We Are Indivisible

A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump

Leah Greenberg, Ezra Levin

• Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781982129989
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This national bestseller is not only the guiding " centerpiece of a robust new grassroots machinery" ( Rolling Stone ), it is the story of democracy under threat. It's the story of a movement rising up to respond. And it's a story of what comes next. Shortly after Trump's 2016 election, two outraged former congressional staffers wrote and posted a tactical guide to resisting the Trump agenda. This Google Doc entitled "Indivisible" was meant to be read by friends and family. No one could have predicted what happened next. It went viral, sparking the creation of thousands of local Indivisible groups in red, blue, and purple states, mobilizing millions of people who had never engaged in politics before. Between one and two million were inspired—they canvassed, caravanned, shouted back, and ran for office.Proof of concept: A blue 116th House of Representatives.In We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump, the directors of Indivisible tell the story of the movement. They offer a behind-the-scenes look at how change comes to Washington, whether Washington wants it or not. And they explain how we'll win the coming fight for the future of American democracy. We Are Indivisible isn't a book of platitudes about hope; it's a steely-eyed guide to people power—how to find it, how to build it, and how to use it to save our country.* All proceeds to the author go to Indivisible's Save Democracy Fund

SECTION 1: What We’re Up Against

1 The Problem: A Buckling and Rigged Democracy

I don’t want everybody to vote… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

—PAUL WEYRICH, cofounder of the Heritage Foundation and architect of the modern conservative movement, 1980

I had never realized that if you want a democracy, you have to fight for it.

—OGIE STROGATZ, California Indivisible group leader

On November 8, 2016, we hosted the worst house party of our lives.

The day started off well. We’d just come off a weekend canvassing for Hillary in Philadelphia with a dozen friends. We’d voted at the elementary school across the street from our house in Washington, D.C.¹

Around 7:00 p.m., our friends—a collection of former Hill staffers, think tank policy wonks, and Obama administration officials—started to arrive at our house. We opened the champagne at 7:30 p.m. The mood was celebratory; the biggest concern was that Democrats might not take the Senate. Somewhere around 9:00 p.m., it became clear that this was not, in fact, the biggest problem we needed to worry about.

Things went downhill fast. Some guests recognized reality faster than others. Some people started crying, others started yelling, others started to quietly trickle out. The few who remained hit the bourbon hard, then fell into an intense argument about Hillary versus Bernie. At some point we gave up on our hosting duties, wished the remaining guests well in their increasingly heated debate, and went to bed.² As we fell asleep that night, we were scared, angry, confused, and shocked—basically just totally lost.

The coming days were surreal. The next morning, the streets of D.C. were eerily quiet. People were sitting on the metro and walking around downtown with tears openly streaming down their faces. Our community of D.C. progressive policy friends were stunned. Like, deer-in-the-headlights-that’s-also-just-taken-a-brick-to-the-face stunned. This was supposed to be the crowd who knew stuff about policy and politics. But no one had answers and no one knew what was coming next.

And it wasn’t just D.C. Nationwide, excitement for the first female president had given way to horror at the prospect of a Trump administration. Not everyone on our side of the aisle was shocked: plenty of people, especially people of color, had been warning that a Trump victory was all too possible. But everyone was devastated.

A sense of shock, horror, pain, shame, and loss were being felt in homes of future Indivisible leaders around the country. For Ivonne Wallace Fuentes of Roanoke, Virginia, it “seemed like reality had just broken in half in a really important way.” In San Antonio, Texas, Trish Florence was “gobsmacked” on election night. Her two children are autistic, and when she told them the following morning, they both broke down in tears. At school, bullies chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” at her older son. In Arizona, Gabriella Cazares-Kelly and April Ignacio of the Tohono O’odham Nation were deeply concerned: the Tohono O’odham lands straddled the border, and with Trump’s election, the threat that a wall would divide their community was suddenly imminent. Joyce Vansean of New Orleans “spent a lot of time crying and a lot of time trying to come to terms with what my country had just done.” Those who moved quickly from grief to action found that they had company: in Tampa, Florida, a devastated Christine Hanna created a Facebook group for Tampa-area women the day after the election. By evening, she had a thousand members of what would eventually become Indivisible Action Tampa Bay.

