Political Parties Won't Save America. Civil Society Can.

A Coalition for America: Building a Bulwark Against Authoritarianism

Photo by Rosie Kerr on Unsplash

A Coalition for America does not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
The goal is not a maximally ideal liberal democracy.

The goal is to align incentives around the institutions of a minimally acceptable liberal democracy, one that leaves civil society institutions largely free to do what they do best.

[Part II of this series provides more detail; don’t miss it]

The comments on last week’s post made clear that both sides are convinced that there’s no playing by the rules when the other side refuses to admit there’s a playbook in the first place.

We’re stuck in a vicious cycle, where each side’s perceived transgressions are used to justify additional transgressions. It’s like watching my kids whack each other while yelling “she hit me first!”, but the stakes are much (much) higher. Vicious cycles are notoriously hard to end and typically require some kind of exogenous (and often painful) shock to the system.

After some depressed hand-wringing, I had a brainstorm. What if we stop thinking that our political woes have a political solution? What if we could figure out a way for that exogenous shock to come - safely - from civil society itself? We don’t have to (thankfully) wait for a natural disaster or civil war to break out. We can construct our own solution from the ground up that doesn’t rely on virtuous politicians or magical thinking about the electorate.

Instead, we take a page from the Federalist Papers and fight power with power.

If political erosion has undermined trust in big-tent liberal institutions over time due to misaligned incentives, we can activate a non-political counterweight, something large and powerful like a social glacier, to shove them back into alignment.

That non-political counterweight already exists in the form of a range of decentralized civil society institutions that, for now, are held hostage by toxic polarization.

But they don’t have to be.

Below I offer a framework for how to activate civil society organizations to create a bulwark against authoritarianism and institutional decline, not by sitting around with our fingers in the dam, but by reshaping the incentives for a virtuous cycle of governance.

Civil society can fix what political parties have broken

Here’s what we know: Elite polarization is destroying American institutions while most Americans remain remarkably moderate on most issues. The problem isn’t that citizens are hopelessly divided—it’s that every incentive in our political system pushes elites toward extremes while punishing compromise and cooperation.

Whether it’s the realities of winner-take-all elections, polarized primaries, divisive algorithms that amplify extreme voices or big donors dumping money into elections to skew policy, there are about a thousand Goliaths working against the American people getting solid governance.

But what America has that we shouldn’t underestimate is a strong and robust civil society. If mobilized and harnessed, that civil society—foundations, universities, media organizations, corporations, and everyday citizens—can create the structures that shift these incentives back toward the foundational principles that made America work in the first place.

So here’s my radically moderate proposal to save America:

We create a Coalition for America, an explicitly non-partisan and intentionally pluralistic compact of powerful civil society organizations built to protect keystone institutions of liberal democracy and designed to realign the broken incentive structures that fuel toxic polarization.

A coalition to protect liberal democratic institutions

The Coalition for America would start with what unites us rather than what divides us not by focusing on civil discourse or specific policy positions (we’ll always disagree on those), but by creating a nonpartisan mutual protection society that vigorously protects the foundational institutions that make productive disagreement possible, creating a bulwark against authoritarianism.

It focuses on two key processes to disrupt the current vicious cycle of toxic polarization:

1. Adversarial collaboration: people who don’t agree get together to decide on the rules of the game, in this case coming together to agree on the keystone institutions that need protecting.

2. Realigning incentives: specifically, intentionally using existing levers to re-align civic virtue with self-interest, enforced with influence and money.

These two processes work with our deep pluralism rather than against it. It doesn’t require unity around identities or values or even a particular way of life.

Instead it takes deep pluralism for granted and starts by doing what big-tent liberalism has been doing well for hundreds of years: identifying the “low-but-solid” institutions that allow us to navigate political pluralism without violence.

The Coalition would intentionally work across party lines to identify the core institutions that we need to vigorously defend. By intentionally avoiding mission bloat and focusing on a small number of keystone institutions, Coalition members ensure that they stay focused and maintain strong bipartisan support.

