We’ve defeated Trump. We’ve defeated his cronies. We won in Georgia and took the Senate. We’ve celebrated. Now, we have a short window to save our democracy. Getting it done depends on all of us, and this new Indivisible guide provides a blueprint.
Four years ago, we wrote a guide to resisting Donald Trump. Our message was simple: even in a dark and frightening moment, when Trump and his minions controlled every branch of the federal government, we still had power. We could use our power to resist—and ultimately, to win.
We could never have predicted what would come next: that thousands of people would bring together their neighbors, their friends, their communities, to do just that. That we would become part of a grassroots movement that would help save the Affordable Care Act, build a Blue Wave in 2018, stand in fierce solidarity with communities under threat, and ultimately, kick Donald Trump out of office.
If you’re reading this, you’re part of that movement. Maybe you formed an Indivisible group. Maybe you showed up at a town hall, or a protest, or a congressional office. Maybe you knocked doors, raised money, or ran for office yourself. Whatever you did, you’re a part of history.
Together, we’ve defeated Trump. Now, it’s time for us to defeat the forces that allowed him to rise—and that continue to threaten our democracy.
We must recognize that Republicans have been working to rig our democracy for decades. They know the country is getting more diverse and more unequal. They know a truly representative democracy will reject their radical social and economic agenda. And so they suppress voters, flood the system with corporate money, gerrymander districts, pack the courts with right-wing hacks. Their enemy is representative democracy, and they attack it at every turn. They’ve been playing a long game, and they’ve come very, very close to winning for good. Our only chance of stopping them is to use this precious window of time to save our democracy—to enact the kind of structural reforms that will put power in the hands of the people.
We have this opportunity now because Democrats won a trifecta. We’ve been in a similar place before. We were congressional staffers during the last Democratic trifecta in 2009. We witnessed the rise of the Tea Party and the GOP’s campaign to undermine President Obama. That experience inspired the original Indivisible Guide. Now, as President-Elect Biden and the Democrats return to power, we offer the flip side of that experience: what we can learn from the last time Democrats held a trifecta.
The parallels between 2009 and 2021 are impossible to ignore: a Democrat follows a catastrophic Republican incumbent, inheriting an economy in shambles. The incoming President has a mandate for bold action, but faces an opposition determined to delay, obstruct, and undermine.
In 2009, President Obama and Democratic leadership did everything they could to win over Republicans and build buy-in for their policies. It cost them precious time, and forced them to scale back crucial elements of their agenda—from the size of the stimulus package to key elements of the Affordable Care Act. It meant there wasn’t time or political appetite for other desperately needed priorities, like immigration reform, D.C. statehood, labor rights, and climate change legislation. Just two years later, despite Obama’s electoral mandate, and the popularity of his proposals, Democrats suffered an electoral “shellacking” that lost them the House and ended any hope for their legislative agenda.
Now, as we head into a new Democratic trifecta, history is poised to repeat itself. Mitch McConnell has declared himself the “Grim Reaper” of all legislation in the Biden era, and his threat is even more grave because Democrats hold this trifecta through a slim 50/50 split with Vice President Harris as the deciding vote. But that’s not a reason to give up; it’s a reason to fight harder. McConnell knows that the surest way to win back the Senate for Republicans is to kneecap the Biden presidency. If we fail to use this Democratic trifecta now, we may not get another chance. We must learn from the past if we are to secure our democracy for the future.
Whose responsibility is this? Yes, President Biden has a role to play here. As do congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. But they will not solve our democracy’s problems on their own. No, the task of saving our democracy is ours. If our leaders succeed, it will be because we supported, cajoled, and pushed them towards that success. A representative democracy is within our reach—but we must demand it.
There’s another historical parallel that guides us. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt won a landslide electoral victory against a discredited Republican opponent. FDR’s win delivered a Democratic trifecta for the first time in more than a decade. The economy was in shambles and fascism was on the rise globally. Shortly after his election, a labor leader visited with him to ask for a big policy reform. FDR replied, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”
FDR’s landslide did not by itself save America. Resisting his agenda, his opponents cried “socialism”! Members of his own party urged caution. The Supreme Court fought back. But grassroots advocates pushed, prodded, cajoled, incentivized, welcomed, and willed FDR’s agenda into existence. Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor rights, the Fair Employment Practice Committee, rural electrification, and defeat of the fascists are not just FDR’s legacy—they are the legacy of the people-powered movements that shaped that era.
What our legacy will be depends on what we do right now in this very moment. Together, we can demand and win the era-defining reforms that save our democracy, lift a nation out of economic turmoil, secure our country against the current and future pandemics, and turn back a rising tide of fascism. Ours could be an era that future generations write practical guides about.
If there’s one takeaway from this new guide, we hope it’s this: we have the power, we have the opportunity, it’s up to us, and the time is now.
Good luck! We will win.
In solidarity,
Ezra & Leah, Co-Founders of Indivisible