Democracy Futurist Aditi Juneja: Why We Need to Look 50 Years Ahead
Season 2 Episode 6
The best way to unstick the present is to think further into the future.
In this episode of How We Future, Lisa Kay Solomon sits down with Aditi Juneja, Executive Director of Democracy 2076, to explore how thinking 50 years ahead can break down current obstacles and make seemingly unrealistic hopes feel very possible. Democracy 2076 helps us plan democracy not for the next election cycle, but for the next 50 years, all the way to America’s tricentennial in 2076.
The conversation reveals how the media we consume shapes our perception of what democracy looks like. From Scandal normalizing election fraud to The West Wing making some viewers think our government is running smoothly, Aditi’s research uncovers how TV shows and movies are quietly teaching us civics.
You’ll also hear:
Why a 50-year timeline makes change feel possible instead of impossible
What happens when people sit down to design constitutional amendments together
Why we need to give people a menu of possibilities, not just ask them to imagine the future
The episode closes with practical advice for staying resilient in noisy political times. Thank you, Aditi, for joining How We Future!
Links from the episode:
🎧 Listen now:
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📖 Read now:
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow, starting today.
What if the future of democracy is something we deliberately design? This week, I’m talking with Aditi Juneja, founder of Democracy 2076. Aditi is thinking further than the next election cycle; in fact, further than many election cycles. She’s asking us to imagine democracy 50 years from now, and then work backwards to figure out what we need to change today.
We explore why expanding our time horizon can remove the constraints of making us feel stuck, how the media we consume, from Scandal to Star Wars, shapes what we believe is possible, and why different audiences need different narratives to imagine a democracy that works. Aditi shares advice on how to stay resilient in noisy political times, why being a doer beats being a news consumer, and how to push for 50-year visions instead of just four-year plans. Let’s jump in with Aditi.
Aditi, I am so happy to welcome you to How We Future. We met last year. You’re one of those people where I learned about your work, and I was like, “Wait, what? I want to put everything under my pillow immediately.” You’re doing what, in what way, for what reason? Amazing. We are going to tap into all of that and really give more listeners a chance to learn about you and your work because I think it is just so powerful the way you are trying to reframe democracy. Welcome to How We Future, and we’re so glad you’re here.
Aditi Juneja: Thank you so much. I’m so glad to be here.
Lisa: Let’s start with your organization, audaciously called Democracy 2076. That is not around the corner. That is in the far distance. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about what the organization is and how you came to start it.
Aditi: Democracy 2076, the goal is to try to help us reimagine democracy for the next generation. The reason we named it Democracy 2076 was because I kept finding that when I would try to talk to people about big, audacious goals for the future, they would say, “That’s not possible. You can’t do that. There are all these constraints.” I found that when I said, “Well, what if we try to do it over 50 years?” they were like, “Well, anything can happen over 50 years.” It was really about trying to expand people’s imagination of what is possible, which feels desperately needed in this moment.
Lisa: I love that. I often hear in futures work that expanding the time horizon is actually a liberating force as opposed to a constricting force. In fact, it’s sometimes easier to imagine bolder solutions in the longer term than immediately, but our attention is focused on the immediate. We’re trapped in this cycle of the urgent overtakes the important sometimes. I think even the framing of it gives people, first of all, intrigue, like, “What? What is happening?” Also, an opportunity to move beyond the “Well, that would never happen because,” which is the killer.
Aditi: If you’re stuck in “that will never happen because,” when the thing changes that you think is the because, you don’t know what to do. If you’re thinking, well, we could never pass constitutional amendments because Republicans wouldn’t allow X thing to happen or Democrats wouldn’t allow Y thing to happen, and then suddenly Democrats change their position on X or Republicans change their position on Y, you’re flabbergasted. You’ve never thought about a future where these constraints didn’t exist.
It makes you a lot less adaptable as well if you’re really only imagining and planning within a very strong set of constraints. Whereas if you’ve thought about a broader range of possibilities, then as the context shifts and the circumstances evolve, you’re much more agile, which isn’t about visioning and imagination and the woo-woo of it all. It is a very tactical, pragmatic approach to being a better change agent in the world.
Lisa: I totally agree. One of the things that I really appreciate about what you’re doing is that you’re stretching our belief around what could be, and you’re also building the capacity of the people that you’re working with. You don’t do this solo. You’re very much a coalition builder and someone that is trying to do this collectively that stretches us, but also has the relevance of now. I wonder, again, if you could talk just about your approach around balancing those two things of being so pie in the sky that it’s like, “Okay, this is fantasy land with Aditi, but I really got to get back to my real work.” How do you think about those two things?
