Reflections on Dēmos: Sabeel Rahman

On January 27, 2017, in one of its first major actions, the first Trump Administration issued a sweeping “Muslim ban,” seeking to bar the travel of Muslims and other “undesirable” immigrants to the United States. Within hours, protests thronged the airports in New York City, lawsuits were filed, and there commenced the first round of what would become a yearslong struggle between the policies of an administration bent on reasserting visions of white supremacy and economic dominance, and grassroots social movements focused on the needs of everyday Americans seeking a more just and inclusive democracy and economy instead.   

At the time, I was teaching constitutional law at Brooklyn Law School and joined the spontaneous protests that evening outside the court buildings in downtown Brooklyn. By the next summer, the Supreme Court issued its formal blessing of the Trump travel ban. That decision made plain the stakes of the moment and just how deep the power structures committed to a hierarchical society really were. As a Muslim-American equally committed to a just and inclusive democracy, I was convinced I had to do more in that moment.  

A few weeks later, I was offered the opportunity to lead Dēmos. As the premiere think tank working on issues of democracy, racial justice, and economic inequality, Dēmos’ reputation and work was already stellar. But more importantly in that particular moment, it was the uniqueness of the Dēmos model that stood out—a movement-aligned organization working in close strategic partnership with grassroots organizations bringing to bear litigation, policy, and smart organizing  strategies, paired with a commitment to a shared North Star of an inclusive and equitable economy and democracy. I was humbled and thrilled to join the fight for the future of our democracy with the Dēmos team.  

Expanding the scope of the possible, 2018-2021 

During the first Trump Administration, we saw an early version of the reactionary agenda that is in full flight today.

During the first Trump Administration, we saw an early version of the reactionary agenda that is in full flight today. In response, our work at Dēmos from 2018 to 2021 was focused not just on defending marginalized communities, but, in particular, on seeking to expand the realm of the possible, piloting transformative policies and the community-driven solutions that would make our democracy and our economy work for everyone.   

During that period, our work was rooted in this dual project: one of protecting Black and brown communities at risk—particularly of losing their power to make themselves heard in elections and represented in government—and another of forging the ideas and policies that could inspire movements for transformation and help make real the kind of democracy that Dēmos envisioned. This work depended on deep relationships between Dēmos and movement partners at both the national and state level, working to build Black and brown power through organizing. Along with our partners, Dēmos has always believed deeply in the idea that people power is what drives transformational change. It is the people themselves, the demos, who are the real experts in diagnosing the realities of marginalization and oppression and in identifying the kind of structural changes that are needed to make freedom and democracy real.  

This orientation shaped our work across all our programs.  

Through our democracy reform work, our legal team worked closely with a wide range of movement and litigation partners to restore ballot access to thousands of Black and brown voters across the country and helped defend the right to vote against the threat of attack at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our policy work in turn sought to design democracy reforms that would better secure the equal political voice and power of our communities—whether through executive action or transformative new legislation. As with our legal strategies, these policy proposals were built collaboratively with state and national partners. In our economic justice work, we focused on the structural roots of racial and economic inequity. Dēmos’ longstanding work on the racial wealth divide informed our research and advocacy for student debt relief and our interest in public banking. More broadly, we began to zero in on underlying concentrations of corporate power in the economy, particularly in the form of control over finance and the rise of data capitalism, where power over data and algorithms provided platforms and firms with new ways to hoard wealth, opportunity, and exert control. Our environmental justice work foregrounded the disparate racial impacts of the climate crisis and the importance of affirmatively investing in climate resilience in Black and brown communities. Working with our partners, we won key policy changes at the state level, which then informed proposals for federal policy on climate justice and debt cancellation. We also began a series of projects designing institutions for greater democratic decision-making in day-to-day administration and economic policymaking, imagining proposals for energy democracy and ways administrative governance can build power.  

