The "Fourth Founding": How our Unelecteds Plan to Rewrite the Constitution (Part 1)
Inside the Foundation-Funded Blueprint to Restructure American Governance by the Nation's 250th Birthday
The Oldest Learned Society
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams and James Bowdoin. It holds a Massachusetts state charter granted by the Massachusetts General Court on May 4, 1780 — nine years before the Constitution was ratified. Its fellows have included Washington, Franklin, Einstein, Darwin, and almost every consequential American scientist and statesman for a quarter of a millennium.
It now houses a project to restructure American governance.
In the spring of 2018, a 93-year-old Republican billionaire named Stephen D. Bechtel Jr. asked the Academy a question. Bechtel — chairman of the Bechtel Corporation for thirty years, lifetime GOP donor, Hoover Institution chairman former — wanted to know what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century. Jonathan Fanton, the Academy’s outgoing president, translated that question into a formal commission. Fanton — former president of the MacArthur Foundation (1999–2009), former chair of Human Rights Watch — used his final act as Academy president to launch it.
The commission’s own report foreword states the origin plainly:
“The Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship was established in the spring of 2018 at the initiative of then Academy President Jonathan Fanton and Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., Chair of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. Mr. Bechtel challenged the Academy to consider what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century.”
They called it Our Common Purpose.
What came out was not a civics pamphlet. The commission produced 31 recommendations including proposed constitutional amendments, expansion of the U.S. House by at least fifty seats, eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, ranked-choice voting nationwide, and a universal expectation of national service. The question about good citizenship had become a structural blueprint for a different republic.
The timeline was not accidental. Commissioner Carolyn Lukensmeyer said it explicitly in 2021: “The commission targeted our 250th anniversary as a point to put a stake in the ground.” America’s semiquincentennial was embedded in the mandate from day one.
Bechtel died in March 2021 at ninety-five. His foundation closed in December 2020. Within months, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund seamlessly took over — $500,000 to AAAS in FY2022, labeled on its 990 for “IMPLEMENTATION OF THE OUR COMMON PURPOSE REPORT.”
The oldest learned society in America had a new purpose. And someone else was paying for it.
From Aspiration to Blueprint
Our Common Purpose did not originate at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. By the time AAAS published it in 2020 under the institutional authority of a Massachusetts state charter older than the Constitution itself, the project was already on its third incarnation — and its second institutional host.
The trail begins in 2013 at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Stage 1: Aspiration (2013–2015)
On September 30, 2013, RBF president Stephen Heintz delivered a speech at the Independent Sector Annual Conference. The speech was titled “Our Common Purpose.”
His co-presenter was Diana Aviv, then president of Independent Sector — and wife of Sterling Speirn, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation CEO who would later serve as a named commissioner on the AAAS version of the project. The speech was a joint production between two institutions run by the same household.
Aviv told the room that the nonprofit sector had “the kind of credibility needed to take on issues as complex and nuanced as re-launching our democracy.” Her prepared remarks included a bullet point about nonprofits welcoming “social pioneers: Who, in the quest for the common good, rewrite the laws of the land.”
Heintz offered his personal inspiration. He had spent years in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell and described the experience as a source of hope: “entire societies becoming animated by a shared sense of purpose — to redefine themselves, write a new story about themselves, seize a moment of agency.” The movement he was describing as a model was the post-Soviet civil society transformation.
Heintz announced what he called the “National Purpose Initiative,” a coalition of nine partner foundations: the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, Kellogg, Open Society Foundations, Carnegie Corporation, Hewlett Foundation, Packard Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation. The goal: citizens’ dialogues that would produce “a broadly shared agenda of national priorities” by 2016.
The language was aspirational. No structural reforms were proposed — no House expansion, no term limits, no constitutional amendments. The initiative sought to renew America’s promise through conversation.
By early 2015, Heintz conceded: “I am not as optimistic as I was.”
Stage 2: Failure and Pivot (2015–2018)
The National Purpose Initiative’s 2016 deliverable was never produced. No report. No agenda. No public output of any kind. Nine of the largest foundations in the United States partnered on a multi-year initiative and generated zero.
Then 2016 happened.
The election of Donald Trump shattered the consensus premise that animated the entire project. You cannot produce “a broadly shared agenda of national priorities” when the nation has just demonstrated it does not share one.
Heintz pivoted. He recruited the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as the new institutional host — securing Fanton’s enthusiasm and Bechtel’s $1.5 million founding grant from the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. The project moved from an RBF initiative to an AAAS commission. Heintz moved from project manager to named co-chair.
The title traveled with him.
Stage 3: Structural Blueprint (2018–2020)
What the commission produced in 2020 was unrecognizable from what Heintz had described in 2013. The Our Common Purpose report contained 31 specific recommendations — House expansion by at least fifty seats, eighteen-year Supreme Court term limits, ranked-choice voting nationwide, a constitutional amendment on campaign finance, universal voting, citizens’ assemblies interfacing with Congress.