The overwhelming feeling was one of fear. Fear of what the election of Donald Trump meant for the policy gains of the Obama administration. Fear of what this election meant for the people Trump had openly promised to harm: Muslims, Dreamers and other immigrants, refugees, and more. Fear of what this meant for the Supreme Court.

Fear, fundamentally, of what this meant for democracy itself.

We were right to be afraid, then and now. Trump is a uniquely grotesque human in a position of immense power, an aggressively ignorant buffoon whose authoritarian instincts and malice are only outweighed (when we’re lucky) by his incompetence.

But while Trump’s election was a shock to our democratic system, the system had already been weakened long before he arrived on the scene. That’s why this chapter, this book—this whole Indivisible movement—is not about Donald Trump. It’s about what allowed him to take power. It’s about what came before Trump and what will remain after he is defeated or imprisoned or both.

It’s not exactly provocative anymore to say that America’s political system is broken or rigged. We’re not here to convince you of that. You probably feel it in your bones. You probably know the system doesn’t respond to the people’s will. You know that big donors and corporations extract from the political system the way strip miners extract from a mountaintop. You probably know that the whole mess—from campaigns, to the courts, to officeholders, to ex-officeholder lobbyists—is a colossal revolving door of privilege and greed.

The point of this chapter isn’t to convince you of this; it’s to disentangle the various strands of dysfunction and shine a light on the forces behind the breakdown. This can all seem convoluted and overwhelming and impossible to grasp at first, but we think it can actually be understood as a relatively simple story with two parts: our democracy is buckling, and our democracy is rigged.

Part 1: Democracy buckling. American democracy just wasn’t built for what we’re dealing with now—and it’s coming apart at the seams. The Founders didn’t foresee two political parties like we have now, and for most of our history we didn’t have them. Since the 1960s, the parties have grown ideologically distinct; they’ve polarized. That polarization, overlaid on top of our outdated democratic institutions, is a recipe for gridlock and dysfunction—and it’s only going to get worse. Our democracy is buckling.

Part 2: Democracy rigged. Our democracy isn’t just falling apart on its own; it’s being intentionally rigged. An unholy alliance between wealthy plutocrats, practitioners of white identity politics, and religious ideologues has produced a reactionary conservative party—and they’re systematically rigging the rules to keep themselves in power. They know that a truly representative democracy will reject their unpopular social and economic agenda. So they’re doing their best to prevent that from happening. Our democracy is being rigged.

If we’re ever going to fix the system and save our democracy, we need to understand how it came to be so broken and rigged in the first place. The following pages describe what we’re up against.

PART 1: OUR DEMOCRACY IS BUCKLING

About three decades ago, Juan José Linz, a Yale political scientist and expert on totalitarianism and authoritarianism, wrote an essay called “The Perils of Presidentialism.” The essay made a simple point: the presidential model of democracy, which divided power between the presidency and separately elected legislative branches, was inherently unstable. It naturally led to conflict between the president and the legislative branches, producing gridlock, brinkmanship, and escalating levels of dysfunction. Many countries had adopted presidential models in the early transition to representative democracy; overwhelmingly, they either reformed into parliamentary systems or devolved into violent conflict.³

This model was so unstable, in fact, that literally no country on the planet that tried it was able to sustain it for very long. There was, at the time of Linz’s writing, only one exception: the United States.

What made us different? For our entire history, we had been running this outdated, beta version of democracy. So why hadn’t our system crashed yet? Linz had thoughts on that too. The United States, he argued, had uniquely weird political parties.⁴ Yes, there were Democrats and Republicans, but the parties were not ideologically polarized. There were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans; there were liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. These ideologically all-over-the-map political parties could work out conflict and cut deals because they were each so incoherent. That lack of party polarization, Linz argued, was what allowed American democracy to keep chugging along.

