The movement to strengthen democracy in America is not struggling because its enemies are too strong. It is hobbling because its friends are too many.
I have spent decades inside the machinery of social action movements. I have convened rival cancer organizations under a single coalition, mobilized over a thousand corporations to withdraw from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine (earning a #6 ranking on Vladimir Putin’s “Enemies of the Russian Federation” list), and activated hundreds of top business leaders to address urgent governance reforms after the scandals of 2001.
I have rallied business leaders in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, convened 100 leading CEOs right after the 2020 election controversy to certify the authenticity of the election results and avert a constitutional crisis; brought together the same group plus voting rights advocates in 2021 to defuse voting suppression initiatives, and ensured multi-sector collaboration during the 2008 financial crisis.
In such causes and others, I watched the risk of the same pathology unfold: a critical cause, staffed by genuinely dedicated people and organizations, slowly strangled by the proliferation of groups claiming to serve it. The weeds did not kill the garden. The flowers did.
That same pattern is now threatening the most consequential civic effort of our time. America has witnessed a proliferation of voting rights groups with sound justification and demonstrable results, but there comes a point when there may be too much of a good thing. Worse still, a kaleidoscope of pro-democracy advocacy groups can end up siphoning funds in diffuse directions and confusing the very constituents they seek to inspire.
A thousand weeds
The United States alone has roughly 180 overlapping voting rights advocacy groups, 5,000 cancer control organizations, 17,145 civil rights and social justice organizations, roughly 30,000 organizations addressing global hunger, and 33,000 environmental activist organizations.
Certainly, many of these organizations are virtuous, tapping different constituencies, and forming alliances to reinforce common interests. But they also drain attention and resources from the most prominent and salient causes, while adding significant duplicative overheads—swelling payrolls, internally devoted expenses including seven-digit salaries. The disconnected myriad of local, state, and national animal welfare organizations pursuing massive media campaigns has led to persistent controversy over the actual destination of donations.
Last week, I met with a bipartisan coalition of retired Federal judges, who expressed concern about presidential interference in the fast-approaching 2026 midterm elections. Later that day, a major business group asked me which of the myriad pro-democracy groups soliciting their support actually deserve it. The following evening, three legislators complained to me that several of these groups were actively undermining one another.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
From 1997 through 2002, I facilitated the National Dialogue on Cancer—later known as C-Change—co-chaired by President George H.W. Bush and Senator Dianne Feinstein. This consortium unified 50 rival cancer-fighting organizations that risked confusing legislators by battling over the primacy of competing priorities: prevention, early detection, environmental causes, equitable treatment access, and basic research.
It brought together long-standing, legitimate organizations such as the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and many others that tapped into disparate constituencies. We carefully screened out the overnight splinter groups, the pretenders and the imposters drawn to money and the allure of compelling virtue-signaling missions.
Profiteers often flood a cause, adopting lookalike titles and chasing the same revenue sources. These opportunists drown out the core mission, creating a cacophony of competing voices that confuses donors, crowd the inboxes of CEOs and members of Congress with colliding petitions, and paralyzes meaningful action by draining critical funding and attention away from the truly effective groups. Instead of having a thousand flowers bloom, a thousand weeds end up strangling them.
Mission hijacking in the nonprofit space
A similar overcrowding afflicts the pro-democracy space today. Hundreds of proliferating nonprofits—focused on election integrity and democratic governance, and largely sharing the same mission and drawing from the same donors—are crowding an already bustling ecosystem of existing nonprofits, coalitions, and think tanks.
In our own preliminary count, we identified at least 387 organizations operating at the national level, with more than 1,200 additional groups operating at the state level. Some coalitions have become massive bureaucratic behemoths, with certain coalitions claiming over 700 member groups. At least a 100 of these organizations contain the same three words—Democracy, Vote, or Justice—in their titles. And over half of all these groups are less than a decade old.
No doubt, dozens of them are doing extraordinary work, with genuinely heroic impact and unimpeachable integrity and efficacy. Among the groups worthy of recognition for their heroic efforts are the Lincoln Project, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Action Network, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Anti-Defamation League, the Brennan Center, Protect Democracy, Keep Our Republic, Article III Project of Keep Our Republic, Alliance of Former State Chief Justices, CREW, SPLC, Democracy Defenders Fund (DDF), State Democracy Defenders Action, States United Democracy Center, Democracy Docket, Leadership Now, and the Bipartisan American Election Project.
