A Coalition for America

Part II: Moving from Concept to Reality in 4D

Photo by Rosie Kerr on Unsplash

Last week I proposed a Coalition for America: a non-partisan compact of powerful civil society organizations built to protect keystone institutions of liberal democracy and realign the broken incentive structures fueling toxic polarization.

(If you missed Part I, read it here.)

The response was largely encouraging, but there are obviously a lot of details to be worked out and a lot of skepticism (including some of my own).

At the same time, I think this model or something like it has a lot of promise, for a couple reasons.

Why This Could Work

This isn’t naive optimism. It doesn’t require the entire electorate to suddenly develop new civic muscles or a bench of principled candidates to emerge from the earth. It’s also not wishful historicism, hoping the problem of the “other side” (whichever side that is) will just go away on its own.

Instead, the Coalition is grounded in strategic realism about where power actually lies in a democracy—and it’s based on structures we already know work. It’s a way of thinking in all four dimensions about the complex problem of toxic polarization instead of focusing entirely on politics.

We also have a couple things going for us.

We already have proof of concept. Climate change compacts mobilize similar coalitions across diverse organizations. Adversarial collaboration models from academia get people with opposing views to agree on baseline standards. Independent watchdog groups already pressure government actors effectively. The Coalition for America simply scales and coordinates what we’re already doing piecemeal, directing those tactics toward a single protective goal.

Most Americans already agree. Elite polarization is real, but citizen polarization is largely manufactured by broken incentives. Most Americans support democratic norms, free markets with safety nets, and institutions that check government power. They’re looking for political options that reflect these views—we’re just helping that option emerge by redirecting incentives - money, power, and influence - in those directions.

The power is there. Foundations control billions in grants. Universities train future leaders. Media shapes narratives. Corporations employ millions. When these institutions align around shared principles, they create massive pressure on political actors to respond. We’re not creating new power—we’re redirecting existing power toward shared goals.

The timing is right. What better occasion than the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? And what makes this powerful is that we only need a few crucial players to get started. It doesn’t require wholesale re-education. No constitutional amendments. No Marshall Plan in civic rebuilding. We just need a few key players signing on to get the ball rolling.

The Forward-Looking Framework

One piece that’s critical is that the coalition has to be forward-looking, not backward-looking.

Both major parties are responsible for how we got here. Both sides have a variety of grievances, both perceived and legitimate. I still believe Trump represents something qualitatively different, but part of why we’re here is because we’ve collectively allowed institutional erosion to the point where partisans only enforce principles against the other side. In the toxic game of winner-take-all politics, the foundational institutions that support human flourishing are getting trampled. This is what war does, but we shouldn’t let it.

If we get caught up in which side is worse we just get recaptured by the binary thinking we’re trying to escape.

To move forward, the Coalition can’t relitigate past failures.

The question isn’t “Who betrayed these principles or violated these institutions first?” but “How do we recommit to them now?” This is what makes the coalition genuinely non-partisan rather than performatively bipartisan.

If we can’t get agreement on that piece, the whole thing admittedly dead in the water. The second we come at this expecting the “other side” to apologize or admit they were wrong, we’re right back in the throes of toxicity.

What This Isn’t

Let’s also be clear about what the Coalition for America isn’t.

It’s not another bridging movement. I love bridging work and it’s critical work, but it’s not sufficient for our current crisis. The Coalition isn’t just about creating space for civil disagreement. It’s a mutual defense coalition protecting the institutions that make disagreement possible.

It’s not a third party. We have too many structural barriers to third parties. This works within and across existing party structures.

It’s policy-neutral (mostly). The Coalition cares about policy implications for keystone institutions, but it cannot take sides on normal policy questions. That’s non-negotiable—remaining firmly committed to a narrow mission is what keeps the coalition functional.

It’s not for everyone. Extremists won’t come to the table. That’s fine. We need the reasonable majority who already share these values but lack institutional support for expressing them politically.

It’s (emphatically) non-partisan. When one side violates these principles, the coalition calls it out. When the other side does, same thing. The consistency is what builds legitimacy. That’s the only way it will work.

Where It Might Fail

While I think there’s promise, there’s also a lot that could go wrong. So let’s play around with some devil’s advocacy here to see the most obvious ways this goes off the rails.

Let’s be clear: I have no idea if this will work. Nobody does. We’re dealing with complex adaptive systems—foundations, universities, corporations, media organizations, political parties—each responding to different incentives, each with its own internal dynamics and constraints.

