Time for a New Synthesis
Americans yearn for shared purpose. But we are trapped in an archaic and badly designed political system that fractures us by our differences instead of uniting us by common values.
Micah L. Sifry argues that America’s political system is broken—fractured by division, weakened by isolation, and captured by entrenched power. To rebuild, we need new ways to come together: stronger civic infrastructure, meaningful local engagement, and a multi-party system that unites citizens around shared values. This essay lays out a roadmap for reclaiming a democracy that truly works for everyone.
This essay is one of 26 that forms our Out Of Many, One anthology. We invited people from across disciplines to share with us their thoughts on how the ideas of American Universalism can shape our nation moving forward.
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By Micah L. Sifry
Co-founder, Civic Hall and Personal Democracy Forum
Americans yearn for shared purpose. But we are trapped in an archaic and badly designed political system that fractures us by our differences instead of uniting us by common values. To find the way out, we need to change how and where we come together to get things done.
I am an American Jew and the son of a Holocaust survivor. My mother was born in Belgium in the early 1930s and, along with her family, tried to flee to Britain when the Nazi army overran their country in 1940. By the time they made it to the coast, the Germans had already captured the port city of Ostend. My mother survived the Nazi occupation separated from her parents, hidden in a convent and at other times in homes of members of the Belgian Resistance. Her family was lucky. My wife’s father also lost many family members; she carries a copy of a list he made of more than 80 of them.
I think of this heritage often, more so now as we face the rise of authoritarianism in America. Experts on how democracies collapse say they not only see all the warning signs here, but they are also shocked at how quickly norms and institutions are falling to Trump’s assault. Sometimes, while catching up on the latest news and feeling my inherited epigenetic trauma, I wonder if I should leave America, the country where I was born. And then I think, no. We have to stand and fight here.
Indeed, if we take America’s history seriously, this fight isn’t a new one.
But we need to also stop addressing our problems in isolation from each other and treating them with short-term Band-Aids rather than long-term cures. That’s why I believe that we need a new synthesis—a way of doing politics that doesn’t divide us by our differences, but that unites us by our common values.
The core tension of America’s ongoing democratic experiment is ensuring majority rule without enabling the tyranny of the majority. The Founders deliberately dispersed power among the three branches of government, reserved many powers for the states, and gave the White male landowning (and slave-owning) minority extraordinary advantages in everything from apportionment of population to the design of the Senate. Another, more critical, view argues that the Founders never intended for America to be a nation where all people were equal, and therefore sought to accentuate the power of the propertied minority to be able to block the demands of any putative majority.
However one sees the Founders’ intent, the development of actual democracy in America can best be understood as an ongoing contest between an organized minority (the propertied class) and a disorganized majority (the rest of the people).
At various moments in our history, ordinary people have organized themselves sufficiently against the advantages of that powerful minority to win meaningful improvements: abolition, women’s suffrage, direct election of senators, child labor bans, income tax, collective bargaining, occupational safety laws, the Voting Rights Act, environmental protections, abortion rights, gay rights, and campaign finance regulations that began to limit private spending on politics, to name a few.
And at various moments in our history, the propertied class has fought back in a number of guises—the slavocracy (aka the “Slave Power”), the robber barons, Jim Crow, the monied class that Theodore Roosevelt called the “malefactors of great wealth,” the New Right, the one percent, MAGA, and now, the tech broligarchs. The struggle between advocates of an expansive, inclusive democracy and defenders of a narrow, exclusive plutocracy has been with us for a long time.
Remember how we got to today’s democratic crisis. Over the last 20-plus years, the Supreme Court has turned back the clock on decades of progress. Minority group voting rights were drastically weakened. Campaign finance rules were eviscerated. Most recently, the Court invented a new kind of immunity for the head of the executive branch. The Republican-controlled Congress is on the verge of giving up the last vestiges of its power to hold the executive in check.
At the same time, the ways that Americans come together to navigate life and make meaning of the times have also changed. The rise of the Internet has undermined mainstream mass media, ravaged traditional local newspapers, and given everyone a personal megaphone and the ability to “do their own research” to construct whatever reality they like. The founders of our great social media platforms thought that they were making the world better by connecting everyone to everyone else, but the result was the fostering of echo chambers and the deepening of social divisions.
Civil society, the great engine of social change, has become warped in similar ways. Older mediating institutions like churches, unions, and neighborhood clubs have grown weaker, as personal fandoms grew stronger. While more Americans than ever before may now participate in the public arena by posting, sharing, commenting, and liking each other’s content, we are less connected to our actual physical neighbors and more organized into polarized virtual camps.
Trust in institutions was already in decline thanks to shocks like the Vietnam War and Watergate. The Great Recession of 2008 and the Great Pandemic of 2020 damaged trust even more. And then the most talented demagogue in modern American history came to dominate the stage, preying on people’s fears and resentments. The organized MAGA minority has seized control of one of our two major parties, and with that they are governing unchecked, imposing their vision of America on the rest of us.