Aditi: It’s interesting that thinking 50 years into the future feels like fantasy land to people because when you ask people about 1972, that doesn’t feel like fantasy land. It’s the same distance from the present. I’m very often in conversations where people are making references to the Civil Rights Era or to Reconstruction or to the Gilded Age, but somehow thinking that far into the future feels just impossible to people. It’s just an interesting thing about the flexibility of our minds. Civil Rights Era, that just happened, but 2076, that’s a fantasy far in the future, which is just an interesting thing about the human mind.
For us, it’s not that I naturally love coalitions. Anyone who’s run or worked in coalition knows that there are frustrating aspects about it. There’s the old adage that you can’t go far if you try to go solo. For the types of changes we’re talking about, the scale of things we’re talking about, it is a field-wide, society-wide effort. I think that is paralyzing for people. When you talk about constitutional change, people are like, “That’s two-thirds of Congress. That’s 38 states.” I’m like, “Okay, so let’s bring together leaders from across the 50 states and build a strategy.”
I think a lot of people hear two-thirds of Congress, 38 states, and just stop, as opposed to thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot of people. That’s really hard. What would you need to do to make that happen?” Then what we found is when you start naming what you need to do, the things that feel impossible start to feel possible. We had a gathering last year where we brought together national and state partners to think through the strategy for amending the Constitution. What are the activities you need to do 15, 30, 45 years? Put a dollar amount on it.
From the start to the end of the convening, people’s confidence that we could amend the Constitution went up 30%. Just sitting down and taking the time to try to make a plan. We didn’t give them any guidance on how to make the plan. We didn’t know the answer either. Being able to do it with other people is really powerful because we all have a piece of the puzzle. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. Whether it’s policy or advertisement or marketing, whatever your realm is, you just can’t do things alone. If you can come to it with your piece of the puzzle and others can come to it with theirs, it’s much more than the sum of its parts.
A lot of our work I see as coordinating and catalyzing, where we’re coordinating a set of actors who are all holding a disparate piece of the pie. Then we’re catalyzing where we’re beginning to see gaps. Where we’re like, oh, there’s no one working on this, but there’s someone who’s well situated to do it. Can we go to them and say, “Hey, would you consider stepping into this type of role?”
Lisa: I love that research that even our mindset can shift. Even if we didn’t land at an answer, by just engaging in it, it changes our stance towards agency and our posture towards possibility. Unrelated but kind of related, we recently had Chip Conley on, who is really focused on learning to love midlife. He has this reframe that we should not be thinking about midlife as a crisis, but as a chrysalis. He brings in research from a Yale professor that says even just changing our mindset towards aging improves our lifespan by seven and a half years.
There’s this interesting thing that just even by engaging with the frame that we can improve the probability that we can make a difference, which is so critical in this moment where we feel so powerless and lacking agency. I would just add one more thing to that. I love that catalyzing and curating is that you’re framing. Yes, it’s audacious, but you’re shrinking it in a container that makes it manageable. Specifically, you have three big, I would call, frames or projects. There’s one around the constitution, 2076, that you just mentioned, one around imagining 2076, which I really want to get into — I just think that work is fascinating — and one around coalitions, 2076.
Maybe we’ll start a little bit more with the constitution, 2076. I think that was your first effort to try to really interrogate what is possible if we take a longer timeframe. Maybe you could just share a little bit more about that project.
Aditi: It originated actually back in 2019 when I was still at Protect Democracy, and we were having conversations about how we got into the authoritarian crisis. There are two things that are a little bit unique about our constitution. It’s the oldest constitution in the world. Most other countries have had to rewrite their constitution in the 20th century after World War II, either because colonization ended or because of World War II. Ours is the most enduring one. We have two big problems with it. One is there’s inbuilt minoritarianism. What that means is that democracy is supposed to be governance by will of the majority, but we have systems and structures that make it anti-majoritarian.
The Senate is an example of that. The Electoral College is an example of that. The Supreme Court is an example of that. There are these ways where the majority of Americans’ voices are not heard. Often when I think about legislation, for example, where 80% of Americans across the political spectrum agree, there is a compromised position on abortion that most Americans agree on. There is a compromised position on gun rights that most Americans agree on, but it doesn’t get through Congress. Why is that? It usually gets held up in the Senate, which is a minoritarian institution. That’s one problem.
Then the second is our constitution only has negative rights. The framing of our constitution is we have our rights from God. We are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. The government is not allowed to infringe on those rights. The government will not infringe upon our freedom of speech. It’s a lot of shall not. Constitutions go through trends, and in the 20th century, it became much more trendy to have positive rights. Then constitutions became social contracts. It became an answer to the question of what do we owe one another. We owe each other a right to education. We owe each other a right to vote. Our constitution doesn’t have any of that.
