The past few years have called for a fundamental reckoning with the question of American democracy—really, with the question of what it means for us to live collectively. Foundational assumptions have been proven false; it-could-never-happen-here scenarios have happened; and we are confronted by deep contradictions in our political system that were for too long ignored, suppressed, or minimized. 

Faced with this reality, and the inadequacy of existing strategy, the Reflective Democracy Campaign has been challenging itself to deeply examine its work and possible paths forward. Since the Campaign launched, it has produced first-of-its-kind data and analysis; changed the conventional wisdom about race, gender, and political power; established the concept of reflective democracy as a value and commonly-used framework; and incubated some of the most innovative recent democracy-building work through grants, fellowships, and projects that can fundamentally challenge the system.  

And while the team is continuing to build on the foundation they’ve built, simply continuing to do the same things they’ve done in the past is not sufficient. The only path forward is to dive into the hardest questions, in all their messiness and uncertainty.  

That’s why the Reflective Democracy team has embarked on a wide-ranging process of exploration, research, and discovery. To facilitate this process, they are centering their work around a vehicle for experimentation and growth: the Reflective Democracy Lab. The Lab is a new arm of the Campaign that continues the Campaign’s rich history of developing bold new insights and strategies and meets the profound challenges of our moment with approaches that are more explicitly experimental, assumption-challenging, and category-busting.

The work of the Lab—and the Campaign more broadly—is based on a set of foundational beliefs, including:

  • We are at a remarkable historical juncture, in which the old institutions and norms are collapsing and new ones must be imagined and built.
  • There is an urgent need for spaces of feminist analysis and action, especially in light of the powerful role of gender and sexuality in authoritarian movements.
  • Ways of thinking and doing imbued with patriarchy and white supremacy got us here; those same forms, processes, and expectations are not our path to a different, liberated future.
  • A truly multiracial democracy has never before been built; those of us engaged in that project are attempting something profoundly new.
  • Something that has never before existed will not be brought into being with already-existing imaginative frameworks, methods, and tools.

We ask what we see differently if we:

  • Understand that American democracy began in 1970, when women and people of color finally won a true right to vote, not in 1776 or 1789?
  • Grapple with democracy as an emotional project – one of joy, grief, rage, belonging, fear, conflict –  as much as a technical, rational project of laws, positions, rules, and policies?
  • Center creativity and creative process and look to other fields for methods, approaches, and wisdom to reimagine the work of democracy-building?
  • View the challenge of building democracy in the U.S. not just as a national project, but an aspect of an international project?
  • Think in terms of generations, centuries, and epochs, not years, election cycles, or even decades?

To quote Georgia O’Keeffe, “…to see takes time.” Without time, we see what we expect to see, and we do what is familiar and urgent, yet ultimately inadequate.