Fragile Hope

Picture a perfect pink haze riding the top of the nation’s capital on a warm April night. Joggers running every direction, protestors filming themselves for some publicity, and Class 55 of the California Ag Leadership Program preparing for a unique opportunity. Day seven of our National Trip — our first day in D.C. — started with philosophical commentary from a decades-gone pragmatist and ended with tangible advice from a current California congressman.

“The only solution to democracy is more democracy.” — John Dewey

While Chicago was all about the anatomy of systems, our time in the nation’s capital is focused on the creation and correction of them. We opened the day with Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems — a century-old commentary on the public’s importance in the democratic process that felt startlingly current. Together, we connected our Chicago experiences to a core insight: many systemic problems are rooted in a lack of exposure. Those building systems often can’t see the ripple effects their decisions will have on the people living inside them. That thread ran through everything that followed.

“As someone who is occasionally overwhelmed by the problems of the world at large, it was eye-opening to explore the importance of the individual in fixing systems in a way that feels more effective than ‘putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.'” — Jordan Albiani

Adam Brandon of the Independent Center arrived with a perspective that was both grounding and energizing. At the heart of his talk was something we had just learned about with Dr. White- Dewey’s concept of meliorism — the belief that the world is neither inevitably good nor hopelessly broken, but that it can be made better through deliberate human effort. It’s a middle path between blind optimism and paralyzing pessimism, and a powerful lens for thinking about democracy.

But Adam didn’t stop at philosophy. He pushed us to consider something more uncomfortable: that the two-party system, as it currently functions, may itself be the biggest part of the problem. When the structure of participation is broken, the act of participating inside that structure has limits. There are other ways — and increasingly, people are finding them. Third party movements, independent candidates, local organizing, and issue-based coalitions are all evidence that democracy doesn’t have to be a binary choice between two increasingly polarized options. The system can be reshaped, but only if people are willing to think beyond the architecture they inherited.

That message landed especially hard when the conversation turned to millennials — now the largest voting bloc in the country and an overwhelming majority of the class. The data is clear: authenticity is what moves this generation. Not party loyalty, not polished talking points, not carefully managed messaging. Millennials have grown up with enough information — and enough disappointment — to spot performance from a mile away. What they respond to is realness: candidates and leaders who say what they mean, acknowledge complexity, and treat voters like adults. If democracy is going to be tended well, it will require speaking to this generation in a language they actually trust.

Our democratic system isn’t perfect, but it responds to pressure, to participation, and crucially, to who shows up. His emphasis on bringing younger generations into political conversations wasn’t idealistic — it was strategic. Fresh voices inject energy into systems that can calcify without them. Dewey believed progress wasn’t guaranteed but was possible — and that belief obligates action. Adam carried that same conviction. Democracy, like any living system, requires tending. And if we want it to reflect our values, our communities, and our futures, the work of tending it falls to us.

Anne MacMillian, Chief Strategy Officer at Invariant, was the perfect voice to help us pause and take stock. Her session felt less like a lecture and more like a mirror — an invitation to reflect on what we’ve absorbed and what we’re still figuring out. She wove together the concepts we’ve been wrestling with all journey: systems thinking, credibility, and the slow and sometimes frustrating work of building influence. Anne didn’t sugarcoat it. Understanding how decisions get made — and positioning yourself to be part of those decisions — takes time, relationship-building, and a willingness to stay engaged even when progress feels invisible.

But her core message was clarifying rather than daunting. Involvement changes systems. Getting in the room, earning trust, and learning the landscape is how you eventually move the needle. It echoed the meliorist thread Adam had introduced — the world can be better, but only if we do the work. She left us with less of a conclusion and more of a charge: keep going, keep learning, stay in the room.

We carried those words with us as we entered the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — and the weight of that transition was not lost on us. After a morning spent articulating the nuances of how systems shape public life, we were about to encounter history’s most devastating reminder of what happens when the symptoms of a broken system go unnamed, unchallenged, and unanswered. Before we went in, Dr. White offered four words that would stay with us the rest of the day: “What you do matters.”

Some in our group had visited before. It didn’t matter. Walking the arc from the calculated rise of Nazi power to the ruins left in its wake demands your full attention every time — not just for the stories of those who suffered, but for the communities that stood by, the systems that enabled, and the uncomfortable historical record of what America knew and when. That last piece was perhaps the hardest stop on the journey. Knowledge without action is its own kind of complicity, and the museum doesn’t let you look away from that.

We moved slowly through the exhibits, sitting with images and testimony that resisted easy processing. The museum is careful not to reduce the Holocaust to a single narrative. It is a story of ideology meticulously normalized over time, of propaganda that didn’t announce itself as propaganda, of bureaucracies that made atrocity feel procedural. For a group that had spent the morning discussing how systems shape behavior and belief, the connections were impossible to ignore — and deeply unsettling in the best possible way.

Our debrief raised questions that didn’t resolve neatly — which felt right. Were ordinary people too afraid to act, or had systematic propaganda so thoroughly reshaped their reality that resistance felt unthinkable? Probably both, in proportions that varied from person to person, town to town, moment to moment. That complexity is part of what makes this history essential to sit with, and so relevant to the conversations we’d been having all day about credibility, the slow erosion of norms, and what happens when a public stops asking questions.

But the museum doesn’t leave you only with darkness. The record of rescuers — people who hid neighbors, forged documents, and guided strangers across borders in the dark — offered evidence that individual effort matters even inside collapsed systems. They decided, against every pressure telling them otherwise, that what was happening was their problem. It replaced the instinct to look away with a different question: Should I be curious enough to learn more? Curiosity, it turns out, is not a passive act. It is the first step toward the kind of involvement that Adam and Anne had been pointing us toward all morning. Standing in that museum, surrounded by the evidence of what silence costs, it felt less like a suggestion and more like a responsibility.

“The Holocaust Museum was extremely hard to endure, but bearing witness to these atrocities informs us how to keep them from happening again, and how we can deal with current world atrocities better.” — Casey Kirchoff

As the sun set over the D.C. skyline, our day came full circle. Congressman Fong (R-Bakersfield) welcomed us for a personal tour of the Capitol — accompanied by his wife Ashley and one-year-old son Gerritt, a reminder that the people shaping policy are, at the end of the day, people. We walked the same halls as the founders, paused in the statuary hall to hear its secrets, and caught brief but meaningful conversations with other congressmen wrapping up their day’s work. There was something quietly powerful about moving through those rooms — history layered on history, the weight of decisions made and yet to be made hanging in the air.

Fong walked us through the differences between state and federal systems and what it means to address a broader public when trying to effect change at scale. His own journey to Congress — from California’s Central Valley to the halls of the Capitol — was itself a case study in the meliorist principle we’d been sitting with all day. He didn’t wait for the system to come to him. He got in the room. And standing in that building, watching him navigate conversations with colleagues while his toddler explored the rotunda, the distance between “elected official” and “person who decided to show up” felt smaller than it ever has.

Walking out into the evening air, the sentiment that surfaced among several of us was simple: anyone can enact change. They just need to be brave enough to try. From Dewey to the Capitol steps, Day Seven asked us to sit with the full weight of what democratic participation means — its history, its cost, and its possibility. We left with more questions than answers, which, as we’re learning, might be exactly the point.

Jordan, Jon, Omar and Class 55