To step up for democracy looks different for everyone, depending on our diverse strengths. Here at The Renovator’s Editorial Board, we work hard to provide the public with quality writing, five times a week, from esteemed authors who share our belief that democracy can (and must) be renovated. We’ve loved growing this platform, and creating a space to host this essential dialogue. We’d like to continue our work— and that gets a lot easier if others step up with us.

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Take a look through any recent major AI bill or governance framework, and you will likely stumble on the phrase “independent third-party audit.”

On Monday, Illinois became the first state to enact a law requiring the largest AI companies to submit to annual third-party audits. In June, a bipartisan House draft from Reps. Obernolte (R-CA) and Trahan (D-MA) proposed the same thing. OpenAI’s latest policy blueprint endorses regular third-party audits.

Audits have intuitive appeal. Who would object to an independent body periodically checking under the hood of the frontier AI labs?

What’s less obvious is how these audits actually work, and what they are supposed to achieve. Or what separates effective audit legislation from regulation that just looks good on paper.

That picture has become clearer. Auditing AI, a new book from a group of eleven experts, offers a remarkably accessible, compact primer on the process of auditing AI systems — who conducts them (law firms, public officials, academics), what they actually examine (a system’s output, not its code or algorithms), what they measure (bias, accuracy, safety), and what they can achieve (public awareness, changed business practices, new laws).

More striking than any particular detail about the mechanics of an AI audit is the authors’ broader argument that legislation alone can’t guarantee these audits protect the public.

“Most of the consequential audits and investigations of serious AI failure have come from concerned citizens who have experienced harm and documented the problem,” Nathan Matias, a Cornell professor and one of the book’s authors, told The Renovator. “We see that in the case of chatbot-induced suicide. We see that in the case of racial bias in facial recognition. Nearly all of the examples in the book are investigations that started with citizens raising concerns.”

Just last week, the nonprofit Future of Life Institute released an independent audit of nine leading AI labs, finding that several (OpenAI and Anthropic included) have walked back earlier safety pledges.

That doesn’t mean there’s no place for regulation. The authors recommend clear disclosure requirements and an easy way for citizens to report complaints. The book points to a 2021 New York City law as a model for letting citizens flag problems directly to regulators. But that law isn’t perfect. “It checks for gender and racial bias in hiring tools,” Kristen Vaccaro, a professor at UC San Diego, told The Renovator. “But it doesn’t look at other types of discrimination. And it certainly doesn’t check if the tools do a good job of matching the best people for a given job.” That’s why requiring AI companies to disclose fresh, specific data matters, Vaccaro added.

The authors, above all, encourage public awareness and participation. Audits are only as strong as the public’s willingness to demand and scrutinize them. “Be critical observers of the institutions in your lives,” Matias told The Renovator. “Institutions are being rebuilt to integrate AI everywhere. Use what you already know about how much these decisions matter to make sure they continue to serve people.”

Now, on to the headlines.

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3 Stories Worth Your Time

1. OpenAI released its latest model, GPT 5.6, to the public after the Trump administration cleared it for broad release following weeks of closed-door testing. It’s the second time in as many months the administration stepped in to delay a frontier model’s release — it had issued export controls against Anthropic in June. Critics argue the episodes illustrate the government’s unpredictable licensing approach to regulating frontier AI models.

2. The UN’s AI for Good Summit convened in Geneva, launching a new Global AI Commission. The 40-plus member commission includes heads of state and executives from Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft. Their task? Expand AI access and narrow the digital divide. In response, civil society organizations signed a letter warning that “AI governance cannot be shaped solely by state and corporate perspectives.”

3. SCOTUS ruled that police need a warrant to access people’s location data, even when that data is held by a tech company like Google. The decision in Chatrie v. United States, a 6-3 ruling that crossed ideological lines, stems from a 2019 case where police used a “geofence warrant” — a tool that pulls data on devices near a crime scene. The Court held that people retain a Fourth Amendment privacy right over that data regardless of who’s storing it.

Also Happening

• OpenAI is in talks to give the U.S. government a 5% equity stake in the company, following similar deals the Trump administration has struck with Intel and Nvidia.

• The Trump administration missed its own 30-day deadline to create an AI cybersecurity clearinghouse, set in a June 2 Executive Order.

• Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger broke with a growing number of Democrats by rejecting calls for nationwide data center moratoriums, calling instead for giving local communities a stronger role. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has taken a similar approach, favoring incentives over outright restrictions.

We welcome any feedback on how this roundup can be most useful for you. Please drop us a message at zachey.kliger@gmail.com. See you in two weeks.

Their story appeared just two days earlier. “President Trump,” they said, “flew out of Turkey on Wednesday night on the old Air Force One instead of his new Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8 as a security precaution related to the resumption of hostilities with Iran… The swap deepens questions about whether the new plane, which the president had pressed to be ready as soon as possible, was retrofitted with sufficient security measures over the last year.”

The subpoenas, some of which were served on the reporters at their homes, ordered the Times journalists to testify in a federal grand jury proceeding on Wednesday. It is likely that they will be asked to reveal the sources who provided them with information about the new Air Force One’s inadequate security measures.

Such a bold assault on press freedom and attempt to discourage people from providing information to journalists should not have come as a surprise. In April 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi repealed a policy of the Biden Justice Department that prevented it “from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media.”

She accused the Biden Administration of using that policy to protect “media allies [who engaged] in selective leaks in support of failed lawfare campaigns.” Bondi added, “The leaks have not abated since President Trump’s second inauguration, including leaks of classified information.” And she announced that “This Justice Department will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.”

Trump’s attacks on journalists are too numerous to count, but threats of criminal prosecution represent an escalation. In April of this year, the president threatened to jail reporters who published a story about a plane the Iranians had shot down and the administration’s efforts to rescue one of its pilots. Referring to confidential sources, President Trump’s policy is “‘Give it up or go to jail.’”

That is why it is time for Congress to enact a national journalist shield law. Such a law would “protect journalist-source confidentiality,” except in “cases involving terrorism, other serious emergencies, or journalists suspected of crimes.”

Two and a half years ago, the House of Representatives passed such a bill, the so-called Press Act, but it died in the Senate. It was sponsored by Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin and Republican Kevin Kiley in the House.

As the subpoenas issued to the New York Times reporters suggest, it is more important than ever that reporters be provided protection. Without it, the current administration and any future one can harass and threaten journalists and choke off the information they need to tell stories that the government does not want told – or create a hostile environment that dissuades them from pursuing those stories at all.

More than fifty years ago, in 1971, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black described the press’s essential role this way in his opinion in New York Times Co. v. United States: “In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press,” he wrote, “was to serve the governed, not the governors.“

As Black put it, “The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

In Black’s view, the First Amendment only prevents the government from stopping the press from publishing something. That’s it. He said nothing about providing reporters with protection so they can get the information they need from sources who will provide it only if they are confident their identities will not be revealed. His opinion established a precedent that seriously undermined the freedom of the press and laid the groundwork for Bondi’s DOJ today.

One year later, in Branzburg v. Hayes, the Court considered the case of a reporter who “declined to testify before a state grand jury about information that he had obtained for a newspaper in an investigation of drug activities.” It refused to go beyond what Black had written and held that “there is no testimonial privilege for reporters that goes beyond protections for ordinary citizens.”

The Court downplayed the chilling effect that being forced to choose between revealing sources or going to jail might have on press freedom. As Justice Byron White observed in his majority opinion, “There is a stronger public interest in deterring crime than in preserving the flow of news.”

That is exactly the position articulated in Bondi’s 2025 decision to have the Justice Department get back into the business of compelling reporters to reveal their sources.

Looking back on those Supreme Court decisions, the New York Times editorial board was right to say in 2024 that doing the job Black assigned to the press, i.e. censuring the government, “depends…not just on journalists but also on brave officials willing to sound the alarm about government misconduct. Even when their disclosures are clearly in the public interest, these whistle-blowers — or sources, in the journalistic parlance — often hide their identities to avoid punishment or retaliation.”

“In this way,” it continues, “bringing essential information to the public often depends on protecting the identity of the person sharing it.” That is why the editorial board wrote that “A Reporter’s Shield Law Is Vital to Prevent Abuses of Power.”

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Fortunately, state governments recognized the danger of the Branzburg precedent. They responded by enacting journalist shield laws to cover reporters within their own jurisdictions. The Reporters Committee on a Free Press suggests that “a national consensus has emerged among the states, establishing protections for journalist-source communications.”

In forty-nine states and the District of Columbia, either the state legislature or courts have recognized a privilege for reporters to withhold information about their sources. Wyoming is the only outlier.

Many other countries have also passed laws recognizing a reporter-source privilege. They include Austria, Norway, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom. Spain, Sweden, Portugal, and Germany go further and protect this privilege in their constitutions.

It is time for the federal government to join them, by legislation if not a constitutional amendment.

As the Times put it in 2024, ”the need [for federal action] is arguably greatest, in part because of the rapid evolution of electronic snooping and the fallout of sharply polarized politics.” It is also important because the reach of the administration in Washington, D.C. is much greater than that of any state.

At present, neither legislation nor constitutional change can come in time to help the reporters who uncovered the truth about the new Air Force One. But without such change, the project of protecting press freedom in this country will remain radically incomplete.

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It’s Friday, July 10, 2026, and time for your Democracy in the States’ Weekly Roundup.

This week, the Trump administration widened its confrontation with the people who run American elections. The president fired every sitting member of the Election Assistance Commission, and the Justice Department sent letters threatening criminal prosecution to secretaries of state in at least eight states over unsubstantiated noncitizen-voting claims, all while new research shows state voter rolls are already accurate and up to date. We’re covering these developments and more state-level changes to election administration, redistricting, and primary access below.

Trump Fires the Election Assistance Commission

• President Trump fired all four sitting commissioners at the Election Assistance Commission this week, leaving the agency that certifies voting machines and distributes election security grants without a quorum to act.

• NATIONAL: Trump fires all Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act (VoteBeat).

• NATIONAL: ‘Dangerous … reckless … desperate’: Trump’s firing of EAC leaders escalates his war on voting, election chiefs and lawmakers warn (Democracy Docket).

DOJ’s Prosecution Threats Over Noncitizen Voting

The Justice Department sent letters to secretaries of state in at least eight states this week, threatening criminal prosecution if they don’t purge alleged noncitizen voters from the rolls. The department is separately deploying election monitors to several states ahead of the midterms, a move Michigan faith leaders say undermines the voting rights it claims to protect.

• NATIONAL: Department of Justice warns election officials they could be criminally charged over noncitizen voters (VoteBeat).

• ARIZONA: DOJ letter threatens Arizona election officials with prosecution as Fontes calls it ‘intimidation’ (Arizona Mirror).

• NEVADA: ‘It’s threats, it’s intimidation’: Nevada secretary of state slams Trump DOJ letters targeting election officials over noncitizen voting (Democracy Docket).

• COLORADO: DOJ letter an attempt to intimidate, Colorado’s top election official says (Colorado Newsline).

• UTAH: Utah’s top election official gets DOJ letter threatening criminal prosecution (Utah News Dispatch).

• IDAHO: Trump administration threatens to criminally prosecute Idaho election officials if noncitizens vote (Idaho Capital Sun).

• RHODE ISLAND: Feds threaten Rhode Island’s top election official with criminal charges if noncitizens vote (Rhode Island Current).

• MARYLAND: Justice Department threatens Maryland’s top election official with criminal charges (Maryland Matters).

• WEST VIRGINIA: Trump’s demand for state voter lists has hit a wall — for now (West Virginia Watch).

• LOUISIANA: Republicans take lead in Louisiana registered voters; Democrats claim purge (Louisiana Illuminator).

• MINNESOTA: Minnesota begins routine election machine tests as feds retreat from election security (Minnesota Reformer).

The Primary Battles

As more states fight over who gets to vote in primaries, South Carolina Republicans are suing to close their primary to registered Republicans only, while independents in Maine and Massachusetts are fighting to stay in the process at all.

• SOUTH CAROLINA: SC GOP sues to close primaries to registered Republicans (South Carolina Daily Gazette).

• MAINE: Maine Democrats Are About to Lock Independents Out of the Process—Again (Independent Voter News).

• MASSACHUSETTS: Massachusetts Insiders Tried to Kill Primary Reform. Voters Get the Final Word (Independent Voter News).

• TEXAS: Veterans Step Into Texas Open-Primary Lawsuit to Defend Voters’ Freedom to Participate (Veterans for All Voters).

• OKLAHOMA: Oklahoma June primary election saw low independent turnout (Oklahoma Voice).

Building Better Elections

Not every democracy story this week was defensive. States and advocacy groups also championed structural changes aimed at making elections work better, from ranked-choice voting to ballot-initiative protections to money in politics.

Ranked-choice voting

• MAINE: Graham Platner’s replacement and ranked choice voting (FairVote).

• WASHINGTON, D.C.: Results from the first ranked choice voting election in Washington, DC (FairVote).

