The Way to Renew Democracy
That’s a bold statement, I know. But that’s what I intend to argue. I’ve read many wonderful books of history, economy, philosophy, psychology, and storytelling that have well described and analyzed the rise, decline, and fall of democracy in America and the world but without offering a practical prescription to those of us who want to not only defend but enhance democracy. My argument and prescription that I offer is simply more democracy — with everyone, everywhere and everywhen we are. But that takes a lot of organization, commitment, and above all action.
The MAGA movement, while disrupting democracy, presents an opportunity for a renewal of democracy in America. The populist movement is built on the false premise of white supremacy and the threat of outsiders — a lingering strand in American colonial settlement and national development history. It was a shock in 2016 when a confidence man was able to convince an almost majority of voters, many with strong grounds for resentment because of a failure of “liberal” policies that created gross inequalities.
Democracy, Alexis De Tocqueville wrote in his reflections on Democracy in America, is built on the principle of equality. He is not talking about semblance or boring uniformity. Indeed, he praises diversity in religion, culture, race, gender, education, IQ, living styles and livelihoods — as a condition of democracy. Equality in Democracy is not a cultural or economic or metaphysical or even religious principle and aspiration. It is a political principle and aspiration that rules the economy and fosters a unifying culture that upholds in stories, myths, and beliefs the goodness and dignity of every human person and a collective destiny for all humankind.
Equality is based on a verifiable reality — a capacity that all humans have whether considered a gift of gods, or developed by evolution guided by Providence, or a scientific law of nature, that is discovered in the genetic structure of our species and further developed by human interaction with the material and social environment.
De Tocqueville observed that voluntary associations, assemblies to deal with common cares, open to all, are the farm teams of democracy. In civil society, each person is considered as equal as the next, sharing opinions, suggestions, common action, ready to disagree as well as to agree, giving and receiving respect, focusing on the issue at hand not ad hominem. In associations citizens learn the meaning and acquire the habit of democracy.
Democracy is not an essence. It Is not a quiddity but a quality, not a state, but a way of being a state. Democracy is not a noun (person, place, or thing) with an adjective (or modifier) of a noun, but more a verb (an action or practice) or sometimes an adverb (modifier) of an action.
Democracy is not violent but persuasive, not a mover from outside persons, but a mover from within, a choice made freely rather than compelled by force.
Habits are default behaviors, often unconscious or preconscious, conditioned by corporal actions. For a person individually, habits constitute character, a style of being, a consciousness and conscience, a “soul.” For persons in association, including a nation, habits are institutions, a collective style of being, a collective consciousness and conscience, a collective character or “soul.”
Sociologists have inquired into the institutions that organize a society as a democracy. Historians have documented the democratic institutions of Americans that portray the democratic republican “soul” of the nation. Political scientists have considered the means by which a democratic society is governed. Philosophers have inquired into the theories of democracy that distinguish it from other forms of human interaction.
Despite the word’s etymology, democracy for DeTocqueville is more than a way of governing a society. To repeat in other words, democracy is a calling together based on a principle embodied in a human nature or, better, human existence (whether evolved or created) which is always becoming. Democracy for me, following Polanyi, Dewey, Arendt, Harrington, Douglas, and Wolin, is the public sector itself that in the free and open space where (and a public time when) human beings are in association as equal agents, together coming to terms with their environment and thus constituting their community, their common world. This world includes matters of livelihood, culture, and the governance that decides economy, culture, and politics which many of us call democratic social change.
Democratic social change means a restoration and renewal of the public sector. It is an art with techniques that must be learned through practice. Theory or science and philosophy can teach, critique, and advance the practice based on its growing understanding of the universe and humanity’s opportunities and role in the universe. But the action and participation in collective action is vital at all levels starting for most of us at the very basic level of livelihood in a locality.
DeTocqeville in his return to Democracy in America warned Americans of the dissolution of democracy 1) by allowing slavery for the sake of a union without equality and 2) by fostering an industrial economy (e.g. capitalism) that creates a new aristocracy.
“I have shown that democracy is favorable to the growth of manufactures, and that it increases without limit the numbers of the manufacturing classes: we shall now see by what side road manufacturers may possibly in their turn bring men back to aristocracy.”
“I am of opinion, upon the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest which ever existed in the world; but at the same time it is one of the most confined and least dangerous.”
“Nevertheless the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that this is the channel by which they will enter.”
That’s my argument for what we in the tradition of civil rights, anti-war, and local based labor and neighborhood organizing have called “community organizing.” We start where we are, in the institutions where we live, learn, pray, support, speak, and act. We help each other achieve the power to be by understanding how power is working in our neighborhoods, cities, schools, businesses, congregations and how we might grow power with and for those of us being left out. We called it “being at the table” where the decisions are being made that are affecting the people with whom we identify, those being “left out.” We learn to discover potential leaders in everyone who can learn to listen, discover a person’s self-interest, agitate them to get together, strategize to take actions that will move towards resolution, and build ongoing relationships.
There is no one model in community organizing. But there are strategies and techniques that can be taught and learned through practice. There are no absolute rules, but there are “rules for radicals” as Saul Alinsky and his students taught that both change and persist.
There is a mentality in the community organizer who is constantly analyzing power by listening to people who are “in the condition” of being victims, those who are forced or manipulated to do rather than choosing to do, those who do not have privilege to live well enough to seek the higher capitals of knowledge, wealth, reputation, and association, seeking to build collective power through association. But the response is not to use or tout victimhood. It is to take power to change all the policies and practices that make victims.
“Freedom and justice for all.” Freedom for a democrat, while always having boundaries, is an affirmative “free to” rather than a negative “free from.” Freedom is agency to invent, initiate, speak and act with and for others. Justice is a social order that is structured to achieve equality. And equality is the “for all”, no one left out by lifestyle, gender, race, education, disability, and wealth.
We were shocked by the election of 2016 and other elections around the world that show the fragility of democracy, the decline of a public sector dominated by markets where a few are more equal than many, and the return of authoritarianism, autocracy, and aristocracy in which equality and equity are denied to many. We are shocked by the return of antisemitism, Christian and other religious nationalism, and the rise of violence, militarism, and the tools of war. These are calls to remember that we have been here before many times: Slavery, colonialism, Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Klanism, McCarthyism, Vietnam. For a democratic republican, our shock is a call to remember and renew rather than to blame and react.
Personally, for me in my aging years in a retirement home with assisted living and with medical and memory care, I have the free time and privilege to think, remember, read, teach, discuss, and to act with companions to support new forms of a free, open, healthy, and happy association that are emerging to shape our coming world.