What if the federal government had a Department of Democracy charged with safeguarding the democratic rights of every citizen?
This is part of a new miniseries FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, a special Ms. series examining the next chapter of American democracy through a feminist lens. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the series explores how women and marginalized communities have shaped democratic progress, what lessons history offers for the challenges ahead, and how a more inclusive, representative and equitable democracy can be built for the next 250 years.
When former First Lady Michelle Obama shared on the Call Her Daddy podcast that the nation was not ready for a woman president, I understood what question was really being asked.
This question positions the country as judge and women as the ones awaiting the verdict. It treats our leadership as something the culture must decide it is comfortable with before we are permitted to exercise it. I refuse that premise entirely.
Here is the question I want to ask: When has this nation ever been without us? When has it flourished without our labor, our vision, our sacrifice, our love?
… Kamala Harris’ candidacy was not a defeat. It exposed again, with absolute clarity, that even excellence, even historic qualification, even the full-throated support of millions is not sufficient to overcome a system structurally tilted against our full participation.
America has always had women. The question was never whether we were ready for women to lead. The question is whether this democracy is finally, after 250 years, going to be built to reflect that truth.
Women are the majority of this nation. We are more than half the voters, more than half the population, and we are grotesquely underrepresented in both chambers of power in Congress. That is not an accident. That is architecture.
Two hundred and fifty years since the founding of this republic, women hold roughly 28 percent of seats in Congress. We have never had a woman president.
We came closer than ever for a second time in 2024, and I want every person reading this to hear it clearly: Kamala Harris’ candidacy was not a defeat. It exposed again, with absolute clarity, that even excellence, even historic qualification, even the full-throated support of millions is not sufficient to overcome a system structurally tilted against our full participation.
And that is not a reason for despair. That is a reason for a different strategy entirely.
American democracy was conceived inside a framework of white patriarchy. The founders wrote, “All men are created equal”—and meant it literally, for themselves and other white men with land.
The architecture of our government—its departments, its courts, its congressional districts, its very rhythms of power—was designed by men who did not envision us as full participants. We have spent 250 years amending, expanding, fighting, litigating, marching and organizing our way into a system that still does not center us.
I want all of us to stop reading this democracy as a structure we must navigate—and start reading it as a structure we must redesign.
The most transformative moments in American democratic history did not only come from the top down.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 came from Bloody Sunday in Selma, from the courage of ordinary people, many of them women, who put their bodies between brutality and the ballot box.
The 17th Amendment establishing direct election of senators grew out of Progressive Era reforms and grassroots anti-corruption pressure from Populists and state-level movements.
Every expansion of this democracy that was worth having was demanded, not gifted.
The Department of Democracy will not be handed to us—it will be built by us.
I have heard people of all ages ask whether politics is worth their energy. Whether the system is too broken to bother with. But the answer to a broken structure is never to abandon it to the people who broke it. The answer is to build something that outlasts them.
We are the majority. When you combine women with the men and gender-expansive people who genuinely believe in and respect women’s leadership, this is truly possible. The nation now awaits a political system that actually reflects the democracy we deserve. Innovative, responsive, grounded in people rather than profit, and centered on the dignity of every life rather than the consolidation of power in a few hands.
And I have a proposal to meet the moment.
The U.S. government maintains Cabinet-level departments dedicated to the defense of its borders, the stability of its financial system, the readiness of its military. It has no comparable institution whose singular mission is the protection of the democratic rights of its citizens here at home.
That is the gap I am proposing we fill with a Department of Democracy: a durable, people-powered, enforcement-capable institution designed to protect voting and civic rights, monitor the conduct of all three branches of government, hold states accountable, and serve as a permanent firewall against the erosion of democratic participation. It would be built to hold regardless of who’s in power.
Unlike anything for U.S. citizens that currently exists in the federal government, it would not be owned by any single branch. It would be designed to survive shifts in presidential administrations, partisan congressional control and judicial reinterpretation. The rights it protects belong to the people, not to whatever administration happens to be sitting in the chair.
Its core work would include enforcement authority against voting rights violations; a “democracy impact score” for every significant piece of legislation, so citizens can see before laws are passed how they would affect democratic participation; an annual “democracy index” holding all 50 states publicly accountable for voter access, polling equity, and certification integrity; a modernized preclearance function for jurisdictions with documented patterns of democratic violation; and a national civic education mandate grounded in the full, honest history of who has actually built and sustained this democracy.
This is not without precedent.
Elections Canada administers all federal elections with full independence from the sitting government.
South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission was constitutionally designed with explicit independence from the executive, because the architects of that democracy understood that no government can be trusted to oversee the elections that determine its own continuity.
The question is not whether such an institution is possible. The question is why the country that calls itself the world’s leading democracy has never built one for its own people.
The Department of Democracy will not be handed to us—it will be built by us.
The path forward runs on the following tracks:
- A national campaign, coordinated through voting rights organizations, women’s groups, civic networks and allied organizations across the country, will build a documented popular mandate through town halls in every state, a digital pledge campaign, and a “people’s democracy report” carrying citizen testimony on democratic rights violations directly into public and congressional debate.
- Simultaneously, we will build state-level democracy protection acts through the initiative and referendum processes available in 26 states, creating local versions of the accountability mechanisms this proposal envisions. As state models demonstrate what works, they build both the political coalition and the proof of concept for federal action.
- A federal Department of Democracy Act, introduced with bipartisan co-sponsorship, will establish the legislative record and policy infrastructure.
The current political climate makes the formal establishment of a Department of Democracy very difficult in the near term. I present it anyway—precisely because this is the moment when the idea must be put into public circulation at scale. The goal of this phase is to build the intellectual and popular foundation, and to organize the coalition that will make it politically achievable when the window opens.
I am a daughter of Selma, Ala., the cradle of the voting rights movement. I carry that history not as a relic but as a living inheritance and a moral obligation. A crucial question those marchers were asking on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, whether this democracy would protect the rights of all its citizens, is still not fully answered.
But I am not asking you to carry the past. I am asking you to build the future. I am asking you to stop seeing yourselves as citizens who must navigate a government built by others and start seeing yourselves as architects of the next 250 years.
The women who organized the Freedom Summer Project in Mississippi and the Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, when more than 80,000 people voted in a parallel democratic structure because the government refused to extend democracy to them, were not waiting for permission. They were building proof of what democracy could look like. Fannie Lou Hamer did not stand on the floor of the 1964 Democratic National Convention asking for a favor. She was naming a debt that was owed.
We are all owed. And we are done waiting to collect.
I am a daughter of Selma, Ala., the cradle of the voting rights movement. I carry that history not as a relic but as a living inheritance and a moral obligation.
Continue Exploring FEMINIST 250
This essay is part of FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, Ms. magazine’s sweeping series marking America’s 250th anniversary through a feminist lens. Much of the project is already live, including Founding Feminists, which reexamines the nation’s history through the women who shaped it; Feminist Lessons, which explores the defining victories, setbacks and organizing strategies of each decade since the 1970s; and the ongoing Democracy’s Feminist Future section, which looks ahead to the challenges and possibilities facing the next generation. We invite you to explore the full series and catch up on earlier essays, interviews and reported features examining how feminist movements have transformed the nation—and where the fight for a more inclusive democracy goes next.