That can feel like a theoretical exercise, but for your ordinary citizen who feels frustrated about healthcare subsidies or with their SNAP benefits ending, they don’t have recourse. They can’t sue their government and say, “You’re supposed to provide me food. You’re supposed to make sure I have access to health. You’re supposed to make sure that I can vote.” You don’t have that recourse. A lot of these processes end up being lawyers filing lawsuits about process issues. Process issues feel very disconnected from people’s everyday lives. It feels confusing that surely I pay taxes. Doesn’t the government owe me something? That feels like a gap in our constitution.
As I said, we brought together organizers from across the country to begin running a strategic foresight exercise, looking at different possible futures and asking the question, what do we need to change between now and then so we can have a representative, responsive, and effective government so that no matter what happens, whether it’s climate change or another big technological boom, that we can be adaptive and meet the needs of our citizens.
Lisa: I love that reframe. Again, this idea of we’re here today, this is built on this history. Does it reflect our preferred future? How might we change elements of it without blowing it up, having a total revolution to get closer to where we are today? How do we maybe take the best of the enduring elements, but also not be afraid to question the things that are not serving us? I love the framing. This, in some ways, gets to the next project that I want to talk about around Imagine 2060, which is, I mean, fascinating. I can’t even believe you took on a third project after this one because there’s so much to unpack there.
One of the biggest takeaways of that was, where do we learn civic education? This idea even that the constitution was built on shall nots, I don’t think most people know that. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about imagining 2076, which was really about civic awareness, civic education, storytelling and narrative and where it shows up in our daily life, and some of the insights that that fostered around just-- well, I would say no fault, but there are systems in place that are essentially not prioritizing us to be an informed civic body. Where do we even get our information about what we believe to be true or not regarding what democracy should be doing or not doing?
Anyway, maybe just start with talking about Imagining 2076, and I’ve got so many questions about it.
Aditi: The origination of this project, which I think is worth sharing to answer your question, was after the 2020 election, as the big lie took hold, I was really struck by the fact that one of the most popular shows on TV for the six years prior was Scandal. On that show, the president stole an election by altering a voting machine, killed a Supreme Court justice, and killed a reporter to cover it up, and then won reelection. It really sparked a question for me of, what are we normalizing? When Trump goes on Fox and says Dominion Voting stole this election, you can’t actually do that.
It’s not possible to alter voting machines in the way that they were describing, but everyone says, “Yes, it is. I watched it for six years on ABC. It was the most popular show on Thursday nights.” When I watch Scandal, as someone with a lot of civic education and a lot of experience, I know where they’re pushing the boundary, and this is silly, versus where it’s real. Most Americans don’t know that. Only about half of Americans have had any civic education, and if they have, it was one time in high school. About 42% of Americans actively avoid political news. They’re not reading the paper. They’re not even seeing politics on their TikTok; they’re scrolling past it. They’re actively trying to avoid it.
That means where they’re learning it is in entertainment media. It’s in the TV shows they watch, it’s in the movies they watch, and they’re not all scandals. I heard yesterday that people watching a Black president on 24 might have been the reason we got Obama. It’s a really mixed bag. I think that in the democracy space, culture and pop culture in particular is really undervalued. We did a set of research with Harmony Labs that came out earlier this year to really understand what depictions of democracy and government look like in film and TV.
Then this year, so it’ll be out in January, we did another set of research to really understand what are the stories that help different audiences feel a sense of agency and imagination for the future, because the stories we tell ourselves are just everything. The stories you tell yourself about middle age affect your lifespan. Surely, the stories we’re telling ourselves about our democracy and whether it can improve and whether we can do something to improve affect whether we vote, affect whether we think it’s worth participating at all, and affect how we choose to participate, because do we even know what we want to change? Do we know what we’re trying to get to?
Lisa: I just think it is so captivating. The futures nerd in me, when I saw and heard about that research that you’re doing, thought about this concept called The Image of the Future that comes from Fred Polak, who is a Holocaust survivor. He’s a sociologist in his 20s, was saved by a Dutch family, and then in the ‘50s actually came to Stanford to try to understand how did Nazi Germany get this idea socialized of the destruction and cruelty and mass killing and death that they did. One of the conclusions he’s had was that the image that a society has about its future will dictate its behavior.
If you believe that a society is thriving and growing, then the culture will follow. The reverse is true, that if you see that the image is in decay or dystopic array, that will also then dictate just a decay of society. It’s so powerful, but it’s in the air. It’s not talked about enough. Your study was one of the most powerful and recent examples of really taking a look at this. How do the stories that we’re consuming influence our belief around what can be and what should be? I’m dating myself, but I’m certainly longing back for The West Wing. Let’s get The West Wing back. That was one of the first shows that really popularized discourse debate.
Again, I’m sure there was a whole lot of license taken, but it was a much more productive look at thoughtful individuals trying to be in public service in a different way than I think some of the certainly Scandal, the dystopic narrative.
