The Democracy We Must Still Build

Tomorrow, our nation will mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the start of the American experiment. Across the country, we are witnessing competing claims about what this anniversary means, and who counts as American at all. We have not yet achieved a true democracy because we seem afraid to address the gravity of our founding contradiction: how are we to be a government by and for the people, if we concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the few?  

We will say plainly what we see: democracy is unfinished work. What has remained incomplete is economic justice: access to capital, to housing, to fair wages, and to shared prosperity. While the vote determines who holds office, ownership determines whose interests govern. And the history is clear: time and again, ownership rights have been stripped from Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color here in the U.S.

The current assault on democracy is not haphazard, and it is certainly not unprecedented. Look at who is being targeted for exclusion, whose citizenship is questioned, whose ballots are challenged, whose participation is being legislated away, and you will find the same communities of color whose labor and land built this country's wealth without ever sharing in it. This is the oldest pattern in the American story: political power follows economic power, and the tools used to deny one have always been manipulated to deny the other. 

From a founding franchise reserved for property-holding White men, to a present in which an oligarch class writes the rules while inequality widens to historic extremes, we have circled right back where we started. It should land as a sharp awakening that 250 years into this “democracy,” its promise for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color remains largely unfulfilled. A person can hold a ballot yet hold no say in whether their neighborhood is bought out from under them, their wages suppressed, their community's capital extracted by institutions they will never sit inside. 

Yet, the situation is far from hopeless. We know repair is possible, because we have invested in it directly, and it has existed long before and far beyond the work of Common Future. Communities of color have never stopped demonstrating what an equitable economy looks like. Their models persist, adapt, and thrive together even when justice is denied. Just as concentrated ownership is the mechanism of democracy's failure, shared ownership and capital control are key to the remedy. Across our network, economic democracy is not a theory but a practice: when communities build power and control capital, they know exactly what to invest in for the greatest collective gain. They prove it in cooperative enterprises, in community-owned land and assets, in capital moving on terms communities set for themselves. 

For example: Jerjuan Howard of Howard Family Bookstore and Common Future’s Legacy Lab is imagining what it looks like to serve the fullness of one Detroit neighborhood through entrepreneurship, healthcare, and government collaboration. Aisha Nyandoro of Magnolia Mother's Trust and our Childcare Action Lab is envisioning a society that pays Black mothers a guaranteed income for the work of raising their children. Through the Moonsoon Fund, we've joined Vanessa Roanhorse and the efforts of Roanhorse Consulting LLC to support Indigenous women imagining a world where they move money on the terms and timelines their communities need, building a body of evidence to take on traditional financial models, and now investee and Diné matriarch Jordanna Saunders is showing what mental health care can do for Indigenous communities when informed by the trauma they face.

This is what a democracy by and for the people could look like. The very folks shut out of economic and political power are building it anyway. So at this historic inflection point, we will say it louder for those in the back:

We are doubling down: on the leaders already living economic democracy, on the capital and infrastructure that lets them grow it, and on the conviction that the next 250 years belong to the people who own them together.  

Let us build a multiracial democracy and an economy of, by, and for the people.