Democracy as Inquiry

                When thinking about how to reimagine democracy after the failure of our constitutional system in the age of Trump, I think the temptation is to assume we were more democratic than we ever really were.  It is hard to confront the limitations of formal democracy and its institutions as more than a temporary lapse of decorum and judgement.  If this was only a momentary gaffe, then the institutional foundations of formal democracy would be enough to build on.  This is not a momentary gaffe.  This is the moment of realizing that if we are going to be a democracy at all we have to be a more radical and less formal democracy. 

                Dewey said basically the same thing a hundred years ago when formal democracy looked a lot better than it does now and when the hope of science, including social science, made it seem that a bright future was just over the horizon.  Public education was a big part of that horizon.  While most others took a practical and economic approach to public education, Dewey warned that unless education made the values of democratic life and community its central focus we would never realize a democratic future.  For him, the driving force behind this version of education was the idea of inquiry.

                Of course, we use inquiry in education, but not in the holistic and systematic way Dewey intended and not to the ends he suggested.   We think of inquiry with an automatic qualifier, such as scientific or criminal, in front of it.  In those cases, there is a well- defined set of protocols and processes that shape the inquiry and its outcome.  When teachers use inquiry in a classroom it is usually limited to an inventive and interactive way of covering a fixed curriculum.  In short, where inquiry exists at all in schools, and those instances are becoming more and more rare, it exists inside a defined curriculum where the protocols and content are predetermined.  A radical democracy requires an entirely different version of inquiry.

                Dewey saw inquiry as a social, intellectual, aesthetic and political undertaking.  The point of inquiry for him was not just to answer questions but to pose them, and the questions he had in mind were big questions.  Who are we? How do we form communities?  What do we need to know to realize to be a more democratic society?   Essentially, he is arguing that inquiry is philosophy, although not the kind taught in school.  He rejected the notion that philosophy was about the mere memorization and recitation of previous thinkers from the past.  Philosophy had to be reinvented in every age and in every society to meet the conditions, including linguistic conditions, of the moment.  Inquiry was his suggested means of doing that.

                His time is not our time, however, and there are things about Dewey’s notion of inquiry that we have to change.  He had more faith in science and reason than seems justified today.  He was too quick to promote consensus and uniformity instead of working constructively with diversity.  He was a product of his era, just as we are products of ours.  Going back to Dewey for inspiration doesn’t mean that we can just pull his ideas off the shelf and apply them now.  Even those close to his ideas got entangled in arguments of progressive versus traditional education to the point of losing his larger democratic emphasis.  Our job is to apply the principles of inquiry and radical democracy to our own circumstances.

                In the last century, American democracy was aspirational in a way that it no longer seems to be.  A lot of his work on democracy took place between the wars when America was just finding its footing as an international power.  We thought we represented something new and bright in the world, a country finally aware of and capable of fulfilling its destiny.  We were wrong about a lot of that.  Just as Jefferson’s high- minded rhetoric was contradicted by his stance on slavery, the rhetoric of American transcendence in the last century was to be contradicted by economic inequality, racism, misogyny, and homophobia.  The metaphor of the ‘melting pot’ still left out a lot of folks.  The political divides in our country are obvious, but we are also more segregated by race and economics than we have ever been.  Social mobility is more stagnant (the least mobility in the industrialized world), and we struggle to find ways to even to talk to the people on the other side of those divides.

                If radical democracy is possible in America, it needs to be incubated in emergent institutions that bring people back together over an aspirational vision.  As corny and hypocritical as it was, Trump’s MAGA slogan represented that to some people.  Unfortunately, it represented a way back to white, male privilege and not a democratic future.  Radical democracy is not an ad campaign.  The work of creating an aspirational motivation for our moment has to include and not exclude the diverse segments of our society.  A healthy democracy knows what its people want to become, and what we don’t.  Inquiry is a means to discover a direction and a purpose for our community and our community of communities.  Inquiry is the posing of questions that unite us without Dewey’s rush to a manufactured consensus.

                Our age demands that we leave open the questions of what counts and who counts.  We face a long process of engagement over what our lives and our country should be.  We need a place to teach us how, from early childhood to old age, to engage these questions which have been ignored in the rush to build a technological façade of meaning.  Can we forge a democracy that both honors our differences and unites us in a common aspiration that is both decent and just?  The jury is still out on that, but the alternative is clear.  We either forge this radical democracy or we choose off and fight.