Protecting direct democracy

• UTAH: Utah lawmakers now won’t pursue constitutional amendment to change ballot initiative power (Utah News Dispatch).

• MICHIGAN: Michigan could approve a constitutional convention this year. What would that mean? (VoteBeat).

Money in politics

• MISSOURI: It’s possible to end corporate influence in politics (Missouri Independent).

• NATIONAL: “Pop-up” Super PACs Game the System to Leave Voters in the Dark (Campaign Legal Center).

• MAINE: How the Supreme Court campaign finance ruling is altering Maine’s ongoing legal battle (Maine Morning Star).

• OHIO: Ohio court case eliminates limits on coordinated spending between parties and candidates (Ohio Capital Journal).

Election Administration, State by State

Beyond the DOJ fight, states are making their own changes to how elections are run, some expanding access, others restricting it, and two states quietly redrawing their political maps.

• WISCONSIN: Elections Commission orders investigation of Green Bay duplicate absentee ballots (Wisconsin Examiner).

• ARIZONA: Judge blocks Arizona elections rule barring ‘intimidating’ and ‘harassing’ clothing (Arizona Mirror).

• RHODE ISLAND: RI elections board approves early voting regulations (Rhode Island Current).

• GEORGIA: State Election Board passes rule seeking access to secretary of state’s election night ‘bunker’ (Georgia Recorder).

• GEORGIA: A last-minute change to Georgia’s ballot QR code bill could steer voting in a new direction (Georgia Recorder).

• NEW JERSEY: Federal attacks on mail-in voting demand New Jersey’s attention now (New Jersey Monitor).

• NATIONAL: What You Need to Know About the Proposed USPS Mail Ballot Rule (Voting Rights Lab).

• PENNSYLVANIA: Pennsylvania elections could look very different if Democrats win full control of state government in 2026 (VoteBeat).

• WISCONSIN: How inconsistent standards led to dozens of disenfranchised voters in a Wisconsin city (VoteBeat).

• MICHIGAN: Already voted for a candidate who dropped out? Here’s what you can do (Michigan Advance).

• SOUTH DAKOTA: Dell Rapids Republican lawmaker may get plea deal in election fraud case (South Dakota Searchlight).

• NORTH CAROLINA: What goes on behind the scenes in an NC election? This nonprofit wants you to know (North Carolina Newsline).

• ALASKA: Alaska’s news organizations are collaborating on voter guides — and you can help, too (Alaska Beacon).

• MARYLAND: Ferguson, Peña-Melnyk announce special session for redistricting (Maryland Matters).

• UTAH: Utah Republicans concede defeat in multiple partisan redistricting efforts (Democracy Docket).

In case you missed it…

• What Is Civic Education For?, by Scott Warren, July 9, 2026

• Liberalism for the 21st Century, by Danielle Allen, July 7, 2026

• Civic Education News Roundup: Reflecting on the American Experiment., by Joanna Kenty, July 6, 2026

• The Golden Apple, by Danielle Allen, July 4, 2026

Civic education, at its best, helps prepare young people to be the next stewards of America’s constitutional democracy. But today’s political environment increasingly asks it to do something else: Save democracy itself. For many, civic education has become a shorthand for producing better citizens according to one political vision or another, rather than its classical purpose of equipping young people to think, deliberate, and participate.

To this end, the central question, then, is not simply how we expand civic education, but what we believe it is ultimately for. Too often, advocates treat civic education as a solution, or even the solution, to democratic dysfunction itself, rather than as one institution among many that prepares citizens for democratic life.

Clear evidence exists that the subject has been systemically deprioritized in our K-12 schools and universities in recent decades. In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Harvard professor Danielle Allen attributes this decline primarily to political polarization, arguing that, “adults could not agree on what should be taught about our country’s political history, and as a result the kids had been taught nothing at all.”

Danielle is right that the renewed attention to civic education is encouraging, and that the Educating for American Democracy initiative represents one of the field’s most significant achievements in recent decades. By bringing together scholars and practitioners from across the ideological spectrum, the effort demonstrates that meaningful common ground remains possible even amid deep disagreement.

But even if we succeed in bringing civic education back into our schools, foundational challenges remain. Political disagreement today is not only about what happened in history or which facts students should learn. More fundamentally, many Americans disagree about the very purpose of democracy itself. The challenge runs deeper than polarization over curriculum. It reflects competing understandings of what the American system of democratic self-government is ultimately designed for.

For some, democracy is primarily about protecting individual liberty. For others, it is about advancing equality. For others still, it is about preserving a moral and cultural inheritance grounded in religious character. These are not gaps in knowledge- they are fundamental disagreements about what democracy is for — and no curriculum can close that gap.

I co-founded a civic education organization, Generation Citizen (GC), in 2008, when it was still difficult to persuade funders and policymakers to take the field seriously. I led the organization for 12 years, and continue to support its work. Having spent more than a decade leading GC, I’ve watched the field’s resurgence with both appreciation and unease. The appreciation is genuine: Efforts to promote pluralism, collaboration, and engagement across differences are sorely needed. The unease stems from what that resurgence has revealed about why so many people began to care.

Prior to 2016, civic education struggled to attract sustained attention. After Donald Trump’s election, that changed almost overnight. Our organization’s budget quadrupled in less than a year. But the flood of interest belied a basic assumption that many of our supporters implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, would note: Americans could only have voted for Trump because they lacked an adequate understanding of democratic institutions and norms. Civic education was less a tool for developing independent civic thinkers than a corrective — a way to bring misguided citizens back to the right conclusions.

That assumption has not gone away. In the work I lead today, focused on broader democracy reform, civic education almost always emerges as a societal corrective from both the left and right. When concerns arise about executive overreach, the weaponization of government, or threats to electoral institutions, from divergent partisan perspectives, a common reflex is to bemoan the lack of civic knowledge and capabilities amongst young people and call for more civic education. The logic is straightforward: If Americans better understood democratic institutions, they would be more likely to support them. But understanding how an institution works and trusting it are not the same thing.

Recent research we conducted with colleagues at Johns Hopkins and ReD Associates illustrates this distinction. In deep interviews with conservatives across the country, we found that skepticism toward democratic institutions often stemmed not from ignorance of how those institutions work, but from a belief that they had become disconnected from the purposes they were meant to serve. Participants could often describe institutions in considerable detail. Their challenges with these institutions focused on whether they remained legitimate, trustworthy, and aligned with their understanding of the common good. These individuals didn’t lack civic education. They had civic grievances — and those are not the same problem, and do not have the same solution.

Effective civic education can help young people understand institutions but it cannot, by itself, persuade them that those institutions deserve their trust. Conflating learning about institutions and asking young people to trust them asks civic education to solve problems that are ultimately political rather than educational.

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This temptation to use civic education as a political corrective is not confined to one side of American politics. The Trump Administration recently announced the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, a partnership of organizations largely aligned with the Make America Great Again movement, many of which advocate a “patriotic education” emphasizing national pride and shared civic inheritance. Where the post-2016 progressive impulse was to use civics to rebuild faith in institutions, this coalition’s goal is seemingly to use civics to instill a particular national identity. The ultimate goal is different, but the assumption underneath is similar. Both approaches begin with a vision of what an ideal democratic citizen should believe, and work backward to a type of civic education designed to produce that citizen. Both treat the outcome as settled and the education as a means of getting there.

The work of Danielle and her colleagues on Educating for American Democracy illustrates the most promising path forward precisely because it does not pretend these disagreements can be resolved. The EAD framework invites students into enduring debates about patriotism and solidarity, equality and liberty, rights and responsibilities. Its ambition is not to eliminate disagreement but to prepare students to engage it thoughtfully. That strikes me as the right aspiration.

Yet even a framework as carefully constructed as EAD cannot answer the larger question that continues to shape our politics: what and who is democracy ultimately for? No curriculum or framework can resolve that debate, because it is itself one of the central questions democratic citizens inherit.

The answer, then, is not to expect less from civic education, but to expect something different. Schools should absolutely teach students how American government works, how elections function, what constitutional principles have shaped our history, and how citizens can participate effectively in public life. They should expose students to competing traditions of American political thought, like those that argue for limited government versus a more expansive state. Students should study moments in history when our institutions strengthened democracy and moments when those same institutions fell short. In other words, they should prepare students to think politically, not simply to think alike.

But what should change is how we judge the long-term effects of civic education. Right now, both sides of this debate — supporters who helped to quadruple our budget after 2016, and the coalition building “patriotic education” today — risk measuring success the same way: By their perception of the health of democracy. In other words, they assess the effectiveness of civic education by asking whether students end up trusting the right institutions, or believing the right story about the country. These implicit metrics are not about good education, but about political persuasion and conversion.

A better standard of effective civic education may be both more narrow and more demanding. Can a student accurately state the strongest version of a political position they themselves reject? Can a student explain why others might not trust an institution they themselves trust? This type of civic education focuses on the disagreements that have always defined American democracy, and always will.

Civics education cannot save democracy. It can, however, prepare citizens capable of renewing it.

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So read below and sign up! This is a chance for Renovators everywhere to help forge the coalition we need to change our politics.

On July 16, I’ll be doing a live podcast-taping with David French and Jamelle Bouie.

On July 17, I’ll be doing a fireside chat with Ezra Klein.

We’ll all be involved in one of my favorite activities: thinking out loud together in public.

The conference is filling fast, but they are keeping a waitlist, so run, don’t walk, to registration!

Hope to see you there,

— Danielle

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And don’t miss Shikha’s piece here —>

The UnPopulist

LibCon2026: The Reconstruction Coalition

This year, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism’s “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference—LibCon—arrives not quite two weeks after one of the most remarkable achievements in human history: the 250th anniversary of the American founding. While we are not drawing a full parallel with the task that fell to …

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a month ago · 40 likes · 3 comments · Shikha Dalmia

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Also worth watching is this panel from the National Constitution Center with Danielle, Colleen Shogan, and (the surprise jokester) Jon Meacham, which was also the opening event for the National Conference of Mayors — a context that gave the conversation about democracy and civic education a lot of added relevance.

From Democracy 201, don’t miss this great essay about First-Year Writing programs and civic learning (and don’t forget to activate your subscription to Democracy 201):

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And Stanford’s Eva Lacy wrote a great piece about the Civic Profile self-assessment — take the quiz and get yours!

Lessons for the 250th:

• 250 Reasons This Is the Time for a Renaissance in Civic Education: Virginia embraced an effort to renew students’ patriotic zeal that could be a blueprint for other states, by Aimee Rogstad Guidera for Education Next.

• How Can We Talk to Kids About Patriotism? A conversation with Declaration of Independence expert Danielle Allen by Lori Hough for Harvard’s Graduate School of Education blog.

• Reflections on Teaching the Declaration by Danielle Allen for the Jack Miller Center.

• Teaching the Declaration of Independence with hashtags 250 years later By Cara Tabachnick for CBS News.

• Don’t Let America’s 250th Pass You By, By Vince Stango and Julie Silverbrook for The Fulcrum

• The forgotten lesson from 1776 that could rescue democracy in 2026, By Rutgers’ Nicholas V. Longo and Elizabeth C. Matto for NJ.com, calling for “a revitalization of public-spirited institutions.”

• America Is a Story We Tell Ourselves: How do we reconcile the promise of the Declaration of Independence with everything we know about our country? By Kaitlyn Greenidge for Harper’s Bazaar.

• At 250, the Declaration of Independence Still Sparks Hard Questions in Class: Teachers say debates over citizenship and equality are reshaping how students read the declaration today. By Greg Toppo for The 74 and The 19th.

• Talking to Young Children About America 250: Considerations and Strategies, By Megan Pamela Ruth Madison for Teaching for Change.

• America’s 250th is an invitation to help kids understand exactly what this country is all about: being “the founders of today,” by Lindsay Cormack for the New York Post.

• Students Without a Country? By Andrew D. Carico for RealClear Education on “informed patriotism.”

• America at 250: A birthday letter to my refugee students, by Adam Sudmann for the Syracuse Post-Standard.

Civic learning in the spotlight:

• Making Democracy Flourish in the Classroom: A Karsh Institute fellowship for K–12 educators is exploring how civic learning can prepare students for democratic life. By Natalie Ermann Russell.

• Why Faculty Need Experiential Learning Too, by Dara N. Byrne, Dean, Macaulay Honors College (CUNY) on the the Faculty Civic Academy, a faculty externship model.

• From The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley:

  • This Grad Season, the Future Might Be in Good Hands After All: At a time of uncertainty, Gen Z’s creativity, compassion, and commitment to change offer reasons for optimism, By Katherine Reynolds Lewis on Oberlin students.

  • How Do You Learn to Care When Caring Is Your Job? See how a pharmacy school is teaching students to step outside their comfort zones and care for patients with different backgrounds, beliefs, and access to power, By Juliana Tafur and Kelly Rafferty.

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Hear from young civic leaders:

• Made By Us is continuing to publish Letters to America — I really enjoyed Sofia Segarra’s, about including women and immigrants in American constitutional democracy: Can America Keep it?