Today we are arguably at, or approaching, the nadir of self-rule in America. Indeed, one major problem for would-be defenders of democracy in 2024 was the perception that they were not interested in improving the system—they cared more about maintaining a status quo that most voters hate. Supermajorities regularly tell pollsters that the American political system needs major changes, including a healthy plurality who want it completely reformed. According to Gallup, public satisfaction with “how democracy is working in this country” has been trending downward since 1998, hitting an all-time low in early 2025. The threads that weave us together as a people are badly frayed.
We cannot win the future from a defensive crouch. It is time to think anew about what has worked in the past to enable ordinary people to claim their share of the American birthright. We need a new synthesis.
Simply put, politics is how we decide who gets what. It’s how we resolve differences without recourse to violence. And one utterly crucial if insufficiently appreciated truth about any functioning democracy is this: Politics is a team sport, not an individual one. It’s worth reminding ourselves that each individual voter has very little power. What matters more than anything is how we use “the power to combine,” which Alexis de Tocqueville divined as the heart of America’s vibrant public arena, to come together in common purpose.
We have a lot to rebuild. The path to a better future can only run through revived political party organizations and the plethora of secondary associations that help individuals act more sensibly and forcibly in the public arena. Political parties that recruit and elevate candidates and organize voters around common labels and values, and secondary associations that bring people together around shared interests, are the warp and woof of democracy. No healthy democracy exists without them. Reformers who hope to weaken the influence of parties or interest groups are making a gigantic systemic mistake. We will not bowl alone or click ourselves or rank individual candidates to democracy.
Thus one key starting point for starting afresh should be: How and to what degree might changes to our political system incentivize and enhance the ability of the citizenry to participate in self-governance in ways that reknit our frayed social ties?
Three quick answers:
First, it’s long past time that we committed ourselves to moving America off the two-party system and onto the path of becoming a pluralistic multi-party democracy, like nearly every other functioning democracy in the world. It’s understandable why Americans are so angry and alienated from the political system we have now. The two-party system, where the only way to reject one party is to embrace the other, is stifling the kind of healthy competition that would arise if more parties could meaningfully contend for power.
Today’s system, which for all practical purposes forces all political discontent to flow through only two channels, is making both parties raise the stakes of every election. We are caught in an ever-worsening “doom loop,” as political scientist Lee Drutman cogently argues. To get to a multi-party system, we need to change the rules so that new parties can form and compete for votes without being forced into the role of the spoiler. Either we enable fusion voting (where two or more parties can nominate the same candidate and thus form broad multi-party coalitions) or we move to multi-member districts where more than two parties can win a representative share of power. Trying to solve America’s political crisis without addressing how the existing two-party system keeps making it worse is a fool’s errand.
Second, we need to change how we engage with voters (something that more competition from more parties would help spur). The election of 2024 triggered a big debate on the losing side about what lessons need to be learned, between those who argue that Democrats have become too liberal or “woke” and those who say Democrats abandoned the working class and became too “corporatized.” While there are bits of truth on both sides, this debate avoids the deeper lesson of 2024, which is that the way Democrats do politics is too disconnected from the lives of the people they want to reach. Digital political technology and data has made it very easy and profitable for candidates as well as advocacy organizations to extract money or time (from volunteers). But hollow parties that rely on strangers talking to strangers to beg for their votes, and organizations that are “heads without legs” cannot possibly meet the hunger for connection and meaning. Republicans and their allies benefit from year-round community engagement that occurs at places like evangelical churches and gun clubs; a healthier and more authentic Democratic party (as well as new parties) can only emerge from similar place- and meaning-based hubs.
Finally, the best way to reverse the decline in social trust is to invest heavily in civic infrastructure dedicated to bringing Americans together locally in common endeavors. As sociologist Eric Klinenberg discovered when Chicago was hit by an intense heat wave in the summer of 1995, fewer people died in poor neighborhoods that had more social infrastructure—a local park, a thriving church, a shopping strip. That’s because people in those areas were more likely to know and care about each other, and consequently to check up on elderly shut-ins who were at greatest risk of dying in the heat. As climate upheaval worsens, the need for local connective social infrastructure will only grow.
Given the immediate challenges facing the rule of law in America today, it’s tempting to set these problems aside and try to fight incipient fascism from within the systems that we have. But it’s my contention that the more Americans live in civic deserts, spend their time in virtual silos, and experience politics as a hyper-polarized zero-sum game, the more they will be attracted to demagogues and strongmen blaming scapegoats and promising easy solutions. Not only are our nerves frayed, our social fabric is, too. It’s time we saw all these separate challenges as different faces of the same problem and gave the work to reknit America together a unifying name. It’s time for a New Synthesis.