Aditi: What’s interesting is we looked at West Wing in our research. It’s one of my favorite shows as well. What we saw is West Wing only moves to values-based audiences. There’s one who actually moves backwards on questions of democracy. For people power who like insider transformers, they have the attitude that you have about The West Wing. For people whose primary value is community, they approach it the way you did. Even for people whose primary value is order, they watch The West Wing, and they’re like, “They’re good people who are trying to return a system to order,” and they really like insiders.
For people who are more outsider-oriented and want to restore the system, they watch The West Wing and they think there are no problems in our democracy. The system works. Why do I need to do anything to change it? That’s why doing this type of research, I think, is really important because the stories I tell myself that inspire me for the future of democracy are really different than the stories you might tell yourself or the stories your average voter might tell themselves. We see this in all kinds of messaging. For anyone who’s done political messaging, you know the people who are worst at predicting what messaging resonates with voters are experts. You know too much.
If you work in this space and you think about democracy all day long, you’re like me. You watch Star Wars and you go, “This is a movie about democracy. It’s so great. Why didn’t anybody tell me?” Most people don’t watch it and think that. Most people don’t go to the Barbie movie and leave going, “Man, why did they have to disenfranchise men at the end? Why couldn’t it be one person, one vote?” That’s not most people’s reaction. This type of research is really important to understand how different audiences need different stories, because the stories that work for me do not work for Trump voters. They are different stories.
Particularly in a moment where we have authoritarian crisis, it’s really important for us to understand for the people who are susceptible to authoritarian appeals that exist in our politics right now, what are the stories they need to be able to imagine a future of democracy that works?
Lisa: Yes, it’s such an important point. Thank you so much for naming it and calling it out. The research also similarly seemed to suggest that, like Maverick’s, people working outside the system also had an appeal. Whether it was-- I think you talked about richer or white-collar folks that had a more rebellious side of changing the system. That that was actually a strong motivator towards action than, as you said, defending the status quo or just suggesting everything is fine here, nothing to see.
Aditi: The White Collar one actually really sparked something for me because it’s about an outsider changing the system, but that outsider can also be a criminal. That really made it clear to me why Donald Trump’s 17 indictments bounced off him like Teflon because there are people who watch hours of TV a day, whether it’s The Sopranos or White Collar, where an outsider criminal is improving the system. It fits a preexisting narrative that they have about how change happens.
Similarly, there are these them-versus-us Maverick stories about war, like Top Gun Maverick is an example. If you’re telling them-versus-us narratives, that really lands for people. They’re crime procedurals. That’s some people’s primary understanding of our government and our democracy. If you’re watching that, someone talking about what’s happening in Chicago or Baltimore, that all lands for you. It really struck me that Donald Trump intuitively really had an understanding of three of the four quadrants. He was talking to three of the four audiences at all times, whereas I think Harris and Biden really were only talking to one audience.
Lisa: Such an interesting way. For everybody listening, we will put a link to the full report, which is not only so rich in its insights, it’s also beautiful. It’s really fun to read and look at, and has fantastic graphics that situate the reader in these different quadrants. No political degree required in order to go and check that out. Aditi, I read that, and I was like — with no background in teaching civics, although as you know, I’ve tinkered and we can talk about that in a minute — I want to rewrite a new civics curricula that has Star Trek, Star Wars, Black Panther, White Collar, Top Gun, Barbie.
As you said, there’s so much to learn about what’s in there instead of the way that we tend to teach it, which is now go memorize these three branches and study what they mean, and then they forget it. One of the ways we first got connected was, I think you had heard about a program that I started back in 2019, ahead of the 2020 election, with-- again, I was a government major many years ago, but that’s it. I didn’t have, but I was like, what might design and futures offer young voters to help them feel more empowered to be engaged?
We have this very pervasive, and I think false, narrative that young people are apathetic. They don’t vote, the voting is low, low turnout, they must be apathetic. I just wanted to question that. I was like, “Is that true?” I don’t think that’s true. Maybe they’re undersupported. Maybe they feel like impostors. Maybe they feel put off because most of the civic information and systems are really hard to navigate. They’re poorly designed. I created a experimental class called Designing the President, which basically was around inviting young voters to think of themselves as hiring managers. Forget the whole you got to vote, shame, guilt, blame.
It was like, hey, when you turn 18, you become a hiring manager. That means you have power. That’s so cool. What are you going to do with that? Anyway, I went through then a process to help them deliberately think about, wow, if I’m a hiring manager, what am I hiring for? Where is the job of the president? Where does it live? Oh, there’s a job description. It’s Article 2 of the Constitution. That got us into a much more productive conversation about leadership qualities that would make someone good at this.
All of this is to say I think that your approach of deconstructing where we think about the future, how we think about the future of these democracies, that there’s so much more for us to take a look at than just what the pollsters or what the experts want us to view.
