Jackie Payne: Our Democracy Needs Ordinary Americans To Save It
By Jackie Payne
Our country is at a tipping point. The murder of Charlie Kirk and the responses that have followed are not just another round of shocking headlines—they’re a warning flare. How we respond in this moment will have outsized consequences for the future of our democracy.
We have all been seeing political violence escalate in America and we are perilously close to normalizing this violence as just another part of politics. At the same time, ordinary Americans are retreating from civic engagement and political conversations altogether, opting out because the discourse has become so toxic. Both dynamics—the rise in violence and the rise in silence—pose grave risks to our democracy.
The alternative is clear, but not easy: a return to civil, constructive discourse rooted in shared values. We must counter the “us vs. them” narratives that are dominating our national dialogue and recommit to seeing one another in our full humanity; not as enemies to be silenced, but as neighbors with whom we can disagree productively.
After years of listening to women around the country, I kept hearing the same thing: they felt alienated by the extremes, worried that no one else shared their point of view, and reluctant to engage in conversations that too often devolved into conflict. Many stopped talking about current events or politics altogether, and I feared what that silence meant for our democracy.
I built Galvanize USA in 2018 as a judgment-free digital community by women, for women, where we could engage in real talk about the things that matter most to us. Now, more than ever, I realize that we need to massively scale efforts like this, so when we pick up our phones and start scrolling, we’re met with content that lets us see similarities across our differences, grounds us in shared values, and offers real pathways to the things the majority of us want: safe communities, good schools, the ability to provide for our families. We can’t rely on any one person or political party to save us from our current reality. We need an upswell of engagement strategies that support ordinary Americans to stand up for each other and our democracy.
Our latest project shows how this can work. We invited a group of women from different backgrounds to do a puzzle together in pairs. As they worked side by side, they responded to conversational prompts and discovered unexpected common ground. When the puzzle started to take shape, they saw it was a collage of their own photos and the shared humanity in front of them was undeniable. We filmed the activity and shared Pieces of Us widely online. The response has been overwhelmingly positive: “A reminder that when we choose love over judgment, unity over division, powerful things happen.”
How does content like this help address political violence and encourage healthy civic participation? Extreme polarization leads to dehumanization and a willingness to use violence against those we perceive as “the other.” In 2024, Stanford University published the results of their Strengthening Democracy Challenge, a megastudy that included large-scale field experiments with 25 interventions designed to decrease American partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. The most successful interventions—one of which we modeled Pieces of Us after—reduced partisan animosity by 10.5 percentage points. For comparison, partisan animosity in America between 1980 and 2020 increased by around 25 points.
This is not a soft response to violence, it’s a strategic one. By reminding Americans that we have the ability to transcend differences and see each other’s humanity even when we disagree, we reduce fear and hostility and replace “us vs. them” with “we.” That’s what happened in our puzzle project, and it’s exactly what our country needs more of right now.
The future of our democracy hinges on our collective ability to resist the cultural trend toward seeing one another as disposable. Will we allow political violence and silence to define us, or will we tip the balance toward unity and the kind of constructive engagement that makes progress possible? What happens next depends on every one of us playing a role to shape the civic culture of America.
Jackie Payne is the founder and executive director of Galvanize USA. She is a trustee of the Patsy Takemoto Mink Foundation and is on the board of the Women and Justice Project.