They also wouldn’t start with a list of institutions some random person on the internet decided is important. Instead, the Coalition would use the principles of adversarial collaboration to get people who otherwise disagree politically into a room to decide which institutions they consider “keystone” institutions.

This is perhaps the most critical component of the coalition: it’s not just Democrats or Republicans who get to decide what institutions are keystone institutions and when they’re violated. We already have thousands of people screaming about partisan violations every day across media and social media.

What we need is to get a group of thoughtful and respected people from across the political spectrum - people who deeply disagree on policy, identity, even on broad vision - into a room, working together to decide on two critical things:

1. What are the keystone institutions that keep liberal democracy functioning?

2. What are the governance principles that can help us identify when those institutions are breached?

The adversarial collaboration model accounts for deep pluralism and creates a mechanism for navigating it.

While these would need to be hashed out by the Coalition, I’m guessing some of these institutions will likely include:

Likely Keystone Institutions:

• Separation of powers and checks and balances

• An independent judiciary

• Federalism that respects state and local governance

• Rule of law, not rule of men

• Free and independent media, including a commitment to avoid spreading misinformation and disinformation

• Academic freedom and independent universities

• Fair and transparent electoral processes

(These obviously overlap, but they’re a starting point.)

Identifying the keystone institutions will probably be the easy part.

The harder part will be identifying governing principles that help us identify when these institutions are being breached. Again, these principles would need to be hashed out by the coalition members themselves, but I’ll suggest some baseline principles below that shift incentives away from partisan self-interest and back to good governance.

Possible Governing Principles*:

• Minimize special interest carve-outs in legislation (I know, wishful thinking but I figured I’d throw it in)

• Protect free markets (broadly conceived) while preventing monopolistic abuses (often created via special interest carve outs in legislation)

• Ensure due process and equal protection under law

• Refrain from spreading misinformation and commit to correcting misinformation when it happens.

*I’m missing a lot here, so drop ideas for additional governing principles into the comments.

Notice, I’ve intentionally left out specific policy prescriptions about tax rates, healthcare systems, or immigration quotas. Those are the things we’ll continue to debate. This coalition is not about policy.

It’s about navigating deep pluralism to recommit to the rules of the game; it’s agreeing on how we debate policy issues and how we manage disagreement and pluralism broadly.

How It Works: Shifting the Incentive Structure

Here’s where this gets interesting.

A Coalition for America isn’t just a statement of principles. It would actively reshape the incentives that currently reward extremism and punish principled moderation with some key levers.

It aligns virtue with self-interest and uses civil society levers (money and influence) to shift political incentives.

What I like about this approach (if I do say so myself) is that each lever reinforces the lever that comes after so it’s, to a certain extent, a pretty robust system.

In a nutshell, the Coalition starts with a handful of powerful and wealthy anchor organizations, which then provide support and cover for additional civil society organizations to sign on. The entire coalition protects itself and its members by assiduously avoiding polarizing topics and staying laser focused on the narrow mission above.

Here’s how I’m envisioning it working (but there are likely others):

1. Funder Pressure

The Coalition starts with critical anchor institutions. For a range of reasons, I think we should start with major philanthropies from across the political spectrum. Imagine the Koch Foundation working alongside the Gates Foundation and the Templeton Foundation. These large funders generally like big-tent liberal democracy, dislike toxic polarization and have a fair amount of control over their message and mission.

And here’s where the first lever kicks off: Large foundations would join the coalition and commit to funding only causes and candidates that demonstrate adherence to these keystone institutions. Suddenly, extremism becomes expensive while principled governance becomes lucrative.

Notice, this doesn’t require changing anything fundamental about the mission of these institutions. They’re not changing their funding priorities or their overall mission. All they’re doing is - like with various kinds of climate or sustainability agreements - agreeing to carry out their existing mission with a critical eye toward a common good, in this case protecting the institutions that make liberal democracy possible. And they do so within the framework of the keystone institutions and governance principles created via a process of nonpartisan adversarial collaboration.