Aditi: Yes. I think there’s certainly a way of thinking about how you use pop culture to design civic education curriculums. Another way to think about it is when everyone is talking about a pop culture moment, how can you participate in the conversation that’s already happening? In an attention economy that we’re living in right now, it is so hard to get people’s attention. If we can be in the conversations that people are already having, talking about things they’re already interested in, helping them make connections, I think that’s really powerful.
Anne Helen Peterson has this quote. She says, “We talk about celebrities to talk about ourselves from a distance.” I’m butchering the quote a little bit. The idea is when we’re talking about-- when you’re like, “Why is everyone so obsessed with the Kardashians? Why are people online deconstructing the Wicked movie and whether it’s okay to support Elphaba? Should you feel bad for Glinda or is Glinda an accomplice?” That was a real conversation people were having after the Wicked movie. That’s a powerful conversation about your responsibility as a bystander and as someone who gets wrapped up into a system.
The conversation about Glinda is, is she a victim or is she a perpetrator by virtue of being an accomplice? That is not a conversation about a movie. That is a conversation about 2025 politics, but people are having it through the lens of this movie. If we’re not showing up for those conversations, we’re seeding them to the people who are.
Lisa: I love looking at that as an invitation to have it and an invitation to learn, as opposed to where we are right now, which is, I think, fleeing to the extremes and getting very uncomfortable when something doesn’t fit within our worldview. It’s in some ways similar to what we’re talking about. Stretching out the timeline to 2076 allows you to have a different conversation than what’s going to happen in the upcoming midterms or somewhere else. It changes the frame dramatically.
In my background and scenario planning, it’s one of the big benefits. It’s just much easier to agree in a longer timeframe. It’s much easier to have a thoughtful conversation maybe about Glinda and Elphaba, as it is about something that’s a little bit hotter at the moment. It gives us practice. It gives us flight hours.
Aditi: Yes, totally. You reach a whole different audience because 42% of people who are going to scroll past your political TikTok will sit and watch your TikTok about Wicked. It’s about who you can even reach because, again, we’re in an attention economy where the algorithms are controlling everything. If you’re trying to draw people to your conversation, that’s not going to work. I also think that, to your point on the longer timeframe, yes, you’re having a different conversation about the future, but that also then enables you to have a different conversation about the midterms.
Around healthcare subsidies, for example, I had a conversation with someone who works in health policy about a right to health, like a constitutional right to health. They were expressing to me this frustration that we go from the ACA is working to it’s trying to be torn down and we’re just going between those two polls, and we’re never moving past the ACA. I said, “Well, you don’t have to get into that trap. Instead of talking about subsidies and defending the ACA, you could be advocating for a right to health.” The response was, “If people don’t want the ACA, surely they’re not going to want a right to health.” I said, “Well, you don’t know that.”
The ACA has been very politicized. People like the ACA and hate Obamacare. There’s been so much information and polarization around this topic, but most people haven’t really thought about a right to health. It’s not a polarized, politicized issue. Wouldn’t it be worth finding out if you could have a different conversation? I’m not magic that that occurred to me. It’s that I was thinking about over the next 50 years, ideally, what do we want for our constitution? Which means then when we’re talking about an ACA fight on healthcare subsidies that shut down the government, I’m thinking about that in a different way. To me, that is the value.
The value is not, oh, Aditi will be prepared for 2076, so the rest of us don’t have to worry about it. The value is, can we do the present better?
Lisa: Absolutely. Can we expand the surface area and the optionality of what we’re looking at as possible levers rather than get caught in a conversation that somebody else framed? A couple of quick things come up. We also had a great opportunity to have a conversation with Dan Roam, who is the author of Back of the Napkin, how to solve complex problems with simple pictures. He is really a visual thinking guru and really talks about why visualizing the problem enables us to solve the problem. Again, I’ll call out that because of the visual way in which you are sharing your research, it is inviting different conversations, which I so appreciate.
He had this great story from when the ACA was in development, where it was like a 1,300-page bill with no pictures. It was causing all these debate like death panels and this and that and polarized. First of all, I’m sure nobody really read the 1,300-page bill. He locked himself in a room with a healthcare expert — he was not a healthcare expert — for a week to go through it. They drew something like 33 pictures to describe. Within a week, he put them up on SlideShare, which was like the slide-sharing moment. Within a week, it was the most downloaded SlideShare presentation ever. Then he was invited by the White House to come in.
My point is, this is the idea of when we feel stuck, maybe the answer is not retreat or just try harder, it’s look for different ways in. Look for ways that are inviting, that allow us to grow together, that allow us to have a different kind of conversation. It may just be The Hunger Games is the way in, or Elphaba or however. It reminds me also one more thing I’ll share. Last year, I created a gathering at the Stanford d.school called The Future is Happening, which was trying to do something similar to what you were doing around what if democracy goes right? How do we spark our imagination, not in a way that feels unrealistic but is built on bright spots of today?