The language had escalated to match. In 2013, Heintz wanted to “renew [America’s] promise.” By 2019, Heintz himself was writing that “nation-state system and representative democracy” was “showing signs of being obsolete.” By the report’s 2020 publication, the commission’s framing had arrived at a “fourth founding.”
The money followed the same path. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund — the same foundation Heintz was presiding over even as he co-chaired the OCP commission — granted AAAS $500,000 in FY2022 “FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE OUR COMMON PURPOSE REPORT.” The Ford Foundation added $250,000, labeled: “FOR OUR COMMON PURPOSE: REINVENTING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.” The Hewlett Foundation would throw in its money as well: “FOR SUPPORT OF THE OUR COMMON PURPOSE REINVENTING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY PROJECT.”
The funder’s own president co-chairs the commission the funder pays to implement. Put the two endpoints side by side:
In 2013, the National Purpose Initiative sought “a broadly shared agenda of national priorities” but proposed zero structural reforms.
In 2020, Our Common Purpose delivered 31 recommendations including constitutional amendments and called it a “fourth founding.”
Is this what the late Bechtel, a long-time Republican, truly had in mind when his foundation provided the funds for OCP? We will never know.
The Strategy Paper
Two years after the Our Common Purpose commission published its blueprint, one of its funders sponsored the instruction manual.
Rachel Kleinfeld — Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow, National Endowment for Democracy board member, Freedom House trustee, States United Democracy Center trustee, Protect Democracy advisory board member, and senior advisor to the Democracy Funders Network — released “Five Strategies to Support U.S. Democracy” through Carnegie in September 2022.
Kleinfeld listed the approaches most democracy practitioners were already pursuing and dismissed them as “insufficient”: helping Democrats win elections. Increasing voter turnout. Getting minorities to vote. Courting swing voters. Improving election administration. Increasing economic redistribution. Fixing gerrymandering. All insufficient.
Not wrong. Not counterproductive. Insufficient.
I’ve covered the Five Strategies, and they largely operationalize the One Common Purpose paper: financing establishment Republicans in primaries, ranked-choice voting, implementing progressive agendas to galvanize Democratic turnout, lawfare against Republicans not aligned with “democracy.”
How do you carry those out? Strategy #4 was “a broad-based, multistranded, prodemocracy movement around a positive vision concretized in locally rooted action.” In other words, saturate every faction of civic life with NGOs.
Such a massive undertaking meant a coordination layer was required.
The Coordination Layer
By September 2023, the coordination layer had a name, a fiscal home, and a Rosetta Stone.
The Inter-Movement Impact Project — IMIP — became formalized as a project of Mediators Foundation, also backed by Hewlett Foundation and partnering with Heintz himself. Its founding document declared its purpose explicitly: IMIP’s purpose and work “is in service to” realizing Rachel Kleinfeld’s Strategy #4 by helping to coordinate.
The same Mediators Foundation produced a companion document that functioned as a crosswalk — a line-by-line mapping of Our Common Purpose’s 31 recommendations to the goals of the “More Perfect” implementation framework.
The complete structure to remake America’s governance was now in place.
Enter, America250
A 240-year-old learned society publishes 31 recommendations to restructure the republic. A Carnegie senior fellow, sitting on that same commission’s funder network, writes the operational instruction manual. Coordination NGOs adopt that instruction manual as its verbatim mission statement, and produces a line-by-line crosswalk mapping the commission’s 31 recommendations to implementation targets.
None of these institutions reported to each other. There is no master plan document. They didn’t need one. The blueprint was published. The strategy paper was published. Everyone reading from the same text arrives at the same destination.
And everyone has the same date circled.
July 4, 2026, the nation’s 250th birthday, was embedded in their mandates from the beginning.
Tune in for Part 2.
If you enjoyed this, please pre-order the upcoming book I co-authored with @JoshuaLisec, Unelected, available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books-a-Million.
It’s nice to know that the proverbial “they” have plans for all of us, isn’t it?
NEVER give up your guns, people…never.
This is brilliantly terrifying, and very in line with your recent work. "Big" things usually have a charter, a blueprint / roadmap, and an implementation plan. The plan gets at the "how" you are going to do the "what" stated in the blueprint. Unlike the funding of the Shadow Cabinet, this part of the effort seems better concealed, and less obvious...very in the shadows. The history of the original effort you described is critically important to the story. What started out with (apparently) good intentions stalled, and appears to have been gutted and worn as a "skin suit" (thanks Iowa Hawk) by its exact opposite. It appears the executive committee of the "blob" has multiple COAs in play, some more openly visible than others. You have brought something previously "in the shadows" into the light. Now visible it's frightening in itself, and in implication. Have to wonder what other efforts are underway supporting the same goals?. Thank you for what you are doing...wish we had about a dozen of you at work!