• What will Philly look like in 25 years? These kids wrote plays about the changes they want to see. “It’s freaking amazing,” one student playwright said of seeing her work on stage, brought to life by professional actors. By Kristin A. Graham for the Philadelphia Inquirer, on Philadelphia Young Playwrights’s Civic Theater Project.

• Can We Choose Democracy? By Isabel Papp for The Fulcrum: “Democracy is not a fixed state but a continuous negotiation. It means having a voice and fighting to keep it in the conversation, even when things seem to be going well.”

• From Anguish to Action: How I supported my campus community during ICE crackdowns. By Anthony Marquez, then a student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, for Liberal Education.

• 5 Practical Lessons from Gen Z Changemakers: The Andrew Carnegie Foundation and Baratunde Thurston join forces on DIY Civics, a new series featuring Citizens & Scholars’ Carnegie Young Leaders in action.

Learning from history:

• The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Document (with Danielle Allen & Mary Bilder) on Stay Tuned with Preet, with a bonus subscriber-only clip on “Trump against civic education.”

• Sojourner’s Truth, by Jocelyn Frye for The Fulcrum.

• As the US turns 250, a forgotten founding influence helps explain its current unease: University of Maine professor Robert A. Ballingall explores Montesquieu’s Enlightenment philosophy about freedom on The Conversation.

• How the Story of Young George Washington Offers Some Important Civic Lessons: A new movie connects with a civics curriculum that goes beyond memorizing dates and places to consider whether Washington made the right decisions. By Martin Slagter at The 74 - shouting out the Bill of Rights Institute, Stand Together, and Mount Vernon. You can also check out Historian Roundtable’s video on the accuracy of the film.

• What Minnesota taught a Buddhist-Catholic immigrant about America at 250: The promise that brought a young exchange student from Sri Lanka to Minnesota is the same one that inspired the Founders nearly 250 years ago. By Patrick Mendis for the Minnesota Post.

• Ask the expert: The ‘pursuit of happiness’ 250 years since America’s inception, an interview with Michigan State U. political scientist Raul Rodriguez.

Civic education in the states:

• ‘Crucial’: New Maryland law lets public school students earn a civic excellence seal on their diploma, from ABC WMAR in Baltimore.

• America’s 250th Birthday Is a Test for Civic Education, By Joshua Dunn and William Lyons for RealClear Education, about the Institute of American Civics (IAC)’s Civics Academies in Tennessee.

• UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership partners with rural high school for Adulting 101: The pilot class at J.F. Webb in Granville County included a civics unit led by Carolina faculty.

• As America marks 250 years, Iowans highlight an inclusive view of history, and America’s 250th birthday prompts rethinking of historical markers, from the Iowa Capital-Dispatch and States Newsroom.

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Civic learning resources

• Emma Humphries and Joseph Kahne: Measuring civic education, a recording from iCivics also available as a podcast from Spotify or Apple.

• From the Pew Research Center, a new tool for civic self-reflection: Where do you fit in the political typology? Are you Unconventional Right? Loyal Liberal? Or something else?

• Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum’s new exhibit explores ‘Second American Revolution’ from Illinois Public Media’s The 21st Show.

• Recording available of “Purposeful Pluralism” in Higher Education from the American Enterprise Institute with panelists Angela Hawken, Vice Dean for Research, School of Government and Policy, Johns Hopkins University; and Jenna Silber Storey, Codirector, Center for the Future of the American University, American Enterprise Institute. They highlighted the collaborative efforts between their two institutions to cultivate intellectual pluralism in higher education, including the Civic Thought Project, the JHU-AEI Fellowship Exchange Program, and the Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative.

• America’s Immigration Waves: 250 Years of Arrivals, from Newsweek. Also from Newsweek, Indiaspora’s 250 at 250 Highlights the Indian Americans that Built America.

• America 250: A Republic Built on Native Land, a series from Native News Online.

Upcoming Events:

1. Unfinished Revolution: Social Movements, Freedom Struggles, and American Democratic Development, for APSA’s Engaging America’s 250th Webinar Series. Tuesday, July 7, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM (ET).

2. Our Declaration: “We the People” and the Declaration of Independence, a course for educators from the Civic Learning Institute taught by Danielle Allen, beginning July 8.

3. Teaching Difficult Issues in K-12 Schools-Summer Virtual Workshop Series from Penn State’s Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative, begins July 8.

4. Teaching250: Civics Renewal for America’s 250th and Beyond from The Center for Civic Education In Partnership with the National Constitution Center, July 9, 7:00-8:30 pm EST.

5. The American Political Science Association’s 2026 Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER) will be held in-person at UCLA in Los Angeles, CA from July 13-16, 2026.

6. Institute on Experiential Learning and Engaged Dialogue, AAC&U, July 14 – 17, 2026: a four-day, online, team-based institute for colleges and universities committed to strengthening applied learning, dialogue across difference, and civic preparation.

7. Smithsonian National Education Summit—Together We Thrive: Towards a More Perfect Union July 14–16, 2026, in person and online.

8. Faith, Freedom, and the Classroom: Navigating the First Amendment and Religious Literacy, an online workshop from the Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS) and the National Constitution Center (NCC), August 25, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm EST

9. International Association for Research on Service-Learning & Community Engagement (IARSLCE) 2026 Conference at Loyola University New Orleans, October 11-13, 2025.

That is our question too. Can we rededicate ourselves to the cause of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal?

Lincoln also called the Declaration of Independence the apple of gold, held up in a frame of silver, which was the Constitution. He was drawing on Proverbs, where the word of a wise man fitly spoken is said to be an apple of gold held up in a frame of silver.

I’ve been working on, writing about, and speaking about the Declaration of Independence for more than 25 years — more than a tenth of the life of our nation. For that matter, I am astonished to reflect that I have been alive for more than a fifth of the life of the nation. My mother and father have been alive for nearly a third of the life of the nation. We are still that young as a country! In America years — a concept like dog years — we might think of ourselves as still little more than a pimply, hormonal teenager, still developing our frontal cortex.

Across those years of reflection, I have come to understand what Lincoln meant when he called the Declaration of Independence the apple of gold. It was low-income night students in a class I taught in Chicago more than 25 years ago who gave me the critical insight. The Declaration tells an economical story of human agency. A group of people looked around and diagnosed their circumstances. They found them wanting. They determined to set out in a new direction, first laying out some principles to guide them. Then they clarified their diagnosis of the ills they faced, chose action steps, and set out. My night students were in my class because they, too, had surveyed their circumstances and found them wanting, and had determined to set out in a new direction. They resonated immediately to the Declaration of Independence, connecting to its story of agency.

Astonishingly, I also learned that few of them had encountered the Declaration of Independence before my course. Their inheritance — a golden apple — had been withheld from them. Why? Most generally because a generation of people had decided that a text attributed to Thomas Jefferson, who held people in bondage, could not be taken seriously as the founding text for our nation.

But, of course, Thomas Jefferson was not the solo author of the Declaration. Nothing in democracy is ever a solo act. The committee that he chaired also included John Adams from Massachusetts and Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania. Adams never held people in bondage and always was against enslavement. Franklin had held people in bondage earlier in his life but had repudiated the practice by 1776.

Before the end of the Revolutionary War, both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania would abolish enslavement, drawing on the principles and language of the Declaration, and lay the foundation for abolitionism. (Vermont did so as well, though it was still its own country at the time.) In that Revolutionary period, free and enslaved Black Americans like Prince Hall and Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman also seized on the idea that all people are created equal to describe their own deeply felt and held sense of agency.

I’ve also written at length elsewhere about how the word “men” was meant in a universal sense at the time. And the contrast between the lofty principles and the slow start to abolition, the continuation of enslavement throughout most of the country, the ongoing subordination of women, and the expropriation from and suppression of Native Americans all require acknowledgment and explanation.

Yet Lincoln was right to observe that without the principle that all people are created equal, there could be no moral justification for revolution. Without that principle, it was little more than a power grab. Without that principle, it would condemn people to nothing more than an ongoing brute-force struggle over who had power. The Civil War, in other words.

But with that principle firmly in place, something else would be possible — a government for the people, because it was by the people. That, in incredibly economical summary, is the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. It is what we commit ourselves to when we acknowledge and embrace the principle that all people are created equal. We are equal in all of us being people with purposes, trying to make tomorrow better than yesterday. That striving communicates our natural right to and need for freedom — to steer our own lives in our private spheres and to steer our collective lives together with others in the public sphere. We can all have freedom only when we commit to that collective steering.

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The golden apple is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, which communicates the standards and principles of popular self-government, grounded in the proposition that all people are created equal. This is our collective inheritance:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Right now, a chorus of voices from all over the country and all sides of the political spectrum is calling out that government is not currently for the people. There are crises in housing, health care, child care, and prices. There is forever war and there are technological overlords restructuring our economy and society willy-nilly. There are limits on the freedom to form new businesses and to deploy one’s lifelong savings for investments of one’s own choosing in a timely fashion. There are challenges to the health of young people and limits on their opportunity. And there is incredible wealth accruing to those who hold power simply because they hold power.

Facing these clear indicators that our government is not currently “for the people,” Lincoln would ask us to consider whether it is also by the people. If it is not, that is where we need to focus our energies.

And indeed our government is not currently by the people — because of corruption, and because of the restriction of the right to vote. On the latter point, thanks to gerrymandering, closed primaries, and low-turnout primaries, 60 million Americans no longer have a meaningful vote in federal elections.

To rededicate ourselves to this nation — conceived in liberty, and already several times rededicated to the proposition that all people are created equal — requires us to embrace the hard work of fighting corruption and broadening the suffrage. We must form a movement on both fronts, joining the people who are leading those fights. On the first front, they are American Promise and Issue One. On the second front, they are the Coalition for Healthy Democracy and FairVote (disclosure: I’m involved with all of them).

Yes, we are in a time when we need increased devotion to the cause of government that is for the people because it is by the people. We have much to be proud of as Americans on this Fourth of July — if also nearly as much to lament — but our goal should be to give future generations more to be proud of than to lament. That requires devotion to the principle that all people are created equal.

The golden apple. Pass it on.

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I’m writing from Hawaii, where it’s still Independence Eve, and not-too-late for another Democracy in the States’ Weekly Roundup before America’s 250th Birthday! The U.S. Supreme Court closed out its term this week, ruling that states can count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day and upholding birthright citizenship, while a separate ruling loosening limits on party spending is already reshaping the money race in contested Senate contests in Georgia and Maine. Days before the nation’s 250th birthday, Colorado’s primary delivered the cycle’s biggest upset yet, as a democratic-socialist-aligned newcomer unseated a 30-year incumbent in a Denver-area U.S. House seat. We’re covering these developments and more state-level changes to elections, voting rules, redistricting, ballot measures, and safety-net policy below.

The Supreme Court closes its term

The court’s final rulings fell squarely on state election administration and campaign finance, with reactions breaking down along predictable lines.

• FLORIDA: Florida Republicans are not happy about U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on late-arriving mail-in ballots.

• OHIO: Ohio nixed absentee ballot grace period before US Supreme Court ruling, but court went the other way.

• PENNSYLVANIA: Pa. lawmakers relieved, urge action after US Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship.

• GEORGIA: Supreme Court eases spending rules in win for GOP as U.S. Senate battles brew.

• MAINE: How SCOTUS striking limits on party spending could impact Maine’s Senate race.

• GEORGIA: FBI redirects hundreds of analysts to examine Fulton County’s 2020 election records.

Colorado’s primary upsets and the rest of the field

Colorado held its primary this week, and the results reordered the state’s entire statewide ticket, beginning with a first-time candidate’s win over one of the longest-serving members of the state’s congressional delegation.

Colorado

• COLORADO: Newcomer Melat Kiros unseats longtime Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado Democratic primary.

• COLORADO: Weiser beats Bennet in Democratic primary for Colorado governor, Kirkmeyer in lead.

• COLORADO: Democrat John Hickenlooper of Colorado defeats Senate primary challenger Julie Gonzales.

• COLORADO: Jena Griswold wins Democratic primary for Colorado attorney general.

• COLORADO: Jeffco clerk and voting rights advocate Amanda Gonzalez wins Democratic secretary of State primary.

• COLORADO: Four Colorado state legislators ousted in primary election.

  Elsewhere

• SOUTH CAROLINA: Inside Alan Wilson’s historic GOP primary victory over Pamela Evette.

• LOUISIANA: Letlow rides Trump endorsement to US Senate GOP ticket win; Davis cinches Democratic bid.

• ARKANSAS: Sanders calls special election to fill south Arkansas Senate seat vacated by Gilmore.

• KENTUCKY: Clerical error stopped Democrats from voting in narrow primary, Jefferson clerk says.

• ALASKA: Alaska Supreme Court rules Dan J. Sullivan eligible to run for US Senate.

• UTAH: One of Utah’s hottest Democratic races shows how far left voters are willing to go.