From movement power to governing power 

On January 6, 2021, a mob stormed the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election. The Dēmos team was in the midst of responding to the moment. I was sitting for interviews, discussing the insurrection clause and the 14th Amendment, as well as the history of violent attempts to undo egalitarian, equitable visions of democracy arising from the first Reconstruction. Later that evening, I received a call asking me to serve in the new administration. While it was a surprise and a tough decision, with the support of the Dēmos team, I made the switch a few weeks later. I entered my virtual White House position coordinating the Biden administration’s domestic regulatory policy agenda —everything from climate policy to labor regulations, to new policies tackling corporate concentration and implementing economic recovery and infrastructure investments.  

In that capacity, I had the privilege to work to advance many of the values and ideas we fought for on the Dēmos team. Under a slew of presidential directives, I helped lead efforts to reimagine the inner workings of government: to incorporate equity into policy design and agency practice, to redesign safety net programs to center the experiences of beneficiaries and reduce the racialized and gendered administrative burdens blocking access to benefits, to develop a new framework for proactive participatory engagement for the most impacted communities, and to revamp how the government assessed the costs and benefits of policies to better incorporate values of dignity, equity, and equality while addressing the problems facing everyday Americans attempting to build economic power.  

Toward the next Reconstruction 

During our country’s most recent brush with reactionary threats to democracy, we powered an affirmative response, forging a mandate for a more inclusive and equitable democracy. Millions of Americans mobilized in response to the pandemic, the economic crisis, and the aspiration for racial justice, particularly after the murder of George Floyd. In that following governing moment, many important policies (including several that Dēmos itself helped develop) were implemented, from a massive investment in economic resiliency and recovery to the halving of child poverty via the Child Tax Credit to revived action on corporate and monopoly power, to new investments in clean energy and climate justice. But many urgent needs remained unmet. The safety net expansions were halted and undone too soon, while mounting crises of affordability—especially with respect to health care, child care, and housing—were left unaddressed. And crucially, the moment of change in 2021 did not yield structural democracy reform. Nor were these policies sufficient to fundamentally alter our political economy or the concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy elite. 

Over a year into the second Trump Administration, it is clear that we are in the midst of not just an autocratic threat to American democracy, but a specifically reactionary one. This administration has weaponized the state to go after political opponents, to attack universities, civil society, free speech, and independent media, and it has triggered a wave of gerrymandering, all in an attempt to centralize political power and insulate against democratic accountability.  

It is critical to view these attacks on democracy as part and parcel of a substantive vision of society that these power-accumulating moves are seeking to advance. Indeed, this administration has been explicit about deploying these powers specifically to undermine past advances toward racial, gender, and economic inclusion. This administration has attacked DEI programs, weaponizing civil rights laws to undo anti-discrimination, desegregationist, and gender-inclusive policies. It has dismantled safety net programs, leaving Americans more vulnerable than ever to economic shocks, climate-change-fueled natural disasters, and public health crises. It has gone out of its way to (lawlessly) claw back funds from communities and seeks to dismantle the very agencies charged with protecting Americans against corporate power abuses, whether by workplace bosses or market monopolists. Essentially, this administration is remaking government itself to encode and instill its particular vision of a hierarchical, unequal society in which a few dominate the many—and in which racial, gender, and economic justice are no longer leading values animating our politics or our public policies. 

Now, as always, the prospect for transformative change depends on the engine of grassroots mobilization and power-building.

The challenge now is much more extreme and urgent than before—but many of our same values, aspirations, and understandings of power are still relevant, if not doubly so. Now, as always, the prospect for transformative change depends on the engine of grassroots mobilization and power-building. Now, as always, that possibility of a more inclusive democracy and economy requires the forging of an affirmative vision of a different possible future—one that sees the project of democracy, economic opportunity, and racial justice as deeply intertwined. As Taifa noted in her recent essay, our dream of freedom is not one that comes from the benevolence of those with plenty but from the shifting of power such that everyday people are able to demand what they want and force government to respond. Now, as always, the prospects for structural change turn on the building of this power and vision—and the conversion of that power into new norms and new institutions that meet the moment.  

We have reinvented and expanded our democracy in key moments of crisis, and in this crisis, the work of Dēmos, its movement partners, and the transformative potential of bold new policy ideas remains essential.