The Two Fronts

The fight for democracy is a fight against oligarchy, and oligarchy is coming at us from two directions at once.

I grew up in the Dominican Republic under an elected fascist named Joaquín Balaguer.

I know what it is to watch a country metabolize corruption until it's as ordinary as the weather. I know the particular silence of a people who've decided, without ever voting on it, that being quiet is how you stay safe. I know the tingle in the spine when you approach the limits of your freedom.

I'm telling you this because the last year of my life has felt, at moments, like a fever dream of that childhood, and because I want you to understand that when I say what I'm about to say, I'm not speaking from the comfort of theory. I'm speaking from the other side of a door most Americans have never walked through.

Here is what I want to tell you: The fight in front of us isn't democracy versus authoritarianism. The fight is against oligarchy—a small concentration of wealth and power that has decided the constraints of self-government are no longer acceptable, and has set out to dismantle them.

Authoritarianism is one of its tools. Technology is the other. Donald Trump is the face of the first. The tech billionaires who stood behind him at his inauguration are the face of the second.

Every generation of oligarchs in history has reached the same conclusion—that the many are an inconvenience to the few. The Gilded Age had railroads and Pinkertons. The twentieth century had radio and the ministries that learned to use it. Ours has an authoritarian movement in the White House and a handful of men in Northern California who own the architecture through which almost all of us now think and speak.

Different tools. Same project.

What we were built for

I launched American Opposition in January of last year because the organizations built to defend democracy had become paralyzed—unable to function in an environment that had moved beyond their structural limitations. I wrote about that in The Fulcrum this summer.

What we built to replace them is a movement tuned to the moment: National Days of Protest. The No Kings marches. The Tesla and Disney boycotts. The Mass Blackout. Direct actions. Opposition research. The Trump Administrative Action Database. Broad and innovative coalitions. As one observer put it, this project "looks like a brand, behaves like a campaign, and grows like a movement."

The results speak for themselves: The largest protest and boycott movement in American history. An immaculate election last November where Democrats won every race they could win—a historic first. The near-unanimous vote to release the Epstein files after successive unanimous votes against it. Three impeachment resolutions. A record number of Republican retirements from Congress. The worst poll numbers an American president has ever experienced.

That didn't happen because of the Democrats. They are, after all, less popular than Trump.

It happened because the American people answered our call and decided to move.

What the midterms actually are

The 2026 midterms aren't the end of anything. They're the beginning of the hardest work we've ever tried to do.

The window that opens the morning after those elections won't stay open long. What we do with it will decide whether this country spends the rest of the decade healing or bleeding.

A movement that uses that window to restore 2024 will have failed.

Because 2024 is what produced 2025.

We're not restoring. We're building something new—and we’re doing it on two fronts.

The first front: The system

The authoritarian track has a foreseeable end. Elections can discipline it. Institutions, once defended, can be hardened. The first front is political, and the plan is concrete. To be clear, we will not execute all of it. We will motivate others to join us. This will be a movement-wide effort.

Our direct-action infrastructure will shift from the streets to the districts. From protest to pressure. On the obstructionists. On the members who vote with this administration and then go home and tell their constituents they had no choice. The Trump Scorecard will become a Democracy Scorecard—real-time vote tracking, constituent call-ins during key votes, rapid mobilization around democracy-stabilizing legislation. The same muscle we built to show up in the streets will be squarely aimed at the members who thought the anger on the streets wouldn't follow them home.

A Democracy Renewal Commission—a cross-faction working group of pro-democracy members of Congress, fed by our investigative pipeline, focused on the reforms no one in Washington has had the stomach to pass. Anti-corruption initiatives. DOJ independence. Inspectors general with real protections. Whistleblower expansion. Foreign disinformation defense. Not a wish list—a legislative agenda powered by our movement.

The Trump Administrative Action Database will become a structured briefing tool for House Oversight, a searchable public corruption index, a litigation support resource for watchdog groups. Monthly investigative memos. Quarterly reports. Referral packages for inspectors general and state attorneys general. Accountability Trump can’t block.

An Annual Public Democracy Report—documented abuses, disinformation networks mapped, corporate complicity named, an ongoing legislative to-do list.