Because these major philanthropies and foundations play an outsized role in funding other civil society organizations, they become a critical leverage point in changing the incentives for everyone who follows.

2. Civil Society Powerhouses Join In

Once major funders join the coalition, they create incentives for other civil society powerhouses - media companies, corporations, universities, and large non-profits - to join. The Coalition can then build out membership in other key civil society spaces, including:

Media: Major media companies could join the Coalition, committing themselves to certain core principles of media governance and creating their own non-partisan coalition arm that creates a framework for FCC and other government agency engagement. Imagine Reason Magazine working with the New York Times and the American Conservative to lay out a broad framework for media independence. In areas the coalition cannot agree, it remains silent. This takes contentious policy issues off the table, focusing coalition energy on the core principles of a free and independent media.

Corporations: If corporations like Meta can performatively support #BLM or MAGA when it feels convenient they can certainly join onto a coalition with widespread voter and civil society support. Just as with the media, corporate powerhouses can work together to create a broad framework for corporate-government relations that aims to reduce entanglements and undermine polarization.

Universities: Similarly, universities who join the coalition could work to create a set of guidelines for what independent higher education looks like that doesn’t require a homogenizing structure that treats state schools, University of Phoenix and Hillsdale the same. Instead, each of these diverse players who choose to join the Coalition can work together to hash out the minimum standard for higher education independence, including an acceptable framework for what kinds of strings can legitimately be attached to federal grants and federal loans and what should be left off the table. Organizations like Heterodox Academy are already doing work like this and could be brought in to consult in key areas.

In all these cases, the Coalition works because what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Civil society power players of all kinds - media companies like Paramount, universities like Harvard and corporations like Meta - hate our current polarized landscape because it creates forced binary choices that actively harm their bottom line. They don’t want to alienate 51% of the American people by being forced to kneel to whoever happens to be in power. The Coalition’s keystone institutions provide principled cover for decisions that also happen to support their bottom line, like institutional neutrality.

And this is the root of why it works: the Coalition doesn’t rely only on a sense of civic duty but also on self-interest. If we can realign incentives around keystone institutions, civil society organizations can get back into the business of entertaining, educating, and whatever Meta actually does. I guess innovating, maybe.

In turn, these institutions agree, by joining the Coalition, to work internally to align their own practices with these broad institutions. That might mean Coalition universities choosing institutional neutrality, corporations pledging to limit anti-competitive lobbying, and so on. This part might be a bit utopian, but remember: if there is an institution or governance principle Coalition members can’t reach agreement on, it gets dropped.

The Coalition for America does not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The goal is not a maximally ideal liberal democracy. The goal is to align incentives around the institutions of a minimally acceptable liberal democracy, one that leaves civil society institutions largely free to do what they do best.

None of this is new, by the way. These ideas are literally ripped from the pages of the Federalist Papers. As Madison noted in Federalist 51, “This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.”

The Coalition for America is a deeply American idea: We should appeal to American principles and ideals, absolutely. But the founders always knew we had to create systems that align our principles and ideals with individual and organizational self-interest. This in turn generates the power - in this case the combined coalitional power of money and social pressure - to enforce those principles and ideals.

This is principled realism or pragmatic idealism or principled populism, all brands of what I’m calling radical moderation.

But back to the Coalition for America…

3. Candidate Endorsement

Once we have a coalition of powerful civil society organizations on board, the next step is to put direct pressure on the parties to realign themselves with these institutions and the interests of the American people.

A truly non-partisan Coalition - and this is where really thoughtful bridging and collaborative work is absolutely necessary - composed of respected figures from across the political spectrum gains the legitimacy to endorse candidates based on their commitment to foundational institutions rather than policy positions.

In states with fusion voting, this could mean a “Coalition for America” ballot line that voters can select regardless of party affiliation. In all states, candidates could earn a Coalition for America endorsement, one that would only be granted if their campaign and platform committed to protecting the keystone institutions the Coalition exists to protect.

The Coalition in turn would agree only to endorse candidates based on this very narrow set of values, ignoring policy differences and other divisive ideological issues.