This idea of why don’t we gather democracy makers, movers, and multipliers to learn from each other? Makers being innovators like you — you’re really all of them. Folks that are trying something new, whether it’s Amplifier art or Athletes Unlimited, which is this incredible new professional sports league that honors civic life. Movers being teachers, educators, and multipliers being networks and funders. What could we do if we learn from each other, taking a positive frame towards the future? The coalitions and the conversations and the experiments that follow just blew my mind just from changing the frame.
I just want to call out a specific finding in your work where you say seeing the future helps inspire imagination, just inviting them to see the future.
Aditi: When we look at the baseline numbers, over 70% of Americans across demographics understand there’s a problem. Less than half feel like they know what they should be doing about it, and less than a third feel like they can imagine the future. You were talking about having an image of the future and how that shapes our actions in the present. We see that in the exit polls from 2024. Americans who felt like America’s best days were ahead of us voted for Harris, and Americans who felt like our best days were behind us voted for Trump. Being able to imagine the future is so core to wanting to work for it. In the absence of that, it totally makes sense that you would be looking to the past and trying to figure out how to get back there. Or you’d be like, “I don’t know what it should be, so let’s just burn it all down anyway,” because you’re not clear on what you want to burn down and what you want to drive forward. I thought in the Constitution work, it was really interesting. There were people who came in with a burn-it-all-down mentality. Having to sit there and think about the long-term future and the institutions they would need, it actually was a really moderating force for people. That they were like, actually, free speech, good. Separation of powers, good.
There’s some of this stuff that we don’t like or some things we think we’re missing, but 80% of this is good. Forcing folks to get really clear on their vision for the future actually, in a lot of ways, moves you away from the whole system is rigged, it doesn’t matter what I do, we have no power, and allows you to be really precise about the changes that we need. When you have precision, then it’s not overwhelming. Then you have a tactic that you’re trying to achieve. People even said that to us about the Constitution work. “We do visioning exercises, but it feels like it’s all over the place. It’s so overwhelming.”
With amendments, there’s a clear process. Even if it’s a hard process, at least we know what to do. At least it’s concrete. I think that’s the other value of it. I think sometimes people think doing futures work is unwieldy, but I think it can actually really have this focusing effect, where you realize how much is working. You can become much more specific about what you want to keep, what you want to change, and what’s missing.
Lisa: I so appreciate that. You actually foreshadowed — ever the futurist — the question I was going to ask, which is that not everybody listening to this is deep in the political conversation as you are, or as I sometimes dabble in. I wondered what you’ve learned from applying foresight in this very real, very meaty, adaptive, wicked problem of sorts. What have you learned about the foresight practice, and maybe what others who are in organizations or trying to figure out how to help their teams or their companies have a longer lens? Just curious what’s come up.
Aditi: There are just some very basic principles of foresight that I think I found to be very important, which is that it really matters to have multiple futures. That is part of the foresight practice. I think that often when you’re doing visioning or projections, you are only thinking about one future. I think that makes us less resilient. It also makes us scared of the future. I also find that often people don’t want to have a conversation about the future because they’re scared about what might happen in the future. You need to be able to hold a thoughtful container for it. Often the way I invite people into that conversation is by simply saying what we’re doing right now is not working.
I’m not making promises of how I can fix things. I’m saying we need to experiment with other stuff. Let’s try this. I think for someone who’s inside of a company or an organization where there’s reticence, not trying to sell people hopes and dreams, but simply saying, “Hey, thinking on a two to five-year timeline isn’t working. Shouldn’t we at least try to find out if it changes something to think longer term?” Let’s find out. Let’s learn. I think that also of not overselling it, and it really being a practice.
Then I think the third is giving people a menu of options for the future. What I’ve seen in the constitution work, but I just came from an exercise on campaigns, is that people don’t have the innovations in their head already. Especially if you’re trying to bring together power brokers who have the power to make the changes, they are very ingrained in existing systems. If you’re at a company and you’re trying to think about how you can do direct-to-consumer marketing differently, the people who currently work on that team are not going to have the innovations in their mind.
I found having a menu of options from people — from other companies, other countries, other states — is actually really helpful in expanding their imagination. It gets people away from that’s not possible because it is possible. They do it in India, they do it in Georgia, they did it in ancient Greece, being able to give people a menu of possibilities. Not that they have to pick from those menu of options, but it helps just expand the range of what is possible. I think that in the absence of that, people can very clearly name what they don’t like about existing systems and processes, but really struggle with the alternative. You need a menu of alternatives in order to spark more conversation.
