Reflections on Dēmos: David Callahan

The idea for Dēmos emerged in the late 1990s, a period that was both hopeful and troubling. A popular Democratic president occupied the White House, the nation was at peace, and the economy was booming. But inequality was also soaring, voter turnout was anemic, and an increasingly radical Republican Party controlled Congress. American politics felt profoundly stuck. There was little hope on the horizon that a bold new set of ideas could break through to create more broadly shared prosperity and a stronger democracy. 

To get past this logjam, Charlie Halpern—a longtime leader in the social sector then serving as president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation—set out to create a new organization that could think beyond existing paradigms and advance fresh approaches to solving the country’s largest problems. 

I met Charlie early in his efforts, at a time when I was also thinking about the need for new policy institutions to move America forward. As a fellow at the Century Foundation in New York, I had been writing since the mid-1990s about conservative successes in shaping public debates. Much of the credit, I came to believe, lay with influential donors like the Koch brothers and Richard Scaife, who had invested consistently over twenty years in multi-issue think tanks, legal groups, media outlets, and leadership training centers. This infrastructure put forth a broad vision for America, while also backstopping right-wing activists, Republican office holders, TV and radio pundits, and federal judges. These efforts together created the infrastructure that fueled a powerful conservative movement. 

Few institutions connected policy and organizing, working to weave both approaches together to advance change.

Progressive foundations, meanwhile, were pursuing a very different strategy, focusing on making gains on specific issues. The ecosystem of left-of-center nonprofits was vast, but highly siloed. A long list of organizations worked on causes like advancing reproductive rights, protecting the environment, promoting civil rights, curbing gun violence, and more. But what was missing were strong institutions that could work intersectionally across different issues and advance larger narratives. Few institutions connected policy and organizing, working to weave both approaches together to advance change.

The founding team behind Dēmos set out to solve these problems. We envisioned a new organization that would tackle multiple big issues and also embrace a range of strategies: idea generation, policy development, advocacy, and grassroots organizing.  

A New Kind of Organization 

These grand ambitions would not be easy.  

First, we had to map out the structure and programs of a startup that was broad in its reach and yet realistic in its early phases. Second, we had to sell this unusual kind of organization to foundations.

One early choice was clear. We decided that creating a more just and inclusive democracy and a fairer economy would be the two major areas of focus for Dēmos. Strange as it may seem today, neither of these all-important issues was central to U.S. political debates in the late 1990s.  

Even though voter turnout hit nearly its lowest level ever recorded in the 1996 presidential election, there was scant public discussion about how to turn this trend around. In particular, while it was hardly a secret that low-income Americans participated at much lower rates than other groups, which limited their voices in the corridors of power, little work was being done to register and turn out new voters. Nor was there yet much focus on the fragility of U.S. electoral systems, which would be revealed later by the deadlocked 2000 election. Beyond growing efforts to reform campaign laws, nobody seemed to care much about the weak state of America’s democracy.  

Rising economic inequality was also largely off the national agenda. Amid the boom times of the late 1990s, elected leaders and the media paid little attention to the grinding hardship faced by tens of millions of working people, or the persistently high levels of poverty, especially in communities of color. Labor unions, which once forced attention to these issues, were weak and getting weaker, with membership rolls plummeting through the 1980s and 1990s. Meanwhile, the Clinton administration had embraced a neoliberal agenda that included welfare reform and free trade. “The era of big government is over,” Clinton famously declared in 1995. He would spend his second term focusing on small ideas, like school uniforms and job training.  

The Twin Pillars of Dēmos 

The founding team at Dēmos imagined a more hopeful future in which big ideas and newly activated citizens could drive forward the promise of a more inclusive nation. The key to building this future, we believed, lay in strengthening democracy and creating broadly shared prosperity. In addition, we believed it was essential to disrupt a growing and dangerous feedback loop, a vicious cycle whereby economic and political inequality reinforced each other. 

This dynamic had become increasingly evident in the late 1990s, as a growing share of income gains went to the wealthy. In turn, business leaders—including those from Silicon Valley—were using their newfound wealth to exert greater influence in politics, working to tilt the system in their favor. 

At the same time, low voter turnout made it easier for politicians to ignore the communities they represented, while catering instead to campaign donors and special interests, worsening inequality. Americans’ perception that the system was rigged against ordinary people fueled cynicism and led to further civic disengagement. Historically marginalized communities were the most negatively impacted in this cycle of hopelessness. 

Overall, it seemed clear that creating a more just and inclusive economy would be impossible without a much stronger democracy.