Voting rules, rolls, and ballot access

Beyond the primaries, states are still debating over who gets to vote, whose maps count, and which ballot measures survive to November.

Voter rolls and citizenship checks

• NEW HAMPSHIRE: Court decision blocking NH voter file transfer the latest loss for Trump administration.

• INDIANA: Longtime citizen flagged, voter registration revoked in proof-of-citizenship ordeal.

• ARIZONA: US Supreme Court to take up Arizona proof of citizenship case.

• SOUTH DAKOTA: Group wants help for voters affected by proof-of-citizenship law and federal-only designation.

Redistricting

• COLORADO: Colorado Supreme Court blocks 2028 redistricting measures in blow to Democrats.

Ballot measures

• IDAHO: In rural Idaho, medical marijuana ballot initiative hits setback after signatures turned in late.

• ARKANSAS: Federal judge rules Arkansas initiative restrictions unconstitutional.

• OREGON: Nearly every proposed Oregon initiative won’t make it onto the November ballot.

• ARIZONA: Voucher oversight initiative turns in 420k signatures, more than enough to make the ballot.

• WASHINGTON: Ballot fight on WA income tax looks certain.

• NEBRASKA: Signatures turned in for measure to restrict Nebraska lawmakers’ ability to change voter-passed laws.

• IDAHO: Supporters of ballot measure to end Idaho’s strict abortion ban turn in nearly 110K signatures.

States push back on federal health and food aid rules

States are increasingly struggling to keep up with federal changes to the safety net, such as new Medicaid work requirements and tightened SNAP error-rate penalties that could cost several states hundreds of millions of dollars.

Medicaid

• MARYLAND: States gird for new Medicaid ‘medically frail’ rule.

• INDIANA: Indiana leads nation in decline of children insured through Medicaid.

• PENNSYLVANIA: Pa. joins multi-state lawsuit against Trump administration over Medicaid work requirement rules.

• NEW JERSEY: NJ joins multi-state challenge to Trump administration Medicaid rule.

• MONTANA: Medicaid cuts spark legislative, provider concern.

• VIRGINIA: Virginians living with HIV struggle to get drugs that fight the virus after massive health care cuts.

SNAP and food assistance

• MAINE: Maine could owe $50 million a year to maintain SNAP benefits under new federal mandate.

• TENNESSEE: Tennessee taxpayers could foot bill for some SNAP costs if state’s error rate doesn’t improve.

• MISSOURI: Missouri could be on the hook for $150 million in food benefits due to error rate.

• MINNESOTA: Federal changes to SNAP could cost Minnesota more than $100M per year.

• GEORGIA: Georgia’s SNAP payment errors could cost the state millions of dollars — but not quite yet.

• IOWA: Feds pull Iowa’s ‘healthy food’ SNAP waiver.

• ARKANSAS: Arkansas launches mobile app to navigate new food stamps junk food ban.

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Young people should care about America’s 250^th birthday out of gratitude for those who came before us for advancing this project of self-government. Holding a critical eye to your government is an important aspect of patriotic citizenship, but that criticism is most productive when it comes from a genuine desire to make things better.

College campuses, even — or perhaps especially — the most elite, can function as bubbles around the students inside. Students can become oblivious to the goings-on in the broader community, the state, and the nation. I myself am guilty of ignoring the news headlines that cross my phone screen, or choosing to discuss my upcoming weekend plans and homework instead of the most recent SCOTUS ruling. Obviously, we all do this from time to time, but on my campus, it is the standard.

By the end of my freshman year, I was craving something to pull me out of the bubble. I felt my disconnect with the wider community growing and my sense of civic duty slipping. I applied for and received a student fellowship with the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Civics and American Citizenship, within the Center on Revitalizing American Institutions (RAI). I found myself suddenly surrounded by other student fellows who shared similar frustrations about our lack of attention to the state of the nation and the world around us. I had the privilege of working alongside faculty and fellows who have devoted their lives to thinking, writing, and leading efforts to increase democratic participation and strengthen our education system. My work with Hoover and RAI drew me out of my campus bubble.

Our largest project has been creating the Civic Profile, a three-part online self-assessment, built to provide individuals, educators, and organizations an opportunity to explore civic knowledge, values, and engagement behaviors. You can take the Civic Profile quiz right now, and based on your responses, you’ll get a report about what kind of values and principles shape your particular civic identity, and how your profile compares to others.

Get your Civic Profile

I wouldn’t have anticipated my highest Civic Profile value to be “constructive patriotism” or my lowest to be “civic solidarity,” but there were many moments where I surprised myself with my choices when the Civic Profile quiz asked me to grapple with two compelling and competing ideas. This pioneering project opened my eyes to the variety of civic identities that exist, and how rarely we have discussions about our views. This lack of conversation can weaken our engagement and strengthen the bubble. We need to think about what we believe and learn about other perspectives, especially as young people actively developing our civic identities.

My Hoover experience inspired me to seek other bubble-breaking opportunities, which led me to spend the winter quarter last year interning for my Congressman in Washington. I began each morning collecting press clips to send to the rest of the office team. This mainly meant summarizing news from our district, along with general news from national sources. After 55 straight days, I expected the news habit to continue back on campus in the spring. Yet within a few days of returning to the dorm and classroom, I felt my newfound public-affairs mindset begin to fade. Fortunately, I was given an opportunity to continue my work with RAI and the Civic Profile.

Civic engagement doesn’t just mean keeping up with current events and voting every few years, although I need to keep pushing myself to do that. It also means holding our government accountable and working to correct the flaws that we see in our immediate communities and beyond – something that feels particularly important to me, with a high score for “constructive patriotism” in my Civic Profile. It means connecting with our neighbors and engaging respectfully with those who hold different views — an example of being a “community builder,” from the engagement section of the Civic Profile.

Working on the Civic Profile, I have been constantly reminded that being engaged can also look like volunteering at a local food bank, being part of clubs on college campuses, or boycotting a specific brand for the way they make their clothing. It means, particularly for my fellow young people, struggling with the complicated reality that we inherited a deeply flawed system, but one that affords us something genuinely rare in human history: relative security, legal protection, and the freedom to dissent. It is up to us to ensure we move it closer to the ideals articulated in the Declaration.

Becoming involved in this project has broadened my perspective on civic engagement, and I hope it has made me a better citizen in the long run. But most importantly, this experience made me realize how important civic education is as a part of my education and college experience. If we don’t learn about the history of winning our rights to vote, or practice disagreeing respectfully in a class seminar, how will we exercise these skills in the real world? The Civic Profile opened my eyes to the plethora of civic identities and to the importance of civic education to help us each cultivate our own.

I encourage others—not just fellow college students—to try the Civic Profile themselves. Yes, take it in observance of America’s 250^th birthday, but please take a bit more time to reflect not just on your own results but also on what it means to be engaged in keeping our “Great American Experiment” afloat. Each of us has a slightly different Civic Profile, a different set of interests, values, and principles. We don’t all have to participate in democracy in the same ways or for the same reasons, but we all owe it to each other – and to those who came before – to get out of our bubbles and do something.

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Eva Lacy (’27) is a rising senior at Stanford University studying Economics and Public Policy. She is passionate about strengthening our democratic institutions through increasing civic engagement and has furthered this passion through a Student Fellowship at Stanford’s Hoover Institution for the past two years. Outside of Stanford, she enjoys spending time outdoors, creating community events, and listening to live music.

I know it seems unwise to predict victory. People rightly worry about the desperate anti-constitutional actions that President Donald Trump could attempt to bend the election his way. And people are understandably beaten down by a daily barrage of awful headlines. Plus, overconfidence brings with it the risk of undercutting the hard electoral work necessary to successfully check this presidency.

But at the same time, we must not allow either learned despondency or misplaced humility to prevent us from getting ready to act on what could be a historic wave in support of constitutional democracy.

Imagine the following: In January, Democrats and pro-democracy Republicans have secured a modest majority in the Senate and a crushing margin in the House. Despite efforts by Trump to use the Justice Department to block some new members of Congress from being seated, those majorities are duly sworn in and begin serving. Within months, virtually every House committee has launched an investigation into malfeasance and corruption in U.S. departments and agencies. With each passing week, new information about White House abuses of power, threats to our national security and personal graft explodes into public view.

In that world, the tide of stunning headlines will have reversed direction, and the wide revulsion that produced the anti-Trump wave will only grow stronger. And at that point, Americans longing both for a restoration of democracy and for progress on all of the major challenges of the day — housing, health care, employment, climate change, campaign finance reform and scores of others — will have the greatest window of opportunity to make real progress since the post-Watergate period a half-century ago.

It does not matter whether this scenario is likely. (Though I think it is.) What matters is that it is possible, and whether, if it occurs, the forces for reform will be ready to offer the country carefully designed, politically vetted and legislatively effective solutions.

In my field — sustainable finance — the answer is: not yet. In many ways this is understandable, because so many arms of the federal government — particularly the Securities and Exchange Commission — have been deployed to roll back critical shareholder rights that have given investors the ability to hold corporate boards accountable. The leaders of the most prominent organizations have been relentlessly investigated by congressional committees, forced to respond to harassing lawsuits, and preoccupied with rebuffing Trump administration attacks on investor freedom. Their focus on beating back those attacks has been understandable and exemplary.

With a new Congress only months away, however, it’s time to break free of the despondency that can come from always playing defense. Reform does not just occur with victory in an election. It comes, as the Republicans showed with Project 2025, when people have spent time developing ideas that are ready when a political opening arrives.

If we want to move our immense capital markets toward better alignment with 21^st century democracy and with future economic, ecological, and human prosperity, Congress could pass a series of ambitious reforms. A Protecting Retirement from Catastrophic Risk Act would direct retirement fund trustees to identify and manage systemic risks that threaten long-term portfolio returns. A National Sustainability Accounting and Measurement Act could create standardized, auditable systems for measuring environmental, social, and governance performance. A Public Benefit Corporation and Stakeholder Governance Act could create stronger legal frameworks for corporations pursuing long-term value creation across multiple stakeholders.

Additionally, in the same spirit of creativity that led New Deal reformers to establish the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Social Security, a new generation of lawmakers could create institutions designed for an era of systemic risk and AI-enabled transparency.

A Federal Sustainability Accounting Board could establish and oversee nationally recognized standards for measuring environmental, social, and governance performance. A Systemic Risk and Fiduciary Commission could monitor threats to the long-term stability of retirement systems, capital markets, and the broader economy, helping fiduciaries identify and manage risks that cannot be diversified away. Finally, a National Transparency and Systems Intelligence Agency could harness advances in data collection, measurement, and artificial intelligence to provide real-time visibility into the health of critical economic, environmental, and social systems. Together, these institutions would help equip democratic capitalism with the information infrastructure needed to navigate the vast, interconnected, planetary challenges confronting the American people.

These are examples of my priorities, in my area of expertise. We can safely predict that after years of reckless regulatory and legal destruction, there are thousands of creative ideas waiting to be unleashed, debated, and introduced into our legislative process. What about in the areas you care most about? What’s your agenda for the post-Trump moment?

And yes, President Trump will still have veto power in 2027. Fine, make him use it. Because after 2026 comes 2028, and the chance to put a renovator in the White House. Starting now, let’s get a package of problem-solving, pro-Constitution bills ready to put on his or her desk. There’s a sunrise on the horizon. Let’s shake off the gloom and get busy designing the future.

Bob Massie is an expert on sustainability and finance who has served as the president of the nonprofit sustainability organization Ceres and was the co-founder of the Global Reporting Initiative. In 2018, he was a Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts.

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As several of you pointed out, I neglected to comment on one of the complaints from party leadership that merits attention.

The MassGOP said in its statement that All-Party Primaries “would undermine core democratic principles by eroding the ability of political parties to select their own nominees.”

This is misleading. Seeing why requires paying a bit more attention to how parties operate than most people can usually stomach. Bear with me for a moment, because it’s important.

Right now, with conventional primaries, parties rely on public welfare to determine the person who will be their official standard bearer. Taxpayers pay for the state-run party primaries that have for decades now generated a “party nominee.” Even taxpayers who are not enrolled in a party pay for this process. In Massachusetts, 65 percent of voters are not in a party, but they too are forking over hard-earned money to pay for parties to select a “nominee.” In Massachusetts, they can participate in that primary, yes, by choosing a party ballot in a primary election, but often they are independent for a reason!

This arrangement dates to the turn of the 20th century, when state governments took over the party primary process. The effect was to make our two major parties something strange: private clubs running on a public subsidy. Their membership shrinks — as it has, consistently, over the past two decades — but the taxpayer funding for their primaries flows on. They are like businesses with a dwindling customer base and a guaranteed public revenue stream for a core part of their operations.

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Those public funds also flow even though the parties hold conventions, paid for by party members, at which members vote on which candidate the party should endorse. In deciding whom to endorse at their member-funded conventions, parties behave like the private associations they are. They can and do use their conventions to choose standard bearers via their endorsement process.

Here’s the truth: All-Party Primaries in no way hinder parties from exercising their First Amendment freedoms of association to identify their favored candidates.