Lisa: Aditi, that is such gold insight for so many reasons. One is we often ask people, so what do you want in the future? They don’t know.
Aditi: They don’t know.
Lisa: Or they tell you what they think you want to hear, which is why I think from a research perspective, surveys can be so problematic, because they give this false sense that we know what people want when we really don’t know what they want. Giving them something to react to, to try to elicit what’s really going on, and to try to learn, as opposed to present or convince. It is such a different switch. Then that other piece that you said, which I think is so powerful, is creating a space where they can learn and try. You didn’t say the word psychological safety, but I think that’s absolutely critical because of the work that I do that spans design and futures.
I, as you might imagine, get a lot of requests to do a futures boot camp, much like we did a design thinking boot camp, to help spark ideas and innovation. I think you can get a lot of value out of having an episodic moment where you explore the future, but it’s not enough. At the end of a design or design sprint, sometimes you hear like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so creative. I didn’t think I was creative because I couldn’t draw. This is amazing.” With futures, sometimes you get a little bit of that, like, “Oh crap, this is hard. We got a lot to do. We have more vulnerabilities than I thought. We got to get much more serious about what’s robust.”
You don’t have that same adrenaline cortisol shot because it just suggests that there’s more work to do, there’s more learning to do because, of course, the future isn’t a given. I think those are really great suggestions, particularly around having some options for people to respond to.
Aditi: I think if you don’t have next steps and a way for people to take action from what they’ve learned, doing futures work can be unkind because you are exposing people to the fact that we’re not taking big enough swings in the present. That was a big impetus for me for Democracy 2076. I was like, it can’t be that the pinnacle of democracy reform is open primaries. That can’t be the biggest idea we have. Like, “The system is so broken, we need more.” If you don’t have a plan or you don’t have a next step of like, “We’re going to come back together next year or in the next month,” and actually build a strategy to achieve it, then you’ve now given people all of these ideas of things that are possible.
I worry, actually, that might lower their sense of agency and optimism for the future because they now know more is possible and no one is even trying to get there. Not everyone is the kind of person who’s going to say, “Oh shit, I need to be the person who gets us there.” Most people need some support and a container to do that. I think making sure that if you’re bringing folks together, thinking about the next steps is important.
Lisa: It’s a responsibility for sure. The whole premise behind How We Future really stems from my very first year working on a political campaign as a 21-year-old. I went to Washington, and I was working for a senator from my home state of Pennsylvania. I was like, “Okay. Well, they’ll teach me how to do this.” What I learned in that year that has shaped the rest of my career and even this initiative is there is no they. You are the they. We are the they.
Going back to something you’ve said a few times around the attention economy, we’ve got to scaffold some different ways that people get involved, because if not, then it will get outsourced for us. It’s getting increasingly harder, which to me means that this work is ever more important.
Speaking of scaffolds, I want to maybe close out talking about your latest project that scaffolds five different scenarios of what might unfold in our future. Tell us a little bit about Coalition 2076.
Aditi: If we’re talking about imagining what the future in our democracy might look like and we’re thinking about the structural parts of constitutional change, an obvious question is, how do you get the politics to get that done? That’s a very obvious next step. It’s interesting to know that in the United States, our political parties realign every 30 or so years. What we mean by a realignment is while the party’s names don’t change, what they stand for changes, who is in them changes, and the ideology that drives them shifts.
That’s why the 2024 Democratic Party that spanned Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney would have seemed totally crazy in 1994. That would have seemed like such an odd-- If you had told someone in 1994 who would be endorsing the Democratic nominee, you’d be like, “What the hell? That’s not real.” The idea and the insight that drove this work was if you can track those changes in real time, then maybe you can actually shape them. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, there was a lot of conversation about what was happening. Why did this happen?
It was in 2018 that a book came out called Identity Crisis that was talking about how non-college white voters began leaving the Democratic Party after the 2008 election. Which means by the time the book was written, and the research was done, it had been 10 years since that had been happening. A whole cohort of voters had moved in that time. Not that no one was trying to intervene, but it wasn’t a widespread national story that this was happening. The question we had was, how do you observe those changes in real time, and who’s going to have that information?
It’s not going to be the data scientists and the pollsters because, to your point earlier, they only know to ask about an existing set of options. They don’t know to ask a set of questions about what changes might be coming. We brought together a variety of membership-based organizations and asked them, “What are the changes you’ve seen over the last 30 years, what are you currently seeing, and what do you think you’re likely to see?” We also did look at a lot of the research and the data, and we identified 17 emerging spectra, emerging wedge issues that are reshaping our politics and scrambling left and right, and then we utilized them to project out over the next 30 years.
