Project 2029

If we're going to rebuild our democracy, we better start planning for it now

Every day of the Trump administration is a struggle to prevent our democracy from slipping away. That struggle has been as challenging as we expected. We knew Donald Trump would ignore the Constitution and do everything possible to centralize power in his hands. We were prepared for his partisans in Congress to roll over for him. We feared the Supreme Court would enable him. We had little hope that the mainstream media would challenge him.

We realized it would be painful to watch Trump ignore the checks and guarantees provided by law and the Constitution as he denies people their civil rights, militarizes our cities, attacks our universities, fires civil servants and disables government functions.

Our democracy has been weakened by Trump’s lawlessness. It is under assault. But it is still here. It is still here in large part because of the few guardrails that remain to protect it: Federalism and the actions of blue state governors and attorneys general who hold Trump’s worst impulses in check. Courts that have been unafraid to stand up for the rule of law. And us. Ordinary people gathering by the millions in peaceful protest and privately through emails, texts and phone calls, telling for our Democratic officials to hold the line for the Constitution and shine a light on Trump’s abuses.

Our democracy has been weakened, but so has the would-be dictator who seeks to destroy it. That’s because of our resistance.

Resistance is the primary work of the second Trump presidency.

But it can’t be the only work.

We need to preserve what we can of our democracy while it is under assault. But we also need to be ready to rebuild it as soon as Trump is gone.

That is a large project and one that can feel secondary amidst the urgent crises we face every day. It shouldn’t be. Failing to develop a rebuilding plan is a mistake we can’t afford to make.

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Last Wednesday, I mentioned that over the summer I intend to write a series of posts addressing how we might think about reconstructing democracy after we reclaim it. I’m thinking of this as the Project 2029 series. The far right had a systematic plan for destroying the modern state in its Project 2025, which the Trump administration has been ruthlessly implementing. We need a plan for rebuilding it.

Not returning it to what it was before Trump. Rebuilding it so that it can meet the challenges of a twenty-first century multicultural republic.

Our democracy has been ailing for a long time—you don’t get to the point where someone like Donald Trump is a credible presidential candidate in a healthy democracy. We need to think about what went wrong and what we can do to address it when we get the chance to govern again.

This is a big objective. I believe it is an attainable objective. But we have to start thinking about it now.

I realize that’s a lot to ask while we’re in survival mode. And I recognize there is no way to know what our country will look like after a four-year long MAGA assault, just as there is no guarantee we will reach a point where we have the power to implement whatever plans we make now.

Still, we have to make them.

We should learn a lesson from the other side. It hardly looked certain that Donald Trump would return to power when the Heritage Foundation and its allies drafted their blueprint for attacking the government. Their efforts would have all gone to waste had Kamala Harris been elected. They prepared anyway. They were ready.

We need to be ready too.

If we wait for the moment when the public hands us the keys to the legislative and executive branches, we risk squandering what could be a brief window of time when people may be willing to embrace bold change. If we arrive without a plan, without having considered different perspectives on how to rebuild democracy during the presidential campaign, we could end up squabbling among ourselves about how to proceed at a time—maybe the only time—when we can bring about necessary structural changes that were not possible before and may never be possible again.

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The argument I plan to make is complex—at least complex enough to warrant spreading it out over a number of posts during the summer. Here’s the case I intend to make:

• I believe we are approaching one of those rare moments when non-incremental changes to the rules of the political game are possible, and I believe the country will give Democrats a chance to make them. Coming out of the Trump reaction, the public should be poised to give Democrats another chance to govern—provided they do things very differently. This would amount to Democrats advancing an era of progressive government that looks nothing like what was possible before the Trump era.

• But for progressive policies to happen, there will first need to be changes to the political system to reconnect voters with their representatives in a way that permits majorities to govern. Institutional change needs to precede policy change. And the institutional changes we need to make are substantial.

• Those changes would have to address the impediments to majority rule that made it difficult for Democrats to govern during the past four decades, even when they had substantial congressional majorities. The Constitution establishes a system of majority rule with protections for minority rights, but institutional imbalances in the Senate and the Supreme Court, in how congressional districts are drawn and how campaigns are financed, have created a de facto system of minority rule that has worked to the advantage of a small political and economic elite. This has to change if democracy is to flourish and the interests of the many have a chance to prevail over the interests of the few.

• The attacks on democracy we’re living through today could open the political space necessary to make these changes. It is possible that the ironic legacy of the MAGA era will be the birth of a new democracy, much like the Civil War made possible emancipation and the Great Depression set the stage for the New Deal.

Some of what I plan to discuss can be found in greater detail in a book I’m writing with my colleague John Kenneth White, a longtime professor of politics at Catholic University in Washington. John and I are completing a manuscript that looks at how the last three election cycles left democracy at a crossroads and what the potential options are for post-Trump America. Given the slow nature of publishing, our book (still untitled) won’t be out until late next year, but I’ll give you a glimpse into some of what we’re writing in these posts.

What I won’t do is present an agenda for the policies the next Democratic president should follow. The presidential campaign is a more appropriate forum for that discussion. I’m going to limit my recommendations to the institutional changes I believe are needed to support whatever policy changes the next administration decides to make. Even here, I’m only going to delve into a few changes that I feel are necessary—without claiming they are sufficient—and avoid making suggestions about how they might be implemented. That discussion should take place during the campaign as well.

This series will no doubt evolve as I develop it, but as I sketch it out, here are the posts I imagine writing:

• Where we are in the political regime cycle

• Why Democrats have not realized the electoral promise of the Obama coalition

• How Trump could make progressive change possible

• What a second progressive era might look like

• Why institutional change needs to precede policy change

• How our own Project 2029 would address judicial reform, gerrymandering, the filibuster, voter participation, campaign financing, and civic education

More to come in the days and weeks ahead.