What I do know: doing nothing while institutions crumble isn’t a strategy. The Coalition for America represents the kind of strategic, multi-pronged intervention that has worked before when people tackled problems this complex.

And I think overall the risks of this approach are pretty low. Worst-case scenario it doesn’t work and a number of well-heeled organizations have wasted some time and manpower.

But it’s still worth confronting the most likely points of failure and I’ll take the most obvious objections one by one.

“This Is Too Ambitious—You’ll Never Get Anchor Institutions to Agree”

The Concern: Major foundations from across the political spectrum can’t even agree on what constitutes a problem, much less solutions. They’ll never be able to coordinate like this.

My Response: But this is exactly the point! They don’t need to agree on problems or solutions. They just need to agree on the rules of the game—the baseline institutions that make disagreement possible without violence.

The reality is that every one of these organizations already hates toxic polarization. It makes their work harder, forces them into binary choices, and alienates half their stakeholders. The Coalition offers them cover to do what they already want to do: operate in a functional democracy.

The adversarial collaboration model exists precisely for this scenario. You get people who disagree on everything into a room and ask them one question: “What institutions do we both need to survive?” Not “What’s the ideal society?” Just “What’s the minimum we can’t do without?”

That’s a much narrower question. And history suggests it’s answerable.

The Risk: Mission creep. Once you have these powerhouses in a room, the temptation to expand the coalition’s scope will be enormous. “Well, if we’re protecting separation of powers, shouldn’t we also take a stance on healthcare?” No. False. Stop that. That’s how coalitions die. The discipline to stay narrow is everything.

I’m not sure that temptation alone won’t kill it, but I think it’s still worth a try.

“What Happens When Coalition Members Violate the Principles?”

The Concern: A university that signs the compact gets pressured by legislators to fire a controversial professor. A corporation that endorsed the coalition makes a massive illegal campaign contribution. A media organization spreads documented misinformation. Do you kick them out? Issue a statement? Quietly look the other way?

My Response: This is where the nonpartisan policy arm becomes crucial—and where things get genuinely difficult.

The Coalition needs clear, public criteria for what constitutes a violation. Not vague principles but specific rubrics: What level of government overreach into university hiring triggers a response? What counts as actionable misinformation versus editorial judgment?

I admittedly don’t know exactly what that would look like. It would need to be hashed out in detail by smart people from a variety of perspectives. But there are some broad principles that I think are crucial to any kind of success:

When violations happen—and they will—the Coalition’s response must be:

1. Consistent regardless of which “side” violated principles

2. Proportional to the severity

3. Focused on correction and accountability, not punishment

Think of it like credit ratings. Your score drops when you miss payments. It rises again when you get back on track. Organizations aren’t permanently expelled or blacklisted for mistakes—but they lose the Coalition’s endorsement and funding advantages until they realign.

The Risk: False equivalence. Not all violations are equal. A university canceling one controversial speaker is different from a president threatening to defund all universities that don’t support his policies. The Coalition must be able to recognize the difference without becoming partisan. This requires extraordinary intellectual honesty and sophisticated institutional analysis.

Again, I’m not sure we’re capable of anything close to that in the dumpster fire of 2025, but with the right people and organizations in the room we might be.

“The Extremes Will Just Build a Counter-Coalition”

The Concern: Once you create a powerful centrist coalition, extremes on both sides will mobilize their own counter-coalitions. You’ll have three Americas instead of two.

My Response: Too late! They already exist. MAGA has its network. The progressive left has its network. These aren’t new—they’re just currently capturing all available political energy because there’s no viable alternative.

The Coalition doesn’t eliminate these networks. It creates a third option for the exhausted majority who don’t want to choose between authoritarianism and what they see as cultural radicalism. Most Americans—including most foundation leaders, university presidents, and corporate executives—are already desperate for this option. We’re giving them the infrastructure to express it.

The Reality: Some extreme actors will double down and that’s fine. The goal isn’t unanimity. It’s shifting enough incentives that principled moderation becomes politically viable again. It’ll still have to stand on its own two feet and demonstrate its worth, but at least it can get in the door.

“Who Decides What’s a ‘Keystone Institution’?”

The Concern: One person’s essential democratic institution is another person’s oppressive power structure. How do you avoid just recreating the status quo with different branding?

My Response: This is why the adversarial collaboration process comes first, before the coalition even formally exists. The founding compact must be genuinely co-created by people with opposing political visions.

Yes, this means some potential “keystone institutions” won’t make the cut. If coalition members can’t reach consensus on whether something is truly essential, it gets dropped. Better a shorter list everyone agrees on than a longer list that splits the coalition.