This is settled law. In Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party (2008), the US Supreme Court upheld the kind of all-candidate, top-two primary that is proposed for Massachusetts precisely because it does not determine the parties’ nominees. A so-called “blanket primary” — where all candidates appear on the same first ballot and then the top Democrat and the top Republican advance — is unconstitutional, as the court held in California Democratic Party v. Jones (2000). The court ruled that that “blanket primary” method did amount to letting outsiders pick a party’s official representative. But an all-party primary that advances the top two vote-getters regardless of party takes nothing away from the party’s right to endorse its own standard-bearer. The party’s nominating function is left entirely intact; it simply moves where it belongs — the party’s convention, carried out through its endorsement process.

In our Massachusetts ballot initiative, which improves on the Washington and California versions of the all party primary, those party endorsements can appear on the ballot, if a candidate accepts them. The parties are not only able to choose their standard bearers; they will continue to be able to communicate those choices to the broader electorate. Nor will outsiders be weighing in on their choices. Voters will see all the candidates, as well as the information about which candidates are standard bearers for which parties. They will even be able to tell if a voter is a standard bearer for more than one party, as candidates can carry more than one endorsement on the ballot.

The MassGOP is right that the taxpayer-funded nomination process would disappear. What it cannot honestly say is that parties would lose the ability to select their own standard-bearers. That ability survives in full. What changes is who pays for that process. The other thing that changes is the contest on the public ballot: all candidates who meet the public’s requirements for candidacy, as expressed in state law, will appear.

That is the heart of the matter. The All-Party Primary insists that state-run elections belong to the voters and taxpayers, not the parties. The voters who pay for the election should get to see all the candidates. And candidates, running in elections funded by voters, should face all the people who fund them, all the time.

All-Party Primaries restore parties to being what they should be — private networks of people coordinating around shared ideas and policies. Parties can continue to choose their nominees, as the Supreme Court has recognized. But they can’t block other people from running and claiming ideological affiliation with their agenda, and their endorsed nominees will have to fend off challengers all the way through.

Our major parties will have to re-learn the muscle of being private associations. Currently, in Massachusetts, they carry out the endorsement process only for statewide elections. They would have to re-learn how to do endorsements in legislative districts.

But this is as it should be. A party that must persuade the whole electorate, rather than bank on a closed primary, has every incentive to organize through the grassroots, sharpen its agenda, and tie voters to it. We can already see what that kind of organizing looks like: the gains that the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party are making come precisely from doing this work — building membership, contesting races and earning support voter by voter. They are functioning like private associations rather than relying on a public subsidy to manufacture a nominee. All-Party Primaries would extend that same discipline to everyone. They also require everyone to earn votes from the whole electorate at every stage. They push parties out of their feather-bedded nest.

I want to take you back five years, to one of the biggest whistleblower moments of the social media era. It’s October 2021. Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen discloses thousands of pages of internal documents – known as the “Facebook Papers” – to the SEC, revealing that the company knew its products were harming teenage girls and amplifying inflammatory content. (This fall, a companion film to The Social Network tells Haugen’s story. Early reviews seem lukewarm. But Mikey Madison as Haugen and Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg? Worth the price of admission).

The Facebook Papers catalyzed a new wave of advocacy to hold social media companies accountable, culminating in the passage of two landmark Senate bills in July 2024: the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and COPPA 2.0. But neither ever received a vote in the House, where Republican leadership has instead produced competing social media legislation. Their latest package, unveiled last week, includes a pared-back version of KOSA, along with a hodgepodge of provisions on kids’ safety and data privacy. The bill is set for a vote on the House Floor today (June 29). It too appears ill-fated in the Senate.

Why can’t the two chambers get on the same page?

“Kids’ online privacy and safety legislation attracts broad ‘save the children’ commitments that tend to break down on critical specifics that companies don’t like,” Lindsey Barrett, an assistant professor of law at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law, told me over email.

When it comes to the impasse between the House and Senate, two sticking points in particular stand out: duty of care and state preemption. Specifically, should social media companies be legally required to “exercise reasonable care” to prevent harms to minors? (Senate says yes; House says no.) Should states have the right to pass their own social media legislation? (Senate says yes; House says no.)

Responding to the House proposal last week, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), co-authors of the Senate’s KOSA bill, called the package dead on arrival, citing the bill’s removal of the duty of care provision. Opponents of the provision argue it could force platforms to over-censor. Senator Cantwell (D-WA) added that the Senate “is not interested in having state cases preempted”, referring to the preemption language in the House bill.

The House and Senate appear deadlocked for now. But continued gridlock may not be the worst outcome.

“The prospect of not passing something fast enough doesn’t worry me,” Barrett wrote. “I’m much more concerned about performative bills that heap busywork on the FTC and celebrate cosmetic disclosure requirements being embraced as meaningful reform.”

Now, onto the other big headlines.

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White House

• The Trump administration asked OpenAI to limit the release of its latest model, GPT-5.6, to a small set of government-approved partners before a wider public release, a move that echoes the export control directive on Anthropic earlier this month. Critics of the move (including tech executives who have been supportive of the President) argue it is the latest example of the administration’s ad hoc approach to AI model oversight.

• The administration is pressing Meta to submit its AI models for government safety reviews. It is the only major AI company that has yet to agree to the voluntary process.

• The administration is providing a $17.5 billion loan for 10 new large nuclear reactors to meet power demand from AI data centers.

Congress

• Several new AI bills were introduced:

  • Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would levy a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the largest AI companies to create an estimated $7 trillion sovereign wealth fund.

  • Sens. Brian Schatz (D-HI) and John Curtis (R-UT) introduced the AI Labeling Act, legislation to require AI providers to visibly label AI-generated content.

  • Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) introduced the AI Incident Reporting Act, legislation to require AI developers to report critical safety incidents to the Secretary of Commerce.

  • Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act, which would temporarily prohibit the construction of new data centers until “Congress passes more comprehensive AI legislation”.

• The House Science Committee advanced 10 bipartisan AI bills out of committee, including measures to establish a national AI research resource, create standards for detecting AI-generated content, and improve transparency around AI model development.

States

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order directing state agencies to study AI’s workforce impacts and explore how to share AI’s economic benefits more broadly – including launching a public dashboard tracking AI-related job losses.

• A bipartisan coalition of over 200 state lawmakers signed a letter urging Congress to oppose the Great American AI Act, a proposal released earlier this month by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) and Lori Trahan (D-MA) that would create a federal framework for AI development, preempting state AI laws for three years.

Courts

• The Department of Justice intervened in support of xAI in a lawsuit filed by the NAACP alleging the company is endangering public health by running unpermitted natural gas turbines at its Colossus 2 data center in Southaven, Mississippi. In its filing, the DOJ argued that attempts to stop xAI from running the turbines “threatens American national, economic, and energy security”.

• A nationwide coalition of publishers representing nearly 400 newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft for scraping their content without permission or compensation, warning that unchecked AI copyright infringement could be a “death knell for local journalism”.

Industry

• Google became the latest major AI company to publish a policy framework. Their white paper proposes a “pragmatic middle path” on AI governance, most notably an independent (industry-funded) regulatory body to oversee frontier AI labs.

• Meta announced plans to replace 90% of its remaining human content moderators with AI by the end of 2026 – a significant retreat from human oversight.

Civil society

• Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Indiana’s former Republican governor Eric Holcomb announced RAISE US, a nonpartisan initiative to help workers adapt in the age of AI. The effort has received over $500 million in funding, including from the OpenAI Foundation and Anthropic.

• Raimondo is also co-chairing, alongside former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a new bipartisan commission launched by AEI and the Urban Institute on AI and the workforce.

• A new report by immigration advocacy organizations found that ICE spending on AI-powered surveillance grew from $310 million in 2025 to a record $513 million in 2026, fueled by new contracts with Palantir and Anduril.

• A new report from Yael Eisenstat (Cybersafety Research Center) and Justin Hendrix (Tech Policy Press) offers nine recommendations for platforms to mitigate political violence.

• A new report from Americans for Responsible Innovation calls for national safety benchmarks for AI chatbots used by minors.

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A First–Year Writing (FYW) course built around experiential civic learning helps students develop dispositions that support participation in democracy. It puts their learning to work beyond the classroom.

Writing is Thinking

When we write, we don’t just transcribe what’s in our minds; we discover it.

I see this happen in my classrooms. In a gen-ed writing course on gender and sexuality politics, a student fervently objected to the curriculum because it conflicted with their religious beliefs. I encouraged them to treat our course as an opportunity to explore their beliefs, not to change them. They stayed in the class, but remained skeptical.

After the semester ended, they emailed me to say that the course had helped them facilitate a heated conversation in their church youth group—one they would have otherwise felt unprepared to take on.

By writing through discomfort, the student discovered that disagreement didn’t threaten their beliefs. It challenged them to enter into dialogue. It strengthened belonging in their religious community.

Reckoning with individual convictions alongside the demands of the collective is at the core of democracy. When we use writing to help us think, we practice democracy.

Writing gives form to uncertainty. When we write, we can deliberate rather than preemptively resolve or bulldoze past tension. We set ourselves up to act from a place of agency.

We can strengthen that agency when we examine how writing shapes public perception across space and time. For example, in reading across civic genres, from primary historical documents and documentaries to legal briefs and academic articles, we can trace how certain ideas about democracy become “common sense.”

When my students read the Declaration of Independence alongside Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech and critical historiography on racial classification systems, they notice the contradiction baked into the founding ideals of the United States. They tease out how the “independence” deemed natural and inevitable in 1776 was enforced through a racialized, gendered system of human enslavement and colonial genocide. They realize how writing helped authorize the conditions for nationhood, but also for structural violence. They realize how their own writing can shape the status quo. They realize both the agency and accountability embedded in that possibility.

Writing is Inquiry Across Differences

To be sure, writing isn’t inherently democratic even when writers use it as a thinking tool. In writing Mein Kampf, Hitler crafted and disseminated his fascist, racist, antisemitic ideology, codifying a rationale for genocidal violence. Writing becomes democratic when it’s structured as inquiry across differences, in the service of accountability to the people affected by the outcomes of that inquiry.

FYW teachers can create the conditions for such accountability. They can frame arguments as evolving stories, not fixed positions. Class activities can explore the material consequences of building arguments—the people, communities, and values that writers must answer to. Students can use writing to understand where disagreement comes from and the ethical stakes of intervening.

In my FYW courses, students unpack the histories of AI, mental health, greenwashing, cancel culture, and other complex social issues. They work in small “Discussion Circles” in which each person researches a different perspective on a given issue. Together, they synthesize their research into a narrative about how the issue evolved. This synthesis culminates in each circle crafting an argument for a “next step” that accounts for disproportionate impacts.

Barack Obama described democracy as a “bold experiment” in self-governance. Similarly, writing can function as a thought experiment. While experimentation can lead to new insights, progress isn’t guaranteed. “The blank page is a razed patch of soil. So many possibilities for starts that could grow well or go wrong,” poet Camille Dungy warns in a 2024 Poets & Writers article. The same is true of policies passed in the name of democracy.

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Teaching Writing As A Process

A writing classroom cannot entirely neutralize risk. But treating writing as a process can help contain risk by mirroring the process of democratic deliberation: proposal, response, revision. My students workshop the next steps they produce in their circles with the whole class. These whole-class workshops aren’t about evaluating the work, but reverse engineering it. The class articulates how each circle’s next step seems to emerge from its synthesis. This process highlights where links are clear and gaps persist. In this way, students discover how their work is landing on readers and adjust accordingly. A functioning democracy operates on a similar kind of dialogic process—a continual calibration of intention and impact.

Regular, structured engagement in feedback and revision can increase students’ civic self-confidence, a trust in their ability to contribute to shared decision-making. It can expose students to new perspectives, motivate them to seek out different sources, challenge them to make their logic more transparent, and stretch their capacity to engage different audiences.

Why First-Year Writing?

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The few times I voted in municipal elections, I walked into the polling booth not knowing who (or what) I was voting for. I’ve loosely followed a yearslong feud at Brookline High, my town’s public school, over deleveling classrooms. But I’m not sure where the school board lands on the debate. Or who the board members are. Or where most of my neighbors stand on it.

“Can’t you just Google it?” Well, sort of. Google’s Gemini pulls from Brookline.News, a hyperlocal outlet that launched in 2023, and gives a decent summary of the debate. But the most recent development it surfaces is from 2024. I still don’t know where things stand today.

And Brookline is not representative of the country as a whole. For most Americans, information about local affairs is not easily accessible. 50 million Americans live with limited or no access to local news. Even for those who do have a local outlet, the coverage leaves a lot to be desired: an estimated 1,500 of the nation’s 5,400 remaining newspapers have lost more than half their newsroom staff – what researchers call “ghost newspapers”. In those communities, a school board debate like the one over deleveling might never reach local residents at all.

