The United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. Democratic institutions and ideals — however imperfect to begin with — are eroding at stunning pace. Corporations are intimately tied up in this moment. We need them to hold the line on values they don’t inherently possess and have no embedded obligation to uphold.

How did this happen?

• Collective action is a social muscle, and ours is atrophied. We’re isolated, calcified in our groups, and reliant on likes and followers to signal virtue and argue principles. We’ve lost our sense of a public square where debates are fought and resistance is seeded.

• The inheritors of the civic space we’ve lost are large corporations. They own our data, algorithmically serve up our ideas, and provide the platforms on which we organize our movements. As we become ever-more invisible to one another, corporations stand out as targets for illiberal threats. They’re easy to go after — you need only attack a single bottom line — and they’re big enough to make a splash when they fall.

• Here’s the problem: The corporate form lacks the structural capacity to reliably refuse to acquiesce to authoritarian demands. Corporations do not act — were never intended to act — in solidarity. Collective action requires suspension of individual interest. A one-dimensional entity — the corporation, with its singular mandate to chase near-term profit— can’t make this choice, not consistently. It isn’t designed to do the kind of good and generous world-building we need.

The stakes are high and the front-line fighters are ill-equipped. Power redistribution is necessary, but so is power redirection. It’s a small, but critical, part of how we’ll transcend this moment.