People, Purpose, Power: Dēmos at 25

Two trends keep me up at night. 

People of color, across a spectrum of backgrounds and experiences, will, together, be the majority.

By 2043, the United States will have no racial or ethnic majority. People of color, across a spectrum of backgrounds and experiences, will, together, be the majority. In every demographic sense of the word, it will be a new America. Around the same time in our very near future, Black and brown people are projected to have zero-to-negative net wealth. Not limited wealth. Not less wealth than others. None. 

Stay with that paradox for a moment: The communities who will soon be most of America are on a trajectory to own almost none of it. They have been systematically stripped of the economic and political power to make what should be shared decisions over who builds our country anew and how—who can vote in it, breathe in it, choose the shape of their family and survive a birth in it, grow a career, have a home, and live a life of dignity in it.  

This collision course isn’t an inevitability or mistake. It is the result of decades of deliberate policy choices, from the blatant erosion of voting rights and the decimation of worker power to the endless deregulation and concentration of an economy that was never designed to include everyone in the first place. 

Averting the collision course ahead requires strategic clarity about how to take on what we’re facing, the courage to name it plainly, and an organization with the tools, the relationships, and the vision to make way for self-determination and collective transformation. 

For 25 years, that organization has been Dēmos. And we are ready for this moment. 

My Purpose, Our Vision 

I did not come to Dēmos from the world of national think tanks or elite policy circles. I came by way of Georgia, after 20 years advocating at the state level, in a hostile political environment, fighting for the things that shouldn’t be contentious: healthy children and families, livable wages, quality schools and other public services, households with enough.  

Policy disagreements are rarely just a difference of opinion

What those years taught me is that policy disagreements are rarely just a difference of opinion. They are disagreements about who is worthy of the public good—who counts, who belongs, who’s included in the ability to thrive in our nation. And this understanding is a core framework I carried with me when I stepped into the presidency of Dēmos in 2021, only months after an insurrection had tested the foundations of U.S. democracy and in the middle of a pandemic that had laid bare every inequity yet to be rectified. 

Those events were disheartening enough, but the imminent, insomnia-inducing trends in demographics and wealth were no longer abstractions in a policy brief. In fact, the things I’d monitored for years were on a collision course. And Dēmos, with its 25-year commitment to an inclusive democracy and economy, was exactly where I needed to be. Getting to where we needed to go, however, would require addressing the defining crisis of our time: the imbalance of power. 

The Power Imbalance Is the Crisis 

Economic and political power are not separate problems with separate solutions

From its founding, Dēmos understood something the broader policy world had yet to accept: that economic and political power are not separate problems with separate solutions. They are one crisis, compounding each other in a cycle that, left uninterrupted, produces the collision course I describe above. When people are denied economic power, they’re less able to participate politically. When people are denied political power, they’re unable to demand changes to their economic conditions.  

The cycle is vicious, and it has never been more visible than it is right now, as billionaires purchase political influence in plain sight and fund an ascendant authoritarian state while the working class witnesses in real time the dismantling of the very institutions meant to protect them.   

What I’ve worked to make explicit during my tenure—and what this moment demands we name without apology—is who, exactly, is caught most dangerously in that cycle and what it will take to break it. A multiracial democracy that lasts is built by targeting our efforts where the power imbalance is most acute: in the economic and political reality facing Black and brown communities. This is not a departure from Dēmos’ founding vision. It is the fulfillment of it. 

This insight led to the launch of the Power Agenda two years ago, our affirmative vision for building economic and political power for all that treats belonging as policy. And it’s what established the Power Scorecard, a first-of-its-kind data tool that maps the material conditions people are actually living in, state by state, overlaying demographic, economic, and political data to show us exactly where the gaps are widest and where our collective efforts must go. The data, which reveals that not a single state in the U.S. has optimal conditions for building economic and political power, clarifies the scale of what we’re up against. It also makes clear the scale of what is possible, if liberatory movements join in formation with this knowledge in hand. 

This is the work: naming the imbalance and also (re)making the infrastructure and institutions necessary to rectify it. The people most affected by our current crisis are not the margins of this work; they are its center, its source, and, ultimately, its proof. 

A Future Worth Fighting For  

What has always moved people is being able to imagine themselves in the future being built.

Research and analysis alone do not move people. Advocacy and storytelling alone, however righteous, do not move people. What has always moved people is being able to imagine themselves in the future being built. Not as recipients of policymaking or beneficiaries of someone else’s truth. But as authors of their own lives and their own democracy. 

