Building What the Right Built -- From the Bottom Up
An Introduction to the Arc of Justice Alliance and the Infrastructure the Progressive Movement Has Been Missing for 50 Years
In 1971, corporate lawyer Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that would quietly reshape American politics for the next half century. He was alarmed -- by consumer advocates, by environmentalists, by a culture that was growing skeptical of corporate power. His prescription: build. Fund think tanks. Cultivate judges. Train political operatives. Dominate the narrative. Coordinate relentlessly.
They did exactly that. Heritage Foundation. Federalist Society. Koch network. ALEC. Fox News. A web of coordinated institutions, operating with a 30-, 40-, 50-year horizon, shifting courts, legislatures, school boards, and culture -- methodically, patiently, effectively.
The progressive movement, in the same decades, built extraordinary organizations. Powerful unions. Brilliant policy shops. Innovative community groups. Creative cultural institutions. Dedicated advocacy campaigns. And yet -- these achievements remained largely siloed. Even coalitions , some with hundreds of organizations , tend to be siled and not cooperating with other organizations working for different aspects of Justice freedom and equality Each organization or coalition doing important work, often unaware of parallel efforts a few miles or a few clicks away, competing for the same donors, reinventing the same wheels, unable to aggregate their collective strength into durable, strategic power.
That is the gap the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA) exists to close.
Not Another Organization -- An Infrastructure
AJA is not a campaign, a think tank, a coalition, or a political action committee. It is not a command center that will tell other organizations what to do. It is not another progressive startup competing for donor project funding.
AJA is infrastructure -- a shared coordination layer for the progressive ecosystem. Think of it as a nervous system for the movement: connective tissue rather than command structure. A mycelial network beneath the forest floor, invisible but essential, allowing the trees above to share nutrients, signals, and strength.
The core question AJA answers is: what would it look like if progressive organizations could actually find each other, learn from and share resources with each other, coordinate with each other -- without surrendering their autonomy or being absorbed into a hierarchy? What becomes possible when the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts?
What AJA Is Building
At its most practical level, AJA begins with a comprehensive directory of progressive organizations -- from national advocacy groups and unions to local grassroots organizations, faith communities, policy institutes, media outlets, and the service providers and funders who support them all. Organizations can claim their listing, build out their profile, and become discoverable as/to potential partners, collaborators, and funders.
But the directory is just the beginning. AJA is designed to be a living platform for movement intelligence -- surfacing patterns, identifying gaps, enabling structured coordination spaces, and building the kind of compounding institutional knowledge that the right has accumulated over decades but the left has never systematically captured.
Project 2029, AJA's policy readiness initiative, takes this further -- creating the infrastructure to develop comprehensive, implementation-ready progressive policy frameworks drawing on the expertise already distributed across hundreds of organizations, so that the next opportunity for change finds us prepared rather than scrambling.
Why Bottom-Up Matters
The right built its infrastructure top-down: billionaire donors, elite institutions, disciplined message control. That model has real power -- but it also has real limits. It cannot easily generate the grassroots energy, the moral authority, the creative innovation, or the genuine community rootedness that have always been the progressive movement's deepest strengths.
