rich 1.0 Everybody's got a hot take on how American democracy is dying. Almost nobody has an actual plan to save it. This week, Rick Wilson sits down with Ben Wikler — the former Wisconsin Democratic Party chair who turned a purple-state battleground into a national model, and author of This Is the Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy — to skip the hand-wringing and get straight to the blueprint. Because the authoritarian playbook Trump is running isn't magic. It's a system. And systems can be beaten by people who understand how they actually work. Rick and Ben get into the real fight: the systemic threats hollowing out the guardrails, why Supreme Court reform has to be on the table, and the unglamorous grassroots work — local elections, state parties, showing up between the presidential years — that actually moves power. They map the road to a federal trifecta in 2028 and what it would take to finally rip out the rot that's rigged the whole system. It's not a doomscroll and it's not a fairy tale. It's a strategy — and a reminder that the people who built this mess are counting on you believing it can't be fixed. This is the conversation that proves them wrong. • • • • • Ben Wikler is the former chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and author of This Is the Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. Find his work at https://www.benwikler.com/, and follow him @benwikler. Rick Wilson is on X @TheRickWilson, Bluesky @TheRickWilson.bsky.social, and Substack at therickwilson.substack.com. More from LP at www.lincolnproject.us and on X @ProjectLincoln. #BenWikler #ThisIsThePlan #SaveDemocracy #RickWilson #LincolnProject #SupremeCourt #Grassroots #2028 #Democracy #Politics #PoliticalPodcast #Podcast The Lincoln Project https://audioboom.com/channels/5157535-the-lincoln-project Audioboom https://audioboom.com 480 95 https://audioboom.com/i/42906864/600x600/c 600 600 <iframe width="100%" height="95" src="https://embeds.audioboom.com/posts/8933611/embed?v=202301" style="background-color: transparent; display: block; padding: 0; width: 100%" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="allowtransparency" scrolling="no" title="Audioboom player" allow="autoplay" sandbox="allow-downloads allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation"></iframe>