This is a failure the progressive movement must own. We have made the case for a multiracial democracy—in the language of identity and economics, in white papers and legislative testimony, in boycotts and protests—and we have been right. But we have not made our case viscerally enough in the language of human possibility. We have not demonstrated—through images and stories and lived experiences—a clear, farsighted vision that allows a Black mother in Georgia, a farmworker in Arizona, a young organizer in Maine to look at what we’re offering and say: That world is for me. I can see myself, my loved ones, and my neighbors thriving in it. 

In “Paving the Path for a Third Reconstruction,” I outline how we can dream and plan our way forward to create something genuinely new, rather than simply reenact past progress. Built from the foundation up, new norms, new institutions, and new forms of power can produce a democracy that goes beyond treating people of color as data points, instead reflecting their agency, authority, and full citizenship. We can have an economy that doesn’t demand gratitude from Black and brown people while exploiting them, but is restructured in ways that make flourishing the standard. 

This world looks like a mother who can afford to keep her family housed without choosing between rent and groceries. A worker who can organize without fear of retaliation and bargain for wages that reflect the actual value of their labor. A young person who can vote, run for office, and see their community’s priorities reflected in the laws that govern their life. A government that is accountable not to the highest donor but to the people it was constituted to serve. 

These are not radical demands. They are the foundational promise of American democracy, one that has never been fully kept—and that we are not willing to abandon.  

This is the vision Dēmos exists to advance. We believe an inclusive, multiracial democracy that endures is not only possible but necessary. And the people who will actualize it—the grassroots organizers, the intersectional researchers, the youth leaders—are already in formation. 

Dēmos’s Role: Research and Partnerships in Service of the People 

Dēmos has never been a think tank that produces research to produce research. We are a think tank for movements, and the distinction matters enormously right now. 

The Power Scorecard doesn’t end on the internet. It lives with Andrea Serrano at OLÉ (Organizers in the Land of Enchantment) in New Mexico, who uses it to show elected officials how economic exclusion unfolds in her community. It lives with ​​Brianna Brown at the Texas Organizing Project, who is building political power with Black and Latinx folks in a state designed to suppress it, armed with undeniable data.  

These leaders don’t need Dēmos to affirm what their people are experiencing. They need Dēmos to provide the research and relationship-building infrastructure that makes their lived knowledge impossible to ignore and to have their back in the fight for progress. 

This is the model: policy priorities set in deep collaboration with organizers, new ideas that grow from the grassroots up, and governing power that extends from the grasstops out. The authoritarian playbook depends on atomization, with autocrats working overtime to bring harm, despair, and division to the American people and our communities. The answer is a movement that is connected, coordinated, and unrelenting—one that provides a political home where the Dēmos, the people, become both the creators and the embodiment of a durable, multiracial democracy and economy. 

Conclusion: A Clarion Call for Courage 

As Dēmos keeps its sights “over the horizon,” we must be clear that a multiracial democracy that endures is not a distant aspiration. Backed by a quarter century of research, relationships, and resistance, we are carrying forward a movement-led vision that refuses to wait any longer to believe in its own possibility. 

The stakes are too damn high. Fascists don’t negotiate. Authoritarianism doesn’t wait for us to find consensus. And the people whose wealth, votes, and very belonging are under direct assault do not have the luxury of incrementalism. This is not the time to assuage the discomfort of Christian nationalists, to manage expectations animated by white grievance, or to make the truth palatable to those who have never cared enough to acknowledge it.  

We all lose under an antidemocratic, corrupt, unconstitutional regime, but a long-range, liberatory future can’t be lost if we refuse to accept where we’re headed. As we course-correct, our most valuable asset is each other: the community organizers who, however exhausted, can’t be intimidated; the researchers who won’t let structural oppression hide in the aggregate; the young people who’ve inherited a democracy that was never meant to fully include them; the movement leaders and forebears—the freedom fighters of old—who have always shown us that power is taken, not given. At the foundation of our collective power is a commitment to not self-abandon—as individuals, as neighbors, and as one country.  

Dēmos was founded on the belief that a more just and inclusive America is attainable. Twenty-five years later, that belief is the most radical and necessary contribution we can offer the people in this moment: an unwavering, clear-eyed, and joyful insistence that the future belongs to the many. 

We know what’s coming. We know who’s on our side. And we’re not waiting for permission to do what needs to be done.