The Coalition could start with elected officials with a history of working across the aisle, including folks like the Problem-Solvers Caucus.

But like with other elements of the coalition, if candidate endorsements become contentious or threaten membership in the Coalition, they get dropped. The Coalition itself is more important than any one element and there are other levers, including funding and social pressure, that can be brought to bear. Levers are only useful as long as they actually work.

And the keystone institutions themselves are more important than any given lever. So if a particular lever starts causing conflict, the Coalition can drop it for the moment and try something else.

4. Nonpartisan Policy Analysis

Another possible lever the Coalition could create is an independent non-partisan policy wing, similar to the Congressional Budget Office or the old Consumer Reports (before it went off the rails). The Coalition could provide nonpartisan, high-quality analysis of how policies and candidate positions align with the keystone institutions above and the governance principles that flow from those institutions.

Just as Snopes gives grades for misinformation and Consumer Reports offers rankings on reliability and safety, the Coalition’s independent and non-partisan policy analysis create social and reputational costs for those who violate keystone institutions and rewards for those who uphold them.

As with every other part of this coalition, policies are not analyzed in terms of their costs or outcomes or ideological lens, but instead based on their compatibility or incompatibility with keystone institutions. The Coalition might give a neutral rating to a particular kind of policy or it may choose not to rate policies at all unless it finds they have clear and weighty effects - whether good or bad - on a particular keystone institution. Or it might indicate situations where a policy has a positive effect on one keystone institution and a negative effect on a different keystone institution, perhaps offering guidance on how to mitigate the conflict.

5. Electoral Reforms

The Coalition for America could also use this leverage to push for reforms that align our electoral system with these keystone institutions. Right now, neither party has much of an incentive to reform electoral systems that breed polarization and distrust, such as the primary system that currently allow tiny minorities to select general election candidates. Certainly it’s unreasonable to expect people who were elected via flawed systems to work to change those systems. But with the power of the Coalition behind it, we could get real advocacy and momentum for open primaries, anti-gerrymandering practices, ranked-choice voting, or other reforms that help increase the trust and transparency of elections. Many of these reforms would create a virtuous cycle in turn by shifting power from the extreme margins back toward the reasonable center.

The reforms suggested above are not automatically given. Each would have to be vetted by the nonpartisan policy wing of the Coalition, whose primary concern is not any particular policy outcome but instead how best to align electoral practices with the keystone institutions the Coalition exists to protect.

6. (Minimal) Educational Resources

The Coalition might also decide to create a minimal but powerful educational arm offering free, foundational resources for K-12 and college students. This probably shouldn’t be an expansive platform—just high-quality, shareable curriculum on the institutions that buttress liberal democracy: separation of powers, federalism, independent judiciaries, free media, and the rule of law. Think free texts, engaging videos, and balanced materials that schools and universities can actually use without triggering culture war battles.

The goal isn’t to indoctrinate but to educate, giving young people the tools to understand *why* these institutions matter and *how* they function, regardless of which policies they ultimately support. When students understand the machinery of big-tent liberal democracy, they’re less likely to support dismantling it for short-term political gains.

This shifts the long-term incentive structure by creating citizens who value the system itself, even when they lose particular policy battles.

What’s Next

In Part II I’ll get into the weeds a bit more in terms of process and mechanics. That will drop next week, which will also give me the chance to address any concerns or objections that come up in the comments on this post. Finally, I’ll post a one-page summary with links to both of the longer posts for those among us (like me) who are time/attention/bandwidth challenged.

Your Turn

I’ll admit that I think I’m onto something here. I would love to hear if you think so too.

But if this thing has any potential, I want to hear objections, ideas, refinements - whatever you got. You can also drop names of potential coalition members, ideas for keystone institutions or governance principles I’ve missed, or anything else. Let’s crowdsource a solution to what ails us.

And as always, if you like what you read, please share and subscribe. Reader shares are the primary way people find me, as they did with my semi-viral Trump post last week. And if we’re going to build a real Coalition for America we need all the shares, ideas, and participation we can get.