By Jarvis Williams
What the Rooms Told Me
Over the past three years, first as Director for Race and Democracy and most recently as a Democracy Fellow with the Horizons Project, I have had the privilege of doing some of the most meaningful work of my life. That arc, from leading conversations across the country about how the democracy sector might reckon with its own racial dynamics to the quieter and more reflective work of a fellowship that allowed me to ask honest and uncomfortable questions, produced a body of learning I feel compelled to name before this chapter closes. I entered those rooms not to deliver a message but to listen for one.
What I heard did not match the confidence that sometimes fills movement spaces. The people I sat with were not cynical or disengaged. They wanted, deeply and sincerely, to be part of something larger than themselves. The aspiration was real. Beneath it was a question that appeared with remarkable consistency.
People were not asking whether they would be welcomed. I understood them to be asking about the institutional commitments that would govern their participation once they arrived. What mechanisms would make those commitments enforceable? How would the coalition hold itself accountable for the ways race, class, and gender continued to shape authority, agenda setting, participation, and influence within the movement itself? Without an answer to those questions, participation would always become symbolic rather than consequential.
They were not asking for reassurance. They were naming a standard. And the consistency with which that standard appeared told me something that the movement has not yet found the discipline to confront. Therefore, this short reflection aims to assist the movement in hearing what it struggles to accurately hear.
The Problem with the Strategy
The democracy movement has correctly identified that authoritarian actors use race, class, and gender as instruments of division. That diagnosis is sound. But it subtlety infers that the civil society seeking to address the authoritarian’s use of those categories is deserving of trust. And this implicit assumption of trust reveals a common limitation within movement spaces that has gone largely underexamined. To be sure, that common limitation discloses an uncomfortable truth. The movement inherits the same categories as the authoritarian, but accountability mechanism for the movements’ practices with those categories remains largely absent.
The two theories of change that dominate the landscape deserve attention. One locates the work in behavioral pressure by identifying harmful conduct and organizing citizens to raise its political cost. The other locates the work in the condition of civil society by rebuilding broad democratic coalitions capable of serving as a counterweight to democratic erosion more broadly defined.
Different theories, different methods, and different expectations of participants. But the limitation is shared.
Both theories ultimately ask participants to demonstrate solidarity across differences of race, class, and gender. That aspiration is neither naïve nor misplaced. The difficulty is that solidarity is asked of participants without establishing how it will hold itself accountable for the ways those same differences continue to organize authority, legitimacy, agenda setting, and influence within the coalition. The movement readily encourages people to acknowledge race, class, and gender rhetorically. It has built far fewer mechanisms capable of governing how those realities continue to shape coalition behavior in practice.
The result is an accountability gap. Participation becomes the visible measure of inclusion while the conditions governing participation remain largely beyond review. It is not authoritarianism of intention. A structure does not require a villain to produce harm. But a movement that performs inclusion while preserving inherited authority without mechanisms of accountability risks reproducing, within its own practices, the very condition it exists to oppose.
The Question That Will Not Go Away
The standard those communities raised will not dissolve through better messaging, softer language, or more carefully crafted invitations. Their question was never whether they would be welcomed. It was whether the movement could be held accountable.
The people I sat with had shown up before. They had learned that presence does not guarantee influence, that partnership in language does not always become partnership in practice, and that solidarity without accountability easily becomes another hierarchy with better rhetoric. They were not withholding themselves out of apathy. They were holding the movement to a standard it had not yet met.
The question is not whether people will join the movement. The question is whether the movement has built institutions capable of governing participation according to the standard of equal citizenship once they do.
Our Authoritarian Roots
The authoritarianism that concerns us did not arrive fully formed in any single administration or election cycle. It grew from conditions our democratic society produced together in the ways we have organized power, distributed participation, and determined whose voice carries weight and whose does not. What appears at the administrative level of government reflects a condition that has long existed within civic life.
I am referring to a deeper more severe reality lurking beneath our discourse. A reality that has always whispered to the nation that its pattern of governance and legitimacy rests on shaky ground. This ground can be described as civic authoritarianism.
Civic authoritarianism describes authority that no longer has to justify itself. It persists because it has been inherited, normalized, and left without mechanisms that require it to explain, defend, or correct itself. It operates through the ordinary routines that determine who convenes, who decides, whose judgments carry weight, and whose participation remains conditional. It is the quiet practice of unaccountable authority embedded within civic institutions.
This contradiction is therefore unavoidable. The movement demands accountability from the political system while leaving significant portions of its own authority beyond comparable accountability. Until that contradiction is addressed, the movement will continue to risk reproducing internally the condition it seeks to overcome publicly.
The Work That Remains
Here is what I have come to believe, and what I think years dedicated to this work has earned me the right to say with verifiable integrity.
The work ahead is not a better invitation, nor a new framing of an old analysis. The work ahead must be the construction of accountability mechanisms within the movement that are as visible and enforceable as the ones the movement demands of the political system. Those mechanisms must be anchored to the standard of equal citizenship and capable of identifying what institutional practices, distributions of authority, and patterns of participation are acceptable and which are not.
Without those mechanisms, both dominant theories of change will continue asking participants to invest themselves in institutions that have never clearly explained how inherited advantages and burdens will be governed in practice. Participation will remain dependent on trust rather than accountability, goodwill rather than governance, and promise rather than practice.
The question those communities placed before the movement still stands. What mechanisms of accountability ensure that our participation will be consequential, protected, and worthy of our investment? My question is, what evidence exists that we are equally resisting the continuation of civic authoritarianism?
When the democracy movement can answer that question through practice rather than promise, it will have built something that no authoritarian impulse, internal or external, can easily dismantle. That work still waits for us. It is, in the end, the most democratic work of all.
Jarvis Williams is a Democracy Fellow with the Horizons Project.
