Re-Languaging Democracy 

                We tend to think of democracy as a thing, a series of institutions and laws that is meant to churn out some idealized result.  Maybe it’s time that we adjust the way we think about and conceptualize what it means to live in a democracy.  It is particularly important to do so in the midst of the assault on those institutions and laws currently underway.  If we want to revitalize our democratic roots, we have to radically and fundamentally re-language them.  We have a Platonic view of democracy even though it’s more Aristotelian in its essence.  We are trying to cobble together institutions and practices meant for an agrarian oligarchy that are hopelessly out of step with the broader enfranchisement and rapid access to information and communication of our era. 

                The most important thing to do is to see democracy as an experience and not just a governmental structure.  Too many people see the government as this ‘thing’ out there that is not really a part of their daily lives.  We claim to be a democracy, but we have always practiced more autocratic tendencies in our schools, our jobs and our families.  We offer one semester of High School civics as a band aid to the disparity between what we claim to value and how we really act.  Chomsky is famous for making this point.  When Dewey wrote about democracy, he saw it as a process of inquiry, one that had to expand participation and scope.  If we want to save or reclaim a democratic society we have to start teaching ourselves how to be a different kind of citizen, one that does more than vote sporadically in an election or two.

                The experience of democracy is hard work.  It means real engagement with people that are different from us and see the world from a different perspective than we do.  What we do now is to put these differences into a competition with each other and let the winner have their way.  If the process is contaminated with large sums of money, it’s easy to see how little understanding or accommodation ever happens.  In Dewey’s sense of inquiry, he strives to frame these conflicts as opportunities to learn and perfect our collaboration instead of playing a zero-sum game of diminishing returns.  Educating people to do this has to start very early in their lives; it can’t wait until they are adults already habituated to win at all costs.  Democracy is a way of making knowledge that reframes the way we understand the world through our encounters with others.

                One of our challenges is that there are so many more players in the game now.  Our democracy was never meant to be this inclusive.  Its institutions and practices served the oligarchs that designed it pretty well.  As long as they were mostly benign and progressive, the country thrived.  But that good thing never included everyone and never was meant to.  The great triumph of American democracy is that it ever so gradually pushed itself to actually include, albeit in often limited form, more and more people.  The institutions that were created by oligarchs have been modified to work for a more representative cross-section of Americans, although by no means all Americans.  One way to understand where we are politically is to recognize the regrettable, but probably inevitable, move by people who see their privilege being eroded to dial back and restrict the access so many have fought so hard to create.  It is no coincidence that their efforts have been so focused on schools.  The way we learn to think about our engagements in a common sphere are the key to what our democracy will look like.

                How do we learn to talk to each other and learn from each other?  One sign a democracy is in trouble is when it can no longer produce a “we.”  I’m not suggesting some homogenized “we” that erases our differences or back doors a hegemonic view.  But out of our individual and group identities we have to find a way to produce a “we.”  Not because we have to agree; we won’t.  Not because we have to all be the same: not happening.   We have to create it so we can engage each other in the process of change and renewal.  We are not looking for an ‘answer;’ we are looking for a beginning.  Dewey believed we can learn to do this.  He believed we could learn how to not just govern democratically but to think democratically.  I believe that, too.