Summit on Trust and Democracy: Cross-Ideological Work Toward a Flourishing Democracy

Over two days in Washington, DC, the Institute for Humane Studies recently gathered a room full of scholars, civil society organizers, philanthropic leaders, and policy professionals to tackle one of today’s most fundamental questions: how do we rebuild trust in American self-government before the cracks widen? Supported by the Hewlett Foundation’s US Democracy Program, the Summit on Trust and Democracy asked participants to bring fresh evidence, practical experiments, and above all a willingness to cooperate across ideological and institutional lines. Most event sessions were held under the Chatham House Rule, so this post only quotes IHS staff who gave explicit permission to share their remarks.

Opening the summit, IHS president Emily Chamlee-Wright reminded the audience that the organization was founded in 1961, when “the brutal lessons of two devastating world wars were still fresh,” and that the core challenge has not changed: “How can a free, self-governing people build a society marked by peace, widely shared prosperity, and human flourishing?” She stressed that the gathering was intentionally “a big tent … all united by a shared commitment to the liberal democratic ideal.” That breadth set the tone: disagreement welcomed, cynicism checked at the door.

Courtney Derr, IHS’s executive director, explained how “Our 65 years of experience shows us that the downstream wins we so desperately need right now … will only be as strong as the relationships and research that we build upstream—where ideas take shape.” In other words, fix the pipeline of scholarship and partnership, and policy and public opinion victories will follow.

The summit’s intellectual core rested on four commissioned research projects. A two-wave “National Survey on Democracy and Elections,” led by the Karsh Institute at the University of Virginia, mapped shifting public confidence in election integrity. UC Berkeley’s Goldman School offered a deep dive into the “Political Psychology of American Democracy,” probing the emotional levers that move citizens toward or away from tolerance. Ethnographers at ReD Associates traveled around the country to document why some Americans undergo dramatic ideological conversions, while the Metropolitan Group presented an analysis of the dominant stories Americans tell about their own governing experiment and how those stories might be reframed. Each team delivered early findings, then opened the floor to hard questions: what actually changes minds, what merely flatters funders, and how do we know the difference?

Conversation did not stay locked in the data. During the event’s one on-the-record conversation, Columnists George Will and Jamelle Bouie traded views from their respective conservative and progressive perspectives on whether a revival of classical republican virtues could shore up democratic norms, exploring both areas of agreement and shared fundamental principles.

Matthew Kuchem, IHS’s director of coalition partnerships, hammered that point in his own remarks. “Liberal democracy cannot be sustained by one sector alone. It requires cross-sector coordination—from academia, philanthropy, civil society.” He urged attendees to treat the summit as a launchpad, and to carry the conversations into concrete collaborations after they returned home.

Throughout the event, participants discussed a recurring anxiety: trust in democratic institutions has slipped so low that any reform proposal must clear a credibility hurdle first. Yet the mood was anything but fatalistic. Presenters highlighted local successes such as citizen assemblies that cooled school board feuds, narrative campaigns that reframed election audits as quality control rather than partisan warfare, and philanthropic bets on cross-disciplinary research that produced unexpected alliances. The takeaway was pragmatic optimism; no single lever will restore trust, but a mesh of small, scalable projects just might.

What happens next? IHS pledged follow-up workshops to refine the research, and several attendees sketched plans for pilot programs linking their own organizations. Perhaps most importantly, people who entered the room as wary allies left swapping phone numbers and draft proposals. That coalition-building network—fragile, diverse, and newly energized—is the ultimate outcome moving forward.

Rebuilding confidence in American democracy will not be done in a day, and no one pretended otherwise. But the Summit on Trust and Democracy showed that a coalition both serious about liberal principles and honest about current fractures can still convene, argue, and leave with work to do together. By convening scholars and frontline practitioners at events like the Summit on Trust and Democracy, IHS breaks down the academic silos and forges new connections. Because of this, ideas can both take root across fields and reach those who then carry them out into tangible impact in the world.