This is not a new problem. Since 2005, 3,500 local newspapers have closed, and more than 75% of newspaper jobs have been cut. In the 2010s, community-rooted nonprofits began emerging across the country to fill the void. Organizations like City Bureau (2015) in Chicago, Outlier Media (2016) in Detroit, CivicLex (2016) in Lexington – among dozens of others – built small, dedicated teams focused on helping residents understand and engage with local government.

This work drew the attention of national philanthropy. In 2023, a coalition of foundations launched Press Forward, pledging more than $500 million over five years to revitalize the local news ecosystem — with significant commitments from the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and others.

Now, into this mix comes something new: AI-powered civic information apps. Since the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022 – and other large language models that followed – independent developers have been able to cheaply build apps that summarize public records and make local government information more accessible.

Last month, one of these apps – CivicDigest – appeared in my LinkedIn feed.

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Developed by Brandi Kinard, a software engineer and North Carolina homeowner, CivicDigest produces AI-generated news reports on hyperlocal public affairs – city council meetings, zoning decisions, school board rulings, even HOA proceedings. The interface is pretty basic: type a city or topic into a search bar, hit “Generate”, and within a few minutes an audio summary appears, recapping your local council’s most recent meeting. Request the full broadcast and you get a fully composited AI news report in your inbox: an avatar of a young woman standing before a fabricated newsroom set, a headline bar and ticker scrolling below, reading a meeting summary.

Brandi built CivicDigest in two days on her laptop, inspired by her own frustration trying to follow the activities of her city council in Gastonia, North Carolina. Rather than relying on a general-purpose AI like Claude or ChatGPT – which are trained on the entire internet – she built her own smaller model, trained exclusively on city council meeting minutes from nine cities – Boston, Chicago, and Detroit among them. The whole process cost her three dollars, and helped her land a job at The New York Times.

I’ll be honest: the recording left me feeling a little queasy. There was something hollow about it – an AI voice reciting meeting minutes with no sense of how individual council members voted and why, or what it all meant for the people affected. By Brandi’s own admission, CivicDigest is a prototype. It currently covers a handful of cities, and has occasionally gotten budget numbers wrong.

But CivicDigest is just one of dozens of apps that have launched since 2022. Alex Rosen founded SeeGov in 2023 after years of listening to government meetings on C-SPAN to fall asleep. “I realized that there are important moments in these meetings,” he told me, “but people don’t want to watch a four-hour meeting.” SeeGov uses AI to surface those moments, producing video highlights for journalists and advocacy groups. Citizen Portal AI (2023) tracks government spending and decisions across all 50 states, generating daily summaries and spending dashboards for subscribers. Aware (2024) converts audio and video from city council and school board meetings into concise, nonpartisan summaries. CivicSummary (2026) tracks not just what local officials decided but whether city staff actually followed through.

My reporting focused on tools like these — citizen-built apps designed to help residents understand their local government. But they’re part of a much bigger civic tech landscape. Platforms like Resistbot and MAPLE — the Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement, which The Renovator covered earlier this year — use AI to help citizens communicate directly with their elected officials. Commercial vendors like CivicPlus and Granicus sell software to governments to help them manage their communications with residents. Deliberation tools like Pol.is and Talk to the City facilitate civic dialogue and channel public opinion into policy.

Beth Noveck, a professor at Northeastern University whose new book argues that AI could either strengthen or undermine democratic institutions, wrote that the size of this field is hard to pin down. “It’s growing fast but still fragmented,” she told me. “You have citizen-built tools like CivicDigest, and then government-deployed tools like Boston’s city council summarizer. The citizen-built side is still tiny, but the honest answer is we don’t have good aggregate numbers because most of these tools are built by individuals or small nonprofits who aren’t reporting to anyone. What we do know is that the need vastly outpaces the supply. There are roughly 90,000 local governments in the United States. Almost none of them have meaningful public-facing AI tools.”

What these apps do best is make dense public information digestible at a speed and scale not previously possible. “These are legibility tools at their core,” Beth said. “A tool that summarizes meeting minutes and links you back to the original transcript gives you a window into your democracy that we didn’t have before.”

These developers have started to find an audience – in both users and institutional backers. SeeGov now partners with more than 60 newsrooms and monitors 230 local governments, and in April received a Knight Foundation grant that will extend its reach to 1,000 communities. Aware has expanded to cover more than 3,800 cities across five countries, though its founder Alex Zaltsman acknowledges the user base is “still in its infancy”. The company recently launched Sundays.news, a companion newsletter delivering weekly AI-generated local summaries to 50 towns. Mozilla Foundation launched a Democracy x AI incubator this year, specifically seeking tools that make government decision-making visible and translate bureaucratic processes into plain language. Its first cohort was announced in June. And Protect Democracy launched an AI for Democracy Action Lab to incubate and accelerate AI-enabled civic tools.

Despite the promise of these apps, the field still must wrestle with some hard questions.

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As I watched the CivicDigest recording of my town’s most recent city council meeting, I found myself thinking about Richard Young. A lifelong Kentuckian, Richard founded CivicLex to make civic information more accessible to Lexington residents. I’d worked with Richard recently at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where I staffed a democracy reform initiative that counted CivicLex as a partner. I wondered: what would someone who had spent a decade building this organization from scratch – cultivating funders, hiring staff, earning the trust of a community – make of all these new apps that seemed to short-circuit that entire process?

“I think tools like this have both a lot of promise and peril,” Richard wrote. “When fed good content produced by humans that is fact-checked and verified, they can fill gaps where traditional media is dying or disappearing. But AI tools without an editor can miss very obvious details and struggle to navigate the complexity that happens during in-person meetings. There’s also real value in having people physically present at public meetings — it shows elected leaders they are being observed, and creates a type of mutual accountability between those being observed and those doing the observing.”

Developers of these tools have taken different approaches to human oversight. CivicDigest and Aware are fully automated. SeeGov puts a human name on every piece of content and gives journalists the choice to select moments manually or with AI guidance. “We don’t want to create a single view of what happened but instead let many parties highlight what they thought the community should know about,” Alex Rosen told me.

There’s also an accountability question that none of these tools have fully resolved. Beth Noveck emphasized the need for disclosure: “This is why it’s important to disclose when AI is used, so people know to go and check the original source. You don’t want to file a legal action based on an AI summary without reading the original. But it’s much better to have a first draft with AI than nothing at all.”

An even thornier question is whether these tools are meant to substitute for local journalism in the long run. Their creators insist they are not. Brandi envisions licensing CivicDigest to local newsrooms and civic nonprofits: “My goal is to co-create the refined version of this with the people who actually do the work on the ground.” And SeeGov is already explicitly journalist-facing. “If we can help reporters monitor and share key moments quickly, they have more time to do that deeper reporting,” Alex Rosen told me, adding that his longer-term vision is to build shared data infrastructure across tools — a nonprofit data commons that could serve the whole ecosystem more efficiently.

Richard acknowledges that while the tools may be able to complement local journalism, they have real limits: “These tools can aggregate and convey information, but they aren’t good at building trust with an audience on their own. They also can’t put on the in-person events that are so essential to building local civic capacity. And they’re not able to do the hard work of institutional reform — creating new mechanisms for participation and co-governance — which may be the most significant problem that needs to be solved in this area.”

Something else lingered in the back of my mind throughout my reporting. Having spent time with several of these apps – navigating the interfaces, generating sample reports, watching AI anchors read public meeting summaries from fabricated newsroom sets – I kept thinking: would I actually use one of these? I had doubts.

After all, there are many reasons why only 9% of Americans under 30 follow local news very closely. Lack of access to legible information is just one among them. Resistbot’s founder Jason Putorti was blunt in his assessment that information access doesn’t translate into civic interest: “People don’t want to care about politics,” he wrote. “They do only when they have to – when there’s a data center in your backyard that sounds like a jet aircraft, or the school board is banning books.” Jason’s view is that civic engagement is fundamentally reactive – a view I imagine many in the democracy reform community would push back on.

Alex Rosen struck a more optimistic note, though he agreed the apps themselves wouldn’t directly spark greater civic engagement. SeeGov, he told me, isn’t really designed for ordinary citizens as end users, but instead for journalists and civic creators to reach them.

Whether legibility alone can move the needle on local civic engagement remains an open question. But the next time Brookline’s school board meets to vote on deleveling, at least I’ll know where to look.

Welcome to our first Wednesday edition of your Democracy in the States’ Roundup. Now that most states are fully transitioned from their legislative calendar to campaigns, we thought post-primary Wednesdays might be a good time for this update. Let us know if it works for you!

And, now for this week’s roundup, the federal vs. state fight over election infrastructure intensified this week when a judge blocked the Trump administration’s overhauled citizenship-checking database from being used to purge voters, while the administration separately moved to withhold homeland security funds from states that won’t adopt its election changes. Meanwhile, the FBI has yet to offer justification for last week’s widespread operation, involving over 100 agents searching offices and visiting the homes of employees and volunteers associated with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. The voting-rights group has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and denounced the action as political intimidation.

Elsewhere, ICE quietly shelved detention-facility plans in several states amid local pushback, and Tuesday’s primaries in Maryland, New York, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah set more of the November map. We’re covering these developments and more state-level changes to election administration, redistricting, voter rolls, immigration enforcement, and the data center boom below.

Election administration and primaries

State legislatures are racing to settle election rules before the midterms, even as one state’s new law could cancel an entire election.

Election bills and ballot measures

• KANSAS: ‘Coordinated effort’: Kansas Republican leaders have a plan to cancel the 2026 U.S. Senate election.

• GEORGIA: Ballot QR code bill headed to governor after Georgia lawmakers scale back hand-counting requirement.

• GEORGIA: Georgia lawmakers advance bill to delay voting machine changes until 2028 presidential election.

• NORTH CAROLINA: Advocates say a sweeping elections bill moving through the NC House undermines voting rights.

• NEW HAMPSHIRE: Ayotte signs law raising cap on anonymous campaign donations.

• WASHINGTON: Postal Service skips hearing with WA lawmakers on mail-in ballot rules.

• OHIO: Ohio Sec. of State candidates split on mail-in voter ID bill; DeWine considering veto.

• NEW JERSEY: Mixed reception for bill allowing candidates’ names to be rotated on ballot.

• MASSACHUSETTS: Mass. primary election overhaul eligible for November ballot, SJC rules.

• RHODE ISLAND: Party leaders, lawmakers champion Rhode Island joining Super Tuesday states.

Primary day and its aftermath

• NEW YORK: Big Tech critic loses House race in New York as AI lobby flexes political power.

• NEW YORK: Mamdani’s political gamble pays off as his endorsed candidates sweep their primaries.

• MAINE: Pingree clinches Democratic nomination for governor after lengthy ranked-choice tally.

• MAINE: Two Republican legislative primaries settled with ranked-choice run-offs.

• MARYLAND: Election officials urge patience as holiday, mail-in ballots will affect count.

• SOUTH CAROLINA: SC primary runoffs Tuesday will set November ballots.

• SOUTH CAROLINA: GOP senator running for Congress resigns, enabling voters to replace him in November.

• ALASKA: Alaska legislators probe decision to remove candidate from the ballot.

• SOUTH DAKOTA: South Dakota Republican state senator charged with felony over false candidate forms.

• IDAHO: Idaho PACs spent more than $4.2M on primary races.

Redistricting and gerrymandering

Georgia Republicans dropped plans to redraw the state’s congressional map as the redistricting fight shifts from new maps to defending the ones already drawn.

• GEORGIA: Georgia Republican lawmakers drop plans to redistrict, citing pending legal cases.

• GEORGIA: On redistricting, Georgia GOP lawmakers concluded today’s election risks outweighed future gains.

• MISSOURI: Missouri secretary of state sues to close records on redistricting referendum signatures.

• UTAH: After redistricting saga, Moore leads GOP primary for Utah’s second congressional district.

Voter rolls and the DOJ

With a federal judge blocking the administration’s revamped citizenship-checking database, the Justice Department and outside groups still managed to keep pushing into state voter rolls this week, from Wisconsin to Ohio.

• ARIZONA: 9th Circuit freezes DOJ appeal over AZ voter rolls while it weighs similar California, Oregon cases.

• MARYLAND: Federal judge tosses Justice Department lawsuit seeking Maryland voter records.

• WISCONSIN: Wisconsin, outside groups urge appeals court to reject US demand for state’s voter list.

• NEBRASKA: Republican National Committee sues Nebraska over state election law.

• OHIO: Ohio voter rights group denies any wrongdoing while FBI stays silent on ‘swarms’ across state.

• VIRGINIA: Civil rights group files motion to speed up Va.’s reform of voter registration process for ex-felons.

Immigration enforcement and detention

States and advocates continued chipping away at ICE’s detention footprint this week as families fought individual cases through the courts.

ICE pulls back on detention facilities

• ARIZONA: Frustrated by inaction on ICE warehouse, activists move to dissolve Surprise, AZ altogether.

• FLORIDA: ICE empties ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ amid hurricane season. Activists aren’t buying it.

