This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy—my new book, out July 21

The country is on fire. We can save it together. This is the plan.

It’s hard to read the news, or even turn on your phone and glance at the notifications, without wanting to curl up in a fetal position or punch a hole through the wall. It feels like we’re falling off the side of a cliff.

One insidious undercurrent: the feeling of being powerless.

But there’s a way out of this accelerating disaster. It’s a long, hard path. It’s going to take all of us, working together, to walk it. But I know we can do it. And if we fight our way along that path—if we can join our power together, even as the far right tries to take that power away—we can build a new era of democracy that actually delivers for everyone.

I’ve spent the last few months furiously mapping out that path in my new book. In truth, I’m still in the middle of revising it, and my publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, is pulling out all the stops to get the book out to the country as quickly as possible. It will hit bookshelves (and phones, as an ebook and audiobook—narrated by me!) on July 21, 2026.

You can pre-order the book from your favorite bookseller via this link.

Reversing an authoritarian collapse is an enormous lift. But I’ve seen a state-sized version of it right where I live—in Wisconsin, the only state where five of the last seven presidential elections have had margins of victories of under 1%, and where I served as the state Democratic Party chair from 2019 to 2025.

Here, thousands of people—my heroes—have fought year-round for more than a decade, throwing their energy into organizing and communicating everywhere, to everyone, in contests for power at every level of government, despite a system rigged by the GOP to thwart majority rule. As a result, a state that was, just recently, categorized as a “democracy desert” is now a toss-up for a Democratic trifecta in the 2026 midterms. To hear Wisconsin’s story, told from the inside, is to realize that there’s a way out of this mess. The book shares that story—and then applies its formula to a national plan to win elections, remove democracy’s saboteurs from office, and make America work for all of us.

My goal in this book is to equip you to level up your role in the fight, or to join it for the first time. I’ll map out not just what we have to do, but how you personally can do it.

And I aim to have fun. Things are dark. But the people smashing the country to pieces have no sense of humor. They win when we cower. Most of all, they fear being mocked. But we win more when we’re having a blast. Our job is to—to quote The Princess Bride—have fun storming the castle. In a decidedly non-violent, non-January-6-y sort of way.

I don’t need to tell you that the fight for our country’s future isn’t waiting for the publication of this book. It’s underway, from the streets of Minneapolis to your own front door. We’ve all got a lot to do. But I wrote this book because, even as we’re organizing and protesting and trying to care for each other and survive, it’s worth looking beyond the daily howl to figure out how we’re going to get out of this mess.

I hope you’ll join me.

In solidarity,

Ben

P.S. Presale links to all your favorite booksellers can be found here. I’m grateful for your help in spreading the word—either through this post, or the version that appeared on The Contrarian this morning, or on BlueSky, Threads, X (ugh, I know), LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram. And stay tuned for many more announcements this spring!