My Political Party Position
I am not a Democrat, but I am most assuredly a democrat.
About a 1000 of emails each day stuff my mailbox — most of them requests for money under the guise of polls about issues. It seems my name, address, and phone have been sent to every Democratic candidate for office from Atlantic to Pacific. Well, my bad, since I often contribute to candidates who are Democrats because I have judged that the Republican Party has been captured by autocrats funded by plutocrats — even more than the Democratic Party. Republican politicians simply do not represent my interests-become-issues.
In my bulk of mail, I often get scolded by leaders for not affirming and paying for membership in the Democratic Party — even on occasion when I answer their polling questions on issues. I don’t sign up though I often register and request the Democratic ballot in elections.
Recently I read with my book club The Man who Understood Democracy, the Life of Alexis de Tocqueville by Oliver Zunz. The reading and discussion led me back to my own introduction to De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America who studied democracy in the 19th century by observing and analyzing its history in America. His most relevant finding is that the citizens of the first British colonies acquired the habit of democracy by practice, through association of neighbors to acquire and work the land, build homesteads, and solve problems. Their governance as a community was carried out through town meetings where all were considered equal — one man, one vote to select leaders and to collaboratively resolve conflicts and issues. De Tocqueville evidenced this in the statements of leaders, through interviews with ordinary people, and primarily through direct observation. His subsequent theory of democracy in contrast to autocracy developed out of practical action.
De Tocqueville puts himself in a long tradition of “virtue ethics” from Aristotle, Aquinas, Machiavelli, and Locke. A virtue is defined as a good habit. Good individual habits constitute character. Social habits, like the habit of cooperation among many persons, are institutions. De Tocqueville discussed the “habits of the heart” and the habit of democracy which he used interchangeably with equality. He saw in the Declaration and in the Constitution institutions of democracy that were consistent with the democratic habits developed in the history of the colonists in America.
The Constitution codified the institutions of government the right to associate, speak out, act in collaboration, vote on issues and representatives, and establish new institutions for the general welfare along with the duty to participate in governance to approve laws and define rules for personal and community well-being. Citizenship consisted in all residents, but citizen rights and capacities were at first limited to men of European descent with property.
Associations were and are the education into the virtues of democracy. Hamilton and Madison in the Federalist Papers#9 and 10 spoke of “factions” and their negative implications for democracy and how to remove and regulate the negative effects of partisanship. The framers did not want to support parties or factions but wanted to set up processes both locally and nationally whereby citizens would be making decisions as to who their leaders, issues, and policies should be.
De Tocqueville discovered the importance of voluntary associations in making democracy work locally and nationally yet also the importance of a strong federal government to regulate the process to avoid mob and autocratic rule, “the tyranny of the majority.” He clearly distinguished democracy from class or mob rule. Yet he worked through an aristocratic lens and relied on mostly elite informants.
De Tocqueville also alerted Americans of the contradictions of slavery and the plunder of native American Indian lands. He identified the factions that were arising around slavery and an economy requiring it and warned of the civil conflict that would threaten a democratic republic. He studied and then practiced in his own French government service the tension between individual rights of liberty and the common good of freedom and equality for all.
Today historians, political thinkers, and pundits are writing and teaching that American democracy is in decline, losing its soul, evading its principles. Some attribute this to crass materialism and consumerism. Others to despair, resentment, and fear of others who are different, strangers, unworthy, without traditional Christian beliefs, and so threatening. In reading De Tocqueville’s observations, I realize that in America there has always been an undemocratic tradition of judgment of persons and societies not by character and humanity, but by attribution — e.g., ethnicity, lifestyle, sexuality, beliefs, upbringing, physical appearance, intelligence. De Tocqueville discovered and advocated that democracy superseded all attributions. And while there are many theories and forms of democracy that can be taught in schools, democracy is mostly learned by experience, that is, by doing democracy, by acquiring democratic habits and partaking in democratic institutions in the neighborhood, the workplace, and in local and national governance.
We point to great academic teachers of democracy like John Dewey and Hannah Arendt. But most important are the organizers and leaders of democratic institutions like Thomas Jefferson, Walter Reuther, and Jane Addams.
My most significant teacher of democracy was Saul Alinsky who trained organizers and leaders to create a tradition of democratic organizations in places where people had been denied the power to shape their lives and communities. After I reintroduced myself to De Tocqueville, I read a paper refreshed my own experience of Alinsky and his teachings through the experience of assisting community members become leaders and create institutions by which they could identify common interests and issues and develop the capacity to act together, i.e., power, to contravene public and private powers that held them back using the nonviolent rules of democracy. Through their organization they carved out a democratic space of freedom and power thus cultivating the habit of democracy. Alinsky, who concedes his debt to De Tocqueville, is best seen as a corrective to De Tocqueville’s vision and practice of democracy
To conclude my position as a democratic republican, I list the following points:
1. Democratic republicanism is not primarily a grand theory[i] or ideology as are capitalism, white supremacy, socialism, communism, and monarchy. It is a habit engendered by communal and personal practice that treats every individual as worthy of respect and belonging to their social order with inalienable rights and corresponding responsibilities as agents of their soul-filled bodies or incorporated spirits.
2. A democratic republic promotes and protects the privacy of all persons in aspiring to live and grow and the capacity of all persons to enter, participate, and shape the place where decisions are made locally, nationally, and worldwide that affect the well-being of all who emerge from and live upon the earth including the earth itself.
3. A democratic republic is founded on free association for speech and action rather than the domination of others. The authority, the laws and rules, and the order of a democratic republic is founded on the will of the majority while guarding the rights of minorities and all those who disagree.
4. Politicians, coalesced under a Party are sometimes, and many would say often, more interested in keeping their jobs as party leaders than engaging with the people, especially those without wealth and power, who they promise to not only serve, but also help educate and support.
5. A democratic political thinker and actor, whether connected to a Party or an independent civic organization, works and holds tension with governmental and non-governmental leaders in order to advance democracy in places and institutions throughout the social order where people lack power and so do not have or exercise the ability to act in concert. Speaking and acting with and to people in power in order to bring people without power to achieve it in the space of freedom which democracy consists of. Representative democracy requires direct democracy, i.e., people organizing themselves to have and exercise power.
6. Politics, i.e., speaking and acting in public space, is more than the legislative, executive, judicial institutions of government that order a society. Democratic politics that aims that all persons in society have livability in private and respect in public. And happiness in both private and public space. Democratic politics, as the fulfillment of human capacity to think and act, thus based in human nature and existence, is its own purpose protecting and transcending culture and economy
[i] Though I read Giovanni Sartory and John Dewey who advocate democracy and even Aristotle and Plato who write disparaging rule by the demos and I realize there are important theories of democracy; and though De Toqueville in Democracy in America calls for a clear agreed-upon definition of democracy, The practice and habit, I argue is more important than any theory.