for example, in the face of a second Trump administration, will publicize and highlight conflicts of interest, ethical breaches, activate coalitions with other organizations to defend the rule of law, lobby to help block legislative agendas, legally challenge the new administration to obtain documents and block illegal actions, confront the use of emergency powers and violations of impoundment control act in court, and publicize the use of administrative law rules for “arbitrary and capricious” purposes. Another massive legal strategy is being developed by Michael Popok, a lawyer affiliated with the Meidas Plus Network. You can view it by clicking here.

State Democratic Party leaders such as Ben Wickler in Wisconsin, Anderson Clayton in North Carolina, and Martin O’Malley in Maryland are increasingly aware of  the need for a more local civil society role. Law Forward in Wisconsin, for example, plans to continue its work on gerrymandering and flip the script on overly complicated voting rights. These leaders have been strongly supported by Simon Rosenberg, who leads Hopium Chronicles, an online network of over 154,000  members, many of whom donated to or volunteered for Democrats during the election.

State and local party leaders can work with  Democratic governors as well as civil society organizations as they strengthen and refine their strategies for challenging the Trump administration. There are also national nonprofit organizations such as Run for Something and Dirt Road Democrats that target local activity but in many parts of the country.

Other major allies in the fight for democracy may not be so obvious. The many organizations that comprise the environmental movement are sharpening their legal strategies and pointing out that environmental groups won the vast majority of legal cases they brought against the first Trump administration. As Manish Bapna, CEO of the Natural Resource Defense Fund, observed about the first Trump Administration, “We brought 163 cases against Trump…We won 90%. Representing smaller [environmental] nonprofits in court may need to include training.”

The third part of this larger democratic civil society is the media or “sphere of public debate” that has emerged recently and, perhaps belatedly, in response to the extreme right takeover of online spaces and, even more recently, the MAGA containment of the mainstream media. New or strengthened democratic outlets such as Meidas Touch (now ahead of Fox News in Youtube ratings), Courier Newsroom, The Guardian, Daily Kos, Resolute Square, Crooked Media, and The Bulwark have recently been boosted by the new  X rival Blue Skies. Other established media sources such as The Guardian also seem to be gaining prominence, as well as other kinds of outlets such as Deep State Radio. How both the Democratic Party and the associational parts of civil society respond to and support these outlets strategically, without trying to control them, will be important to watch.

Other pro-democracy communicators are on Substack, including, most prominently, Simon Rosenberg’s  Hopium Chronicles, very important because it creates political activists who both contribute and volunteer.  Rosenberg recently talked about fellow Substackers like Robert Hubbell, Heather Cox Richardson, and  Yale professor Timothy Snyder. As Simon observed, “We’ve talked about the role we all have to play in working our networks each day, getting louder, and becoming more accomplished information warriors for our democracy. “

Here is more from Simon Rosenberg:

“First, the DNC and other state parties must become a central communications hub of the new opposition and produce high quality, modern, social, and YouTube content every day both advancing our ideas and leaders and challenging theirs. As some have mentioned here, elements of the social-based KamalaHQ should be brought into the DNC, and large gatherings of Dems along the lines of White Dudes For Harris should become a regular thing. Our party infrastructure simply has to take on a greater comms responsibility in the 20 months outside of the last 4 months of elections every two years, and large donors in our family should support this strategic evolution.”

When such measures are combined with greater awareness of the need for strategic networking, future victories for democracy will become more likely.   Strategic networking needs to become a major priority for all of the actors in our democratic civil society, particularly the media. And it seems that the 2024 electoral defeat has brought this urgent priority to center stage.

* Here is an earlier overview of democratic civil society in the U.S. that  I wrote, over a year before the election, called Dollars and Hours.    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-you-help-save-democracy-julie-fisher-melton-ph-d-/