But the recent surge of new groups has confused CEOs, donors, and other key constituencies by pursuing often wildly divergent messages and contradictory agendas, inadvertently establishing circular firing squads, undermining unity, and siphoning resources from credible expert voices. With over half of all these groups newly established, it is not hard to understand why their key constituencies feel overwhelmed and confused.
I am often asked to rally CEOs in support of efforts in many states that take commendable and much-needed steps to strengthen the integrity of their elections. But these CEOs are not the handful of oligarchs with controlling equity in their enterprises. They are hired hands and stewards of other people’s capital, with no desire to becoming embroiled in internecine squabbles between clashing advocates, parochial activists, and plain opportunists latching on to the moment.
They cannot help but ask: Where is everyone else? Where are the clergy who once locked arms and marched for progress? Where are the trade union leaders, the professional associations, the employee advocacy groups, the campus voices, the pension funds, and the institutional investors, the true owners of these CEOs’ companies who control 80% of public equity?
While many of these overlapping nonprofits no doubt harbor good intentions, the excessive and often brazen overcrowding among them undercuts their natural allies in the sweepstakes for funding, baffling CEOs and politicians alike with a kaleidoscope of confusing—and at times false—messages, colliding appeals, and contradictory petitions offered up in a grandstanding scramble for support and attention.
The primary question is whether this crowded field of new entrants is actually accomplishing anything, or whether its members are simply tripping over one another with deleterious impact. The answer, for too many of them, is the latter. The imperative is clear: these groups must join forces and operate in concert rather than at cross purposes. A movement that cannot discipline itself cannot expect to discipline those it seeks to hold accountable.
A disciplined path
The political center and left could learn valuable lessons from the disciplined coordination of financing, message control, and focus practiced by the various affiliates of major conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, or the State Policy Network, which pump out studies, draft op-eds and provide legislative testimony.
Paid state directors of these groups and their staff teams are often deployed by Americans for Prosperity, which centrally produces radio and television advertisements, sponsors bus tours, convenes rallies, launches public forums, and blasts mass mailers alongside legislative outreach.
Some may argue that the more the merrier applies as much to advocacy for social justice as to anything else. But the old legal adage—that any town too small to support one lawyer is exactly the right size for two—suggests that rival advocates may ultimately direct their primary efforts toward undercutting each other.
This dynamic is particularly dangerous when the stakes are as high as they are today. The threat to upcoming midterm elections is genuine and not invented. Nor is it paranoia. Voting rights advocates from California to Ohio and Georgia to Alabama are under assault, as absentee ballots are threatened to be refused by the US Post Office and paper documentation such as passports and birth certificates are being used to screen out eligible voters.
History offers a cautionary tale about what happens when movements turn inward. Children of the 1960s may recall that even within the militant activist group, Students for Democratic Society (SDS), animus was frequently directed not at the establishment but at fellow antiwar advocates. And the organization’s internal splinter groups, the Soviet-leaning Weatherman Underground and the Maoist-leaning Progressive Labor faction fought each other bitterly.
The Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) complained about the excessive caution of the NAACP, while Lyndon LaRouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees waged war on virtually every other activist group in sight, reserving its most vicious attacks, delivered with vitriol and violence, for the fellow travelers on the new left.
This tendency toward fragmentation is not limited to street-level activism; it begins far earlier, in how individuals conceive of their own civic roles. I have reviewed university admissions applications for a half century, and I am continually struck by how frequently applicants believe that creating a new advocacy group—to address a common societal problem, with themselves installed as its leader—represents a greater act of citizenship than does the far rarer candidate who suspends personal ego to join existing efforts.
Self-aggrandizing proliferation among advocates does not always translate into fortification of the intended cause. While proliferation at a hyper-local level ought to be celebrated—driven as it is by community-rooted campaigns—repetition and redundancy at the national level can produce inadvertently damaging results.
The remedy is neither silence nor surrender, but strategic discipline. What is needed now is a deliberate consolidation of overlapping groups into effective coalitions, accompanied by rigorous tracking of donors and their commitments. As the Japanese poet RyÅ«nosuke Satoro once advised: “Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.”
