It’s the third day of the Frontiers of Democracy conference, and the mood is different than I can recall. Last year during the conference we received news that Great Britain had voted to leave the European Union: this year the conference began with a preconference on authoritarianism. Many attendees answered an ice-breaking prompt from Caesar McDowell about what they don’t want to talk about here with some variation of “the election” or “Trump” or even “the party system.” Yet we also had a plenary session on US democracy’s vulnerabilities led by the Democracy Fund, where they delved into the crosstabs of their latest voter study group report.
Later today we’ll discuss Peter Levine’s framework for responding to the election of Donald Trump, 
which one plenary speaker described as reminiscent of “the John Birch Society” for its resolutely anti-administration approach. And I’ve also heard devoted deliberative democrats talking about refusing to “trust the system” and even “blowing up the system.” One panel was titled “How to start a revolution,” though I had to miss it because it conflicted with the panel I ran on Civic Games. (An attendee of the revolutionary conference reported to me that she walked out a lot less optimistic than she began.)
Yet my colleagues here are certainly not contemplating the violent overthrow of the current order: one of the most popular plenary speakers was the President of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict. He presented on the work of Chenoweth and Stephan, who used a century of data to show that nonviolent resistance movements are twice as likely to succeed as violent ones–and that the results of such civil resistance are nine and a half times more likely to be democratic when they do succeed than violent movements.
I rather suspect that this is a minor aberration, but for a conference that began in 2009 after the election of Barack Obama titled, “No Better Time,” and spent many years afterwards bemoaning the lost civic engagement of that campaign season, it has been interesting to watch how attitudes change and methods evolve. Many many of the civic professionals I know are embracing Black Lives Matter and the implicit rejection of deliberative methods therein. Professional mediators and dialogue facilitators are talking about the importance of action, symbolic speech and protest, and resistance. They are–we are–frustrated. I can’t wait to see what we do together next.