Here’s what makes this work: We’re not asking “What institutions would create the perfect America?” We’re asking “What institutions are necessary for peaceful coexistence in a deeply pluralistic society?” That’s a radically (moderate!) different question—and one with more bipartisan agreement than you’d think.

The Tradeoff: This approach means accepting that some things you care deeply about won’t be on the keystone institution list. Maybe you think aggressive climate action is essential to democracy’s survival. Someone else thinks unrestricted gun rights are. If you can’t agree, neither makes the cut. The Coalition protects the minimum, not the maximum. The list I came up with focused on really broad institutions like judicial independence for this reason. These are the institutions we need to decide how to tackle things like climate change and gun control. We need to be careful to distinguish institutions from policies and in the grey areas we might just have to leave things out for now.

“This Could Take Years—We Don’t Have That Kind of Time”

The Concern: By the time you get this built, American democracy will be over.

My Response: Building the full infrastructure takes time. But creating political pressure doesn’t.

Here’s what could happen in Year One:

• Three major foundations with different political leanings announce they’re exploring a coalition to protect liberal democratic institutions.

• They publish their adversarial collaboration process and invite comment.

• Media starts covering it; scholars at universities engage; funding (at least from the big three) starts moving in a different direction.

• Suddenly there’s an immediate (if relatively small) political cost at the margins for violating principles the coalition will eventually protect. And conversations open up that might have been difficult to have before.

You don’t need the full machinery to shift incentives. You need visible momentum from credible players. I think we underestimate the power of social pressure on elite players across the spectrum. And even if we don’t shift political incentives immediately, we shift the incentives toward protecting keystone institutions in other areas of civil society. That’s worth doing too.

And look, if American democracy can’t survive the few years it takes to build proper institutional defenses, then it was already too fragile to save. We’re not putting bandaids on bullet wounds. We’re doing the hard work of institutional reconstruction and protection. That will take a while, but not as long as people think if the incentives are right.

“What About [X]?”

The Concern(s): What about Supreme Court reform? What about campaign finance? What about gerrymandering? What about media regulation? What about tech platforms?

My Response: All important questions. Some might become focal points for the Coalition’s work. But here’s the discipline required: We can’t protect everything simultaneously. We identify the absolute keystones—the institutions without which liberal democracy cannot function—and we protect those first.

Everything else is negotiable. Everything else depends on which levers the Coalition finds most effective. Everything else gets debated by people who’ve already committed to protecting the baseline.

The Real Risk We’re Taking

The honest risk isn’t that this fails. Plenty of good-faith reform efforts fail. The real risk is that this succeeds partially—gets major institutions on board, creates some political pressure—but then stalls out before fundamentally shifting incentives.

We end up with another well-meaning organization issuing statements nobody reads, hosting conferences nobody remembers, and slowly losing relevance as the political situation worsens.

That’s the failure mode we have to avoid: becoming performative rather than structural.

I think this risk is minimal if the coalition is broad enough, if adversarial collaboration is baked in and taken seriously, and if the policy wing is robust enough. Maybe the policy wing can even be tasked with periodically doing some meta-analyses on the success of the coalition itself. And maybe we add a sunset or self-destruct clause: if the coalition is not creating real impact after a certain timeframe has elapsed, everyone can go back to doing whatever they were doing before. But at least we’ll have tried something.

What This Requires From All of Us

What I need from readers is to help me dig into the weeds a bit more. I’ll be discussing the rough outlines of this proposal next week at a conference, but I’d love people to help me troubleshoot before then. Give me some:

Intellectual honesty. Tell me where this breaks. What am I not seeing? What tradeoffs am I underestimating?

Strategic thinking. Who are the specific people who need to be in that first adversarial collaboration room? Not “foundations from across the spectrum” but actual names. I have some ideas but would love to hear some more.

Network connections. If you know someone who might have leverage at any level, send them these posts. Can’t hurt, right?

Other stuff I’ve missed. What else needs to be in here? I got some great suggestions last week for principles we can add to the list in the first post and I would love similar kinds of suggestions for keystone institutions, governing principles, or tactics to get started or prevent falling apart.

Your Turn

I’m interested in the good, the bad, and the ugly about this approach and also in extending its reach. Drop feedback of all kinds into the comments, but also:

• Forward this to someone who should read it.

• Drop ideas for potential anchor institutions into the comments.

• Subscribe for the one-page summary that I’ll post sometime next week.

As I always say, reader shares are one of the main ways people find my work so please do consider sharing if you’ve found value in any of the above.