Claiming Permanent Power: How D.C. Residents Are Building the Third Reconstruction

The world watches as American democracy plays out in hallowed halls in the seat of Washington, D.C., while nearly 700,000 residents of the capital city endure up close its glaring, structural contradictions.  

Washingtonians work invaluable public sector jobs, powering our federal government. They serve in the military and pay federal taxes like the rest of us, yet they are governed by laws they have no vote in making. Congress can override the D.C. Council’s budget, block its legislation, and reverse its decisions at will. 

This is not a procedural anomaly; it’s structural subjugation.

This is not a procedural anomaly; it’s structural subjugation. The Constitution’s framers carved out the district as a special federal jurisdiction, stripping it of its own political power and representation. And as a historically Black city, that nearly cemented the inability of Washingtonians’ constrained political power to challenge the unjust status quo. 

If our democratic leaders wanted to ensure that a multiracial democracy worked for everyone, Congress could move to make Washington, D.C., a state that would add two senators who would likely be Democrats. That those two senators would represent most D.C. voters is therefore a problem rather than the point. And no matter how you frame it — as a race issue or a partisan one — this is a deliberate arrangement designed to keep power from the rising multiracial majority.

And yet, the people persist. Despite an entire year of military occupation by armed troops and federal agents tormenting everyone from Black teenagers and elders to the unhoused; despite the federal government colonizing this city for more than two centuries; despite living in the shadow of an oxymoronic democracy—a uniquely contradictory form—Washingtonians are building the Third Reconstruction anyway. 

The people are practicing self-determination and radical citizenship, with or without statehood. 

The Structural Reality

The connection between restricted democratic participation and economic exclusion plays out clearly in Washington, D.C., a city that has been systematically denied the political power to make economic decisions on its own behalf. “Taxation without representation” is not a metaphor for disenfranchisement. It’s reality.

The economic consequences of being denied self-governance are what you’d expect for what used to be a majority-Black city—before displacement pushed Black residents out of the neighborhoods they built. The District suffers from “chronic racial inequality,” as documented by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, including the fact that three out of five Black residents can’t afford to live there. The affordability crisis didn’t just happen, and it isn’t hitting everyone the same.

Political exclusion doesn’t just precede economic exclusion in D.C. It produces it, year after year in a vicious cycle. 

Political exclusion doesn’t just precede economic exclusion in D.C. It produces it, year after year in a vicious cycle. And yet, Black-led movements especially have always found the way forward.

Grassroots Organizing for a Third Reconstruction

The people of D.C. are not waiting for statehood to practice multiracial democracy. They are building it—in community, in the spaces they control, through the forms of organizing that the Third Reconstruction requires. Our fellow Americans who have been denied the most basic democratic rights are doing the extraordinary work of exercising them anyway, with creativity and discipline and an unwillingness to accept what generations of exclusion have produced.

D.C. is building for the new future in four main ways:

1. Grassroots power-building: Local organizers are connecting the fight for representation to the fights for housing, healthcare, economic justice, and more. This democratic practice has produced more than political power: paid family leave, a $18.40 minimum wage, expanded tenant protections, and a raft of populist policies won through exactly the kind of people-powered campaigns the Third Reconstruction requires. Aligned with our Power Policies agenda, the district’s grassroots movements understand that material relief and structural change must be won at once.
2. Policy innovation: D.C.’s Pay Equity Fund—created with an income tax increase on households earning more than $250,000 a year—now supplements the salaries of more than 3,300 early childhood educators, the majority of whom are Black and brown women. This is more than a policy win; it produced a broad worker constituency that has organized to protect it every budget season. The Pay Equity Fund is a power policy: an economic policy made real by the people that then carries the political power to sustain itself.
3. Cross coalition-building: Securing D.C. statehood will take more than the district, as demonstrated by Together for DC. Rooted in the conviction that “when democracy is undermined in the nation’s capital, it is undermined everywhere,” the coalition—led by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, DC Vote and the Fair Budget Coalition—is organizing a people-powered solidarity movement with D.C. residents and neighbors from all 50 states. DC Vote’s “Road to 51” summit this month [will gather/gathered] more than 30 national leaders from democracy groups, voting rights organizations, and labor and advocacy communities to build the strategy, partnerships, and political power necessary to make D.C. statehood the centerpiece of the next governing agenda. This is one way radical citizenship connects, insists, and fortifies: through coalition-building across movements, geographies, and issue areas and coming together around a shared structural demand—because D.C. statehood is not just a D.C. issue. It is a democracy issue, an economic issue, and a Third Reconstruction demand.
4. Electoral organizing: D.C. residents are already exercising the democratic values that statehood would formalize through deep canvassing and sustained civic engagement. Free DC and its electoral offshoot, the Free DC Slate, have expanded the community-led organizing frame beyond statehood to shape future leadership of the District. D.C. is not only demanding transformation; it is already living it.

As D.C. pursues economic and political power at once in the most radical of ways, it makes possible exactly what white minority rule is adamant to prevent.

An Honest Reflection on the Upcoming Election

As we approach November’s midterm general election, I keep coming back to the same realization: We have been asked to out-organize voter suppression. “Getting out the vote” is an extraordinary thing to ask of people whose erasure is being expedited and whose fundamental rights are being systematically eroded in real time. Black women especially have carried this tension with a persistence and grace that our democracy has never fully deserved. We show up, we organize, and we turn out our communities, and then we watch the gains be recaptured, the maps redrawn, and the ask circle back again: Show up with more. Show up, show up, show up.

We know what you are being asked to carry. We know it is unfair. And we ask you to show up anyway—not because one election can solve everything, but because voting is a form of power, and every form of power matters right now.

At Dēmos, we see that pressure. We feel it too. The most honest version of a GOTV message does not pretend that the playing field is level. It does not disrespect the intelligence and history and exhaustion of the people being told to get to the polls. It says: We know what you are being asked to carry. We know it is unfair. And we ask you to show up anyway—not because one election can solve everything, but because voting is a form of power, and every form of power matters right now.

Elections are bellwethers, of course. They tell us the direction of the wind and its intensity, and they matter enormously. But they are not the destination. 

The destination is a multiracial democracy so structurally sound, so rooted in interdependent economic and political power, that no single election can undermine its survival. D.C. knows this better than anyone. Its people have lived without representation and without much recourse, trapped in a vicious cycle they were never meant to escape and discouraged from making the beloved community real.

Regardless of what happens in November, Dēmos and our partners will keep building. Keep holding on. We’re on our way.

Conclusion: Self-Determination Is at the Heart of the Third Reconstruction

Our nation’s capital has been told that it cannot govern itself. But the people of D.C. have never accepted what the system tells them. They’re proving radical citizenship’s promise anyway: They are doing democracy. They are making it real. They are insisting and persisting.

Statehood is essential. It is a cornerstone of the Third Reconstruction, and it is long overdue. But statehood is not a prerequisite for self-determination. The people of our nation’s capital have claimed their agency in the spaces available to them, with the tools they have, against extraordinary structural resistance.

Like the two that came before it, the Third Reconstruction is not something that will happen after an election. It is not something that will happen after statehood. It is happening now—in the grassroots organizing drives and the local policy wins and the community-led coalitions that are building what U.S. democracy has always promised but never fully delivered. 

D.C. is not waiting. And neither are we.