But Linz wrote that decades ago. And things have changed.

A brief history of how we got here

Since the Civil War, there have been two major political parties on the ballot every year: Democrats and Republicans. But these were not the parties we know today. Each had been shaped by the battle lines of the Civil War, and as a result, each contained within it enormous racial, ideological, and regional variation. As the party of Lincoln, the Republicans attracted Black voters and rich white Northern businessmen but remained toxic to Southern whites. Democrats brought together a broad coalition of working-class immigrants in the North and a white cross-class base in the South. It was sort of a bizarro world version of modern American politics.

In the decades following the Civil War, if you were an elected official, the “D” or “R” next to your name didn’t have much to do with your ideology. Both parties had reformers and populists and business interests and reactionaries. Both parties had pro–civil rights and segregationist factions. There were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, and vice versa. When you were in power, if you couldn’t move your agenda with just members of your own party, you could usually do it by co-opting a faction of the other party. Each party’s internal incoherence created room—and necessity—for bipartisan legislating.⁵

In this golden age of bipartisan legislating, American democracy “worked”—or at least, it worked for some people. The kinds of compromises this system produced often depended on reaching agreements involving segregationist factions, which meant that even recent twentieth-century liberal policy advances routinely excluded people of color. Progressive-era reforms under Republican Teddy Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson either offered little for people of color or actively reversed gains previously made. Wilson didn’t just do nothing; he actively resegregated the federal workforce, defended the Ku Klux Klan, and told Black civil rights activists that “segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt explicitly excluded farmworkers and service jobs from the original Social Security Act—a concession to segregationist Southern Democrats who didn’t want Black and brown people benefiting from the new program.

The Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal populist policy agenda triggered a realignment within the parties on economics, with organized labor lining up behind the Democratic Party and business interests consolidating with the Republicans. But the racial divide within each party remained. The factions within the Democratic Party started to fracture after World War II as the civil rights movement forced the political system to grapple with segregation. In 1948, future vice president Hubert Humphrey fought to include civil rights in the Democratic Party platform, arguing that “the time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” The argument won the day and also led directly to an immediate fissure in the party as Southern Democrats, or “Dixiecrats,” staged a walkout from the convention.

In the mid-1960s, the internal tensions within the parties on race gave way to full-fledged transformation. Supported and pushed by a powerful Black-led, multiracial, and multifaith civil rights movement, Democratic president Lyndon Johnson passed a series of landmark civil rights bills with a bipartisan group of non-segregationist Democrats and liberal Republicans.⁶ While Johnson was signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act in 1968, segregationist Southern Democratic leaders like Strom Thurmond and his fellow Dixiecrats were jumping ship. They would not return.

The rise of a hard-right ideological force in the Republican Party offered Dixiecrats an appealing new home. Barry Goldwater, the segregationist Republican candidate for president in 1964, lost in a landslide but nonetheless managed to flip much of the Deep South—an unthinkable feat for the party of Lincoln.⁷ Johnson saw what was happening at the time: upon signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he told one of his aides, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” And indeed, President Richard Nixon’s infamous “Southern strategy” revived Goldwater’s efforts to bring anti–civil rights voters into the Republican Party while maintaining a strong alliance with corporate power.

This strategy neatly synced up with Republican courting of white evangelicals. Rapid movement on both civil rights and women’s rights—including the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to abortion—were driving a backlash among white evangelicals that swiftly evolved into a powerful political force within the Republican Party.⁸ Meanwhile, as Democrats bled conservative whites, they also continued to attract more and more voters of color.

So the 1960s were a major turning point for the Democratic and Republican parties—one that continues to define our politics today. Gradually, the Democrats became a party of multiracial ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Nineteen Indivisible Lessons
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section 1: What We’re Up Against
• Section 2: How We Win
• Section 3: A Blueprint for Democracy
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Notes
• Copyright