Six Things We Learned at the End of 2020

Every year, PACE hosts a series of gatherings for its members and we save one meeting for the end of the year. It provides a way for the PACE community of funders to reflect on the year, assess the state of civic engagement, and begin to put shape around priorities for the year ahead.

We convened our membership in early December, and after a year like 2020, this year-end meeting was unlike any other. We decided the best use of our time together as a community was to engage with this guiding thematic question: With the backdrop of all the crises this year revealed, the 2020 Election provided the latest stress-test for our country. What sense do we make of the health of our democracy and civil society? What can be celebrated? What should be further understood?

We tackled these questions with a listening and learning posture, and over two days, we hosted four sessions with the goal of deepening our understanding in key areas. The first session concentrated on the civic bright spots and the areas of celebration coming out of 2020, with a particular focus on unpacking the electorate that led to historic voter turnout through the lenses of generation, race, faith, and other demographics. The second session helped us be honest about the long-standing challenges that re-emerged this year by diving deep into understanding the influence of toxic polarization/hyperpartisanship and understanding anti-democratic tendencies such as disinformation, interference, suppression, and disenfranchisement. Next, we looked to a panel of experts to help us consider the philanthropic strategies and investments that made the biggest differences this year and what should not fall away as we move beyond 2020. Our last session took that conversation one step further by engaging PACE Members in a discussion about how we evaluate momentum for democracy-related work and how we sustain philanthropy’s interest and involvement in democracy over time, especially as we move away from the urgency created by the election season.

The speakers were provocative and the discussions were rich. As we reflect on this member meeting, many, many insights emerge. In no particular order, these are the six learnings from our member meeting that are sticking with us as we prepare to wrap up 2020 and look ahead to 2021:

1. Partisanship is growing and deepening as part of our identities; for example, parents increasingly do not want their children to marry outside their political party. A running theme through our conversations was the ways partisanship has superseded our identities and how that impacts our ability to come together as a country, especially in important times like a pandemic, a racial reckoning, or other events that have unfolded this year. Ted Johnson from the Brennan Center for Justice shared that another way to see the power of partisanship as a social identity was to look at marriage. He drew our attention to research that showed in 1950, 72 percent of respondents to the question “If you had a daughter of marriageable age, would you prefer she marry a Democrat or a Republican, all other things being equal?” either didn’t answer or said they didn’t care. In 2016, that number shrunk significantly to 45 percent. The research goes onto to say: “People who identified with a party had even more intense feelings. In 1958, 33 percent of Democrats wanted their daughters to marry a Democrat, and 25 percent of Republicans wanted their daughters to marry a Republican. But by 2016, 60 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans felt that way.” Increasingly, parents care if their children marry within their political party, and with Gallup reporting an 87% approval rating for interracial marriages, they may care about it more than they care about their children marrying within their race. This demonstrates just how central partisanship has become to our identities.
2. Polarization is going to keep pushing us to trade democracy for power. Ashley Quarcoo from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship and American Identity Program shared her perspective about the role toxic polarization and hyperpartisanship played in the election season: when there is hyperpartisanship with deep social cleavages, partisan actors are going to trade off their democratic values for power. While we did not see this take effect broadly in this election (see point 6 below), many fear the toxic polarization of this election — and frankly, the last few years — has irreversibly deepened our social cleavages. This leaves us vulnerable to a mindset in which supporters would rather tolerate authoritarian tendencies than let the other group “win.” Suddenly, if the price to pay for democracy is perceived to be too high, people may be more likely to abandon their commitments to uphold democractic values in order to justify their efforts to retain political power. Ashley warned once we are in this type of zero-sum political cycle, it’s very hard to escape. Both sides want to prevail, and we might find ourselves in a “race to the bottom.”
3. We might be at a moment where Americans must decide: do we want to be in a country together? Ashley also provoked us to consider that we — as a country — have not had an agreement about the scope of our national identity, the rules of how we will practice democracy, and that perhaps in this post-election moment, we are at the moment of renegotiation. Many have characterized 2020 as the year of reckoning, and the election might have laid bare another reckoning we need to wrestle with: do we want to be in a country together anymore? It was widely covered that 61% of Americans were concerned a civil war would erupt after the election, but at the same time, 97% of Republicans and 96% of Democrats rejected the idea that physically attacking their political opponents would be justified. When we interrogate Americans’ appetite for unity, it seems the problem is a perception gap- — that we want unity but we don’t think our political opponents or members of “other” groups do — which makes it difficult to have a productive conversation. How do we minimize or eliminate this perception gap? How do we build bridges across difference and prevent the dehumanization that comes with “othering” groups? What is the future we are trying to build together? Elections are important ways to have these conversations, but they are high-stakes and zero-sum. Everything in between elections also matters in advancing these big questions.
4. Rather than having to rebuild civic infrastructure in future election seasons, now is the time to take steps to keep momentum going and fill major gaps that remain. A few times, our conversations examined the “boom and bust” tendencies of philanthropy. This happens often in election years, when groups need to staff up and heavily engage, organize, and mobilize ahead of an election, only to see those investments fall away after the election and the work they’ve done to build networks, trust, and action fall away with them. To ballpark this, we can track that our country spent approximately $14 billion in this election cycle, the most that has ever been spent on any election and nearly three times the amount philanthropy has invested in democracy organizations over the last decade. While this is good news, it also means that we have a lot of work to make sure key investments don’t fall away post-election. Imagine how much more efficient civic philanthropy dollars could be if they rode the wave of momentum from 2020 into stronger networks, more sophisticated technology, and deeper relationships ahead of 2022, 2024, and beyond? We had a panel of experts share not only their perspectives on where investments made a difference this year, but also how we can fill the gaps in civic infrastructure that still remain. For example, Sarah Audelo from the Alliance for Youth Action reminded us that there is no major youth organization in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania doing organizing work year-round. Her provocation: “Imagine what that could do instead of the pop-up shops that exist.”
5. It might be time to evolve how we think about crisis and urgency. With the multiple crises of 2020 in mind, we shared in a conversation about what it means for philanthropy to move from one urgent crisis to the next, and we challenged ourselves to perhaps shift our paradigm from crisis response to crisis resilience. Instead of thinking about what we need to fund in response to a crisis, could we instead accept that there will be another crisis in the future and think about funding the capacities and capabilities that will increase our resilience for crisis long-term? We also challenged ourselves to embrace the rapid response activity that naturally emerges in times of crisis response and see that as energy to harness in service of long-term work. Both discussions felt like hard-earned reflections at the end of a year filled with crisis, and they pushed us to evaluate what philanthropy’s role in response might look like moving forward.
6. The office of citizen remains the engine that drives democracy. PACE has a shared belief that the office of citizen should be treated as central to how democracy functions, and while a lot of the focus this year was on electing a candidate into the office of President, it was the office of citizen that really drove the engine of democracy. For example, as a community, we reflected on the role local election officials played in stewarding our democracy, both in the face of unprecedented logistics which required many jurisdictions to run three elections at once (in-person voting, early voting, mail-in voting) with notably few irregularities and in the face of tremendous partisan pressure to sway or call the election early and in certain favors. Ashley Quarcoo shared that as other countries came to observe our election this fall, they questioned how our system relies on 10,000 jurisdictions who do things slightly differently. She went on to say “But that’s the story we should be telling. There were 10,000 jurisdictions working their hearts out, staying up at night, putting their health at risk. It was an overwhelming example of democracy and patriotism.”