I can’t offer such a strategy here, but three important elements stand out: a proactive, long-term vision for improving representative government and making it perform, greater solidarity between US activists and their counterparts, and conscious efforts by newly active individuals and groups to support, not supplant, existing local activists. It might, for example, have helped US activists see American democracy support efforts abroad not merely as an exercise in imperialism but as a sometimes flawed but still invaluable exercise in democratic solidarity; or it might have made those same government programs look less self-righteous and more self-reflective to civil society partners abroad.