This is how we move from activism to documented institutional accountability.

We'll also have to live with those who were captured by MAGA. I don't believe they're beyond reach. I believe many of them were promised dignity and given someone else to blame instead. Many were raised to expect and depend on white supremacy. I believe they were taught that cruelty was strength and empathy was weakness. I believe many of them have been lied to for so long they no longer remember the concept of truth.

The closest American analogue to the work in front of us is Reconstruction—the actual one, before it was abandoned. A country that had just concluded a war against itself attempted, for a brief moment, to imagine a shared future across a chasm it had created. It failed, in large part, because the political class lost the nerve to finish. We're not in that same position, but we're in its echo. We'll have one chance to do what they couldn't—to hold people accountable for what they enabled, to deliver justice for the victims, to force a reckoning with what this administration actually did, and then, in time, to find our way to reconciliation. And in more time, to forgiveness.

This is years of work. And if it's the only thing we do, it won't be enough.

The second front: The people

I've long argued that the causes of Trumpism are cultural rather than political.

Restoring the letter of our institutions without restoring their spirit—pluralism, truth, civic duty, non-authoritarian leadership—leaves us exactly as exposed as we were before. The guardrails didn't fail because they were badly written. They failed because the country had stopped believing in the project they were built to protect.

The political architecture is necessary. It isn't sufficient.

So the second front is cultural, and it's every bit as operational as the first.

A National Campus Democracy Tour across key media markets, with movement leaders in conversation with cross-ideological student groups — including conservative ones, because democracy isn't a partisan project and we aren't going to build it as if it were.

A Veterans for Constitutional Democracy Initiative, using our national veterans network to host American Renewal Forums in districts across the country. When veterans lead the defense of democracy, sustaining democracy stops being something cable news argues about and becomes what it always was—a civic responsibility. That's the move that takes us from protest energy to moral legitimacy.

Our cultural renewal effort will anchor institutional legacy projects built to outlast all of us: An American Democracy Defense Fellowship that trains a hundred young organizers a year in constitutional literacy, disinformation analysis, and ethical civic leadership.

An Anti-Disinformation Lab, expanding our social listening and narrative disruption capacity with university partners—because we can't sustain a democracy if fake actors are allowed to overrun its public square.

A Digital Archive of Democratic Resistance preserving movement history, whistleblower testimony, and victim accounts because authoritarian regimes survive on forgetting, and we won't let this one be forgotten.

These aren't soft programs surrounding the hard political work. They are the hard work. The culture that produced Trumpism is the same culture that will either absorb the next shock or buckle under it.

And the next shock is already here.

The wave nobody wants to talk about

While we've been fighting Trump, something else has been building. Not in Washington. Not at a rally in a desert. In the server farms and the venture capital spreadsheets and the earnings calls of the small number of men who showed up to clap for him in January: Artificial intelligence.

The oligarchy has never possessed a better tool to dispossess us of our dignity, and it's facing very little resistance in its implementation.

It helps to remember that we've seen this kind of transformation before. When the tenant-farm system in Britain collapsed in the nineteenth century, rural workers flooded into Manchester and Birmingham. By 1851, Britain had become the first urban-majority society in human history. A triumph, if you read it at the scale of nations. But for the people who actually lived through it, the reward for displacement wasn't prosperity. It was factory labor. Working-class poverty in England remained above thirty percent into the 1930s. It took nearly a century for that technological revolution to translate into broader household wealth.

Technological revolutions reorganize labor quickly. Shared prosperity arrives slowly, if it arrives at all. And in the long gap between the two, someone always gets crushed—and a small group get rich enough to exploit both the new conditions and the crushing itself.

We're living inside that gap right now.

Goldman Sachs finds that unemployment among 20- to 30-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations has risen nearly three percentage points since the start of 2025. Entry-level job postings have declined approximately 35 percent since January 2023, according to Revelio Labs. The IMF estimates that 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies carry high AI exposure. Anthropic's own labor market research found that job-finding rates for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most exposed fields are down roughly 14 percent relative to 2022—even as aggregate unemployment holds flat.