Overall, it seemed clear that creating a more just and inclusive economy would be impossible without a much stronger democracy. But while this linkage was obvious, there were almost no major policy organizations in the late 1990s that worked in both these areas, developing larger narrative and policy frameworks to help create an America that was more economically and civically inclusive. The robust ecosystem of progressive policy groups that exists today—including the Center for American Progress and the Roosevelt Institute—had not yet emerged. Many of today’s state-based organizing groups, like the New Virginia Majority, New Georgia Project, and Texas Organizing Project, also didn’t yet exist.  

In forging a new organization and a new vision for America, Dēmos would have to break new ground. That was a tall order for a founding team that included just a handful of senior staff in 2000, led by Stephen Heintz, Dēmos’ first president, and including myself, Steven Carbo, Michele Demers, and Michelle Holder.  

Making the Case for Dēmos 

As we began pitching funders, we imagined that our twin focus on democracy and economic opportunity, along with their linkage, would be a selling point. It wasn’t.  

Then and now, most progressive foundations operated along narrow program lines, making restricted grants, which meant that Dēmos could try to get support for either our democracy or economic work but not general operating funds for the organization overall. In contrast, most conservative foundations offer exactly such broad support, allowing right-wing policy groups the freedom to craft larger visions.  

After the 2000 election crisis in Florida, funders began paying new attention to voting systems, and Dēmos was able to raise money for new projects in this area. This included work to fully implement the National Voter Registration Act, often called “motor voter.” While Congress had passed the law in 1993, many states ignored its key provisions—such as providing the recipients of public assistance programs with opportunities to register to vote.  

Dēmos’ NVRA project became one of its signature programs and eventually helped register hundreds of thousands of voters. This work also laid the groundwork for a larger set of democracy initiatives that put the organization at the forefront of efforts to push back against growing efforts in many states to suppress voting and subvert election results.  

Raising money for Dēmos’ economic work would prove more challenging. In time, though, we landed our first small grant, for an initiative on credit card debt. Over the next few years, under the leadership of Tamara Draut, who led Dēmos’ economic opportunity program, we scaled a larger project on reforming credit card regulations, helping enact new legislation that President Obama signed in 2009. This work led to other Dēmos projects focused on the economic squeeze facing working Americans—a problem that’s only gotten worse over the past two decades.   

Toward a Larger Vision 

Even as Dēmos succeeded in launching programs in its two core program areas, it would continually struggle to link these issues together. Nearly all our funding took the form of restricted support for highly focused policy or advocacy work, and it was hard to raise money for initiatives aimed at developing a larger narrative—for example, through a fellows program to support authors and other big-picture thinkers.  

Over time, though, Dēmos succeeded in attracting more general support that gave it greater flexibility in its work, as well as making good on its founding commitment to connect ideas with action. This proved challenging from the start, given the very different ways that policy experts and organizers approach their work. Even as Dēmos staffed up with people with both backgrounds during its early years, we struggled to meld our different approaches together. 

But Dēmos would eventually connect analytic and activist work in ways that we hadn’t anticipated. As we engaged in battles on issues such as election protection and financial reform, we built increasingly strong ties with organizing groups across the country. These partnerships have a strong logic. While grassroots organizations have deep ties in communities, many lack the capacity for high-level policy work. National institutions like Dēmos, in turn, aren’t set up to directly engage in organizing and can struggle to have an impact at the state and local level.  

Today, Dēmos’ far-reaching connections to movement groups are among its signature strengths. These relationships help ensure that its policy work is informed by what’s happening on the ground and is also designed to be useful to those engaged in frontline work.  

Conclusion

Creating and then scaling Dēmos was never an easy enterprise. But one reason that the organization has succeeded is that Dēmos was ahead of its time in many ways.  

Over the past 25 years, the challenges facing U.S. democracy have moved from the back burner of politics to being a full-blown crisis with the takeover of the GOP by an authoritarian movement. Likewise, the 2008 financial crisis catapulted issues of economic inequality to the top of the national agenda; in the years since, the affordability crunch on Americans has only worsened.  

More broadly, Dēmos’ insight that democracy and economic opportunity are intertwined has never felt more urgent, with U.S. society increasingly dominated by oligarchical players that seek to reinforce their power and privilege at every turn.  

Our founding bet on connecting ideas and action has also been vindicated. There is now wide recognition that the worlds of policy and organizing must be closely integrated to advance change. While too much important work still happens in siloes, more efforts exist than ever before to break down these divisions.  

It’s hard to know what the future holds as the United States moves deeper into an alarming era of backlash and chaos. But one thing is clear: Dēmos’ vision of a just and inclusive democracy and economy, along with its model for advancing such change, offers a powerful way forward.