• FLORIDA: Florida still owes $603 million on immigration enforcement contracts.

• GEORGIA: DHS appears to axe plan to construct immigration detention megacenter in small Georgia town.

• MICHIGAN: ICE scraps plans for Romulus detention center, AG says.

• PENNSYLVANIA: ICE plans to offload Berks County and Schuylkill County warehouses, report says.

• UTAH: ICE plans to offload Salt Lake City warehouse, report says.

Detainees and due process

• NEW JERSEY: Advocates say Delaney Hall detainees have ended hunger strike.

• TENNESSEE: Congressman urges Gov. Bill Lee to revoke directive to report immigration status of sick kids.

• MINNESOTA: Judge rules DOJ used grand jury subpoenas to coerce Minnesota officials on ICE enforcement during Metro Surge.

Data centers, utilities, and the grid

The data center boom kept colliding with ratepayer politics this week, from utility commission shakeups to local fights over where the next facility gets built.

Utility rates and regulation

• INDIANA: Braun replaces chairman of the Utility Regulatory Commission days after AES rate-hike decision.

• INDIANA: State regulators approve $70M increase for AES, less than utility originally sought.

• LOUISIANA: Gov. Landry weighs in on Entergy’s proposed power plant purchase.

• PENNSYLVANIA: Pa. House passes $1.7B tax cut on electricity, reins in utility company profits.

• OHIO: Ohio proposed constitutional amendment to ban data centers will not be on this year’s ballot.

• ARIZONA: Hobbs vetoes bill to fast-track small nuclear reactors at Arizona data centers.

Local fights over new builds

• MONTANA: High interest in data center discussion at Public Service Commission.

• MAINE: Jay data center on hold indefinitely as company backs out, despite veto of statewide ban.

• MICHIGAN: Senate Democrats propose tighter regulations on data centers amid statewide backlash.

• MICHIGAN: House Republican bill would allow aboveground power lines to use highway rights-of-way.

• PENNSYLVANIA: Rally attendees criticize Gov. Shapiro for being ‘incredibly cozy’ with data center industry.

• NEW MEXICO: New Mexico judge dismisses Project Jupiter data center lawsuit, but offers chance to re-file.

• VIRGINIA: Amid statewide drought conditions, data centers face same restrictions as all water customers.

• VIRGINIA: Virginia’s data center fight deepens Dem divisions and more state headlines.

• WASHINGTON: Big battery farms encounter resistance across western Washington.

• CALIFORNIA: This million-square-foot data center would be the biggest in the state. How local leaders are challenging it.

Here in Massachusetts, we’ve at last discovered how to get the two parties onto the same page. It turns out to be simple. Challenge their political duopoly — also known as the two-party doom loop, as political scientist Lee Drutman puts it — and the two parties will stand shoulder to shoulder.

The two-party duopoly is a self-reinforcing dynamic that locks politics into cycles of partisan escalation that deepen voter alienation and institutional gridlock. Low-turnout party primaries, gerrymandering, and excessively restrictive rules on party formation established by the duopoly are among the contributing factors.

In my home state of Massachusetts, a group for which I’m the convening chair, the Coalition for Healthy Democracy, is tackling that doom loop with a ballot initiative to do away with traditional party primaries and replace them with an all-party primary. In an all-party primary, all candidates from all parties run on the same first ballot. Voters pick their favorite, and the top two vote-getters go on to the general election. Most Massachusetts cities already elect their mayors this way, so it’s a pretty familiar method. Alaska, Washington, and California also have an all-party primary.

Our initiative has some small additional elements that the municipal elections and other states don’t — endorsements can be printed on the ballot, and candidates can carry more than one endorsement, a form of fusion voting. The purpose is to make the ballots information-rich.

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Here’s an example of what this kind of ballot would look like:

This kind of election system does many positive things. It increases primary turnout. It moves the decisive election from the primary to the general, where turnout is vastly higher. It reduces the rate of incumbent retention. It speeds up diversification of state legislatures. And it increases the rate of competitive elections needed to hold public officials accountable and make our democracy responsive.

And guess what: The party establishments hate it. And they have the same complaints!

Although Massachusetts voters from every demographic group and both major political parties are net positive on this proposed reform, the state committees from both major parties have passed resolutions against it. What’s really surprising is that the chairs of both the Massachusetts GOP and the Massachusetts Democrats complain about the policy in nearly identical language:

MassGOP in a Monday statement said the system “would undermine core democratic principles by eroding the ability of political parties to select their own nominees, marginalizing smaller parties, stifling ideological diversity, suppressing general-election turnout, and amplifying the role of big money while disadvantaging grassroots efforts.”

And from MassDems: “We’ve seen the unintended consequences of all-party primaries in other states: general elections between two candidates from the same party, smaller parties shut out entirely, and grassroots candidates who simply can’t compete against self-funded opponents.”

Astonishing to see the sudden empathy of both major party leaders for third parties. They clearly didn’t check in with the Forward Party and Green Rainbow Party, which have both endorsed the measure.

Jaw-dropping to see the complaints about money from a GOP whose party has just endorsed a self-funding gubernatorial candidate in our current system, and when Elon Musk, Andrew Cuomo, and Tom Steyer have all just proved that a boatload of money comes up short in an all-party primary system. (Locally, Josh Kraft, son of Patriot’s owner Robert Kraft, also came up short in a self-funded bid for mayor of Boston, which uses a top-two election system).

Gob-smacking to see the concern for grassroots candidates in a state with a 99 percent incumbency retention rate. It literally can’t get any worse than it is.

The one thing our parties can agree on is that they want to keep our dysfunctional political system exactly as it is.

This means we now know precisely who and what have locked our current dysfunction in place: the party establishments, R and D. And on the Republican side, it’s a Trump establishment now.

So, Renovators: Here are the facts. There is no way out of our dysfunction other than to go through the fire of fighting it out with the party establishments. Can’t go over, can’t go under, can’t go around. Have to go through.

Are you with us?

Let’s roll.

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PS- We still have a few more signed copies of Radical Duke for folks who join our founding tier Elm Society subscriber group. Don’t miss out!

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We’re off to a great start with our new Democracy 201 feed! Zachary Cote of Thinking Nation outlined a new minimum standard for history education, and we’re sharing an updated version of Peter Levine’s remarks from the National Summit on Civics in Higher Education held at Tufts in April.

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From Zachary Cote:

From Peter Levine:

I’ve read many tributes to the late historian Gordon Wood over the past weeks, not only to his field-defining work but to his character and his influence as a mentor. ’s for The UnPopulist celebrates how Wood “Explained the True Meaning of the Revolution to Americans.”

The Youth250: Letters to America initiative is collecting wonderful videos and writing from young people. Emiliana Korin’s letter, “America the Brave,” also appears on the Latino News Network:

What I found, every time, was that service was the answer to the questions I kept asking. Not service as performance. The kind that shows you that your presence matters, that you are not a guest in the project of democracy, but an active contributor to it.

Grace Khan’s essay, “Silence Won’t Save The American Dream, So I’m Speaking Up,” appears on Her Campus:

No one loves America more than those who were willing to leave behind everything they’d ever known to come to America, to pursue the American dream. Why should any of us settle for anything less than that?

And Sara Abdulla’s essay, “Letter to America From the First-Generation of Breaking a Cycle,” appears on The Fulcrum:

For America’s 250th birthday, I picture a recommitment to what the founders sought in the revolution and wrote in our founding texts, even when they couldn’t always live up to it. No kings; dignity and respect for individuals; economic flourishing for all, not just aristocrats.

Hear more from young civic leaders:

• Nothing about us without us: youth solutions now, by UP Leaders of Tomorrow Fellowship for the San Antonio Report

• DC Teens Imagine the Future They Want from Everyday Democracy with the DC Public Library

• Teenagers took over Philadelphia city government for a day. Here’s how it went. By Carly Sitrin for Chalkbeat.

• Students Give Hope—For the Country and Its Constitution: Young delegates to the Model Constitutional Convention model the civility and courage needed to tackle America’s toughest constitutional challenges. By Rick LaRue for The Fulcrum.

• To Save Our Schools, Trust Young People: Young people have done more than enough to earn our trust. Policy makers not so much. By Kaya Henderson for the Stanford Social Innovation Review on co-creating education systems with students.

• What Youth250: Our Declaration Taught Me About Youth Leadership, by Omaer Naeem for the Aspen Institute: “we must foster the intergenerational trust that allows a young person’s internal pull to become a public practice. We must stop asking young people to prove they are capable and start building systems that trust they already are.”

Civic learning in the spotlight:

• Americans believe they aren’t being taught enough about democracy:

  A new NBC News poll shows that Americans remain committed to the nation’s founding ideals — but widely feel that schools are not adequately teaching what’s needed to sustain them.

• Engaged citizens built America. Today, civics education is coming back. By Scott Baldauf for the Christian Science Monitor, including quotes from Danielle, Shawn Healy, Nick Longo, and Donna Phillips.

• Brookings Institution Discussion on Civics Education and Democracy: Scholars participated in “Brookings on the Hill: Civics at 250” along with Senators King, Lankford, and Kaine.

• What do donors expect from nonprofits? Civic education! New survey data shows broad, bipartisan support for nonprofits that educate voters, protect elections, and speak up for democracy. By Miranda Carter and Sarah DiJulio for Candid.

• Civic education builds democratic skills for N.J. students, by Aruna Patel for NJ.com on work by the Center for Civic Education and the New Jersey Center for Civic Education

Goals for civic learning

• Civil Dialogue Alone Won’t Prepare Students For What’s Next, By Rajiv Vinnakota for Forbes: “We don’t need a generation of polite debaters. We need young people who are prepared to navigate a world where truth is contested and solving problems across differences is vital.”

• Want better civic education? Improve college teaching. By Jonathan Zimmerman for The Hill.

• At the West Texas A&M Civil Discourse and Civics Education Symposium, pastor and educator Dr. Howie Batson delivered a lecture examining the causes of growing division and incivility in American culture, arguing that civil discourse depends on virtues such as humility, forgiveness, and genuine engagement with those who hold different views.

Stories of success in civic learning:

• Sustained Professional Learning is Key to the Successful Implementation of New Civics Curricula: Interconnected evaluation efforts among CIRCLE, DESE, and the One8 Foundation have provided valuable insights into how the Investigating History curriculum has been implemented. By Maya Williams, Sarah Burnham.

• It’s Elementary: Civics and Literacy, A look inside one of the We the People National Symposium on Civic Education Research’s key conversations.

• From the ballot box to a career: What do we know about the long-term impacts of student civic engagement work? How does the movement for 100% student voter participation shape the next generation’s professional choices? By for State of the Student Vote.

• How Libraries Are Rebuilding Civic Connection through multipartial facilitation with the Urban Libraries Council, from Everyday Democracy.

Civic education in the states:

• Michigan Organizations Boost Voter Engagement and Civic Empowerment, by Hugo Balta for The Fulcrum.

• ‘Founding Voices’ initiative to bring immersive civics education ahead of America’s 250th anniversary: Florida State University’s Institute for Governance and Civics is launching a $1.7 million program to bring live historical interpreters to middle and high schools statewide.

• The American Cornerstone Institute (ACI) announced they are partnering with the state of Arkansas to bring new civics resources to teachers in honor of America’s semiquincentennial. The effort is part of the American Cornerstone Institute’s Little Patriots Initiative. The American Cornerstone Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Dr. Ben Carson that advances America’s founding principles of faith, liberty, community, and life.

• President’s House exhibits should be restored in time for July 4, another federal judge rules, but only a few days later, Court ruling clears way to replace slavery exhibit in Philadelphia at President’s House Site, handing Trump a win.

• As you read in our last roundup, Iowa’s state legislature has mandated a civics requirement in higher ed. At the University of Iowa, that requirement must be fulfilled with courses from the Center for Intellectual Freedom, also created by the state legislature. The Iowa Capital-Dispatch reports on curriculum planning at the center, the Des Moines Register takes a critical view, one state rep celebrates that “Iowa makes history and civics great again,” and KTIV reports on the requirement’s price tag.

• Auburn requires faculty to upload syllabi, adds mandatory civics classes: Williesha Morris on AL.com notes that the civics requirement was passed at a Board of Trustees meeting that also saw the faculty senate dissolved.

• IU Southeast Hosts New Civic Dialogue Initiative with Council on Foreign Relations and College Debates & Discourse Alliance.

Civic learning resources

• Elizabeth Evans is wrapping up her “Civics in a Year” podcast for Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL), to coincide with the 250th.

• SHEAR Civics Exchange: A site to connect members of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic who can speak to your organization, club, or institution about the history that has shaped our civic institutions and civic culture.

• The Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation’s Founding from the American Philosophical Society is a central hub for students, educators, scholars, and the public to learn about diverse stories of the American Revolution from the perspective of early residents of America’s revolutionary city. Also from APS, check out videos from their recent conference, America’s 1776: Independence and Its Enduring Legacies.

New publications

• Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools (2026) from the Network for Public Education.