This is how structural change hides. Not in mass layoffs, but in a quietly closing door the unemployment rate never registers.

Aquiles La Grave—a Boulder business owner who served as a delegate at the 2026 Colorado Democratic assembly—wrote recently about standing in a convention hall full of candidates across dozens of races and watching almost none of them treat AI as something voters should be thinking about. The silence was deafening, he wrote. His own Pearl Street company should have added a dozen to two dozen good-paying junior roles in recent months. Those jobs were never posted. They simply ceased to exist.

The skeptics will say the hype outruns the reality. My friend Gary Marcus has made that case as rigorously as anyone, and he isn't wrong about the hype. But whether full displacement is two years away or ten isn't really the question. The question is whether we're building the economic and civic ladders for a transition that is, already, measurably, underway.

The fear nobody wants to name

The American professional class is about to experience something it hasn't experienced in living memory.

Not the fear of poverty—though that is real—but the fear of irrelevance. The creeping certainty that the degree you took on debt to earn, the skills you spent a decade building, the career identity you constructed may be undervalued, or discarded, or quietly automated out from under you. That the ladder you climbed is being pulled up behind you by people you'll never meet and have no way to stop.

That fear isn't irrational.

Historically, it's the exact emotional raw material from which authoritarian movements are built. The Weimar middle class didn't turn on its democracy because it was poor. It turned on its democracy because it had been middle class and was losing the identity that came with it, so it looked for someone to blame and someone to follow.

Displaced dignity, in every generation, eventually finds a strongman to restructure it as grievance.

I've spent a year watching frightened people struggle to find a politics that meets their fear rather than exploiting it. I've watched my own neighbors—good people, kind people, parents of small children—get swept into grievance.

I don't want to fight the same battle twice, which is why the two fronts are actually one fight: The young professionals entering a constricted labor market are the people who should be recruited into democratic leadership pipelines. The universities and community colleges that need reform to build new economic ladders are the exact institutions that a reinvigorated congressional reform agenda should engage. The reconciliation dialogues between communities divided by culture are inseparable from the reconciliation dialogues between communities divided by displacement. The anti-disinformation infrastructure we built to counter foreign campaigns is the same infrastructure we'll need against the AI-generated disinformation that will soon consume our information environments.

The fear generated by displacement is the raw material disinformation will weaponize. Channeling that fear into institution-building rather than grievance politics is the difference between a resilient democracy and a fragile one, and it's exactly what the oligarchy is counting on us not to do.

What I know, because I've lived it

I want to end where I began, because I think the most important thing I can tell you isn't strategic. It's personal.

I've seen what a country looks like when it stops asking what it's becoming. I grew up in one. I know the particular tiredness of a people who have concluded that the system is just what it is, and the only thing to do is keep your head down and hope.

I also know that the United States isn't that country. Not yet.

What I've learned in the past year—from every protest, every veteran, every student, every parent who showed up when it would have been easier not to—is that the American capacity for self-correction isn't a myth. It's just dormant, and it wakes only when someone tells people, plainly and without condescension, what's actually happening and what they can actually do about it.

The authoritarian wave is going to take years to fully resolve. The AI wave is going to take a generation. The people who will do that work are in high schools and community colleges and entry-level jobs that are quietly disappearing right now. They're rightfully frightened, and they're waiting—whether they know it or not—for a movement that takes their fear seriously without ever weaponizing it.

A movement that gives them purpose.

A movement that gives them hope.

That's the movement I'm trying to build.

That's what the fight on two fronts—political and cultural—is for.

History won't remember this moment for the speeches we gave or the op-eds we wrote, mine included. It will remember whether—when oligarchy came at us from two directions at once—we had the imagination to see both and the discipline to answer both at once.

I grew up in Joaquín Balaguer's Dominican Republic. I came to this country by choice, and fell in love with it the way only an immigrant can: Aware of what it is and what it could be, and how thin the line is between the two.

We're standing on that line right now. What we do in the window after the midterms will decide which side of it we end up on.

I intend to be on the right side.

I'm asking you to join me there.

In solidarity,

Carlos Álvarez-Aranyos
Founder, American Opposition