I would go spend a couple of days on Yale history professor Timothy Snyder reading his books and then watch him on YouTube. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig is also a major academic in this area. Their respective relevant books are "The Road to Unfreedom" and "They Don't Represent Us." Timothy Snyder also wrote "On Tyranny," which is a very quick read which is directly applicable to the question you are asking, he also narrated it in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tocssf3w80

Timothy Snyder is more about understanding and fighting the forces of tyranny while Lawrence Lessig focuses more on the mechanics of our democracy and the consequences of our current implementation.

I promise you will love Timothy Snyder.

My personal take is "democracy" the word has been hijacked and it's probably time to stop using it casually. The core idea and foundation of liberal democracy and what you feel is being eroded and needs strengthening is rule of law. Russia tried to privatize and democratize but failed because they did not have rule of law. Rule of law is where all the good stuff comes from. So what you really want an answer for is "how do I use my technical skills to promote rule of law?"

Supporting rule of law means supporting a fact based world, supporting institutions that do investigative research, and promoting empathy for the oppressed. Supporting rule of law means empowering the un-empowered by, for example, supporting unions.

Snyder would say: So choose an institution you care about – a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union – and take its side.

FedSoc/Fox/Heritage Foundation/Cato/Cambridge Analytica/CPAC are the exact opposite of what you want to invest in. I am not sure there are good examples on the pro rule of law side of the aisle.

One of the problems of supporting rule of law is that law has always bound the poor and powerless, but often does not bind the rich and powerful. The consequence of this is that powerful people will defend their ability to arbitrarily use their power without consequence. This makes supporting rule of law something that puts a person in real personal risk proportional to how effective they are in their support. I imagine as a consequence it's harder to find the forceful efforts to support it.

How you contribute depends on how far long you think America is. If you think we've passed the precipice, then the correct investments are ones that help people fight to reform the republic, specifically helping people organize and fight. If you think we are still redeemable, then investment in our institutions (media, legal, educational) is the way.

Here is kind of what I would expect the answers would be:

The USDS is probably the most directly applicable organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service

I can't vouch for ACS, but they seem opposed to fedsoc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Constitution_Society

I can't vouch for this either, but here's a list of think tanks: https://academicinfluence.com/inflection/study-guides/influe...

PBS/NPR are generally good media.

Might be good to look into what Stacy Abrams is doing.

I'm not sure how to support unions or unionization efforts.

I probably feel quite similarly to you, but haven't put in the hard research myself, so this is where I'm at. I was hoping for better answers here too.