Radical Democracy

                We have been living in and practicing a formal democracy.  We have laws and institutions that stabilize and regulate our formal democracy.  From the beginning, our democracy has been driven by an oligarchy, a class of elites that more or less run everything.  We put a lot of emphasis on leadership instead of participation, and we have a news media that presents the news at about a fifth- grade level to a general populace that they pretty much despise.  Public opinion doesn’t really matter much in a formal democracy.  The current president got almost three million fewer votes than his opponent, but he sits in the White House anyway.  The current leader of the US Senate decides to kill bills that a majority of the people support, and the Republican Party keeps trying to get rid of health care coverage and abortion rights even though a strong majority of people support it.  The senate is ramming through unqualified judges to turn the last branch of government into a rubber stamp for their abuses.

                Obviously, something is broken.  If the fundamental idea of a democracy is that the majority rules, with some restrictions, then is it fair to call what we have a democracy?  On a structural level, the protocols and procedures of government have allowed a well- organized, not to mentioned well- funded, minority seize control.  Millions of Americans are celebrating a musical about a ‘founding father’ of ill repute who was against the rabble voting for senators, let alone the president.  We are a democracy that values territory, and land ownership, more than people.  We have begrudgingly expanded the franchise far beyond the intention of the man who wrote some of the most stirring phrases of our founding.  This is not to say that it didn’t work, for a while.  But it isn’t working anymore.

                There are a lot of people who think that if we can get beyond our current political woes, the glory and stability of American democracy will be restored.  I’m not one of them.  It is true that what we face now is worse, but we have been heading this way for a while. We can elect new people, and we should, but the only way not to keep slipping back into the state we’re currently in is to fundamentally change our idea of democracy.  It is time to dig back into the foundation and root out the rot at the core. Democracies cannot be run by an oligarchy.  Eventually, power concentrated in the hands of the few will become power of the few over the many.  There is nothing that says we have to continue on as a democracy, but if being a democracy is important, then we have to exchange formal democracy for radical democracy. 

                Our democracy is grounded in the idea of individual rights, and it those rights that Jefferson so eloquently gave voice to, even if he never thought they should apply to everyone.  Rights are a product of thinking about individuals as part of a social contract, where we agree in some magical process to exchange our individual rights for a social arrangement that protects and unifies our interests.  Locke thought we could do this rationally, as individuals, while Hobbes was pretty sure we needed a strong leader to keep us from tearing each other apart.  We chose Locke.  In either version, rights are central.  To be fair, the emergence of rights after centuries of kings and popes was no mean accomplishment.  Even if we feel the restraint of depending on an oligarchy now, the founding oligarchy was a huge improvement over the despotic arrangements that preceded them. 

                I think there are two problems with the democratic origins grounded in the Enlightenment thinking about the social contract.  The first is the eventual problem of the oligarchy – the notion of elite rule – that I have already mentioned and which I will develop more later, and the second is the idea of individual rights.  There probably isn’t an American today who hasn’t used the phrase “it’s my right” or “I have my rights.”  Rights are the bedrock of our democratic beliefs, but that foundation is cracking.  A radical democracy has to be about more than rights.  It’s not enough to have your rights, to be free, if that freedom leads to the destruction of the planet.  A democracy is never just about you or me; a democracy is always about us.

                The social contract imagines us as unique and alone.  The fact is that none of us are either of those things.  The human condition is not isolation, it’s collaboration and interaction.  Humberto Maturana says we are a paradox of being autonomous and connected.  We are born into a world of other people and we are born into that world as a separate entity.  Being just one or the other fails to adequately represent our existence.  We need rights, but we also need community.  Radical democracy is a way of organizing that community so that both our individual rights and our collective responsibilities are realized.  No one has the right to harm the collective for their own advantage.  The collective shouldn’t have the power to stifle self-realization and expression. 

                Radical democracy is hard.  It is impossible if value rights above everything else.  One of the strongest signs of crisis in our democracy is the disappearance of the ‘we.’  There is a lot of talk about ‘tribalism’ today, of groups putting their interests above the whole.  I think in democracies and communities the idea of consensus is always problematic, always at risk or silencing or even erasing people on the margins, but a democracy has to find some way to embrace difference as necessary, as a way of expanding consciousness and perspective.  At its core this is less about law and policy than it is about values and perceptions.  If we want to be democratic, we have to figure this out.  The first iteration of American democracy has crashed and burned.  If we value democracy as much as we say we do, we have to the most democratic thing imaginable, we have to change.