Mike Berkowitz is a philanthropic adviser, cofounder and principal of Third Plateau, a social impact consulting firm, and executive director of the Democracy Funders Network, a cross-ideological learning and action community for donors concerned about the health of American democracy.
In January, Berkowitz cowrote an IP guest article (one of several he’s authored or co-authored for IP over the years) on the threats posed by encroaching authoritarianism across the U.S. I caught up with him again after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection and an ascendant Kamala Harris candidacy was bringing recalcitrant democracy and civic engagement donors off the sidelines.
“An interesting change over the course of the last five, six weeks is that we went from a seeming Trump outright victory to what looks to be possibly the closest presidential election in history,” Berkowitz said during our most recent call. “And seeing what’s happening with the Georgia election board and in other places, plus ongoing threats to election workers, there is renewed concern among funders about election sabotage and efforts to gum up the works. It has shot to the top of the list for those of us who are in this, not just for partisan politics, but trying to preserve democracy.”
In a freewheeling conversation, Berkowitz hit on democracy funders’ historically defensive posture, growing interest in election-related scenario planning and what may be the most effective — and admittedly improbable — way to reduce polarization across the body politic. This discussion has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve said that funders’ posture in the democracy space has been defensive in nature. Can you elaborate on that premise?
I think the work of the democracy space, basically from 2016 until now, has been defensive, meaning we’ve looked at threats to the rule of law, the threat of authoritarianism and political violence, the rise of polarization and protecting the right to vote, from a defensive posture. We’ve been trying to sort of preserve what’s in place without any thought to how we revitalize and reimagine the work. It’s not that there is none of that, but the fundamental posture of the space the last eight years has, first and foremost, been trying to protect against threats.
In our previous chat, you mentioned efforts to catalyze a more forward-looking agenda, like the Democracy Funders Network brief “Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy” and Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement’s Democracy Futures Project. How can groups and funders move past that defensive posture?
There are a couple of things that they can do. One, they can take more of a long-term orientation in their philanthropy. Again, this is a hard thing to do, given the severity of short-term threats they’re facing, but it’s extremely important. We cannot revitalize American democracy election cycle by election cycle. Nor can we do it through the kinds of investments that one makes in terms of short-term giving or defensive giving. We need to take a five-, 10-, 20-year time horizon, and think about what it is that we want to see at the end of that time horizon, and start building toward that.
The second is to adopt tools and methodologies that are used in other disciplines to help think about and prepare for the future. And these are tools like futures thinking, scenario planning, strategic foresight and horizon scanning. We at the DFN are going to be launching a toolkit to help funders think much more rigorously about the future, which is one of the keys to thinking about an affirmative agenda.
And then the final piece is to get clear about what it is that you want to see in this world when it comes to American democracy. We’ve got to move out of just thinking about what we want to protect against and preserve, and start to think about the kind of democracy we want to build as part of building an affirmative agenda.
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The DFN and another group you founded and run, Patriots and Pragmatists, have been working on scenario planning related to a whole host of democracy-related issues. And the Brennan Center just did a scenario exercise called the Democracy Futures Project premised on an authoritarian candidate winning the presidency to test the resilience of democratic institutions.
I just saw that [Brennan Center Senior Advisor] Barton Gellman was on Sam Harris’ podcast this week talking about this issue. You also had the documentary film “War Game,” which is about a contested election scenario and a variety of contingencies that come into play.
What I can say is that throughout the space, there is a lot of scenario planning happening where folks are getting together and trying to think about the various contingencies of what could happen in the pre-election to election day period, the post-election, certification, the inauguration period and whether we wind up in an autocratic moment in the next presidential administration.
Part of what Bart said in the Harris interview that I think bears repeating is that none of these groups are scenario planning around standard policy fights. This is all about over-the-line abuse of executive authority, political violence, claims that the election was fraudulent, things of that nature.
That seems like an incredibly important distinction. Up until recently, there’s been a tendency to take these norms for granted.
We need to expand our imaginations and think about the variety of things that could be done that are not preventable just because they seem wrong.
We need to recognize where the vulnerabilities are, and understand that at the end of the day, the only thing, in many cases, that we have to help uphold those things is all of us trying to uphold them and upholding them in ways that also don’t necessarily always redound to our partisan benefit, right?
In the Democracy Funders Network, one of the reasons we push folks to differentiate between their politics and democracy work is because we have to be able to stand up to our own side of the spectrum. And I don’t just mean “we” on the left. If any of us have to be willing and able when our side does something that violates core democratic norms, values and institutions, we have to be able to stand up to it as vehemently, forthrightly and loudly as we do when it happens on the other side of the political spectrum.
It is extremely hard to be what the scholars call in-group moderates, to not just be comfortable criticizing the other side, but actually to stand up to antidemocratic behavior on our own side of the political spectrum. There may be nothing more important, ultimately, to preserving and protecting and revitalizing democracy than exercising and building that muscle.
Do you think we could turn down the temperature when it comes to polarization if more in-group moderates called out their own side?
Funders are investing in a lot of bridge-building, social cohesion and pluralism work. In some ways, I think the answer to the challenge of polarization is to solve the problem of elite polarization, which is to say, the public, broadly speaking, takes its cues from how we see our leaders act and speak.
And what I’m seeing here is both straightforward in some respects, and also the most difficult challenge, because it’s almost unimaginable right now, on either side of the political spectrum, to see more of our national leaders and media elites acting as in-group moderates — not just willing to criticize the other side, but actually willing to stand up to partisans on their own side for their antidemocratic behaviors. I think if we saw more of that, that would go a long way toward setting us on a path toward depolarization, because it sends a signal that the other guys aren’t bad all the time.
On the bright side, you noted that we’re seeing more people using joy as part of a forward-looking democracy agenda. For instance, you forwarded me a piece by Ruth Ben-Ghiat about how joy can combat authoritarianism.
This idea is new to me. In a sense, I, too, have been working in a defensive manner the last couple of years. But two things have struck me. One — and even if the Harris campaign doesn’t quite feel the same today as it did on day one or two — we’re seeing the deployment of joy as a political strategy, which, considering the weightiness of this election, feels good and motivating.
The message isn’t, “Get out and vote, your democracy is about to die.” It is, “We’re turning the page on division, turning the page on authoritarianism. We’re moving forward together.” That’s powerful at the human level, and to see it show up in the campaign and be embraced has been interesting to see.
The second is the takeaway that I get from Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s piece, and others who talk about joy as a strategy for countering authoritarianism, is quite literally the way authoritarianism works — it tries to shut you down. It tries to shut you up. It uses scare tactics and violence. And so, in refusing to feel scared and threatened, and instead responding with hope and joy, you take away one of the core tools of antidemocratic action.
And in a sort of similar fashion, one could say, the way we should respond to the threat of violence at a polling place, or the threats of voter intimidation and voter suppression at a polling place, is to make sure we have security, but to also embrace the joy of voting, to make it celebratory. This is the fundamental right in a democracy that we get to enjoy and to make that a positive experience.
It goes to this question of how we get out of just being in a defensive posture and think about the kind of democracy we want to create. I would love to create a democracy where we experience voting as a joyful activity and feeling some sense of connection with our neighbors, regardless of who they’re voting for. I think there’s a lot there, and it’s very powerful.