What might that mean for our parties? Really trying to understand, how do we get to a scenario where both political parties are pro-democracy, but also understanding, what might it look like if both political parties are authoritarian? How will we know what the steps are to know if we’re getting there? Because something I often hear in the space is, this is like not a two or a five-year process, right? This is like a generational fight, but how do we know if we’re on track? Being able to map out where we’re going and then understanding what are the steps to getting there so we can track if we’re on track for where we’re going.
Lisa: It’s such rich research, and I love that it’s ongoing. We’ll have a link in the show notes to the interactive tool that you created, which is so cool, so everybody can participate. Again, to do it with the mind of a scientist, of being curious about this, as opposed to judgmental, which is just so key, and just a wider-range time zone or timeframe to think about, knowing that great piece of data that you put out, which is like maybe this isn’t such a blip, right? Maybe there’s some cyclicality around what’s going on here that’s wider than a single election cycle or even a week’s worth of news that could feel like, oh my gosh, so overwhelming, a lifetime’s worth.
I love how, again, you are framing it in history, and you are offering it up as another option and another perspective on how to engage in this moment because we’re just foundationally under-trained. We just are.
Aditi: Yes, and it feels really scary, right? In a week’s worth of barrage news, how do you know what to pay attention to? How do you know what is an anomaly and not something to really be worried about, versus what is actually a really bad sign of something to come? How do you distinguish that so it’s not just your own fears, and it’s not just a projection of your own anxieties? Doing it in a collective process like this, again, we don’t all have to know all the things, but we can be wiser when we’re in a collective. Very importantly, I think a lot of futures research misses out the application. What should you be doing based on this?
We didn’t leave that to people’s imagination. In this report, for each scenario, we had recommendations for the field in places where we saw that people are underinvested. Where is there not enough work happening right now?
Lisa: Oh, so valuable. 2026, no doubt, is going to be a very noisy political year. I wonder if you have any advice for people to hold on to that longer frame, besides, of course, reading your research and getting involved, and just for their own resilience and their own health and wellness. How to have a longer-term perspective while also making choices that feel agentic and right in this moment.
Aditi: The answer I always give to this question is that we have a lot of political hobbyists, people who consume a lot of news, and very few people who actually do political work. What I would say is stop reading the news and find something you actually want to change and devote your time to that. Your highest impact is going to be at the local level. It’s going to be in your community, on your school board, for your local election. Find something you actually want to do and focus on that. If you’re doing something to change our culture, you will feel more optimism about the future.
If you are stocking shelves at your food bank, it will give you optimism to see your neighbors coming together to help one another because you’ll be surrounded by doers. Being surrounded by doers is very empowering.
Lisa: I totally agree. I accidentally fell into the civics work that I was talking about. What I found is that I didn’t always know what I was doing, but at the end of every day, I felt more resilient. I called it my personal resilience strategy. That was enough to feel like you are engaging, you’re doing, and not just worrying. That shift alone can be so helpful to people. Again, I just want to say it aligns with what Howie Future is all about. Howie Future is starting with the doing. Starting with the doing.
Aditi, thank you so much for talking with me today, for sharing your incredible work. Maybe I’ll ask if there’s anything in particular, besides folks that are already engaged in this work, for whether you’re an educator or you are one of those people that wants to get involved, is there something about your work that you would invite people to investigate?
Aditi: I think in this coming year, we’re going to be sharing a lot more. You can go to our website and sign up and get updates from us on an ongoing basis. I think we’re going to be trying to be out talking a lot more in this coming year because I would really love to see over the next few years, as we move towards the presidential in 2028, my ideal for that race is to have the candidates across the political parties articulating visions for the future of democracy. I want to hear not a two-year plan or a four-year plan, but I want to hear their 50-year plan. We are all voters. We are all citizens. I would really encourage us to be pushing.
When we’re feeling stuck where it feels like we only have two options, I think asking ourselves the question, what would happen if I looked a little further? By the way, this is not just about politics and futures work. There was a time earlier this year where there were 10 crises happening in my family. Someone was sick, someone had died, someone was injured, all at the same time. I literally sat down and wrote when they were all going to be over. When is this injury going to be healed from? When is the funeral? Just to really name and to remember that the future is coming. It’s coming whether we want it to or not.
If you’re feeling stuck or down, to remember that something is going to change. With a lot of agency, I think more than we realize, in deciding what that’s going to look like.
Lisa: What a great place to end, Aditi. I couldn’t agree more. Thank you so much for all the work. We’re really excited to share this with a lot more people.
Aditi: Thank you again so much for having me.
Lisa: Thanks for spending time with me and Aditi Juneja. Here’s something to try this week. Pick one thing that feels impossible in our democracy. Then ask, what would need to be true for this to happen in 50 years? That shift from never to what would it take can open entirely new possibilities. If this sparks something, share it with someone who believes democracy is worth reimagining. Check out the show notes for abundant links to Aditi’s research and the work of Democracy 2076. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time.