Community connection becomes a form of political stamina in an age of institutional breakdown.
The decimation of civil service capacity exposes how autocracy works: not through spectacle, but through slow, grinding collapse.
Reimagining government isn’t a luxury project—it’s the only credible response to structural harm already inflicted.
Sam Osterhout and Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, meet the moment head-on by treating legal battles like moral diagnostics, not headlines, grounding every question in the lived stakes of food security, civil service sabotage, and democratic exhaustion. SNAP has turned into a window on governmental cruelty, showing how “one in eight Americans” became leverage in a manufactured crisis while the administration tried to gaslight its own voters. Skye’s insistence that courts, communities, and civil servants are “winning more than people think” reframes resistance as a functioning ecosystem rather than a string of emergencies. The push toward Democracy Works 250 widens the aperture entirely—because if the civil service has been gutted, rebuilding can’t be nostalgic; it has to be imaginative, expansive, and rooted in the country people actually live in.
Tune in to the full conversation with Skye Perryman, now!
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