Upcoming Events

1. #TogetherTuesday Potlucks & Perspectives: A community story share activity where participants can contribute the community’s story of service to Our American Story, a national storytelling initiative highlighting America’s culture of service for the 250 & Beyond milestone. The National Museum and Center for Service has a toolkit for setting up a gathering in your community.

2. Designing and Conducting Community-Based Research, from the International Association for Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE), June 25 at 10am Eastern.

3. Reflection, Reckoning, and Recommitment: Student Voices at the 250th from Campus Compact on Thursday, June 25th at 1pm ET

4. America at 250: A Conversation with Adom Getachew, Aziz Rana, and David Waldstreicher. The panelists will discuss their recent pieces in Boston Review and Dissent on the legacies of the American Revolution at home and abroad, its gutted promises, and how its ideals might still inform our politics of resistance and solidarity today. June 29th at 12:00 PM EDT.

5. UPEN Question Time: Is Evidence Facing a Trust Crisis? What does it mean to produce evidence that people actually believe? And what responsibility do researchers and knowledge mobilisers have in building that trust? From the Universities Policy Engagement Network, University College London, Tuesday 30 June, 3:30 PM - 5 PM (5 hours ahead of Eastern Time in the US)

6. The National Assessment Governing Board is looking for civic educators to serve on the NAEP Civics Framework Development Panel. Apply or nominate by June 30.

7. Independence Week Town Hall: The American Idea at 250, from the National Constitution Center, in partnership with In Pursuit and More Perfect. Featuring Jon Meacham, Colleen Shogan, and Danielle Allen. In person and online, July 1, 6:30 PM Eastern.

8. Story Seeds: From Personal Narrative to Public Practice, a webinar series from Campus Compact featuring author Megan Lovely. Sessions include “A blueprint for cultivating community,” “A pedagogy of belonging,” “The responsibility and ethics of storytelling in community-engaged scholarship,” and “Growing practices of collective care.” Tuesdays in July.

9. Our Declaration: “We the People” and the Declaration of Independence, a course for educators from the Civic Learning Institute taught by Danielle Allen, beginning July 8

10. Teaching Difficult Issues in K-12 Schools-Summer Virtual Workshop Series from Penn State’s Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative, begins July 8

11. Teaching250: Civics Renewal for America’s 250th and Beyond - from The Center for Civic Education In Partnership with the National Constitution Center, July 9, 7:00-8:30 pm EST

12. August 8, join the League of Women Voters for a nationwide day of action of civic action in honor of the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Leagues and partners will lead hundreds of activations across the country centered on civic education, voter engagement, turnout, with an emphasis on young voters and community partnerships. A digital activation is also planned for those who cannot show up in person.

Proposing a bipartisan alliance to break the Scarcity Cartel

The Land of Opportunity

There are as many American dreams as there are Americans. But the dreams that inspired people from all over the world to journey to the United States share an essential, common image: America as the Land of Opportunity. To immigrants of the past or future, and to Americans seeking their fortune far from where they were born, America represents both vast resources and the freedom to make the most of them. Every American Dream involves access, agency, and a frontier of self-creation where the two meet. America, in its most romantic imagination, is defined by Liberty and Abundance.

Liberty and Abundance cannot be cleanly separated; in fact, they’re mutually constitutive. At best, the dialectic of Liberty and Abundance powers an overflowing flywheel — one generation’s liberty produces a flush of abundance, and then the next generation uses that abundance to build further resources for liberty. Thomas Edison, in an abundant society, had the liberty to tinker with new inventions; he invents a lightbulb; decades later, in a small town out west, a young man stays up all night reading, freshly electrified, until he has a eureka moment of his own. Liberty requires abundance to burn; abundance requires liberty to alight.

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The Founders knew that this generative fusion of Liberty and Abundance promotes prosperity and progress. Jefferson and Hamilton came at it from completely different angles, but converged in recognizing the essential role that material conditions play in cultivating the independence of citizens and a nation.

Jefferson’s ideal of the self-sovereign yeoman farmer required a massive amount of land to be made accessible and affordable to common citizens — so he broke his own strict constitutionalist principles in order to purchase the Louisiana territory from Napoleon, double the size of the country, and give ordinary citizens the resource most essential for abundance. This democratized access to land for American citizens in a way that radically departed from Europe’s feudal history, at the expense, however, of indigenous Americans. Hamilton, after writing a long essay like this, formed a company called the “Society for the Establishment for Useful Manufactures,” a proto-example of a public-private project to build new cities (notably, Paterson, New Jersey, which the company founded at the falls of the Passaic) focused on making domestic manufacturing a national priority to secure economic independence from England.

Both of these Founders’ dreams acknowledged that the federal government can be useful for securing the conditions of liberty and abundance. Throughout American history, many of our finest periods of progress followed from governance that balances the fusion. Lincoln’s Republican Party of the 1860s created the transcontinental railroad, land-grant colleges, and the Homestead Act — these are Liberty-and-Abundance policies that created conditions for Free Labor to flourish.

That young man out west I mentioned wouldn’t have seen a light bulb turn on in time for his eureka moment if it weren’t for FDR’s 1935 Rural Electrification Administration. The ever-broadening shared prosperity represented by the high-wage worker, the GI Bill beneficiary, and the homeowner became the basis of American dynamism through our mid-20th century glory. Though that prosperity was not shared equally across race lines and other divisions, the flywheel was spinning in the right direction, and on the whole liberty and abundance increased and slowly spread. It made us freer, richer, more creative, and more democratic.

But since then, in the lives of those living today, something happened. Liberty and abundance decoupled. The flywheel seized up.

Breaking the Scarcity Cartel

Every American today knows this strange feeling — that nagging sense that everything takes longer, costs more, and produces less than it should. Our supposedly independent citizens can’t afford housing, and though we once built a train across the continent, now we can’t even build one halfway across California. We live in the wealthiest nation in history, but we can’t seem to make things anymore. The gains from productivity began to spread more and more slowly from the 1970s onwards. The positive-sum culture of an expanding pie increasingly gave way to zero-sum competition over a pie that appeared baked and ready to be divided. A scarcity mindset is toxic to liberty, toxic to abundance, and toxic to the kind of cooperation and culture that democracy requires.

Without realizing it, we replaced a Liberty-and-Abundance republic with a Permission-and-Scarcity republic. Permission is what liberty becomes when it can be granted only by gatekeepers, rather than exercised by citizens. Scarcity is what abundance becomes when it’s hoarded by incumbents, rather than reinvested to compound for the next generation.

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Permission-and-Scarcity has become its own political project in modern America — across the political spectrum, a wide range of actors have, for different reasons, found it useful to keep things scarce. Homeowners want housing scarce. Incumbent utilities want grid interconnection scarce. Established firms want competition scarce. Permitting lawyers want permits scarce. There is a NIMBY left and a NIMBY right.

These people have understandable reasons, individually, for pursuing their various forms of regulatory capture and rent-seeking. And of course, some regulations that protect health, safety, and the environment are important and necessary, even if they make it harder to build things; but when the sum total effect of regulations layered over decades is that we can barely build anything, and certain special interests have an incentive to maintain their form of scarcity at the expense of everyone else, then we have a problem that both the left and the right acknowledge.

All these actors rarely think of themselves as allies, but they share a political-economic interest in maintaining scarcity; over time, as they’ve carved off more of the pie, the net result has set off a negative flywheel of Permission-and-Scarcity that’s hobbled American agency.

Call it the Scarcity Cartel. The Scarcity Cartel has an asymmetric advantage over the Liberty-and-Abundance coalition it (implicitly) opposes, because the actors involved have concentrated spheres of power and are conscious of their clear personal interest; meanwhile, the benefits of the Abundance flywheel are more diffuse, because although most people benefit from highways and the Manhattan Project, the relationships are not as immediate, obvious, or tied to one’s next paycheck. The compounding value of restarting the virtuous flywheel becomes clear only in the next generation.

What’s needed is a cross-partisan Liberty-and-Abundance coalition to become politically conscious of itself, in order to break the cross-partisan Scarcity Cartel.

Liberty and Abundance Zones

I believe that the seeds of a modern Liberty-and-Abundance fusion are already beginning to converge on the ground.

From the Libertarian Right, the idea of “Freedom Cities” has gained real momentum in recent years — Silicon Valley startup “Founders” are looking to create things more ambitious than mere companies, Congressional Republicans have signalled that they would like to pass a bill creating special economic zones to develop essential American manufacturing capabilities, and the White House has made the vibe a priority with an eye toward a potential executive order.

Meanwhile, the nascent Abundance Left is looking for concrete ways to demonstrate its theory of politics — ways to experiment with responsible permitting reform, build dense, affordable, sustainable mixed-zoned communities, invest in rapid scientific research capabilities, and fast-track renewable energy projects. It seems like the Freedom Cities vessel provides a natural opportunity for Abundance ideas to be tested, shared, and deployed at scale — perhaps there’s an alliance to be forged here.

On Capitol Hill, these seeds are taking root, coalescing concretely around a piece of prospective legislation to create “Liberty and Abundance Zones,” aka “LAB Zones.” LAB Zones would be place-based sandboxes where Americans can experiment with streamlined permitting, flexible land use, and innovative governance so that they can really build things. They’d be hubs of productivity innovation where we can experiment with new approaches to domestic manufacturing, develop important new real-world technologies, and build abundant supplies of housing and energy. If a federal bill is too complicated, it might also make sense to start with state-level LAB Zone bills in friendly places like Colorado. The physical frontier might have closed in 1890, but with LAB Zones, we could crack open enough space for the chain reaction of Liberty and Abundance to catch fire again.

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We will, of course, need compromise to craft good policy for LAB Zones and ensure that they avoid the failure modes of the extremes on either side. On one pole is the extreme of Thielosphere projects like Praxis — they want to create Freedom Cities outside of America, corporate/charter cities in places like Greenland where they can pursue liberty as exit from America, exit from democracy and the nation. On the other pole we have all the failure modes that come with top-down planning, whether by company-town capitalists or centralized industrial policy statists. Both the accelerationist right and the abundance left sometimes display a lack of appetite for democracy; but if we are able to avoid the pitfalls of both horseshoe poles, and fuse novel governance innovations with these new experiments, there is a real opportunity here to create true “laboratories of democracy,” as our federal system was designed to promote.

Luckily, the farthest-along prototype of what a new American city project might look like is already beginning to blaze a middle path. ProtoTown — recently featured in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg — has been quietly building a radical new hub for hardware manufacturing in the pro-building, purple-blossoming land south of Austin, Texas. In ProtoTown, over a dozen startups are tinkering freely with hard tech, trying to solve some of our real-world problems the old-fashioned way. A couple of kids are experimenting with a new kind of desalination centrifuge to address our water crisis; someone is working on a special solar panel that cools water, and someone else founded a company that can mass-produce ADUs on the land using local adobe. Meanwhile, a reactor that will produce isotopes for nuclear medicine research is set to go from greenfield to splitting atoms in under 10 months — that’s Manhattan Project speed. That’s liberty and abundance, reunited. (Disclosure: I’ve worked with ProtoTown on and off over the years, most notably by driving their big red school bus.)

Though ProtoTown is itself a startup, rolling together acres of privately owned ranchland, it eschews both top-down control and fantasies of democratic exit. Instead, it has aligned itself remarkably well with local, state, and national support in order to build a prototype of what a new city project committed to American national renewal might look like in practice, inspiring us to create other experiments along wider frameworks. This new model is an opportunity to fuse the best of Liberty and Abundance with democratic legitimacy and a sense of national responsibility. Perhaps, if we seed other experiments around the country, we can innovate new ways of building and living together, while reinspiring the sense that America is the Land of Opportunity.

I would like to see the Abundance Left and the Libertarian Right come together to hammer out the details on a framework for LAB Zones at both the state and federal level. We don’t have to know in advance what will happen; we just have to craft sandboxes where experiments can take place. We will, of course, keep certain safeguards — conversations about novel ways to integrate labor, environmental, and community fairness considerations will be essential to making this experiment workable, and truly American rather than merely libertarian. But if we want innovation then we’ll need to loosen our belts a bit. This will involve a little bit of faith — the thing about freedom is that we often cannot, in advance, know what its fruits will be. But the converse problem here is that a risk-averse society, which requires every experiment to be safely predicted and permitted in advance, precludes certain possibilities of progress which can only emerge as organic surprises in the uncertain process of experience. Better to take a bet on American creativity than acquiesce to managed decline by default.

Perhaps these contained experiments could become internal combustion engines of innovation, restarting the virtuous flywheel like a guy pulling the starter cord of an old lawnmower as hard as he can. Perhaps those who value the American Dream can unite, break the Scarcity Cartel, and help build an America with liberty and abundance for all.

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If you enjoyed this, you can read two final philosophical sections on “The Lacuna of Justice” and “American Pragmatism” in the original version of the essay published on Beatin’ Paths:

Beatin' Paths

Liberty and Abundance

Liberty and Abundance…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · Aidan Fitzsimons